Not long after this I went down to Laugharne to stay with Dylan, and I was there when a London publisher’s letter arrived, expressing disappointment in the opening chapters of the novel. It was not, ran the letter, the great, serious autobiographical work to which they had looked forward for so long. The manuscript would be returned, and it was hoped that he would offer them something autobiographical, but different, at a later date.

Dylan reread the letter with amused indignation. He was hard up, and a letter of acceptance would have been far more satisfactory. He promised to me that, whatever the publisher said, he thought the book entertaining, and he would not write any kind of solemn rhetoric in which he did not believe. At this time he used to write mainly in the afternoon, and after lunch he disappeared, and showed me a new part he had written when he emerged for tea. It covered about a page and was extremely funny. The rapidity with which he wrote this kind of prose and dialogue stood in sharp contrast to the composition of his poetry, for which he used separate work sheets and would spend sometimes several days on a single line, while the poem was built up, phrase by phrase, at glacierlike speed. Each of the stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, with the exception of the last, was written in two or three weeks, but every long poem, though parts of it would come to him in a rush, always involved fifty or a hundred transcriptions and months of incessant toil.

Why, in view of his facility for writing comic prose, did Dylan not continue the novel beyond the first four chapters? Did he lose interest in it, or was there a deeper reason which restrained his hand? The first suggestion is contradicted by the fact that as late as June, 1953, he wrote in a letter to Oscar Williams that he would “begin to go on with Adventures in the Skin Trade.” The heckler of his own success, the rebel against his own progress, still carried in his head the memory of his anti-Faust. Surely it was the intervening horror, the impact of war, particularly the London air raids, on his appalled and essentially tragic vision, that restrained him. Nothing less than the truth would now satisfy him. With his precise visionary memory he was able to reconstruct out of joy the truth of his childhood, both in his poems and in his late stories and broadcast scripts, for those experiences were real; but what was only half real, half fictional, he had to abandon.