The Collected Stories Read online

  THE COLLECTED STORIES

  Dylan Thomas

  Contents

  Foreword by Leslie Norris

  After the Fair

  The Tree

  The True Story

  The Enemies

  The Dress

  The Visitor

  The Vest

  The Burning Baby

  The Orchards

  The End of the River

  The Lemon

  The Horse’s Ha

  The School for Witches

  The Mouse and the Woman

  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

  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

  The Peaches

  A Visit to Grandpa’s

  Patricia, Edith, and Arnold

  The Fight

  Extraordinary Little Cough

  Just Like Little Dogs

  Where Tawe Flows

  Who Do You Wish Was With Us?

  Old Garbo

  One Warm Saturday

  Adventures in the Skin Trade

  A Fine Beginning

  Plenty of Furniture

  Four Lost Souls

  Quite Early One Morning

  A Child’s Christmas in Wales

  Holiday Memory

  The Crumbs of One Man’s Year

  Return Journey

  The Followers

  A Story

  Appendix: Early Stories

  Brember

  Jarley’s

  In the Garden

  Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar

  List of Sources

  Foreword

  When I told some friends I was about to write this introduction to Dylan Thomas’s stories, their eyes lit up, they smiled, they began at once to tell their own stories. About Dylan Thomas. He was a man around whom anecdotes crowded, like pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and many of them are good stories, highly coloured and amusing, and not all of them are apocryphal. That Dylan Thomas still exists for many people, the type of the bohemian poet, a man whose extraordinary and inexplicable gift for poetry was all the more amazing when one considers what seemed the chaos of his life.

  He was, of course, far more disciplined an artist than legend allows. Among other things, he knew himself very well. It would have been impossible for him to have written the many graceful, acute, brilliantly funny letters of apology without being completely aware of his own faults. Those letters are documents of self-knowledge, as well as evidence that he knew other people very well too; and they are written, nearly always, in marvellous prose. In short, Dylan Thomas possessed all the deliberate qualities of a writer of stories. He knew this. From the very beginning of his career he knew he was not simply a poet. He wrote to Glyn Jones, in a letter written when he was nineteen: ‘You ask me to tell you about myself, but my life is so uneventful it is not worth recording. I am a writer of poems and stories.’ And he was always a writer of poems and stories, although his life was to be neither uneventful nor unrecorded. He had already contributed stories as well as poems to the Swansea Grammar School Magazine, of which he was editor, and four of these early narratives are included here in an appendix. There is plenty of evidence that he considered poems and stories equal products of his gift, drawing no clear distinction between them, knowing they came from the same source. Even his projected magazine, which never appeared, was to be called Prose and Verse. When friends visited him at his parents’ house in Cwmdonkin Drive he read his stories to them as well as his poems.

  The early stories, like The ‘Tree’ which he published in the Adelphi, or any of the pieces which were to appear in The Map of Love, are indeed very like the poems. They possess the same obsessive imagery, are written in heightened rhythms, deal with the same interior world. They are very clearly the work of the young man who wrote the poems. And when Dylan Thomas left home late in 1934 to become a freelance writer in London, he found his poems and stories equally admired.

  ‘Young Mr Thomas was at the moment without employment, but it was understood that he would soon be leaving for London to make a career in Chelsea as a free-lance journalist; he was penniless, and hoped, in a vague way, to live on women.’ So wrote Dylan of a young man exactly like himself in ‘Where Tawe Flows’, one of the stories in the autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Certainly he had no job to go to when he arrived in London on Sunday, 11 November 1934, carrying his meagre luggage, his poems and stories. He had been encouraged in his move by winning the Sunday Referee poetry prize, part of which was the publication of his first book, Eighteen Poems. This appeared a few weeks after Dylan’s arrival in London, and with it he was launched into the small world of contemporary poets. It may be that this first public recognition of his ability as a poet also marked the beginning of a comparative neglect of his stories. If this were so, Dylan was unaware of it. From the chaotic room off the Fulham Road which he shared with his Swansea friend Fred Janes, and where he could see ‘for yards around nothing but poems, poems, poems, butter, eggs, mashed potatoes, mashed among my stories and Janes’ canvases’, he wrote with pride of the stories which had been ‘accepted by various periodicals’. He was still a writer of stories.

  They were not, however, collected into a volume, as the poems were. Eighteen Poems had created a small sensation and Thomas was already a famous young poet. His reputation was further enhanced when Twenty-Five Poems appeared in September 1936 and went rapidly into four impressions. It was widely and passionately reviewed. At twenty-two Thomas was firmly established as a leading poet.

  But not a rich one. He was always careless about money and, despite its phenomenal sales for a book of verse, it is doubtful that he made much from Twenty-Five Poems. The book sold at a mere half-crown. Contemplating marriage, Dylan needed money more than ever, and took his stories to Richard Church, his editor at Dent’s. He had already, early in 1936, tried to interest Church in a book of stories, but Church refused them, thinking them obscene. He saw no reason to change his opinion, a point of view shared by the printers who refused a little later to set them for another publisher. In the event, Dylan married Caitlin Macnamara on 11 July 1937, the stories uncollected, the financial future uncertain.

  Dylan remained convinced that the stories deserved to appear in book form, and David Higham, who had become his agent, was able to arrange that six of them were included with sixteen new poems in one volume. This was The Map of Love, which came out in August 1939. It carried the sub-title, ‘Verse and Prose’, as if Dylan were keeping faith with his old Swansea dream of editing a magazine of an an almost identical name. Certainly he was once more making it clear that he was ‘a writer of poems and stories’. This was the book which introduced me, a young man beginning to read contemporary work, to Dylan’s prose, and a heady experience it was. The book was handsome, beautifully produced, with a reproduction of the famous romantic portrait by Augustus John as frontispiece. In December of the same year The World I Breathe, a collection of all the poems in the first three books and three stories in addition to those in The Map of Love, was published in America. The early stories, it seemed, had found a home.

  Much the same had happened to Dylan. He and Caitlin had moved into a small house in Laugharne, the little Carmarthenshire town which was to be his home for much of the rest of his life. Here Dylan was happily engaged in writing stories which were quite unlike those he had already published. Glyn Jones, whose commentaries are among the most sensitive on Dylan’s work, tells us:

  Dylan very early urged me to write short stories, and in 1937 my first collection, The Blue Bed, a
ppeared. In Llanstephan in, I think it was, the summer of 1938, I mentioned to Caitlin Thomas that I had started a second volume, a series of short stories about childhood … She seemed very surprised and told me that Dylan had already started doing the same thing. His were the autobiographical stories which in 1940 appeared as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. (Glyn Jones, The Dragon has Two Tongues, Dent 1968.)

  The new stories were direct, vivid and uncomplicated evocations of the Swansea in which Dylan had grown up; gone was the charged prose of the early work. Thomas had already thought of ‘a book about Wales … an intimate chronicle of my personal Journey among people and places’, and Richard Church had also suggested to him that he write of his early years. It is obvious that the old manner would not suit either of these projects, but the sources of the new, more conventional style are a matter of conjecture. Dylan was certainly a reader of short stories and knew the work of Lawrence, H. E. Bates and Liam O’Flaherty among others. He was also particularly interested in the work of Caradoc Evans, whose stories had already used a Welsh background with success. With Glyn Jones he had visited the older writer in Aberystwyth in 1936. The two young men had driven north, wearing each other’s hats, to talk with ‘the great Caradoc Evans’, as Dylan calls him through a character in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Dylan may well have admired Evans enough to wish to write more directly, to attempt for urban Swansea what Evans had done for rural Cardiganshire. Again, he had been living unprotected in the world for years, his eye sharpened, his naturally observant senses at work. He was probably ready to abandon the interior universe of his adolescent work and to create a world more like the one about him. Above all, he had become a great story-teller, famous among the bars. He realized there were great areas of his ability and personality that he would never be able to use in lyric poetry, but that he could use them in his stories. Most of us believe that poetry is a solemn art, its themes restricted to the few great subjects, its puns and word-play grave and serious. Dylan certainly felt like this about his poetry and served his serious muse with dedication; but he was also a brilliantly funny man. In the ten stories which make up Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog a comic Dylan makes his appearance, and he is a virtuoso of comedy. He is master of the whole range, from slap-stick to that pathetic laughter which moves us to tears. He is the sharp citizen of Swansea, a comedian of suburban manners, his ear a meticulous recorder of the speech of that city, his eye noting everything. He is a young dog moving from the innocence of the first three stories, ‘The Peaches’, ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’ and ‘Patricia, Edith and Arnold’ to the knowing young man of ‘Old Garbo’, his ‘new hat on one side’, his cigarette worn in admiring imitation of the old reporter he accompanies. It is probably the introduction of humour that was the most important element in the making of the new style and marks the clear division between the poetry and prose from now on.

  The stories are full of wonderful talk. We hear and recognize the voices of the characters as they describe how Swansea Male Voice ‘did the Messiah’, tell the stories of their small lives as, huddled out of the rain, they stare at the sea, cheek school teachers, joke and wise-crack and argue their way to the coast. Always an actor, Thomas was able to use his gift for mimicry in his stories. We begin to hear the voice in which he would read them aloud. It is in them that Thomas is best able to use his exceptional narrative skills; his humour, his sense of place, his fine ear for speech, his eye, appreciative and unjudging, for the people he creates. These are the qualities which made him a famous writer, as distinct from a famous poet. Had he not written the stories his death would have been, comparatively speaking, a still drop.

  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is a title said to have been suggested by Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind in Jamaica and other distinguished work and a neighbour of Dylan’s in Laugharne. Hughes had befriended the young Thomases, but I’m not sure he should be given the entire credit for the title. It does, of course, pay tribute to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but Thomas’s stories are closer to those in Joyce’s Dubliners. And Dylan had almost used his title years before, when he wrote in 1933 to his friend Trevor Hughes, long before he had gone to Laugharne. In his letter Dylan had advised his friend to dive ‘Into the sea of yourself like a young dog’. Dylan, in his own stories, had certainly dived into the sea of his childhood and youth.

  Portrait was published in 1940, the last of Dylan’s books to appear in England until after the war. After a short period of uncertainty, Dylan began to work in films and to make increasingly frequent broadcasts. He wrote fewer and fewer stories and poems.

  He was, however, engaged on a novel. I heard of this when, a newly published poet, I travelled to London to meet my publisher. His name was Peter Baker and he had already printed a small pamphlet of my poems, all I had written at that time, and was prepared to take a larger collection. I had never met a publisher. It was disconcerting when Baker turned out to be younger than I was. The year was 1943 and I was twenty-two. Baker asked me what I was working on apart from poetry. Desperately, not wishing him to know I had never thought of working on anything else, I told him firmly that I was writing a novel. He was interested. A humorous novel, I said. He lost interest at once, telling me that it seemed to him that every poet in the country, intent on self-destruction, was writing a funny novel. Relieved, I threw away the new-born idea of a comic novel. Even Dylan Thomas, said Baker, had written one, or part of one. He had himself read it only a few weeks before and thrown it back as rubbish. I perked up considerably. If Dylan Thomas couldn’t write one it was certain I couldn’t. Dylan’s novel, never completed and published posthumously in 1955, was called Adventures in the Skin Trade.

  Despite its late appearance, most of it seems to have been written in the early summer of 1941, before Dylan was employed as a scriptwriter for Strand Films. I read the first section of it after I had spoken to Peter Baker, discovering that it had been published in 1941 in Folios of New Writing, but I didn’t see the rest of the work until Putnam issued it, with an interesting Foreword by Thomas’s friend, the poet Vernon Watkins. In a sense the novel is a continuation of the fictionalized autobiography Dylan had started in Portrait, his hero, Samuel Bennet, leaving Swansea early in the narrative by the train that Dylan had taken when he left home to live in London. Watkins felt that the novel had not been finished because of the impact of war, particularly the London air-raids, on what he called Thomas’s ‘essentially tragic vision’, but he also suggests that Thomas mistrusted his own facility. Certainly he was able to write this kind of prose very quickly, in marked contrast to the painstaking, phrase-by-phrase way in which he wrote his poetry. Reading the book now, many years later, I still find it funny and inventive, and I can only think that Thomas did not continue with it because he had come to the end of what he had to say. He was not a novelist, he was a natural writer of short stories. The novel was too long for him. The short story, like the poem, is a selective form, but you can pack anything into the novel. And while Thomas recognized his kinship with Dickens when he called Adventures in the Skin Trade ‘a mixture of Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Kafka, Beachcomber, and good old 3-adjectives-a-penny belly-churning Thomas, the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’, it was Dickens’s energy, humour and poetry that he acknowledged, not the novel form. Still, this fragmentary novel, incomplete as it is, bears the mark of its author. Its characters are as logical as life, and as unexpected; it has bounce and colour. Dylan still hoped to complete it years after he set it aside, suggesting as late as 1953, the year of his death, that he would go on with it.

  It was put away for all practical considerations when Dylan went to London to work as a scriptwriter. This work left him little time for his own writing, and in addition he was in increasing demand as a broadcaster and, later, as a reader of his own poems and those of other poets. There are left only seven short prose narratives from this late period, and six of these were written for broadcasting. It is ironic that
his great popular reputation rests on one or two of these. But it is also understandable, for they are memorable pieces, bringing us the whole man, his warmth, his humour, his incredible memory for the days of childhood and youth, his moving sadness for what was irrecoverable, his poetry even. The first of these late stories, ‘Quite Early One Morning’, was written in 1944 and reads now like the first draft of Under Milk Wood, dealing as it does with the dreams of the sleeping town in the early morning, where Captain Tiny Evans, predecessor without doubt of Captain Cat, sleeps through his ‘big seas of dreams’ and watches ‘a rainbow hail of flying fishes’.

  But it is ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ that everyone knows. Compounded of two similar stories, ‘Memories of Christmas’ and ‘Conversation about Christmas’, this is the unforgettable narrative we hear broadcast every year. What is there to say about this rich confection, as full as a Christmas stocking with gifts: great, sheepish uncles and singing aunts, snow by the skyful, those Polar cats sleek and long as jaguars, wonderful Miss Prothero who ‘said the right thing, always’, the cosy, terrifying ghost story that sends the boys scuttling home? It’s the best Christmas since Dickens.

  ‘The Followers’ is a ghost story. It is filled with hard evidence of the real world. I read it often, never failing to be convinced of the existence of the wet streets, listening to the voices of the ‘youngish men from the offices, bundled home against the thistly wind’ as they call to each other. It is in this palpable and recognizable world that the two young men begin to follow an unknown girl, an ordinary girl. In such a world ghosts should not exist, but there is one, entirely credible, in this story.

  Of these late narratives ‘The Followers’ is the only one not written for broadcasting, and ‘A Story’ the only one written for television. I saw Thomas tell this story on the old black and white screen. He filled it with action and colour with his unaided words. His enormous uncle, ‘the loud check meadow of his waistcoat littered, as though after a picnic, with cigarette ends, peelings, cabbage stalks, birds’ bones, gravy’, grew out of words bigger than John Wayne. The tale is the account of an outing to Porthcawl, in which the small Dylan is both participant and, as a child, observer. The ancient boys who go on the trip never reach Porthcawl, since they stop at every public house on the way. The child, left to ‘keep an eye on the charra’, stays outside, listening and watching. I recognize delightedly the confrontation between a stranger and Enoch Davies in the Hermit’s Nest on the journey home, the men having stopped for ‘a rum to keep out the cold’.