Sober truth behind the liquid legend

39 in New York on November 9, 1953, according to the authors of this book on the immortal lyric poet. James Nashold and George Tremlett claim he could have lived on for another 40 years for, despite tales of the permanently parched and plastered saint of liquid legend, Dylan was ''no alcoholic'', though that sounds like a likely story, given the poet's battle with the bottle and his definition of an alcoholic as one you dislike who drinks as much as you do, as he did speaking for or against himself.

He was, Nashold and Tremlett opinionate, ''a man with easily treatable illnesses, who needed a good doctor and true friends (and who) really died from a morphine overdose and steroid injections which pushed him into diabetic shock''. Yes, folks, it can now be revealed, Dylan was a diabetic who disliked telling the truth to doctors and thus avoided insulin and dosed himself foolishly with drink and with such drugs as benzedrine and cortisone. And, at the end, accepted a fatal dose of drugs from a supposedly demonic doctor. Nashold and Tremlett have their credentials: the former is a neurosurgeon, the latter an author who knew Dylan's widow Caitlin and lives in the town cursed by Thomas.

Tales told about Dylan conform to a simple thematic pattern, featuring a Welsh Eden and an American Inferno. When Thomas left London on October 19, 1953, for his fourth and final trip to the US he was a celebrity suffering from asthma, gout, blackouts, anxiety, bouts of delirium tremens, and a suspicion that his great talent would dry up before he could dry out.

As is well-known from J M Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America (1956), Caitlin Thomas's Leftover Life to Kill (1957), Constantine FitzGibbon's authorised The Life of Dylan Thomas (1965), Paul Ferris's Dylan Thomas (1977) and Rob Gittin's The Last Days of Dylan Thomas (1986), the basic dilemma was the poet was required to play the role of epic drinker in America where role-playing is a reality.

Biographies of Thomas are generally blow-by-blow - or bout-by-bout - accounts of the days leading down to the legendary death of Dylan at St Vincent's Hospital, New York. Portrayed in this manner, the creative vitality of the poet is overwhelmed by an apparently obsessive self-destructive stagger towards death. It is a subject that encourages biographers to indulge in psychological asides. His fine talent is ignored, his flaws become the raw material of myth.

Tremlett set out to demythologise Dylan, to give Thomas the respect due to a poet who ''wrote some 20 great poems that will live for as long as the English language is spoken'' in his book Dylan Thomas: In the Mercy of His Means (1991).

Dismissing the biographies by Brinnin, Fitzgibbon (previously spelled FitzGibbon), and Ferris as ''defective'', Tremlett maintained in his first biography about Dylan that the truth was obscured by activities of the trustees of the Dylan Thomas estate, men (one of them Kingsley Amis who idiotically thought Dylan a poor poet and ''a rotten man'') unable to appreciate the significance of Thomas's work. For Tremlett, then and now, Thomas was not a minor poet who died after destroying his talent; he was a major poet who need not have died in his prime.

Tremlett is well placed to question the authorised version of the rise and fall of Thomas. He lives in Laugharne, the Llaregyb (buggerall backwards) of Under Milk Wood. He knows all about Caitlin, having collaborated with her on her Caitlin (1986). Caitlin, he found, was as coarse a character as her husband at his worst. She regularly battered Dylan, aimed a bottle at the head of a photographer, was straitjacketed and hospitalised for her violent reaction to seeing Dylan in hospital, tried to kill herself on several occasions, and spent periods in hospital. According to Tremlett, Caitlin thought her marriage had collapsed shortly before Dylan's death. From her perspective, Dylan ''was a

bastard'' (Caitlin thought ''all men are bastards''); he might have been less of a bastard had he been able to find domestic peace in the valleys.

To Tremlett, Thomas was a likeable poseur, genuine only in his genius. For all his boasts about his sexual prowess, he was hopeless in bed and may have been a virgin at 21 when he met Caitlin. He had a low tolerance of alcohol. He and Caitlin were spongers who exploited friends. ''I suspect,'' said Tremlett first time around, ''Thomas was not half the man he wanted to be.'' Inadequate as a man, the argument goes, Thomas perfected the role of the boozy womaniser as a self-defensive strategy. Nashold read what Tremlett wrote first time around and asked if he could inform him on the Death of Dylan second time around. Hence this book.

Like Ferris before him, Nashold and Tremlett dispute the

popular perception of the Death of Dylan from alcoholic excess. Many writers have taken Thomas at his word when he said, after a 90-minute pub session six days before his death: ''I've had 18 straight whiskies, I think that's a record.'' It is this book's belief the poet could not have knocked back so much in such a short space of time without an immediate alcholic seizure.

Eighteen whiskies in 90 minutes is one every five minutes, not an impossible task for a seasoned cask. However, Thomas was a beer drinker, habitually given to hyperbole, so he probably did not consume as much as he claimed. Again following Ferris's lead, this book suggests Thomas could have survived had not his boozy body been injected with cortisone and half a grain of morphine.

Like other poets who have been turned into liquid legends - Berryman to name but one who was there at the bedside when Dylan died - Dylan was unfairly regarded as a flawed man who put his talent into his work, his genius for self-destruction into life. The boozy bard is a convenient peg on which to hang anecdotes and opinions. Scores of boozers claim to have known Thomas. He is invariably referred to as Dylan, not Thomas, for Dylan was always young and easy to understand whereas Thomas required more effort. Thus a private poet became public-house property. This fascinating book goes beyond the booze to the diabetic disease that may have done in Dylan.