AMERICA AND DYLAN THOMAS
259
There was a certain element of drama in Thomas's readings that
had nothing to do with his extraordinary powers. His story preceded
him wherever he went; the perverse publicity somehow reached every
town before he did and so the drama of his visit started before he ar–
rived. Would he, first of all, really make it? (Awful if he didn't, with
the tickets sold, hall hired, cocktail canapes made in advance.) Would
he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would some dismaying
scene take place at the faculty party? Would he be offensive, violent,
obscene? These were alarming and yet exciting possibilities. Here, at
last, was a poet in the grand, romantic style, a wild and inspired spirit
not built for comfortable ways. He could be allowed anything. They
would give him more drinks when he was dying of drink; they would
let him spit in the eternal eye of the eternal head of the department,
pinch the eternal faculty wife, insult the dull, the ambitious, the rich, tell
obscene stories, use four-letter words. It did not make any difference.
Thomas was acknowledged, unconsciously perhaps, to be beyond judg–
ment, to be already living a tragic biography, nearing some certain
fatality.
And he could make all the passes he chose, have all the love affairs,
since the unspoken admission always was that he was doomed, pro–
foundly
ill,
living as a character in a book, and his true love, beyond
all others at this time, was alcohol. Yet so powerful and beguiling was
his image-the image of a self-destroying, dying young poet of genius–
that he aroused the most sacrificial longings in women. He had lost his
looks, he was disorganized to a degree beyond belief, he had a wife
and children in genuine need, and yet young ladies
felt
they had fallen
in love with him. They fought over him; they nursed him while he
retched and suffered and had delirium; they stayed up all night with
him and yet went to their jobs the next morning. One girl bought cow–
boy suits for his children. Enormous mental, moral and physical adjust–
ments were necessary to those who would be the companions of this
restless, frantic man. The girls were up to it-it was not a hardship, but
a privilege.
Apparently no one felt envious of Thomas or bitter about the at–
tention he received. Even here he was an interesting exception. The
explanation for the generosity lay first of all in the beauty and im–
portance of his verse: this circumstance was the plain ground from which
the elaborate and peculiar flowering of Thomas's American experience
sprang. The madness of the infatuated is, after all, just an exaggeration
of the reasonable assent of the discriminating. And so Thomas's personal
