All That is Wales
Page 12
Tales of the Landless Gentry – the title of Heseltine’s unpublished collection in a way says it all.11 From the middle of the nineteenth century, Wales’s great Tory landlords who had (mostly affably) kept the peasantry in obsequious thrall for centuries were forced by the irresistible new power of Liberal politics literally to give ground to new, proto-democratic political realities. Compelled, by a series of great people’s elections, to relinquish political control, they were also gradually obliged to sell off their vast acres to the tenant farmers who had been the main sources of their wealth. The extent of the revolution may be gauged by the fact that in the 1873 census over 60 per cent of Wales ‘consisted of estates of over 1,000 acres’:
these estates were in the hands of only 571 landowners, a mere 1 per cent of the total of those owning lands in some form. Beneath these great families lay a whole nexus of smaller land-owners and squireens, bound together by marriage and by commercial and social intercourse. Over most of Wales, these landowners still exercised a massive, almost unchallenged authority.12
The dismantling of this powerful hegemony was a process begun with the great campaigns of radical and nationalist protest of the last decades of the nineteenth century. As a result, these ascendancy landmarks ‘now became beleaguered outposts of a new form of English and Anglican dominance over the countryside’ (Rebirth of a Nation, 11). The process was subsequently accelerated, and completed, by the economic crisis during and following the Great War. At the same time a new upstart class of industrial magnates, ennobled en masse by the unscrupulous political maestro Lloyd George, turned squire, acquired land, built grand houses, and generally usurped the (much diminished) place of the great landed families some of whom had arrogantly traced their pedigrees back to Tudor times.
This was the world Nigel Heseltine entered, when he was in effect adopted by his paternal grandparents and brought up in the rambling would-be plas of Cefn-Bryntalch, with its thirty rooms, situated ‘near the village of Llandyssil, about half way between Montgomery and Abermule in Powys (then known as Montgomeryshire)’ (Crying Curlew, 9). Not that his paternal step-grandfather could claim ancient pedigree. Walter Buckley Jones was one of the grandsons of a Welsh hill farmer from Mochdre who had made enough of a fortune by selling flannel to Newtown to become gentrified. The old man married into the genuinely ancient but impoverished Buckley-Williams family, thus allowing his offspring to conceal the vulgar Welsh appellation of ‘Jones’ within a new, decently hyphenated surname.13 Consequently, by the 1920s and 1930s, such an upstart Welsh family had acquired at least a sheen, a patina of dignified age, and an impeccable, imperially English, establishment character. Two of Walter’s brothers became distinguished military figures – Colonel Whitmore and Brigadier-General Lumley Williams Jones served in India, Burma and South Africa, and Lumley was awarded the DSO. Given Heseltine’s upbringing in this definitively Anglo-Welsh setting, it is no wonder that as a writer he became interested in ‘hybridity’.
In the unpublished Tales of the Landless Gentry, a collection seemingly assembled over a period of decades, Heseltine draws heavily on the yarns of his genially eccentric step-grandfather Walter along with other family experiences. Many of the stories are for instance fictive retellings of tales about Heseltine’s father, the composer known as Peter Warlock, and others that Heseltine had heard from his step-grandfather and was eventually to include in his late 1992 memoir Capriol for Mother, while characters such as Colonel Whitmore carry the names of actual family members.14 Almost all the stories either directly concern, or at least mention, the typically eccentric Vaughan-Thomas family of border squires who claim direct Tudor ancestry. The family’s zany modern history is traced by means of the only son, Rhys, who in some respects seems to be an amalgam of Heseltine and of his father. The dominant, and socially representative, theme of the collection is a once-great family’s decline and eventual social disappearance. Indeed, the stories are a powerful comic elegy for the passing of a peculiar Welsh class and with it a way of life. Comedy prevails for most of the time, and it ranges from the subtle comedy of social manners to the robustly anarchic, even faintly nihilistic humour of outright farce. But the tone changes, and darkens, towards the end of the collection, when Heseltine sensitively identifies with the plight of a young woman who has effectively been sentenced to a life blighted by hard labour following her colonel father’s squandering of what was left of the once-prominent family’s dwindling fortunes.15
The tragicomedy of money as fecklessly handled by a squirearchy terminally bewildered by its own decline is one theme treated at times acidly and at times sympathetically by Heseltine. Rhys’s incorrigibly vague mother pins her hopes on her ultimately ruinous speculations in the Wahi gold mines of South Africa, while his amiable uncle Devereux has – but whisper it not, since the family never does – fled to Madagascar to escape his creditors, having failed for years even to glance at his business ledger. Money is to them a mysterious foreign body. It is status and land alone that really matter – the land they have lost, such as the farm sold off to old Hamer, a speaker of Welsh, regarded by Rhys’s family as a mere barbaric patois. But if Hamer can scarcely speak a word of civilised English, he can certainly accumulate cash, and when he sets about felling the may trees on the land he has bought from the Vaughan-Thomases, these outraged grandees treat it as if it were still theft of their own property. Mrs Vaughan-Thomas regularly bemoans her straitened circumstances, but, as Rhys notes, ‘having been ruined every morning for months, his parents would set off in good spirits for Vichy and Baden Baden to recover from their worries by drinking beneficial foreign waters’.16
And the nouveau riche gentry lack the bearing, the manners, the grooming, the style of the Old Quality. Whereas Lord Herbert unmistakeably looks like a lord, fat Mrs Buckley with her withered eyes ‘wore what looked like a sponge-bag on her head’, and as for the awful, aitches-dropping Mrs McCraw, in her best get-up she resembles a bloated purple fuchsia.17 But as they are forced to abandon their great sprawling Jacobean houses for smaller, and increasingly shabby accommodation, the old gentry, raised to fecklessness and mad eccentricity, can demonstrate a talent bordering on genius for the unkempt and the squalid. When Rhys crosses south to the wrong side of the Black Mountains to stay with the Pryses he finds himself visiting a family with bats in their bedrooms and grain in their bath; he has to fend off the cats in order to help himself to some of the rancid butter among the ruins of the breakfast table. And it isn’t just the squirearchy that is bizarre, so is its supporting class, like the vicar of Llanmerewig, ‘his moustache fluttering like a wounded bird’.18
Farce is the natural mode of this mad world, and a number of the stories are hilarious exercises in this genre, ingeniously extended so as to suggest, as does Pope’s Dunciad, that Folly possesses its own insane energy, its own crazily creative inventiveness. There is, for instance, the story of the Mochyn Hunt, a ramshackle outfit bringing together the remnants of the Old Quality, mounted on shaggy ageing nags, and the ‘arrivistes’, ridiculously spruce in their new pink coats and riding fine horses with gleaming coats.
Divided among themselves the Quality cast envious glances at certain near-squires with their polished horses and willing grooms neatly dressed, reflecting that these happy new-comers of thirty years back, now staring haughtily through the calm morning air, were financed by cotton-booms and profitable trade in fat and oils, while the remote descendants of Welsh chieftains sold off their land to them.19
The Master of the Hunt is Major Borrowdale, whose grandfather, the family’s founding squire, came from Bradford and was known as ‘Old Stink o’ Brass’ (a name Heseltine took from one of his step-grandfather’s tales). The Hunt’s Hon. Secretary is Mr Chappell, ‘five days a week at his desk in Liverpool, but a jolly squire on the sixth, and tootling a horn, too’ (2). And one of its most prominent members is Mrs de Morgan, a tough old biddy of ‘indisputable Quality’ (2). The hunt is meeting on the lawns of a new villa that aspires to be a pla
s, but lacks not only the acreage of lawns but even the imposing sweep of derelict drive that every true plas can boast. To cap it all, the villa’s tiny lawn is dominated by the most vulgar of arboreal species, a monkey-puzzle tree. This is the abode of Mr McCraw, ‘a recent immigrant from Manchester’ who is so vaguely known to the assembled gentry that he is mistaken for a groom and beats a hurried retreat.
Into this scene intrudes Rhys Vaughan-Thomas, celebrating his recent return from exotic Ethiopia by being mounted not on a horse but on a camel from Duffy’s Travelling Menagerie, and sporting a djellaba (5). It is a wild parody of the Empire striking back, because chaos predictably ensues as the horses take fright and in the resulting melée the camel backs into one of Mr McCraw’s prize greenhouses. That is just the beginning of a whole series of mishaps, including a failed attempt to ensure that the Mochyn Hunt manages to raise a fox (a previously unthinkable triumph) by releasing the animal into a covert under the very noses of the hounds. At the end of the story the fox is indeed killed – not, though, by the hunt but by a local farmer vengefully trespassing on his neighbour’s land. Major Borrowdale, now bent on retirement, is left wistfully reflecting that ‘with what he could save with no flea-bitten hounds he could go to the South of France every year and relax at Monte Carlo’ (8).
Of all Heseltine’s many portraits of the parvenus, or what we might term the new half-baked Upper Crust, the most unforgivingly biting is that of Evans-Hughes (Lord Hughes of Llandewi). He is what Americans colourfully call a blowhard, a Welsh gwerinwr made good, and vulgar to the core. His father, the great founder of the family’s fortune, had, or so local gossip has it, started out as a mere bottom sawyer before moving on to move a mountain in order to build first the Cambrian railways and then Cardiff docks. There are therefore no prizes for spotting a resemblance to the renowned Davies family of Gregynog, that pseudo-Tudor pile in the near vicinity of Cefn-Bryntalch, built of concrete but on Welsh coal by ‘Davies [top-sawyer] Llandinam’, one of the lords of the industrial Rhondda. As for Evans-Hughes, the bottom sawyer’s son and one of the Liberal MPs elevated to the peerage as a job lot by the cunning Lloyd George, he is renowned primarily for being renowned. His reputation for philanthropy is literally legendary, since it has no basis whatsoever in fact. He wraps his avarice up in fantasies of grandiose community projects, the latest of which is to construct a House of Re-Coordination on top of a mountain and to make it accessible only by a funicular railway. Don’t ask what Re-Coordination means: neither Lord Hughes nor anyone else has a clue, but they are too much in awe of him ever to ask. A comically disastrous theatrical performance is arranged at the local Abermule hall to raise money for this project, at which Lord Hughes himself unexpectedly materialises to dispense not largesse but patronising bonhomie to all and sundry. When a local orchestra is commandeered to play at a fund-raising concert, Lord Hughes insists on attending the rehearsals, booming advice in his megaphone voice, bullying the distinguished London conductor hired for the occasion, and mistaking a Mozart symphony for that non-existent oratorio, Mendelssohn’s Elisha. At the end of the story, Lord Hughes disappears to Washington on urgently important government business, leaving the locals to pick up the disastrous bills for the fiascos he has perpetrated. But through it all the local Montgomeryshire and Radnor newspaper remains cravenly, obsequiously loyal. ‘None will be found to dispute, at least among our readers,’ it sententiously pronounces, ‘that in our Generous Patron we are the fortunate possessor of the summit of forward-looking progress which is the acme of our Era.’20
In its humour, the unpublished Tales of the Landless Gentry may be considered an interesting border hybrid. It is reminiscent of an English comic genre that ranges from Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities by Robert Surtees to P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. But it also has some affinities with the young Heseltine’s prose paraphrases of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s great medieval poetry.21 Heseltine turns many of the poems into little comic sketches of a sort, and he responds best to the extravagant, burlesque elements in the writing, as in the well-known poem about the drunk lover who stands pleadingly under his mistress’s window on a freezing night, with the frost biting him like a rake. The window is opened by her ‘withered oaf’ of a husband who sets the whole town after him. In other poems, a pining lover emaciated by passion complains ‘You could make a razor from my nose’ (54), and another is so bewildered by his infatuation that he falls into a bog. It is noticeable that Heseltine’s poem ‘To a Girl Marrying a Man with a Wooden Leg’, published in Wales in 1939, could easily be a crude paraphrase of Dafydd ap Gwilym. But another parallel for Heseltine’s Tales may be found in Irish fiction, not only the Anglo-Irish great house novel, from Maria Edgeworth to Somerville and Ross, but also the contemporary work of that comic genius Flann O’Brien. In reviewing O’Brien’s quirky, zany, absurdist masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds in 1939, Heseltine praises the way in which ‘the funniest book yet out of Ireland’ ‘scoffs at the sacred foundations of Celtic culture’. Heseltine exults in the maverick quality of this ‘grand Harlequinade’, and in celebrating the achievements of what a contemporary English reviewer had uneasily styled ‘an uncomfortable book’, Heseltine may well have been paving the way for the book he himself was to publish in 1946, Tales of the Squirearchy.22
As already noted, it was published by Keidrych Rhys’s Druid Press, which also almost simultaneously published The Stones of the Field, the groundbreaking volume by R. S. Thomas, then at Manafon, himself very much a border writer. And in a way, both these books address, in their indirect and wholly singular and arrestingly grotesque fashion, the radical changes that had happened in the Welsh countryside. A weird, bizarre, work, Tales of the Squirearchy includes some stories that make one feel as if one has stepped into a Dalí painting.23 It is difficult not to believe that Heseltine had been influenced by the surrealism of the previous decades, and his work has certain affinities with the strange stories in Dylan Thomas’s Map of Love, a book Davies Aberpennar (later Pennar Davies) had reviewed for Heseltine in Wales.24 And just as Thomas invented his own imaginary Jarvis Hill country as a setting for stories that were clearly concerned with west Wales, so Heseltine set his stories in the county of Cariad which is obviously a most peculiar version of Montgomeryshire. The absurdist tales are full of an ebullient black humour, frequently expressed through the controlled hysteria of crazy farce. Theorists of the grotesque and of the absurd have made much of the way such disquieting modes seem to derive from psycho-cultural factors that destabilise normality, defamiliarising it startlingly by twisting it out of comfortingly familiar shape. Such modes are frequently expressive of psychic and/or cultural alienation. And such insights into the genre seem relevant to Heseltine’s case. One might phrase the same understanding rather differently, and suggest that the grotesque can be expressive of borderline states, of border experiences where different cultures not only confront each other but sometimes violently collide. That may give us a clue as to the deeper logic of stories that might otherwise be rather difficult to comprehend. It may also aid the placement of Heseltine in the context of his Anglo-Welsh contemporaries. In reviewing The Map of Love in the winter (1939–40) issue of Wales, Davies Aberpennar (later Pennar Davies) proposed that there was
an interesting family resemblance between, say, Caradoc Evans, Arthur Machen, the Powys brothers, Dylan Thomas and even Richard Hughes – a delight in the eccentric, the luscious, the strange, sometimes the macabre. Reading them you find yourself in a world which has a life of its own but which remains unnatural according to the life of this world. There is no escapism, for their creations are rather grimmer, if anything, than the world you know. (307)
The Heseltine of Tales of the Squirearchy would seem recognisably of that company.
It is therefore worth considering some of the points of tension out of which these stories proceed. A character common to many of them is a young gentleman called Thwaite, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, whose father limps and has a hole in his h
ead left by the Great War. Thwaite lives in a great house.
Raskolnikov Jones is his neighbour and is still rich and wicked, yet Thwaite’s father has now thirty acres out of the four thousand. So [Thwaite’s] estate is a large house, a large yard, large stables, a large garden; two small fields, a small wood, some scrub. (45)
And through that he walks ‘with his second unnecessary servant to the broken fence’. We enter, then, the superannuated and therefore unnecessary world of the Welsh border squirearchy, a moribund world which is inherently absurd because there is this gross and grotesque mismatch between its self-image and the social reality. Add to that another consideration. This squirearchy, whatever its cultural antecedents, has become in many respects an interloping English class, a colonial relic, not only surviving but still enjoying social privileges and exercising social authority, although it has been shorn by an erstwhile Welsh peasantry of the political and economic power on which it had depended for so many centuries. One could therefore read Nigel Heseltine’s collection as a species of post-colonial literature. In his early collection of poems, The Four-Walled Dream, he has a slogan-ridden English journalist say of the people who have been killed in a bomb blast: