‘I grow [vegetables in wartime] for Llanybri, for Llanybri that I love and that has given me so much’ (DLR, 21). Touchingly, Lynette Roberts was ‘putting down roots’ in the village as early as June 1940, just eight months after her arrival there. Yet she was fated ever to be as much ‘scarlet woman’ as ‘native’. Significant aspects of her consciousness had, after all, been formed by Argentina. Her passion for ‘deep time’ and its human equivalent – Tradition – obviously owed much to an unconscious awareness that, although she herself was indeed ‘native’ to Argentina, her parents had only very recently migrated there, a late example of the great waves of European migration of peoples to the country during the nineteenth century. She had no claim on the ‘aboriginal past’, such as she came to feel in Llanybri. Likewise, her understanding of ‘Tradition’ as itself always, at any given point, ‘hybrid’ in character – the moment when the past meets the future and is modified by it – obviously owed much to her own peripatetic life, and the experience of searching for some meaningful form of continuity in the face of constant, restless change.
Her situation as ‘Llanybri’ poet is thus symbolically captured in an observation she recorded in her diary on 18 May 1942:
I noticed a large splash of brilliant scarlet, a secretive flight from tree to tree until whatever it was hid deeper and thicker among the leaves. This sudden sensation of flight in colour disturbed me considerably … I had no idea what this could have been. It was so large. The Scarlet Cardinal in Buenos Aires, yes I had seen many of those, and flights of wild emerald green paraquets, but this vivid flash[?] (DLR, 44)
It turned out to be a great spotted woodpecker. Lynette Roberts’s attachment to scarlet, always bringing with it memories of her South American ‘home’ – she entitled one of her most evocative poems about the vast plains of the pampas ‘Blood and Scarlet Thorns’ – had once more creatively sharpened her eye for her immediate surroundings in her new Welsh ‘home’ of Llanybri. ‘While she was dying, in rural Wales’, her daughter Angharad Rhys has movingly written, ‘she kept reverting to Spanish – though not her first language it was the language of her childhood’ (CP, x).
(To be published in Siriol McAvoy [ed.], Locating Lynette Roberts [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, forthcoming].)
Notes
1In her essay ‘An Introduction to Village Dialect’, she quotes one of Taliesin’s famed boasts: ‘I have been in the ark,/ With Noah and Alpha,/ I have seen the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra,/ I was in Africa’, etc. Patrick McGuinness (ed.), Lynette Roberts, Diaries, Letters and Recollections (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), p. 108. Hereafter DLR.
2First published in Wales, 10 (October 1939), 278–9. It is reprinted, but under the title ‘Song of Praise’, in Patrick McGuinness (ed.), Lynette Roberts, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), pp. 81–2, where it is mistakenly identified as first appearing in The Welsh Review in October 1939. Hereafter the Collected Poems will be cited as CP.
3Wales, 11 (Winter 1939–40), 302. Reprinted in CP, p. 82.
4From the very beginning of the construction of the extensive Argentinian rail network British engineers and shareholders had played a dominant role in its development. Rails, locomotives and rolling stock were likewise usually of British manufacture. And when the Western Railway Company was formed in 1855, its Vice-President, David Gowland, was a Briton. Roberts therefore grew up largely within an expatriate, ‘Anglo’ community.
5Duly written, the poem was included in her first published collection, Poems (1944) (CP, 16). In it, she rejoiced that ‘shocking the air/ With scarlet bill and garter’ – the word ‘shocking’ is there surely charged with the village reception of the scarlet-caped Roberts herself – the water-bird could ‘draw a wreath of joy/ From our pale receded hearts’.
6At first she found the vivacity of the ‘old, old, man’ who had turned up unannounced ‘bubbling over with joy’, invigorating and entertaining (DLR, 12). But she quickly grew annoyed at ‘the mock Celtic Twilight’ era at the turn of the century of which he was by then the lone survivor, because ‘he was still caught up in its aura when he met us, and, frankly, this nauseated me’ (DLR, 13).
7‘Anglo’, but by no means exclusively English. As well as representatives of all the nations of the British Isles, it also included ‘colonials’ such as Roberts’s Cambro-Australian parents.
8Although she, along with a friend, briefly held salons for writers, artists and intellectuals in Buenos Aires around 1930 – ‘No English just Argentines were invited – philosophers, psychologists, journalists’ (DLR, 202) – there is no evidence she was aware of the exciting new developments in contemporary Argentinian literature. At that time, Modernismo was being replaced by a new wave of writing perhaps most strikingly instanced in the work of the writers (who included the young Bórges) associated with the Ultraísmo movement. She makes clear her indebtedness to European (and specifically English) writers when writing of Patagonia in her essay on that region, where she singles out not only W. H. Hudson for praise but also A. F. Tschiffely’s This Way Southward (CP, 130).
9‘If we do not listen to the rural wisdom of the common man we shall be a lost nation’, she wrote in June, 1940. What was dangerous alike in capitalism, Socialism and Communism was the ‘imposition of a bourgeois and shallow town culture [which] is forced on their wholesome ways. That is why I have such an interest in the village of Llanybri. I see that in future it will be forced to change for the worse’ (DLR, 17). In her further belief that ‘the dignity and pride of the craftsmen and farm labourers should be permitted to prevail … I do not mean the retention of arty crafty work of the past’, she was echoing, as she shortly discovered, the sentiments of respected Welsh ethnographers of the time such as Dr Iorwerth Peate (see below). She was also – as again slowly became clear to her – championing the cause of y werin, the reputedly devout and naturally cultured ‘folk’ of the rural, Welsh-speaking heartlands, whose way of life had come to be heavily idealised by such influential scholars as Sir O. M. Edwards. His classic Cartrefi Cymru (‘The Homes/Hearths of Wales’) became a huge popular success and contributed to the cult of the Welsh rural village, the ramifications of which are brilliantly analysed by Hywel Teifi Edwards in ‘“Y Pentre Gwyn” and “Manteg”: from Blessed Plot to Hotspot’ (in Alyce Rothkirch and Daniel Williams (eds), Beyond the Difference: Welsh Literature in Comparative Perspectives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), pp. 8–20). Roberts’s essays ‘An Introduction to Village Dialect’ and ‘Simplicity of the Welsh Village’ fit squarely into this cultural milieu.
10She believed the ‘peasant’ class to be an international phenomenon, and so easily set Llanybri in the context of her experiences elsewhere, including Argentina and Spain. Similarly, she believed this class of ‘people of the soil’ shared a vocabulary: ‘in certain idioms there can be found relationships between peoples of the soil elsewhere; in Spain, Ireland, Italy, France, Iceland, Brittany’ (DLR, 123).
11Glyn Williams, The Desert and the Dream: A Study of Welsh Colonization in Chubut, 1865–1915 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), p. 104; also Glyn Williams, The Welsh in Patagonia: The State and the Ethnic Community (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991). There are several interesting differences of detail between the version of the episode recorded by Roberts and her informant and that offered by modern historians such as Williams.
12It would be interesting to compare Roberts’s version of Patagonia with that of Eluned Morgan, a Welsh Patagonian born and raised in Gaiman, whose Dringo’r Andes (1904) is a classic account of her subsequent journey across the desert to the high mountains.
13In the notes to the Collected Poems, ‘Penillion’ are mistakenly described as a form of barddas (classic traditional strict-metre poetry). Around this time, the penillion were attracting much interest from such eminent Welsh-language writers and scholars as T. H. Parry-Williams, who produced an authoritative scholarly collection of them and wrote a poetry influenced by their colloq
uial rhythms and vocabulary. In addition, they fascinated ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poets such as Glyn Jones, who highly valued them as a ‘people’s poetry’ and eventually translated a body of penillion into sprightly, rhyming English verse.
14Gauchesco (or ‘gauchesque’) writing, claiming to use the ‘real’ language of the gauchos themselves, flourished roughly between 1870 and 1920. It would therefore probably be very much ‘in the air’ when Roberts was a child.
15Recent scholarship has expressed considerable scepticism about such Welsh Patagonian claims to ‘exceptionalism’. An underplayed history has been uncovered of tensions between the native peoples and the Welsh settlers, and emphasis has been placed on the much wider history of colonisation of which the Patagonian venture was demonstrably a part. For instance, the extension of the Welsh settlement as far as the foothills of the Andes, that constituted the epic second phase of the venture, was a multinational enterprise financed by business interests in Buenos Aires. And this aspect of inland development is unconsciously prefigured in Roberts’s ballad as, far from being innocent idealists, the four Welsh adventurers are hard-headed gold prospectors, whose values contrast strikingly with those of the natives on whose territories they trespass. Interestingly, Roberts’s Notes for an Autobiography records an early personal experience of the difference between immigrant white and native Inca attitudes towards gold (DLR, 195).
16Graves was drawing upon the theories for the origins of Ogham outlined by R.A.S. Macalister in The Secret Languages of Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1937). Macalister was later to revise his own theories which, while still predictably popular in neopagan and New Age circles, have not found support among later serious Celtic scholars. Both Graves and Roberts were also in thrall to the writings of that enthusiastic Druidophile, Edward ‘Celtic’ Davies (1756–1831).
17The affinities between Roberts’s poetry and that of Jones remain to be explored thoroughly, as does her obvious respect for his work. She spent much of her time visiting T. S. Eliot in his Faber office in London recommending Jones’s work to his attention and urging him to pay a visit to the recluse. (A deeply appreciative review of In Parenthesis by Vernon Watkins – ‘unique writing’ – had appeared in Wales, 5 [Summer 1938], 184.) Both Roberts and Jones shared a passion for reviewing and restructuring present experience in the light of ‘deep time’ and, in naming their son ‘Prydein’ (the old Welsh name for Britain – ‘Prydain’ in modern Welsh – favoured in medieval chronicles lamenting the loss of much of the Island to foreign invaders), Roberts and Rhys seem to have been signifying their own sympathy for Jones’s vision of a modern post-imperial Britain that, no longer arrogantly Anglocentric, would be a genuine confederacy of all the peoples of the Island.
18Given Roberts’s own admission that, in structure and texture, her long poem owed something to contemporary film, it might be interesting to compare ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’ to a classic groundbreaking documentary of the period, Listening to Britain. Directed for the Crown Film Unit by Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, and released in 1942, this is a highly atmospheric montage of the sounds and sights of Britain at war, without any linking voice-over commentary.
19‘[T]here has been practically no acknowledgement of Welsh Literature in the past. This lack of recognition in the History of English [sic] Literature has yet to be adjusted’ (DLR, 106). Such omission resulted, she added, in a ‘tragic deformity’.
20For a highly informative account of Peate, his vision and his accomplishments, see Catrin Stevens, Iorwerth C. Peate (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986).
2
MARGIAD EVANS AND EUDORA WELTY: A CONFLUENCE OF IMAGINATIONS
‘I hate my writing and nearly everyone else’s.’1 Margiad Evans’s bullish comment, recorded in a brief profile of her as a writer that appeared in Keidrych Rhys’s rumbustious magazine Wales in the summer of 1938, shouldn’t be taken too seriously. After all, she proceeded to claim that her only reason for writing was so as to be able to buy paintings and to enjoy country pursuits, an explanation that is unlikely to survive even brief enquiry. Her provocative statement is very much in keeping with the tone of Rhys’s Wales, a self-consciously outrageous publication. Anxious to cultivate a cavalier image, it aimed to convey the ungovernable, irreverend spirit of a group of young Welsh Anglophone writers uncowed by their elders and indifferent to the metropolitan judgements of the English establishment. But the sharply discriminating reviews Evans occasionally contributed to periodicals of the period, such as Wales and the Welsh Review, confirm that hers was a fierce, demanding, and finely discriminating, literary intelligence.
There were, though, writers who readily survived even her most searching scrutiny. Kate Roberts was one such and another, according to Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, was the great writer from the Mississippi delta, Eudora Welty. In noting that the ‘writers who earned [Evans’s] unconditional praise were from outside the English metropolitan circle’, Lloyd-Morgan identifies Welty as ‘one of her great favourites’.2 She particularly relished the ‘power and fury’ of the Southerner’s prose, and Lloyd Morgan ventures to suggest that ‘Welty may perhaps have had some influence on Margiad Evans’s stories’, noting possible ‘stylistic affinities’ between them and those by Welty collected in her 1943 collection The Wide Net.
Lloyd-Morgan’s point is well made, but that term ‘influence’ is often much too glibly applied to relationships between writers without any awareness being shown of the complex, irreducibly nebulous and incorrigibly problematical character of the kind of relationship towards which the word vaguely gestures. Writers’ notorious shyness of being cornered by such a term is no doubt partly due to their understandable wish to ‘cover their tracks’ – like skylarks, they prefer to take flight at a distance from their precious nests. But equally, like any reflective person, they understand how difficult it is to determine where, when and how any deep, unforeseen impulse of affinity originates. Who could possibly tell, as Wordsworth powerfully enquires in The Prelude, what portion of the river of one’s mind comes from what source? After all, as Paul Klee otherwise imaged it, the relationship between a creative work and its ‘sources’ resembles that of a tree to its manifold, tangled roots: who would ever claim to be able to trace any given branch back to its origins in a single root?
Eudora Welty herself had forceful and subtle things to say about such matters. Commenting on the structure and texture of her own writings in her revealing memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, she thoughtfully observed:
Each of us is moving; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.
I’m prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer has any weight, testifying to the pattern, one of the chief patterns, of human experience.3
Elsewhere in the same essay, she further glossed that term ‘confluence’, explaining that by it she had in mind
a writer’s own discovery of affinities. In writing, as in life, the connections of all sorts of relationship and kinds lie in wait of discovery, and give out their signals to the Geiger counter of the charged imagination, once it is drawn into the right field. (OWB, 99)
Furthermore, she insisted that such ‘confluence’ occurred only at those deeply solitary points when a mind paradoxically descried echoes of its own singular uniqueness in the mind of another, and was thereby quickened into new creation. ‘What counts’, she wrote of herself as a writer, ‘is only what lies at the solitary core’ (OWB, 101): only through the mysterious experience of confluence could such a core be penetrated and impregnated while somehow remaining virginal, pristine, inviolably itself.
In making such comments, Welty had in mind not only the kind of interconnective relationships within families and communities that she, as a writer, found herself exploring
in her works, but also her analogous relationship with other authors, to whom she felt deeply indebted for enabling her own creative development. Two contemporaries whom she habitually called to mind in this context were William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. And taking our cue from Welty’s suggestive remarks, it would seem appropriate to consider Margiad Evans’s interest in the Southerner’s fiction under the rubric not of ‘influence’, but rather of ‘confluence’, as Welty interprets that term, because ‘influence’ is a concept that lends itself all too readily to the simplistic assumption that one writer passively absorbs what is ‘learnt’ from another, and is thus in danger of failing to take into account the shock of augmented self-recognition that is always a major aspect of a writer’s unexpected, creatively responsive awakening to the work of a kindred spirit. Such, it seems to me, is the most interesting aspect of the relationship one perceives between the fiction of Evans and Welty.
* * *
In instancing what she means by Eudora Welty’s ‘influence’ on Margiad Evans, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan points to a common concern with ‘stories about working people in disadvantaged rural communities … told in a superb literary style’ (OY, 4). But what I have termed ‘confluence’ operates at an altogether deeper and more radical level than that. It manifests itself in the singular manner in which both writers handle ‘place’ in their respective fictions. Both of them arrestingly, and indeed often disconcertingly, view human beings and their locales simply as different points on a single continuum: between them they constitute a single, highly distinctive, ‘zone of consciousness’ and it is this that both Welty and Evans recognize as constituting ‘place’.
All That is Wales Page 8
