Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR DYLAN THOMAS Considering the human issues involved, Granville Hicks's defense of John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America [NL, December 26] seemed a little casual, and compatible...
...What it does do, with its repetitively detailed accounts of drinking, of family dissensions and of sexual incidents, is feed the indecent hunger for gossip, which we now know can be exploited on somewhat higher levels than those reached by Confidential magazine and its imitators...
...It should have read: "I am not equaling the Fund with the USSR...
...In tragedy we share the pity and terror, and pay a price for our increased self-understanding and increased moral commitment...
...It is perplexing to live in a literary climate in which the same sort of people who have so elaborately praised Henry James's novels for their nuances of moral feeling, their reticences behind reticences, can find the gross exposures in Brinnin's volume perfectly acceptable...
...In a report of five years' activity by District Attorney Hogan's office, which came to our attention in recent weeks, Hogan says that bis staff has thoroughly explored "all the theories publicly espoused" in connection with the Tresca case, but that it has not been solved...
...There has been a tremendous amount of entirely warranted concern about political informing, about the justification for testifying publicly about objective political acts which have definable social consequences...
...The book throws no light on Thomas's poetry, or on the real causes of his breakdown, and records almost nothing of value from Thomas's conversations...
...Dylan Thomas in America is a book which manifestly will cause great pain to sensitive people, including Thomas's wife and three children...
...This seems to me an important test case which cannot be passed over lightly...
...Do mere curiosities about other people's private lives give us a "right to know" which is superior to that humane respect for the dignity and sensibility and privacy of the individual which is among the cardinal principles, as I well know, of Granville Hicks and The New Leader...
...Northampton, Mass...
...These seem to me important questions...
...Even if the instigators have not been identified, these friends inquire, would not an indictment have been justified...
...The situation is very different in true tragedy, where strengths and weaknesses are experiences in inseparable conjunction, and where the audience is not permitted the morbid inhumanity of feeding on another human being's suffering...
...Do we really mean what we say about human dignity and the right to privacy...
...Help us keep the Tresca case alive...
...That date has been chosen (instead of the actual anniversary date three days earlier) for the convenience of many of those who join us each year in paying tribute to Carlo...
...Flowers will be laid at the scene of his death—northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 15th Street—on Saturday, January 14, at 1 p.m...
...and the garage in which it was kept, why no one was ever indicted for this killing...
...It is quite true that Thomas behaved embarrassingly in America some years back and that this was much talked of for a time in literary and academic circles...
...No speeches, but two minutes of silent contemplation of a crime which we continue to believe was a political murder, committed because of the victim's opposition to certain alien and evil forces...
...We hope you will be present when the flowers are laid...
...Are there to be no limits whatsoever...
...If we take any satisfaction in such an account, it is a satisfaction partly masochistic, partly sadistic, which will not bear looking into...
...Many of Carlo's friends, however, still wonder, in view of the evidence which Hogan's office has been reported to have in hand dealing with at least one suspect, the murder car...
...These questions will be raised in a letter to Hogan...
...Might not such action have produced information about those behind the Tresca crime...
...This time the flower-laying will be without speeches, because everything has been said that can be said about the significance of the courageous life of that champion of workers and the cruel death dealt to him...
...DEAR EDITOR DYLAN THOMAS Considering the human issues involved, Granville Hicks's defense of John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America [NL, December 26] seemed a little casual, and compatible neither with the perceptive humaneness of most of Hicks's reviews, nor with the principles of respect for the individual for which The New Leader so valiantly does battle...
...To dwell on the weaknesses, the deterioration, of a man of superior talents, when no illumination comes from it and when no responsible commitment is demanded of the audience, is simply debasing...
...I am referring now not to Hicks's brief comment, but to the general reception of the book, and to the Atlantic's self-satisfaction in publishing it...
...Robert Gorham Davis TRESCA MEMORIAL Once more the Tresca Memorial Committee plans to honor the memory of Carlo Tresca, uncompromising anti-totalitarian editor, whose murder in 1943 remains unpunished...
...If what is printed in Dylan Thomas in America is justified by "legitimate speculation," then there is no reason why we should not be given the fullest sexual and domestic information about any living person of distinction who arouses our curiosity, or in whose household a talented writer has been hospitably received...
...I see no possible good that it serves (except to relieve Brinnin's feelings) which would justify our disregarding that pain...
...Something of the sort happened, but to a less shocking degree, in the case of Scott Fitzgerald...
...But this is hardly a reason for making a permanent record of just those items which where disturbing and displeasing in Thomas's conduct in his last years ("Brinnin's burden," in Hicks's phrase), and giving them the widest possible currency, creating from them the dominant image of Thomas for far more people than know his poetry...
...New York City Norman THOMAS, Chairman CORRECTION The first sentence of the last paragraph in Arnold Beichman's letter of December 26 was incorrectly printed to read: "I am equating the Fund with the USSR...
...Yet hardly a voice is raised in protest when, under no social necessity, a book is published which makes gratuitous revelations of a painful nature about the purely private affairs of living people...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 3
