Memories & Martyrs

QUITE EARLY ONE MORNING, by Dylan Thomas (240 pp.; New Directions; $3.50), will scarcely affect posterity's view of Poet Thomas, for it is no more than a fragmentary prose footnote to his poetic genius. Composed largely of BBC talks on poetry and childhood reminiscences, the book suggests less how Dylan Thomas made a poem than how he made a living. But even as he fell back on lecturing for money to radio listeners and the matronly bands of U.S. "culture-vultures," as he called them, Poet Thomas whirled his economic crutch like a pinwheel. These pieces testify to his roving eye, roguish humor and beery vision of the human condition. He can draw a third-person self-portrait as accurately as a brilliant cartoonist or observant cop: "He's five foot six and a half. Thick blubber lips; snub nose; curly mouse-brown hair; one front tooth broken . . . speaks rather fancy; truculent; plausible ; a bit of a shower-off; plus fours and no breakfast, you know ... a bombastic adolescent provincial bohemian with a thick-knotted artist's tie made out of his sister's scarf--she never knew where it had gone ... a gabbing, ambitious, mock-tough, pretentious young man; and moley, too." Or he can roll all the world's seaside picnics into an impressionistic memory of one boyhood frolic: "August Bank Holiday--a tune on an ice-cream cornet. A slap of sea and a tickle of sand ... A wince and whinny of bathers dancing into deceptive water. A tuck of dresses. A rolling of trousers ... A sunburn of girls and a lark of boys. A silent hullabaloo of balloons." Appearing near the first anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death, this litany for fellow poets, lost youth and loved objects shows again how much the English language will miss its larking balloonman.

JESUIT RELATIONS, edited by Edna Kenton (527 pp.; Vanguard; $6). In its original form, this work was a big and worthy promotion project. The Jesuit Relations are accounts written by French Jesuit missionaries of their lives in the American wilderness from 1632 to 1673. They were published year by year to raise money and recruits, and with related documents they later appeared in 73 volumes. Now the best of the Relations are published in one book. Life for the missionaries was a long, slow martyrdom. At best, they lived in crowded, smoke-filled Indian shelters, where they slept on the frozen, rock-hard ground and often had only tree bark to eat. At worst, they were captured, like Father Isaac Jogues, by the Iroquois. The Indians tore out his fingernails and bit the ends of his forefingers, "grinding and crushing them as if between two stones." He then had to run the gauntlet stark naked, as 200 savages clubbed him into insensibility. They tied him flat on the ground for several days and nights, during which children tossed hot cinders on his naked chest. "In truth, these torments are great," he later wrote, but "God is infinite." The Jesuits did their best to "change these Wolves and Tigers into Lambs," and in the process provided some of the best reporting in existence on the Indians and the countryside of the period. But the Jesuits were waging a losing fight. In 1764 the Jesuit order was dissolved in France and in French territories, which made the missionaries' position in the New World untenable. By 1789 they had relinquished their last Canadian possessions. The Relations of their arresting adventures succeed, nevertheless, in setting down a triumph of humanity within the failure of a mission.

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