Since Amanda hasn't been doing any copyright infringement lately, I thought I'd pick up the slack. . .

I've been reading Dylan Thomas' Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog recently. I'm almost done, in fact. It's a collection of prose vignettes about Thomas' life in Wales. In the last one, he's probably about 20 and in the first, probably about 12. The chapters seem kind of uneven and Thomas is oddly detached from a story of his own life (you don't ever get to know much about him), but there are some moments that are pure poetry.

In this part, Thomas is visiting his cousin Gwilym who wants to be a preacher.

'Now you confess,' said Gwilym.

'What have I got to confess?'

'The worst thing you've done.'

I let Edgar Reynolds be whipped because I had taken his homework; I stole from my mother's bag; I stole from Gwyneth's bag; I stole twelve books from three visits to the library, and threw them away in the park; I drank a cup of my water to see what it tasted like; I beat a dog with a stick so it would roll over and lick my hand afterwards; I looked with Dan Jones through the keyhole while his maid had a bath; I cut my knee with a penknife, and put the blood on my handkerchief and said it had come out of my ears so that I could pretend I was ill and frighten my mother; I pulled my trousers down and showed Jack Williams; I saw Billy Jones beat a pigeon to death with a fire-shovel, and laughed and got sick; Cedric WIlliams and I broke into Mrs Samuels's house and poured ink over the bedclothes.

I said: 'I haven't done anything bad.'

The funny thing about the book is that it doesn't seem to owe all that much to Joyce. Oh, on a superficial level, it's a story of growing up and there are some religious influences. But Thomas avoids stream-of-consciousness narration and stays out of the story, unlike Joyce. I can think of several novels that owe far more to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man than this one.