All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  The younger generation in the novel is in most other respects more knowing, and also sometimes more honest, than its elders. Thea openly flirts with her father, teasingly treating him as her beau. His nephew Norman is more honest about his contribution to the breakdown of his marriage than J.T. ever managed to be. Such frankness, particularly in sexual matters, is graphically suggested by the wartime scene in which J.T., crossing a field on his way to visit Vernon, finds his attention unwillingly riveted to a woman’s half-naked body: ‘Her white belly and her black pubic hair that were meant to be hidden, had become the centre of the whole landscape.’ But his subsequent (and consequent) argument with his errant son Ronnie (the woman’s lover) in that same scene brings out the glibness, flip reductiveness and selfishness of his son’s outlook on life.

  Change itself is shown by the novel to involve unexpected continuities as well as differences. Vernon is very much his father’s son, idealistic to a fault. Even Dan Llew’s ‘modern’ mercenariness has its antecedent in his Pa’s lifelong habit of lifting the stair-carpet, and the old tyrant of Argoed is indeed proud of a son who has prospered because he followed the biblical injunction not to ‘bury his talent’. The sad Christian farce performed at Oberammergau is paralleled by what has long been going on in Nonconformist Wales. Yet when all is said and done, some of the most powerful scenes in Outside the House of Baal are those which plangently convey a scene of the passing of a world, memorably instanced by J.T.’s heart-breaking attempt to speak, on tape, to Lydia’s relatives in America. Emyr Humphreys sketched in his notebooks the kind of change he there had in mind: ‘Man lives longer – no other physical change but the world frame of his imagination shattered [… J.T.’s] children lose faith; his country decays; his family becomes estranged – like Job long ago.’ Nevertheless the relationship between past and present in the novel as a whole is more complex and subtle than this. In the last scene but one in which J.T. is featured, we see him poignantly at a loss to prevent the mistakes of the past from being repeated, but this time in a harsher key.

  That scene revolves around the incident in which a forlornly lost little boy dirties his pants, and so after a fashion there is a reference right back to the opening paragraph, in which J.T. breaks wind. It is, in fact, noticeable how often ‘gross’ bodily functions are mentioned in Outside the House of Baal – farting, defecating, urinating, vomiting and so on. These are strong reminders that human life, however spiritualised a view of it one takes, inescapably involves an existence in and of the body, an existence which thereby has its comic, distasteful and grotesque aspects with which any serious spiritual philosophy has got to come to terms. The novel shows traditionally puritanical Nonconformity, in the shape of the main characters, endeavouring to recognise that, as one of the notes has it, ‘the body [is] not an evil thing’. When, therefore, J.T. comes face to face with these physical facts of life, or is simply juxtaposed with them, the maturity of his spiritual vision is implicitly put to the test, as it is when he is seen to struggle, along with Kate, to cope with the potentially humiliating physical disabilities and general bodily decrepitude that accompany old age.

  If Outside the House of Baal is, as I believe it to be, the best novel that has yet been written in English about Wales, then that is due in no small measure to the central division of mind and of feeling out of which it came, and which it clearly reflects. This division has already been explored, in several of its different manifestations, in the main body of this essay, but in conclusion it may be approached once more via the comments Emyr Humphreys made about the novel Traed Mewn Cyffion by his late friend, the great Welsh short-story writer Kate Roberts. His remarks about her talent, and her achievement, apply almost equally to himself as author of Outside the House of Baal:

  Kate Roberts belongs to that select category of artist whose work emerges from a given landscape and society with the numinous power of a megalith or a stone circle. This is a status not easily achieved. It requires a combination of servitude and revolt which reflects the relationship between the artist and her society. In retrospect, it is the product of a life-long struggle and a life-long commitment: the unceasing urge to be both a free artist and a responsible member of a society under siege from hostile historical forces … On the surface the novel would appear to be in the mould of the ‘three generations sagas’ of popular fiction. But because of the special nature of Kate Roberts’s gift and her response to the crisis in the life of her community and the wider upheavals of her time, the novel takes on several of the features of an epic in the classical sense. For example, although her style is bare and her prose is deliberately unadorned, there is throughout the work a note of intensity, a quality of song, that echoes the timeless celebration of tribal and social qualities characteristic of epic poets from Homer to the Hengerdd. Almost in spite of the modern critical mode there is an underlying current of praise-poetry. With all their faults and short-comings, these are her people to whom she is tied by indissoluble bonds of attachment.17

  When the publishers first received the typescript of Outside the House of Baal they announced their enthusiasm for it in the form of a telegram to the author which read: ‘VERY PLEASED STOP WRITING’. Since Emyr Humphreys happened to be away at work when the telegram arrived, it was opened and read by his young daughter, who then excitedly reported to her baffled father over the phone that his publishers had told him to stop writing immediately. Fortunately, Emyr Humphreys did not take that advice – indeed during the half century since the novel appeared in 1965 he has published more than a dozen more novels, including the impressive Amy Parry sequence. But Outside the House of Baal remains the single best work he has ever produced; a masterpiece among Welsh novels, and a marvellous combination of ‘servitude and revolt’.

  (First published in Sam Adams [ed.], Seeing Wales Whole: Essays on the Literature of Wales [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998].)

  Notes

  1The novel places the decay and eventual sale of a corresponding farm at the very centre of its concerns, treating it implicitly as an allegory of the decline of the family values promoted, for better and for worse, by Welsh Nonconformity, with a resultant erosion of social conscience and cultural commitments. For the name of his fictional farm, Humphreys turned to ‘Argoed’, a great poem by the renowned strict-metre poet T. Gwynn Jones, recording the story of the casual erasure of a Gallic tribe’s language and way of life by the implacable legions of imperial Rome.

  2This aspect of Emyr Humphreys’s fictional output is considered at length in ‘“Solid in Goodly Counsel”: The Chapels Write Back’, in M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), pp. 294–330.

  3The remark was made during a discussion with R. S. Thomas in the programme Mother’s Tongue, not Mother Tongue, presented by M. Wynn Thomas (BBC Radio 4, August 1986).

  4See John Harris (ed.), Caradoc Evans, My People (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1987).

  5For the general background, see Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

  6Emyr Humphreys’s own view of this period is to be found in The Taliesin Tradition (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1989).

  7For further information about these figures see Meic Stephens (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  8Another notable ‘rebel’ Nonconformist minister of the inter-war years mentioned by Emyr Humphreys in his notes for Outside the House of Baal was Tom Nefyn (Williams) (1895–1958), whose controversial life furnished models for certain events and characters in the novel. Tom Nefyn saw action both in the Dardanelles and in the Middle East during the First World War, and in the process underwent a religious conversion which influenced the remainder of his life. On his return he entered the Calvinistic Methodist ministry where his unorthodox theology, allied with his evangelical readiness to preach a radical social gospel, made him a figure revered by some but disapproved
by others.

  9George M. Ll. Davies, Pilgrimage of Peace (London: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1950), p. 13. Hereafter Pilgrimage.

  10In this section I draw heavily on the working notebooks which Emyr and Elinor Humphreys kindly allowed me to consult and that are now in the National Library of Wales. References to Outside the House of Baal are to the revised and expanded text published by Seren (1996) for which I furnished extensive notes.

  11Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 151.

  12This quotation is taken from Emyr Humphreys’s notebook. In the translation by Pears and McGuinness the sentence reads: ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (p. 149).

  13Claudio Magris, Times Literary Supplement (7–13 December 1990), 1332.

  14Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) was arrested by the Nazis in April 1943, imprisoned in Buchenwald and hanged two years later at Flossenburg.

  15Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 129.

  16Entry on Outside the House of Baal in Meic Stephens (ed.), The New Companion to the Literatures of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), p. 546.

  17Emyr Humphreys, ‘Under the Yoke’, New Welsh Review, 3 (Winter 1988), 9–10; collected in M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Emyr Humphreys, Conversations and Reflections (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), pp. 77–83.

  7

  ‘YR HEN FAM’: R. S. THOMAS AND THE CHURCH IN WALES

  ‘Poet and priest’: when John Ormond was making his celebrated film profile of R. S. Thomas for television in 1971 that was the title he gave it.1 And it was while being interviewed for that film that R.S. made those celebrated, not to say notorious, remarks to the effect that, for him, poetry and religion were much the same thing. Insofar as sustained attention has been paid to Thomas as poet and priest it’s tended to consist either of an exploration of the implications of this controversial statement, or an attempt to uncover the roots of his notoriously casual decision to enter the priesthood, usually in his relations with his mother and her own clerical background and leanings.2 But I’ve come to feel that that doesn’t do justice to his complex dual identity. And I’ve also come to suspect that critical discussion of the matter has been seriously hampered by an ignorance of its subject. Has anyone noticed, for instance, that R. S. Thomas was actually eight years older than the Church he served as priest for some forty years?3

  We need, it seems to me, to get back to basics, which means beginning at the beginning – the beginning not so much of the Church of England as of R. S. Thomas’s Church: the Church in Wales. We need to start by fully registering the fact that he belonged to virtually the first generation of priests in Wales to serve a newly disestablished Church. Throughout not only his period of training but also his early years as a priest, his new Church was in process of radical restructuring. But – and much more importantly for the young curate and vicar – it was also in the throes of the effort to come to terms with its problematical new status and role. R.S., I believe, came gradually to feel an immense personal investment in this latter dilemma. And, indeed, an interesting, if in the end only doubtfully persuasive, case could be made for reading those numerous early poems of his, many of them figuring Iago Prytherch, that agonise over the relationship of a priest to his people, primarily in the light of the much larger cognate crisis of his Church. What was the new Church in Wales to make of its relationship to the nation?

  But, resisting temptation to at least toy with that passingly seductive but reductive reading, I’d like to highlight instead two long-lasting concerns of what might be styled R.S.’s disestablished mentality and then show how they seem to me to have left their mark on some of his poetry. The first might be succinctly designated ‘the issue of independence’; the second ‘the case of Yr Hen Fam/the Old Mother’. Disestablishment became fact in 1920 when the Church lost its long, and frequently bitter, rearguard action against the socially and politically powerful onslaught of nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity on its privileged and supposedly predatory status. It now had to recognise the legally accomplished fact of its disestablishment and disendowment. Viewed by leading Anglican clergy and the faithful alike at the time simply as an accursed example of the trumping of spiritual authority by crude political power, this profound change in the Church’s status came, in the fullness of time, to be viewed by some as an unlooked-for blessing. R. S. Thomas, in particular, came to regard this change not as a historical catastrophe but rather as a historical turning point – no less than a de facto assertion of Welsh independence. In 1970, for instance, he published a letter in the Church’s Welsh-language weekly, Y Llan. It objected to a clause in the Church’s constitution that specifically denied a priest the right to a clerical pension were he to be imprisoned for any offence against the law. With his own case very obviously in mind, R.S. points out that this harsh penalty clause would inescapably apply to any priest currently engaging in law-breaking activities in active support of the morally admirable campaign of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg for full legal recognition of the Welsh language. And he concludes by arguing that such a clause should no longer be acceptable to a Church that had, after all, declared its separation from England and was no longer a dutiful handmaiden of the state.4

  In other words, R.S. had come to view the Church in Wales as, at least potentially, a wholly separate, and therefore truly national, Welsh Church. But implicit in his very letter, of course, was evidence to the contrary – evidence that is of the Church’s continuing reluctance to face the implications of its new status. Indeed, as R.S. very well knew, a substantial majority within the Church was stubbornly devoted to the continuation of what he regarded as unreconstructed ‘English’, statist, norms. It was an attitude that had been not only passively condoned but effectively ‘sponsored’ from the very beginning by the inaugural Archbishop of the new Welsh Church, Archbishop Alfred George Edwards (erstwhile Bishop of St Asaph), memorably characterised by the unfailingly waspish W. J. Gruffydd, a leading Welsh-language intellectual of the day, as ‘the most disastrous man that Wales has ever seen’.5 And priests and people alike of this dominant opinion were prone to manifest in practice, if not in cautious word, a hostility to the Welsh language of which R. S. Thomas was such a prominent champion. The resultant ‘civil war’ within the Church in Wales is fascinatingly chronicled in the columns of Y Llan throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. During the later part of that decade the tension between the two factions was greatly heightened, at least until the enthronement of Glyn Simon6 in 1968 as Archbishop and his game-changing inaugural address, by the controversial activities of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg.7 And I’d like to draw attention to the implications of this for R.S.’s poetry by first homing in on one prominent clash between Welsh-speakers and the Church establishment, and then using it to read one of his well-known poems in a rather different light.

  An editorial in Y Llan on 14 June 1974 launches a stinging attack on St David’s Cathedral, which is accused of treating the Welsh language with contempt. Nothing, it states, at St David’s is calculated to disturb the peace of the visiting English, save for an occasional Welsh phrase on the ancient tombs. The situation is, it vehemently declares, little short of a disgrace in a diocese where Welsh is still a living and lively language. ‘Gall ymweld â Thyddewi’, it movingly concludes, ‘fod yn fendith i’r Cristion; ond mae’n wayw i’r Cymro’ (‘Visiting St David’s may be a blessing to a Christian, but it is agony for a Welsh-speaker’).8

  The sheer exasperation so powerfully voiced in this editorial is the product of years of ever-growing discontent amongst Welsh-speakers, also liberally chronicled in Y Llan, of this soi-disant ‘national’ cathedral’s treatment of the national language. The most prominent example arose in 1967. That year the Church was celebrating a momentous event: the 400th anniversary of the translation both of the New Testament and Book of Common Prayer int
o Welsh. And in May, the Llan carried an angry letter from the Revd Terry Thomas of St David’s College Lampeter, protesting at the fact that the official service to mark the event at St David’s Cathedral had been conducted almost entirely in English.9 This sparked off a variety of responses, defenders of the service arguing that it was only one commemorative event out of many, that it was intended to draw the attention of non-Welsh-speakers to an important national occasion, and so on.10 But many correspondents remained unconvinced, among them two heavyweight Anglican laymen of the day, T. I. Ellis, son of the late, iconic Cymru Fydd MP and Chief Liberal Whip, and Aneirin Talfan Davies, by then Head of BBC Wales.11 The latter was insistent that the St David’s event was symptomatic of a serious malaise in the Church as a whole, its dereliction of its duty to serve its nation.12 And another correspondent, Revd Tom Bowen, vicar of Llanegwad, called for the creation of ‘Cymdeithas Gymraeg yr Eglwys yng Nghymru’, a Welsh-language society of the Church in Wales. He was to prove as good as his word as, over the next few years, he worked successfully and tirelessly to establish and to develop exactly such a ginger group.13