Above all, he had become a great story-teller, famous among the bars. He realized there were great areas of his ability and personality that he would never be able to use in lyric poetry, but that he could use them in his stories. Most of us believe that poetry is a solemn art, its themes restricted to the few great subjects, its puns and word-play grave and serious. Dylan certainly felt like this about his poetry and served his serious muse with dedication; but he was also a brilliantly funny man. In the ten stories which make up Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog a comic Dylan makes his appearance, and he is a virtuoso of comedy. He is master of the whole range, from slap-stick to that pathetic laughter which moves us to tears. He is the sharp citizen of Swansea, a comedian of suburban manners, his ear a meticulous recorder of the speech of that city, his eye noting everything. He is a young dog moving from the innocence of the first three stories, ‘The Peaches’, ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’ and ‘Patricia, Edith and Arnold’ to the knowing young man of ‘Old Garbo’, his ‘new hat on one side’, his cigarette worn in admiring imitation of the old reporter he accompanies. It is probably the introduction of humour that was the most important element in the making of the new style and marks the clear division between the poetry and prose from now on.

The stories are full of wonderful talk. We hear and recognize the voices of the characters as they describe how Swansea Male Voice ‘did the Messiah’, tell the stories of their small lives as, huddled out of the rain, they stare at the sea, cheek school teachers, joke and wise-crack and argue their way to the coast. Always an actor, Thomas was able to use his gift for mimicry in his stories. We begin to hear the voice in which he would read them aloud. It is in them that Thomas is best able to use his exceptional narrative skills; his humour, his sense of place, his fine ear for speech, his eye, appreciative and unjudging, for the people he creates. These are the qualities which made him a famous writer, as distinct from a famous poet. Had he not written the stories his death would have been, comparatively speaking, a still drop.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is a title said to have been suggested by Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind in Jamaica and other distinguished work and a neighbour of Dylan’s in Laugharne. Hughes had befriended the young Thomases, but I’m not sure he should be given the entire credit for the title. It does, of course, pay tribute to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but Thomas’s stories are closer to those in Joyce’s Dubliners. And Dylan had almost used his title years before, when he wrote in 1933 to his friend Trevor Hughes, long before he had gone to Laugharne. In his letter Dylan had advised his friend to dive ‘Into the sea of yourself like a young dog’. Dylan, in his own stories, had certainly dived into the sea of his childhood and youth.

Portrait was published in 1940, the last of Dylan’s books to appear in England until after the war. After a short period of uncertainty, Dylan began to work in films and to make increasingly frequent broadcasts. He wrote fewer and fewer stories and poems.

He was, however, engaged on a novel. I heard of this when, a newly published poet, I travelled to London to meet my publisher. His name was Peter Baker and he had already printed a small pamphlet of my poems, all I had written at that time, and was prepared to take a larger collection. I had never met a publisher. It was disconcerting when Baker turned out to be younger than I was. The year was 1943 and I was twenty-two. Baker asked me what I was working on apart from poetry. Desperately, not wishing him to know I had never thought of working on anything else, I told him firmly that I was writing a novel. He was interested.