Stories by Poets

Stephen Spender’s book of short stories was first published in 1936; Dylan Thomas’s unfinished novel, here published as a unit, was first brought out in the second and third Mentor Books in 1953, those lively American paperbacks. One could not imagine two books more different – a war lies between them, and between the authors’ many light-years of experience. Spender’s work is above all sensitive. His characters exist in total separation, alone with their inhuman past and terrible present in which every gesture of communication withers because only states of mind are real. His stories are technically imperfect; they tend to sprawl, the style is often rather trite and wooden: yet a sense of struggling sincerity binds them together. They are not tragic, for tragedy requires a solid universe, a harmony to be shattered – the characters in these stories are all sleepwalkers. In the words of the young dipsomaniac in the finest story of the collection – ‘Those whom one saves are oneself, and there is nothing outside oneself, not even that which is to be saved.’ In face of this recurring zero politics becomes opinion, sympathy a hypochondriac’s muttering, sex a nervous habit, the vigorous known creation an unconsoling painted mirage. It is life of a kind; and in 1936, new to it, Mr Spender described it very well.

One suspects that Dylan Thomas had an intractable conscience. Adventures in the Skin Trade was (one hears) mortgaged to two separate publishers, to each without the other’s knowledge; and perhaps the sense of trouble ahead made Thomas stave off the projected ending, when the country innocent, Samuel Bennet, would stand stark naked on Paddington Station after the skin traders of London had had their way with him. We can only mourn for what was never written, and rejoice in what is. From the moment Samuel Bennet wakes in his suburban bedroom and creeps downstairs to blacken his sister’s doilies and crack his mother’s china the story never flags, the hullabaloo is strong and loud, the picaresque menageries charge hairy and shouting. But no one is really hurt. Perhaps tragedy is no more possible in Thomas’s crowded world’s fair of cosmic innocence than in Spender’s arctic drawing-room though for a very different reason. Perhaps words do not describe the real world anyway. But in Thomas’s work there is at least a loving hand at work and a strong wind of rebellious laughter.

1956 (127)