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there-even his poetry, blooming on the ashheap of her own domestic
worries and motherhood. She was hysterical about Dylan's VISltS to
America, particularly when she came with him and was an appendage
to his being wined, dined, oh-Dylaned, and tumbled into bed by every–
thing from bobby sox to mink coats, mostly whatever happened to be
around; when, in short, he was cashing in on his poetry in the way it
is
possible for a poet to do only at the great American pay-window.
(Brinnin was shocked, and not above saying so, to see the orderly and
seemingly indifferent treatment accorded Thomas in his London
haunts.) She made dreadful scenes, was unspeakably rude to innocent
bystanders, she sulked, she fought- she and Dylan more than once
smashed up a house they happened to be visiting, furniture, china, bric–
a-brae and all. She complained about Dylan to his friends, she was
forever demanding money and nagging him about it, at the same time
fully participating with him in the insane, compulsive squandering that
left them broke on a more than handsome income. Throughout Brin–
nin's treatment of her there is somehow the implication that Caitlin,
as Dylan's wife, should have granted him his poet's permit, should in
fact have been the first person in the world rather than the last to
forego ordinary demands on him. (For my part,
I
see no reason to be
as impressed as either Brinnin or Caitlin herself seems to be with her
ferocity against America. Here she was, watching her husband hanging
by the teeth in an aerial spin, the crowds below egging him on largely
to satisfy their own craving for a thrill, he taking the applause as an
obligation to go still further-and she, the wife, regarding the whole
business as Dylan's evasion of the kind of mucking through life that
she felt necessary to them both and to their marriage. Why should
she not have hated America? Why should she not have whispered to
Dylan before he went on-stage for a poetry reading, "Remember, they're
all
dirt"?)
So now we understand. Dylan dies, and Caitlin writes a book. There
is
where the dog lay buried, Caitlin is a writer. (There can be no mis–
take about that: for all the confessing, tearing of flesh, suffering, and
defiant apologizing in
Leftover Life,
what its author was really doing
with the book was
writing
it.) A crude, nasty idea, but an inevitable
one; and no less nasty were it to be softened
by
the complicated
language of insight. She is a cultural-psychological phenomenon, and
a familiar one.
If
she is a writer now, then she must
in
some way have
been a writer all along-married to a brilliantly successful poet. The
storm that was a major part of their life together and that breaks with
its
final violence over Caitlin after Dylan's death, was a magnified-by-
