All That is Wales
Page 7
Not that Roberts’s interest in Patagonia was entirely nostalgic. On the contrary. She concluded her radio broadcast on the Welsh connection with an impassioned plea for contemporary Wales to pay attention to what had been achieved in the face of substantial odds in ‘Y Wladfa’, because there was so much to learn from the courage, adventure, resources and enterprise of the early settlers. Broadcast in 1945, her comments therefore applied in part to the immediate post-war period. But by then her six-year stay in Llanybri had made her aware of a far older, indeed seemingly chronic, malaise of the Welsh psyche, a lack of self-confidence that was the consequence of ‘continual subjugation … by conquerors’, as she perceptively put it in a diary entry that same year (DLR, 69). As a result, she remarked in her broadcast, ‘Wales seems oppressed partly through her own misdirection, and partly through outside jurisdiction’ (DLR, 133). A concentration on Welsh Patagonia ‘would help to extend [the country’s] vision, which at the moment, through suffering, has become too parochial. An exchange, I believe, on all matters, such as agriculture, political and cultural, would stimulate and help both countries to develop.’
This (liberating) concern to bring out the international dimensions and connections of Welsh life both past and present finds interesting creative issue in Roberts’s poetry. The grandiose pseudo-scholarship paraded by Robert Graves as he constructed his own ingenious personal poetic mythography in a series of articles that culminated in The White Goddess appealed greatly to her, as the sustained correspondence between Graves and herself confirms. His fanciful narrative seemed to ‘prove’ that ancient Wales had been firmly linked in to a mythic pathway that had extended along the seaways and trade routes all the way through the Mediterranean to the Aegean and onwards to India, the source of all Indo-European cultures. Ancient Welsh legend and poetry everywhere bore covert testimony, he claimed, to this esoteric international ‘songline’, in which was encoded the primal secret religion of the ‘White Goddess’, whose priests were the Druids and whose initiates were the bards.
Roberts’s poem ‘The Circle of C’ is one in which she connects herself as Llanybri poet to this supposed tradition, since her consciously ‘bardic’ imagination, having been initiated into Graves’s secret lore, perceives the ‘C’ of ‘Cwmcelyn’ (and of ‘cinder’ and ‘curlew’, both words that play a key role in the poem) to be a letter from the sacred ‘tree alphabet’ of the Celts.16 Cwmcelyn Bay thus reveals its hidden Druidic aspects to her. Accordingly, she assumes the role of a devotee and petitions the powers instinct in the sacred landscape to grant her prophetic insight so that she might foresee the fate of her lover (Keidrych Rhys, then away on war duty guarding the east coast of England). The Delphic answer she receives is, of course, full of dark foreboding and delivered against the background of the baying of the ‘Dogs of Annwn’ (the Celtic underworld). The ‘C’ of the title seems also to refer to the belief she shared with Graves that the travels of the magical ‘White Cow’ (emblem and emissary, so to speak, of the White Goddess) traced a ‘circular route’ (168). And her belief in the sacred significance of the letter surfaces again when, in her essay on ‘Village Dialect’, she mentions ‘a reference by Giraldus to the circular dance of the Welsh and this is from his Itinerarium Kambriae, 1188 AD’ (120).
The estuarine situation of Llanybri, which features so prominently not only in ‘Cwmcelyn’ but in her major poem ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’, fitted in perfectly with Graves’s theories, since the myths that were the carriers of the White Goddess religion travelled along the ancient sea routes. Roberts homed in on Finnegans Wake because it made mention of the ‘Celtic’ link between the Liffey and the Towy: ‘Joyce … linked up the close mythology and dialect between the peoples of Eire and Wales – the Liffey – “Towy too”’ (DLR, 119). All this accorded well with Lynette Roberts’s own deep respect for the sea, dating from her early experiences of ten transatlantic journeys between Britain and South America. ‘For the British born in the Argentine’, she wrote, ‘there are many voyages’, and in ‘Seagulls’ she captured the nexus of experiences that was, for her, the essence of these trips. Describing a typical stopover en route at a port in the Canaries, the poem artfully encapsulates the ambivalences of feeling about land and sea. While the former offers the stability of ties, those ties take the form of the greedy locals who come alongside in their rowing boats only to fleece the voyagers by selling them shoddy ‘bargains’. As for the sea, that is wistfully associated with the ‘seagulls’ easy glide’ but also viewed queasily as ‘an ocean of uncertainty’(CP, 17).
Elsewhere, as if seeking for a magical sea route that would connect Argentina to Llanybri through a transatlantic extension of the White Goddess trail, she makes an interesting suggestion in a letter to Graves about the possible meaning of a phrase from a famous boast by the legendary poet, magician, priest and shape-changer Taliesin:
What puzzles me is what does he mean by I was born ‘Under the region of the summer stars’. As the legend carries the tale in various versions that he was shipwrecked & found in a coracle, or like Moses cradled in reeds, I have often wondered if it may have meant under the Southern Hemisphere or tropical stars. (DLR, 173)
Partly motivated by stories like this, Roberts thoroughly researched the history of the Welsh coracle. Fascinated by its continuing use in the Llanybri vicinity during her period there, she campaigned strongly for the modest ‘industry’ it served to be publicly supported. She also wanted it to take advantage of modern synthetic textiles and for coracles to be ‘machine-sprayed with ICI plastics’ (DLR, 136). But at the same time her passion for the coracle was steeped in her poet’s sensitivity to the numinous aura by which the little ‘primitive’ craft had, over many centuries if not millennia, come to be invisibly haloed: ‘The coracle men working on the rivers, the play of magic, ritual, superstition, prophets of the sky and foretellers of the ocean bed, these attributes remained a force in their trade, both for their gain and their protection’ (DLR, 69).
Her deep wish to connect Argentina to the Celtic world of ancient Wales is again manifest in her Patagonian ballad ‘El Dorado’, when Parry, one of the four young Welsh adventurers, imagines he sees a ‘Welsh’ horse in the wild herd that descends on them, almost trampling them underfoot as it sweeps madly past:
And that white
Horse with the black mane
Ears, fetlock, muzzle and tail,
Is surely a Dynevor strain.
The white cattle (with red ears) of Dynevor Park, Llandeilo, are reputed to date back to the ninth century and the period of Rhodri Fawr. Associated with them are various legends, such as their use in Druidic sacrificial rituals, and the special protection accorded the breed in the tenth-century Laws of Hywel Dda – supposedly confirming the sacred status the cattle had enjoyed in Celtic culture, as evidenced by mentions in old Irish saga. Lynette Roberts’s letters to Graves include meditations on the significance of white creatures in Celtic legend and literature, particularly when combined with red (or russet) ears, as in the story of Pwyll, Pendefig Dyfed in the Mabinogion (DLR, 168).
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Lynette Roberts, then, partly ‘read’ Llanybri through Argentina, just as she came retrospectively to ‘read’ Argentina (for example the settlement of Patagonia) partly through Llanybri. Hers was a hybrid imagination – no wonder she was so taken with the universal village practice of making pele (Welsh for ‘balls’) for burning on the fire. A mixture of coal dust, clay and water (Roberts provides the ‘recipe’ in great detail [DLR, 7]) the pele seemed to her perfect for burning in a homely hearth. And she was similarly attracted to the mixed, or hybrid, in her own poetics. A simple, striking example of her ambition to fuse the New World with the Old is provided by one of her early poems, ‘Rhode Island Red’. Not only does the very breed of the chicken advertise its (North) American origins, in using the phrase ‘Song of joy I sing’ to render the crowing of the cockerel, Roberts deliberately invokes the Poet Laureate of both North and South America, Walt Wh
itman. But rather than use a ‘New World’ poetic form, Roberts turned to what she (wrongly) thought of as an English equivalent to the Welsh englyn, a form she admired for its brevity, pithiness and intricate system of internal alliteration and assonance.
One of the deepest of the interests that were consonant with her hybrid imagination – the question of how paradoxically to respect traditional cultures by modernising them, thus changing in order to ‘conserve’ – seems to have been born of her childhood anger at the way the traditional life of the peons was being crassly disfigured and thus effectively erased through the wrong kind of modernisation, inflicted on them as the River Plate conurbation rapidly expanded. But her anger was brought into sharp focus by her Llanybri experience, because within months of settling in the village it became clear to her she was confronting an unacknowledged crisis: ‘the imposition of a bourgeois and shallow town culture forced on their wholesome ways. That is why I have such an interest in the village of Llanybri. I see that in the future it will be forced to change for the worse’ (DLR, 17). This remained her unwavering opinion throughout the years she lived and worked there, and still vibrating through her (increasingly nuanced and sophisticated) concerns may be felt the anger of the child recoiling from the horror of what the River Plate was doing to the peons.
Also from the very beginning, she was very clear that protecting Llanybri did not mean fighting to preserve the status quo of the ‘traditional’. Adaptation to the modern was not only inevitable it was highly desirable. But first it was necessary to identify and evaluate that which was distinctive and invaluable about not only the village but the whole locality and culture of which it was a part. The thoroughness and industry with which Roberts applied herself to the task of educating herself in this matter, even while raising three children virtually alone in a tiny cottage with minimum facilities, is as humbling as it is impressive. She had no water on tap and lived off the produce of back-breaking labour in her small, simple kitchen garden. That hers were the researches of an undirected autodidact and led her to rely on nineteenth-, and even eighteenth-, century sources that were unreliable when not wildly wayward was not her fault. And in any case such sources may have in some ways served her very well, since what a poet needs in order to assemble enabling fictions and effective operating systems is very different from the aims and purposes of a scholar.
Not only did she familiarise herself with the traditional architecture, crafts, dialect and literary culture of Llanybri and its environs, she also studied its natural habitat, becoming versed in local flora, bird, butterfly and animal life. And she went much further, exploring anthropology in order to understand the prehistory of human settlement in Wales, and further seeking to map the village and its environs in deep time by understanding its geology and mineralogy. In an aside to Robert Graves that throws interesting light on ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’ and highlights the committed hybridity of her imagination she comments ‘Today [1944] we need myth more than ever: but not blindly, only in relation to its scientific handling: in relation to today. You will help us here – just as David Jones is helping us with his paintings’17 (DLR, 169). And in a crucial passage from her Carmarthenshire diary she makes clear her wish to produce, through a creative fusion of different forms of knowledge, a psychically healing, holistic, reintegrative vision of the world:
The entomologists may learn the names of hundreds of insects entirely through their study of larva breeding and imago feeding. The ornithologist may notice the shape and leaf of trees; and when studying water birds in particular, the names of shells cast on the shores, the small fish rippling on the water-scales of the tide. And so, whether we are conscious of it or not, the intense and penetrating study of any of these branches in the field of a naturalist will in the end grow, until it covers an area of the whole field. Sky, plant, tree, animal and soil strata included. And in this way a natural conclusion and unity is reached, which politics, industrial problems and scientific research cannot achieve. (DLR, 62–3)
‘Gods with Stainless Ears’ can perhaps be read as a war requiem for the death, by grotesque distortion, of some such aspirational vision as this; as a terrible miscarriage of her lovingly conceived hybrid imagination. In a letter to Graves she explained she’d ‘purposely set out … to use words in relation to today – both with regard to sound (i.e. discords ugly grating words) & meaning’ (DLR, 181).18
The following single brilliant detail, not from the poem but from a prose fragment vividly describing the terrible 1941 raids on Swansea as seen from Llanybri, must suffice to illustrate the process at work:
A collyrium sky, chemically washed Cu.DH2. A blasting flash impels Swansea to riot! Higher, absurdly higher, the sulphuric clouds roll with their stench of ore, we breathe naphthalene air, the pillars of smoke writhe, and the astringent sky lies pale at her sides … Alarmed, we stand puce beneath another flare, our blood distilled, cylindricals of glass. The raiders scatter, then return and form a piratic ring within our shores. High explosives splash up, blue, white, and green. We know all copper compounds are poisonous, we know also where they are. (DLR, 103)
The active interest Roberts had developed in mineralogy as part of her holistic surveying of Llanybri and its peninsula heightened her awareness that, for more than a century, Swansea had been one of the world’s greatest metallurgical centres, and consequently dubbed ‘Copperopolis’. The poisonous fumes emanating from the maze of great works had already blighted the landscape of the lower Tawe valley by the time a new petrochemical plant at Llandarcy was added to the deadly mix, and it’s this new component that Roberts probably had in mind when referring to naphthalene (an organic compound with the formula C10H8) produced by the petroleum-refining process. Specific reference is twice made (Cu.DH2, copper compounds) to the copper industry for which the town was most famous. Particularly powerful is the envisaging of a malign ‘collyrium’ (normally a harmless eye-wash) that consists of a ‘chemically washed’ copper. The metallurgical theme is continued through reference to the blue crystal cyanite – an aluminium silicate. And of course following the three-night Blitz of 1941 the area is smothered in the poisonous clouds of sulphur dioxide released. A response to the violent disintegration of a whole landscape, the whole passage is therefore a darkly parodic version of the holistic, integrative vision Roberts was so hopeful her hybrid imagination might achieve in Llanybri.
One interesting question that will have to be postponed to some other occasion is how far hers was, in spite of all its good intentions, essentially a ‘colonial’ incomer’s relationship with the village. As has already been noted, hers had after all been a ‘settler’ consciousness, virtually from her birth. One prominent aspect of Roberts’s otherwise conscientiously thorough self-education in the cultural mores of Llanybri was her seeming lack of interest in even attempting to learn Welsh at a time when most of the villagers struggled with English as a decidedly ‘second’ language. But that Roberts came to value what she somewhat perversely, and perhaps tellingly, persisted in calling the ‘Kymric’ language is unquestionable. She not only scolded the English for routinely excluding Welsh-language literature when purportedly surveying the history of literature in the British Isles,19 but implicitly rebuked the Welsh themselves for needing to travel to distant Patagonia before they could muster up the courage to treat their language as vigorously living rather than moribund and dying. And she certainly made attempts to familiarise herself with Welsh-language poetry, from the very beginning of the great strictmetre tradition of barddas (in the process actively experimenting with the englyn form, for example [CP, 83]) to significant contemporary poets such as R. Williams Parry. And, acknowledging the work of W. J. Gruffydd, Dyfnallt and others in her notes to ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’, she adds that ‘I have intentionally used Welsh quotations as this helps to give the conscious compact and culture of another nation’ (CP, 76). Yet she seems not to have been particularly concerned to learn the Welsh language by which she was daily surrounded.
Her ‘Argentinian’ instinct to associate creativity with hybridity and to understand tradition as harmonious change is thus apparent in her attitude towards both the practical affairs of rural life and her poetics. Indeed, by 1952 she was urging Welsh writers in both languages to find new forms of creative synthesis ‘before the particularities of the Celtic imagination are once again submerged in an Anglicised culture’ (DLR, 142). In retrospect, it can be seen that her own poetry had constituted exactly such an enterprise – the prefacing of the different sections of ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’ with epigraphs from Welsh-language poetry both old and new was calculated both to instance and to emblematise the kind of creative synthesis she already had in mind in the early 1940s.