Elizabeth Hardwick
AMERICA AND DYLAN THOMAS
He died, grotesquely like Valentino, with mysterious, weep–
ing women at his bedside. His last months, his final agonies, his utterly
woeful end were a sordid and spectacular drama of broken hearts, angry
wives, irritable doctors, frantic bystanders, rumors and misunderstandings,
neglect and murderous permissiveness. The people near him visited
indignities upon themselves, upon him, upon others. There seems to
have been a certain amount of competition at the bedside, assertions
of obscure priority. The honors were more and more vague, confused
by the ghastly,
s~ffering
needs of this broken host and by his final imper–
sonality. No one seems to have felt his wife and children had any divine
rights but that they, too, had each day to earn their place on the open
market in the appalling contest of Thomas's last years. Could it have
happened quite this way in England? Were his last years there quite
as frenzied and unhealthy as his journeys to America? He was one of
ours, in a way, and he came back here to die with a terrible and
fabulous rightness. (Not ours, of course, in his talents, his work, his joys,
but ours in his sufferings, his longings, his demands.) "Severe alcoholic
insult to the brain," the doctors said.
Dylan Thomas was loved and respected abroad, but he was literally
adored
in America. Adored, too, with a queer note of fantasy, a baffled,
psychic force that went beyond his superb accomplishments as a poet,
his wit, amazing and delightful at all times, his immense abilities on the
public platform. He was first-rate: one need not be ashamed to serve
him or to pursue him. He was also, and perhaps this was more impor–
tant to some of his admirers, doomed, damned, whatever you will, un–
deniably suffering and living in the extremest reaches of experience.
As Eliot observed about Byron: after the theatricalism, the posing, the
scandals, you had to come back to the fact that Byron was, nevertheless,
genuinely disreputable. And so it was with Thomas. Behind his drinking,
his bad behavior, his infidelities, his outrageousness, there was always
his real doom. His condition was clearly critical. It couldn't go on
much longer.
