AMERICA AND DYLAN THOMAS
263
died in St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City. His death was miserable
and before he passed into the final coma he had delirium tremens, hor–
rors, agonies, desire for death, and nearly every physical and mental
pain one can imagine. Brinnin does not try to render the great de–
nouement, but again it is, in an odd and indefinable fashion, rendered
by the dazed and peculiarly accurate and endless detail. "His face was
wan and expressionless, his eyes half-opening for moments at a time,
his body inert." The actual death: "Dylan was pale and blue, his
eyes no longer blindly searching but calm, shut, and ineffably at peace.
When I took his feet in my hand all warmth was gone...." The final
line of the record does fly upward in intention, but it is more clumsy,
more earthbound than all of the repetitive detail of all the thousands of
preceding lines and it does not even seem true. "Now, as always, where
Dylan was, there were no tears at all."
Could it have happened quite this way in England? It is an un–
happy circumstance for us that Thomas should have died here, far
from his family, far from the scenes he had lived in and written about.
The maniacal permissiveness and submissiveness of American friends
might, for all we know, have actually shortened Thomas's life, although
he was ill and driven in England too. But there was a certain amount
of poison in our good will. In the acceptance of his tragic condition
there was a good deal of indifference and self-deception. The puzzling
contentiousness and the ugly competition remain coldly in our mind.
According to Brinnin, Thomas made these frantic flights to America
because of his "conviction that his creative powers were failing, that
his great work was finished." He feared he was "without the creative
resources to maintain and expand his position." The financial benefit
was destroyed by the familiar condition of our economic life: he spent
every penny he made just as soon as he had
it
in his hands. His wife
and his mother wanted him to stay at home
in order
to earn a living
for his family. Furthermore Caitlin Thomas felt he had been "spoiled"
in America, that he came here for "flattery, idleness and infidelity."
Perhaps one shouldn't read too much between the lines, but it is hard
not to get the idea that Thomas's American friends, with a cynical show
of piety, treated these accusations and feelings as outrageous. They,
sinking sensuously into their own suspicious pity, flattered and allowed
and encouraged right to the brink of the grave.
In England we have Brinnin's own observation that the deference
shown to Thomas was
of
a quieter, less unreal and unbalancing sort.
