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Lot 178
THOMAS (DYLAN)
22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £525 inc. premium
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THOMAS (DYLAN)
Letter of contract issued to Thomas, via his agent, and signed by him ("Dylan Thomas"), from the publisher Victor Weybright of the New American Library of World Literature, opening: "This will confirm our purchase of the first part of Dylan Thomas' autobiographical novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade" for $397.50; the letter going on to specify terms (at a rate of two-and-a-half cents a word for a total of 15,900 words for the first 100,000 copies printed, with additional payments to be made thereafter), and stating that work is to be published in a Mentor Selection of New World Writing, with copyright in the US and Canada "in our name and at our expense" ("...and, after publication, we agree to reassign to you, on demand, all rights to the copyright in the above material except world first serial rights in the English language..."); the letter originally addressed to his agent Oscar Williams and re-directed to Dylan Thomas, with Thomas's signature at the foot, one page, on headed paper, slight dust-staining and creasing, two punch-holes at head, 4to, New York, 9 May 1952
Footnotes
'OUR PURCHASE OF THE FIRST PART OF DYLAN THOMAS' AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL': the letter of contract for Thomas's novel Adventures in the Skin Trade, left incomplete at his death. He had begun planning the book in 1940 as a sequel to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, telling his main American publisher: ' I had wanted to write a sequel to the Portrait: a year in London, but written as a continuous story: the flight into another convention: a proper city book and far free-er in style than the slight, "artful" other stories' (letter to James Lauchlin, 15 April 1940).
The story was intended to tell how a young man from the provinces lands up in London, as he had done, and how in the process he sheds the various skins of the title. It contains passages where Thomas is at his sardonic best; such as one (which echoes a love letters sent Caitlin) where the young man day dreams of what his arrival in London will be like, with him knocking at a the door of a rooming house and an Irish girl answering: '"Good morning, madam, have you a cheap room?" asks the boy. "Cheaper than sunlight to you, Danny Boy," says the girl./ "Has it got bugs?" "All over the walls, praise be to God." "I'll take it"'. However the project fizzled out somewhat after criticism from his English publishers Dent, when they were shown what he had written in July 1940; one of their readers describing it as 'more coprolitic than ever' and 'without intellectual control', with the warning that 'Unless he pulls himself together he is going to fizzle out as an author most ignominiously' (quoted by Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, 1985 edition, p. 488 fn).
He did not abandon the project however, and on 2 October 1951 we find him asking Robert Pocock at the BBC to send him the manuscript which he wants 'to work on and get money'. The first two-thirds of Adventures in The Skin Trade, as under the terms of the present letter, appeared in New World Writing, 2nd Mentor Selection, New York, November 1952, pp. 158-89; with the remaining third in New World Writing, 3rd Mentor Selection, New York, May 1953, pp. 192-207. The complete surviving fragment was published posthumously by New Directions as the first three sections of Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Stories in 1955, and separately by Dent as Adventures in the Skin Trade later that year.