EB: 'Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he'd received from Dylan T[Thomas] before D's last trip here [New York]--very clever, but it really can't be published for a long, long time, he's decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.--one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as 'A truck called F------.' RL: 'Psycho-therapy is rather amazing--something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium--chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.' RL: 'I have just finished the Yeats Letters--900 & something pages--although some I'd read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated.' RL: 'Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don't want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn't say anything then.' EB: 'so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can't bear much of American life these days--surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.