He was always careless about money and, despite its phenomenal sales for a book of verse, it is doubtful that he made much from Twenty-Five Poems. The book sold at a mere half-crown. Contemplating marriage, Dylan needed money more than ever, and took his stories to Richard Church, his editor at Dent’s. He had already, early in 1936, tried to interest Church in a book of stories, but Church refused them, thinking them obscene. He saw no reason to change his opinion, a point of view shared by the printers who refused a little later to set them for another publisher. In the event, Dylan married Caitlin Macnamara on 11 July 1937, the stories uncollected, the financial future uncertain.

Dylan remained convinced that the stories deserved to appear in book form, and David Higham, who had become his agent, was able to arrange that six of them were included with sixteen new poems in one volume. This was The Map of Love, which came out in August 1939. It carried the sub-title, ‘Verse and Prose’, as if Dylan were keeping faith with his old Swansea dream of editing a magazine of an an almost identical name. Certainly he was once more making it clear that he was ‘a writer of poems and stories’. This was the book which introduced me, a young man beginning to read contemporary work, to Dylan’s prose, and a heady experience it was. The book was handsome, beautifully produced, with a reproduction of the famous romantic portrait by Augustus John as frontispiece. In December of the same year The World I Breathe, a collection of all the poems in the first three books and three stories in addition to those in The Map of Love, was published in America. The early stories, it seemed, had found a home.

Much the same had happened to Dylan. He and Caitlin had moved into a small house in Laugharne, the little Carmarthenshire town which was to be his home for much of the rest of his life. Here Dylan was happily engaged in writing stories which were quite unlike those he had already published. Glyn Jones, whose commentaries are among the most sensitive on Dylan’s work, tells us:

Dylan very early urged me to write short stories, and in 1937 my first collection, The Blue Bed, appeared. In Llanstephan in, I think it was, the summer of 1938, I mentioned to Caitlin Thomas that I had started a second volume, a series of short stories about childhood … She seemed very surprised and told me that Dylan had already started doing the same thing. His were the autobiographical stories which in 1940 appeared as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. (Glyn Jones, The Dragon has Two Tongues, Dent 1968.)

The new stories were direct, vivid and uncomplicated evocations of the Swansea in which Dylan had grown up; gone was the charged prose of the early work. Thomas had already thought of ‘a book about Wales … an intimate chronicle of my personal Journey among people and places’, and Richard Church had also suggested to him that he write of his early years. It is obvious that the old manner would not suit either of these projects, but the sources of the new, more conventional style are a matter of conjecture. Dylan was certainly a reader of short stories and knew the work of Lawrence, H. E. Bates and Liam O’Flaherty among others. He was also particularly interested in the work of Caradoc Evans, whose stories had already used a Welsh background with success. With Glyn Jones he had visited the older writer in Aberystwyth in 1936. The two young men had driven north, wearing each other’s hats, to talk with ‘the great Caradoc Evans’, as Dylan calls him through a character in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Dylan may well have admired Evans enough to wish to write more directly, to attempt for urban Swansea what Evans had done for rural Cardiganshire. Again, he had been living unprotected in the world for years, his eye sharpened, his naturally observant senses at work. He was probably ready to abandon the interior universe of his adolescent work and to create a world more like the one about him.