Eight Stories. - book reviews

The main news about this little collection of eight stories by Dylan Thomas is the book's format. Eight Stories, Ronald Firbank's Caprice, and Henry Miller's A Devil in Paradise comprise the first three New Directions Bibelots. A bibelot is a miniature book, especially an elegant one. The price is right (only $5 - 62 1/2 [cts] per story), and the size is compact and convenient (4 3/4" x 7"). Presumably in the nineties even serious readers have shortened attention spans. Eight Stories offers 92 pages of short fiction by Dylan Thomas, and then you can move on to David Letterman.

Still, I find it appealing that the stories are intended for those serious general readers and not for scholars. The book features no critical or biographical introduction, nor even any indication of who selected these eight stories or why (apart from the assertion on the back that these stories are "particularly enjoyable"). The book also chooses not to reveal the provenance of the stories beyond the fact that they are taken from the 1984 Collected Stories.

But never fear: I am here to provide textual perspective. The anonymous editor has selected the stories with the aim of providing a cross-section of Thomas's career as a short-story writer. Thomas published "The End of the River" and "The School for Witches" in the mid-1930s. The first appeared in book form only posthumously, and the second was collected in The World I Breathe (1939). "The Peaches," "Just Like Little Dogs," "Old Garbo," and "One Warm Saturday" are four of the 10 stories in Thomas's book of related autobiographical stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940 - and what a wonderful title). "Plenty of Furniture," also autobiographical, is a self-contained piece of Thomas's unfinished novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade, first published in book form in 1955, two years after Thomas's death. "The Followers" was published in 1952 and first collected in 1955.

Thomas's poetic reputation has rather faded in the past quarter-of-a-century. It is fair to say that his dense, difficult, intensely overwrought style (a New Critical delight) and his complex, intensely overwrought quasi-religious speculations (also a New Critical delight) are no longer fashionable. Though at the age of 19 he characterized himself in a letter as a "writer of poems and stories," poetry was his real calling. In 1939 he wrote of the Young Dog stories that he was "hoping to sell some new straight autobiographical stories in America for a whole pile of England-trotting money." He also called these stories "mostly potboilers . . . stories toward a provincial autobiography." But let me say at once that these are terrific stories, and it's a shame that they have essentially disappeared from view. I'm glad that this Bibelot gave me a chance to sample a few of them.

The two earliest, "The End of the River" and "The School for Witches," are the least interesting. These stories seem self-conscious, artificial, and distractingly word-happy to me. But the other six stories are charming, humorous, and immensely likable.

A book of stories that calls itself Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is certain to intersect with Joyce, and indeed it does. But though Thomas's protagonist - called Dylan - shares Stephen Dedalus's ambition to become a poet, Dylan is much more shambling and inept, much less self-important than Stephen. (A "young dog" couldn't be that self-important.) Joyce's Portrait is austere and serious; Thomas's is down-to-earth, compassionate, humorous. Stephen Dedalus distances himself from his sexual longing. In contrast Dylan in the Young Dog stories (and the slightly older Samuel in "Plenty of Furniture") are innocents totally possessed by their longing for women. Rather ominously, Dylan/Samuel is a young man who has also already formed the habit of losing himself in the oblivion of alcohol.

The Young Dog stories are furthermore a Swansea version of Joyce's Dubliners. Some connections seem quite specific: "Peaches" brings "An Encounter" to mind, "Just Like Little Dogs" is a revision of "Two Gallants." More broadly, as Thomas wrote to a friend, the stories "are all about Swansea life: the pubs, clubs, billiard rooms, promenades, adolescence and the suburban nights, friendships, tempers and the humiliations." That is, they are stories of provincial squalor and moral paralysis. But Thomas's stories lack the sourness, the "scrupulous meanness" of most of Dubliners. Instead they are wry and compassionate, amusing and affectionate, certainly filled with life. The prose is richly evocative, sometimes haunting:

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 tramlines 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 and for the unfeeling systems in the upper air, Mars and Venus and Brazell and Skully, men in China and St. Thomas, scorning girls and ready girls, soldiers and bullies and policemen and sharp, suspicious buyer of second-hand books, bad, ragged women who'd pretend against the museum wall for a cup of tea, and perfect, unapproachable women out of the fashion magazines, seven feet high, sailing slowly in their flat, glazed creations through steel and glass and velvet. ("Just Like Little Dogs")