All That is Wales
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21Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies (eds), R. S. Thomas: Uncollected Poems (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2013), p. 27. Hereafter UP.
22An obituary for Gwenallt was published in Y Llan (3 Ionawr 1969), 1. It specifically mentioned his disillusionment with the Englishness of the Church in Wales: ‘Bu’n anffyddiwr, yn Ymneilltuwr, yn Eglwyswr, ac yna’n Ymneilltuwr drachefn am fod Seisnigrwydd yr Eglwys yn ei gadw draw’ (‘He had been an atheist, a Nonconformist, an Anglican, and then a Nonconformist once more because the Englishness of the Church alienated him’).
23Walter Davies (‘Gwallter Mechain’) (1761–1849), poet, editor and antiquarian, was rector of Manafon from 1807 to 1837.
24There is a summary of the programme of celebration in Y Llan (16 Ionawr 1976), 1.
25An alternative, less colourful but no doubt more reliable, version has it that he burned the cassock in the back garden of his rectory.
26‘R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen’, The David Jones Journal (Summer/Autumn 1991), 97.
27Radio Cymru centenary profile of R. S. Thomas, broadcast Friday, 29 March 2013.
8
R. S. THOMAS: ‘A RETIRED CHRISTIAN’
I am retiring at Easter. I shall be 65. I could stay till 70, but I am glad to go from a Church I no longer believe in, sycophantic to the queen, iconoclastic with language, changing for the sake of change and regardless of beauty. The Christian structure is a meaningful structure, but in the hands of theologians or the common people it is a poor thing.1
When R.S. retired as priest of the Church in Wales in 1978, almost a quarter of a century of life, and half of his years as a writer, still remained to him. Although he himself repeatedly treated retirement as a watershed episode, no commentator (myself included) has hitherto considered its impact on his thinking and his poetry, preferring to refer indiscriminately instead to his late, Aberdaron, period. But in fact his writing testifies to the painful and pivotal nature of his break – for so in truth it was – with his church, and records a narrative of severance and reaction far more nuanced and complex and conflicted than I first supposed when my attention was first drawn to R.S.’s final years. I had assumed that break to have been simply liberating and creatively enabling. But while this was indeed straightforwardly the case with regard to the freedom he gained to act and to speak uninhibitedly on those issues closest to his heart, such as environmental concerns, nuclear policy and the future of the Welsh language, the implications of retirement for his thinking and creative writing were altogether more mixed and ambivalent.
In this latter respect, it seems to me tentatively possible to distinguish between three different phases. The first (1978–85), immediately following his retirement, is characterised by a continuation of that process of spiritual exploration that had first found explosive expression in the first of his ‘Aberdaron’ volumes, H’m (1972). Central to the second (1985–92) are several seminal and radical exercises in retrospection, most notably Neb (1985), Blwyddyn yn Llŷn (1990), and that remarkable volume The Echoes Return Slow (1988). These include important sections that highlight the fraught circumstances of his retirement; and this second phase also features three volumes of mostly mediocre poetry (Experiments with an Amen (1986); Counterpoint (1990); Mass for Hard Times (1992)) which are the intermittently successful creative result of his efforts to work through the intellectual and spiritual crisis precipitated by the traumatic rupture he had experienced. The third, and concluding, phase (1992–5) sees him establishing a new equilibrium, as evidenced in an outstanding and in some ways summative, final volume, No Truce With The Furies (1995). What follows will primarily concentrate on the second of these phrases, since it seems to me to distil the crisis that determined Thomas to retire and dictated the whole tone and tenor of his last years.
* * *
Crisis indeed it was, judging by an intriguing, uncharacteristically full, letter he sent to his friend Raymond Garlick in 1979, the year following his retirement. He there confesses to having suffered from ‘some sort of malaise lately; a nervous reaction or something which has given me to much thought’. ‘Whenever I am unwell,’ he continues, ‘I fall to questioning various postures and tenets too easily and arrogantly held when one is well, both in one’s life and in poetry.’ And he then specifically connects his current psychically troubled condition to his worries about his relationship with his Church. It is a crucial passage, and therefore needs to be quoted in full:
I am writing like this to you because of the difficulty both of us are having with our allegiance to a church which seems to be abandoning too lightly the wonderful traditions which have sustained [sic] over the centuries.2 Many systems and structures tempt me from time to time, but I find, when I am unwell and nervously shaken, that I can’t live by them. I can’t bring myself to agree that Christianity is the only way, as so many dogmatists claim, but it is certainly one of the great ways and for one brought up in the European tradition, there is little point in turning to one of the other ways. So I am content to leave in such a mysterious and wonderful universe the issues in God’s hands, asking pardon for wilfulness and grace for humble trust and acceptance. The church is imperfect, God knows, but it has the scriptures and sacraments, if it only will have the grace to let those who prefer the old forms continue to enjoy them. So I shall still go along on Christmas morning. Perhaps you will? (LRG, 111)
To me, at least, this sounds like a cri de coeur from the brink of a breakdown prevented only by humble recourse to a makeshift credo. Gone is the proud defiance of a morally and spiritually bankrupt Church manifest in the earlier letter anticipating imminent retirement he’d sent to Garlick two years earlier and that serves as epigraph to this essay. Ten years later and Thomas would be claiming, in another letter to his friend, that his breakdown in 1979 – ‘I had been feeling more and more on edge, until suddenly one night something snapped and I was seized with uncontrollable shivers. This was followed by a week of extreme depression and, as you mention, claustrophobia’ (LRG, 138) – had been due to his having at that earlier time embarked on an unwise experiment with vegetarianism. Maybe. But my own instinct is still to suppose that the turmoil of soul attendant upon his break with his Church had more to do with it.
This crisis had certainly been a long time building. Long before his retirement, he had seen it looming, with a mixture of relief and dread. In his blither moments, he imagined a simple, clean break – ‘Let retirement be retirement indeed’, as he put it in The Echoes Return Slow.3 But always shadowing that blitheness there were dark misgivings. ‘Just when, after such long practice, he was beginning to approach spiritual health’, he noted with characteristic wryness, ‘life with that irony that is so dear to it announced that there is a time to retire even from a cure’ (CLP, 62). He had always been whimsically drawn to the medical connotations of that traditional ecclesiastical term for a priest’s duty of care to his parishioners and had been particularly appreciative of the irony of his own responsibility as a theologically challenged priest for the spiritual health of his flock (see CLP, 62). On the brink of retirement, he (correctly) anticipated that ‘the problems he had concealed from his congregations’ would have ‘him now all to themselves’ (CLP, 68). No longer would he have a round of duties to order his life by, or a fixed role within a community to ballast his solitary voyages through strange seas of thought. No longer either could he allow the Holy Sacrament to speak through him and for him, as it had done all those decades he had been the officiating priest. During those years he had come to appreciate how ‘the simplicity of the Sacrament absolved him from the complexities of the Word’ (CLP, 46). Now he was left face-to-face with those very complexities. If the prospect of having to move ‘from a parsonage to a cottage’ disheartened him – ‘the poverty of the spirit must be extended to the flesh’ as books, furniture and paintings had to be disposed of or placed in storage – much more dismaying was a downsizing of a wholly different kind: ‘he was under compulsion to give away whatever assuran
ces he possessed’ (CLP, 70). There were therefore times when retirement even balefully seemed to him to be bathed in an apocalyptic light and he toyed with the conceit of millenarianism: ‘Towards the end of one’s life, towards the end of the century, worse still towards the end of the millennium, the tempter approaches us with desperation’ (CLP, 67).
So concerned indeed was he about the practical as well as the psycho-spiritual consequences of retirement that, for all the bravado of that letter to Raymond Garlick at the end of 1977, he actually proposed a compromise arrangement to his bishop. He would, R.S. intimated, be willing to stay on for another five years as priest, provided that upon reaching the compulsory retirement age of seventy he then be allowed to remain in the vicarage ‘and do voluntary work in the parish’.4 His Church’s rejection of this compromise may well have reinforced his bilious disillusionment with the direction in which it was heading. He hated the reformed services, and, while sympathetic to the aim of reconciling church and chapel in Wales, was suspicious of any concession to forms of Nonconformist service that seemed to drain worship of its numinousness (A, 89). Imagine the depths of his dismay, then, when his own Church seriously began to contemplate measures that in his eyes would fatally compromise its for him unique power to mediate the awe of the human encounter with the holy.
* * *
For over a decade before his retirement, the Church in Wales had been establishing committees and commissions to advise on the adaptation of its texts, liturgies and sacraments to suit modern needs. R.S. was particularly exercised by their recommendations on reforming the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and by the modifications they proposed be made to the ministering of the Holy Sacrament or Eucharist. A flavour of the controversies that swirled around the reform proposals of this period may be got by consulting the columns of Y Llan – the Welsh-language weekly of the Church that R.S. regularly read and to which he occasionally contributed.
Take the liturgy, for example. Notes in Y Llan to welcome in the new year of 1966 predicted a move within the Church to implement reforms even to the Communion Service and three weeks later the six members of the ‘Liturgical Commission of the Church in Wales’ were listed by name.5 Indeed, every issue of Y Llan during the opening months of 1966 devoted space to discussing liturgical reform, culminating in an extensive report on debates on this subject at the Annual Meeting of the Church’s Governing Body in April.6 The moves afoot prompted considerable unease among some members of the clergy. Indeed, some (perhaps including R. S. Thomas) became rather demoralised by the whole process, because it seemed to them to diminish the sacerdotal power of the priesthood. For three weeks in the spring of 1969 Y Llan featured a series of powerful, highly articulate articles by a priest depressed by the prospective reduction of priestly authority – by which, as he explained, he meant not the authority of social status but the divinely bestowed authority to satisfy the deepest spiritual needs of his parishioners.7 He confessed to a feeling of pointlessness because the proposed changes would, in his opinion, leave the priest with no duties to discharge save those that could equally well be discharged by the laity.8 Traditionally, the central role of the priest – most completely fulfilled when serving the Eucharist at the altar – had been recognised and respected as that of bringing humanity unmistakeably face-to-face with the challenge and grace of the Gospel.9 It was in performing this role that the spiritually privileged and unique status of the priest as ‘Alter Christus’ (the human surrogate of Christ Himself, thus, in classic Catholic terms, acting ‘in persona Christi’) had always been most fully revealed. In this resided the truly essential function of the priesthood, and if the priest was not essential then he could be nothing but an obstacle. That, indeed, was precisely what the priest was in danger of becoming, under the changes currently being seriously considered by the Church. These would reverse the traditional relationship between priest and people, by encouraging the congregation to participate in the liturgy on much the same level as the priest, and to turn the sermon into a forum for discussion.
Whether or not Thomas would have endorsed all the sentiments expressed in this series of articles, there were certainly striking affinities between them and his own position. But there were equally powerful voices raised in Y Llan in support of the proposed reforms, and the terms in which they argued their case also sharpen our understanding of R.S.’s stance. In early 1972, the Church weekly printed a summary of the preparation by the Liturgical Commission of the Church in Wales of its submission to the General Synod on the reforming of the Eucharist.10 And a little later Y Llan noted that Communion in its proposed new form would now be trialled for a ten-year period, time enough for the Liturgical Commission to assess fully the practical implications of its prospective eventual adoption.11
This was the culmination of a process of review that Y Llan had been tracking for half a dozen years. In April 1967 it had approved the move to make the central thrust and divine purpose of the communion service clearer to all communicants, and had commended signs of an intention to increase the congregation’s awareness of playing as active a role as the priest in the Eucharist service.12 It approvingly quoted at length from an article on this subject by one of the leading Welsh Anglican laymen of the day, Aneirin Talfan Davies. He had recalled in an essay for the Western Mail how a Christian from another denomination had commented, after attending the traditional Eucharist service, that it had seemed odd for the priest to be doing everything, as if Communion were nothing but a priestly monologue. Three years earlier, an important editorial in Y Llan had warmly supported a proposal that in a new, reformed Eucharist service the altar should be so placed that the congregation could gather around it, with the priest facing the communicants rather than having his back to them and his face to the altar as hitherto.
This was precisely the proposed alteration to the sacrament that R. S. Thomas most deeply resented. And his own ‘reactionary’ view had been anticipated by Y Llan in its editorial, because it had anticipated objections to the reforms it was championing from those who sincerely believed that only an altar placed at a distance from the congregation could elicit the immense respect proper to the awesome mystery at the centre of the Eucharist, a mystery requiring communicants to approach it in fear and trembling. This, too, had been R.S.’s traumatic concern, as he made clear several years after retiring in Blwyddyn yn Llŷn/A Year in Llŷn:
It pains me greatly, but ever since the Church reformed the Liturgy, I cannot partake of the Sacrament. The new order of the Church in Wales has changed the whole atmosphere of Holy Communion for me. The pinnacle of the original service was when I, as a priest, would say the words of congregation over the bread and wine, with my back to the congregation as one who had the honour of leading them to the throne of God’s grace. But now it is the congregation that the priest faces, inviting them to speak, as he breaks the synthetic wafer before them. It is to God that mystery belongs, and woe to man when he tries to interfere with that mystery. As T. S. Eliot said, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ (A, 131)
So seminal a passage does this seem to me for any attempt to understand not only R.S.’s spiritual stance in retirement but the very character of the remarkable body of poetry he produced during that period, that I remain astonished its implications seem never to have been properly considered.
In Blwyddyn yn Llŷn he even proceeded to gloss his anguished comments about the Eucharist by drawing a distinction between the two sides of existence – ‘the transcendental and the subordinate, as it were’. ‘It is’, he explained, ‘an abysmal rift that exists between those who seek to exalt life and those who want to reduce it to the “bare facts”, as they term them. “Life is nothing but” … they say.’ And most tellingly of all, he turned, when seeking to lay this fundamental fallacy to rest, not to the central sacrament of his Church, which, in its traditional but now tragically ‘superseded’ form had been the irreplaceable symbolically expressive mainstay of his belief in the sacred source o
f all life, but to the life of Nature in which alone he could now find consolatory reassuring evidence of a belief essential to him both as a human being and as a creative artist. After all, Jesus himself, he became fond of stressing, had been a poet of nature. As a natural phenomenon, the Northern Lights, he affirmed, ‘is in the same class as thunder and lightning and earthquakes. If it doesn’t frighten you in the same way, it nevertheless sends a shiver through your being like something tremendum et fascinans.’ ‘It is likely’, he tellingly added, ‘that Jacob was too far south to see it, and yet it isn’t unlike a huge ladder between earth and heaven, and “behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it”’ (A, 133).
In that culminating fusion of a phenomenon of Nature with the imagery of the Old Testament, R.S. implicitly anticipates the crucial turn away from the Church and towards the natural world his creative mind was to take in his last decades, following his tragic estrangement. It was his attempt to recuperate the authentic imagery of the sacred he felt had been so culpably abandoned by the Church in Wales in favour of what it misguidedly supposed, under the influence of the powerful modern secular, purportedly ‘scientific’, outlook, to be the ‘bare facts’ of the Christian faith.
* * *
But in order fully to appreciate the nature and depth of R. S. Thomas’s late alienation from ‘his’ Church, and its implications for his great religious poetry, it is necessary to consider not only the crucial alterations to the Eucharist outlined above but the simultaneous movement to modernise the language of both the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Revision was in the air’, he noted acidly in The Echoes Return Slow, ‘Language was out of date; too formal. God was available for conversation’ (CLP, 60). And as with the movement to reform Holy Communion, Y Llan scrupulously recorded the developing debate. In March, 1969, for instance, it summarised the history of the preparation of a New English Bible, beginning with the establishing of an Inter-denominational Committee by the Church of England in 1947 and culminating with the publication of the modernised New Testament in 1961.13 (In 1963 the Welsh Free Church Council had likewise sponsored a new translation of the Bible into Welsh.) Four years earlier, in May, 1965, the weekly had reported a proposal to produce a simplified form of the Book of Common Prayer.14 Sympathetically noting that the intention was to reach the ninety per cent of people who were baffled by the traditional forms of worship of the Church, it nevertheless warned against simplification to a point that would dilute the richness and maturity of spiritual experience embodied in the existing, traditional form of the Prayer Book, and the following month it published a critique of an attempt to reform the text in order to bring it more into line with the views of the modern age.15 A year or so later it recorded similar reservations about the reforms in train, approvingly quoting the comment of Stephen Bayne that the Book of Common Prayer was ‘our best watchman of the supernatural and the holy’.16