150
an adventurer with a taste for both bourgeois solidity and religious
ap–
purtenances, an impersonator of roles not merely in his novels
but
throughout a lifetime of risks. And while Mr. Watt is aware of Stamm',
portrait, he does not, I think, give it sufficient credence.
Still, disagreements of this kind are the very heart of literary
life,
and I find myself grateful to Mr. Watt for stimulating me to exprell
them. At the very least, I hope, it will be clear that his book should
be read by everyone interested in the novel or in literary criticism. It
is that rare thing: a model of excellence.
THE PAST SURVIVED
LEFTOVER LIFE TO KILL. By C,itlin Thomes. Atlentic-Liitle, Brown.
$4.50.
This book offers the reviewer a peculiar choice between
finding the revelations it contains to be the truth-the ugly, though
to
a woman reassuring, universal facts of the case-or finding them to
be
no more than a sort of interesting clue to the character of its authCl'
and the nature of her special predicament.
One's first temptation is to do the latter, to stand off and "under–
stand" Mrs. Thomas. She herself makes this very easy by presenting
an account of just the kind of behavior one can automatically disso–
ciate oneself from, the behavior of a perverse, self-destructive,
self·
dramatizing, nail-biting drunk. You can, moreover, be doubly superiCl'
to her by being withal sympathetic: "understanding" her drinking,
giv.
ing self-destruction its basis in a higher decency, conceding to
poets'
wives,
!IS
to their husbands, the right to trespass on all our plainer
social
sensibilities. Then there is her prose, which can
be
right, intelligent,
ef·
fective, sometimes marvelously witty (as, particularly, in her descrip–
tions of some American women she has known), but which alwa,s
manages to pull your attention right back from whatever is being
0b–
served to the kind of observation she is making about it.
Clearly the easiest and most workable way of dealing with
Mn.
Thomas is to keep in mind the fact that she was married to the mOlt
adulated, indulged, petted poet of our time. According to John Malcolm
Brinnin, whose
Dylan Thomas
in
America
this book was purportedly
written to answer, Caitlin bitterly resented her husband, resented
his
friends, resented the attention paid to him, resented-Brinnin's
hint
i
