Graduating in English from Swansea in 1965 I still had only the very dimmest sense of such formative developments, but it became clear enough over the next decade or more that I was living through a revolution in Welsh cultural history that was being powered by major social, economic and political transformations. Some of these were global in origin as in implication – the final dismemberment of Empire, the collapse of British industrial civilisation, the wave of grass-roots protest movements from the US to Europe, the irresistible rise of popular culture and crisis of ‘high culture’, the dramatic ethnic diversification of the UK population. Others were local, but often featured the transformation of global trends into Welsh terms: the Tryweryn protests and campaigns of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the jolt given to the hegemonic British state in Wales by the rise of Plaid Cymru, the violently divisive issue of the Investiture, the evidently terminal decline of industrial south Wales. These and other major fractures to the long-established order led to radical cultural realignments involving, for example, the emergence of a common front between Welsh-language and English-language writers and to conditions seriously favourable, for the very first time in Welsh history, to the development of a bicultural identity. Two publishing events of the mid-1960s helped reinforce this seminal development: Poetry Wales was founded in 1965 by Meic Stephens to provide young Welsh anglophone poets with an opportunity to see their work in print, and in 1967 Tony Conran published the Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, a revelatory anthology of Welsh poetry from the sixth century to the twentieth in English translation.
The distinctively Welsh version of a 1960s ‘counter-culture’ was formidably reinforced with the formation by the UK government, in 1967, of an Arts Council for Wales served by a number of discrete art-form committees, of which one of the most financially powerful and culturally influential was the Literature Committee (which I later came to chair). Its director, for almost a quarter of a century, was Meic Stephens, a young poet who proved to be a visionary (if controversial) administrator of inexhaustible determination and energy and insofar as any one person can be credited with having transformed what had been the marginalised cultural phenomenon of ‘Anglo-Welsh Literature’ into the present-day book industry of ‘Welsh Writing in English’, it is undoubtedly he. Most of his efforts understandably went on supporting writers and creating a rudimentary publishing infrastructure that respected professional standards in a Wales whose authors had hitherto had to look to London (or occasionally to Dublin) for publication outlets. But Stephens had an acute sense of historical perspective and a sometime-teacher’s awareness of the role of the educational sector in fashioning lifelong habits of reading. Consequently, he enabled the establishment of the first bona fide publisher of Welsh anglophone literature (Poetry Wales Press, subsequently Seren Books), and commissioned and launched an impressive range of critical and scholarly publications, from the pioneering Writers of Wales series of monographs to the magisterial Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales that he himself so consummately edited. It would not be entirely disproportionate to describe these initiatives as paradigm-shifting in the context of Wales’s apprehension of its own literary tradition and cultural profile. And the rise in Welsh academia of a cohort of scholars committed to exploring the anglophone literary culture of Wales would scarcely have been possible without the enticing preliminary mapping of the field that had been undertaken under the auspices of the Welsh Arts Council.
In his work, Stephens benefited from earlier initiatives by lone individuals such as Bryn Griffiths and by Sally Roberts Jones, one of the key figures in the creation of an English-language section of Yr Academi Gymreig (The Welsh Academy), the first institution to appreciate the need to bring significant English-language texts from the Welsh past back into print, thus anticipating by almost half a century the flagship Library of Wales series launched in 2005 by the Welsh Government. In the absence of any university literature specialists competent to edit such texts, the Academi turned to Dai Smith,17 a specialist in coalfield culture and lavishly talented young member of the school of Left-leaning Welsh historians whose emergence during the post-war period had so radically extended and enriched understanding of the social, political and economic past of modern Wales. And given the particular interest of many of those historians in the dramatic history of the South Wales coalfield, attention naturally tended to be concentrated on writers from this richly congested area.
The 1960s also saw the establishing of courses, and indeed of departments, of ‘American studies’ in British universities, a development openly supported by the American Embassy in London, the newly established Institute for United States Studies at the University of London (whose founding director was an Aberystwyth-educated Welshman, Howell Daniels), and covertly by the CIA. As an undergraduate, I myself had profited from such an initiative and subsequent to my appointment to the staff at Swansea I embarked on a career that was to result in my establishing my international credentials as a Whitman scholar and spending two periods as Visiting Professor at Harvard University. It was at this time that I became fast friends with one of the founding figures of the great Library of America series, the distinguished Americanist Dan Aaron, and it was conversations with him that led later to my recommending to the Welsh Assembly Government that it seriously consider funding a parallel series of classic reprints in Wales to be called The Library of Wales. In keeping with several of my contemporaries in Wales I was to find that an acknowledged ‘global’ status as a ‘mainstream’ scholar, confirmed by my election as Fellow of the prestigious British Academy, was to provide me with indispensable cover within academe as I persisted in venturing on an otherwise risky maverick second career as a scholar of Welsh Writing in English.
Exactly how disadvantageous such a career might otherwise have proved was brought home dramatically when I very belatedly applied for a Personal Chair. The interview was pleasant enough, apart from aggressive questioning by one Valleys-boy turned ‘Oggsford man’ (as The Great Gatsby acidly puts it) who insisted on suggesting that my record of extensive publication on the literatures of Wales made mine a mere provincial reputation, unworthy of recognition by promotion to his own rank of Professor. It was, I subsequently learnt, only an exceedingly flattering letter of support from Helen Vendler, one of the greatest literary critics not only of Harvard but of the whole of the US, that reduced him eventually to silence.
The embracing of ‘American studies’ by British universities opened the doors of erstwhile conservative departments of English to the study of literatures in English whose provenance was not England. This later led to a distinction being drawn between ‘English literature’ and ‘english literature’, the former being the literature of England itself, the latter being the term coined to describe the literatures in English that had proliferated across the globe in the wake of the decolonisation movements of the post-war period. Such a distinction was in due course to help legitimise, and indeed to ‘normalise’, the ‘english’ literature of Wales, and to make it more visible both to the Welsh themselves and to outsiders.
Following on from the craze for things American, the 1970s saw the growth, across the UK higher education system, of ‘Commonwealth studies’. The precursor of what later became known as ‘postcolonial studies’, it provided Ned Thomas, newly appointed as lecturer in the Department of English at University College, Aberystwyth, with an opportunity to smuggle specimens of the anglophone writing of Wales (alongside translations from Welsh-language literature) into a course of study of a kind grudgingly accepted at the time by British universities as legitimate. In so doing, he was capitalising on his impeccable reputation as an internationalist. Multilingual, and a confirmed Europhile with experience of working as an academic on the Continent, he had latterly been the editor of the Russian-language periodical sponsored by the British government as a propaganda tool during the Cold War.18 Such was the state of cultural affairs in the Wales of the early 1970s, however, that Ned Thomas discovered the Welsh anglopho
ne texts he wanted to include in his Commonwealth literature course were no longer in print. He therefore had to xerox passages from library copies in order to compile booklets for the use of his students. And in Jeremy Hooker, a fine poet and exceptional critic, Thomas found a young colleague who shared his own admiration for the neglected writers of Wales.
Other individuals ventured on similarly innovative ventures elsewhere. At Trinity College, Carmarthen, Raymond Garlick, along with a few colleagues, took advantage of the somewhat more intellectually permissive Training College culture to insert ‘Anglo-Welsh’ elements into the syllabus, while at St David’s University College, Lampeter, Belinda Humfrey extended her core interest in the work of the Powys brothers into a wider preoccupation with selected aspects of the anglophone literary tradition of Wales and was one of the first to add examples from it to the academic syllabus.19
It was not until the mid-1980s, however, that literature scholars across the HE sector in Wales set in train a more ambitious programme of interlinked developments resulting from an informal meeting of young academics at University College, Swansea in 1984.20 The meeting had been convened by me largely at the instigation of John Pikoulis of University College Cardiff’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies, its primary purpose being to bring together a small group of young scholars with a view to exploring the possibility of creating some kind of informal professional alliance based on shared interests in the English-language literature of Wales. This resulted in the formation of a ‘self-help’ organisation that christened itself ‘The University of Wales Association for the Study of Welsh Writing in English’ (AWWE) of which I served as Secretary.21 Starved though it was of any financial support and lacking any formal institutional validation, the fledgling association – consisting both of intramural and extramural university staff from across the HE sector in Wales,22 and consciously appealing as much to a lay as to an academic constituency – nevertheless soon arranged for a conference to be held annually at the University of Wales’s centre at Gregynog, near Newtown,23 and entered boldly into an informal agreement with two presses – the University of Wales Press and Seren Books – with a view to establishing three series of publications: one (which I edited) would feature significant creative texts carefully selected and edited with an eye to the schools market; another would consist of authoritative scholarly editions of the work of major authors; and the third would take the form of biographical and critical studies. It was this major tripartite publishing initiative instigated by AWWE that was, in due course, to help enable the prestigious Library of Wales project and to pave the way for such valuable series as Writing Wales in English and Gender Studies in Wales.
In the end, upwards of two dozen books bearing the AWWE imprint appeared from a number of presses, an impressive body of work to have been accomplished by what was, in fact, a tiny stage-army of scholars – no sooner had a scholar exited one side of the stage proudly bearing a volume than s/he reappeared perforce on the other side of the stage equipped with a new publication. The first comprehensive history of Welsh Writing in English, published in 2003, was the cumulative product of all this scholarship and should have been widely recognised and welcomed in Wales and beyond as a landmark volume.24 That it was not was no doubt indicative of the residue of ignorance – and indeed apathy – that continued to exist not only within the Welsh academy but also in Welsh cultural circles in general and beyond.
However, hopeful signs of an incipient change in the intellectual climate began to appear at the turn of the millennium, most notably in the form of the recognition for the first time by the UK Research Assessment Exercise of Welsh Writing in English as a legitimate field of scholarly activity, and the commissioning by the Welsh Assembly Government of a review of its programme of provision for the anglophone culture of Wales. This resulted in the award in 2004 of a sum of a quarter of a million pounds to the Welsh Books Council to administer an extensive programme of grant-support for the English-language book industry in Wales. Combined with the smaller sum for the grant support of English-language literature that had been transferred from the Welsh Arts Council the previous year, this government investment enabled the Books Council, under my Chairmanship, to embark on an ambitious, multi-faceted funding scheme that would totally change the Welsh literary landscape.
From its inception, AWWE had been concerned to introduce and manage a consciousness-raising campaign to increase awareness of Welsh Writing in English both at home and abroad. School visits were organised, with an eye as much to the educating of teachers as of pupils, and eventually Masters courses began to be developed at several university colleges, with the intention of attracting not only postgraduate students but also teachers keen to take advantage of INSET (in-service training) opportunities. Welsh Writing in English began to be recognised, too, at undergraduate level, and later still, postgraduate research was encouraged. A final development was the emergence of specialist centres of advanced research such as CREW (the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) at Swansea (home to both the Encyclopaedia of Wales project and BWLET (Bibliography of Welsh-Language Literature in English Translation)), to whose growth my late friend and colleague James A. Davies made such a notable contribution; and the R. S. Thomas Centre (Bangor) that has developed into the world’s major Thomas archive. The success of this programme of interlinked initiatives in developing a new generation of scholars may partly be gauged by statistics that show that, up to the time of writing, more than sixty doctoral dissertations on Welsh Writing in English have been produced over the last decade or so by the HE sector in Wales.
Particularly worthy of emphasis, perhaps, is the fact that all these developments were the result of ready, friendly, mutually supportive collaboration between colleagues across all of Wales’s university system, and that at a time when official UK government policy was to encourage ruthless competition between individuals, disciplines and institutions. But there was one sad, and fateful, occasion, when institutional selfishness won out. When, a decade or so ago, first I, and then (in collaboration with me) Kirsti Bohata, very much with the enthusiastic support of colleagues right across the sector, succeeded in putting together a highly detailed proposal for the establishment of an inter-university, Wales-wide, National Research Institute for the study of Welsh Writing in English – a proposal actually prepared in response to a recommendation by the then Education Minister, Jane Davidson – it was scuppered by the refusal of several key institutions to support it, although it would have brought significant sums of research money (from the Welsh Government’s substantial fund to reconfigure HE in Wales) into their respective coffers. Theirs was, I continue to feel, a negative decision of historic significance.
Very much with an eye to internationalisation, AWWE arranged during the 1990s for piratical groups of raiding scholars to descend on international conferences from France, Germany, Luxembourg and Slovakia to the US and Canada, and to deliver a salvo of papers, while tentative working alliances were established with cognate organisations in Scotland and Ireland. Among the long-term consequences of these and other missionary endeavours was the gradual piecemeal establishment of leading figures from AWWE in influential roles within the academic and cultural sectors in Wales, a development that facilitated the ‘normalising’ and ‘mainstreaming’ of what had begun as very much a suspect programme of peripheral studies. And, of course, the training, over some three decades, of several cohorts of talented young scholars meant that Wales was provided for the first time with the means of developing a spectrum of approaches to its anglophone literary culture consonant with the exciting diversification of critical discourses and analytical paradigms that characterised contemporary literary studies worldwide. Crucial to this latter development was the establishment (1995) by AWWE of a specialist journal – the Yearbook for Welsh Writing in English25 – that, under the impeccable stewardship of its founding editor, Tony Brown, established new standards for literary and cultural criticism i
n Wales.
The Yearbook was, in a way, a companion to the New Welsh Review, the literary periodical the Association had co-founded a few years earlier in 1988 (in partnership with the English-language section of Yr Academi Gymreig) under the scrupulous editorship of Belinda Humfrey. As, with the passage of time, that periodical gradually inclined more towards creative writing than critical discussion, Association members began to feel the need for a new, scholarly, publication. The launch of the Yearbook satisfied that need and over the next twenty years the journal went on to contribute very substantially to the professionalisation of the study of Welsh Writing in English and to the related development of a cadre of academic specialists well versed in contemporary critical discourses.
Under the auspices – in the most relaxed and hospitable of senses – of an AWWE that has by now matured into a multigenerational fellowship of mutually supportive scholars, the professional study of Wales’s anglophone literary culture has been steadily and quietly transformed. Among the most spectacular of the consequences have probably been the revelatory uncovering of a substantial body of writing by Welsh women, indicative explorations of Wales’s bicultural past and present, and the increasingly confident examination of Welsh writing in a global perspective. Not that there isn’t far more work yet to be done. Indeed, the study of Welsh Writing in English remains very much at an inaugural stage. Even before one allows for the certainty that the rising generation of young scholars will determine its own unguessable priorities and will set its own distinctive agenda for research, there are so many enticing subjects and resources already staring today’s salaried academics in the face – for instance, the National Library of Wales’s extensive and valuable holdings of authors’ manuscript collections remain virtually unexplored, as does the Library’s rich archive of radio features, scripts, plays and poems by Wales’s anglophone writers of yesterday; the transformative contribution to literature made by key institutions such as the Welsh Arts Council and the Welsh Books Council has yet to be properly registered, let alone properly evaluated; there has been no sustained attempt made to determine Wales’s place in the cultural reconfiguration of the ‘British Isles’ as an ‘Anglo-Celtic Archipelago’; nor has the process of disentangling the complex implications of the traditional embeddedness of Welsh Writing in English in an Anglocentric ‘British’ literary tradition even begun as yet.
All That is Wales Page 4
