15-4
PARTISAN
personality version of a literary marriage. Her hatreds and
of her husband, her guilt and female self-hatred, her assertive,
tive, and resentful feelings about motherhood, all this can be seen
is
the perspective of a woman frantically unsure, as they say in the
of her role, immature-as most lady writers must be, in the sense
their spiritual and worldly ambitions keep them in a constant state
anxiety about settling for just those things adulthood offers wo'meo-'
married to a man who, no matter what gutters he dragged
blind drunk and on his knees, was first and foremost the author
those poems; and a man, it must be added, with a few childish
of his own to make, and knowing how to impose them on the
far more successfully than she.
But all of it, the marriage, the violent, drink-fogged, chaotic
with Dylan, the entire business of living at the outer edge of
ience--and even once toppling over into madness-do not really
count for
Leftover Life.
Dylan was an accident of Caitlin's
blCIgr.ipny:
she might, after all, have married someone else; like all particular
of a personal history he is ineradicable and yet fortuitous.
If
he
her with a load of pain and guilt and bewilderment she will never
able to clear away, he could also have been her salvation. (Imagine
woman with the sense of sin and self-destruction that shrieks
these pages married to a soft man or a gentle man-who might
thought it his part to give her something!) As it was, Dylan's
death forced her to examine the meaning of her life and her
The examination was postponed: first in an American sanitarium,
in Laugharne, Wales, where she returned with Dylan's body and
him and where, by her account, she spent the first flush of her
lonely life making raids on the entire male population of the
But finally she took herself and her youngest child, Colm, age five,
the island of Elba "to sort things out" or "to pull herself together"
whatever is the going cliche in these matters. And there she found
means to take a long look at herself and be ultimately honest. N
else that happened on Elba and nothing she says about it,
foolish, can obscure that real achievement.
True, a good deal of what she writes about is simply the usual
perience of widowhood. She calls the life ahead of her "leftover."
is forever trying and failing, at least so far as the reader is
rnr,rp,onM
to evoke a living image of her husband. She reproaches herself for
wasted in hostility or disbelief when death was so near. She
certain unserious impulses to suicide. Her very visit to Elba
is
classic journey of a widow to the scene of an earlier happiness.
Her
