Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog: Dylan Thomas

Product Information

Mr Casey pushed his plate rudely into the middle of the table and, resting his elbows before him, said in a hoarse voice to his host: Then the higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle of the refectory, Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard who was allowed to smoke cigars and the little Portuguese who wore the woolly cap. And then the lower line tables and the tables of the third line. And every single fellow had a different way of walking. All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices. He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother's lap. But he could not: and so he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed. Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always. Simon Moonan and Tusker are going to be flogged, Athy said, and the fellows in the higher line got their choice of flogging or being expelled.

Well. I let her bawl away, to her heart's content, Kitty O'Shea and the rest of it till at last she called that lady a name that I won't sully this Christmas board nor your ears, ma'am, nor my own lips by repeating. Haven't I? he cried. Mrs Riordan, pity the poor blind. Dante covered her plate with her hands and said: 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. It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. He wondered from which window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the ha-ha and had there been flowerbeds at that time under the windows. One day when he had been called to the castle the butler had shown him the marks of the soldiers' slugs in the wood of the door and had given him a piece of shortbread that the community ate. It was nice and warm to see the lights in the castle. It was like something in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbey was like that. And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell's Spelling Book . They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from. He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominoes and once or twice he was able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas. The prefect was at the door with some boys and Simon Moonan was knotting his false sleeves. He was telling them something about Tullabeg .He poured sauce freely over Stephen's plate and set the boat again on the table. Then he asked uncle Charles was it tender. Uncle Charles could not speak because his mouth was full; but he nodded that it was.

I was a lonely night-walker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tram-lines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel. 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… [etc.] Published when Thomas was in his mid-twenties, this is a series of 10 sketches, some of which are more explicitly autobiographical (as in first person, with a narrator named Dylan Thomas) than others. There is a rough chronological trajectory to the stories, with the main character a mischievous boy, then a grandstanding teenager, then a young journalist in his first job. The countryside and seaside towns of South Wales recur as settings, and – as will be no surprise to readers of Under Milk Wood – banter-filled dialogue is the priority. I most enjoyed the childhood japes in the first two pieces, “The Peaches” and “A Visit to Grandpa’s.” The rest failed to hold my attention, but I marked out two long passages that to me represent the voice and scene-setting that the Dylan Thomas Prize is looking for. The latter is the ending of the book and reminds me of the close of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante . He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carving fork. Nobody spoke. He put it on his own plate, saying:

Book contents

There are of course lighter moments as well; noisy and carefree childhood games of scalping; a fight that turns into friendship—and a friendly competition of showing off their respective skills; walks outside in nature; Mrs Prothero in ‘Old Garbo’ who takes advantage of a message misunderstood; and the author and his friends in ‘Where the Tawe Flows’ weaving a story together with a character Mary in particular who ends up having a rather complicated, or should one say convoluted life. He turned the handle and opened the door and fumbled for the handle of the green baize door inside. He found it and pushed it open and went in. A great fire, banked high and red, flamed in the grate and under the ivy-twined branches of the chandelier the Christmas table was spread. They had come home a little late and still dinner was not ready: but it would be ready in a jiffy his mother had said. They were waiting for the door to open and for the servants to come in, holding the big dishes covered with their heavy metal covers. Peach, Linden. The Prose Writing of Dylan Thomas. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 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. He saw the rector sitting at a desk writing. There was a skull on the desk and a strange solemn smell in the room like the old leather of chairs.

Yes. Well now, that's all right. O, we had a good walk, hadn't we, John? Yes... I wonder if there's any likelihood of dinner this evening. Yes... O, well now, we got a good breath of ozone round the Head today. Ay, bedad. He came out on the landing above the entrance hall and looked about him. That was where Hamilton Rowan had passed and the marks of the soldiers' slugs were there. And it was there that the old servants had seen the ghost in the white cloak of a marshal.

by Dylan Thomas

The hushed class continued to copy out the themes. Father Arnall rose from his seat and went among them, helping the boys with gentle words and telling them the mistakes they had made. His voice was very gentle and soft. Then he returned to his seat and said to Fleming and Stephen: Well, they drank that and it was found out who did it by the smell. And that's why they ran away, if you want to know. He was very decent to say that. That was all to make him laugh. But he could not laugh because his cheeks and lips were all shivery: and then the prefect had to laugh by himself. The rector looked at him in silence and he could feel the blood rising to his face and the tears about to rise to his eyes. He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places in America. Still they were all different places that had different names. They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe.