at by degrees, each in itself imperceptible. And we are well beyond the early stages of this process, as the calmest reflection will reveal. When a baritone sneaks up behind us, then circles unseen from hidden speaker to hidden speaker, when an audience starts, grabs for stomach or chair, and gurgles as it rides the waterfall or roller-coaster, it has reached a point of deliberate pliability under a technician’s manipulation which can only be called unhealthy. It is not good for man to seek abject susceptibility; to submit, with a practiced grace, to the thousand different hypnotisms that assail him in our age of falsely-high “fidelities.”
Letters to Vernon Watkins, by Dylan Thomas (New Directions, $3.00). Most of these letters written to his fellow Welsh poet by Dylan Thomas are warm, witty, nimble shop talk, about the “craft or sullen art” of verse which they shared. But even so, they ought to delight anyone who likes to read other people’s letters, for they are brimming with the zest and charm which Thomas brought everywhere, and to everyone. There is even perhaps a clue here to the terrible question of why so bountiful a man was so little able to preserve himself, and died at thirty- nine. For in every one of these letters (as in all the others of Thomas which have been published so far), there is the same inexhaustible wish to please. No matter what he is saying or how he feels, whether he is happy about his marriage or miserable about the war, he is always turning somersaults, always striving to engage and delight, always exerting himself to be liked. This was his profoundest virtue—this need to take the trouble to reach others; but it was also his most debilitating weakness. Even a Welshman has only so much energy, and Dylan Thomas gave so great a proportion of his to the art of making himself loved that, eventually, there was none left for anything else; not even for keeping his body alive. R. PHELPS
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