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Meanwhile, the poet John Malcolm Brinnin has published an account of his intimate association with Thomas—as lecture-planner, business manager, and friend — during the last four years of Dylan’s life. Mr. Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America (Atlantic Little, Brown, $4.00) is certain to arouse sharp controversy. Some will feel that to chronicle Thomas’s alcoholic dégringnlade was a betrayal of the loyally due to a hugely gifted friend. Others will applaud Mr. Brinnin’s decision to set down what he knows of the record before the facts become hopelessly blurred by gossip and mythmaking. What is certain, to my mind, is that Brinnin has written out of the deepest regard for Thomas; and further, that he has written a compelling and extremely moving book.

Mr. Brinnin describes two visits to Laugharne, the Welsh fishing village where the Thomases lived; and there we see the poet in a different light — as a man devoted to his father and mother, and one who cared deeply about his three small children. But even here he betrayed signs of a gnawing restlessness; and his meetings with Brinnin in London revealed a long-established pattern of orgiastic drinking which effectively refutes the charge — voiced in some quarters after his death— that it was American hospitality which “killed him.”

Mr. Brinnin’s brief attempts to clarify the sources of Thomas’s guilt, unhappiness, and compulsive drinking did not seem to me particularly enlightening. What is valuable and arresting in his book is the precision, candor, and feeling with which it describes Thomas’s turbulent last years — his triumphs and his disgraces; his stormy relationship with his wife; his three love affairs in America; his moments of relaxed, cheerful enjoyment; and his final terrible tailspin.

“ How fortunate,” wrote Pascal, “is a career that begins with love and ends with ambition.” The sequence of passions which the great moralist prescribed w-as curiously reversed in the career of a princess who was his contemporary, and who is now the subject of a captivating biography by Francis Stecgmuller: The Grand Mademoiselle (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $3.75). The lady’s name was Annc-Marie-Louise D’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier; and her life spans the period 1627-1693. She was the daughter of Monsieur, younger brother of Louis XIII, and was known as La Grande Mademoiselle. Mr. Stecgmuller is to be congratulated on having spotted the fact that this lady, who could hardly be called a major figure in French history, is a really magnificent subject for a biographer. His book is based on the courageously candid volume of memoirs which his heroine started writing at twenty-five, and it seems to me in every respect an admirable job.

The Grand Mademoiselle was the richest princess in Europe. Early in life she concluded that she had no taste for galanierie, and for her the question of marriage reduced itself to securing “an establishment” that would improve her already glittering station. Among the succession of grandees who figured as possible husbands for her were the then thirteen-year-old King of France, Louis XIV, eleven years her junior; Philip IV of Spain; the Hapsburg Emperor, Ferdinand III; and Charles Stuart, later Charles II of England. For one reason or another, all of these prospective matches and many others failed to materialize.

The most troublesome fact in the Grand Mademoiselle’s quest for the perfect establishment was the behavior of her worthless father, to whom she was fanatically loyal. Monsieur repeatedly took part in doomed conspiracies against his brother, supposedly to liberate the king from the evil influence of Richelieu: and later he carried his daughter with him into the revolt known as La Fronde, which was directed against young Louis XI\’s minister, Mazarin. The Grand Mademoiselle personally won over the city of Orleans for the Frondists; and shortly afterward there occurred in Paris the incident for which she is remembered in the text books of French history — she ordered the guns of the Bastille to fire on the army of Louis XIV which was besieging the city.

But the Fronde collapsed; the Grand Mademoiselle was exiled, at twenty-five, to a remote country château; and after she was permitted to return to court, she remained for many years in eclipse. Then, on the verge of forty, she fell desperately in love — and with a mere Captain of Dragoons; a dashing, headstrong gallant, so reckless that he once hid under the king’s bed to eavesdrop on a conversation between the monarch and his mistress. The drama between the Grand Mademoiselle and the Comte de Lauzun was later described by Madame de Sévigné as the perfect subject for a Racine tragedy; and it makes the last part of Mr. Steegmuller’s biography t ho high point of an altogether remarkable story.

John O’Hara’sTen North Frederick (Random House, $3.05) is another fictional chronicle of life in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, the small town which was the setting of Appointment in Samarra and A Rage to Live. Three generations of Chapins — one of Gibbsville’s first families — appear in the story, but it is essentially a biography of Joseph B. Chapin, who dies in 1945 at the age of about sixty. Opening with his funeral, the novel first presents to the reader the public image of Chapin as a singularly fortunate and exemplary citizen. Then the author proceeds to unfold the subtly different truth about Chapin’s life — the lofty political ambitions which he secretly cherished and the bitter humiliation they brought him; the painful stresses and disappointments within his home; his hopeless (and to this reader improbable) love affair with a beautiful young friend of his daughter; and finally, his discreetly handled decline into alcoholism.

Mr. O’Hara works into this narrative a keyhole report on Gibbsville’s sex life; he quotes ream upon ream of dialogue, gossip, and small talk; and he anatomizes Gibbsville snobbery with encyclopedic thoroughness and a great deal of repetition. There is something excruciatingly parvenu in the relentless way in which O’Hara points up the minutest social distinctions; and his mesmerized immersion in small-town snobbery — however accurate his findings may be — becomes a bit of a bore.

To my mind, Clifton Fadiman was right when he predicted two decades ago that O’Hara would end up in a blind alley. What Fadiman said then applies perfectly to O’Hara’s new novel: “Here ... is the ripe fruit of the nonspeeulative, perceptive American newspaperman mind. A precise and conscious talent devotes itself to a tale from which is extracted all possible point, even the point of pointlessness. . . . [O’Hara] can draw you a map of Gibbsville’s social strata . . . he knows [everything about] the décor of country-club civilization. But about all these things he deliberately has no ideas . . . his particular effect ... is to produce no effect at all.”

“God himself couldn’t sink this ship,” one of the deck hands assured a passenger on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. At 11:40 P.M. on April 14, 1912, the “unsinkable” Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, and two hours and forty minutes later it went to the bottom. That legendary disaster, in which some 1500 persons lost their lives, has been vividly and meticulously reconstructed in Walter Lord’sA Night to Remember (Holt, $3.50). The author has been fascinated by the tragedy of the Titanic ever since he was a boy, and he has been collecting data about it for more than twenty years. Insofar as it is humanly possible to separate fact from fancy in the story of that. April night, Mr. Lord’s book does it. It is a magnificent job of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the last.

In many parts of the ship, the sidelong collision with the iceberg (which rapidly vanished into the night) was fell only as a slight, grinding jar; and it was quite some time before the passengers grasped that their lives were in danger. The first boats lowered were not one-quarter filled, many people still believing that, they were safer on the ship. When it. became quite clear that the Titanic was doomed and that there was lifeboat space for only half of those on board, many male passengers began to fight their way in with the women and children. But there were many, too, who behaved with exemplary discipline and courage. Benjamin Guggenheim even contributed a seignioral touch to the tragedy by changing into his evening clothes and making good his resolution to “go down like a gentleman.” And the band, which lustily went on playing ragtime, was at its post when the ship nose-dived.

What happened later in the boats is a more discreditable story. Only one made a determined effort to pick up survivors. Although a number of the remaining seventeen were only half-filled, they stood off, fearful of being swamped, while hundreds drowned in the freezing waters a short distance away.

The sinking of the Titanic—in which Second Class and especially Steerage suffered the severest losses —played a part in the social revolution in the twentieth century: never again would the Western world lake it for granted that class discrimination was normal in the sphere of safety precautions and rescue work.

If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice warnings she received; if there had been a moon or if she had hit the berg in any other way; if the wireless operator of the Californian, which was less than ten miles away, had not packed up for the night — if any one of half-a-dozen ‟ifs” had turned out right, every life would probably have been saved. But fate conspired against the Titanic; the disaster had the aspects of a classic tragedy.

In the course of his research, Mr. Lord made a curious discovery. Fourteen years before the sinking of the Titanic, an obscure author published an uncannily prophetic novel entitled Futility- He invented a fabulous Atlantic liner, the Titan, almost identical in specifications with the Titanic; he loaded it with wealthy and complacent passengers; and he wrecked it on an iceberg on a cold night in April.

A Book Society Choice in England and a Hook-of-the-Month Club selection in the United Stales, We Die Alone by David Howarth (Macmillan, $3.05) is one of the most extraordinary escape stories of World War II. In March, 1943, a small group of Norwegian saboteurs trained in Scotland landed in their home country with the intention of destroying the great German airfield near the Arctic convoy route. Alerted by a Quisling, the Nazis trapped the party on a small island and annihilated it with the exception of one man, Jan Haalsrud, who, though wounded in the foot, swam across the icy fjord to the mainland. Relentlessly hunted by the Germans and heroically aided by a network of patriotic Norwegians, Haalsrud eventually escaped to Sweden after breath-taking adventures and unimaginable sufferings. At the very outset he was caught by an avalanche, and was left concussed, frostbitten, snow-blind, and delirious. Later, he lay for twenty-seven consecutive tlays on a storm-swept mountain plateau where one by one he amputated his gangrened toes with a blunt penknife and no anesthetic other than a swallow of brandy.

Ten years after the event, the author of this book and Haalsrud revisited each and every scene of the drama; talked to the people who helped to engineer Haalsrud’s escape; and pieced together this amazing story, many details of which had remained unknown to its hero. It is truly an epic of human endurance; and Mr. Howarth’s telling of it is taut, vivid, and precise — a stirring example of British understatement.

Not having read, I’m afraid, the more recent works of James Branch Cabell, I was somewhat surprised by the tone of his latest book, As I Remember It (McBride, $3.75), subtitled “Some Epilogues in Recollection.” The style has not changed — it is still convoluted, on the precious side, and quite often tellingly witty. But as I remember Cabell, he was world-weary and fashionably disillusioned. Now he affirms that life is in the main an enjoyable affair — and so, I’m happy to report, is his book. It contains a long sketch of his first wife (who died in 1948), composed with candor, affectionate irony, and a genuinely moving devotion; a short account of his second marriage, which he embarked upon at seventy-one; and amusing, sometimes catty, reminiscences about his literary friends.

The Easy Chair (Houghton Mifflin, $1.00) contains a selection of the highly charged essays which the late Bernard DeVoto contributed to Harper’s magazine. In an age in which most polemical writing is shoddy journalese, Mr. DeVoto had the rare distinction of being a commentator whose artistry and learning were as impressive as his firepower. He included in this volume his withering pieces on the pretensions of the ex-Communists; on. the Reece Committee’s shameless “investigation” of the tax-exempt foundations; and on tHe doctrine of guilt by association. There is a wonderful satire describing the “ordeal by chic” of a girl called Gloria who is learning to live up to t he gospel according to Vogue. And there are a couple of memorable essays on American history.