Dylan Thomas - C B Cox (ed)

 This is a collection of critical essays put together, roughly a decade after Dylan's death, by the senior lecturer in English at one of my old alma maters (even before my time).   It makes for an essential primer for the great swathe of critical literature that sprang up after the fatal collapse in New York in November 1953.   Indeed, several of the contributors comment on that event which, of course, they all remembered.

There are no dud essays here.   Robert M Adams is the least interesting contributor for me, because he compares Dylan with an earlier poet (Richard Crashaw) whom I confess I have never heard of.  He died in 1649, apprently.   The most interesting is the final entrant, the American critic Karl Shapiro, who is irreverent and challenging and, to my mind, comes closest to the mind of the man himself.   I shall definitely look out for the work from which his chapter is extracted, In Defense of Ignorance.   Even the title appeals.

From the first four essays - and Cox's introduction = I was quickly able to establish the tripartite map which overlays all criticism of Thomas's work: the early, semi-surrealist poems, mostly about childhood and sex; the second period of seemingly intentional obscurity; and the late, mature period of clarity, the era of Fern Hill, Do not go gently and, obviously, Under Milk Wood.

Still relevant after more than half a century, I commend Cox's book to all new entrants into the work and myth of the most unique British poet of the 20th century.

Adventures in the Skin Trade - Dylan Thomas

 Thomas intended Adventures in the Skin Trade as the successor to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.  The latter was a fictional rendering of his childhood in Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, the former as a version of his first attempt to break free by going to London in 1933.  In real life the key element of his first London life was participation in the Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in 1936.  The fictional version never gets that far.  The discontinued fragment that came out in 1955 - this Aldine paperback - is limited to three chapters covering the day of departure, arrival, and immediate descent into dissolution.

Dylan's fictional alter ego is Sam Bennett, intended to be a passive character whom things happen to.  Thus he stays in the station cafeteria until someone offers to take him home.  The someone is Donald Allingham, a dealer in secondhand furniture, who takes Sam to his three rooms in Praed Street, every room of which is crammed with furniture, thus making rooms within rooms.  There is no water or cooking facility so Allingham takes Sam to Mrs Dacey's informal cafe, where Sam ends up naked in the bath without the company of Mrs Dacey's amorous daughter Polly.  Then it's everybody off to the progressively seedier nightspots - "the Gayspot first, then the Cheerio, then the Neptune."

It is surreal in its way, and colossal fun, but how I wish Thomas had been able to take us to exhibition and finding the spanner to get Dali free of his diving helmet.  Nevertheless, Adventures in the Skin Trade is an essential for anyone interested in the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive.

The Last Days of New Paris - China Mieville

The Last Days of New Paris is a novella, and better for it. The other Mieville novel I have read (Kraken, which I reviewed here last year) went on just that bit too long. Here, the ideas are fizzing throughout but the tighter narrative seems to help Mieville maintain the high standard of his prose.


The idea itself is a corker. Surrealist concepts are brought to life in Nazi-occupied Paris. As a result Paris is still occupied - indeed, cordoned off from the rest of the world, with the rest of the world's blessing - in 1950. These manifestations ('manifs') are predominantly on the side of the resistance (specifically the Surrealist resistance, the Main a plume) of which our hero Thibaut is a member. Thibaut wears one manif, the armour of Surrealist women's pyjamas, and joins forces with another, the Exquisite Corpse (featured on the cover) dreamt up by Breton, Lamba and Tanguy. The Nazis created the manifs with the S (for Surrealist) bomb, the creation of which in 1941 is the secondary storyline here, but the manifs naturally hate them for it. The Nazis have therefore done a deal with Hell and signed up hellish demonic monsters. Also involved is Sam, an American woman photographer, who may or may not be with the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. She is collecting photographs for a book called - typically Mieville - The Last Days of New Paris.


I enjoyed this hugely. It is precisely my cup of tea, right down to the account of how Mieville came by the story and the learned notes at the end. Just reading it inspired me. Hopefully it will do the same for you - because you have to read it.