Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog: Dylan Thomas

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There were two beds in the room and in one bed there was a fellow: and when they went in he called out: And Ray, the author’s older friend in ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us’, having lost most of his family, some of whom he nursed and watched wither away, falls frequently into melancholy even on a day out meant to cheer them up. He was very decent to say that. That was all to make him laugh. But he could not laugh because his cheeks and lips were all shivery: and then the prefect had to laugh by himself.

That skeleton is generally a private vice that is not too vicious and may be both comic and pathetic. From the first three stories, “The Peaches,” “A Visit to Grandpa’s,” and “Patricia, Edith, and Arnold,” readers learn that Dylan’s Uncle Jim is drinking his pigs away; Cousin Gwilym has his own makeshift chapel and rehearses his coming ministry there; Grandfather Dan dreams he is driving a team of demon horses and has delusions about being buried; the Thomas family’s maid, Patricia, is involved with the sweetheart of the maid next door. In the next pair of stories, “The Fight” and “Extraordinary Little Cough,” the pains and pleasures of boyhood begin to affect the hero, chiefly in finding a soul mate, a fellow artist. He also encounters the horror of viciousness in his companions. The remainder of the stories deal with young adulthood and are varied in subject and treatment—from the recital of a tale told to the narrator to the final story in which the narrator for the first time becomes the protagonist, although an ineffectual one. Most of the stories include an episode set at night, and it seems a pity that the best of Thomas’s night stories, the ghostly “The Followers,” could not have been included in the collection. Published when Thomas was in his mid-twenties, this is a series of 10 sketches, some of which are more explicitly autobiographical (as in first person, with a narrator named Dylan Thomas) than others. There is a rough chronological trajectory to the stories, with the main character a mischievous boy, then a grandstanding teenager, then a young journalist in his first job. The countryside and seaside towns of South Wales recur as settings, and – as will be no surprise to readers of Under Milk Wood – banter-filled dialogue is the priority. I most enjoyed the childhood japes in the first two pieces, “The Peaches” and “A Visit to Grandpa’s.” The rest failed to hold my attention, but I marked out two long passages that to me represent the voice and scene-setting that the Dylan Thomas Prize is looking for. The latter is the ending of the book and reminds me of the close of James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

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Haven't I? he cried. Mrs Riordan, pity the poor blind. Dante covered her plate with her hands and said:

Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which through Thy bounty we are about to receive through Christ our Lord. Amen. Come now, come now, come now! Can we not have our opinions whatever they are without this bad temper and this bad language? It is too bad surely.I know you weren't the mangy dog, dear. But who was? That's the worst of writing without thinking: you write more than you think. I must have been the mangy dog, but I don't feel at all self-pitiful today. Damn the nonsense. Forget it. Out here, Dedalus. Lazy little schemer. I see schemer in your face. Where did you break your glasses? He looked round at the others whose faces were bent towards their plates and, receiving no reply, waited for a moment and said bitterly: His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him. Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.

Eileen had long white hands. One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory . He was walking down along the matting and he saw the door before him. It was impossible: he could not. He thought of the baldy head of the prefect of studies with the cruel no-coloured eyes looking at him and he heard the voice of the prefect of studies asking him twice what his name was. Why could he not remember the name when he was told the first time? Was he not listening the first time or was it to make fun out of the name? The great men in the history had names like that and nobody made fun of them. It was his own name that he should have made fun of if he wanted to make fun. Dolan: it was like the name of a woman who washed clothes.

It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel; and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a schemer and he wished he had a little mirror to see. But there could not be; and it was unjust and cruel and unfair. Because there is a thigh in it, he said. Do you see the joke? Athy is the town in the county Kildare and a thigh is the other thigh. Well, you can't say but you were asked. I think I had better eat it myself because I'm not well in my health lately. Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante .

He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carving fork. Nobody spoke. He put it on his own plate, saying: Greenway, William. “The Gospel According to Dylan Thomas.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 20, no. 1 (January, 1990): 2-4. Does not assert that Thomas is a religious writer but that he achieved a biblical tone in much that he wrote. But what was the name the woman had called Kitty O'Shea that Mr Casey would not repeat? He thought of Mr Casey walking through the crowds of people and making speeches from a wagonette. That was what he had been in prison for and he remembered that one night Sergeant O'Neill had come to the house and had stood in the hall, talking in a low voice with his father and chewing nervously at the chinstrap of his cap. And that night Mr Casey had not gone to Dublin by train but a car had come to the door and he had heard his father say something about the Cabinteely road. Then the higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle of the refectory, Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard who was allowed to smoke cigars and the little Portuguese who wore the woolly cap. And then the lower line tables and the tables of the third line. And every single fellow had a different way of walking.

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Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb. He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was. The fellows had seen him running. They closed round him in a ring, pushing one against another to hear. And he saw Dante in a maroon velvet dress and with a green velvet mantle hanging from her shoulders walking proudly and silently past the people who knelt by the water's edge.