The stance Dylan Thomas chose to emphasise in his Portrait stories, that of a “young dog”, evokes an image of bravado, defiance and aggression in the face of life, a devil-may-care approach to existence that would seem to be well suited to Thomas's fertile comic fancy. I use the word “seem” because a reader would be insensitive to Thomas's vision of life if he failed to see the irony of the “young dog” pose. There is a pattern in Thomas's parade of youthful versions of himself but it is not the one that is generally emphasised.¹ The pattern is one of a gradual loss of courage and boldness, a consequent increase in fears and terrors, until the young dog is fully metamorphosed into a “terrified prig of a love-mad young man” (p. 104).²

The pattern starts to unfold itself in ‘Patricia, Edith and Arnold’ and ‘The Fight’ where we see Thomas as a bumptious young boy yet alarmed by his chance encounters with the human flesh and lovers. The surface impression of Thomas's emotional fright at seeing Patricia's leg close-up is one of comedy:

The boy stood bewildered between them. Why was Patricia so angry and serious? Her face was flushed and her eyes shone. Her chest moved up and down. He saw the long black hairs on her leg through a tear in her stocking. Her leg is as big as my middle he thought. I'm cold; I want tea; I've got snow in my fly (p. 30-31).

The passage also registers the boy's emotional confusion at the sight of the hairy female leg. There is an uneasiness which doesn't go away. In ‘The Fight’ which opens with the “young dog” at his exuberant best, Thomas writes of Mrs. Bevan:

I tried to undress her, but my mind grew frightened when it came to her short flannel petticoat and navy bloomers to the knees. I couldn't even dare unbutton her tall boots to see how grey her legs were. She looked up from her plate and gave me a wicked smile. (p. 41)

If the fear wasn't recurrent we might pass by with a smile ourselves. Earlier in ‘The Fight’ Thomas had walked past a young couple arm in arm commenting, “They would be tittering together now, with their horrid bodies close” (p. 37).

The strange thing is that what seems like an awkward stage in a young boy's growth in later stories germinates into a burden that Thomas finds very hard to carry. Indeed, as we shall see, in the later stories the “young dog” spirit masks a deep-seated anxiety that the world of sexual experience and female flesh is as Swift perceived is in scatalogical poems like ‘The Lady's Dressing Room’ (1731). We are not yet at the point where it is destroying him. The next story, ‘Extraordinary Little Cough,’ is a subtle portrait of Thomas's own sexual development during adolescence. The story might seem unrelated to what I have just said because it dramatises Thomas's healthy yearnings for girls rather than revulsion from them. But this would be wrong. In ‘Extraordinary Little Cough,’ the forces that are at war inside the young dog can be pin-pointed. First, Thomas prefigures in his imagination a day out at Rhossilli, meeting three girls and whisking them off their feet (pp. 47-48). However, when the encounter takes places, the girls prefer Brazell and Skully, two bullies, before Thomas, Dan, Sidney and George Hooping (extraordinary little cough). George Hooping, a boy who has no interest in the opposite sex, symbolises a world of innocence from which Thomas is trying to escape, but to which he is comically restricted:

As I bent down, three lumps of sugar fell from my blazer pocket. “I've been feeding a horse”, I said, and began to blush guiltily when all the girls laughed. (p. 51)

We walked into Button's field, and I showed her inside the tents and gave her one of George Hooping's apples. “I'd like a cigarette”, she said. (p. 52)

The gesture with the apple confines Thomas to the world of sexless but heroic exploit that Hooping inhabits by taking a dare made by the bullies seriously (to run across Rhossilli sands). Brazell and Skully, in contrast, represent a suavity with the opposite sex which Thomas recurrently wishes were his in later stories.³ In dog terms, Brazell and Skully are mastiffs compared to the spaniel Thomas and the poodle Hooping. Brazell and Skully are part of the “remote and overpressing world”, a central image in Thomas's repressed reveries in the next story, ‘Just Like Little Dogs’ (p. 57). The phrase Thomas uses there to describe Brazell and Skully suggests both their distance from him and their burden upon him as a young man. They are as advanced toward manhood as George Hooping is set-back in his development.

‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ records the agonising stage between two states of development,

… they [Brazell and Skully] looked like a boy with two heads. And when I stared at George again he was lying on his back fast asleep in the deep grass and his hair was touching the flames. (p. 53)

Brazell and Skully are unreal and monster-like, George Hooping on the verge of immolation. This puts Thomas's own predicament and fears neatly. The very emphasis of the story which celebrates Hooping rather than Thomas deserves notice. Where is the “young dog” spirit? Where is the innocent heroic aggression that he showed against Dan in ‘The Fight’? The next story, ‘Just Like Little Dogs,’ insists that a reader develop his inclination to see the “young dog” image as an ironic pose, carefully chosen to reveal its disappearance in the course of growing up. Jocular connotations of the “young dog” become replaced by more sinister ones.

‘Just Like Little Dogs’ portrays Thomas listening under a railway arch in pitch darkness to the story of Tom and Walter's sexual escapades with Doris and Norma. Thomas listens “… like a pimp in a bush at Tom's side …,” (p. 59) to an account of how Tom and Walter loved Doris and Norma and then changed partners, how paternity cases are brought against the young men and how Tom marries the girl he does not love. Thomas responds in a more serious manner than the 80 year old deaf magistrate Mr. Lewis who hears the paternity cases. Mr. Lewis chuckles philosophically to himself and mutters “Just like little dogs”! (p. 59). Thomas responds as he responded to Patricia's leg: “All at once I remembered how cold it was. I rubbed my numb hands together” (p. 59). The darkness of the arch adds to the sense of desolation consequent upon the encounter on the beach. The story is essentially a farcical account of how sex (without love)⁴ is frightening. Thomas's reaction to what he hears is to pelt up the steep streets (presumably) for the warmth and comfort of home. Where is the “young dog” spirit now? As we shall see, he tries to use it to defend himself against the forces that press in towards him from the adult world. This can be seen in ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us’.

There is a resurgence of the “young dog” spirit in ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us’. Its opening is as juvenile as the opening of the first Rhossilli story, ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’, though Thomas is some years older. With his fellow gallant Ray, Thomas exudes typical bravado at the beginning of their day of escape from the town:

We went up Sketty Road at a great speed, our haversacks jumping on our backs. We rapped on every gate to give a terrific walkers' benediction to the people in the choking houses. Like a breath of fresh air we passed a man in office pin-stripes standing, with a dog-lead in his hand, whistling at a corner (p. 76).

Thomas tries to keep the exuberant mood going but fails in relation to Ray's depressive spirit which totally eclipses the fantasy of escape: “He [Ray] was stretched out like a dead man, his feet motionless in the sea, his mouth on the ruin of a rock pool, his hand clutched round my foot”. (p. 84) The “young dog” spirit is powerless to resist such a depressive force. Thomas ironically evokes the memory of “mad Gwilym” of the very first story in the volume, ‘The Peaches’ (p. 85). In ‘The Peaches’ the boy Thomas was happy in his innocence unaware in emotional terms of the desolation of his landscape: “… the quiet untidy farm-yard, with its tumble-down, dirty-white cow-house and empty stables open” (p. 5). But as ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us’ symbolically concludes, the way back to such a state of mind is blocked: “The sea was in. The slipping stepping-stones were gone” (p. 86).

Instead, the “young dog” boldness becomes a mask of bravado, which characterises Thomas as he is led into the pub world of temptation by Mr. Farr in ‘Old Garbo,’ the chain-smoking bitter-drinking, “round-faced and round-bellied” senior reporter in ‘The Tawe News’. In the world of “The Three Lamps”, after the initiations, comes “the threat of the clutched tankard” (p. 93) and a world of bewilderment and confusion.

Darkness and confusion engulf the young dog in ‘One Warm Saturday’ and put him at one with the world around him. Hitherto, he has looked on the world wishing it to be purer, simpler and more congenial. Embodied as the “young dog” spirit, Thomas carries hope and vitality as far as he can to the point where they are destroyed and where the spirit aids in the destruction. Moving forward from his George Hooping world towards the complexity of adult experience, Thomas comes up against the rub of love in ‘One Warm Saturday.’ The early sensations of a small boy and young adolescent in relation to the female body were the seeds of a failure and disillusionment more deep-seated. In ‘One Warm Saturday’ Thomas is desperate (though drunk) to be left alone on the bridal bed of his fantasy with Lou, the girl he sees in Victoria Gardens and picks up at the pub. But Lou is not alone, in her entourage are Mrs. Franklin, Harold the barman, Marjorie, the drunk man with one buttock (a hint of Candide here), and the rival for Lou's hand, Mr. O'Brien.

The young man's desires are pure but sepulchral: “In the darkness he and Lou could creep beneath the clothes and imitate the dead” (p. 115). In the crowded tenement room Lou beckons to the young man from the bed, but the young dog has to obey the call of nature and search out the “House of Commons”. As he exits looking for it, the blackness and confusion of the world descend upon him. Blindly he gropes his way about the house trying to get back to Lou. He goes in and out of rooms but Lou has vanished. His romantic ideals come crashing down: “Love had grown up in an evening” (p. 117). We are left uncertain as to whether it has all been a dream or not, with “… only the approaching day to remember his discovery” (p. 119). The young man who walks out onto a waste space at the end of the Portrait does so with the knowledge that the life and vitality of the “young dog” has departed for ever. He becomes one with rubble of some houses “… where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost” (p. 120). The disappearance of the spirited “young dog” and the emergence of another troubled animal is the point of the stories and the irony implicit in the “young dog” image from the very start.

Notes

1. Vernon Watkins has written: “… he [Thomas] 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”. (“Afterword”, Adventures In The Skin Trade, Signet Classics, New York, 1960, p. 187).

2. All page references are to Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog (A New Directions Paperbacks, New York, Fourteenth Printing, 1968).

3. In ‘Old Garbo’: “… or to be called ‘saucy’ and ‘a one’ as I joked and ogled at the counter, making innocent, dirty love that could come to nothing among the spilt beer and piling glasses” (p. 94); in ‘One Warm Saturday’: “Oh boy! to be … telling the latest one to the girls. …” (p. 102).

4. Thomas goes in pursuit of that in ‘One Warm Saturday’.