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

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

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

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

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

But not a rich one.

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MY ACCOUNT

The Collected Stories Read Online

THE COLLECTED STORIES

Contents

Foreword

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