Child in the. Dark
Leftover Life to Kill. By Caitlin Thomas. (Put- nam, 18s.) THE wife of a genius of the classic kind—childish, irresponsible, 'impossible' as provider, father, social being—has roughly two courses open to her, two opposite attitudes to him and methods of facing life with him : she can give or she can compete. She can be an anchor—indispensable and invisible—to his bobbing, picturesque exis- tence, a Martha, who eliminates every glimmer of creativeness in herself, who surrenders her whole self to the full-time support of his creative- ness, to his Mary; or she can pit her powers and herself against his and him, can join his cork-like progress and bob about as extravagantly and improvidently as he does. Which method is likely to be the more successful no one, of course, can say: it depends what you look for in marriage.
Dylan Thomas's wife belonged to the second category—emphatically not the appendage, the subterranean, the practical and sober category; and one's response to her frank account of the see- saw relationship and its aftermath, with its beauty and squalor, its high spirits and glumness, its petty jealousies and the tough framework of what, for lack of a more explicit word, one must call (though some of the usual ingredients seem lack- ing) love, must be so much a matter of tempera- ment, of personal—too personal—reaction, that it is hard to judge it, firmly and factually, as a work of literature.
For it succeeds, to my mind, not because but in spite of its severe literary disadvan- tages. It succeeds through such a sodden, be- wildering mass of sub-Dylan verbiage as seems calculated to bog down the most sublime sincerity, such a deal of (at times) boring chit-chat as might be expected to send the most sympathetic listener into a doze. It succeeds by what one can only call the force of personality; by a warmth and some sort of basic grandeur, a sweeping and (I at least find) irresistible persuasiveness that gives pathos, depth and a sense not of impudicity but of can- dour to an attitude that might easily have been, and that often on the face of it looks mawkish, distasteful and plain muddy. Every hackle goes up—against this sort of revelation, this sort of attitude, this sort of prose—to be whacked firmly down again by the sight, through it all, of suffer- ing, of spiritual and physical disintegration, of that most tragic though not most terrible of all pains, loss. Pity, in the end, is what one is left with; not that Mrs. Thomas, for all her desolation, asks for it, but it is wrenched half willingly up from the bottom of a muddle of reactions.
Leftover Life to Kill—the attitude, the style, are all contained in that one phrase of title—is Mrs. Thomas's evocation of a rich past, happy and miserable in about equal proportions, and an empty present into which a feverish, trivial and profoundly sad lot of action and emotion has been haphazardly jammed. When her husband died she, after a short time in Wales, took her youngest child to the island of Elba and there spent a chill winter, full of grief and bustle, with the old basic pain overlaid by brisk, scratchy new feelings, and memories of her husband mingled with the curiously conventional trappings of a back-to-Nature Mediterranean aflaire. These new griefs and affections and passionate stabs at feel- ing and caring sometimes seem to blot out the original great loss, but never quite : back it comes, inexorably, like the sky over it all. The book's best parts are those which directly recall the past, evoke her husband's personality an,d analyse his motives and behaviour. Criticism of him and herself is ruthlessly and disarmingly severe; but while she deals admirably with such things as the disastrous
effects of American encouragement on his charac- ter, and the resentment his success inspired in her, she seems simply not to realise the basic flaw in them both, their supreme and absolute egoism.
In an artist and a man we—perhaps rather naively —understand, even expect it; in a woman and a mother it seems strange. It runs through every- thing—a desperate, passionate preoccupation with her feelings, her future, her grief, shown not only in the general air of the book but in dozens of small practical examples and in an apparent forget- fulness of the fact that there were three children needing, presumably, a mother's attention. This self-centredness and almost pathological irrespon- sibility reaches so immature a pitch that one has hardly the sense of dealing with an adult at all. `Children do not need love, and only later feel the need of it,' Mrs. Thomas writes. 'And I am one of the renegades who think grown-ups need it more; that the older they get, and the less love they get, the more they need it.' In that, as in so much else she says, one has the impression of a child, violent and bewildered, who happens to have acquired adult age and experience but doesn't know what to do with it, who has no idea how to apply it to the relentless problems of being alive at all.
Where the book scores is in being an antidote to Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America, which, though no doubt factually true, had the truth not of portraiture, but of police or medical photo- graphs. Beside the obscene glare the earlier book threw on a man lately dead, and all its prodding impertinence, Mrs. Thomas's account appears tender and even dignified. Her honesty at least has a point, a justification; it is not the ugly exhibitionism that battens, as Brinnin's book did, on a knowledge of every hidden humiliation of a man people happen to want to know about. And beyond the rounded and—one must admit— engaging portrait of the man there is a piece of self-portraiture such as few women can have faced or attempted : a picture of almost complete spiritual chaos presented without self-pity or excuses. For this alone, it is a deeply moving book, the courageous record of someone who makes no attempt at courage, the 'extraordinarily vivid and ebullient and occasionally huniorous account, within thoroughly material terms of reference, of a soul's long progress in the dark. ISABEL QU1GLY
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