This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican/a> and Carmel Doyle. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 8 December 1913, United Kingdom
Died: 1 August 1994
Country most active: United Kingdom, International
Also known as: Caitlin Macnamara
Caitlin Thomas (née Macnamara ) (1913–94), writer, and wife of Dylan Thomas, was born in Hammersmith, London, on 8 December 1913. Nicolette later wrote of Caitlin’s chocolate-box beauty and underlying savagery as a child, traits which persisted into adulthood. She received only two years schooling at Groveley Manor, Bournemouth, after which she moved to London, aged 16, to attend dancing school. At Christmas 1931 she appeared in the pantomime ‘Aladdin’ at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and was then in the chorus line for a year. Her lack of application and discipline she later blamed on her bohemian upbringing. She spent the next two years on prolonged visits to her father, whom she disliked, in Ennistymon, where she swam and danced in cottages; this period represented a perfect rural idyll all her life. She took dance lessons in Dublin from Vera Gribben, an Austrian who taught freestyle barefoot dancing to classical music in the manner of Isadora Duncan. Caitlin performed with Gribben at the progressive Group Theatre in London, and worked in Paris for a time. On 12 April 1936 she met the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–53) in a pub in Fitzrovia; he put his head in her lap and swore eternal love, and she never danced professionally again. On 11 July 1937 they married in Penzance, Cornwall, and in 1938 settled in Laugharne, Wales. Their relationship was passionate, destructive, and fuelled by alcohol. Both were promiscuous and spendthrift, but her behaviour was the more uncontrolled, possibly because she harboured literary ambitions but lacked his creative outlet. Their final meeting, like their first, was legendary: on 3 November 1953 she arrived drunk at the New York hospital where he was dying and tried to get into bed with him, broke a crucifix, and was eventually straitjacketed. Left widowed with three children (two sons and one daughter), in the years after his death she scandalised Wales with her wild, promiscuous behaviour. Her memoirs, Leftover life to kill (1957), fostered the myth of a fatalistic passion, what she called ‘the one, deadly, organic entanglement of a lifetime’ (Ferris, 164). Although Louis MacNeice in the New Statesman called the book highly personal and often deeply moving, The Times judged it a monument to egocentricity, and the Economist noted the ‘absence of reticence and decency – those who enjoyed Francis Bacon might be able to relish the exhibitionism of Caitlin Thomas’ (Ferris, 171). It was a bestseller. While most critics have detected Dylan’s influence on the purple prose passages, George Tremlett has argued that Caitlin’s free, uninhibited speech patterns probably found their way into Dylan’s radio play Under Milk Wood (1954). From 1957 Caitlin lived in Italy, where she met Giuseppe Fazio, eleven years her junior, who became her companion for life; in 1963, aged 49, she gave birth to her fourth child. She wrote several other books, including Not quite posthumous letters to my daughter (1962) and Double drink story (1997, posthumously); these rehearsed the same themes as her first book, but were less striking. All her children and the unemployed Fazio were supported by the Dylan Thomas Trust, which was set up after the poet’s death and became an increasingly lucrative source as his legend grew; the relationship between widow and trustees was bad. In 1969 she gave up alcohol, but does not seem to have found happiness in Rome or, after 1982, in Abruzzi, Sicily, where she died 1 August 1994. Her body was taken to Laugharne for burial beside Dylan. Paul Ferris performed a hatchet job in his 1993 biography, characterising her as uncontrolled, egocentric, attention-seeking, hard-nosed, humourless, calculating, and responsible for driving her husband to drink; he calls Thomas’s love for her a fatal dependence. In Nashold’s and Tremlett’s The death of Dylan Thomas (1997) she is a magnificent virago, damaged, tragic, but always honest. An undated portrait of Caitlin in early womanhood, painted by John, is reproduced in Bill Read, The days of Dylan Thomas (NY: McGraw–Hill (1964), 86).