He saw the rector sitting at a desk writing. There was a skull on the desk and a strange solemn smell in the room like the old leather of chairs.

Published when Thomas was in his mid-twenties, this is a series of 10 sketches, some of which are more explicitly autobiographical (as in first person, with a narrator named Dylan Thomas) than others. There is a rough chronological trajectory to the stories, with the main character a mischievous boy, then a grandstanding teenager, then a young journalist in his first job. The countryside and seaside towns of South Wales recur as settings, and – as will be no surprise to readers of Under Milk Wood – banter-filled dialogue is the priority. I most enjoyed the childhood japes in the first two pieces, “The Peaches” and “A Visit to Grandpa’s.” The rest failed to hold my attention, but I marked out two long passages that to me represent the voice and scene-setting that the Dylan Thomas Prize is looking for. The latter is the ending of the book and reminds me of the close of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” They went together down the staircase and along the corridor and past the bath. As he passed the door he remembered with a vague fear the warm turf-coloured bogwater, the warm moist air, the noise of plunges, the smell of the towels, like medicine. There were two beds in the room and in one bed there was a fellow: and when they went in he called out: He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominoes and once or twice he was able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas. The prefect was at the door with some boys and Simon Moonan was knotting his false sleeves. He was telling them something about Tullabeg .

Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb. He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carving fork. Nobody spoke. He put it on his own plate, saying: Well, it is perfectly dreadful to say that not even for one day in the year, said Mrs Dedalus, can we be free from these dreadful disputes! I wouldn't like to be Simon Moonan and Tusker Cecil Thunder said. But I don't believe they will be flogged. Perhaps they will be sent up for twice nine . Fleming knelt down, squeezing his hands under his armpits, his face contorted with pain; but Stephen knew how hard his hands were because Fleming was always rubbing rosin into them. But perhaps he was in great pain for the noise of the pandybat was terrible. Stephen's heart was beating and fluttering.

When Bobby's clowning around starts getting out of hand, Hank offers to let him go to clown college if he behaves at home, school, and church. Bobby, who thought he knew what clowning around really was, is told otherwise by his new professor. Very well, the rector said, it is a mistake and I shall speak to Father Dolan myself. Will that do now? There are of course lighter moments as well; noisy and carefree childhood games of scalping; a fight that turns into friendship—and a friendly competition of showing off their respective skills; walks outside in nature; Mrs Prothero in ‘Old Garbo’ who takes advantage of a message misunderstood; and the author and his friends in ‘Where the Tawe Flows’ weaving a story together with a character Mary in particular who ends up having a rather complicated, or should one say convoluted life. He closed his eyes wearily and paused. Mr Dedalus took a bone from his plate and tore some meat from it with his teeth, saying:

by Dylan Thomas

Hoho, Fleming! An idler of course. I can see it in your eye. Why is he on his knees, Father Arnall? Portrait is peopled by a range of curious characters, many, no perhaps most, who seem to have a thread of the tragic, the pathetic running through their lives. In ‘Peaches’ for instance, we meet Uncle Jim, who, even if not an alcoholic is addicted to his drink, sneaking away a pig or sheep from the farm to fuel his addiction (the ‘squeal’ and tell-tale ‘tip of a pink tail curling out’ of a basket that the author sees alerting us to what is happening, before it is confirmed); ‘Annie’ his uncle’s wife longs to open a tin of peaches, a rare treat, during the visit of a rich guest, Mrs Williams, who is coming to drop the author’s friend for a visit, only to be snubbed, the visit itself also ending later in discord; while Gwilym his cousin, a minister in training, practices his sermons on the little boys, almost forcing them to confess and collecting contributions. The relationship of these stories to the Thomas canon, however, is not entirely straightforward. Adventures in the Skin Trade was the first prose work; Thomas called it his “Welsh book.” It was commissioned by a London publisher, and the first chapter appeared in the periodical Wales in 1937. The previous year, Richard Church had suggested that Thomas write some autobiographical prose tales. After his marriage in July, 1937, Thomas took up this project but set to work in a very different style. He first produced “A Visit to Grandpa’s,” in which the surrealism is muted and the lyrical tone sustained by the young narrator; this story, standing second in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, became Thomas’s favorite broadcast and reading material. The most interesting feature of the new style of story is the rapid succession of apparently logical but often haphazardly related events, the whole ending in a diminuendo that seems anticlimactic. The intention of the play of events on the diminutive observer is to record, by means of an episode that largely concerns or happens to others, a stage in the observer’s growth, that is, in his development as a “young dog.”

Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain. Stephen looked at the plump turkey which had lain, trussed and skewered, on the kitchen table. He knew that his father had paid a guinea for it in Dunn's of D'Olier Street and that the man had prodded it often at the breastbone to show how good it was: and he remembered the man's voice when he had said: Come now, come now, come now! Can we not have our opinions whatever they are without this bad temper and this bad language? It is too bad surely. On the cinder-path, sir. A fellow was coming out of the bicycle house and I fell and they got broken. I don't know the fellow's name. And can we not love our country then? asked Mr Casey. Are we not to follow the man that was born to lead us?All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices. He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother's lap. But he could not: and so he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed.

The episode title is a reference to James Joyce's 1916 novel "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man." Dylan Thomas (identificabil pentru cine ştie cît timp cu inubliabilul do not go gentle into that good night) a construit Portretul artistului ca tînăr cîine din zece povestiri care-şi adună conţinutul din experineţele directe ale lui Thomas, toate legate de vîrstele primelor descoperiri revelatorii: copilăria şi adolescenţa. Desigur, ele pot fi citite în orice ordine preferaţi, fără teamă că pierdeţi vreun fir care le ordonează (asta deşi există cîteva personaje şi peisaje recurente, dar fără ca ele să condiţioneze cursul lecturii). Citite în ordine cronologică, ele lasă să se vadă o gradaţie a vîrstelor şi a transformărilor care îmbogăţeşte foarte mult experienţa de lectură. foarte multe dintre povestiri, personajul central, care e, cum spuneam, o ipostază a autorului, e mai mult martor la scene care se deschid în faţa lui şi care îl implică, vrînd, nevrînd. În prima, „Piersicile“, asistă la reprezentaţiile în forţă date de unchiul său, un personaj macho, dintr-un colţ al Ţării Galilor, un teritoriu care plezneşte, ca şi unchiul Jim, de vitalitate, în ciuda aerului mai degrabă precar al vieţilor din partea locului. Într-o criză de beţie, unchiul Jim îi alungă prietenul, mai gingaş şi mai sclifosit, venit să petreacă vacanţa împreună cu Dylan, iar nepotului nu-i rămîne decît să fluture, nedumerit, din batistă, în urma maşinii care ridică praful şi împrăştie orătăniile.He was very decent to say that. That was all to make him laugh. But he could not laugh because his cheeks and lips were all shivery: and then the prefect had to laugh by himself. He heard the voice of the prefect of the chapel saying the last prayers. He prayed it too against the dark outside under the trees. In the meantime, Bobby is soon analyzing humor in the same pedantic manner as Prof. Twilley from the television after they laugh at this video, citing "Aristotle's dictum" and "the ha-guffaw-aw-ha-ha formula." Twilley is finally impressed enough to move Bobby up to the study of commedia dell'arte. Boris becomes jealous about his Bobby's success because he had to take twice the clowning class. Bobby is quite happy to do that work. And he has such a soft mouth when he's speaking to you, don't you know. He's very moist and watery about the dewlaps, God bless him. Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahogany.