BOOKS
157
If
I seem to have given too much importance to my piddling, mock,
frivolous affairs, it is not that I think they are important, but that, to
live at all, it is necessary to have the illusion of something going on.
They were but fly spots in the dense mesh of the day; but at night it
is
important for me to dream that I am looking forward to meeting
somebody tomorrow.
The "somebody" she was looking forward to meeting was Joseph, a
nineteen-year-old iron miner who had been a companion to her little
boy and had then become her lover. The affair with Joseph-with
whom she was genuinely in love but who was just a young boy grasping
at what he thought might be the chance for him to leave the mines and
better himself-was a situation loaded with humiliation for her, just as
being the town whore of Laugharne had been. But no matter how
she arranged to make a fool of herself, her experiences after all were
but a collection of the "fly spots" that made up her enduring female
existence.
The real indignity that Caitlin learned to suffer on Elba-is that
she has no dignity. There is little moral beauty in such indestructability;
the truth is we do not, certainly cannot, admire it. A man--even Dylan,
whose brain and body put an end to the terrible toll he demanded of
them-who cannot bear certain defeats, or if he does, announces to
the world by his very defeated existence that he has succumbed to them,
puts her kind of strength to shame.
This shame is the shame that Caitlin Thomas feels and makes
her readers feel for her. She is leftover, not with a life to kill, but with
her muck and her old desires and her endurance. Her book is in the
end upsetting and embarrassing. But she has chosen not to pretend
that she is a hero. This, for a sensitive woman, is its own very great
heroism.
Midge Deeter
GORKY AND TOMLIN
ARSHILE GORKY. By Ethel K. Schwobocher. Mocmillen. $8.50.
BRADLEY WALKER TOMLIN. By John
I.
H . Bour. Mocmillen. $4.00.
Elegance and agony: a painter's reputation can almost sink
under the weight of those ideas, especially
if
he is no longer around to
ombat it. Arshile Gorky died in 1948, Bradley Walker Tomlin in 1953.
ortunately, their work has been exhibited often enough since then, but
