This unpublished essay was
written as a paper to give at a conference in Wales, and followed up several
others of mine on Williams’ fiction which have been printed. I always found
this interesting and was the only person to speak on the fiction at a memorial
seminar to him we held at Footscray Tech in Melbourne in 1988. While in the
1960s to 1980s his socially oriented criticism was of importance in Britain and
to some degree in Australia – and I examined a PhD written on him in South
Africa -- and his influence as a British
leftist who was very much open to European radical thought in the 1960s was of great importance, especially in New Left Review, it seemed to me that the essays and books
that dealt with those themes from Culture and Society on would steadily become less interesting and relevant, while his
fiction I thought would retain the power to re-realise the world and the issues
which were central to him. His turn back to Wales and its themes as a writer
was very interesting, and quite influential in Wales, though I still very much
regret he never wrote anything about Cambridge. However, I have a feeling now
that the novels have faded from public attention as much as the sociocultural
critique. But they still work.
Tributes to Raymond Williams remembered him as the Lukacs or Goldmann of
Britain - or England in many cases. That certainly recognised his international
standing, his intense seriousness and the domain of his critical work, but it
completely ignored his determined effort to be a creative writer as well as a
critic. He wrote four plays and six novels - seven if you count People of the Black Mountains as two,
and set against his output of eleven critical books, that suggests something of
a divided effort. We might easily think of him as the British Eco, or Edmund
Wilson, or perhaps even, as I shall argue for the lasting and focal importance
of his fiction, the Borges of British thought and letters.
The fiction, and even more so the drama, tends to be overlooked: few of
the essays and books about his work that have appeared since his death in 1988
have had much to say about the creative work, though as far as the fiction is
concerned Welsh commentators have had much more to say relatively speaking:
there is a clear Welsh focus in his novels (though not, curiously, in his few
short stories). Just to remind you, there is the trilogy of Border Country (1960), focusing on a
modern academic's memories of his father's and friends' activities in the
general strike; Second Generation (1964)
dealing with a Welsh working class family in strike-ridden 1960s Oxford, with
academic work involving the son and beckoning the mother; The Fight for Manod (1979) coupling the academic of the first novel and
the son of the second as inquirers into a plan to establish a
Eurotechnologically new town in eastern mid-Wales, Williams' own area of
origin. The three novels deal with, as Williams noted, past, present and future,
as well as different modes of industry and mobility.
The odd novel out is The
Volunteers (1978), dealing with
anarchic violence and sleeper radical spies in a near-future dystopia where
international business, media and political compliance form something close to
a totalitarian world. Williams could be very perceptive. Both the opening act
of political murder and the defining labour activism occur in Wales, and the
central figure seems to validate such radicalism against the ineffective
entryism of the past left-leaning generation. In Loyalties (1985) Williams wrote what is effectively a modern
historical novel, tracing events and personalities form the mid thirties to the
build-up to the miners' strike of 1984, and setting Welsh proletarian values
against the complex liberal positioning, and treacheries, of the English
upper-middle classes, centering on a figure called de Braose - the name of a
major Norman thug of the early middle ages in Wales.
After Williams’ death there appeared two parts of the unfinished People of the Black Mountains trilogy,
on which I want to focus especially in this talk. I will describe its structure
in detail later, but for now it is sufficient to say that this tells the story
of Williams' own Black Mountain hinterland from the first human occupation in
about 4000BC until, in plan at least, the present. The second volume, `The Eggs
of the Eagle' takes the story up to the early fifteenth century and Lollardy,
and as Joy Williams comments in an afterword there was at least a schematic
plan for the final volume.
So all the books deal with Wales -- Second
Generation the least, being set in an Oxford which duplicates some of Williams' own concerns at Cambridge, but
the values of the Owen families are still affectively tied to Welsh experience.
An exile through his education and employment, Williams never lost touch
with his family and home context, and from at least the early seventies on he
had increasing contacts with the newly developing self-consciousness of Welsh
radical and intellectual life. He had a clear idea that Welsh novelists had a
stance different from English ones: he spoke of them in his lecture The Welsh Industrial Novel as `less
willing that those English to restrict or cancel their sense of community' (1979,
16) and went further in his Introduction to Gwyn Thomas's All Things Betray Thee:
Welsh
writers cannot accept the English pressure towards a fiction of private lives:
not because they do not know privacy, or fail to value the flow of life at
those levels that are called individual, but because they know these
individuals in what is always the real level: a matter of inevitable human
involvement. (1986, vi-vii)
William thought of himself, at
least in his later years, as one of these writers; in a remarkable essay
entitled `Working Class, proletarian, socialist: some problems in some Welsh
novels' that he wrote for the German Marxist H. Gustav Klaus, an essay rich in
colloquial and assertive language, he uses the first person plural we
ambiguously to imply both the Welsh as a people and also Welsh writers,
including himself: `We had to write the life of a people... Regional: yes, we
were admitted as that. New exotics for the English to read about. Funny people
the Welsh.' (1982, 112)
Both the Welshness and the
communality are central to the fiction: the ideas recurrent in his criticism,
variously expressed and explained, of `knowable community' and `structure of feeling' are basic to the
novels, and it is clear that Williams felt that fiction was a way of
apprehending and recording these sociocultural formations that official
documentation and traditional high literature would exclude, forget, deny. He
even forgave Lawrence his sins, some of which he at least noticed, on those
grounds, and he celebrated Jack Jones, surely the most undernoticed of the
major Welsh writers, for his sense, or fabrication, of community.
In the fiction both time and
place operate as major forces and as major foci of understanding that is also
true of some of the best criticism like The
Country and the City and Culture and
Society. Border Country operates
in both the late 1950s present and the time of the general strike and its
aftermath, in both the London of Matthew Price's professional life and the
eastern valley town of his family, much like Pandy, Williams’ own point of
origin. Second Generation, in this as
in other respects stylistic and thematic, is a more conventional novel, but the
forces of the past operate through some of the characters, a future is almost
on-stage and the implicit conflict of petty bourgeois Oxford and still essentially
gwerin Wales is implicit. The past
has less of a role to play in The Fight
for Manod except as nostalgia and memorial practices, but the future looms
very heavily; that is also the case in The
Volunteers, but both books contain a very strong sense of the
differentiality of places and the power that runs through them. The last novels
are rather different, and in order to look at them it will I think be helpful
to resume and follow up Williams' own words on the structure and ordonnance of
novels. He discusses this in detail in the highly personal essay in Klaus's
collection.
He first talks about the ways in
which a novel can expresses `the very intensity of the community' (1982, 116).
The he describes four ways of going
about this, and I will synopsise these.
First is `the descriptive novel,
not now by the sympathetic outside observer, but from within the class
community'. (1982, 116) He gives as an example Gwyn Jones's Times Like These, though is doubtful
about its limited focus on a family, and seems to prefer J. Rowland Hughes's Chwalfa as an example.
Second, where `The wider system
is not realised in the novel' but `there is then internal struggle ... between
different version of the nature of the system, as they affect and run through
this intense local life' (1982, 117). He gives Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live as examples.
The third possibility is
`historical formation' which combines the `advantages of locality', `new
perspectives' across time and generations, `a working class being made and
changing, rather than simply, descriptively and substantially, present' (1982,
117) and he gives Jack Jones's Black
Parade as the example, rather than Jones's Rhondda Roundabout, which is only interested in `internal variety',
`rather than the class uniformity or the political diversity of the people of the valley' (1982,
117).
Most interesting is the fourth
`possibility: the process of composition itself.' (1982, 118). He sees some
novels as offering `The composition of a history, and the composition of a
writing of that history.' (1982, 118). The example is Gwyn Thomas's All Things Betray Thee, and this is
worth dwelling on.
In the lecture on The Welsh Industrial Novel Williams
leads up to this novel as the most sophisticated and impressive of the genre,
as `a remarkable creative achievement' (1979, 18). He is interested in the way
it is distanced from its `evident historical origins, not too far from the
crises of nineteenth century Merthyr' (1979, 18) but is also `deliberately
distanced... to an effectively legendary distance.' (1979, 18) He sums up:
There is
then at once a wariness about the literary and ideological small change of the history,
and yet the passion of discovery of what really lies beyond this and is more
profoundly general. The deep structure of the novel is indeed very general:
that awareness of light, of song, of human liberty, which are there close
enough to grasp, yet seemingly always just out of reach, in the harsh close-up
world of deprivation and struggle. (1979, 18-19)
He concludes that:
... the
accents of a fidelity at once visionary and historical are precisely achieved.
It is a novel of voices and of a voice, and that voice is not only the history,
it is the contemporary consciousness of the history. (1979, 19)
I stress this critique because
it seems to me that in his later work Williams is trying to match what he sees
Gwyn Thomas as having achieved. I do not know whether he had read Thomas
before: I suspect that the job of talking on the Welsh industrial novel had
made him look closely at it for the first time, and he had some revealing
surprises in the process. He pursued the topic in his introduction to the
Lawrence and Wishart reprint of All
Things Betray Thee in 1986. There he identifies again the unusual power of
the novel to go beyond specifics, to write `the inner experience of that
historical moment which was always more than depression and protest' (1986, vi)
in the firmly expressed sense of the communal commitment of Welsh writers. With
a thorough technical analysis of how Thomas does this, as well as with
substantial praise of the novel as `an exceptionally authentic work' (1986,
ix), I believe Williams is signalling a major influence on his last novels.
He had already produced Loyalties, which uses an inner plot of
secrets not unlike The Volunteers
across a range of time and place both broader and more detailed than Border Country. But as striking is the
fact that this is now a `discontinuous narrative'. Some, like Tony Pinkney feel
this is the key to Williams' status as a modernist, but rather it seems to me it
is his technical way of breaking the mould of the traditional novels that could
provide the first three `possibilities' discussed above and give him the
capacity to realise a history that combines the linear scope with the
affectively communal. This is not how Gwyn Thomas does it at all, and I suspect
Dos Passos is somewhere in the back of Williams' mind, and in this case the
issue of composition is hardly ventured, but the structural fragmentation of Loyalties is a major move, and in my
view creates a much more substantial novel.
I do not think it is always very
successful in detailed terms, notably those of fluency and conviction of writing.
Loyalties differs from Williams'
earlier work in moving quickly from the start of writing to publication. As a
novelist and as a scholar he was a great rewriter, and I suspect Loyalties has roughness that a less busy and a less
famous - so more editable - writer might not have let stand. On this dissenting
note, can I also say that powerful as Williams' case for All Things Betray Thee is, I do not agree with it. In my view the
novel does not succeed because here Gwyn Thomas was trying for a big market
success and trying to imitate the grand overwritten historical form, but the
radicalism and communality which Williams rightly observes gets in the way: I
could see this being a great success if edited down to the tragic love of John
and as seen by their friend the harper and
banged out in a Georgette Heyer format. I believe that the much more non-linear
and ironical forms which Thomas then turned to, like The World Cannot Hear You (1951) are much more important novels of
hybridised Welsh resistance.
But since Williams derived a lot
from the novel, and wrote what I think are his most interesting novels as a
result, who am I to complain. To return to the post-All Things Betray Thee novels, there are two things in particular
about Loyalties that are interesting. One is the use of the
name De Braose, as mentioned above. It suggest that Williams is already
thinking across time. The other is the contents page. You will notice it has
the title First, then the dates of the sequences, then Last. I ask you to glance
at the title page of People of the Black
Mountains where you will see a temporally much more extended version of the
same pattern.
What I think happened was that
his reading of Thomas's work motivated Williams to write a different sort of
story, one of epic moments as experienced by ordinary people - a Brechtian
rather than Lukacsian historical novel; Loyalties
was a try out for it in the world he knew personally, and then, with an
enormous scholarly commitment, he launched on nothing less than a total
affective discontinuous history of the Black Mountains.
This was not published until
after Williams’ death, but in 1987 in an interview with John Barnie in Planet he made it clear he had been
thinking for some time about this move and Loyalties
was a trial run. But polymath and workaholic as he obviously was -- the
extraordinary list in his bibliography of reviews and columns, in addition to
the published work indicate that -- even Williams must have been aware of needing
to work long and hard on the material for the planned book, The People of the Black Mountains. He
knew the area well of course, both as a child and as an adult returning to walk
the mountains, but the book shows close and accurate knowledge of histories and
archaeologies going back as long as there had been people in the area - I
assume Williams had been reading this material since young, had probably
assembled a massive library, so in some sense it was his own time, place and
memory he now was to represent, but as myself something of a medievalist I can
comment on the accuracy of the data he had gathered, in the areas where I have
the expertise to comment.
The methodology of the book is a
projection of the Loyalties pattern in the generalised mode of All Things Betray Three over this
enormous range of time. The amount of material makes this a three-volume book --
a curious and ironical link with Eagleton's notorious comment that Raymond
Williams' fiction was dominated by the form of the nineteenth-century novel.
But it exploits the double time frame of, especially, Border Country by using a frame narrative. In this Glyn, a
university student in Cardiff -- presumably at what was the still known as `the
College', and so not accidentally a student of Gwyn Alf Williams and Dai Smith
- brings home to the Black Mountains his mother from hospital, but her father
is not at home: he has gone for a long walk in the mountains and not returned.
Experienced walker that he is he has left details and, late as it is, Glyn sets
off to look for him.
Glyn's father was a formal
professional historian, but he is multiply absent: gone to America, divorced
from Glyn’s mother and then dead in a plane crash, all the paternal passages of
modern professional life having occurred. The grandfather, Elis -- spelt in the
Welsh way, with one l -- has been a telephone engineer, but has preferred a
less technological form of communication, being a great collector of
artefacts and lore about the whole Black Mountains area: there seems to be some
sort of projection of a self-construction of Williams himself in this figure.
Short sequences entitled `Glyn to Elis' recur, charting, between the historical
action, Glyn's journey in search of his grandfather; increasingly these
sequences take note of the traditions and implications of the places Glyn is
passing, and there are even some semi-mystical moments when Glyn senses, even
hears, events occurring in the historical narratives within the frame. It is
noticeable that the `Glyn to Elis' frame is a good deal more elaborate in the
second volume, and Glyn's thoughts become increasingly a mouthpiece for
authorial opinion. You could argue that this is an organic development in the
book as past and present come together, or you could argue that Williams would
have edited this development for consistency - incompletion, interpretation is
part of the project's nature, and indeed part of its intimate resemblance to
the materials it handles.
Within the frame the main action
of the novel takes place. This is a set of fairly short sequences: 5000 words
is the average, so these are curiously like the short stories that Williams
very rarely wrote, giving an account of major events in the developing human
history of the Black Mountain region -- which do not always occur there, but
always involve people from the area, as when they are made Roman slave or,
indeed, slaves to the equally invading Celts of an earlier period. As you would
expect of Williams, he is concerned with the changes in social and communal
culture -- the way in which the first inhabitants, in small extended families,
nervously meet each other; then in a great leap meet people of another language
and kin and learn about the use of implements. In the sequence titled, with
Williams’ characteristic anti-rhetorical bluntness `With Antlers to the
Seariver' (1989, 133-50) a group of hunters are encouraged by new acquaintances
to travel with them and sell their antlers: travel and trade bring social and
personal change, and a distant glimpse of the Salisbury Plain culture, anxious
for good digging implements.
A more personally felt history,
it seems, is behind the lengthy and persuasive sequence about `The Coming of
the Measurer' (1989, 151-187): Dal Mered has been trained by the Salisbury
Plain people to measure and plan, and here too there are some elements of
projection, a sense of a Cambridge intellectual revisiting his simple people.
There are clear occasional links
to modern Wales -- the festal ritual of catching the wren in midwinter, and the
arduous servitude in the Roman lead mines connect in different ways with modern
cultural experience in Wales, but Williams is by no means projecting a Celtic
nationalism. In fact the Celts come across as brutal invaders, less socialised
than the Romans, and in many ways communally repressive. This is an idea that
lurks behind Gwyn Alf Williams’ book on Arthur, in which he tries to locate the
mysterious king beyond the Celtic period, and Williams too treats Arthur at
something of a distance, sceptical (rightly in my view) about the idea of him as
a local freedom fighter. Behind this treatment of the Celts there is a
historical and political sophistication a good deal greater than, for example,
Rhys Davies's simple idea of brave Celtic heroes fighting the colonising Romans
and Saxons, and there is a connection with the very interesting essay on `Wales
and England' reprinted in What I came To
Say in which Williams speaks of Wales -- and also England -- as
historically multicultural into antiquity, and so resisting the elements of
racism that can sometimes creep into narratives of national liberty.
Social and intellectual
developments are nourished in the first volume; the second, now operating in
recorded time, tends rather to leap from major event to major event, from
Romans coming and Silurian resistance, to Romans going and Saxons coming. There
is some sense here of a banal history book a bit like the green and red-jacketed
Flame Bearers of Welsh History that I
remember reading in primary school in Caerphilly. This sequence seems
historically more schematic than others: personalisation of the sociocultural
character of the dark ages seems more difficult for Williams than it was in pre-recorded
antiquity or even the multiply recorded medieval period, where monk, serving
woman and townsman are created as credibly knowable elements of communities.
There is still a local focus:
the sequence `The Abergavenny Murders' (1989, 200-26), set in the town where
Williams went to secondary school, outlines Norman treachery against the Welsh,
in the hands of William de Braose, that Williamsesque other, while `The
Abergavenny Rising (1989, 291-95) briefly tells of a moment of resistance that
is read as contributing to the major resistance led by Owain Glyndŵr.
This is close to the end of the
completed draft; Joy Williams provides an afterword about the plans for the
final volume, tracing moments of political and social crisis -- civil war,
Monmouth rebellion, Rebecca Riots as well as new social experiences --
relocation of farms, emigration, religious change, and also increasing moments
of identification: Elis would turn out to have a military career like that of
Raymond Williams. But there were also to be cyclical features to this history:
a dead American airman would be a descendant of an earlier emigrant, and most
strikingly of all Glyn would finally find his grandfather, resting with an
injured foot, inside the stone circle which the Celts had treated as a nemeton,
sacred place and which the measurer had taught the bronze age people to build.
So the land itself is the
connecting element, the place is the text in which the memories can be read. It
is like Loyalties a history, not,
like The Fight for Manod or The Volunteers, a future. But just as
Williams consistently speaks of praxis at the end of his books and essays, so
the end of this long novel, according to Joy Williams was to involve a
discussion between Elis and some `neolithic hippies' which would no doubt have
advised of the danger of self-absorption in the past rather than reading the
lessons of the past for the present and future: lessons which are I think
already stated in the `Wales and England' essay, and can be summarised as:
... the
authentically differential communalisation of the Welsh, product of a specific
history rather than of some racial or cultural essence, could become residual if
it does not grow beyond its current elements of false consciousness.... Radical
and communal Wales, that is to say, will be real to the extent that it develops,
in plan and practice, new forms of co-operative work and communal socialism,
new kinds of educational and cultural collectives, rather than by what happens
to the Labour or even the Nationalist vote. (1989, 73-4)
If that can be taken as the
theme of this massive, and massively learned, venture into communal history,
and in my view its most valuable outcome, there are some other things that need
to be considered, including possible negatives.
One concern is the emphasis on
place. Much locational writing is a form of possession which fetishes the land
in place of recognising the rights and interests of those who populate it -- Australian
admiration of the outback elides Aborigines for example, and the same is true
of romantic interests in Scotland, the Lake District and Wales. There are
writers of fiction about Wales who use place as a displacing focus for their
own concerns, like Brenda Chamberlain and Margiad Evans, but not only women and
incomers do this -- it is characteristic of the city dwellers who write
faux-gwerin stories like Gwyn Jones and Dylan Thomas. There is a remarkable
lack of landscape in writers like Kate Roberts or Gwyn Thomas (except,
revealingly, in All Things Betray Thee),
who are deeply identified with the local world.
Williams would I think reply
that his landscape is always populated, and I think that is true, but I do
think that the physicality of his Welsh writing -- very clear from the start in
Border Country, but not evident in
the Oxford in which he felt more at home in Second
Generation -- is in itself a symptom of his own displacement from the
place, a separation he worked hard to recover.
Then there is the question of
whether vignettes can ever tell a valid story. This concern may rest on a false
premise about the value of a linear account. Williams in his discussion of the
form of the Welsh industrial novel notes that they abandon both the emphasis on
private lives and the linear plotting of the English novel, and he clearly has
a strong sense in those comments of the way in which the machine of the classic
novel is deeply implicated with subjectivity. This includes the Tolstoy style
of `epic history' which the Welsh writers avoid, except for Richard Llewellyn
in what Williams bitingly called the `export version' of the Welsh industrial
novel in his lecture/essay on that topic. But that does not mean that a
discontinuous narrative may not have its own limits, or that vignettes cannot
be lifeless in a way that confirms only the vitality of the subjective
observer. The issue has already been considered by Williams, in the notable
sequence in The Volunteers where
Lewis Redfern, a little uncharacteristically for a journalist turned detective,
reflects on structural ideology in a museum.
He notes that the Folk Museum at
St Fagans `offers to show the history of a people in its material objects'. In
the main building `these are shown in the conventional way, by a labelled
display of each category' but, better, in the grounds these are displayed in
context as `an active material history of the people of Wales" (1985, 28).
But that is not enough: the last quotation is followed with the words `up to a
point'. The limitations observed are that this is `an active history only of rural Wales' and that it is `an old
Wales'. He sums up:
... modern
realities left outside in the car park,. or brought inside only in the toilets
which have replaced the privies. That is why it is called a folk
museum. Folk is the past: an alternative to People.' (1985,[1978] 28)
However, Redfern - or rather
Williams -lets the museum off somewhat, because of its power to prompt creative
involvement, of the kind that will become People
of the Black Mountains and is the central value that Williams found in Al Things Betray Thee.
You can
also hear voices from behind you: the voices that you do not hear in the
scrubbed and polished empty rooms of the farms and cottages: voices speaking of
tribute and of taxes and of rents; voices speaking in different languages,
Norman-French and English but in the farms and cottages the native language,
the language of the comrades, the Cymry... (1985 [1979], 30)
And the characteristic
Williamsesque final connection with the present and politicised action is made:
In the
tidied farms, among the casks and the presses, you could forget this history,
on an ordinary day. But today was not ordinary. Today made those other
connections: the connections to Pontyrhiw. (1985 [1979], 30)
So the analysis ends with the
possibility of a humanly invigorated history itself informing the modern --
Pontyrhiw is the site of the coal-dispute that frames the assassination at St
Fagans and will dominate the Welsh concerns of the novel.
In People of the Black Mountains Williams' effort is to activate those
voices and also, in the questing frame, link analytic history with an affective
relationship with place through time. Its scope is wider and much more
socioculturally specific than the vaguely Celtic liberationism of Rhys Davies,
or the limited communalism of Jack Jones, the communism of Lewis Jones, the
family-based analysis of Gwyn Jones. The only kinds of texts that operate in
parallel ways as accounts of people, time and place in Wales, other than All Things Betray Thee are I think the
equally vignette-based power of Kate Roberts' Traed Mewn Cyffion, Emyr Humphreys' Outside the House of Baal and Christopher Meredith's Shifts, all texts concerned with marking
changes in time and how they are marked in and through people set in places.
It is part of the tragedy of
Raymond Williams' early death that the massively adventurous People of the Black Mountains was left
unfinished, and unrevised. But in a way that is appropriate to Williams’ often
stated sense that the work of politics does not end -- and he has left us in
many places enough guidance for us to be able to complete the texts for
ourselves, ourselves write, and hopefully live, the combined analytic and
affective thoughts of Elis and Glyn who finally meet outside the text, in our
own imaginations, and, as Williams would always finally insist, in our own
actions.
WORKS BY RAYMOND WILLIAMS CITED
Border Country (Chatto and Windus, London, 1960)
Second Generation (Chatto and Windus, London, 1964)
The Fight for Manod (Chatto and Windus, London, 1979)
The Volunteers (Eyre Methuen, London, 1978)
Loyalties (Chatto and Windus, London, 1985)
People of the Black Mountains, 1 The Beginning (Chatto and Windus, London,
1989)
People of the Black Mountains, 2 The Eggs of the Eagle (Chatto and Windus, London,
1990)
The Welsh Industrial Novel, The Inaugural Gwyn Jones Lecture (University College Cardiff Press,
Cardiff, 1979)
`Introduction' to Gwyn Thomas, All Things Betray Thee [1949], reprint,
ed. (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1986)
`Working-class, proletarian,
socialist: problems in some Welsh
novels,' in The Socialist Novel in
Britain, ed. H. Gustav Klaus (Harvester, London, 1982)
`The People of the Black
Mountains: Interview with John Barnie,' Planet,
65 (1987),
`Wales and England,' New Wales, 1 (1983), 34-8; reprinted in What I Came to Say (Hutchinson Radius,
London, 1989)
No comments:
Post a Comment