Do not go silent...

Andrew Varley looks at Caitlin Thomas' memoir of her life with Dylan

When Caitlin Thomas flew to New York to be with her dying husband, she spent the first night in an asylum, laced into a straight-jacket. Dylan had collapsed on 5th November, 1953, after a bout of whisky drinking and was lying in a coma. Caitlin became hysterical in the hospital and threw herself, wailing, on top of the poet, almost extinguishing what life was left. Dragged off him, she continued to make a scene, conscious that Thomas' most recent American girlfriend was amongst those gathered at the deathbed. Later she melodramatically smashed a large crucifix. Through a drunken haze, she remained aware of her performance and gratified at its effect.

"Between sanity and insanity, it is aid, there is a very thin line. In my case there was no such tremulous line, I was perfectly sane, nowhere near insanity. But extreme amounts of alcohol can make its subject, the one who is subjected to it, play some very insane tricks. And those tricks can trick the beholders of them into thinking that it is the subject that is insane, when, in fact, it is the alcohol that is making the subject behave insanely. When the subject is sober once again, it automatically, if unhappily, becomes sane. And this is what happened to me when I was put in the Bellevue asylum. I automatically, if unhappily, became sane again."

In old age, in sobriety, Caitlin Thomas was able to write with this painful, raw honesty, but it is like seeing someone open a wound and sometimes it is necessary to put her book down and detach from the agony she is not so much describing as reinflicting. It may be different for people who have not been there. Double Drink Story: My Life with Dylan Thomas (Virago) is Caitlin's account of her marriage. Her marriage and her descent into alcoholism were one and the same thing. Of course, the poet did not make his wife an alcoholic - the predisposition and the habits of life were already there - but life with Dylan Thomas no doubt accelerated the process. They met in the Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia, she was captivated by his talk (but emphatically not by his appearance), he was flattered by the attentions of a personable, attractive girl who went drink for drink with him, and they spent their first week together in an hotel at the unwitting expense of Augustus John, who had seduced her when she was a young girl. When they married they moved to Laugharne on the South Wales coast into a house rented for them by the wife of the historian A.J.P. Taylor. Dylan wrote in the mornings and then went to the pub. Caitlin joined him in the evenings. Unselfconscious sex was only possible after a lot to drink. The pattern of their life - boozing and sponging, drunken coupling - was established from the beginning. It changed little with the appearance of children.

"Dylan had an ancient, out-of-the-cave conception that his drinking prowess made him even more manly, more of a swashbuckling he-man, more of a superman among his fellow men." Caitlin records this common alcoholic misconception but points out that Thomas never fell for the favourite delusion of drunken writers that inspiration lies at the bottom of a glass. "He knew only too well that drunken writing when reread in sobriety was revealed as junk. And he knew also, only too painfully, that there was no easy way, no painless way, to produce good writing." But Caitlin never deceived herself that his art could ever stop Thomas drinking. Alcohol was his master and, although as far as his writing was concerned he "was totally lacking in competitive spirit", when it came to booze "he had a rampant spirit of competition."

Like most alcoholics, Caitlin had moments of shame and disgust when she dreamed of giving up the stuff but it was not possible until she had experienced a good deal more suffering. Many wives of great men pass self-effacing lives, content with or resigned to second place. Some find a rôle to play or a career independent of their husbands. The same may now be said of men married to great women. Caitlin Thomas found neither career, contentment, nor resignation. She raged against standing in the shadow and, fuelled by drink, hit out, often all too literally. Behaviour which was forgiven her husband was held against her: genius excused, misery did not. Edith Sitwell, an early patron of Dylan, gave a luncheon party some time after the war. Although both Thomases were fearfully drunk, it was Caitlin who was the target of disapproval and Dylan the recipient of sympathy. Admittedly, he was always the less aggressive of the two.

The grotesque events surrounding Dylan Thomas' last days were as much the making of his own alcoholism as they were of Caitlin's. They have been replicated to a greater or lesser degree at the deaths of countless drunks who lacked the poet's literary eminence. Caitlin's drinking career continued into widowhood. She ended up in Italy where she met her second husband, Giuseppe Fazio, a man equal to her fiercest outbursts. This marriage and the birth of their son, Francesco, gave Caitlin the purpose she needed to find sobriety. After many false starts she was able, through the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, to spend the last twenty years of her life in recovery. While still drinking she had written about her life with Dylan. What she had to say then was under the distorting influence of alcohol. In Double Drink Story Caitlin sees clearly what drink did to her life and what it did to the great poet who was her first husband. She speaks with the uncompromising honesty of someone who has stripped away all pretence. If her prose occasionally sounds a little like a pastiche of Dylan's tumultuous language, we can hardly complain when it celebrates the rediscovery of the joy of living.