All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  How instinctive this kind of vision was to Margiad Evans may be neatly illustrated by homing in on a small detail of a remark she made during the course of her otherwise routine review of Old English Household Life, an unremarkable study by Gertrude Jekyll and S. R. Jones. ‘I have only to lift up my eyes to see one of the objects illustrated,’ she observed, ‘a white, earthenware horse who with us stands on the dresser, and is dusted every alternate Friday.’4 This very peculiar choice of the word ‘who’, rather than the customary ‘that’ or ‘which’ used to denote an inanimate object, is a signature feature of Evans’s strange, distinctive, style of vision and of narration. Such a disorienting, or rather re-orienting, use of ‘who’ prepares us to read the whole phrase – ‘who with us stands on the dresser’ – in a similarly unconventional way, understanding it now to be suggestive of the (earthenware!) horse’s living, creaturely coexistence with its human ‘owners’: it is together and between them that ornament and people may be said to turn the house into a place of habitation. This offers us an insight into the peculiarity of Margiad Evans’s ‘places’, where individuals repeatedly seem not so much alive to their world, or even alive in their world, but rather alive with their world, as their world, in its turn, seems alive with them.

  Similar moments abound in Eudora Welty’s classic ‘autobiography of a writer’, One Writer’s Beginnings:

  In a children’s art class, we sat in a ring on kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off whiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell as the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson – as shouldn’t it be? Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again. (OWB, 10)

  Again, where others would distinguish between the inner world of human experience and the outer world of environment, Welty, like Evans, sees only a correspondence so intimate as to bind both together into a single complex, compound entity.

  In such a context, it is not surprising to find her further noting that ‘In my sensory education I include my physical awareness of the word’ (OWB, 10). Elsewhere, in a review, she approvingly noted that ‘the imprisonment of life in the word was as much a matter of the sense with Virginia Woolf as it was a concern of the intellect’.5 ‘Held in my mouth,’ Welty recollected in One Writer’s Beginnings, ‘the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off his vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio’ (OWB, 10). A word here becomes an essential means of ingesting the world, and is thus central to the celebration of the communion of human beings with their intimate environment. And a similar aliveness to language is used to related effect in Margiad Evans’s quirky writing. In ‘Thomas Griffiths and Parson Pope’, the old gardener ‘smoked all the time. The wind, passing him, went away with the swirling blue breath of his pipe. The wind would jump suddenly down into the garden and shuffle the yellow ivy leaves out of the side-paths … The sky looked through one blue eye’ (OY, 27). The human being and his environment form a single, undifferentiated, animated environment and language is a veritable incarnation of this peculiar experience of ‘location’.

  For both Evans and Welty, words are the synapses, or vital connectives, of the single, composite consciousness shared by people and the objects, creatures, natural forces and growing things of a unitary, inter-animated world. To read their fictions is to enter a realm not so much of cohabitation as of ‘coexistentialism’.6 The term was coined by Gaston Bachelard, the remarkable French phenomenologist who understood that ‘the imagination is ceaselessly imagining and enriching itself with new images. It is this wealth of imagined being that I should like to explore’ (PS, xxxvi). To that end he wrote the suggestively entitled The Poetics of Space (first published as La poétique de l’espace in 1958), declaring his concern to be with elaborating ‘a phenomenology of the imagination’ (PS, xviii). To study ‘the onset of the image in an individual consciousness’, he argued, ‘can help us to restore the subjectivity of images and to measure their fullness, their strength and their transubjectivity’ (PS, xix). Poetry was, for him, incomparably rich in such evidence, and a similar claim might usefully be made for the value of studying the compressed, ‘poetic’ short fictions of Eudora Welty and Margiad Evans.

  While avoiding any sustained and systematic application of Bachelard’s ideas, this essay will make occasional, adventitious use of his deeply suggestive insights. And it will do so not on the tacit assumption that these insights are somehow impartially authoritative but rather on the understanding that the climate of mind one encounters in Bachelard’s influential work is, in a sense, that of a particular era, approximately the first half of the twentieth century, during which the minds of Eudora Welty and Margiad Evans were also decisively shaped and they were unconsciously developing their deep, mentally formative assumptions. These two writers seem to me to have shared with Bachelard the legacy both of Symbolism and of Modernism, with their respective disclosures about the processes of consciousness, and to have operated, like him, on the same wavelength as such powerful thinkers of the period as Henri Bergson, Karl Jung and the originator of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. But since the elective form of Welty and Evans was short fiction rather than Bachelard’s poetry, to the love they shared with him for the mysterious potencies of symbol and image they added an excited addiction to story, tale, fable, legend, talk and myth. And whereas his subject was really the solitary soul – he rather effusively understood poetry to be ‘a soul inaugurating a form’ (PS, xxii) – their fascination was with the highly charged, dangerously electrified, web of ‘community’.

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  Bachelard described his intention as being to conduct a ‘topoanalysis’, by which he meant ‘the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives’ (PS, 8). Central to his researches therefore was the figure of the house, because ‘the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being’ (PS, xxxvi). Houses also figure prominently as psychic signifiers in the fiction of both Evans and Welty.7 One notable instance is afforded by ‘The Old Woman and the Wind’, the short story that may surely be accounted one of Margiad Evans’s most perfect accomplishments, beautifully shaped as it is to her compelling purpose and supercharged with several of her most intimate concerns. Through the vexed and varying relationship of the strange old hill-dweller Mrs Ashstone with the wind on the one hand and the villagers below on the other, Evans was able to explore the dialectical relationship between the wild and the domesticated, the contained and the boundless, between communal living and the solitary individual, and she herself no doubt oscillated between similar poles of her own, in her strange oddity of being a somewhat suspect female writer, semi-detached from the community around her and inclined to feel much closer kin to the natural world than to her immediate neighbours. Her ambivalent feelings about her imperious creative powers are mirrored in Mrs Ashstone’s misgivings about her extraordinary relationship with the wind, and in the latter’s allegedly ‘witch-like’ nature is suggested Evans’s uneasy interest in the socially suspect powers of an unconventionally minded female artist of her time.

  The story is brimful of perfectly functional examples of her perpetually startling lyricism, faithful as the text is to the strange originality of her habitual angle of vision. Mrs Ashstone’s house, like her very being, exists strictly in a dialectical relationship with the wind that is the presiding, defining presence of her life as it is the dominating presence in her environment. Its invisible plastic power is everywhere palpably apparent, as in ‘the flattened smoke coming down the chimney’s neck in wisps like her own hair’ (OY, 35). It even determines Mrs Ashstone’s physical bearing, as ‘her small, clutching hands’ seemed always to be ‘chasing the flying and broken things floating in the wind’s wake’ (OY, 36). From
the vantage point of the village her remote upland house, distantly glimpsed ‘where the greyness roamed the bracken’, resembles ‘a white pebble that a boy had flung out of the river’ (OY, 38). But such an impression of impregnable solidity is contrary to the old widow’s familiar experience of the house as an excitingly precarious, permeable dwelling-place, its porousness being the converse of the resolute solidity with which it stoically withstands ‘the boulders of air the wind rolled against it’ (OY, 38).

  Bachelard writes at some length about poets’ preoccupation with the relationship of house to storm. In evoking, as so frequently they do, the ‘bestiary of the wind’ (PS, 44), writers seem to him to focus figuratively on the destructive, animalistic side of the energies by which humans and universe are alike possessed. They turn the ‘combatant house’ (PS, 46) into a beleaguered fortress from which is exerted the ‘counter-energy’ of an individual’s moral integrity. There is much of this in ‘The Old Woman and the Wind’, as the ‘cruel rage and cruel envy’(OY, 37) Mrs Ashstone feels for the villagers below find expression through her relationship with the wind. Indeed, in describing a tempest, Evans accidentally echoes Bachelard avant la lettre when she says that ‘a beast roared in the chimney’ (OY, 38). But Evans also puts the wind to very different figurative use, such as is again touched on by Bachelard when he considers the ways in which, through its dynamic relationship to wind and storm, a house can become expressive of the ‘cosmic’ positioning of humankind. ‘The Old Woman and the Wind’ is centrally concerned with this ‘anthropo-cosmology’ (PS, 470). Mrs Ashstone’s cottage exists primarily as the site of a dialectical relationship evidenced in the alternation of the monstrous howl of the tempest and a correspondingly heightened, uncanny silence in which quieter powers make their mysterious presence known: ‘she heard nothing except clock, kettle, and mouse. She felt that she lived in these stirrings’ (OY, 39). When Mrs Ashstone finally throws in her lot with her exposed upland home, rather than opting to take the enticingly offered key to one of the trim houses in the village, she understands perfectly the reason for her choice:

  Down there I couldn’t hardly tell whether I were glad or sorry. I couldn’t seem to hear, and that’s the reason as I don’t want to change my ways now. I do like to hear even the mice in me cupboard, and the cockroaches, I’m that curious and learned. (OY, 43: emphasis in the original)

  And implicit in her decision is the determination to be absolute mistress of her own house rather than a mere ‘home-keeper’ for a husband, as the village women seem primarily to be. When Evans observes that Mrs Ashstone was so ‘ignorant’ and de-socialised that she’d forgotten that the prefix ‘Mrs’ signified a woman’s married status and now supposed it instead to be a first name, like ‘Annie’, she is implying a great deal. And when Mrs Ashstone claims a singular and unlikely ‘learnedness’ for herself at the end of the story, Margiad Evans fully respects the apparently anomalous application of such a term. Such superior ‘learnedness’ is the old woman’s reward for her socially perceived ‘ignorance’, her unregenerate, pagan independence.

  Halfway through ‘The Old Woman and the Wind’, Captain Ifor, a pillar of the local village community, teasingly asks the visiting Mrs Ashstone whether she’s ‘down from [her] eyrie’ (OY, 37). She is baffled: ‘what was an ar-ray, and what had it do with her hill?’ Her maverick intelligence, resolutely uncomprehending of village ways, is as ever the strong solvent of established language, attuned as she is to the alternative idiom of wind, and stone, and mice, and grass, and rain. At the story’s end, Captain Ifor repeats the word in his attempt to tempt her away from her hill fastness: ‘Get you down from that eyrie of yours’ (OY, 42). But in rejecting his proffered key Mrs Ashstone also refuses to speak his language, and as the conclusion of the story confirms, her instincts in this respect are true ones. Live in an ‘eyrie’ she may, from the villagers’ point of view, but through her strange communion with her environment, her intimate relationship with the secret consciousness of place, the old woman knows her house to be ‘eerie’ in quite another sense: an ‘uncanny’ place in which she is at once safely at home and permanently ‘unhoused’, an unaccommodated dweller, along with mouse and boulder and wind and grass, in the cosmos itself. In ‘The Old Woman and the Wind’ the house thus becomes, in Bachelard’s terms, ‘an instrument with which to confront the cosmos’ (PS, 46). ‘A house that is as dynamic as this’, he writes elsewhere, ‘allows the poet to inhabit the universe. Or, to put it differently, the universe comes to inhabit his house’ (PS, 51).

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  ‘The house’, Bachelard further remarks, ‘shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace’ (PS, 6). Such indeed proves to be the case in Eudora Welty’s ‘June Recital’, the remarkable long story that appears in her consummate collection of interconnected tales, The Golden Apples.8 All these stories are related, either directly or indirectly, to Morgana, a small Mississippi town named in part, as Welty repeatedly affirmed in interviews, for the Fata Morgana, or will-o’-the-wisp, liable to lead humans into the realm of the equivocal and to leave them stranded in that chimerical place. A connoisseur of this disorientating oneiric realm, like Bachelard, Welty repeatedly mentioned dream time and dream states in her fiction and associated her art quite closely with reverie. Such a state dissolved the floor of memory, admitting human beings to the mysterious underworld of time which is paradoxically our real abode. Daydreams seemed to her naturally attuned to that understanding of our temporal existence that she identified in One Writer’s Beginnings, an understanding born of the distinctively Southern sense of time she shared with her great contemporary and friend William Faulkner:

  [Living] is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiralling. 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. (OWB, 102)

  It is this dimension of time that is explored in ‘June Recital’.

  This substantial story interweaves the experiences and recollections of two youngsters, the boy Loch and his gawky adolescent sister, Cassie, via those dreams of yesterday that are triggered involuntarily in them by hearing the opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ being played in the apparently empty house next door, a place unnervingly haunted for them both by the ghosts of their past. The difference between their recollections is due to a number of different factors, including their different gender, their contrasting ages and their respective temperaments. In addition, Loch’s mental state is heightened by the malarial fever from which he is suffering while Cassie’s disturbed equilibrium reflects in part the liminal state between adolescence and adulthood when personal identity, agitated not least by sexual awakenings, remains relatively fluid and undecided.

  Riveting his attention on the house he can see from his sickbed, Loch responds to it as ‘something very well known indeed. Its left-alone contour, its careless stretching away into that deep backyard he knew by heart. The house’s side was like a person’s, if a person or giant would lie sleeping there, always sleeping’ (GA, 21). Like Cassie he is readily inclined to see the house as a site of fantasy, akin to the magical places of fairy tale and animated by a similarly exotic life. While Cassie aspires to a more dispassionate, ‘grown-up’ assessment of the property, she nevertheless finds her imagination becoming inexorably entrapped in its labyrinthine, infinitely recessive interiors and feels herself succumbing to its bewitchment, just like Hansel and Gretel in the witch’s house. Drawn to the window, she stands there, her pale hair infested with paper curlers, her small head vulnerably balanced on her nakedly exposed frail neck, her feet bare, and looks ‘pathetic – homeless-looking – horrible. Like a wave, the gathering past came right up to her. Next time it would be too high’ (GA, 37). As her gaze becomes ever more fixated on the supposedly vacant building next
door, she senses what she suspects to be ‘agitation. Some life stirred through. It may have been old life … a life quicker’ than the life of her own family, ‘more driven probably, thought Cassie uneasily’ (GA, 35). And for both Loch and his sister, the house (like the house in ‘The Old Woman and the Wind’) seems to mark a distinctive zone of consciousness where human life appears to be unified with, and thus inseparable from, the natural world. Indeed, in its decay, the house is in some respects ‘maintained’ by the natural cycle: ‘Leaves and their shadows pressed up to it, arc-light sharp and still as noon all day’ (GA, 35). As Loch’s eyes scan a mattress in the old, semi-derelict property, ‘A shadow from a tree, a branch and its leaves, slowly travelled over the hills and hollows of the mattress’ (GA, 21). It is an example of what Bachelard had in mind when he spoke of ‘[the] coexistence of things in a space to which we add consciousness of our own existence … a very concrete thing’ (PS, 203).

  Gradually, both Loch and Cassie become aware of temporary inhabitants in the house – the old watchman who spends his days sleeping in one room; Virginia Rainey and her sailor boyfriend who use another room as their sexual trysting-place; and an eccentric old woman whose antics in the downstairs room which still houses the piano seem increasingly puzzling and bizarre. One-time tomboy Virginia, it turns out, looms large in the charged narrative of Cassie’s memories of her childhood. Ever socially untameable, a free spirit scornful of the ways and opinions of others, the liberated Virginia was, and is, the pet hate and secret love of the inhibited Cassie. An inveterate worrier and social conformist, she yearns to emulate Virginia in her blithe insouciance and disregard for social mores. But at the centre of the story stands the nervous, awkward, unconventional figure of Miss Eckhart, an everlasting social outsider, indeed a virtual outcast, of German descent whose spinsterish occupation it was to teach Virginia and Cassie and other little girls how to play the piano that now stands abandoned and is the centre of the onlooking Loch’s increasingly fascinated attention. It gradually becomes apparent that it is the eccentric Miss Eckhart’s intention, in the derangement of her dotage, to set the piano alight and to burn the entire house down. However, while it is this act of arson that leads to the climactic action in the story, the real subject of the leisurely expansive and endlessly sinuous narrative is the whorl of the past and its infinite encroachments on the present. ‘The space we love’, said Bachelard, ‘is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere, without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory’ (PS, 53).