Volume 5, Number 9 · December 9, 1965
The Dylan Cult
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
The Life of Dylan Thomas
by Constantine FitzGibbon
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 384 pp., $7.95
Dylan Thomas and Poetic Dissociation
by David Holbrook
Southern Illinois, 211 pp., $4.50
Mr. Constantine FitzGibbon's biography of Dylan Thomas is sensible, modest and careful, unlike its subject. Mr. FitzGibbon is aware of a danger in the biographer's path, that of 'the assumption of excessive knowledgeability.' 'An early biographer of Goethe,' he writes, 'is said to have written: 'Goethe told Eckermann that of all his mistresses it was Lili whom he had loved the most. Here Goethe was wrong.' I should prefer to avoid such judicial pronouncements.' He generally does avoid them and maintains what Albert Camus praised: 'the reserve that befits a good witness.'
Review, 2201 words
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