Of these, the one that most came to absorb my attention was the literary culture of the United States, and in eventually editing Gweld Sêr: Cymru a Chanrif America (‘Seeing Stars: Wales and the American Century’) I provided myself both with an opportunity to explore Welsh – American cultural relations and exchanges vicariously (a subject I had also previously addressed in a discrete chapter of Corresponding Cultures) and to outline, in an introductory essay, the various points of connection I had early come to feel, in rather personal and accordingly somewhat prejudiced terms, between the literatures of Wales and the States.
In that essay in Gweld Sêr, I playfully speculated that my fascination with things American might date back as far as my prenatal state, when two GIs ominously destined for the Normandy landings had been billeted on my parents a couple of months before I was born. More credibly – and persuasively, I hope – I concluded it more likely dated from the occasion, in my mid-teens, when my family belatedly acquired a television, just in time to witness that most thrillingly American of all decades, the 1960s. It provided us with the most appallingly convincing experience of Reality TV, in the form of the Cuban crisis, the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, the killing on-camera of Lee Harvey Oswald, the great Civil Rights marches, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, not to mention the exhilarating experience of the first moon landing and the early astonishing triumphs of the young Cassius Clay. My adult imagination is therefore very much a child of the American 1960s, and it was the small screen, with its The Cabin in the Clearing, its Sergeant Bilko and its I Love Lucy, that seduced my attention, and not the epic Hollywood Westerns of the day, or the outrageous gyrations of Bill Haley with his rocking ‘Around the Clock’, or the adolescent riots that seemed the invariable accompaniment to the screenings of that great heart-throb Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock.
Already by the time I entered college in the autumn of 1962, the America of the small screen had conditioned me to favour American culture, and it so seemed natural to follow an American Literature special option during my two years of specialist undergraduate study. While its foreignness was underscored for me by the slow, relaxed Californian drawl of my tutor, the eminent scholar George Dekker (who later migrated to Stanford via Essex), this new literary culture also seemed strangely familiar from the outset. It also seemed liberating and affirming of my own Welsh cultural identity. That was because I (mistakenly, of course) detected in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers we studied prominent features of my Wales. There was the open concern with identity politics, the anxiety of influence (in the form of a complex relation to traditional English literature), the unmistakeable signs of religious origins, the apparent social egalitarianism. It was the extravagant presence of the latter that first attracted me to the poetry of Walt Whitman, in whose work I was eventually to specialise, and when I came to publish my own experiments in translating some of Whitman’s poems into Welsh I pointed out in my introduction that in rhythm they strongly echoed those of the Bible in ways that reminded me of some Welsh-language writing during the Nonconformist era.10 That era was again brought to my mind when I encountered the mid-nineteenth-century New England of Hawthorne’s writing, Bible-black as his works were (contrary, of course, to the sceptical world view of their author) with his society’s preoccupation with sin, while I immediately recognised in Thoreau’s cussedly principled individualism the influence of an American dissent that was cousin to that of my chapel Wales. That Emerson’s Transcendentalism originated in Calvinism, by way of an extreme reaction against it, was no surprise to me, accustomed as I was to the twentieth-century drift towards humane religious liberalism of some Nonconformist ministers in Wales.
And then there was the different literature of the American South. Granted the odious history of repellent Southern racism I nevertheless became fascinated with the literary productions of a defeated people. Realising that the New Criticism I was being taught in the form of Practical Criticism was very largely the strategic product of a South determined to emphasise the rich complexity of its inherited cultural sensibility contrasted with the crass simplifications of the industrialised, socially levelling, ‘occupying power’ of the North, I developed a Welsh interest in leading figures such as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Faulkner’s great novels I found compelling, because they bore such remarkable testimony – not least in the tortuous passages and tormented inner structures of his seemingly endless sentences – to the past’s tentacular grip on the Southern mind. That remorseless sense of the present being, as Bergson had put it, no more than the past gnawing into the future reminded me of the past-orientated fixations of some of the best Welsh-language writers. On the other hand, in the history-lite approach of the North to the present, I felt I detected similarities to Wales’s ‘new’ literature in English.
In so many writers, North and South, I found examples of a Gothic style strikingly like that which seemed ubiquitous in anglophone Welsh writing, particularly of the inter-war period. For Caradoc Evans (or even Caradog Prichard if it came to that) see Erskine Caldwell or Flannery O’Connor – or of course the great Nathaniel Hawthorne and the even greater Herman Melville. Furthermore, there were the Realist writers from Dreiser and Norris through Upton Sinclair and James T. Farrell and the social protest writers like John Steinbeck, all of whom reminded me of the ‘Anglo-Welsh’ novelists of the inter-war years. There were the Native American writers – most particularly Sherman Alexie and N. Scott Momaday11 – and of course the African American writers from the Harlem Renaissance onwards, all of whom spoke of conditions of disempowerment to which I, as a Welshman, could respond, although even then, in my most callow years, I never entirely lost sight of the vast gulf of difference between my immensely privileged situation and theirs.
And then, as I gradually matured in understanding, the literatures of the US seemed steadily to grow into an inalienable and invincible foreignness that at first I had barely been capable of acknowledging. Eventually, I was able to turn that to advantage, as when, in my first book-length study of Whitman, I paradoxically took the measure of his ‘difference’ by using my Wales-induced awareness of the profound inequalities, and attendant social tensions and conflicts, that could underlie apparent social cohesion and egalitarian solidarities, to bring out the fine cracks, fissures and fractures hidden in the smooth confident surface of Whitman’s intoxicating assertions, and to demonstrate that these divisions were those specific to the mid-nineteenth-century America to which Whitman the apparent universalist was secretly in thrall.
But what proved to endure through all the phases of my understanding was that sense, so early awakened, of the liberating properties for me of an American culture that, unlike English culture, never gave me the impression it felt it had my measure as a Welshman. In American literature – as in America itself when eventually I came to visit it – I felt free to be who I was, confident that I would not be pigeonholed. My career as an ‘Americanist’ of sorts became a necessary complement and ballast to my career as a specialist in Wales’s literary cultures, not least because it periodically freed me from the otherwise unbearable pressures of being confined to an endlessly fissiparous and wearyingly and wearingly conflicted Welshness.
In recent years I have seriously wondered how far in responding so immediately, viscerally, and with such a shock of personal recognition, to Glendower’s touchingly proud protestation ‘I can speak English, Lord, as well as you’ – as self-defensive a protestation as it is self-assertive – I wasn’t precociously recognising the voicing of a primary motivating force of my whole future professional career. Have I perhaps, in all my subsequent teaching and writing, essentially been driven by an overwhelming need to demonstrate to my cultural over-lords a degree of mastery of English and its literatures? It is a need I came to sense in so many ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writers, including some of those – such as Dylan Thomas – who knew no Welsh; and in their case – as perhaps in mine – it frequently took the for
m either of a flamboyantly exhibitionist English, as instanced for example in the writings of Dylan Thomas or Glyn Jones, or of a stylishly hypercorrect English, as found in the work of Gwyn Jones. Such writings are the telltale signs of a subaltern ‘display’ culture.
I was certainly aware, as a callow undergraduate student made to feel uneasy by some of my teachers at my linguistic difference and provincial cultural ‘oddness’, of a quiet (and unconfident) wish to equal – if not to better – them at their own game. And it was at university, too, that I discovered with delight that no less an author than Joyce was an authority on the vexed issue of an ‘acquired’ language:
[Stephen Dedalus] thought: The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine … I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.12
When I listen to Dylan Thomas booming his own poetry in that strange, compelling, synthetic, ‘cut-glass accent’ of his, it is that phrase of Joyce’s that comes to mind – ‘My voice holds them at bay’ – even though I readily concede that Thomas himself never did feel his soul ‘fretting in the shadow’ of an ‘acquired language’. To begin by acknowledging both of these perceptions may yet, it seems to me, prove a fruitful way of preparing oneself to consider much ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writing. And, obviously, in responding to textual promptings such as this I was unknowingly demonstrating an instinctive affinity with what later came to be known as ‘post-colonial literature’, and preparing myself to understand the literatures of Wales as offering me – in however complex, equivocal and controversial a sense – ample and fascinating instances of the post-colonial condition.13
I was early sensitised, then, by my experience of reading English texts that deepened my sense of ‘otherness’ as a Welsh reader, to the fact that all literary works unavoidably have a social, cultural and political dimension – although only later did I progress to a much more sophisticated and accurate understanding of how, being so deeply ‘inscribed’ in literary texts, this dimension influentially informed the structure of the works as well as manifesting itself in their content. And this early education in the politics of literature primed me, I believe, not only for my later studies in the literatures of Wales – literatures that, owing to the long subordinated nature of the Welsh experience, have always been particularly rich in their political implications – but also for my studies of American poetry, and most particularly of the work of America’s ‘national’ poet, Walt Whitman. Hence my insistence, in the opening pages of both of my book-length Whitman studies – no doubt to the continuing bafflement of American readers – on the distinctively Welsh provenance and character of my approaches to his poetry.14
My early education in literature also proved foundational in one final important respect. It made me aware of how culturally determined and circumscribed was a reader’s response to such texts. This was brought home to me when, having been so excited in sixth form by reading the great Welsh-language novels of Daniel Owen, I frustratedly came to realise, as an undergraduate, that to compare – in a way that seemed so obvious and potentially fruitful to me – Owen with his near-contemporary (and, indeed, literary master) Charles Dickens would be a futile exercise, as my monoglot English teachers would be incapable of understanding the comparison, even if they didn’t dismiss it with the amused and tolerant condescension they usually seemed to reserve for things Welsh. Determined therefore as I later became to treat the two literatures of Wales as the discursive products and textual manifestations of a single, partly bicultural, nation, I understood from the beginning that I would be faced with the challenge of contextualising my discussions of Welsh-language texts in a manner that would make my treatment of them both comprehensible and illuminating for my English-language readers.
Such self-indulgent recollections are offered only as preliminary indications of the formative influence of my early personal circumstances on the core structure of my subsequent thinking and writing about Wales, but to continue in like vein would be tedious. It is high time for attention to return to influential formative circumstances of a more general and somewhat more objective kind.
* * *
While a concern to ‘pluralise’ Wales has remained constant throughout my publishing career, the politico-cultural conditions under which my researches have been conducted have changed dramatically during this period. This is so obviously the case at the level of, say, the development of Wales towards its own national assembly, that it scarcely needs detailed recording. Not so, however, the changes that have taken place at the subordinate level that most immediately affected me, that is at the level of the higher education system of which my work has obviously been the product. And what in particular, I think, might usefully be recorded at this reflective juncture is the seismic shift that has occurred over the last thirty and more years in attitudes from within the academy, as from without, towards the anglophone literary culture of Wales, a shift I welcome because in the Welsh context it represents a shift away from a macrocosmopolitan to a microcosmopolitan approach to literary studies. Such indulgent recollection is, no doubt, a sign that I have now reached the age when, as Goethe put it, a person becomes historical to himself, and ‘his fellow human beings become historical to him’.
Over fifty years ago, when I embarked as an undergraduate upon the study of ‘English Literature’ at University College, Swansea, the body of creative writing produced in English by Wales was known as ‘Anglo-Welsh Literature’ – a queasy term that perfectly captured the unease felt by Welsh society and the academic community alike as to the character, status and indeed the calibre, of this writing. Grudging respect for Welsh-language literature as the prior and primary voice of historical nationhood, an anxiety (heightened during the turbulent 1960s) not to encourage ‘nationalist’ sentiment or to dilute British solidarities, and a characteristically provincial unwillingness to believe that Wales could have produced any anglophone writers worthy of serious attention, ensured that society at large scarcely registered the presence of an ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literature. And such an outlook was fully endorsed by an academic community the confirmed Anglophilia of whose departments of English was significantly amplified by the passionate commitment of key staff members to those imposing cultural values so influentially enshrined in the formidable F. R. Leavis’s writings on the Great Tradition of the English novel. English departments across the university sector in Wales were thus proudly wedded to what they deemed to be an enlightened macrocosmopolitan outlook – Leavis even spent a missionary year in the provinces at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, in 1969. Operating in such an environment, I quickly learnt to slight Henry Vaughan’s bilingual roots in the Usk valley in favour of treating him as a great European Baroque exponent of English metaphysical poetry, to deplore the gauche provincial garrulity that disqualified Dylan Thomas from serious attention, and to find in Raymond Williams’s early work clear evidence of calibre sufficient to make him Leavis’s revisionist successor as champion on the world stage of an English cultural nationalism.
Yet, at the same time, I began slowly to intuit a number of things. First, my involvement in the study of American literature made me gradually aware that Leavisite anglocentrism was, in fact, the product in part of post-imperial crisis. All of the fear and hostile resentment of an England fatally weakened by the Second World War was concentrated in Leavis’s impassioned anti-Americanism, and insofar as Wales deferentially persisted in identifying with his ostensibly literary evaluations it was also blinding itself to those aspects of its own historical situation that were illuminated much more fully by American than by English literature.15 Secondly, I began to intuit that some of the Welsh scholars who taught me were, in fact, living a kind of double intellectual life, shyly moonlighting as students (and even as producers) of ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’. For instance, t
he lovable Cecil Price (to whom I am personally indebted beyond measure) capitalised on his eminence as a Sheridan scholar of world renown to quietly research the history of the English theatre in Wales, resulting in a pioneering production he was always inclined to dismiss as a whimsical piece of self-indulgence and whose ‘real’ academic value he was always anxious to disclaim.16
Alerted by such an example of ‘alternative’, ‘extra-curricular’ scholarly practice I began to reflect on further intriguing evidence of like ‘underground’ activity. One of Cecil Price’s closest friends in academe, I realised, was the flamboyant Gwyn Jones, notoriously authoritarian Professor of English at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (and later at University College, Cardiff, where he resisted every suggestion that he lecture on Dylan Thomas, whom he had known, even to the student English Society). A renowned international authority on Icelandic saga, and a stickler for ‘Oxbridge’ standards of traditional literary scholarship, he had for decades enjoyed a second career as gifted ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writer and mentor of anglophone writing talent in Wales, not least through establishing and editing the Welsh Review during the 1940s. In choosing the liminal zone between creative writing and academic scholarship as his preferred terrain for exploring and practising Anglo-Welshness, Jones was the forerunner of several other key investigators of Anglo-Welsh literature who likewise worked ‘off-piste’. These included the two poets and scholar-teachers Raymond Garlick and Roland Mathias, who anchored their own invaluable individual initiatives to the indispensable journal the Anglo-Welsh Review that they in effect jointly developed from its tentative beginning as Dock Leaves into the major organ of record of a cautiously developing ‘Anglo-Welsh studies’. Their strikingly gifted younger contemporary Tony Conran likewise embarked on his career as one of Wales’s most distinguished poet-critics outside the walls of the university, despite being appointed tutor in English at the University College of North Wales, Bangor.
All That is Wales Page 3
