Adventures in the Skin Trade Read online

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Vernon Watkins

  Adventures in the Skin Trade

  After the Fair

  The Enemies

  The Tree

  The Visitor

  The Lemon

  The Burning Baby

  The Orchards

  The Mouse and the Woman

  The Horse’s Ha

  A Prospect of the Sea

  The Holy Six

  Prologue to an Adventure

  The Map of Love

  In the Direction of the Beginning

  An Adventure from a Work in Progress

  The School for Witches

  The Dress

  The Vest

  The True Story

  The Followers

  INTRODUCTION

  In a writer of great originality there is sometimes a heckler closer to him than his admirers, a dissenter who will not keep step with his fame, a spur which contradicts progress. Such a writer was Dylan Thomas. He began as a single performer. He created his own audience. Being very intelligent and witty, he could judge their reactions several years before the applause came. When it came he had already lost interest in his self-created audience, and found his true audience outside, in a sceptical world. His imagination kept a perverse integrity, resisting all favours. A religious poet, he sought the company of unbelievers. His ivory tower existed in the act of writing itself. Before and after the act, he challenged it with every hostile and contradictory element, and it remained untouched.

  To Dylan Thomas, the writing of poetry was the most exacting and, potentially, the most rewarding work in the world. He was, when I first met him at the age of twenty, completely absorbed in the mystery of language, in the latent power of words and the magic of their substitution. He had no political interest, no programme of social reform. It was the power of language itself which obsessed him, its ability to restate the great themes which haunted his imagination—the Book of Genesis, the creation of man, the Garden of Eden, the opening eyes of the suckling, the unfolding universe, and the closing eyes of the witness of the reciprocal vision of heaven and of this world. With his first book, 18 Poems, he had astonished the public by the use of an idiom which recurred throughout the poems and controlled these themes, as from a battery, by a concise and suggestive force. The idiom, new to English poetry, was unmistakable:

  I see the boys of summer in their ruin …1

  The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

  Drives my green age….2

  I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail

  Wearing the quick away.3

  A candle in the thighs

  Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;…4

  The writing of poetry, which was so exacting to Dylan already, but which became more and more exacting with each year of his life, was by no means his only activity. This would have been impossible. The intensity of this activity could not be invoked and sustained at will. Even when he was writing the early poems, whose composition was so much more frequent and consecutive than the late, he was writing prose, too, particularly stories. These early stories, though less permanent than the poems, display the same sexual preoccupation, the same adolescent groping, through tactile images, from darkness to light, the same pressing, through a multitude of symbols and observations, both imagined and real, towards a place and a condition as familiar and truthful as a field, on which the work of his maturity would rest. Many combine the theme of awakening love with an acute sense of the proximity of death. There is also an element of distrust in the act of creation. The writing of the story, the very pencil with which it is written, becomes a symbol of exaltation and of destruction. In the story “The Orchards,” the pencil is described in the act of making a poem:

  The word is too much with us. He raised his pencil so that its shadow fell, a tower of wood and lead, on the clean paper; he fingered the pencil tower, the half-moon of his thumb-nail rising and setting behind the leaden spire. The tower fell, down fell the city of words, the walls of a poem, the symmetrical letters….

  There was, then, in 1935, when “The Orchards” was written, a close link between story and poem, as though the prose, although it contained surrealist elements which did not appear in the poetry, were the reverse side of the same coin. For these words about the pencil are autobiographical: they are clearly Dylan Thomas’ own words defining his own imaginative situation at the time, a writer distrusting, not himself, but himself as writer. So, beneath the dominant activity of his poetry and the subordinate activity of his prose, there was a third activity: distrusting both.

  I have indicated already that Dylan Thomas, far from flattering himself, always opposed himself, and, with a modesty that really concealed a stubborn sureness, remained his own most severe critic and denigrator at every stage of his progress. He took very great pains, for he knew that if what he wrote was authentic and alive it would not be affected by either hostile criticism or the climate of approval. His finished work did, however, influence his creative and destructive judgment. As he wrote to me in a letter: “I build a flying tower and I pull it down.” He was continually remaking himself in his poems, assailing his own established position lest it should hinder or obstruct the vision when the ground was broken for a new poem and he must start afresh.

  In the prose, too, there came recurrent moments of severe self-appraisal, moments when what had seemed a masterpiece at the time of writing appeared in retrospect to be only a tour de force. The highly charged language of the symbolic stories reached its climax in what was to be his most ambitious story, the opening of which he left as a fragment—“In the Direction of the Beginning.” He told me after this that he would never again write a story of that kind, and at the same time his verse underwent a profound change, not exactly of language but of approach. The change was, I think, heralded by the little poem which begins

  Once it was the colour of saying

  Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill…

  soon followed by the line:

  The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo…5

  This, and the other poems of The Map of Love,6 showed that while he had now resolved to write only stories about real people, his poetry had also moved in the direction of the living voice. The poem he wrote for his twenty-fourth birthday, which is the last poem in The Map of Love, announced the work of his maturity even more clearly:

  Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,

  With my red veins full of money,

  In the final direction of the elementary town

  I advance for as long as forever is.7

  In this development, which was to lead to his richest and deepest poetry, the poems of his last nine years, and to the brilliant prose of the late scripts, Dylan Thomas novel Adventures in the Skin Trade, of which he only wrote the first four chapters, plays a significant part. In the stories of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog he released the spring of bubbling life and comic invention which his friends had always known, though he had, until then, kept it out of his work. In Adventures in the Skin Trade the comic invention was directed against himself. He was a poet of tragic vision, but he was also a born clown, always falling naturally into situations which became ludicrous. Just as it is impossible to understand Lear without his Fool, it is impossible to have a complete picture of Dylan Thomas without the self-parody which appears in Adventures in the Skin Trade. It is a key, not only to something instantly recognized in his personality, but to something afterwards recognized in his tragedy and early death.

  A story about skins had been in Dylan’s head for a long time, and I am now inclined to think that it had already been prodding his imagination two or thr
ee years before he began to write it. It was not unusual for Dylan to delay his compositions for an even longer period, and perhaps the first design for this story had suggested itself soon after the semiautobiographical events it describes.

  It was not, however, until 1940 that Dylan repeatedly told me that he was thinking of writing a long story about skins. It was to be more ambitious than his other stories. It was to show what happened to a person, like himself, who took life as it came. This central character, Samuel Bennet, would attract adventures to himself by his own unadventurous stillness and natural acceptance of every situation. He would accept life, like a baby who had been given self-dependence. He would have no money, no possessions, no extra clothes, no civilized bias. And life would come to him. People would come, and they would bring him life. Odd, very odd people would come. But whoever came, and whatever situation came, he would go on. He would keep his position, whether comic or tragic hero, whatever the plot. Then, at a certain point, an unpredictable point in time, he would look back and find that he had shed a skin.

  In Dylan’s first plan, so far as I can remember it, there were to be seven skins. There was to be a succession of scenes, each being an allegorical layer of life, and at the end of the story the character would be stripped of all illusion, naked at last. It would be in one way a journey through the Inferno of London, but it would also be a comedy. There is no doubt that, beneath the absurdity of situation which would provide furniture for the scenes, lay the influence and sense of tragedy of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Had the novel been finished, it is unlikely that the comic central character of the first chapters would not have been revealed as also a tragic figure.

  I remember Dylan reading me the first two chapters. He was still undecided about a title, and we discussed possible titles. “The Skins” was not quite right. “A Trader in Skins” or “A Traveller in Skins” might do. I left him undecided. Then, a few months later, he wrote from the big house near Chippenham where he was staying with John Davenport: “I play whist with musicians, & think about a story I want to call Adventures in the Skin Trade.”

  Towards the end of May, 1941, he was back in Laugharne Castle, and he wrote: “My prosebook’s going well, but I dislike it. It’s the only really dashed-off piece of work I remember doing. I’ve done 10,000 words already. It’s indecent and trivial, sometimes funny, sometimes mawkish, and always badly written which I do not mind so much.” This was characteristic of Dylan’s self-criticism; in the chorus of his admirers his was often the one dissenting voice.

  A week later came a more amplified statement: “My novel blathers on. It’s a mixture of Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Kafka, Beachcomber, and good old 3-adjectives-a-penny belly-churning Thomas, the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive.”

  Not long after this I went down to Laugharne to stay with Dylan, and I was there when a London publisher’s letter arrived, expressing disappointment in the opening chapters of the novel. It was not, ran the letter, the great, serious autobiographical work to which they had looked forward for so long. The manuscript would be returned, and it was hoped that he would offer them something autobiographical, but different, at a later date.

  Dylan reread the letter with amused indignation. He was hard up, and a letter of acceptance would have been far more satisfactory. He promised to me that, whatever the publisher said, he thought the book entertaining, and he would not write any kind of solemn rhetoric in which he did not believe. At this time he used to write mainly in the afternoon, and after lunch he disappeared, and showed me a new part he had written when he emerged for tea. It covered about a page and was extremely funny. The rapidity with which he wrote this kind of prose and dialogue stood in sharp contrast to the composition of his poetry, for which he used separate work sheets and would spend sometimes several days on a single line, while the poem was built up, phrase by phrase, at glacierlike speed. Each of the stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, with the exception of the last, was written in two or three weeks, but every long poem, though parts of it would come to him in a rush, always involved fifty or a hundred transcriptions and months of incessant toil.

  Why, in view of his facility for writing comic prose, did Dylan not continue the novel beyond the first four chapters? Did he lose interest in it, or was there a deeper reason which restrained his hand? The first suggestion is contradicted by the fact that as late as June, 1953, he wrote in a letter to Oscar Williams that he would “begin to go on with Adventures in the Skin Trade.” The heckler of his own success, the rebel against his own progress, still carried in his head the memory of his anti-Faust. Surely it was the intervening horror, the impact of war, particularly the London air raids, on his appalled and essentially tragic vision, that restrained him. Nothing less than the truth would now satisfy him. With his precise visionary memory he was able to reconstruct out of joy the truth of his childhood, both in his poems and in his late stories and broadcast scripts, for those experiences were real; but what was only half real, half fictional, he had to abandon.

  Yet, like everything Dylan wrote, this intensely personal comedy was a part of him. This unique fragment, half fictional though it is, carries the unmistakable stamp of his personality. It is real now because it was once real to him, and because it holds the key to a certain attitude to the world and to a situation which was peculiarly his own. This attitude, which may be defined as a rooted opposition to material progress, he continued to hold long after he had abandoned work on the novel. Its anarchic fantasy appealed to him, and it is one more example of the poet’s indifference to reputation, of his refusal to follow the advance guard of his fame. Even twelve years after he had stopped writing it, he still thought of taking up the threads of the story he had taken so long to begin. Great though his reputation was, he could never become Emperor because he was always also the child who could see that he wore no clothes. Would he have continued the novel, had he lived? That is a question impossible to answer. He might have tried, but the unseen obstacle to his imagination remained. As it was, at the time that he stopped writing these pages, the pressure of the anarchy of war itself and the vision of distorted London had taken the place of his half fictional vision and compelled his imagination forward to “Ceremony After a Fire Raid” and to the beautiful poems evoking childhood, “Poem in October” and “Fern Hill.” He could still go back to peace, but from there he could no longer go forward. The tunnel which led from his boyhood’s home to unvisited London was shattered. Something had happened which prevented him from making the journey Samuel Bennet made, and which he himself had made ten years before.

  VERNON WATKINS

  May, 1960

  1 “I see the boys of summer”

  2 “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”

  3 “If I were tickled by the rub of love”

  4 “Light breaks where no sun shines”

  5 “Once it was the colour of saying”

  6 The story “The Map of Love” which appears in this edition was also published as the title story of The Map of Love: Poems and Prose, London, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1939.

  7 “Twenty-four years”

  ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE

  I. A FINE BEGINNING

  That early morning, in January 1933, only one person was awake in the street, and he was the quietest. Call him Samuel Bennet. He wore a trilby hat that had been lying by his bedside in case the two house-breakers, a man and a woman, came back for the bag they had left.

  In striped pyjamas tight under the arms and torn between the legs, he padded barefoot downstairs and opened the breakfast-room door of his parents’ six-room house. The room smelt strong of his father’s last pipe before bed. The windows were shut fast and the curtains drawn, the back door was bolted, the house-breaking night could not enter anywhere. At first he peered uneasily into the known, flickering corners of the room, as though he feared that the family might have been sitting there in silence in the dark; then he li
t the gaslight from the candle. His eyes were still heavy from a dream of untouchable city women and falling, but he could see that Tinker, the aunt-faced pom, was sleeping before the burnt-out fire, and that the mantelpiece clock between hollow, mock-ebony, pawing horses, showed five to two. He stood still and listened to the noises of the house: there was nothing to fear. Upstairs the family breathed and snored securely. He heard his sister sleeping in the box-room under the signed photographs of actors from the repertory theatre and the jealous pictures of the marriages of friends. In the biggest bedroom overlooking the field that was called the back, his father turned over the bills of the month in his one dream; his mother in bed mopped and polished through a wood of kitchens. He closed the door: now there was nobody to disturb him.

  But all the noises of the otherwise dead or sleeping, dark early morning, the intimate breathing of three invisible relations, the loud old dog, could wake up the neighbors. And the gaslight, bubbling, could attract to his presence in the breakfast-room at this hour Mrs. Probert next door, disguised as a she-goat in a nightgown, butting the air with her kirby-grips; her dapper, commercial son, with a watch-chain tattooed across his rising belly; the tubercular lodger, with his neat umbrella up and his basin in his hand. The regular tide of the family breath could beat against the wall of the house on the other side, and bring the Baxters out. He turned the gas low and stood for a minute by the clock, listening to sleep and seeing Mrs. Baxter climb naked out of her widow’s bed with a mourning band round her thigh.

  Soon her picture died, she crawled back grieving to her lovebird’s mirror under the blankets, and the proper objects of the room slowly returned as he lost his fear that the strangers upstairs he had known since he could remember would wake and come down with pokers and candles.

  First there was the long strip of snapshots of his mother propped against the cut-glass of the windowsill. A professional under a dickybird hood had snapped her as she walked down Chapel Street in December, and developed the photographs while she waited looking at the thermos flasks and the smoking sets in the nearest shopwindow, calling “Good morning” across the street to the shopping bags she knew, and the matrons’ outside costumes, and the hats like flowerpots and chambers on the crisp, permed heads. There she was, walking down the street along the windowsill, step by step, stout, safe, confident, buried in her errands, clutching her handbag, stepping aside from the common women blind and heavy under a week’s provisions, prying into the looking-glasses at the doors of furniture shops.