The writing of poetry, which was so exacting to Dylan already, but which became more and more exacting with each year of his life, was by no means his only activity. This would have been impossible. The intensity of this activity could not be invoked and sustained at will. Even when he was writing the early poems, whose composition was so much more frequent and consecutive than the late, he was writing prose, too, particularly stories. These early stories, though less permanent than the poems, display the same sexual preoccupation, the same adolescent groping, through tactile images, from darkness to light, the same pressing, through a multitude of symbols and observations, both imagined and real, towards a place and a condition as familiar and truthful as a field, on which the work of his maturity would rest. Many combine the theme of awakening love with an acute sense of the proximity of death. There is also an element of distrust in the act of creation. The writing of the story, the very pencil with which it is written, becomes a symbol of exaltation and of destruction. In the story “The Orchards,” the pencil is described in the act of making a poem:

The word is too much with us. He raised his pencil so that its shadow fell, a tower of wood and lead, on the clean paper; he fingered the pencil tower, the half-moon of his thumb-nail rising and setting behind the leaden spire. The tower fell, down fell the city of words, the walls of a poem, the symmetrical letters….

There was, then, in 1935, when “The Orchards” was written, a close link between story and poem, as though the prose, although it contained surrealist elements which did not appear in the poetry, were the reverse side of the same coin. For these words about the pencil are autobiographical: they are clearly Dylan Thomas’ own words defining his own imaginative situation at the time, a writer distrusting, not himself, but himself as writer. So, beneath the dominant activity of his poetry and the subordinate activity of his prose, there was a third activity: distrusting both.

I have indicated already that Dylan Thomas, far from flattering himself, always opposed himself, and, with a modesty that really concealed a stubborn sureness, remained his own most severe critic and denigrator at every stage of his progress. He took very great pains, for he knew that if what he wrote was authentic and alive it would not be affected by either hostile criticism or the climate of approval. His finished work did, however, influence his creative and destructive judgment. As he wrote to me in a letter: “I build a flying tower and I pull it down.” He was continually remaking himself in his poems, assailing his own established position lest it should hinder or obstruct the vision when the ground was broken for a new poem and he must start afresh.