With the passing of time, she obviously came to feel real solidarity with the locals, and in particular to value the ‘sisterhood’ of women, strengthened by wartime conditions when, as she discovered through her own experience, they were left to survive traumas, from childbirth to bombing, while struggling to keep body and soul together not only for themselves but for their whole families. It was this practical experience of tough woman-power that led her, on VJ day, to declare angrily that ‘War will continue until women become freed from slavery … it will exist until they become no longer the slaves of men but their leaders towards a preservation of life’ (DLR, 69). And her campaigning identification with her subjugated gender, implicit in many of the poems in her 1944 collection, strengthened her inclination to identify with the Welsh as a subjugated people (DLR, 69). Her poetry was designed to promote liberation on both fronts.
Yet the value of Llanybri lay for her in its abiding, irreducible ‘foreignness’. To the last, she remained what sociologists would label ‘a participating observer’. To the very end she had to work hard to ‘read’ the locality–indeed omnivorous reading became an indispensable means, alongside constantly heightened observation, of gaining a clarity of understanding. And clarity was, for her, not just a passion but a consuming craving. She demanded of herself exactness of verbal and perceptual definition – her writing was underpinned by an obsession with classification and categorisation that led to her autodidact’s love-affair with all the ‘ologies’ – anthropology, mythology, etymology, entomology, geology, mineralogy, ornithology, lepidopterology and several more. Her appetite for clarity understandably made her impatient of the vague ‘Celtic Twilight’ maunderings of Ernest Rhys, that irrepressible veteran of the 1890s (as well as unlikely friend of Whitman, Yeats and Pound) who turned up on her doorstep like a cheerful, irresponsible tramp.6
Her taste for dispassionate precision was no doubt in part inherited from her engineer father – she inclined to treat poems not as organic secretions but as complex functional assemblages, rather as he must have viewed railways. But it may also have owed something to her early exposure to the clarity of Argentinian light, particularly in the region of the Andes. She commented with characteristic exactitude on the contrasting light of Wales, when mist and soft rain suddenly lifted and creatures, things and objects, caught in a ‘magnesium light’, stood out as if elementalised, washed clean of all superfluities:
The rain, the continual downpour of rain, may also compensate us indirectly, by giving us that pure day which precedes it … During those intervals the rain water is reflected back to us through a magnetic prism of light … Here, then, in Wales, we frequently get three concentrations of light, where normally most countries only have two. This third eye, or shaft of light, gives us the same privilege as many of our scattered islands hold, which are devoted to the Saints. That light magnifies, radiates truth, and cleanses our dusty spirits. (DLR, 130)
She also valued the way the slow tempo and leisurely rhythm of life in a rural community enhanced awareness of every detail of ordinary living (DLR, 64). And then there was the contrast with the ‘rich, mellow tones of English farmhouses’, that meant she, like other English visitors, felt ‘estranged and left singularly apart’ (DLR, 128). She even felt that, in its clear-cut geometrical forms and simple colours, the village of Llanybri resembled a Cubist painting: ‘the sharp outline of the whitewashed farms and houses as they stand against the skyline; the way in which the walls project geometrical planes of light that resemble the still life-life models of squares and cubes’ (DLR, 127).
Like Hopkins, Roberts revered the sacred quiddity and inscape of bird, stone, leaf and flower, and, again like him, she came to believe that the strict-metre poetry of traditional Welsh barddas was perfectly consonant in its ‘hardness’ and disciplined exactitudes of sound and metre with the society and landscape to which it was truly ‘native’. She came to view traditional Welsh rural crafts and architecture in the same ‘light’. There was percipience in her early comment that the poetic form of the Welsh englyn – which she proceeded to approximate in English – was ‘itself like the village, like a piece of quartz’ (DLR, 5).
The foreignness of Llanybri was, then, indispensable to her creativity. While empathising strongly with a village community in which ‘every home [is] a separate unit of the nation’s culture’ (130), she was aware of the secretiveness and peasant tricksiness of her neighbours. ‘The continual subjugation of the Welsh by conquerors has made them distrustful of strangers’, she noted sympathetically: ‘They have grown accustomed to using their wits’ (DLR, 69). Even as the village genuinely became a deeply loved home, it was not entirely ‘my home’, which was still ‘the South American home’. In the summer of 1941 she could still feel ‘lonely and homesick for the Argentine’ (DLR, 37), recalling the pampas, the Incas’ mountain grave, her railway-engineer father, the great River Plate region, the convent where she was educated, and Mechita where she was born. ‘I had the strong desire’, she frankly admitted, ‘to leave the village and go to South America.’ A year earlier, she had confessed to feeling ‘cramped and barred from life’, ‘tired of reading The Western Mail every day. The only news from the outside world. I’m tired of reading the poems of puny poets and want to do something. Something. I don’t know what’ (DLR, 9). The fall of France in the summer of 1940 had prompted a revealingly impassioned response:
I felt like running off to France and selling my British status. And I could do this, since I held an Argentinean Passport and could demand protection from the Argentine Embassy. If it were not for the understanding and knowledge of most of the people here in Llanybri, there and everywhere, I would REBEL and mightily. The villagers are superb in thought and action, and strangely enough there is considerable unity in their thoughts and approach to the war. They are far more intelligent and efficient than most of the ways and means of Parliament. (DLR, 17)
A prison Llanybri could seem at times for her spirit – some of the locals even briefly suspected her of spying – even as it was becoming a refuge and a place of sanity in a mad world, and a catalyst of creativity. Even in Llanybri, the New World was ever present at the deepest levels of her being, although it was not until war’s end that she explicitly began to address the formative significance of her native South America in her writings.
* * *
Her sensuous memories of Argentina retained an almost hallucinatory intensity for Roberts (‘Memory widens your senses’, she was later suggestively to write of her New World recollections), partly perhaps because her periods of living there were ephemerally brief and partly because they marked emotionally charged experiences in her family life. Her heightened powers of sensuous attention and recall were in any case always the most stunningly impressive aspect of both her personal life and her creative imagination. ‘One of my earliest memories’, she wrote in her bewitching radio talk on the origins of her South American poems, ‘was to wander out of the gate and stare at the South American pampas.’ ‘The New World’, she hauntingly admitted, ‘with its strange subtlety absorbed me with its vivid impressions, the spinning windmills irrigating the quintas, and as the corrugated containers filled with water, I bathed in them within shadow of the peach trees’ (DLR, 107).
But these impressions were not simply filed away in memory to be retrieved as nostalgia, they actively informed her responses even to Llanybri, eventually finding issue in her creative work. The suite of powerful poems included in her 1944 collection offer overt evidence of this. But more intriguing, if less arresting, are the examples available in the same collection, as in her journal, of more covert forms of indebtedness to her South American past. Later, in her radio talk, she was to place on public record her indignation at what was happening to the traditional life style of the ‘peasants/peons’ of her native land.
The small pueta where people lived with their horses tethered to the wooden posts outside their shacks, their songs, knife-fights, guitars, the dark shadows of the
peons cast as they gamble behind clouds of dust as the horse race took place. These were and still are at the root culture of the Argentine soil. So when the thatched roofs were torn down and corrugated roofs placed in their stead and values were placed on the wrong issues, I rebelled and wrote to establish belief in these people in my poem called ‘The New World’. (DLR, 108)
That poem, published in her 1944 collection, opens by evoking the original life of the peons, before they were forced first to flee ‘unwanted further on into the land’. There, where ‘Spiders lifted the lids of their homes and slammed them back’ – the detail is taken directly from her own earliest memories of the dusty end-of-the-line township of Mechita where she was born – ‘they strove, the harder not to be seen’. But to no avail. Modernity, in the form of a rapacious capitalism, caught ruthlessly up with them:
Lost now. No sound or care can revive their ways:
La Plata gambles on their courage, spends too flippantly,
Mocks beauty from the shading tree, mounts a corrugated roof
over their cultured hut. (CP, 29)
The anger in these lines was magnified when her uncomprehending London editor asked her to alter the phrase about the corrugated roof, because
it was so ugly. He did not see that that was the purpose of the whole poem. The estancias were being sold or mortgaged and the money drifted into the Casinos at La Plata. The peon or gaucho and the land were left in despair. (DLR, 109)
In 1872 the gaucho’s colourful, violent style of living had been famously glorified by José Hernandez in Martín Fierro (1872/1879), the ‘national epic’ that came to be regarded as epitomising ‘the root culture of the Argentinean soil’. And Roberts’s memories of both gauchos and peons were themselves clearly rooted, as her radio talk shows, in a very small child’s frustration at having been debarred from knowing more about their tantalisingly close but mysteriously ‘other’, seemingly ‘authentic’ and ‘indigenous’ world.
In fact, as we can now see, her ‘instinctive’ sense of that world’s ‘otherness’ had a cultural provenance. She grew up within the extensive immigrant, settler, community of an ‘Anglo’7 professional class and was thus very largely isolated not only from the indigenous cultures but from the dominant Hispanic culture of the country. Her response to the countryside, even, was mediated by the works of enormously influential ‘Anglo-Argentinian’ writers like W. H. Hudson, to whose books Hispanic as well as British children were routinely introduced at school. In this respect, her positioning within Argentina was, like her situation in Llanybri, largely that of a participating outsider.8 And the Eurocentricity of her outlook is everywhere marked.
It had, of course, been a common practice of European artists and intellectuals for two centuries to attribute sterling, precious, even redemptive qualities to a ‘peasant’ existence, valued for its supposed ‘authenticities’.9 But in Roberts’s case such an ideology had a distinctive individual relevance and a corresponding intensity that made it a valuable creative asset. As we shall see, her sympathy with the dispossessed peons and gauchos fed into her gradual awareness that the Welsh – particularly the ‘peasant’ Welsh-speakers of Llanybri and the rest of rural Wales – were a long-subjugated people, their traditions variously threatened by mummification, barbaric modernisation and obliteration.10 Her empathy with their plight also fed into her poetics, central to which was the attempt at a sympathetic melding of old and new.
But it was not only the peons and gauchos of Argentina with whom she imaginatively identified. An interest in the native peoples is manifest in an interesting poem she wrote for radio about a notable incident in the early history of the Welsh colony in Patagonia. In 1863, eighteen years after the first landing in Puerto Madryn, four young men from what was still at that point an exclusively coastal settlement ventured prospecting along the Chubut river. Two of them penetrated inland some four hundred miles, as far as the Andean foothills, where a couple of Araucanians (members of the indigenous ethno-cultural group nowadays known as the Mapuche) alarmed them with an invitation to visit their encampment. Rapidly retracing their steps, they had almost reached the safety of the settled region when they were ambushed. One of them was killed, but the other, John Evans, managed a Douglas Fairbanks escape by frantically spurring his horse into a prodigious leap across a canyon and then making his solitary way back through desert storms to the colony. Glyn Williams, a modern authority on the Welsh in Patagonia, has set the incident in context:
This was the first sign of hostility by the native people against any member of the Welsh Colony in eighteen years of contact. There had been several occasions when they had expressed dissatisfaction with the Welsh occupance of their territory, but the evidence suggests that any threat of hostility by one of the groups against the Colony resulted in discussion by one of the other groups. The probable reason for this lies in the cruel genocidal campaign carried on against the native people independently by both the Argentine and Chilean armies between 1879 and 1885. It has been suggested that the Indians were a group of Northern Araucans who were driven south by the military and took the opportunity of strengthening the Argentinian harassment.11
It was to this episode, relayed to her by Cadvan Hughes, the son-inlaw of John Evans, that Roberts turned when, at the end of the war, she began to consider ways in which she might put her childhood experiences in Argentina to creative advantage. Rejecting as too hackneyed the idea of a book of memoirs, she resolved instead to write a ballad about the Patagonian story, but ‘in it of course [to use] many of my own memories, as a background, or reconstruction of the event’ (CP, 112). She itemised some of the sensuous recollections of the pampas she particularly wanted to record:
The quality of the thistles which they used for fuel and making rennet, their hollowness and crack, seeing iguanas as they flashed past from before the horses’ hoofs, the legends, the racoon that I found on my dressing table, and who later was found curled up in sleep on my bed, the nutrias in hundreds, and flight, colour and song of the myriad birds, these I wanted to recreate. (CP, 112–13)12
As for the ballad form for which she opted, she undoubtedly appreciated its origins as a ‘peasant’, ‘folk’ form and its long history of local storytelling. But, given her enthusiasm at this time for the old ‘Welsh penillion’ (simple stanzas of folk experience and wisdom to be sung to harp accompaniment) she may also have felt the ballad provided a rough but acceptable English cultural equivalent. ‘I still have an ardent PASSION for penillion,’ she wrote to Graves in 1947, ‘I want to write penillion … I believe it is the most authentic and most wholesome material from which to build up any rural poetry. It is never sentimental in its original state’ (DLR, 185).13 And, since the poem makes explicit mention of Hernandez’s Martín Fierro (‘O ghost of Martín Fierro save us’ [CP, 122]), it is further possible she may have felt the ballad form had a ‘folk’ pedigree and popular authority corresponding to the payados of the ‘gauchesco’.14 Indeed, the most adept because best adapted of the four Welsh adventurers whose story she tells is specifically commended for having learnt gaucho skills: ‘He looked the gaucho in “wide awake” hat, / And lived that life as a guide’ (CP, 119). In her autobiography, she specifically associated her ballad with the gaucho figure. Noting that a friend had sent her a record of native music for use in the radio broadcast of ‘El Dorado’, she added, ‘He also sent a very large book of national Gaucho implements which has been very useful’ (DLP, 203). Given this mixture of sources, then, she may have viewed her ballad as a fruitful cultural hybrid; a mix of Welsh, English and Argentinian cultural forms; a creative blend of Old World and New.
That the poem connected Lynette Roberts to her earliest childhood in a particularly intimate way is underlined by its concluding with an old Spanish lullaby ‘which my mother in Mechita sang to me’ (CP, 113). She likewise identified strongly with the first Welsh settlers of Patagonia – although her personal wish to ‘identify’ as Welsh (if only partially) was a recent phenomen
on, the product of her stay in Llanybri. It was evidently important for her to establish that the friendly relations the Welsh enjoyed with the native tribes marked them apart from the Spanish, and for that matter the English. The band that attacked the four Welsh prospectors are clearly identified as a maverick group of avengers, outraged by the wholesale slaughter of natives by General Julio Argentino Roca and his forces during the infamous genocidal ‘Conquest of the Desert’. In pointed contrast, Roberts gives pride of place to one of the colonists’ key ‘myths of origin’, as related by Davies:
‘Not long ago when we lived in caves,
And Indians stood bare …
From nowhere … My father spoke:
The Chief stood back with care.
Suddenly the Indian’s wife bent down,
And with thorn and thread as sinew,
Without a word Father’s trousers tacked
And repaired the tear as new.’ (CP, 121)
The Patagonian equivalent of the Pocahontas story, this episode serves much the same purpose: it suggests that in welcoming the Welsh, the native tribes implicitly bestowed a blessing on their invasion of the land. And in highlighting this ‘myth’,15 it is as if Roberts is claiming that same blessing for herself, in the name of the ‘Welshness’ she supposedly shared with those first settlers. Hers, thus, becomes an authentic, primal relation to the land, ‘innocent’ of the stigma of violent misappropriation that marks the relationship to it of colonists like the Anglos and the Hispanics. In this way, the Welsh connection helped assuage the guilt she felt at the possibility of having been, if only by virtue of the white skin that bespoke her Europeanness, complicit in the seizure of the land from its original populations. Had she not read as a girl ‘that the Incas if they shot a white man buried him upside down’ (DLR, 195)?
All That is Wales Page 6
