All That is Wales
Page 5
That there is a deficit of like magnitude when it comes to the institutionalisation of this important area of study becomes glaringly apparent the minute one begins to consider the situation in Ireland and Scotland, neighbouring countries that officially recognise their respective literary traditions as a global asset and ensure that the study of native literatures at both school and university level is not only encouraged but actively facilitated and financially supported. In stark contrast, neither the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales nor the Welsh HE sector is in any way expected, let alone obliged, to safeguard and develop the academic study of an anglophone literary culture that contributes so seminally to the national profile of present-day Wales, while the challenge of ‘normalising’ the study of Welsh Writing in English in the schools of Wales has yet to be properly confronted and fully met.
And then, there is the crucial issue of the future of the University of Wales Press, the nation’s sole academic publisher, without whose encouragement and support the revelatory cultural scholarship of the last thirty years would not have been possible. Publication, after all, not only remains a vital means of disseminating research, it is also a vital stimulus to research. Cynically deserted by the academic institutions that should be cherishing it for its distinguished past record and eager to exploit its potential, and casually abandoned by scholars intent on their own short-term interests rather than the wider, long-term cultural good, the Press currently faces a struggle to survive. It is a daunting and dismaying prospect.
* * *
Refracted through the prism of the body of research enabled by AWWE (and almost exclusively published by UWP) over the last three decades, the anglophone literary culture of Wales has by degrees revealed the full spectrum of its colours of saying. And it is that valuable ongoing process of intra-cultural diversification that has provided context, precedent and incentive for the sample essays that are collected in this volume. In miniature form, they mirror the multivalent readings of the culture that have characterised the wide-ranging scholarship developed under the auspices of AWWE. Thus, hopefully, they instance, albeit within a narrowly limited compass, the microcosmopolitan character of a small country.
Notes
1Jan Morris, Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
2Michael Cronin, ‘Global Questions and Local Visions: A Microcosmopolitan Perspective’, in Alyce von Rothkirch and Daniel Williams (eds), Beyond the Difference: Welsh Literature in Comparative Contexts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 186–202.
3M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference: Literature in Twentieth-Century Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).
4M. Wynn Thomas, Corresponding Cultures: The Two Literatures of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999); M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), DiFfinio Dwy Lenyddiaeth Cymru (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1995).
5M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Ewtopia: cyfandir dychymyg y Cymry’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), Cymru a’r Cymry 2000: Wales and the Welsh 2000 (Aberystwyth: Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2001), pp. 99–118.
6M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010).
7M. Wynn Thomas, The Nations of Wales, 1890–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016).
8There are ten volumes in this valuable series in all. See particularly my introductory essay to Hywel Teifi Edwards (ed.), Yn gymysg oll i gyd (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 2003).
9See Charles Nicholl’s fascinating study The Lodger (London: Penguin, 2008).
10M. Wynn Thomas (trans.), Dail Glaswellt, Walt Whitman (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, on behalf of Yr Academi Gymreig, 1995).
11Momaday’s House Made of Dawn must be one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century.
12James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 2000), 2005.
13In my judgement, the best study by some distance on this subject is that by Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), based on a doctoral thesis completed under my supervision.
14M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); M. Wynn Thomas, Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005). The latter devotes a chapter to the reception of Whitman’s poetry in Wales.
15See ‘America: Cân fy Hunan’, in M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Gweld Sêr: Cymru a Chanrif America (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2001), pp. 1–29. See also the Preface to M. Wynn Thomas, Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S./ Whitman U.K.
16Price was, however, one of the first ‘English’ academics in Wales to supervise doctoral work on ‘Anglo-Welsh’ authors, including the American Kent Thompson’s pioneering study in the mid-1960s of Dylan Thomas’s Swansea, and Sandra Anstey’s groundbreaking examination of R. S. Thomas’s poetry and prose in the mid-1970s. And, also at Swansea, Désirée Hirst was an early enthusiastic champion of the ‘Anglo-Welsh’ credentials of David Jones and an admirer of Emyr Humphreys. At Cardiff, Terence Hawkes published occasionally on Anglo-Welsh writing, while R. George Thomas produced some perceptive essays on R. S. Thomas, and also specialised in the poetry of Edward Thomas.
17Coincidentally, Dai Smith was later to become Editor of the Library of Wales series.
18Ned Thomas, Bydoedd: Cofiant Cyfnod (Tal-y-bont: Y Lolfa, 2010).
19As late as 1986, the study of Welsh Writing in English across the HE sector was limited to the following: ‘one undergraduate course at Aberystwyth and occasional postgraduate theses; no undergraduate courses at Bangor, though with the occasional MA thesis; no teaching in the field at the Department of English at Cardiff, some in Extramural teaching; at Lampeter, which under the guidance of Belinda Humfrey was very much a path-finder in the field, there was some provision at both undergraduate and MA level; at Swansea there was some teaching of Welsh Writing in English in the context of modern literature, a (new) special author course on Dylan Thomas and a recently introduced MA scheme.’ Information drawn from the History of the Association compiled by Professor Tony Brown for the AWWE website.
20I am deeply indebted to my friend Professor Tony Brown for sharing his ‘A Short History’ of AWWE with me, and for his advice in the writing of this Preface.
21At that time, there was but the one, federal, university in Wales. As a new, plural, HE sector began to be developed, the Association renamed itself ‘The Universities of Wales Association for the Study of Welsh Writing in English’, which was later shortened (1996) to ‘The Association for Welsh Writing in English’.
22Notable figures in this connection were Tom Thomas, English Tutor in the Extra-Mural Department at University College, Swansea and Wyndham Griffiths, English Tutor in the Extra-Mural Department at University College, Swansea. The latter became an active member of the Association and, along with his close friend and colleague Tom, organised a number of internationally successful Dylan Thomas Conferences at Swansea during the mid-1970s. One of the young students who attended these conferences was Mark Abley, who went on to considerable fame as a writer in his native Canada.
23The first conference was held in 1986.
24M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).
25This was rebranded under subsequent editors, first as Almanac and then (and currently) as the International Journal for Welsh Writing in English.
1
THE SCARLET WOMAN: LYNETTE ROBERTS
Lynette Roberts and Keidrych Rhys were married in Llansteffan on 4 October 1939. The very same month her poem ‘To Keidrych Rhys’ was published in Wales, the brash harlequinade of a literary journal established and edited (up to this particular number) by Rhys, her colourful, buccaneering, incorrigibly errant new husband. ‘I have seen,’ she there declared with a bardic claim to omnipresence that later, no doubt, she would have recognised made her unconscious kin to
the ancient Taliesin, legendary poet-prophet of her adopted country,1
light birds sailing
A ploughed field in wine
Whose ribs expose grave treasures
Inca’s gilt-edged mine; …
I have seen, the mountain of pumas
Harbour a blue-white horse.
The tinsel-rain on dogs coat
Zebra shoes at night.2
It reads like an ecstatic epithalamium, while its title, ‘To Keidrych Rhys’, seems also to turn it into a gift-giving ritual: a bride’s ceremonial public display of her lavish dowry. That dowry, as the poem makes clear, is all the exotica of her ‘foreign’ imagination. And it is this largesse, in all its richness, that is again flaunted in the ‘Poem’ she published in the next (Winter) issue of Wales:
For my house is clothed in Scarlet.
Scarlet my household, Scarlet my mind, spiced herbed and cherished, all alcoves wine
Laughter in corners, winks on air chasing shadows on ceiling bruins in lair.
Plush lacquered incense, open flowers on wall, frothed milk bread and honey to overcome falls
So come myth children, no longer fear, the winter is impotent under my care
For my house is clothed in Scarlet.3
Roberts had already lived an extraordinary life, peripatetic, adventurous and not just international but intercontinental. From the beginning, the solid privileges and comforts that were hers thanks to her Welsh Australian father’s career as manager (and later director) of Argentina’s Western Railways had been offset by his rather louche, freewheeling personal conduct.4 A family life supportive enough but rather rickety and improvisatory had been permanently destabilised by the early death of her mother. Thus partly, perhaps, in self-defence, Roberts early developed a restless, daring, unconventional spirit of her own. Resilience and adaptability had been hard-wired into her. As a girl, she’d survived sleazy boarding houses; as a young woman in Buenos Aires, she’d acted as her father’s companion on formal occasions while also holding her own ‘soirées’ for artists and intellectuals; in London, she’d dabbled in bohemia yet acquired diplomas for interior decoration, completed Constance Spry courses in flower arranging, and run her own florist business.
There is therefore, in retrospect, something rather poignant about this defiant poem by a gutsy autumn bride about to start her married life at the outbreak of war in a damp, cold, bleakly windy corner of rural Wales, in a tiny stone cottage with an earthen floor. At least she had her ‘myth children’ to comfort her and to nourish her imagination, and from these she was to draw some of her solace in the challenging years ahead. But at times it was hard. ‘I feel chequered with energy’, she noted in her journal in the spring of 1940: ‘Full of positive red squares and black negative ones. What shall I do?’ (DLR, 8). And later that March, she recorded, ‘The wind was cold. I drew my scarlet cape around me and walked leisurely, as village people do’ (DLR, 9). It was an early attempt to adapt herself to her locality; to adopt its normalities (that leisurely walk) for camouflage, but without entirely repressing her creative energies – that defiantly scarlet cape which she took to wearing on all her walks became a blazon of her quietly scandalous internal difference, as did the ‘scarlet letter’ of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s celebrated novel. The poetry of the next few years was to show her devising strikingly original strategies of adaptation that would guarantee the creative survival of her singular identity.
In the same, October, issue of Wales that saw the publication of his new wife’s ‘study in scarlet’, Keidrych Rhys published a poem of his own, ‘The Van Pool, Tichrig’. Which ‘Van’ he had in mind isn’t entirely clear – fan (ban in its original, un-mutated, form) being simply the Welsh for ‘peak’. A ‘peak’ is y fan (‘f’ in Welsh being the ‘v’ sound in English), and the Brecon Beacons peaks that loom over Keidrych Rhys’s native district of the Ceidrych valley are known in Welsh as Bannau (plural of ban) Brycheiniog – the Breconshire peaks. But there is one b/fan adjacent to the localities identified in Rhys’s poem that stands out in popular imagination as in cultural memory, along with the pool at its base. The latter is known as Llyn y Fan Fach (‘the lake of the small peak’, a neighbouring peak being named Y Fan Fawr [‘the great peak’]). Attached to the spot is a well-known and greatly loved legend; that of the Lady of the Lake. She it is who lived under the pool’s waters until she was wooed ashore by the entrancing rhymes of a young shepherd, whom she duly agreed to marry. Together they had several sons, but she had warned her human husband at the outset of the strange unbreakable conditions on which their unlikely alliance was based, and when, somewhat unthinkingly, he broke each of these in turn over a period of years, she sadly gathered about her all the cattle she had brought out of her native depths as dowry and departed back to the waters from which she had briefly emerged.
Whether Rhys, who wrote several poems about the ‘Van pool’, actually had that specific lake and its legend in mind is immaterial. What is significant is that Lynette Roberts was to become enchanted by it. Noting this, critics and commentators have, unfortunately, been led so suppose that ‘Hal-e-bant, Fan Fach’, in the poem ‘Plasnewydd’, is an allusion to the tale. It is not. ‘Fan’ (abridgement of ‘Fanny’) was a very common name for a Welsh sheepdog, and in her Carmarthenshire diary Roberts specifically mentions that her great friend and neighbour, Rosie Davies, had two sheepdogs, ‘Fan and Tips’ (DLR, 64). The phrase in the poem is therefore a record of the everyday instruction to a sheepdog, Fan (fach, ‘little’, being simply here a form of endearment akin to ‘dear’), to hal e bant, ‘send [or shoo] him [cow, sheep or naughty cat, “pussy drwg”] away.’ After all, for the incomer Roberts the mundane minutiae of Llanybri constituted a new exotica.
No, the significance of the Llyn y Fan legend probably went much deeper with Roberts than that. Could she have failed to recognise key aspects of herself in the tragic, seductive figure of that fey, faery lady? In that denizen of a strange, alien, beguiling world? Didn’t that instinctive early gesture of presenting herself to her husband and his world at the very moment of her marriage as a ‘scarlet woman’, a visitor from a distant, foreign, scandalously opulent world, come to rhyme eerily in her ears with the story of the ill-fated Lady? Might it therefore not prove prophetic of a similar fate for herself? And might not her poetry bear witness to her predicament? What follows is a reflection on precisely such possibilities.
* * *
The poem with which Lynette Roberts announced her mature arrival as ‘Welsh’ poet to the world could scarcely have been more different than ‘To Keidrych Rhys’. Her first collection, Poems (1944), opens with ‘Poem from Llanybri’, a title that designedly and deservedly represents Roberts as grounded in her adopted village. In it, she – who had lived in the village for less than two years – confidently presents herself as an insider, a native well versed in local customs and thoroughly (even nonchalantly) au fait with the patois; indeed as someone already ‘authorised’ to act as the confident voice of her community and to speak on its behalf. Hers is an impressive impersonation – for such it surely is – of cultural authority. But fully to appreciate its performative aspects and to value its complex, hard-earned, achievement one needs to acquaint oneself with writings by Roberts of an entirely different kind and place: those related to her earliest years in Argentina. It is, after all, no coincidence that the collection that opens with ‘Poem from Llanybri’ draws to a conclusion with a suite of poems about South America, before ending with a return to Cwmcelyn. As she noted in July 1941, ‘I have a backward glance at the Argentine[,] my father and Mechita [where she was born]. I start a series of poems which were written here in Tygwyn but they are a South American group’ (DLR, 218).
‘Here are cucumbers in flower, tomatoes and sweet-corn,’ she noted in her journal on 13 July 1941, ‘but in my home – the South American home – we have bee-like humming-birds, flamingos wandering in the paddock, white peacocks, and the sun’s resilient rays’ (DLR,
37). No doubt sensitised anew by such nostalgic recollection, her eye was caught just two days later by the scarlet that seemed always to take her back in imagination to Argentina, prompting her to plan a ‘Poem on Moorhen and its scarlet garters’ (DLR, 8).5 She had nevertheless settled into her Welsh village with impressive resolution, had already grown to love aspects of life there, had started to master, through hard physical labour, some of the important skills and crafts of subsistence country living, and had begun to investigate her physical surroundings with a formidably ‘scientific’ analytic and forensic thoroughness even while appreciating its aesthetic and compositional aspects, brilliantly registering its characteristic forms, colours and textures with an artist’s subtlety and sensitivity.