Thomas the Novelist
ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE. By Dylan Thomas. (Putnam, 9s. 6d.) FOR its eloquence alone this fragment of Dylan Thomas's pro- jected autobiographical novel was worth publishing. In the fore- word, Vernon Watkins points out that Thomas started to plan Adventures in the Skin Trade after he had finished the pieces which were together published under the title Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. With Portrait of the Artist Thomas finally left behind the obscure, symbolical world of his early stories; as Wat- kins says: 'Quite suddenly he began to write about people as they actually were and behaved. Through the exact memory he had of his childhood and an extraordinary power to re-create it he re- leased a spring of comedy, both of character and situation, which had been hidden from himself because it was at first too close to his experience.'
Adventures in the Skin Trade was much more ambitious in design than Portrait of the Artist. Thomas wanted to depict a character, Samuel Bennet, who would be without money, posses- sions or a view of life. He was to be an entirely passive figure to whom things would happen without his searching for them. In each experience he would, as it were, shed a skin (Thomas planned seven such sheddings until, at the end of the novel, Samuel would be shown naked at last, his character formed, his identity clear). This novel was never completed, partly owing to the war, partly to writing plans of another kind, and one does feel doubtful, even had events been otherwise, whether Thomas could ever have ful- filled so metaphysical a scheme. For he was in his prose always the writer of sensation, of immediate experience: everything came to hiin through the senses, nothing through swift intellectual appre- hension. This was his great gift as a poet, his extreme limitation as a prose writer. I do not think he had the equipment for the creation of a total world which a novel .must always be. But he did have one unique gift; he had a deeply physical understanding of human beings. He saw his characters inescapably involved in the world of things.
The fragment which we have of Adventures in the Skin Trade is extremely autobiographical as well as being immensely larger than life. It tells of a young poet who comes from Wales, to London (having first half-regretfully broken the family china and torn up the family photographs) to be acted upon by experience, to shed his several skins. We see him in a waiting-room at Paddington, in a bizarre furniture shop, in a grotesque tobacconist's and in a vividly sordid night club called The Gayspot. But it is not the separate events that are important but rather the settings and characters who are 'flung so violently into life. Thomas does not just describe his characters or their surroundings, he'thrusts them at us—George Ring whose 'glistening fair hair was done in tight curls, and it smelt across the room,' Mrs..Dacey whose 'eyes were sharp and light; the dullness raced from her mouth, leaving it
cruel and happy.' Always the language is precise yet the narrative is unflagging; everything is enthusiasm.
This extraordinary eloquence is perhaps the most notable ele- ment in this beginning of Adventures in the Skin Trade. But what is also extremely interesting is the character of Samuel Bennet him- self. He is a person to whom ludicrous things happen and, in this, bears some resemblance to Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and Iris Murdoch's Jake Donaghue, except that these two characters cast a far more sternly critical eye upon their world; they pass judge- ments, Thomas's Sam does not. But he has something in abun- dance which Jim and Jake are, I think, rather deficient in, and that is compassion. It is a quality one senses, too, in Thomas's short stories and in Under Milk Wood, a quality which also fired his splendid last poems.
ELIZABETH JENNINGS
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