Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas

First published: 1940

Type of work: Short fiction

The Work:

Posthumous biographical studies of Dylan Thomas record a change in appreciation that was long overdue. During his lifetime, Thomas was regarded in the United States as a great English poet and reciter, but only after his death did his work—which includes poetry, fiction, dramas, essays, and impressionistic sketches—come to be regarded as a multifaceted whole. Representative of this reassessment was the growing respect accorded his first collection of short stories, which is also a mock-autobiography, that Thomas titled in imitation of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

If his critics are right in concluding that most of Thomas’s best poetry was written in Swansea before he left Wales for London at the age of twenty, it may also be suggested that this collection of short stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, set in Swansea and environs, laid the foundations for much of the work that was to follow. “One Warm Saturday,” the final story in the collection, seems to anticipate the events of Thomas’s next book of prose, the unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955), which uses the same surrealistic style. In both the story and the novel, the ever-pursued eludes capture by the hero as reality dissolves around him. In fact, this may well be the underlying theme of the entire collection Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

The relationship of these stories to the Thomas canon, however, is not entirely straightforward. Adventures in the Skin Trade was the first prose work; Thomas called it his “Welsh book.” It was commissioned by a London publisher, and the first chapter appeared in the periodical Wales in 1937. The previous year, Richard Church had suggested that Thomas write some autobiographical prose tales. After his marriage in July, 1937, Thomas took up this project but set to work in a very different style. He first produced “A Visit to Grandpa’s,” in which the surrealism is muted and the lyrical tone sustained by the young narrator; this story, standing second in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, became Thomas’s favorite broadcast and reading material. The most interesting feature of the new style of story is the rapid succession of apparently logical but often haphazardly related events, the whole ending in a diminuendo that seems anticlimactic. The intention of the play of events on the diminutive observer is to record, by means of an episode that largely concerns or happens to others, a stage in the observer’s growth, that is, in his development as a “young dog.”

The development of the Thomas found in the collection into the “young dog” of the final tales is related to the development of the real Thomas as a writer. This is seen principally in his use of autobiographical material for prose, poetry, and drama. Thomas delivered the typescript of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog to his publisher, in lieu of the “Welsh book,” in December, 1939. Nine days later, talking to Richard Hughes, he remarked that the people of Laugharne, where he was then living, needed a play of their own. This remark is usually recognized as the origin of Under Milk Wood, which was first broadcast as a radio drama in 1954. Some years earlier, Thomas had toyed with the notion of doing another imitation of Joyce, a sort of Welsh Ulysses that would cover twenty-four hours in the life of a Welsh village. The notion of imitating Joyce and the suggestions of Church and Hughes coalesced with his development of a distinct prose style (instead of a prose extension of his verse, as in Adventures in the Skin Trade) and resulted in his best-known prose and drama. The autobiographical base is common to both works and to his poetry.

Fern Hill and Ann Jones stood as models to Gorsehill and Auntie Ann of the first story, “The Peaches,” and also to the poems “Fern Hill” and “Ann Jones.” The fourth story, “The Fight,” is a version of Thomas’s first meeting with Daniel Jones, the Welsh composer, when they were boys in Swansea. Trevor Hughes, his first genuine admirer, became the central character of the eighth story, “Who Do You Wish Was with Us?” and some of Thomas’s experiences on the South Wales Daily Post are recorded in four of the stories, especially the last two.

Although composed of short stories, the book is given a sense of direction by careful ordering of the sequence and by repeated and cumulative details inside the stories. The ten stories fall into three periods of life: childhood, boyhood, and young adulthood. The central character is called Dylan Thomas, and although this fact is not stressed in every story, it is obliquely indicated in most. Some characters reappear in more than one tale, including his cousin, Gwilym Jones, and his older colleagues in journalism. The chief cohesive factor in the collection, however, is not the central character so much as that each story celebrates a visit or an excursion either within the provincial town or just beyond it. The town and its environs becomes a character in the book, elaborated in the names of its houses, its shops and pubs, and its weather, which ranges from the warmth of summer evenings on the beach to wet wintry nights. The locales of the stories, like the seasons of the year, change from story to story and help create the image of the region as a setting for the gallery of minor characters who dominate each story. The hero remains, as he says in “Just Like Little Dogs,” a lonely and late-night observer of the odd doings of the townsfolk. The landmarks of the locale become associated with the stories of chance or temporary acquaintances met on his excursions. As is certainly true of Under Milk Wood (1953), these stories too generally imply that every person has a skeleton in his or her kitchen cupboard.

That skeleton is generally a private vice that is not too vicious and may be both comic and pathetic. From the first three stories, “The Peaches,” “A Visit to Grandpa’s,” and “Patricia, Edith, and Arnold,” readers learn that Dylan’s Uncle Jim is drinking his pigs away; Cousin Gwilym has his own makeshift chapel and rehearses his coming ministry there; Grandfather Dan dreams he is driving a team of demon horses and has delusions about being buried; the Thomas family’s maid, Patricia, is involved with the sweetheart of the maid next door. In the next pair of stories, “The Fight” and “Extraordinary Little Cough,” the pains and pleasures of boyhood begin to affect the hero, chiefly in finding a soul mate, a fellow artist. He also encounters the horror of viciousness in his companions. The remainder of the stories deal with young adulthood and are varied in subject and treatment—from the recital of a tale told to the narrator to the final story in which the narrator for the first time becomes the protagonist, although an ineffectual one. Most of the stories include an episode set at night, and it seems a pity that the best of Thomas’s night stories, the ghostly “The Followers,” could not have been included in the collection.

The stories are arranged in roughly chronological order, culminating in “One Warm Saturday” and “Old Garbo,” which show Thomas’s inner way of escape from his hometown as reality disappears in a wash of beer and a montage of what-might-have-been. In real life, Thomas took to London and to drink as a way to get out of Swansea; by the time he arrived in London, he had already discovered how to blur the concrete outlines of provincial life and make its values jump. He was to do this best in Under Milk Wood. There is another possible explanation for his ability to see events under the conditions of dream, and that is his Welshness; there is a hint of that in the story “Where Tawe Flows,” titled after the “Great Welsh Novel” that a character named Mr. Thomas and three older friends are writing in weekly installments. Mr. Thomas is about to leave for London and a career as a freelance journalist. The novel is supposed to be a study of provincial life, but the collaborators are only at the second chapter. Readers do not hear Mr. Thomas’s contribution because he has spent the week writing the story of a dead governess who turned into a vampire when a cat jumped over her at the moment of her death. One of the foursome offers, instead, the biography of a character named Mary, an account supposed to be realistic but as fantastic as anything the real Thomas ever wrote.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog collects the tensions of provincial life to the breaking point, as does Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At the end of both books, the hero breaks from home and the style becomes distinctly broken. The increasingly nonrealistic style at the end of both books, a formal expression of the protagonists’ whirling thoughts, could be somehow symptomatic of the breaking of ties with Dublin (Joyce) and Swansea (Thomas). In both books, but more obviously in Joyce, the break is long prepared in the tensions as they mount from a highly imaginative childhood through the pains of adolescence to the frustrations of university study or journalism on a provincial daily. The tensions are so strong that they expel their subjects far from their place of origin. If readers want to know why Joyce died in Zurich, Switzerland, or Thomas in New York, the answer is in their own autobiographies of provincial life.

Bibliography

Davies, Peter. Student Guide to Dylan Thomas. London: Greenwich Exchange, 2005. Biographical and critical study of Thomas. Disagrees with critics who charge that Thomas’s poetry is merely a “careless outpouring of incoherent feeling,” demonstrating how he was a dedicated craftsman who struggled to make his works communicate.

Goodby, John, and Chris Wigginton, eds. Dylan Thomas. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Collection of essays, including discussions of Thomas and women, Welsh contexts in his poetry, and his depiction of “radical morbidity.” References to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog are listed in the index.

Korg, Jacob. Dylan Thomas. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1992. Argues that although the tone of the stories is generally comic, the personal futility and inadequacy of the characters produces irony. Individuals come to recognize a shared sense of loss.

Lycett, Andrew. Dylan Thomas: A New Life. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2005. A candid biography, featuring a wealth of detail about Thomas’s life. Examines the contradiction between the man who lived like the devil and the poet who wrote like an angel.

Peach, Linden. The Prose Writing of Dylan Thomas. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1988. Shows Thomas shedding his fears of the darker side of sexuality, not so much condemning people for their idiosyncrasies as recording those characteristics with fascination.

Pratt, Annis. “Dylan Thomas’s Prose.” In Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by C. Brian Cox. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Demonstrates how Thomas turned away from the tumultuous psychic drama of his early prose and moved from those inward concerns to a confrontation with the events of the social world. Asserts that in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and subsequent work he speaks through a mask.

Seib, Kenneth. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog: Dylan’s Dubliners.” In Critical Essays on Dylan Thomas, selected by Georg Gaston. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Concludes that Thomas sought to do for the Welsh what Joyce did for the Irish: write a chapter of their moral history and allow them to view themselves through his eyes. The stories are linked by repetitive theme and metaphor.