Yet, like everything Dylan wrote, this intensely personal comedy was a part of him. This unique fragment, half fictional though it is, carries the unmistakable stamp of his personality. It is real now because it was once real to him, and because it holds the key to a certain attitude to the world and to a situation which was peculiarly his own. This attitude, which may be defined as a rooted opposition to material progress, he continued to hold long after he had abandoned work on the novel. Its anarchic fantasy appealed to him, and it is one more example of the poet’s indifference to reputation, of his refusal to follow the advance guard of his fame. Even twelve years after he had stopped writing it, he still thought of taking up the threads of the story he had taken so long to begin. Great though his reputation was, he could never become Emperor because he was always also the child who could see that he wore no clothes. Would he have continued the novel, had he lived? That is a question impossible to answer. He might have tried, but the unseen obstacle to his imagination remained. As it was, at the time that he stopped writing these pages, the pressure of the anarchy of war itself and the vision of distorted London had taken the place of his half fictional vision and compelled his imagination forward to “Ceremony After a Fire Raid” and to the beautiful poems evoking childhood, “Poem in October” and “Fern Hill.” He could still go back to peace, but from there he could no longer go forward. The tunnel which led from his boyhood’s home to unvisited London was shattered. Something had happened which prevented him from making the journey Samuel Bennet made, and which he himself had made ten years before.

VERNON WATKINS

May, 1960

1 “I see the boys of summer”

2 “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”

3 “If I were tickled by the rub of love”

4 “Light breaks where no sun shines”

5 “Once it was the colour of saying”

6 The story “The Map of Love” which appears in this edition was also published as the title story of The Map of Love: Poems and Prose, London, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1939.

7 “Twenty-four years”

ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE

I. A FINE BEGINNING

That early morning, in January 1933, only one person was awake in the street, and he was the quietest. Call him Samuel Bennet. He wore a trilby hat that had been lying by his bedside in case the two house-breakers, a man and a woman, came back for the bag they had left.