It was not, however, until 1940 that Dylan repeatedly told me that he was thinking of writing a long story about skins. It was to be more ambitious than his other stories. It was to show what happened to a person, like himself, who took life as it came. This central character, Samuel Bennet, would attract adventures to himself by his own unadventurous stillness and natural acceptance of every situation. He would accept life, like a baby who had been given self-dependence. He would have no money, no possessions, no extra clothes, no civilized bias. And life would come to him. People would come, and they would bring him life. Odd, very odd people would come. But whoever came, and whatever situation came, he would go on. He would keep his position, whether comic or tragic hero, whatever the plot. Then, at a certain point, an unpredictable point in time, he would look back and find that he had shed a skin.

In Dylan’s first plan, so far as I can remember it, there were to be seven skins. There was to be a succession of scenes, each being an allegorical layer of life, and at the end of the story the character would be stripped of all illusion, naked at last. It would be in one way a journey through the Inferno of London, but it would also be a comedy. There is no doubt that, beneath the absurdity of situation which would provide furniture for the scenes, lay the influence and sense of tragedy of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Had the novel been finished, it is unlikely that the comic central character of the first chapters would not have been revealed as also a tragic figure.

I remember Dylan reading me the first two chapters. He was still undecided about a title, and we discussed possible titles. “The Skins” was not quite right. “A Trader in Skins” or “A Traveller in Skins” might do. I left him undecided. Then, a few months later, he wrote from the big house near Chippenham where he was staying with John Davenport: “I play whist with musicians, & think about a story I want to call Adventures in the Skin Trade.”

Towards the end of May, 1941, he was back in Laugharne Castle, and he wrote: “My prosebook’s going well, but I dislike it. It’s the only really dashed-off piece of work I remember doing. I’ve done 10,000 words already. It’s indecent and trivial, sometimes funny, sometimes mawkish, and always badly written which I do not mind so much.” This was characteristic of Dylan’s self-criticism; in the chorus of his admirers his was often the one dissenting voice.

A week later came a more amplified statement: “My novel blathers on. It’s a mixture of Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Kafka, Beachcomber, and good old 3-adjectives-a-penny belly-churning Thomas, the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive.”