Dylan Thomas: this strange excuse.

All lovers of the English language must pause this 9th November: it will be 50 years since Dylan Thomas died in New York, after lapsing into a coma four days earlier. The 39-year-old Welsh poet's wild excesses had already entered literary mythology, as did the details of his sordid and utterly tragic demise. He is alleged to have said, shortly before his collapse: "I've just had 18 straight whiskies. I think that's a record." His passing was put down to pneumonia, with "pressure on the brain the immediate cause," as relates biographer George Tremlett.

Contemplation of the life and death of one of the greatest modern English-speaking poets can tempt one to high-minded and abstract pronouncements on art, which is concerned with truth, and the phenomenon of artist as debauch, bounder and cad--the general theme of which is, how can a man possessed of such, frankly, repellent character traits produce such indescribably beautiful poetry?

While minds far greater than mine have unburdened themselves on the subject, I would say the short answer is, it's the gift. And, in the case of Dylan Thomas, it was a gift of extraordinary magnitude. Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor remarked that "a gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us." Art being, O'Connor added, "a virtue of the practical intellect", to practice it requires "a certain deprivation", an asceticism, and a "leaving-behind the niggardly part of the ego."

For Dylan Thomas, destroying his gift could only be accomplished by destroying himself, which he managed to do in fairly short order. Was his fatal flaw timidity in the face of the demands of such talent? Was it, for a man who wrote so beguilingly about childhood, a fear of growing up? Or was it a triumph of egoism, a fight with God over the authorship of his genius? If one presumes to offer a prosaic insight into this particular poetic temperament, one can propose that addiction trumped all. Not only is alcohol cunning, baffling and powerful to those in its thrall, it is the great leveler. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no poets in A.A., only, to use the quaint label of yore, dipsomaniacs in various stages of disease, committed, to a greater or lesser degree, to the constant acceptance of the only known "cure" for their condition: abstinence.

We now have the benefit of psychological insights into addiction, but we have always had intuitive knowledge, no better expressed than in the old adage, "God looks after fools and drunks." Addiction is a bondage with multiple manifestations--there's always another drug--from which God alone can deliver the afflicted. The sufferings endured to escape its grasp are unimaginable, as attested by the life of poet Francis Thompson, who in his "Hound of Heaven" so luminously acknowledged God's boundless love and mercy, yet who battled opium addiction until his death. As Robert Waldron points out in his novella Hound of Heaven at My Heels, scholars debate still whether Thompson died from tuberculosis exacerbated by drug use, or solely from opium.

Dylan Thomas' poetic gift functioned despite his drinking, not because of it; he was sober when he wrote. His poetic vision was not, arguably, of the highest order, lacking a certain existential or spiritual penetration; to what extent it was stultified or occluded by the drinking, drug-taking and dissipation, or was exactly what it was, we cannot know. We know only what he has left us (I use "only" advisedly), and that is the fruit of a mastery of language few mortals have surpassed. On this grim anniversary we commend his soul to the mercy of God, marvel at his gift, and, fittingly, leave the last words to the poet himself:

   He knelt, he wept, he prayed
   By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light
   And the cup and cut bread in the dancing shade,
   In the muffled house, in the quick of night,
   At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.

Lianne Laurence former managing editor of catholic Insight, writes from Calgary, Alberta.