Leftover Life to Kill

She is egotistical, hysterical, jealous and quarrelsome, her own worst enemy, proud and violent." So reads Cyril Connolly's Sunday Times review of this book. Sometimes the critics actually get it right. This book is a long, endless dirge of self-pity. It may read well as a private journal of one's grief, but it should never have been published. I can only surmise that the publishers wanted to capitalize on Dylan Thomas's death and so a book by his widow would have fit that bill nicely.

Published in 1957, this book was surely in progress shortly after Thomas's death. While there is no denying Widow Thomas's lovely facility with language, the passages of intensive breast-beating mea culpas become a teeth-gnashing experience for the reader show more as well: one wants to put her out of her misery as quickly as possible. One begins to suspect, not long into the book, that her emotions are more on display than they are real.

Throughout, one gets the impression that she has assumed Dylan Thomas's identity: his irreverence, his language, his compulsiveness, his obsessions. She is more of an exhibitionist than DT himself ... if that be possible ... ! so much so that one feels she is leading the reader into a Mad Dance of her own devising.

Had she been able to temper that self-obsession, she might have been a very good writer. As good as DT himself, if not better, ... so many have hinted.

I'm afraid I can't offer much more insight into this one as I was at quite a loss as to why teeth-gnashing, self-indulgence and delirium are worthy subjects to be put on display, without the tempering lessons of humility or self-knowledge.

One doesn't come away from this with any true details of either her own life, or Dylan's -- other than that she is deeply neurotic, and he is dead. show less