In 2019 and 2020 it looked very much like New York’s White Horse Tavern was going to close, and as so many joints shuttered for good during the Covid pandemic, it seemed destined to be another casualty. Miraculously, the owners were able to steer through the hairy patch and at this writing the establishment is doing just fine. Having been founded in 1880, we would have been sorrowful at its closing in any case. So much history had occurred there. But the loss we would have felt most of all had to do with the bar’s heavy association with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953).
New York has a rich folk culture around saloon lore, and Thomas is at the center of one of the most popular tales, and of course the way it is generally told is quite wrong. The myth is seductive, in fact so pernicious that though I know the real story and have been reminded of it numerous times, the fake one always insidiously seeps back in to hold dominion over my memory. Most people believe that Thomas died on the premises of the White Horse Tavern, or immediately after having just left there, having consumed “eighteen straight whiskeys”. He did tell someone he had drunk that many, and probably had done so, but the remark was made several days before he died, and furthermore, he was a binge drinker. He was always putting it away, so it’s entirely possible that he’d had 18 over the course of a day or something, which is quite different from pounding them all at once, which would likely kill you on the spot. Certainly, his massive alcohol consumption over the course of his life contributed to his death.
But Thomas was also a wheezer. He’d had trouble with his lungs since childhood, and he was extremely sick at the time of his death. In New York for a series of performances of Under Milk Wood, his latest, he was running a fever, and was having constant coughing fits, exacerbated by New York’s massive smog. He was staying at the Chelsea Hotel at the time, burnishing its macabre reputation in much the same way he had the White Horse Tavern’s. Doctors were giving him drugs to get him through the rehearsals and performances. He certainly wasn’t getting adequate rest. Quite the opposite. And then the drinking bouts atop of it. Contemporary experts speculate that at the time of his death Thomas was suffering from bronchitis, pneumonia, emphysema and asthma all at the same time. And while there was found to be brain swelling due to the drinking, ultimately the true cause of death was the inability of his body to get any oxygen. It’s less sexy than the idea of pounding 18 shots at a sitting and expiring on the spot, though frankly that story is about as appalling as it is glamorous anyway.
Childhood asthma was right in tune with Thomas’s calling. Raised in bilingual Swansea he absorbed his native land’s rich and musical speech and became its preeminent modern exponent. He was already having poems published as a teenager. He seemed to come from nowhere, and it is difficult to put your finger on antecedents, apart from his choice to live the traditional image of the rogue and romantic, the boozer and womanizer. But in terms of literary style, it’s not cut and dried. He admired and even recited Thomas Hardy (who, most people forget, was a poet as well as a novelist). Rimbaud is another likely influence. (Rimbaud was also a major influence on Bob Dylan, much more so than Thomas directly, from who Dylan merely lifted the name, as opposed to the style). Mostly Thomas loved the SOUND of words, so much so that he once confessed that he considered Mother Goose his greatest influence. All of the nonsense syllables of nursery rhymes. As with the ancient bards, the music was the source of his power.
Collections of Thomas’s poetry were being published as early is 1933. “And death shall have no dominion” is one from the early phase that has emerged as one of his best remembered. In 1937 he married Caitlin Macnamara, an Irish chorus girl at the London Palladium, who was even more of a drunken hellion than he was. Her father had been an aspiring poet; her maternal grandfather was a French Quaker. She had the proper mental capacity to understand her husband, and they were passionate about one other, though the home life was never precisely stable. In 1940 he published the prose collection Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (the title a clear play on Joyce’s 1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).
Thomas was too sickly to serve in the military during World War Two, so he worked for the Ministry of Information, penning and producing short documentary films, usually with some sort of patriotic or boosterish theme. These included This is Colour, New Towns for Old, Balloon Site 568, CEMA, Young Farmers, Battle for Freedom and Wales: Green Mountain, Black Mountain,(all 1942), These Are The Men (1943), Conquest of a Germ (1944) and Our Country (1945).
In 1944 Thomas wrote the horror screenplay The Doctor and the Devils, based on graverobbers Burke and Hare. It went unproduced at the time, although Mel Brooks finally got it onto screens 40 years later with the all star cast of Timothy Dalton, Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Rea, Julian Sands, Patrick Stewart and Twiggy. Thomas did have a hand in a couple of screenplays that were produced in his time, No Room at the Inn and The Three Weird Sisters, both in 1948.
By that time, Thomas had become a star of BBC radio, the lecture circuit, and record albums, and this is how his legend at last reached the wider public. Thomas was a performer and personality as much as he was a poet. He gave hundred of readings of his own work, but he was also in demand as a commentator and panelist, and sometimes even as an actor in classic plays like Comus, Agamemnon, or an adapted version of Paradise Lost. Audiences loved his voice! His early death was a major blow to the popularity of poetry among the general public. The Beats (who also hung out at the White Horse Tavern) were there to pick up the slack, but they spoke only to youth culture. Thomas was embraced by everyone.
His most widely known poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” dates to 1947. You can hear him read it on Youtube, and it ought to shake you to the core. His voice is a lot like Alec Guinness’s — he sings. (Guinness would later play Thomas in the 1964 play Dylan). When Thomas recites, you feel plugged into a ritual that has gone on for thousands of years. It may be the very best use that was ever put to the medium of radio, every bit as significant in its way as Churchill’s speeches. Thomas’s alcoholism prevented him from being hired for the BBC staff, but he remained very much in demand as a guest. The final version of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, now a perennial holiday classic in many different media, dates to 1952. In 1987, there was a TV movie based upon it starring Denholm Elliott. Under Milk Wood, as we have seen, was his last work.
Chinless, doughy, running to fat, and afflicted with bad skin, Thomas was never going to be a movie or TV star, although his fellow Welshman Richard Burton, who’d worked with him in radio, was in awe of his vocal talent. In addition to recording a tribute album of 15 of Thomas’s poems shortly after his death, in 1971 Burton starred in Andrew Sinclair’s film adaption of Under Milk Wood with Elizabeth Taylor, Peter O’Toole, Glynis Johns, Victor Spinetti, et al. In 2014 there was another screen version to celebrate the centennial of Thomas’s birth starring Michael Sheen, Tom Jones, Matthew Rhys, et al.
Welsh director Karl Francis adapted two Thomas works for the screen: The Mouse and the Woman (1980), and Rebecca’s Daughters (1992), based on Thomas’s 1948 screenplay and starring Peter O’Toole, Paul Rhys, and Joely Richardson. Other film adaptions include Cole Claassen’s Fern Hill (2005), and several others.
Caitlin Thomas wrote two memoirs about her life with her husband, Leftover Life to Kill (1957) and Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas (1986). In 1963 she penned Not Quite Posthumous Letters to My Daughter. She spent her later years in Italy with her long-time romantic partner Giuseppe Fazio.
There are several bio-pics and films inspired by the Thomases, included The Edge of Love (2008) with Matthew Rhys, Sienna Miller, Cillian Murphy, and Keira Knightly; Set Fire to the Stars (2014) with Elijah Wood, Celyn Jones, Shirley Henderson, and Kelly Reilly; A Poet in New York (2014) with Tom Hollander, Essie Davis, and Ewen Bremer; and Dominion (2016) with Rhys Ifans, Romolo Garai, John Malkovich, and Tony Hale.
My great-great grandfather John B. Thomas was a photographer and coffin maker in tiny Pelham, Tennessee. His ancestors were among the Welsh Quakers who came to Pennsylvania in the late 17th century and worked their way South and West across the generations. Already a fan of Dylan Thomas since my teenage years, my interest in the poet was greatly enhanced after learning of these ties a few years ago.
The official Dylan Thomas website is here.