Elegy for a Dead Self
RUDIKOFF, SONYA
Elegy for a Dead Self Leftover Life to Kill. By Caitlin Thomas. Atlantic-Little, Brown. 262 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Sonya Rudikoff Contributor, "Partisan Review'' Dylan Thomas was survived by a...
...Her lamentation is at times so obviously "written...
...those who guarded or ignored her, or shouted "Prostituta...
...Mrs...
...On the islands, no one accepted her, but at least there was the relief of not being known, not dragging along in the uncomfortable role of poet's wife...
...For the rest of her life, the rest of her self without Dylan, Mrs...
...Thomas expresses genuine feeling, but, unfortunately, there is a shadow of contrivance looming over her book...
...Reviewed by Sonya Rudikoff Contributor, "Partisan Review'' Dylan Thomas was survived by a wife and three children...
...So far as I can tell...
...From the very first, she coped with her widowhood in an unusual way: Taunted by Welsh neighbors for not putting flowers on Dylan Thomas's grave, she is so closely united with him in her own spirit that she imagines herself in the grave...
...Those who surrounded him were powerless to intervene...
...Perhaps it was because people felt he was by definition doomed...
...somehow saved her from the same fate...
...She writes in a headlong, jumpy, poetic prose which is often very mannered and reminiscent of her late husband's style...
...This is probably one of the most unusual elegies in literary history, but it is not primarily an elegy over a dead husband...
...Away from Wales and England, she had "as much Dylan as [she] could carry...
...After the miserable circumstances of his death, his wife returned to Wales, but, unable to remain there in the "Godforsaken, Dylan-shared, vanishing dip in the hills," she left for Italy...
...Thomas blames America for ruining their marriage...
...Thomas's mourning insistently parallels her husband's last years, with this difference: Dylan Thomas was allowed to find destruction, while his wife was not...
...Thomas wanted to escape, this style finally seems obscure and murky, excluding almost everything except now and then the echo of human footsteps...
...her destiny seemed less clear...
...the intention to be frank and brutal often so clearly willed—after a while nothing she says is so shocking as her persistence...
...She shows herself as frantic and battered, childish, touching, helpless, bitter, pitiable...
...she fled them...
...the range of violent behavior permitted women in remote Italian villages is obviously limited...
...Mrs...
...She is at the same time furious with him for having left her...
...Thomas could think of nothing more fitting than destruction...
...Vergogna...
...Thomas pressed against those limits repeatedly, and was rewarded not with worship and admiration but with contempt...
...Thomas does not offer the much-heralded rejoinder to John Malcolm Rrinnin's Dylan Thomas in America...
...or she blames children, the pressure of domestic chores, insufficient income...
...Finally, she falls in love with a young man on the island, but not until she has somewhat exorcised the demon...
...Something in her own nature combined with her situation to prevent the family parallel from working itself out completely: She courted rejection but was never indulged, had no friends and was not a symbol of anything for anyone...
...this immediate responsibility restrained her surrender to destruction...
...This book records her feelings and activities during a long period spent on the island of Elba with her youngest child...
...Perhaps it was her own essential shrewdness which made her escape America and England, where she might have been cushioned by public adulation or nourished on his memory, his notoriety...
...Too much of it becomes annoying: Everything must be written about in the same way, even Casals and his "planet-encompassing cello.' Like the English fogs Mrs...
...Escaping the "Dylan-infested world" was not easy, however: She brought all her memories, and, even as she rails against the cold weather, the ostracism and suspicion of the villagers, the lack of hot water, of money, she is forced to go over Dylan's death, their marriage, her "rindy fruit of bitterness, already installed since childhood," the quarrels, the unhappy American visits...
...it is much more an elegy over a dead wife...
...she reproaches herself for not loving him enough, regrets her own jealousy and insistence, wants to believe in his love for her, and then doubts whether she ever really loved him...
...England, Wales, America, all were impossible...
...but even her masochism becomes a gesture which allows her to berate others: even her frankness seems a little mechanical...
...It was a painful and desperate time, not only because of her bereavement, but, perhaps more, because she found herself among people who should have given her warmth and sympathy and who gave her only coldness...
...Sometimes Mrs...
...Then, too...
...Leftover Life to Kill: The meaning of that is very clear...
...False friends, American generosity, "the Killer— poetry reading," her own character, his character—all are brought out for blame, shelved and then brought out again...
...She had a small child with her, who had to be fed, gotten from school, put to bed...
...Hers had been an "all-in-Dylan world...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 48
