SOURCE: “Imitation and Invention: The Use of Borrowed Material in Dylan Thomas's Prose,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, July, 1968, p. 275-95.

Brander Matthews once proposed a grading of the short story in terms of its compliance with a catalogue of qualities—something like a working list of litmus tests, of which the most notable were unity, compression, originality, ingenuity and fantasy (Saturday Review, July 1884). These features, or aspects of them, are certainly valid yardsticks, but Matthews's third requirement, ‘originality’, has to be defined and re-defined if it is to be a yardstick of any critical use. Influences which are assimilated into tone or theme in the ordinary run of prose fiction need not be closely defined; but when, on the other hand, whole plots, or segments of plot or descriptive narrative, are borrowed by an author from elsewhere, the test is to see in what way imitation becomes invention. Shakespeare survives because he is so much more resourceful than the plots he adopted, because poetry re-defines material radically. Even with prose, however, and even in the case of its less ambitious forms, the process is interesting and informative. With the short story, a genre which over the last half-century has moved further and further away from the formal requirements of plot in the strictest sense, increasing emphasis has been placed on the power to reveal rather than state. The insistence of E. M. Forster on aesthetic rather than structural compactness in Aspects of the Novel and of a commentator like I, Hendry on ‘revealed’ rather than stated meaning (‘Joyce's Epiphanies’, Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1952) has drawn attention more to vertical depth and less to horizontal plot in fiction. And so, where the horizontal apparatus of plot is in fact borrowed from elsewhere, the reader is now critically prepared to see the material function in new hands.

Dylan Thomas's prose works vary enormously and range from the intense and often moving early stories to the adept radio broadcasts; from the comic elegy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog to the lyrical impressionism of Under Milk Wood and the melodramatic facility of the film scenarios. Nevertheless, a feature common to all his prose is the tendency to borrow material from his reading of other authors. The tendency ranges in quantity from the borrowing of a few words to the employment of total plots. As the range varies, so does the measure of success or failure, and often the habit is a good indication of the nature of Thomas's imagination. In the poetry the device sometimes provides successful drama by verbal allusion. In the late poem, ‘In Country Sleep’, for example, the young girl's growth to sexual self-determination is marked by an allusion to a striking clause in Hardy's ‘A Broken Appointment’. The ominous arrival of Time and Maturity—‘he comes designed … He comes to take … He comes to leave her … Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come’ catches the dramatic lament of Hardy's ‘You did not come … Grieved I, when, as the hope hour stroked its sum, You did not come’. The reference here (incidentally, it is a poem Thomas was once recorded reading) is part of the drama and is all the more fruitful for being recognised.

Similarly, the tendency in the prose works, where it functions more consistently, can be Eliotian in its ability to juxtapose old contexts with new. In this way it can point to the quality of satire in a work like the play for voices. When, for example, the narrator says, ‘The music of the spheres is heard distinctly over Milk Wood. It is “The Rustle of Spring”’, the response required, one invited by Thomas's own inverted commas, is to realise that the reference is to a salon piece called ‘The Rustle of Spring’ written by Sinding, a minor Danish imitator of Grieg, who was popular at the turn of the century. Immediately we are in touch with something like mock-heroics, comic because the nearest approximation to the music of the spheres can only be a piano cliché, redolent of suburbia with its aspidistra atmosphere. Or, again, when Eli Jenkins speaks of ‘Llaregyb Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples that dwelt in the region of Llaregyb before the Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards made themselves a wife out of flowers' (p. 82), the mock-romantic element is best savoured when we notice the direct source of the passage. Eli Jenkins's words are almost a verbatim rendering of some lines in Arthur Machen's Autobiography (1922), where the author recalls that ‘as soon as I saw anything I saw Twyn Barlwm, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of the peoples that dwelt in that region before the Celts left the Land of Summer’. Thomas probably took the reference from Gwyn Jones's A Prospect of Wales (1948) where this exact section is quoted (p. 17). Mock-heroics at third hand seem particularly appropriate, and are further helped by the lifting of the idea of making ‘a wife out of flowers' from Gwyn Jones's translation (with T. Jones) of The Mabinogion (1949, p. 65). The Eliotian idea of embarrassing present company by means of retrospective borrowings is here successful, and it deserves to be recognised.

A discussion of Thomas's borrowings in prose would, therefore, seem to be a suitable means of examining the nature of his work in this medium. But before looking at two examples of how Thomas's short stories are modelled on total plots from other sources, it may be profitable to point out further examples of this widespread tendency to borrow, thus establishing it as conscious effort rather than isolated accident. It is quite clear that in a work like Under Milk Wood the composition of something like paper-clippings from other authors is suitable to the pointilliste nature of the play for voices. The whole tone and manner of the narrating voices especially seems to benefit from the pattern of swift allusion. One example that is particularly successful is the description of Lord Cut Glass. This probably had Dickens's description of Mr. Sapsea in Edwin Drood as its direct original. The First Voice depicts Lord Cut Glass ‘in his kitchen full of time’, surrounded by untidy detail and especially by a fantastic collection of clocks. He is described as a man seeking to overcome Time by living in ‘a house and a life at siege’ afraid of that final time when ‘the tribes and navies of the Last Black Day’ will ‘sear and pillage down Armageddon Hill’ (p. 66). The same comic fortification had been attempted by Dickens's Mr. Sapsea who

sits in his dull ground-floor sitting-room, giving first on his paved back yard; and then on his railed-off garden. Mr. Sapsea has a bottle of port wine on a table before the fire … and is characteristically attended by his portrait, his eight-day clock, and his weather-glass. Characteristically, because he would uphold himself against mankind, his weather-glass against weather, and his clock against time (ch. IV).

The idea of a ‘house and life at siege’ had, then, a clear source in Dickens, for whom Mr. Sapsea's posture for combat was no doubt a more positive extension of that other house at siege, Wemmick's in Great Expectations (ch. XXV).

Dickens had been a source-author for Thomas from a very early period. No doubt the poet felt an affinity of comic attitude with the novelist: but the connection could also be made with the material of ordinary melodrama. In 1933, a short story called ‘Jarley's’ was published by Thomas in his school magazine. The nominal acknowledgement made in that title to the wax-works of the same name in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop is not the only connection; but a more interesting debt was contracted in a story which Thomas was to publish immediately afterwards. This was ‘After the Fair’ which describes the flight of a young girl from the police to the safety of a fairground. The story suggests the sanctuary which Nell finds in Mrs. Jarley's wax-works in Dickens's novel and the parallel also centralises the specifically Dickensian pathos of Thomas's story, relieved as it is by the Dickensian figure of the Fat Man. Sporadic borrowings from Dickens are essentially of this nature, such as would consolidate convenient atmosphere and convenient comic touches. The debt can be traced through David Copperfield's initial fear of his own home (ch. II) to the small boy's fear of the house in the Portrait (p. 13); from Pip's fight with Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (ch. XI) to the schoolboy fight of the Portrait's ‘The Fight’; and from Pip's Christmas meal with Wopsle, Hubble and Pumblechook (ch. IV) to Thomas's family evening meal in the Portrait (p. 90). The world of children as it is controlled and inhibited by grown-ups is a significant legacy from Dickens and to it Thomas brings his own considerable ear for dialogue, following Dickens in theme to the exclusion only of the novelist's insistence on human viciousness.

But even clearer is the presence of Dickens in Thomas's unfinished autobiographical novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade. Describing the novel at an early stage, Thomas wrote to Vernon Watkins that it was ‘a mixture of Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Kafka, Beachcomber …’ and the speed with which the novel was written was no doubt facilitated by this element of parody. Thus, when Samuel Bennet is ruining his teacher-father's exercise books, tearing up his mother's photographs, and breaking the family china the night before he leaves for London, his fear of detection is given imaginatively in terms of a Dickensian situation. He is afraid ‘that the strangers upstairs he had known since he could remember would wake and come down with pokers and candles’ (p. 19). Touched upon here is what Thomas must have considered an archetypal Dickensian situation—as, for example, described in Sikes's attempted burglary in Oliver Twist (ch. XXII) and illustrated in Cruikshank's drawing. The element of surface allusion may also function in the description of Bennet's sensations on regaining consciousness in Mrs. Dacey's house after drinking the daughter's eau-de-cologne. Shades of the bewildered Oliver Twist regaining consciousness in Mr. Brownlow's house (ch. XII) and again later in Mrs. Maylie's house (ch. XXVIII) seem to stand behind the description. The result is that some form of connotative irony comes into play, since the ‘innocence’ of Samuel Bennet is a ludicrous analogy to the real innocence of Oliver. Where the allusions come to the surface we have the direct confession of parody. For instance, when Bennet sees Mr. Allingham stealing the waitress's tip in the station restaurant in London, he thinks of the waitress with exaggerated sympathy as someone who would suffer unbearably through losing the money and who had a husband and two children to support. He first conceives the children's names to be Tristram and Eve, but changes the names quickly to Tom and Marge, as if correcting the nominal consistency of the Dickensian atmosphere. Immediately afterwards, he thinks of London's corrupting influence in a way which pushes the sources to the surface of the episode:

I am not so innocent as I make out, he thought. I do not expect any old cobwebbed Fagin, reeking of character and stories, to shuffle out of a corner and lead me away into his grand, loud, filthy house; there will not be any Nancy to tickle my fancy in a kitchen full of handkerchiefs and beckoning, unmade beds … as I walked into London for the first time, rattling my fortune, fresh as Copperfield (pp. 44-5).

For the hero to recognise his experience as a literary permutation is, of course, part of the comedy.

But such suggestions are strengthened by more decisive borrowings. The best example occurs when Mr. Allingham takes Bennet back to his house immediately after his arrival in London. The first room they enter is seen to be full of furniture:

Every inch of the room was covered with furniture. Chairs stood on couches that lay on tables; mirrors nearly the height of the door were propped, back to back, against the walls, reflecting and making endless the hills of desks and chairs with their legs in the air, sideboards, dressing tables, chests-of-drawers, more mirrors, empty bookcases, washbasins, clothes cupboards. There was a double bed, carefully made, with the ends of the sheets turned back, lying on top of a dining table on top of another table; there were electric lamps and lampshades, trays and vases, lavatory bowls and basins, heaped in the armchairs that stood on cupboards and tables and beds, touching the ceiling. The one window, looking out on the road, could just be seen through the curved legs of sideboards on their backs. The walls behind the standing mirrors were thick with pictures and picture frames (p. 53).

Grotesque emphasis is placed on the description of the overcrowded room and the second chapter is in fact called ‘Plenty of Furniture’. Thomas clearly copied the comic potential of such a description from Dickens's Dombey and Son. In that novel, Brogley the Broker's collection of secondhand furniture is described, and the source of Thomas's description becomes obvious, in detail as well as in comic intent:

Dozens of chairs hooked on to washing stands, which with difficulty poised themselves on the shoulders of sideboards, which in their turn stood upon the wrong sides of dining-tables, gymnastic with their legs upward on the tops of other dining-tables, were among its most reasonable arrangements. A bouquet array of dish-covers, wine glasses, and decanters was generally to be seen, spread forth upon the bosom of a four-post bedstead, for the entertainment of such genial company as half-a-dozen pokers, and a hall lamp. A set of window curtains with no windows belonging to them, would be seen gracefully draping a barricade of chests of drawers, loaded with little jars from chemists' shops (ch. IX).

Such material had interested Dickens since his ‘Brokers’ and Marine-store Shops' in Sketches By Boz: for Thomas, the example was ready-made. But it is also clear that Thomas has here learnt something from Dickens's manner as well as from his material. There is in both cases a fidelity to the fact that shape dictates action or poise: chairs stand on couches which in turn lie on tables in Thomas's description, just as in Dickens washing-stands poise themselves on the shoulders of sideboards. The picture has the quiet animation of suggestions of human posture. Similarly, both pieces pinpoint chaos by referring to normality: the idea of a ‘reasonable arrangement’ and a ‘bouquet array’ of dish-covers suggest comically some method in madness, while in Thomas's attempt the mirrors seem somehow designed to duplicate the chaos and we get the perfect touch of the bed being ‘Carefully made, with the ends of the sheets turned back’ despite the fact that it stands on top of two tables. It is probably significant that Phillip Lindsay recalls seeing Thomas reading Dombey and Son with obvious enjoyment (Adam International Review XXI, 1953): it would appear that the source did not come without its accompanying lesson in comic description.

Yet, on the whole, this kind of borrowing remains fragmentary and is not ultimately justified by total transformation in new hands. Except where the borrowings function satirically, they remain for the most part surface, second-hand material and do not move satisfactorily from imitation to invention, being merely short-cuts to the kind of effects Thomas admired in other writers. In this connection it is, therefore, significant that some of Thomas's finest short stories still make use of borrowed material. The difference lies in the degree to which Thomas in his best work in prose is committed to the consistency of the work in progress over and above the skeleton of what is borrowed. In the two examples I shall examine in detail here it appears that the unifying factors are a convincing psychological interest, a penetrating human sympathy and something approaching obsession with poetic symbols. That the examples are some of the poet's most sombre stories may be significant: perhaps what allowed the dissipation of creative energy in mere surface borrowings was the comic mode itself—the comic mode in Thomas's prose works being too often and too conveniently second-hand Dickens.

It can be shown in the first instance that the poet took as his source-pattern for the early short story ‘The Dress’ (1934), the American writer Ambrose Bierce's classic tale of the execution of a soldier in the American Civil War, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, which first appeared in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and was reprinted in the English edition, In the Midst of Life, soon afterwards. It was conveniently reprinted in The Eyes of the Panther later, in 1928. Bierce's story describes the split-second fantasy which flashes through the soldier's mind at the point of death: he imagines that he thwarts the execution, falling into the river beneath the bridge from which he was to be hanged, and escaping to return home to his wife. After a difficult journey home, described in detail, he is about to embrace his wife when he feels a stunning blow on the back of his neck—and the reader is given a description of the soldier (Farquhar) hanging dead from the bridge. Bierce sought to give the human mind at the exact point of death the appearance and sensation of continuing life which to some degree turns the fact of death into elegy. No doubt Bierce employed the device largely for the sake of bizarre surprise, since the reader is not made aware until the end of the story that Farquhar is in fact dead. Narrative shock, or what A. J. A. Symons once called Bierce's ‘dramatic elision’ (Ten Tales, 1925, p. vii), is characteristic of the author, as a reading of ‘Chickamauga’ or ‘One of the Missing’ will show. Thomas, however, was interested in the life-death phenomenon more for the purpose of enlarging imaginative material than for surprise. His connection with Bierce's tale is two-fold: it was a classic use of a psychological phenomenon and also the source of the plot for his own story, ‘The Dress’, which Richard Hughes has described as one of the most beautiful short stories in the language.

In suggesting that Thomas was interested in the actual psychological process on which Bierce's story is based, it can be said first of all that what we are dealing with here has very close affinities with the folk notion that a man's whole range of memorable experience comes before him in the event of death. Whatever its validity as psychological fact, it has certainly had wide use in literature. One thinks of Richard III (Clarence's dream, I, iv); Mrs. Gaskell's North and South (Mr. Hale compared to the Eastern king, ch. 3); Dickens's Hard Times (Stephen Blackpool's rescue from the Old Hell Shaft, ch. VI); and William Golding's Pincher Martin where it forms the total narrative metaphor of the work. Its function in the Russian film, Ljetat Zhuravly (‘The Cranes Are Flying’) is similar; and William Empson records a biographical fact in his poem ‘Success’: ‘All losses haunt us. It was a reprieve made Dostoevsky talk out queer and clear’. The idea at its crudest and most naïve was used in one of Thomas's later film-scripts, The Beach of Falesá, where the Captain, waiting with Wiltshire for the arrival of Mr. Case's boat, recalls that a sailor ‘fell out of that boat one night and was drowned when he was drunk! That's a horrible death, drowned when you're drunk. Up comes all your past life in front of you and you're too boozed to see it’ (p. 12). It has been touched upon in exactly this form in the Portrait story, ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’: Ray stumbles down the cliff—‘I thought I was done for … I could see all my past life in a flash’. But what I am concerned with here is the kind of use made of the idea in the early prose, where its imaginative potential is harnessed to the author's poetic view of experience; where it had not yet become a surface joke.

We first encounter the theme as early as 1931, when Thomas published a short story based on the phenomenon in his school magazine, called ‘Brember’. Here an old man enters a house in which he had lived many years before and walks through the room remembering. He discovers a dusty book which relates the history of his family. He ‘turned over the pages, until he came to the last: George Henry Brember, last of the line, dies. … He looked down on his name, and then closed the book’ (April 1931, p. 140). A few years later, another early uncollected story made use of similar material. In ‘The End of the River’, Thomas described the last member of an aristocratic family seeking to bring the family line to a close. Though the material is dealt with here in a comic vein which contrasts markedly with the immature ‘Gothic’ atmosphere attempted in the earlier story, the narrative nevertheless makes sensitive use of extended sensation, seeing death in terms of a metaphor of continuing life. The last of the Quincey family reads the chronicles of his lineage. His own death is given in the metaphor of a journey to find a river's end. He meets a girl at the end of his quest: ‘he saw her through his tears and heard her voice singing’ (New English Weekly, Nov. 1934, p. 134). A later short story, significantly titled ‘The True Story’, was to close on exactly the same phenomenon: an old woman lies dying and is nursed by a young girl; Helen kills the old woman and then ‘She opened the window … and stepped out. “I am flying”, she said. But she was not flying’ (Yellowjacket, May 1939, p. 63).

This last example is doubly significant since ‘The True Story’ sought to reproduce the main ingredients of a story which was, to date, Thomas's most comprehensive attempt to turn the phenomenon into total narrative metaphor. This was ‘The Visitor’ in which a dying poet is being nursed by a girl called Rhianon. The ‘visitor’ is Callaghan who in the night takes the poet on a symbolic journey through the continuous mythical geography of the early prose works, the Jarvis valley and the Jarvis hills. The similarity of basic situation is added to in a similar fantasy of escape through flight, bridging sensibly the worlds of life and death. Peter, the poet in the earlier story, continues to ‘live’ in a world which, after his journey with Callaghan, no longer seems to be the world of literal life; when Rhianon enters his room in the morning, he asks why she is ‘putting the sheet over [his] face’ (A Prospect of the Sea, p. 34).

Both the plot and the central psychological feature of ‘The Visitor’ have sources and parallels in other Anglo-Welsh literature, which may help to explain why Bierce's story should have had such an attraction for Thomas. There is, for example, a close parallel in the story called ‘Gone Fishing’ by John Wright, where we find a night's stealthy expedition to the river to fish from the coracles to be an enactment of the death of Dad Elias. The situation is familiar: a man lies dying and is tended by his daughter; in the night he hears the voices of the fishermen calling him; he dresses and carries his coracle to the stream; the following morning, when the woman goes to call her father, she sees a smile on his face but cannot wake him: ‘Dad Elias had gone fishing’ (Welsh Short Stories, ed. G. E. Evans, 1959). The parallel is complete except that Thomas does not, like Wright and Bierce, seek to conceal the process of death for the sake of surprise—‘Rhianon was attendant on a dead man’ (p. 25). Yet the bridge from life to death through the excitement of metaphor is as clear in Wright's story—‘The days meant little to him now and they passed with the light by the window. Tonight he would go with them he thought, if they called again’ (p. 242)—as it is in Thomas's, where Callaghan ‘left alone, leant over the bed and spread the soft ends of his fingers on Peter's eyes. “Now it is night”, he said. “Where shall we go tonight?”’ (p. 30).

Another exercise of the device, as well as of the attendant circumstances, could have been found by Thomas in the work of a Welshman he greatly admired. At the end of Caradoc Evans's Nothing to Pay (1930), Amos is dying and is tended by his wife, Sara. He follows her actions idly, and notices with the same heightened intensity as Peter's ordinary objects about the room. Amos, like Peter, is assured he will survive, and in the process of his death he experiences an intensification of consciousness. Similarly, in an earlier short story by Caradoc Evans, ‘The Glory That Was Zion's’, the main character is dying and is tended by his wife, Madlen. When he does die, Madlen prepares water to shave him—and the dead man is conscious of her actions. He hears the kettle hissing and gets up to sit by the fire, thinking that his wife is merely preparing tea. Immediately afterwards the situation is clarified by the author's ‘From first to last Twm's years were five-and-forty’ (My People, 1915, p. 65). The extraordinary happening complicates what would otherwise have been a stock situation of Anglo-Welsh fiction, death against a background of domestic ordinariness.

Such examples would no doubt have attracted Thomas and confirmed for him the imaginative potential of blurring life into death or imagination into fact. Such possibilities would perhaps account for his detailed interest in Bierce's story, to which we must now turn. There is no evidence that he had read ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ before he wrote ‘The Visitor,’ though there is evidence that he had read it before he published ‘The Dress’. Later in the year in which he published ‘The Visitor,’ Thomas reviewed (in November, 1935) an anthology of horror stories edited by Denis Wheatley called A Century of Horror. Along with stories by, for example, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Maupassant and Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce is here represented by his ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’. Thomas published his review in the Morning Post some two months before the publication of ‘The Dress,’ but his knowledge of the American story could easily have been gained long before this period.

‘The Dress’ concerns the escape of a man from an asylum. Closely pursued, he makes his way home to a woman who becomes for him the symbol of safety and welcome. ‘He thought of the coals that might be hissing in the grate and of the young mother standing alone. He thought of her hair. Such a nest it would make for his hands’ (A Prospect of the Sea, p. 78). The plan of the story and its narrative progress are immediately recognisable as those of Bierce's tale, and a number of direct parallels link the two. Both fugitives concentrate upon and try to interpret what their pursuers are doing—Farquhar being followed by soldiers and Thomas's fugitive by the asylum warders:

Behind a tree on the ridge of the hills he had peeped down on to the fields where they hurried about like dogs, where they poked the hedges with their sticks and set up a faint howling as a mist came suddenly from the spring sky and hid them from his eyes (p. 78).

The man in Thomas's story uses the mist to quench his thirst (p. 78), just as Farquhar uses the cool air for the same purpose (Eyes of the Panther, p. 40); great emphasis is placed in both cases on the fugitive's flight through a dense forest—after which, in each case, the man unexpectedly finds a road leading in the right direction (Bierce, p. 39; Thomas, p. 78). The impetus which gives both men the power to outdistance their pursuers is the thought of the warmth and safety awaiting them in their respective homes where a beautiful woman waits patiently (Bierce, p. 39; Thomas, p. 79). Both writers emphasise the ominous appearance of the stars—Bierce describing the glimpse through the wood of stars set in strange constellations (p. 40), and Thomas, the appearance through the mist of the ‘angles of the stars’ (p. 78). The fugitives are both described making progress over distinctly spongy ground: Farquhar feels how ‘softly the turf had carpeted the untravelled avenue—he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet’ (p. 40); Thomas's fugitive walks towards the stars mumbling a tuneless song, ‘hearing his feet suck in and out of the spongy earth’ (p. 78). When they reach their destination, both men are described as standing at the gate to the house (Bierce, p. 40; Thomas, p. 80). Then the comfort of seeing the woman centres closely on a description of her dress. Farquhar sees ‘a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him’ (p. 40). At this stage in Thomas's story, the title becomes symbolic, evoking the clean sanctuary that has awaited the fugitive's return:

But the moving of her arm drew the neck of her dress apart, and he stared in wonder at her wide, white forehead, her frightened eyes and mouth, and down to the flowers on her dress. With the moving of her arm, her dress danced in the light. She sat before him, covered in flowers. ‘Sleep’, said the madman. And, kneeling down, he put his bewildered head upon her lap (p. 81).

It would seem likely, therefore, that ‘The Dress’ is a reworking of Bierce's plot, a fact which highlights the two authors' similar preoccupation with the sensibility-in-death idea. But, having exercised its possibilities in earlier stories, Thomas may have considered it superfluous to make the phenomenon itself too overt in ‘The Dress’. For one thing, it would evoke the source-story too completely. Yet vestiges of this feature may still reside in ‘The Dress’. The story certainly depends on an atmosphere of lyrical unreality, a hint of merely imagined happenings. Perhaps, in assuming that the reader would recognise the direct narrative source, Thomas was able to assume that the story's function as a brief examination of logic-in-sanity, innocence-in-guilt and freedom-in-captivity would be at least emotively apparent as an analogy to Bierce's treatment of the more obvious life-in-death. As a result, the explanation of the story as dream or projected desire lies outside the role of direct narrative statement. Certainly, after ‘The Visitor,’ there was no need to be again so specific about the phenomenon.

Yet what makes the story essentially Thomas's own is the fact that in title and in theme it was a poetic consummation in prose of a hauntingly consistent image in his work. The author-story relationship cannot be fully appreciated in this instance until the image is ‘placed’. The image is that of a girl's dress, confirmed as metaphor by its very consistency. The way in which it occurs again and again before and after the story which carries it in its title is symptomatic of the romantic oneness of the prose works, especially the early stories. A revealing example occurs in an early unpublished poem in the February, 1933 Notebook MS., where the poet imagines that he sees a boy and girl meeting outside a cemetery. By contrast with death, he sees their love as a transforming quality, turning empty kisses into meaning and the small island of their affection into a costly country. The radiant transience of the two is caught in the image of the girl's summer dress (Poem ‘Thirteen’). In ‘After the Fair’ the baby found in the Astrologer's tent—later to be a child-Christ figure in a grotesque pantomime of the flight into Egypt, on the roundabout horses—is comforted on the bosom of the girl's dress (p. 23). In ‘The Visitor’ the image was permanently fixed as a metaphor for freshness and comfort—‘Rhianon passed in and out, her dress, he smelt as she bent over him, smelling of clover and milk’ (p. 28). In his dejection, Peter,

thinking of the island set somewhere in the south caverns, … thought of water and longed for water. Rhianon's dress, rustling about her, made the soft noise of water. He called her over to him and touched the bosom of her dress, feeling the water on his hands (p. 29).

In ‘The Mouse and the Woman’, the story opens in a lunatic asylum: the patients sit looking at the sun or the flowers and the quietness and comfort of the scene are extended into the narrator's suggestion that ‘children in print dresses might be expected to play, not noisily, upon the lawns’ (A Prospect of the Sea, p. 58). Later, the madman in the asylum remembers the inflections of his lover's voice and ‘heard, again, her frock rustling’. When, as a man in the outside world, he had gone to seek her out in the cottage, he found that ‘she was not sitting by the fire, as he had expected her to be, smiling upon the folds of her dress’ (p. 70), a picture obviously re-worked from the end of ‘The Dress’ itself. The image continued to function throughout Thomas's career. Hence, in The Beach of Falesá, Uma the native girl is described with her ‘long black hair and her bright dress. … Shining wet from the sea or the streams’ (p. 20). Similarly, there walks in the prim precincts of Milk Wood a girl like Gossamer Beynon, hardly aware of her visual suggestion of visionary purity—‘The sun hums down through the cotton flowers of her dress’ (p. 60). The image had long been trained for automatic suggestion, from its repeated use in ‘A Prospect of the Sea’ (pp. 4, 5, 10) to the ‘blossoming dresses’ of ‘Holiday Memory’ and the ‘summery flowered dresses’ of ‘The English Festival of Spoken Poetry’ (Quite Early One Morning, pp. 30, 128). In writing ‘The Dress’, Thomas had at an early stage clarified the image, giving it something like an extended emotive gloss as a key image in his examination of the theme of tension and relief. Taking Bierce's basic plot, he contracted its narrative, isolating its main ingredients and enacting a fevered journey towards an ideal.

The second example of a borrowed scheme is one of the most successful parts of the Portrait autobiography. ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’ was the final story completed for the collection, finished in December, 1939. It was based fairly closely on James Joyce's ‘An Encounter’ in Dubliners. Thomas's general debt to Joyce was similar to that he owed to Dickens and just as fragmentary. Here he had almost as good a storehouse of childhood material as he found in Dickens and the debt was ostensibly acknowledged in his borrowing of Joyce's title, only partly changed as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Joyce's Portrait, like Thomas's, had sought to relate the growth of the artist's sensibility to the specific society which formed its background, though it showed a more mature grasp of the relevant religious, social and political factors involved. A major difference lay in the fact that Thomas's aim was more clearly to close the gap between experience and recollection by constantly remaining faithful to two psychologies at once: his Portrait is less obviously an objective document, the sounds and smells of young dog life remaining clearer than the adult perspective which brings them into focus. Yet much of the minor detail is common to both writers, suggesting that here again we have the copy and the copied. For example, the young Stephen Dedalus is frightened when the school messenger comes to announce that confessions are to be taken in chapel in a way which is converted to comedy when Thomas's hero is asked by his cousin to confess in the improvised barn-chapel of ‘The Peaches’. The moral prohibition of the Nonconformist pulpit suddenly fuses with the institution of the Catholic Church. Stephen would rather ‘murmur out his shame’ in seclusion, ‘in some dark place’ (p. 145), just as Thomas's school companions confess later in the privacy of their bedroom. Again, Stephen is accused (p. 240) of having eaten dried cowdung and Thomas's young dog recalls that he had once drunk a cup of his own water ‘to see what it tasted like’ (p. 33). The parallels continue: Stephen imagines that, if he sent some verses to the girl he met near Cork Hill, the ‘suave priest, her uncle, seated in his armchair, would hold the page at arm's length, read it smiling and approve of the literary form’ (p. 261); in Thomas's ‘The Fight’ the young boy is asked by the Reverend Bevan to recite his latest poem and, after the recitation, is pompously told that ‘The influence is obvious, of course. “Break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, O sea”’ (pp. 91-2). Youth laid embarrassingly bare in adult company is a mutual legacy from Dickens. Joyce was obviously fruitful copy: Stephen turns to the fly-leaf of his geography book and reads what he has written there—‘himself, his name and where he was. Stephen Dedalus/Class of Elements/Clongowes Wood College/Sallins/County Kildare/Ireland/Europe/The World/The Universe’ (pp. 11-12); in ‘Old Garbo’ Thomas's young dog writes down his name and then, ‘Reporters' Room, Tawe News, Tawe, South Wales, England, Europe, The Earth’ (p. 192). But the cosmic address in both cases is merely the incidental comic cipher of a wider theme, part of the adult perspective, which places both heroes in touch with the paradox of romantic loneliness expanding into universal sympathy. Thus, for Joyce, Stephen

was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gay clad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air. … So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him (pp. 198-9).

and Thomas's autobiography, less characteristically, evokes the same process:

I was a lonely nightwalker and a steady stander-at-corners. … And I never felt more a part of the remote and overpressing world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity and humility, not for myself alone, but for the living earth I suffered on and for the unfeeling systems in the upper air (p. 122).

A final detail. On the wall of Stephen's room at Clongowes hangs an illuminated scroll, a ‘certificate of his prefecture in the college of sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, while Thomas's Sunday school certificate hangs on the young hero's bedroom wall, an embarrassing trophy.

The list is endless and could be augmented with details from Dubliners as well. But the plan of the latter, with its break-up into short stories, offered a more total example. Thomas described it as ‘a pioneering work in the world of the short story’,¹ and in his ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’ sought to reproduce something very near to the childhood adventure of Joyce's ‘An Encounter’. Here Joyce had described a truant excursion into the countryside by two young schoolboys. An approximation to the idea of an excursion had already been attempted by Thomas in ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’, but the closer example of Joyce's story allowed him another and better attempt at its possibilities. In ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’, the young hero is accompanied by a friend as in Joyce's story, and the journey of the adventurers out of town is similar in both instances with a mutual elegiac savouring of factual place-names. Similarly the destination in each case is part of the factual childhood scene; in Joyce, the ‘Pigeon House’ (Dublin's electric power station) and in Thomas, the ‘Worm's Head’ a well-known landmark on the Gower coast. Joyce's adventurers antagonise a crowd of ragged girls on their way, and a crowd of day-trippers is harassed by Thomas's young dogs in much the same way. Abuse is shouted after both pairs—‘Swaddlers! Swaddlers!’ in Joyce because the boys are taken to be Protestants, and ‘Mutt and Jeff!’ in Thomas's story because of the boys' comic difference in size. Out in the countryside, the young dogs are freed from the urban claustrophobia but in a way which heightens the example of hard reality they encounter. Joyce's pederast and Ray's inevitable submission to a morbid near-monologue on how his family had been wasted by tuberculosis complicate the freedom of the excursion: escape and no escape seems to be the pattern. This is particularly significant in Thomas since it was indeed the nearest approximation to tragic material in his autobiography, paralleled only by the theme of loneliness in the final story of the volume which shows distinct legacies from Joyce's ‘The Dead’.

Both stories are a good example of how an ordinary event like a schoolboy adventure into the countryside is established as the semi-myth of heroic expedition in a manner similar to that noted in Proust by Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934). As a remnant of myth it also has elementary suggestions of what E. B. Greenwood has recently described as a romantic concern with journey as quest for a neo-Adamic state (Essays in Criticism XVII 1 (1967)). The degree to which it was consciously intended by either Joyce or Thomas is a matter of conjecture. What is true, however, is that, in both, the journey undertaken has natural imaginative extensions. In Joyce it is largely the attraction of emigration, of visiting the places mentioned in school geography lessons but in Thomas it is given in several permutations. In ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ the suggestions is varied from the comic fusion of starting-point and destination in ‘Thousands of miles. It’s Rhossilli, U.S.A.’ to the deeper, poignant description of the boys sitting in a circle, ‘knowing always that the sea dashed on the rocks not far below us and rolled out into the world’. The theme is equally insistent in the later excursion story, where it ranges from the boys' imagining that the Worm's Head was moving out to sea (‘Guide it to Ireland, Ray’) to the description of the promontory, ‘already covered with friends, with living and dead, racing against the darkness’. The liquid movement from the comic to the heroic suggestion narrows the gap between the child-hero and the adult-author's imagination.

It is the insistence on this theme which separates the artistic purpose of Thomas's story from that of Joyce's and justifies the borrowed plot. Thomas's story consolidates the image of separation from home and land as a statement of widening, though merely imagined, horizons. Ray's description of his family, ravaged by disease is given while he sits on the edge of the sea and so involves a tremendous juxtaposition. Waters at their priestlike task! The journey has ended in heroic gesture:

This is a rock at the world's end. We're all alone. It all belongs to us, Ray. We can have anybody we like here and keep everybody else away. Who do you wish was with us?

And the story itself ends with a subtle suggestion of the separation become fact. On their journey, the boys passed some cyclists, and now:

The sea was in. The slipping stepping-stones were gone. On the mainland in the dusk, some little figures beckoned to us. Seven clear figures, jumping and calling. I thought they were the cyclists.

As in the case of ‘The Dress’, the story suggests a concern with something like a poetic image, and the degree to which that image is consistent with other works is again remarkable here. The basic childhood concept of romantic voyages abounds in the unpublished poetry. One poem² uses as a narrative base the idea of children playing at sailing boats on a garden path, seeking to actualise the voyage by blurring their awareness of the garden setting. Another poem³ of the same year includes the idea of imagined voyages in a discussion of religious faith and leadership. The collected poem, ‘Grief thief of time’, still retains part of a picture which, in the unpublished early version,⁴ had been more elaborate:

The old forget the cries,
Lean time on tide and times the wind stood rough,
Call back the castaways
Riding the sea light on a sunken path.

The same picture is given in the short story ‘The Tree’ where the child's vision re-enacts the voyage fantasy:

The house changed to his moods, and a lawn was the sea or the shore or the sky or whatever he wished it. When a lawn was a sad mile of water, and he was sailing on a broken flower down the waves, the gardener would come out of his shed near the island of bushes. He too would take a stalk and sail (A Prospect of the Sea, p. 42).

Travelling on the lorry, the boys in ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ imagine that the vehicle is a raft and the green fields the open ocean. In this sense the young hero's shout to Ray in ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’ to guide the Worm's Head to Ireland is a repetition of the same image, and the comic surface of the imaginative motif which is the story's ultimate significance. A deeper extension of the image itself would be the voyage of life in the later poems, ‘Ballad of the Long-legged Bait’ and ‘Poem on his birthday’; and the visionary flood of the late ‘Author's Prologue’. Praise to our faring hearts!

Thomas, quite rightly, regarded his prose writings as essentially secondary to his poetry and no doubt the presence of much of the borrowed material discussed here is explained by that attitude. In his prose there was no literary reputation at stake. Yet it is clear that the nature of the borrowing varies and that, where governed by the poet's own imagination, it is transformed and justified. Casually lifted material smacks unmistakably of the copied article and remains valid only when it functions as parody. ‘The Dress’ and ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’, on the other hand, are valuable short stories over and above their inherited plots, and have the quality of fresh imagining which must be the touchstone of any critical attention the poet's prose may warrant. The last word can be left with the poet himself since he has conveniently stated the problem in the poem ‘On no work of words’. ‘To take to give is all’, but ‘To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death’.

Notes

1. ‘Poetic Manifesto’, Texas Quarterly IV (1961) 49.

2. Notebook 1930-1932, Poem ‘VII’, dated 2nd January, 1931.

3. Ibid, Poem ‘XXIII’, dated 10th June, 1931.

4. Notebook August 1933, Poem ‘Five’, dated 26th August, 1933.