Books: 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."