Buy this book on-line GITTINS, ROB: : THE LAST DAYS OF DYLAN THOMASLONDON.MACDONALD,1986. ISBN 035610995X.
UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn.FINE/FINE.No owner inscrptn,and no price-clip to dw/dj.Fore- edges slightly aged as usual/normal.8vo, 220pp.
On the 19th October 1953 Dylan Thomas arrived in New York at the start of his fourth visit to America.The omens could not have been less auspicious.The poet's health was breaking down; his wife Caitlin had violently opposed the plan; the flight itself had been disastrous; even the room reserved at his favourite Chelsea Hotel turned out to be small,dark and inadequate.To his American mistress Liz Reitell,who had eagerly awaited him at the airport,Thomas looked 'frail,pale and shaky,sad too,tormented,quite tormented'.
And so he was: by premonitions of inadequacy and disaster; by financial problems; by drink; by a failing mind and
'the horrors' of delirium tremens.His stay
was marked by drama,chaos,violent shifts
in personal allegiances,by behaviour of such boorishness and insensitivity as to amount to madness.And its finale came with
his death on Monday 9 November,in St Vincent's Hospital.No period in the life of one of the twentieth century's most gifted,popular and controversial poets has been more obscured by myth,misinformation, misinterpretation,and even downright misinterpretation.But now that thirty years have passed much new information has come to light,particularly Liz Reitell's journal,previously thought not to exist. For the first time a detailed and impartial account of three traumatic weeks can be pieced together - the drinking bouts,the hysterical scenes,the efforts at rehabilitation,the final debacle.Above all,new light can be thrown on the one great,over-riding achievement: the triumphant performance on 24 October of 'Under Milk Wood' in the poet's last,and perforce definitive,version,a masterpiece of poetry and staging still awaiting acknowledgement as a literary legacy - the generally accepted version, it can be argued,being incomplete.A tour de force of biographical reconstruction,with all the impact of a tragic novel,provides a whole new understanding of an important though neglected period in the life of a giant literary figure.
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