The violent storm proves to be the destabilising force that radically unsettles the ‘normality’ in which Albert’s parents habitually dwell, so that they, too, are not so much drawn as harassed into sharing his vision. His father panics at the thought that one of the children may have got hold of his gun, with fateful consequences. His mother, returning at a wild gallop from her visit elsewhere, roams the rooms of the house closing windows against the tempest, becoming ever more uneasy. Even the candle she holds in her hand turns sinister, and seems to release unquiet presences wherever it goes:
And then she sees it is not light she is bringing with the candle, but only a yellow smirk like fog.
She hears the voices in the kitchen, she hears a moan of thunder and her own shadow twirls about her as she returns. It’s as though some loosened entity of the house were revolving wherever she moves, now dancing as in a cage, now fitfully concealed within her own body. (OY, 105–6)
Hastening to a window, and throwing up the sash, she is transfixed by the sight of little Albert sitting in the yard exposed to the lightning and stirring the embers of a fire. Suddenly he seems to her a sinister, foreign creature: ‘For a moment she hardly recognizes him. That’s what frightens her’ (OY, 106). On the verge of hysteria she screams at him to come in and as he lifts his face in acknowledgement it is unnervingly caught in the ‘white flash of light to earth’, while thunder breaks overhead like an avalanche (OY, 106).
It is an eerie story steeped in a sense of the uncanny. By increasingly infectious degrees that reach their zenith when the house becomes complicit with the storm, home is inverted into a hostile, unsettling place, and intimate family ties become a source of terror rather than of consolation. Knowing that the story was written in October 1945, immediately after the conclusion of the war in Europe, I find it difficult not to associate it with the atmosphere of a period of profound dislocation, when it was clear that old ways, old values, old relationships could not simply be resumed because everything had irrevocably changed. The deep resultant sense of unease was the shadow side of the enthusiasm for change that found historic expression in the unexpected election of a Labour government at that precise juncture. In that sense, ‘Solomon’ may be read as capturing the last phase of an extended period of disorientation beginning with the nightmarish anxieties of the pre-war years, and continuing through wartime experiences such as those of the Blitz, when many observers were shocked and bewildered by eviscerated houses whose most intimate interiors were suddenly exposed to casual public view. A classic text of the first, pre-war, phase would be Vernon Watkins’s ‘Ballad of the Mari Lwyd’, with its invocation of the ghosts that come ominously knocking at doors and windows on New Year’s Eve and press most peremptorily for admission to the domestic hearth:
Out in the night the nightmares ride;
And the nightmares’ hooves draw near.
Dead men pummel the panes outside,
And the living quake with fear.
Quietness stretches the pendulum’s chain
To the limits where terrors start,
Where the dead and the living find again
They beat with the selfsame heart.13
As for the second phase, what text is there that more powerfully evokes the stunned air of the London streets at dawn following an air-raid than ‘Little Gidding’, when T. S. Eliot encounters ghosts of the distant past released by the chaos on to the streets of the present? And it is in the company of texts such as these that I feel ‘Solomon’ naturally belongs, as it uses a rural setting to suggest the way in which the heart of war-shocked, post-war England broods on its new strangeness to its old, familiar self.
* * *
One possible reason, therefore, for the ‘confluence’ of the imaginations of Margiad Evans and Eudora Welty may be their common source in an experience of radical social and cultural change. But, as this essay has already intimated, there are many more reasons than the one for the uncanny mutuality of their minds, and the enigma of their creative correspondence must ultimately be allowed to remain insoluble. What is clear, however, is that, although Welty’s talent had considerably more reach and range than that of Evans – allowance having first been made, of course, for the fact that the American outlived the Welsh border writer by more than half a century – the creative imaginations of the two writers were, nevertheless, joined at the hip, unique though their respective achievements indisputably were. ‘Art, then’, wrote Bachelard, in another of his resonant apothegms, ‘is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent’ (PS, xxxiii). And it is precisely for the remarkable power they held in common to ‘increase life’ in this irreplaceable way that we should value the haunting fictions of both Margiad Evans and Eudora Welty.
(First published in Kirsti Bohata and Katie Gramich [eds], Rediscovering Margiad Evans: Marginality, Gender and Illness [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013].)
Notes
1Wales, 5 (Summer 1935), 182.
2Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (ed.), Margiad Evans, The Old and the Young (Bridgend: Seren, 1998), p. 15. Hereafter OY.
3Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 102. Hereafter OWB.
4The Welsh Review, 10 (1939), 285.
5Eudora Welty, A Writer’s Eye (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 1994), p. 26.
6Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 201. Hereafter PS.
7Dr Kirsti Bohata has drawn to my attention the following intriguing entry from Margiad Evans’s journal for 22 August 1943: ‘One of my strange house dreams, about mother. Big rooms, big beds & black staircases. The moonlight like curtain’s [?] rods. All these things I must remember.’
8Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1949). Hereafter GA.
9Quoted in Jan Nordby Goetland, Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), p. 364.
10Wales, 10 (October 1939), 285.
11The most comprehensive and authoritative introductions to Southern culture during the period in question are Richard Gray, The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) and Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
12Gray, Literature of Memory, p. 178.
13Vernon Watkins, Collected Poems (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1986), p. 47.
3
‘A GRAND HARLEQUINADE’: THE BORDER WRITING OF NIGEL HESELTINE
Somewhere in Montgomeryshire, a young man named Thwaite stands meditatively by the side of a grave, staring down at his father’s coffin. Then he turns around, only to see that very same father ‘limping through the crowd’. And on one of the wreaths he discovers a label with the message ‘An empty box’ in his father’s handwriting. As Thwaite gazes, his father’s figure wends its way up the hill and disappears ‘as the dead should’.1 It is difficult to read this passage from Nigel Heseltine’s 1946 collection of stories, Tales of the Squirearchy, without remembering how haunted he was throughout his life by the death (whether murder, suicide or – very probably – accident) of his own father Peter Heseltine Warlock, the talented English songwriter and notorious dabbler in the black arts, in 1931. In the writer son’s experience, some dead disquietingly refused to ‘disappear as [they] should’.
And now Nigel Heseltine himself is a writer who has very largely disappeared from view in Wales. He is remembered, if at all, only as the author of the occasional odd (sometimes very odd) story and a few critical pieces. But he deserves to be better served, if only for his brief but valuable contribution to his country’s emergent English-language literature, and in that connection he may perhaps best be appreciated as a border-country writer, one of a large and eclectic group that includes (at random) Newtown’s Geraint Goodwin, Hereford-shire’s Margiad Evans, Abergavenny’s Raymond Williams (
a great pioneer of border fiction as of border studies), Flintshire’s Emyr Humphreys, and, of course, Manafon’s very own R. S. Thomas. Border regions are fascinating. They are zones of conflict, regions of cultural exchange, limbo-lands, areas of negotiation, no man’s land, their own place. They generate distinctive forms of consciousness. The Wales–England border is an area rich in cultural history that tends to be marginalised by ‘mainstream’ Welsh and English culture, and it remains for scholars to map out not only the actual geography but the symbolic geography of this region. Border studies are also currently very fashionable. In the light of contemporary postmodern and post-colonial thinking, the relationship between margins and centres has, in effect, been reversed. The former – the erstwhile peripheral and somewhat suspect border regions – now occupy pride of intellectual place as providing the most potent examples of that meeting, mingling and cross-fertilisation that is regarded as the creative essence of contemporary social and cultural life.
Moreover, from the postmodern point of view, they have the advantage of calling the very concept of fixed categories of identity into radical question, as border regions defy categorisation in ‘received’ terms. The cult of rootedness, that flourished half a century ago, has been replaced by a cult of fluid personal, social and cultural being. And the most subtle, sophisticated and influential cultural models of this ubiquitous ‘border’ identity have been produced by Homi Bhabha.2 The key term and value in his thinking is what he styles ‘hybridity’. By it he means to draw attention to the fact that, as the summary in the front matter of The Location of Culture succinctly puts it, ‘the most creative forms of cultural identity are produced on the boundaries in-between forms of difference, in the intersections and overlaps across the spheres of class, gender, race, nation, generation, location’. In the body of the work this concept is more fully developed along the following lines:
The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation … The margin of hybridity where cultural differences ‘contingently’ and conflictually touch, becomes the moment of panic which reveals the borderline experience. It resists the binary opposition of racial and cultural groups … as homogeneous polarized political consciousnesses. (Location of Culture, 7, 207)
If Bhabha’s theory is helpful in enabling us to characterise Heseltine’s cultural and social positioning as a writer, so too Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘schizo’ man may throw light on the creative energies of a life like Heseltine’s, seemingly devoted to a bewildering multiplication of personae.
[T]hey created the term ‘schizoanalysis’ to describe their own approach and goal: not the primacy of the psyche but the primacy of parts, ‘schizzes’ or impersonal and mobile fragments. Instead of beginning from the assumption that there are fixed structures such as language or logic that order life – this would be the ‘paranoid’ fixation on some external order – they argued that life was an open and creative whole of proliferating connections … Their ‘schizo’ is not a psychological type (not a schizophrenic), but a way of thinking a life not governed by any fixed norm or image of self – a self in flux and becoming, rather than a self submitted to law.3
Heseltine’s capacity for ceaseless, lawless self-(re)invention can seem fertile, and while this ‘schizo’ tendency may have originated as a defensive adaptive mechanism for coping with the radically destabilising features of his early family circumstances (never knowing who was his mother; effectively abandoned early by his mysterious and mercurial father; raised by his caring grandparents in a colourful family environment that, however unconventionally stable, was vulnerable to his father’s unpredictable visitations; traumatised young by his father’s mysterious death) it became a powerful enabler first of his (sometimes wildly pantomimic) work as a writer and subsequently of his restless worldwide career as a government administrator. In Celia Buckmaster’s 1939 review for Wales of Scarred Background, the youthful Heseltine’s account of his pre-war travels in Albania, she perceptively wrote: ‘[this book] would seem to be in the circumstances not so much a scarred background for Albania, but a scarred background in front of which Mr Heseltine walks and suffers.’4 That scarred background was his own childhood upbringing, an upbringing which was, indeed, to be not so much described as invisibly inscribed in much of his adult writing. Consequently, he could be seen as having lived his whole life in masquerade, providing a classic example of what Judith Butler influentially termed the ‘performative’ aspects of personal and cultural identity.5
The young Nigel Heseltine may therefore be seen as attempting to ‘place’ his own psychically ‘scarred background’ in his native border country of rural Montgomeryshire – a Wales just ‘round the corner from England’, as one of his characters befuddled by drink suggestively puts it. In his Welsh works he constructs it as a wild zone; a ‘lawless’ territory in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms; a stage for zany performances of identity. Indeed, a version of what Bhabha was half a century later to valorise as ‘hybridity’ was celebrated by Heseltine early in his writing career. In March 1939, he published a revealing review of David Jones’s In Parenthesis, hailing it as the founding text of Anglo-Welsh literature and comparing it with Ulysses as involving ‘the fusion … between Celt and Saxon’. Jones’s prose poem appeared to him to be ‘the first of a new race’ that was ‘more likely to make our national peculiarities international than the mouthings of Dylan Thomas’.6
Appropriately enough, the review appeared in that explosively influential magazine Wales, the natural site for such a claim, since, under the crazy maverick editorship of that charlatan of genius Keidrych Rhys, it set out to provide an aggressively combative and provocatively controversial platform for the first, often flamboyantly experimental, generation of Welsh writers in English. Having first published a poem in Wales when he was twenty-one, and having succeeded Rhys as editor in 1939 at the age of twenty-six, Heseltine at this time clearly subscribed to the journal’s main ideological aim of creating a new Wales by inciting a cultural revolution. And it is easy to see how he might have been attracted to Keidrych Rhys. That Falstaffian lord of misrule was an ideal surrogate father for a child whose own similarly renegade and raffish father had virtually abandoned him at birth, and whose beloved step-grandfather, Walter Buckley Jones, who helped raise him, was at once a conventional establishment figure and a great teller of local, and family, tales – Ian Parrott describes him as being both a JP and a magistrate to the local ‘lunatic asylum’.7 As for the rumbunctious Rhys, in signing off his first stint as editor of Wales with ‘Notes for a New Editor’ (i.e. his successor elect, Nigel Heseltine), he began with the typically baiting observation that ‘The Squirearchy in most villages are of the decayed English militarist class, who settle down in Wales on account of the salmon-fishing or because they are fussed over’.8
It was, then, to the remarkable, self-liberating, culturally hybrid and lawless first generation of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writers that the young Heseltine consciously belonged. Dylan Thomas, Glyn Jones, Rhys Davies, Idris Davies, Vernon Watkins – simply to name them is to be struck not only by the constellation of talents but by the significant fact that they were all products of the south Wales coalfield. That, too, was a border region of a kind, of course. What had the townships of the industrial valleys been but wild frontier towns? And as they gradually established a social equilibrium, it was evident that they represented a wholly new phenomenon in Wales, a rich mix of peoples ready for explosive cultural ignition. It is not for nothing, therefore, that Tony Conran entitled his recent study of the literature that was thus ignited Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry.9 But while Heseltine was naturally attracted to this new, border-country ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’ and its liberatingly hybrid work, he was also aware that, from a Montgomeryshire perspective, these writers came from foreign parts. ‘Takes longer than to go to London’, remarks one
of his characters who has ventured to travel from south to mid Wales.10 One of Heseltine’s aims was surely to extend the map of ‘Anglo-Welsh Wales’ to include his own Montgomeryshire border country.
The above comment appears in ‘The Lay Reader’, a story he published in Wales in August 1939. It concerns a chapel lay reader who arrives in deepest Montgomeryshire and is quizzed by his host: ‘“So you’re from South Wales,” I said, “it’s a long way.”’ That immediately starts the newcomer off about pits closing and lay-offs, dole queues and unemployment, the struggle between labour and capital, until the locals grow thoroughly alarmed at a militant socialism that seems to them positively bolshie. In the end Old Davies the Lane speaks up:
‘D’you know what they sold sheep for last year in Newton Smithfield?’ he asked. ‘D’you know what they were giving for fat lambs?’ The lay reader didn’t know of course. And most of us remembered when you could get a man to work without any of this minimum wage nonsense and insurance on top. (228)
And when the lay reader starts off again about ‘the unequal bargain between employers and workers that only a strong Union could settle’, Evans Cwm-llan breaks in: ‘We’ve had to buy our farms now the landlords have sold out. Pay rates, and do our own repairs too. I tell you, young man, it’s not so comfortable here either.’
There is the nub of it for Heseltine: the hidden, historically momentous revolution that has befallen the Welsh countryside but that (as R. S. Thomas also insisted) has been wholly overshadowed by the colourfully epic sociopolitical drama of south Wales industrial history. That quiet, forgotten, but momentous, rural revolution was central to Heseltine’s understanding of his paternal family, of himself, of his border region and of his Wales, and it was the compulsive subject of his Welsh fiction. Using comedy as his medium, he explored this disappearing world of the border gentry directly, in a splendid collection of stories that sadly remain unpublished, thus perpetuating the marginalisation, the effective silencing, by contemporary Welsh social, political and literary history of the important story of Heseltine’s Welsh place.
All That is Wales Page 11
