I

Dylan Thomas never typed his own stories for submission to periodicals, but he would copy the finished version in careful handwriting into the Red Notebook, from which he would dictate to a friend. Reading aloud was as important for the prose as for the poetry, and many stories were tried out before a group of friends during the Wednesday lunch hour in Swansea. In the same manner “The Enemies,” “The Visitor,” “The Orchards,” “The Mouse and the Woman,” and “The Burning Baby” were read aloud, mainly during 1934, to Pamela Hansford Johnson.¹

Although from 1934 on many of the tales were published in Welsh and English periodicals, Thomas was as concerned with bringing them together into one volume as he was with publishing collections of his poems. By 1937 he had assembled the major early tales in The Burning Baby and had contracted with the Europa Press for publication. It was already advertised and the first edition subscribed when the printers balked on grounds of obscenity. A depressing back and forth of compromise and argument ensued, and, as the efforts of George Reavey of the Europa Press proved unavailing, Thomas began to toy with the idea of publishing the tales through Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller in Paris (several stories, including “A Prospect of the Sea,” were eventually translated in l'Arche by Francis Dufeu-L'Abeyrie). When the situation became hopeless Reavey turned the contract over to the Pearn, Pollinger, and Higham literary agency. Their good offices also proved useless, and although “In the Direction of the Beginning” found its way into a New Directions collection and several other stories were printed in The Map of Love and The World I Breathe (England and America, 1939), The Burning Baby never went to press.

The suppression of the early tales and the poor reception of the volumes that combined poetry and prose may have accounted in part for the abrupt change in prose style that occurred throughout 1938 and 1939. This was also, of course, a time of impending war when the outer world was pressing in upon Thomas as upon everyone else. The early prose tales were part of an inward universe that he constructed in his late teens and early twenties: the war not only disrupted this universe but afforded Thomas the opportunity of trying his hand at the more public genres of broadcasting and “straight” narrative fiction. The early prose tales are much more a unity with the poetry than the later, more simplistic Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and “Adventures in the Skin Trade” (1941), which Thomas himself tended to deprecate. Although the late Vernon Watkins disagreed with me entirely, thinking that “Dylan always did what he wanted to do, in spite of the success or failure of his work,”² I think that with his pressing financial needs at that time he could not afford to write in a prose genre that had been poorly received by both printers and public.

The early prose was not collected until after Thomas' death: the two posthumous volumes, A Prospect of the Sea (England) and Adventures in the Skin Trade (America), did not appear until 1955.³ At that time they were often invidously compared to the later prose (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and Under Milk Wood) which had become popular and even beloved. American critics reserved judgement on the “poetic” and “difficult” pieces following Adventures in the Skin Trade.⁴ But Davies Aberpennar in Wales and Kingsley Amis in England had already found them irresponsibly irrational, full of “factitious surrealist artifice,” and built upon “characters and situations … which people in full possession of their faculties would not find interesting or important.”⁵ Many admirers of the early poetry consigned the early prose to oblivion as juvenilia, or dismissed it as part of a macabre or dark phase which was as well forgotten. To G. S. Fraser they were the “pièces noires” of Thomas' later “celebration of innocence.” Fraser insists that “in writing these pieces, Thomas was grappling with, and apparently succeeded in absorbing and overcoming, what Jungians call the shadow.”⁶

Such an opinion overlooks Thomas' lifelong bout with a “shadow” which he never overcame. The life of the poet, wrote Jung in the June 1930 transition, “is, of necessity, full of conflicts, since two forces fight in him: the ordinary man with his justified claim for happiness …, and the ruthless creative passion on the other which under certain conditions crushes all personal desires into the dust.”⁷ Throughout the forties Thomas was caught in the toils of just such a conflict, and he devoted neither his later poetry nor his later prose to gay reminiscence. Perhaps the critics of the fifties were looking for their own prewar innocence in suggesting that the stories of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, the short novel Adventures in the Skin Trade, or the drama Under Milk Wood were visions of an unsullied, dirty-little-boy Eden. Like Blake's, Thomas' vision of innocence was through the eyes of experience.

Dylan Thomas was certainly not alone among twentieth-century writers in regarding madness, dream, and myth as a fertile source of imagery and narrative material. His tales are concerned with how the storyteller breaks from the bounds of consciousness into the unconscious world, what he experiences there, how he manages to return, and what happens if he does not return (Marlais takes something resembling a psychedelic “trip” in “The Orchards,” as does Peter in “The Visitor” and Nant in “The Lemon”). The inward journey of the poetic imagination, which is usually implicit in the poetry, is more explicit in the prose, where it is the adventure by which Thomas self-consciously defines his narrative mode.

Even though the symbolic forms of the unconscious provide both the goal of his heroes and the structure of his tales, he is careful that the unconscious world never usurps control of the narrative. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the only passages of “automatic writing” in the tales occur when Thomas wants to describe the abrogation of consciousness: he seems to have felt that the further inward the narrative penetrates, the stronger must be the role played by the intellect. “The more subjective a poem,” he wrote, “the clearer the narrative line.”⁸ The intense and often hallucinatory subjectivity of the early tales required an unusual amount of conscious control, and it is probably for this reason that Thomas intruded so often as omniscient narrator. As Jacob Korg has noted, he shapes paranoia and hallucination into “an atmosphere where the mind rules the material world, exercising its powers of creation and distortion over it.”⁹

II

The “progressive line, or theme, or movement” which Thomas insisted upon for every poem is also present in every tale, where it is defined by the progress of the hero from desire through quest to release and renewal. The plots are divided into three or four sections which succeed each other with the rhythm of ritual movements. The tales usually culminate in a sacrament or rite, an act of sexual release, or an archetypal vision. The release may take the form of the loosing of a flood (as in “A Prospect of the Sea” and “The Map of Love”) or of an apocalyptic event (“The Holy Six,” “An Adventure from a Work in Progress,” “The Visitor”). Often the beginning of a new epoch of search and birth is implicit in the cataclysmic denouement, giving a cyclical shape to the narrative.

William York Tindall includes “landscape and sea, enclosures such as garden, island, and cave, and in addition city and tower” under the category of archetype. He goes on to explain that “uniting the personal and the general and commonly ambivalent, these images, not necessarily symbolic in themselves, become symbolic by context, first in our sleeping minds and then in poems.”¹⁰ Thomas' landscapes embody the personal or sexual, the impersonal or mythical, and the poetic aspirations of his heroes. Images of the poetic quest seem to rise up as autonomous entities out of the countryside: words become incarnate in trees, in blood, and in the transforming sea. Often, at the denouement of a tale, they find their final expression in a “voice of thunder” which announces the hero's achievement.

Since Thomas' landscape is not only geographical but anatomical, personal or sexual imagery is latent in the countryside as well as in the bodies of hero and heroine. The hills and valleys of “A Prospect of the Sea,” “The Map of Love,” the two fragments (“In the Direction of the Beginning” and “An Adventure from a Work in Progress”), and “The Holy Six” are metaphors of the feminine anatomy, the breasts, belly, and so forth, of the earth-mother herself. In “The Map of Love” the map which Sam Rib explicates is of sexual intercourse: the island “went in like the skin of lupus to his touch. … Here seed, up the tide, broke on the boiling coasts; the sand grains multiplied” (AST, p. 146). In the tales where the cyclical pattern is most pronounced the feminine landscape is itself circular, dominated by a woman who draws the hero into the “mothering middle of the earth.” In “In the Direction of the Beginning,” “An Adventure from a Work in Progress,” “The Enemies,” and “The Holy Six,” the heroes walk from the rim of an island or valley through ancestral fields into intercourse. Each consummation is analogous to a mythological event, during which the island or circular valley participates in an orgy of division and regeneration. As Dr. Maud has aptly pointed out, Thomas' mingling of geographic and sexual imagery is a successful method of “distancing the intimate,” a means of describing the act of love so that both its intimate and mythical qualities are dramatically embodied.¹¹

Neither the aesthetic imagery, which expresses the poetic quest of the hero, nor the sexual imagery of a given tale predominates. In each case poetic and anatomical metaphors describe a narrative line which is essentially mythological, both in the inward sense (“the union of ritual and dream in the form of verbal communication”) and in the outward or historical sense (the use of Welsh, Egyptian, and other folklore for background). The final synthesis is always personal: images describing the heroes' thrust towards sexual and poetic maturity are overlaid by thematic antitheses of unity and division, love and death. “Poetry in its social or archetypal aspect,” notes Frye, “not only tries to illustrate the fulfillment of desire, but to define the obstacles to it. Ritual is not only a recurrent act, but an act expressive of a dialectic of desire and repugnance: desire for fertility or victory, repugnance to draught or to enemies.”¹² We shall see how demonic vitality and senile repression form the poles of “The Enemies” and “The Holy Six”; in “The Mouse and the Woman” and “The Map of Love” we shall find heroes suspended between fear of the flesh and sensual desire.

“If ritual is the cradle of language,” declares Suzanne Langer, “metaphor is the law of its life.”¹³ Thomas' narratives depend upon the conflict, mergence, and progression of specific metaphors. Given the analogy of geography and anatomy which underlies most of the early tales, even his descriptive images bear a metaphorical burden. In “The Burning Baby,” for example, the relationship between images of gorse, flesh, and fire marks the progression of the plot towards its grim crescendo. At the outset, Thomas describes Rhys Rhys preaching a sermon on “The beauty of the harvest” and explains that in the preacher's mind “it was not the ripeness of God that glistened from the hill. It was the promise and the ripeness of the flesh, the good flesh, the mean flesh, flesh of his daughter, flesh, flesh, the flesh of the voice of thunder howling before the death of man” (AST, p. 91). The biblical metaphor of flesh to grass is the raw material of Rhys' perversion. It embodies both the sensual level (“the flesh of his daughter”) and the poetic level (“the flesh of the voice of thunder”) of the plot.

Further on in the tale a third element is added to the metaphor: the little brother “saw the high grass at [his sister's] thighs. And the blades of the upgrowing wind, out of the four windsmells of the manuring dead, might drive through the soles of her feet, up the veins of the legs and stomach, into her womb and her pulsing heart” (AST, p. 93). The grass has become an even more explicitly sexual metaphor, each blade being analogous to the father's phallus. The “upgrowing wind” surging through the grass is in turn analogous to the spirit, both as the biblical wind which “bloweth where it listeth” and as the impregnator of Mary. Coming into conjunction with flesh the fiery biblical wind ignites as the elements of gorse, flesh, wind, and fire merge in the burning baby. The denouement is organic, in the sense of propounding a natural, season-oriented or cyclical worldview. Rhys Rhys sets fire to the gorse to burn the incestuously begotten son as the tale concludes, its final scene a variation on Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, God's sacrifice of Christ, and man's perennial sacrifice of himself.

“The Burning Baby” is a fairly early and straightforward tale from the Red Notebook in September, 1934. We shall see in Chapter 5 how, in “The Mouse and the Woman,” “The Lemon,” and “The Orchards,” Thomas uses images from a series of related dreams to underline the narrative. In the tales where there is no dreaming he makes use of a similar mode of metaphorical progression. For each of the three key characters of “The Enemies” and “The Holy Six,” the world shapes itself into images appropriate to his perception of it. Mr. Owen is a kind of Great-Uncle Jarvis, a lover of the “vegetable world” that “roared under his feet.” Endowing his garden with his own virility, he works upon the “brown body of the earth, the green skin of the grass, and the breasts of the Jarvis hills.” Mrs. Owen's feminine powers are embodied in her crystal ball, which contains the extremities of hot and cold, clarity and obscurity and is analogous both to her womb and to the round earth whirling outside of the house. Davies, withered with age and insubstantial with sterility, perceives the Jarvis valley as a place of demonic vitality, death, and nausea. Throughout the narrative, it remains a “great grey green earth” that “moved unsteadily beneath him.”

Ghostliness, virility, and demonic lust are embodied in Davies' nausea, Owen's garden, and Mrs. Owen's crystal ball. As the narrative moves towards its consummation the action moves entirely indoors to concentrate upon the ball and Mrs. Owen's pregnant womb. The six clergymen are made to share in Davies' nausea, vomiting up their desires under the influence of “mustard and water.” At the denouement the conflict centers upon a question of paternity: whose child is in Mrs. Owen's womb? Ghostliness triumphs as Davies is assured that he has not loved Amabel in vain. As Owen, like Callaghan, laughs that there should “be life in the ancient loins,” Davies sees “the buried grass shoot through the new night and move on the hill wind.” Mr. Owen is revealed as the midwife-gardener to Mrs. Owen and Davies, laboring to bring new life out of a woman who conceives only in the arms of death. The antithetical metaphors of virility and ghostliness are woven into a new synthesis by Mrs. Owen's paradoxical desires. The narrative as a whole is a symbolic representation of an apocalyptic union of spirit and flesh, the dead and the living.

So intensely does Thomas concentrate upon a metaphor to make it render its utmost significance that his figures nearly burst their usual function, no longer representing a similarity but a metamorphosis. It is as if he, like his heroes, could change real objects into their subjective equivalents, and elements of the outer world into his lyric image of them. Thus in “A Prospect of the Sea” the boy sees a tree turn into the countryside: “every leaf of the tree that shaded them grew to man-size then, the ribs of the bark were channels and rivers wide as a great ship; and the moss on the tree, and the sharp grass ring round the base, were all the velvet covering of a green country's meadows blown hedge to hedge” (AST, p. 127). By a process similar to hallucination the objects of the landscape become elements of a subjective vision, the tree on the hill becoming a symbolic expression of the boy's own transformation.

“The chief source of obscurity in these stories,” remarks Jacob Korg, “is the fact that imagined things are expressed in the language of factual statement instead of the language of metaphor.”¹⁴ Thus when Thomas writes of the girl in “A Prospect of the Sea” that “the heart in her breast was a small red bell that rang in a wave,” one cannot comprehend the metaphor until one accepts the previous statement that the waves not only resemble but are a “white-faced sea of people, the terrible mortal number of the waves, all the centuries' sea drenched in the hail before Christ” (AST, p. 131). The girl herself is a wave, her heart a meeting place of men and mermen, land and sea. If the sea is a metaphor of the human race, it is what Tindall has termed a “metaphysical metaphor,” symbolic in itself and an “element of a symbolic structure.”¹⁵

Thomas' “metaphysical metaphors” are thematic symbols embodying the progression and antitheses upon which such a narrative depends. They are not literary tokens heightening realistic situations in the classic sense, nor are they incorporated into the tales from an external system. Within each story, they are distinguished from minor metaphors by the way that they juxtapose, blend, and contain the several dominant themes. The tree in “The Tree,” “A Prospect of the Sea,” and “The Orchards”; the house in “The Enemies,” “The Holy Six” and “The Dress”; and the tower in “The Lemon” and “The School for Witches” are such inclusive symbols. None of them is the only major symbol in its context, however. Tree, tower, and house form a symbolic triad in “The Tree”; orchard, scarecrow, and maiden are one among several such triads in “The Orchards,” while house, hill, and sea contain the thematic meaning of “The Mouse and the Woman” and “A Prospect of the Sea.”

In each tale, objects contract and expand, merge and reshape themselves according to the pressure of the hero's mind. Like a magician, the poet-hero forces the image of a thing to become the thing itself. Although he draws upon the worlds of magic, folk belief, and madness for his material, Thomas exercises careful control over it, subordinating it to the expression of the hero's quest for meaning. Discontented with images and metaphors that are merely literary and decorative, the hero condemns the “dead word,” story-princesses, and conventional metaphors, forcing himself into the dangerous world of the unconscious where symbols are live things which devour as they illuminate. Since the stories are about the search for a source of all story the symbolic visions which mark each denouement are ends in themselves.

III

It is a pity that there are no recordings of the early tales, which Thomas read aloud during the Wednesday lunch hours to his Swansea friends and, in London, to Pamela Hansford Johnson and her mother at 53 Battersea Rise. For all of its wordiness Thomas' prose style is extremely symmetrical, with orderly paragraphs progressing according to the dictates of balance and emphasis.

The texts alternate between lengthy descriptive passages, briefer paragraphs which sum up the descriptions or outline further action, and brief dialogues. Even in the longer descriptive sections there is a great deal of activity, the prose bristling with verbs of action and reaction describing the thematic conflict. Thomas often relies upon a series of clauses or phrases which he builds into a crescendo at the climax of a passage. In “A Prospect of the Sea” one paragraph begins with a brief and realistic statement: “It was hot that morning in the unexpected sunshine. A girl dressed in cotton put her mouth to his ear,” and continues

Along the bright wrackline, from the horizon where the vast birds sailed like boats, from the four compass corners, bellying up through the weed-beds, melting from orient and tropic, surging through the ice hills and the whale grounds, through sunset and sunrise corridors, the salt gardens and the herring fields, whirlpool and rock pool, out of the trickle in the mountain, down the waterfalls, a white-faced sea of people. … (AST, pp. 130-31)

The participial series, “bellying,” “melting,” “surging,” gives way to a series of adverbial phrases which finally find their subject at the middle of the paragraph. The prose catalogue suggests a sweeping up and down of the earth, a gathering of the “white-faced sea of people” from the north and south, the east and west.

Passages so rich and lengthy generally occur only near the climax of the tales. Thomas leads up to them with shorter paragraphs, composed of a simple sentence at the beginning and end and one or two more complex sentences in between. Brief statement, mounting descriptive rhythms, and brevity of concluding statement are the basic units not only of individual paragraphs but of each story as a whole. Each tale begins and ends with a simplicity which must take its significance from the complex material in between. In nearly every case the plot is rounded out with some such simple statement as

Hold my hand, he said. And then: Why are you putting the sheet over my face? (“The Visitor”)

or

Brother, he said. He saw that the child held silver nails in the palm of his hand. (“The Tree”)

or

Cool rain began to fall. (“A Prospect of the Sea”)

Thomas' dialogues are constructed along similar lines, occurring not as conventional conversations but as catechetical interchanges which usually precede or follow a complex and lengthy description. In “The Visitor” the paragraphs describing the arrival of Peter and Callaghan in the land of death are followed by this interchange:

What is this valley? said Peter's voice.

The Jarvis valley, said Callaghan. Callaghan, too, was dead. Not a bone or a hair stood up under the steadily falling frost.

This is no Jarvis valley.

This is the naked valley. (AST, p. 82-83)

From this dialogue, resembling that of God and Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, the reader is flung on into the powerful description of the deluge of blood which causes even the “monstrous nostrils of the moon” to widen in horror. In “The Tree,” similarly, the description of the boy's view of the Jarvis valley is followed by his question and the gardener's answer:

Who are they, who are they?

They are the Jarvis hills, said the gardener, which have been from the beginning. (AST, p. 75)

A variation of the catechetical dialogue appears in the riddling interchanges that summarize the paradoxical themes of “The Horse's Ha” and “In the Direction of the Beginning.” These bring the reader to a stop and make him, like the hero, puzzle over the significance of the adventure, giving him a pause for reflection before he is plunged into ever more complex prose. Thomas possibly derived this technique from the rhetoric of Welsh preachers.

No study of the metaphorical or rhetorical structure of Thomas' prose can explain its weirdly compelling lilt, indescribable except by reading the tales aloud. This lilt is more pronounced in the shorter paragraphs and depends upon delicate balance of sentence elements. It is not original to Thomas, who may have modeled his prose after the style of Caradoc Evans.¹⁶ Take Thomas' description of Amabel Owen: “She was a tidy little body, with plump hands and feet, and a love-curl glistened on her forehead; dressed, like a Sunday, in cold and shining black, with a brooch of mother's ivory and a bone-white bangle, she saw the Holy Six reflected as six solid stumps …” (AST, p. 136), and compare it with a passage from Evans: “Silah Schoolen was a tidy bundle and she was dressed as if every day was a Sunday. She was not tall or short, fat or thin; her cheekbones were high and her lips were wide and her top teeth swelled from her mouth in a snowy white arch.”¹⁷ In Evans the lilt derives from the adaptation into English of the rhythms of spoken Welsh. Modified slightly by Thomas, it is present in combination with a terse descriptive economy in most of his early tales.

Although Evans' use of dialogue is more conventional and extensive than that of Thomas, Evans relies upon a similar combination of catechism and proverb:

“And who is the husband shall I say?”

“He was Shacki. O you heard of Shacki—Shacki stallion?”

“I have been in ships,” said the man. “I have been with black heathens and whites Holy Sherusalem [sic].”

“The Sea is a stormy place. Have you rabbits to sell?”

Amos made this pronouncement: “There are no rabbits on tidy farms.”¹⁸

Where Evans' prose is full of folk proverb, Thomas is more likely to invent proverbial statements from a combination of Welsh mythology, Christianity, and the sexual metaphors of a given story. Thus where one of Evans' heroes asserts that “Death is a great stiffener,” Thomas asserts that “No drug of man works on the dead. The parson, at his pipe, sucked down a dead smoke.” Evans' tales are terse and economical descriptions of the realistic tragedies of the country, Hardyesque in their reliance upon local dialogue and superstition. Usually curling into a bitter twist at the denouement, they are far more like Joyce's Dubliners than Thomas' early prose.

Although Evans is likely to start a story with a statement like “A tree of wisdom grew inside a certain farmer and sayings fell from it,” he usually goes on to more realistic statements. Thomas is more likely to start out realistically and to become more and more fantastic. In this he certainly owes something to the influence of T. F. Powys. In Mockery Gap, for example, Powys endows the sea with much the same powers of love and regeneration as Thomas does in such tales as “The Map of Love” and “A Prospect of the Sea”: “Mr. Pattimore sat up. He heard the midnight sea, the wicked one, the beautiful, the inspirer of huge wickedness; he heard the sea. However much he had shut out from him all the gentle longings of his loving lady, the sound would come in. It came from the dark places of love, out of the bottom of the sea.”¹⁹ In The Innocent Birds the landscape suggests that of “The Map of Love”: the hero, “old Solly,” overhearing two lovers on the “green summit” of the focal Madder Hill, associates them with the creative and destructive potentialities of the sea beneath them.

In Powys' The Two Thieves we find a macabre turn of events expressed in a style similar to that of Thomas' darker tales: “Grace crept into a corner of the room. She already felt the serpent growing in her womb. She tried to tear open her body with her nails: in three weeks she was measured for her coffin. The undertaker had expected her to be a little taller than she was. ‘A beautiful corpse,’ he said smilingly.”²⁰ Powys' tales are structured upon the organic cyclical pattern beloved to Thomas: “Every Autumn God dies,” he writes in God, “and in the spring He is given a new place in the lives of men, and is born again. It is the same with us; we die and go down to the pit, but until the worlds vanish, new life from our dust will arise and worship the sun.”²¹

“The quality and organization of the language here,” writes one commentator, “is poetic in its deep rhythms and its surface music.”²² Thomas once described his early prose as “this bastard thing, a prose-poetry.”²³ Although his tales do not belong in the French genre of the poème en prose favored by Max Jacob and André Breton, in style and form they somewhat resemble such “prose-poems” as Rimbaud's Illuminations (compare “Après le Deluge” to “The Map of Love,” “Villes” to “Prologue to an Adventure” and Lautrémont's “Les Chants de Maldoror”). In England as in France the two separate genres of prose and poetry merged in the experimental novel of the twenties and thirties. While Anna Balakian notes in surrealist France “a fusion of poetry with prose,”²⁴ Professor Tindall has aptly pointed out that in England, at the same time, “the better novel became a poem” with its “narrative and subordinate details centered in image.”²⁵

Thomas' early tales, as we have seen, are “poetic” in their dependence upon a balance, progression, and contrast of thematic images and symbols. They differ from the work of Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce, however, not only in their brevity but in their intense subjectivism. Where the other novelists create a number of distinct characters upon whose minds the outer world registers its impressions, Thomas' tales more often center upon one protagonist. Even when a consort, father-figure or antagonist is present he or she is absorbed, in the end, into an inward or personal vision. (The triad of Mrs. Owen, Mr. Owen, and Davies in “The Enemies” is a notable exception to this practice.) When a number of persons are involved, as in “The Horse's Ha” and “The School for Witches,” they all are absorbed into a demonic or ritual unity at the denouement. Thomas thus pays little heed to Stephen Daedalus' plea for dramatic distancing over lyric subjectivism, for the conflict within each tale is less between separate persons than between the hero's Blakean faculties of imagination, reason, and desire.

Thomas' tales are not as dependent upon conflicting and merging images as are his poems. Narrative is fundamental to their structures in which action and images are knit together with careful attention to plot coherence and rhetorical style. The result is a genre unique in contemporary fiction, which in its pattern of quest for a fabulous center is more like folktale or mythological legend than realistic fiction. In each story, the protagonist sways between moods of approach and withdrawal which shape the narrative into a strophic and antistrophic “dancing of an attitude.”²⁶ In such stories as “The Enemies,” “The Holy Six,” “The Orchards,” “The Map of Love,” “A Prospect of the Sea,” “The Lemon,” and “The School for Witches,” the protagonists move through a ritual series of trials and adventures towards the paradoxical goal of vision and destruction. In others, such as “The Horse's Ha,” “The Tree,” and “The Burning Baby,” a similar ritual movement, sometimes circling, sometimes progressing, embodies a dance of death and renewal.

Each of Thomas' early tales contains elements of myth (pseudo-primitive folklore or inward ritual), theology (in the sense of a system of cosmic symbology, containing—but transcending—myth), the occult (heretical materials combining the primitive and organic with the transcendent) and, finally, surrealism (the contemporary practice of mingling unconscious, mythological and everyday images into a new, hallucinatory or super-real world view). In each story these elements are knit carefully into an artistic whole, and it might seem a violation of the artistic integrity of each piece to separate its various components, in the following chapters. Only the casual reader should be thrown off by this deliberate unravelling, however. The intent is to elucidate the various strands of Thomas' early prose style so that the reader, winding these strands back together in his perusal of the individual tales, will more fully grasp their richness.

Notes

1. Pamela Hansford Johnson, letter of July 4, 1963 to the author.

2. Vernon Watkins, letter of February 27, 1963 to the author.

3. A Prospect of the Sea was published by J. M. Dent & Sons in London (1955). The collection Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Stories was published by New Directions in New York (1955). Quotations in this study are taken from the New American Library Signet reprint of Adventures (New York, 1961), which will be referred to in the text as AST. (The tales discussed in this chapter can be found in both editions.)

4. See Reviews of AST in Commonweal, Vol. 62 (January 10, 1955), 262; the New Yorker, Vol. 31 (June 11, 1955), 158; the Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. 38 (July 2, 1955), 18.

5. Davies Aberpennar, review of “The Visitor” in Wales, Vol. II, No. 2 (1939-1940), 308; and Kingsley Amis, review of A Prospect of the Sea in Spectator (August 12, 1955), p. 227. See also the London Times Literary Supplement, Vol. 796 (September 30, 1955), 569.

6. G. S. Fraser, “Dylan Thomas,” Chapter 15 in Vision and Rhetoric (London, 1959), pp. 224-25. See also Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas, “Dog among the Fairies” (London, 1949), p. 128.

7. C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Poetry,” transition no. 19-20, (June 1930), p. 42. See Appendix C.

8. Dylan Thomas, “Replies to an Enquiry” in John Malcolm Brinnin, A Casebook on Dylan Thomas (New York: Thomas E. Crowell Co., 1960), p. 102.

9. Jacob Korg, “The Short Stories of Dylan Thomas,” Perspective, Vol. 1 (Spring 1948), 184.

10. William York Tindall, The Literary Symbol (Bloomington, Ind., 1955), p. 130.

11. Ralph Maud, Entrances to Dylan Thomas' Poetry (Pittsburgh, 1963), pp. 81-103 (hereafter cited as Entrances).

12. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 106.

13. Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 141.

14. Korg, “Short Stories,” p. 184.

15. Tindall, The Literary Symbol, pp. 60-62.

16. T. H. Jones describes Evans' style as “based on the rhythms and idioms of Welsh nonconformity, a virile, exuberant, non-conforming prose that has influenced almost every Anglo-Welsh writer, and not least Dylan Thomas.” T. H. Jones, Dylan Thomas (New York, 1963), p. 44. In a letter to the author of August 13, 1963, Glyn Jones affirms Evans' influence on Thomas.

17. Caradoc Evans, The Earth Gives All and Takes All (London, 1947), p. 1.

18. Caradoc Evans, Nothing to Pay (London, 1930), p. 27.

19. T. F. Powys, Mockery Gap (New York, 1925), p. 37.

20. T. F. Powys, The Two Thieves (New York, 1932), quoted in H. Coombes, T. F. Powys (London, 1960), p. 34.

21. T. F. Powys, God (New York, 1932), p. 41.

22. Coombes, T. F. Powys, p. 28.

23. Interview with Harvey Breit in the New York Times Book Review (February 17, 1952), p. 17.

24. Anna Balakian, The Literary Origins of Surrealism (New York, 1947), p. 1.

25. Tindall, The Literary Symbol, pp. 64, 91.

26. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York, 1957), p. 9.