Six months earlier to Dylan Thomas' death, November 9,1953, Dylan visited my father and mother in their apartment at 35 Water Street, New York City. There, as they are parting, Dylan holds my mother and says to her, "Gene, you know, I have a feeling we will never see each other again." As Oscar Williams tells the story, Dylan was dead within six months, and Gene Derwood, six months later.

When a wonderful lyric poet dies before his time at age thirty-nine we must all wonder about the circumstances. Was he fated by being identified with the gods as a great poet? Had he sacrificed himself to the muse so much that he was not in his body sufficiently to protect himself from negative input such as heavy drinking?

In Dylan Thomas' case there is cause for concern that the people around him on his last tour in the United States directly contributed to his death. These observations are based on direct reports to me from my father, Oscar Williams, and from the poet and translator of Yevtushenko, George Reevy. Both of them were upset at the time over what had happened to Dylan Thomas.

If you read the standard biographical reports, even from 'official' sources, such as the BBC, you get their direct observation that Dylan Thomas died of accute alcoholism, implying that drink killed Dylan Thomas and nothing else, as if he had the personality of an alcoholic and not a poet. However, in the autopsy of Dylan's body they found that his liver was not enlarged. An accute alcoholic without an enlarged liver?

The real facts are that America killed Dylan Thomas. This is what upset Caitlan Thomas, his wife at the time, as my father told me.

Why did not Oscar and George Reevy write about the death of Dylan Thomas? What you say in public, printed words and what you say personally to someone you can trust in the world of poetry are two different things. If you are a poet you want your poems published. Most poems and most reputations of poets are based on whom you know in the literary centers of the world. You have to go to the parties. You have to have lunches together with influential people. You have to not offend the wrong people.

In my older years, as well as for most of my life, I do not have to worry that when I try to tell the truth and draw a conclusion that I will offend someone who will try to do me in. The world does not like the truth but they will listen to it when they have to. The self-destructive don't want you to destroy themselves. They will take what you give if it helps them survive. Only read what follows if you have the stomach for reality. I report what these two men and poets told me, but I certainly draw my own conclusions. I speak for them who did not speak for me. read more....

Please note that my father here looks the same height as Robert Frost. Elsewhere I have cried "for shame! For shame!" to Roy P. Basler for calling Oscar in print, 'almost a dwarf, but more of a gnome'. There! What would you then call this great, farmer American poet, Bob Frost, Mr. Librarian of Congress?

Of course, if you are a poet, it may be important to avoid the sawing wars of literary politics, unless you are truly cut out for it, as both my father and Randell Jarrell were. Elsewhere I have also described an Oscar Williams - Randell Jarrell encounter.

Enter Oscar Williams, the made-over American. Though Oscar did not have the benefit of belonging to the exploitive white ancestry of the white European immigrant, he tries to make it into the top echelons of American literary society. Maybe by playing famous he thought that one day he would actually become famous? Oscar gave up being Jewish but in fact you can hide an image but can you hide culture and genes? The European Christian whites would not even let Jews own lands and be farmers themselves, or only after the Jews paid huge sums of money to gain the right to farm.

It is all so clear, but it is not taught in the schools that way. So this is the context you won't hear elsewhere but which Oscar Williams would himself know. His wife, Gene Derwood, was a traumatized American woman from the midwest of 'pre-Revolutionary American stock'. Oscar had won his way out of the Jewish ghetto, but at what price?

Thus when we see Oscar looking almost regal, smiling there in the photograph, this represents, and he knows it, that he has made it to the top, if only for a moment. For no reporters follow him as they follow Frost, the American prototypal poet.

Look at this photograph on the left, Robert Frost is in the center of all attention. Oscar must always bring his own camera with him and gently cajole or request that the American prototypal Frost stand by his side. Frost does not ask him to. Oscar, the great American actor in real life, must always set the stage himself for his self-dramas.