Dead Poet Society

Roughly twenty-four hours before he was admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital in a coma, Dylan Thomas got out of bed to go for a drink, at two in the morning, and came back an hour-and-a-half later claiming, “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.” The proprietor of the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village subsequently estimated that it was probably more like six or eight whiskies.

Later that day, November 4th, 1953, Thomas felt he was "suffocating" and only managed a couple of beers at the White Horse. His doctor saw him three times and, on the third, prescribed morphine. The medical notes, summarized for the New York Medical Examiner’s Office, described his arrival at St. Vincent’s early next morning as follows: “Patient brought into hospital in coma at 1.58 a.m. Remained in coma during hospital stay. History of heavy alcoholic intake. ½ grain of M.S. shortly before admission … Impression on admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy, for which patient was treated without response.”

John Berryman went back and forth to the deathbed. Ralph Ellison remembered Berryman saying that if Thomas died, poetry would die with him. He also remembered hearing Berryman “relieve himself of a rather drunken recital of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

Berryman later wrote that “Dylan murdered himself w. liquor, tho it took years.” But he also said that “[i]t must be remembered … that his weaknesses were often played on in order to get him into positions where he could be insulted with impunity; liquor was poured into him, and women not only threw themselves at him but were sometimes encouraged to do so by their academic husbands – I have myself seen this happen.”

The word “insulted” here is interesting because the cause of Thomas's death was, in fact, recorded as “insult to the brain.” This description, as Thomas’s biographer Constantine FitzGibbons noted, is “equally meaningless in British and American medical parlance.” But perhaps we know, nevertheless, exactly what the good doctors meant.

When Berryman heard that his reaction to Thomas’s death had been called “hysterical dramatizing” by a man at the BBC, he took it very personally, and went on a four-day binge.