Where do you find the spirits of poets? Do you find them in the shadows at night on city streets where they may have walked? It can be a good start and it is often in these places that you might not, at first, associate with their work where you will find their spirit. In one of his songs, Kevin Rowland from Dexy’s Midnight Runners, talks about going up to a man in a bar in Dublin and asking him where he could find the spirit of Brendan Behan and the man tells him New York. When I think of New York, I think of the spirit of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and when I think of Dylan Thomas in New York there is one place that I think of and that is the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village.
I’ve Had Eighteen Straight Whiskies, I Think That’s The Record
‘I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record’ has gone down in legend as being the last words of Dylan Thomas just prior to his death in New York City at the age of only thirty-nine on the 9th of November 1953 . The quote is apocryphal. Thomas is alleged to have made that comment after a big session at the White Horse on the 3rd of November but also spoke to a number of people the following day before he fell into an alcohol induced coma from which he never recovered. That this would be his dying words adds to the legend of Thomas, dying after making a heroically boastful claim when his last words, whatever they were, were probably banal.
It is perhaps the case that Dylan Thomas is known to more people outside of his native Wales for the legends that surrounded his life, the drinking, the tempestuous marriage to Caitlin and the boat house writing studio that is now a tourist attraction in Laugharne than for his poems and prose, although many people would probably recognise the brilliant poem for voices written as a radio play for the BBC ‘Under Milkwood’, particularly the recording and film of it by that other hard living Welshman, Richard Burton.
Deaths and Entrances
One hand, Thomas can be a joyous poet but, on the other, there is a very distinct shadow of death that hangs over his work and this may have been, aside from a gloomy disposition that is seen as a clichéd element of the Welsh character, a result of what he saw and experienced in London during the Blitz in the Second World War. The Welsh musician, John Cale, best known as an original member of the Velvet Underground, set some of Thomas’ poems to music and called it the Falklands Suite following the war between the UK and Argentina in 1983. The poems that make up the Falklands Suite (also known as Words for the Dying) are: There Was a Saviour, On a Wedding Anniversary, Lie Still Sleep Becalmed and one of Thomas’ best known poems ‘Do Not Go Gentle’.
One of my favourite of Thomas’ poems on the subject of death and one that was certainly informed by the death of civilians in London during the Second World War is A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, Of a Child in London. In this poem, he speaks to his own mortality as well as that of the many people dying around him as London was bombed and burned. He speaks of his own death as being a return to somewhere where he will only then be able to truly feel for all the deaths. It is also a poem of resiliance and resistance where the poet is refusing to mourn until his own death comes and at the point of his death it will also be the point of all deaths – an almost solipsist view but also framed within a religious and spiritual context ending, as it does, with the line ‘After the first death, there is no other.’
The Poet in New York
Dylan Thomas was quite popular in America and made a three reading tours there between 1950 and his death. The last time he was there, he stayed in the famous Chelsea Hotel. The Chelsea is New York, it’s art and rock and roll. Bob Dylan lived there for a time and references the hotel in his song Sara, stating that it was there that he stayed up for days writing Sad Eyes Lady of Lowlands, a song that takes up the whole fourth side of the double album Blonde on Blonde. It was also here that the Australian artist Brett Whitely lived when he was in New York and where his daughter Arkie was babysat by another hotel resident, Janis Joplin. Leonard Cohen was another famous resident and it was where former Sex Pistols bass player, Sid Vicious, allegedly stabbed and killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen.
Why New York City?
So, why do I think the spirit of Dylan Thomas can be found in New York City? To begin with, I am sure it can be found in other places as well and you would certainly encounter his spirit in Laugharne at the Boat House. There is something special about New York. For many people, it is the city of vanquished dreams. New York is a city that, on one level, is vibrant and life affirming and yet, on another level, there is a sombreness there, a certain melancholia and you don’t have to stray far from the gaudy touristy areas like Times Square to be in the Housing Projects in Alphabet City. New York’s most sombre attraction which is widely visited is the site where the World Trade Centre towers once stood. Two large granite lined holes, with flowing water and the names of all who died on September 11th 2001, mark the footprint of the falling building. Dylan Thomas had his last drinks in the White Horse Tavern, collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel and died in New York’s St Vincent Hospital but the spirit of the man who wrote A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, Of a Child in London is also to be found at Ground Zero.
