In the prose, too, there came recurrent moments of severe self-appraisal, moments when what had seemed a masterpiece at the time of writing appeared in retrospect to be only a tour de force. The highly charged language of the symbolic stories reached its climax in what was to be his most ambitious story, the opening of which he left as a fragment—“In the Direction of the Beginning.” He told me after this that he would never again write a story of that kind, and at the same time his verse underwent a profound change, not exactly of language but of approach. The change was, I think, heralded by the little poem which begins

Once it was the colour of saying

Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill…

soon followed by the line:

The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo…5

This, and the other poems of The Map of Love,6 showed that while he had now resolved to write only stories about real people, his poetry had also moved in the direction of the living voice. The poem he wrote for his twenty-fourth birthday, which is the last poem in The Map of Love, announced the work of his maturity even more clearly:

Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance for as long as forever is.7

In this development, which was to lead to his richest and deepest poetry, the poems of his last nine years, and to the brilliant prose of the late scripts, Dylan Thomas novel Adventures in the Skin Trade, of which he only wrote the first four chapters, plays a significant part. In the stories of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog he released the spring of bubbling life and comic invention which his friends had always known, though he had, until then, kept it out of his work. In Adventures in the Skin Trade the comic invention was directed against himself. He was a poet of tragic vision, but he was also a born clown, always falling naturally into situations which became ludicrous. Just as it is impossible to understand Lear without his Fool, it is impossible to have a complete picture of Dylan Thomas without the self-parody which appears in Adventures in the Skin Trade. It is a key, not only to something instantly recognized in his personality, but to something afterwards recognized in his tragedy and early death.

A story about skins had been in Dylan’s head for a long time, and I am now inclined to think that it had already been prodding his imagination two or three years before he began to write it. It was not unusual for Dylan to delay his compositions for an even longer period, and perhaps the first design for this story had suggested itself soon after the semiautobiographical events it describes.