Thomas’ life and marriage were tumultuous. So in November 1953, when Caitlin Thomas entered St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York looking for her husband, she expected a positive answer to her question, “Is the bloody man dead yet?” What she got was “Not yet,” for he was in a coma and died not long after.
Ironically, in August of that year, Thomas read his story, “The Outing,” on BBC TV that listeners received was a nostalgic, funny story of a Welsh boy’s first outing with the men of his village for a daylong pub crawl. Only three months later, he was in a Manhattan hospital, dying. Though the story is happy, its author was chronically alcoholic, his health wretched, and he was depressed. So, beneath the story’s surface about the men on a daylong picnic, Thomas wrote his life’s story, lacing it with fictive humor and good feeling, hoping it would last and knowing it would not.
In the story, the beer-sodden men stop, settle in a meadow by a stream, and unload cases of beer, to accompany sausages and mash cooked over an open fire in the moonlight. Sated and drunk, they drift off to sleep under the “flying moon.”
If a nostalgic story about male bonding and beer binging appeals to you, then “The Outing” (1953) is for you. It begins, “If you can call it a story. There’s no beginning or end, and there’s very little middle. It is all about a day’s outing, by charabanc, to Porthcawl, which the charabanc never reached, and it happened when I was so high and much nicer.” Paul Cox’s illustrations for the 1985 issue make the narrative particularly appealing.
Featured Image: Paul Cox. “We all climbed down into the moonlight” (1985), from Dylan Thomas’ The Outing (1955)
See Dylan Thomas. “A Story,” Quite Early One Morning. New York: New Directions, 1954; The Outing. Illustrated by Paul Cox. London: J M Dent Sons Ltd., 1953. Reprint, 1985; http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01zf9ds; Caitlin Thomas. My Life with Dylan Thomas: Double Drink Story. London: Virago Press Ltd, 1997.