Two of a Kind

LEFTOVER LIFE TO KILL (262 pp.)--Caitlin Thomas--AtlanticLittle, Brown ($4.50).

If God does not exist, says Ivan Karamazov, everything is permitted. To his wife Caitlin Thomas, Poet Dylan Thomas was God--or so she suggests. Her book is a searingly candid chronicle of what she permitted herself (very nearly everything) in the first year following Thomas' death in Manhattan in 1953. Leftover Life to Kill will shock and infuriate some readers, make passionate partisans of others. The book's most remarkable quality is not its wild, keening dirge for the dead poet, but its revelation of the Dionysian personality and singing, Celtic eloquence of Irish-born Caitlin Thomas.

Resentfully shunted to the wings by Dylan's ham-acting genius, her own romantic ego yearned for the center of the stage. Ironically, Dylan's death freed her to indulge in his own kind of self-destructive self-expression. The character she re veals is a kind of Lilith raging with sexuality, jealous and mother-fierce as a tigress, and without a compass needle of discretion or direction in her head.

Who Killed Dylan? The first to shrink visibly in Caitlin's earth-mothering embrace is Dylan himself: "Dylan used to read to me in bed, in our first, know-nothing, lamb-sappy days; to be more exact, Dylan may have been a skinny, springy lambkin, but I was more like its buxom mother then, and distinctly recollect carrying him across streams under one arm; till the roles were reversed and he blew out and I caved in." Exactly why Dylan "blew out" is a question that has fueled his funeral pyre for the last four years. The argument ranges from Fellow Poet Kenneth Rexroth's ardently silly blast at U.S. conformity ("Who killed the bright-headed bird? . . . You killed him in your God damned Brooks Brothers suit") to Fellow Poet John Malcolm Brinnin's vulgarly detailed but more plausible notion (Dylan Thomas in America) that drink and lechery did Dylan in. Caitlin blames America, too, in a different way:

"It is easy to understand that, when the unflagging, disarming American charm met Dylan's professional charm, it caused a general melting fudge of a sticky, syrupy, irresistible fluid, impossible for such as us: raw from the harsh Welsh backward blacknesses." To his "wide-open-beaked" poetry readings all over the U.S.. Dylan gave "the concentrated artillery of his flesh and blood, and, above all, his breath. I used to come in late and hear, through the mikes, the breath-straining panting . . . booming blue thunder into the teenagers' delighted bras and briefs. And I thought, Jesus, why doesn't he pipe down."

The Thieves of Love. Caitlin sizzled over the sexual autograph hunters who stalked Dylan "in packs"--"these thieves of my love [who] were candidly, if not prepossessingly, spreadeagled. from the first tomtomed rumour of a famous name." On occasion, Dylan allowed himself to be caught by the hunters, and Caitlin makes no secret of the fact that she had fans of her own whom she was glad to oblige ("There is no doubt, in some people's minds, as to my super bitchery"). They hated each other for their infidelities: "It seems extraordinary to me now that we did not kill each other outright; we certainly got dangerously near to it." But it was only with Dylan dead and buried in his Welsh village of Laugharne ("this Godforsaken, Dylan-shared, vanishing dip in the hills") that Caitlin was possessed by the enormity of her loss, and wanted "to ferret down to that long locked cold box, and burst it apart . . . to mangle him with my strong bones, mingle, mutilate the two of us together, till the dead and the living would be desired One."

As the mother of three children (one of them in his teens) Caitlin was expected by the prim and proper Welsh ladies to wear her widow's weeds decorously. Instead, "I stole their sons and husbands." By her testimony, she used sex to drown her grief, but it did not work: there was only "an increase in my inescapable dedication to Dylan." With the Welsh ladies' faces set against her like so many druid stones, Caitlin took her five-year-old son Colm and fled into exile, to the Italian island of Elba.

Lady Chattelley's Miner. Here began an affair right out of Lady Chatterley's Lover. "I did not fancy myself as a haggard, rabid, avid randy dowager combing the Riviera for young blood," says Caitlin. Nonetheless, Caitlin, then 39, took an 18-year-old Italian iron miner as her lover. In part, Joseph, with his "attractive grave hardness," was an antidote to Dylan, who had been so finicky that he could pull an "all-out faint" at the sight of a mouse, and was "as useless as a penguin with his hands." In part, it was a Latin love call that Caitlin could not resist ("those wonderful whirlpools of dankly greasy, black grass hair, that it was an insult to the Creator not to fondle"). Caitlin recalls every turn of their sometimes amusing, often pathetic affair. Elba proved as strait-laced as Laugharne, Wales, and the time came when the hissed words "Prostituta, prostituta" sounded in her ears.

Though she stands as an insolent, self-confessed sinner at the bar of society's judgment, Caitlin Thomas writes like a saint at the stake. The book may be vulgar and shameless, but it is also a beautifully written, classic portrayal of the romantic temperament. Two of a kind, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas reveal the tragic flaw in that temperament. To intensify every passing moment of life, the romantic must live at an ever-quickening pace. Moving from excess to excess, he must demand more and more of himself. Pursued frantically enough, this course can result only in madness or death; persistent echoes of both ring through this book. Not since Dylan Thomas himself has there been anyone who could have written it -- with all its sickening self-indulgence and all its haunting brilliance.

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