Stephen Knight
This essay is one of a perhaps
unusual genre which I find very useful in several ways. It was written to give
as a talk about the book
I had just written about Welsh fiction in English, the
first book on this topic. The book came out in 2004 from what we used to call
University of Wales High Security Publishing. I can’t say it has been widely
recognised, though I do note that many of the authors I drew attention to have
been selected for the Library of Wales reprint series edited by Dai Smith, a
professor of history and university administrator who has not asked me to
introduce any of them. He also felt he ought to criticise the book severely (in
New Welsh Review) on the grounds that he (like other Labour party dignitaries)
feels Wales was never an English colony, but rather has been a valued partner
in UK activities (including imperialism) since the sixteenth century. I still
feel there are two views on that, one of them ridiculous.
The value of an essay like this,
which I have sometimes written just before I write a book out, sometimes after
it is all set down, is that it isolates the argument you make, it displays the
thesis the book should have. This invokes a somewhat different form of
argumentative process, not the slow development of categories and instances
that a book requires, but a sharper and more intellectually-engaged operation
of analysis. I suspect this habit of writing an essay about the book’s theme when all the research is done
may be one of the reasons why I tend to write two books on each topic, one a
solid lay-out of the material, one a concept-based analysis of it. The lay-out usually
comes first (but didn’t in the case of my two widely-separated crime fiction
books). Occasionally, as with King Arthur, a long essay serves instead of an analytic
book, though I did plan an analytic book but it got side-tracked by the power of
Merlin.
1.
`I'm writing a book about Welsh fiction in English': I have been saying
that for a while now to people who inquire what I am up to when I am not
training the visually over-adapted young in the use of the comma and -- for the
advanced -- the inverted comma. `Welsh fiction in English', my interrogators
repeat, with a sort of irritated surprise: `I didn't know there was any.' I
refrain from asking if they have ever encountered a bookshop or a public
library, and, aware of my professorial role as licensed lackey to the
educationally impaired, I reply,` Oh yes, a whole bookful, a hundred years of
it'.
I've used that title, `A Hundred Years of Fiction' along with the series
title Writing Wales in English to talk in my forthcoming book about ways in
which fiction has both realised and explored the situation, broadly understood,
of those people who live in Wales, feel themselves Welsh, but do not any longer
use the language of the country. That change of language is of course the most
visible and audible of the ways in which Wales has been affected by its complex
relationship with England, best understood as a colonial relationship, but
there are many other factors, social, economic, political and cultural to that
relationship, as well as language, and the fiction has explored those factors
in particular.
Other commentators have traced what might seem similar paths in recent
years. Declan Kiberd in Inventing Ireland
and Robert Crawford in The Scottish Invention
of English Literature have
taken a broad brush, historical and cultural as well as literary to outline
ways in which their countries have both been affected by and have defined
themselves against England and its varied forces. But I have chosen to stick
entirely to literature. Partly because
it is what I know best but also for positive reasons: I think that it is only
by looking very closely at a formation that you can see the actual and often
surprising patterns -- in my view a broad brush usually describes pre-ordained
patterns, and we have enough of those, mostly in conflict, in the modern world,
whether intellectual or political, or indeed military.
What I mean is that by looking very closely at the literature written in
English by and about Welsh people you can discern new shapes, pose new
questions. Not all of them are readily answerable. Why for example, are there
so many trilogies, formal and informal, existing and planned, in Welsh fiction
in English? Rhys Davies wrote one and Lewis Jones planned one about the coal
industry, Jack Jones effectively wrote one, though out of historical order and,
remarkably, Richard Llewellyn produced one
as well, though over thirty five years. Richard Vaughan wrote a rurally
nostalgic trilogy, Raymond Williams shaped a politically aware trilogy, and
finally planned an extensively historical one, and there are quite a few others
hidden away in the work of Joseph Keating, Gwyn Thomas, Menna Gallie; even, in
a deliberately disparate way, Chris Meredith. Emyr Humphreys' `Land of the
Living' series is basically a double trilogy and his great novel Outside the House of Baal (1965) is a
one-volume trilogy. Are the Anglophone Welsh still enchanted by the Celtic
triskel ? Or is it that they have a lot to say and their publishers won't give
them much room to say it in ?
There may anyway be more important questions -- such as what was the
impact of publishing in London with an inherently colonial attitude to author
and material ? Graham Greene rejected Emyr Humphreys' first novel because, it
seems, it wasn't How Green Was My Valley
and Gollancz's readers sent back Gwyn Thomas's excoriating Sorrow for Thy Sons because it wasn't as nice as Rhys Davies.
Richard Church, later a famous peddler of English rural nostalgia turned Dylan
Thomas away from writing superb dark surrealist stories into a producer of
quaint tales about happy colonials; David Garnett and his friends appear to
have helped make the life of the brilliant but tragic Dorothy Edwards even
unhappier than she could herself.
But publishing form and publishing influence are not the only questions
deserving good answers that emerge from looking closely at a hundred years of
Welsh fiction in English. What kinds of writing exist and what they are really
like is a core set of questions. Even my easily annoyed interrogators had
sometimes heard of a Welsh industrial novel or two and sometimes could even
guess the name of Jones as an author -- in fact there is a trilogy of Joneses.
The prevailing idea, in so far as there is one, about the Welsh industrial
novel is that it is Marxist realism, a cultural accompaniment to the serried
ranks of industrial labourism that marched around and sometimes out of south
Wales over the decades. Marxist realism is a good description of much of the
international industrial novel from the American Jack Conroy to the Australian
Dorothy Hewett, but it won't work for Wales -- this is one of the broad brush
strokes best not attempted. First of all Welsh industrial fiction is not really
realism. It's closer to the symbolic and/or informational narratives often
found in colonised literature. And secondly, it is rarely in fact Marxist. I
see anarcho-syndicalism as a much stronger force in Welsh radicalism than
Marxism, including even in the work of the only Communist Party writer, Lewis
Jones. And I also see some remarkable experimental writing in the Welsh
industrial novel, from the early essentialist analysis of Rhys Davies and the
self-consciously self-descriptive sagas of Jack Jones to the complex
imaginative narratives of Gwyn Thomas (which I believe respond strongly to a
reading based on postcolonial analysis), and the equally bold reworking of a masculine
form from a feminine and feminist viewpoint in the work of Menna Gallie.
If the industrial novel in Wales is neither simply Marxist realism nor
in any substantial way coherent as a genre, nor is it the only form of Welsh
fiction in English. A substantial amount of the fiction is rural in focus --
and more than a little of the early material relates to the coastline,
recalling a time when it was easier to access and travel about Wales by sea
than by road. But the country as country is well-represented: the first section
of my book deals with rural writers, especially those from Powys, and there is
a recurrent interest in rural matters especially in the short story. Another
topographical surprise is that it is only in recent years that Cardiff has become
a setting for fiction -- and though urban, it is far from industrial, befitting
the economic structure of that city. Not surprisingly the settings of the
English-language fiction have overlapped with the areas where English is spoken
-- but by no means entirely. Deep Wales was from the beginning an area of
interest to English-language readers in Wales and outside it, and a number of
the writers were bilingual in the two languages of Wales. Emyr Humphreys is the
most powerful example of a dwyieithog (bilingual) author who deals with deep
Wales in the context of English presence, and he also brings the advantage of
dealing with the north and the north east, the least-handled area of the
country in its English-language fiction.
So there are a lot of texts, a lot of authors, and an even greater
number of questions about what is going on in the material that become clear
when it is looked at both closely and in its own and in terms of its own
inter-relationships. From this I have in my book suggested a number of
patterns. But before outlining them, I should also say what I do not deal with.
I have been concerned with authors who write Wales in English, not those who
use Wales as a base for wider considerations. Therefore I have not deal with
Richard Hughes or Howard Spring, Welsh authors whose work was world-wide -- a
fact which doesn't make them any less Welsh, but makes them less relevant for
this study. By the same token I have not dealt with the international work by
authors I have analysed like Emyr Humphreys or Raymond Williams. Equally I have
not taken note of authors who chose to be Welsh, like John Cowper Powys or
James Hanley because their work dealing with Wales seems to me of limited
interest, essentially passing comment not offering internal self-analysis, but
I have discussed writers like Margiad Evans or Catherine Merriman who have
settled in Wales and have made specific and valuable contributions to the
self-understanding of the culture.
My other general comment is that my approach is postcolonial -- and by
that I mean that I follow some of the positions, arguments and approaches
developed by scholars around the world, notably Indian, Caribbean and
Australian, who have discussed how the process of empire and the imposition of
an imperial language on an indigenous people affects their culture -- not
always negatively, but producing recognisable patterns as writers both use and
resist the culture of the coloniser. This can be a delicate topic. In my
experience in Australia and also in Wales, some people prefer to think they
have not been colonised either because they dislike the process so much or
because they are so much at ease with it; others, notably Marxists, feel that
postcolonialism is too weak an approach to reveal any truths worth having. Nevertheless
I suggest that a basically postcolonial analysis reveals some valuable and
informative patterns in Welsh writing in English, answers quite a lot of the
questions that arise, and helps to explain the role of interesting but formerly
uncategorisable writers like Caradoc Evans, Hilda Vaughan, Glyn Jones and Gwyn
Thomas -- and more.
2.
I have divided all this writing into three parts. Am I a Caesar come to
Cymru, or the creator of yet another trilogy ? I hope neither. I call the first
section `first-contact romance’, the second `writing the south Wales settlement’,
the third, from the second world war on, `integration and independence’. The
sections overlap a bit, and there are flashbacks and a few flashes forward, but
I do see the whole hundred years or so of Welsh fiction in English in those
three movements, which relate to patterns of the post-colonial analysis of
fiction.
The first, first-contact romance, is common enough when a dominant
culture comes into contact with a colony and both colonizing and colonised
writers describe this new land for the imperial audience -- it's a sort of
cultural possession of the new domain, combining excitements and validations of
empire with the complicit involvement of at least some colonised writers.
Illustrations and stories describe the newly dominated land -- in the case of
Wales these are in part about the topography and the field sports available --
so you get titles like From Snowdon to
the Seas (1895); a classic field-sports-moralised title is the Rev. George
Tugwell's On the Mountain, Being the
Welsh Experience of Abraham Black and James White, Esquires, Moralists,
Philosophers, Fishermen, Botanists (1862). The stories will also describe
the quaint natives, as in Alfred Rees's Ianto
the Fisherman and Other Stories of Welsh Life (1904). Native religion and
superstition is always popular, showing both the bizarreness and the
heathenness of the conquered people, and witches, magic and enchantments often
occur, but this can also have a more far-reaching effect, being used at times
as in Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams
(1907) to suggest that the Celts have access to levels of spiritual awareness
deeper than the banal imagination of the English imperialists. This is of
course the basis for Matthew Arnold's famous interest in Celtic literature - a
position which has been well described from a Welsh viewpoint by Ned Thomas as
`contributionism', i.e. a way of suggesting that the native Welsh can in fact
make a contribution to the greater quality of greater Britain. It's a position
well-known in English accounts of India as well as Ireland.
These first-contact formations do not belong only to sketches and
stories: there is also from Wales, as from other colonies, an early flood of
romances. A beautiful young woman may symbolise the country being appropriated,
or imperial visitors may be romantically stirred to higher levels of emotional
response by the topography, antiquity or, again, sexual excitement, they find
among the natives. Romance, whether medieval or Wordsworthian, has much to do
with symbolic appropriation and the first substantial Welsh writing in English
is along these lines. It can be historical, recreating the excitements of the
Welsh military past, now safe to admire because well in the past, or it can be
more sexualized and recent, as in writers like turn of the eighteenth century
authors Anne Maria Bennett and Ann Julia Hatton (Ann of Swansea), and the later
writers Anne Beale and Rhoda Broughton -- Jane Aaron has discussed these
writers in her book Pur fel y Dur.
But there is also a possibility of some resistance being written into
first-contact romance. Amy Dillwyn was born in the south Welsh gentry but was
decidedly liberal: her The Rebecca Rioter
(1880) gave a clearly sympathetic account of the Rebecca rioters, and equally
deliberately steered away from a romance resolution. A rare specifically
nationalist non-romance was A Maid of
Cymru (1901) by the `Dau Wynne', the sisters Gwenffreda and Mallt Williams
- though it may be mostly by the latter. I think there are clear elements of
colonial resistance in the work of the first major Welsh writer in English,
Allen Raine. Born Anne Adaliza Evans, she produced a very successful series of
novels around the turn of the twentieth century. While English -- and indeed
American -- readers clearly read them as exotic first-contact romance, as
mismatched couples find their amatory destiny in far south west Wales, they
also have the quality of an ethnography of the actual life of ordinary striving
and feeling Welsh people. The best of them, now in print again with Honno, is Queen of the Rushes (1906), which adds
to the usual Raine ethnographic romance a firm minded account of the problems
associated with the Religious Revival of 1904 and, as its editor Katie Gramich
stresses, has more than a little early feminist feeling.
Raine is much more than part of the `sandcastle dynasty' Gwyn Jones
thought her, to be washed away by the masculine flood of later Welsh writing in
English, and she should be linked with a later sub-genre which I call the
romance of Powys. Hilda Vaughan, born into Radnorshire gentry stock and marrying
the then major London literary figure Charles Morgan, produced a series of
novels which did in some ways debate the value of types of Welsh identity in
the context of romance -- the most striking are The Battle to the Weak (1925), The
Invader (1928) and The Soldier and
the Gentlewoman (1932). Here Welsh-Welsh, English-Welsh and simply English
people and values interact, with both Welsh-Welsh and English seen as of
doubtful value and the only valid positions taken up by distinctly hybrid
characters like Esther, the heroine of The
Battle to the Weak, Vaughan's most memorable novel. Presumably because of
her continued distance from Wales, she did slip backwards into straight
first-contact material with her historical novels, and also with her later,
magically oriented work which has unfortunately, been better remembered -- the
novella A Thing of Nought (1934) and
the distinctly nativist Iron and Gold (1948).
A writer with a similar impact was Geraint Goodwin, a London-based journalist
born just outside Newtown, who started with a fairly serious investigation of
Welsh-English conflict in The Heyday in
the Blood (1936) but allowed himself in spite of his real interest in Wales
to be persuaded by Edward Garnett to write English-style rural romances like
Mary Webb. But not all the literary
traffic across Powys was from Welsh Wales to London: Margiad Evans is a
striking example of someone who was Welsh by choice, and this very gifted woman
wrote one brilliant book about the Welsh-English encounter, Country Dance (1932) -- with a decidedly
enigmatic outcome, and a fine set of short stories which ethnographise the
Welsh border country, now in print again as The
Old and the Young (1948). She died young but remains a model of subtle,
gendered and also politically aware writing.
But there is more than this to first-contact literature in Wales. The
most specific use of such a categorisation is to explain the work of Caradoc
Evans. He is a classic colonial author, the colonized writer who sees the
advantages of the culture of the coloniser and turns his pen against his own
people. As Moira Dearnley has shown, caricatures of the Welsh had thrived in
eighteenth-century England, and that is the publishing contact of Evans's My People (1915) -- Scottish and Welsh
versions of native follies had appeared from the same publisher. Like Frantz
Fanon arguing that the French enlightenment was not only a rationale for empire
but also a means of real self-improvement, Evans rejected as mean-minded the
chapel world of his Cardiganshire context, and, in his anger, identified it
with all Welshness. The brilliance of his style and his pared-down suggestive
skills -- those of a first-rate journalist -- have given his caricatures the
power of real literature, and maybe some aspects of nonconformism invited his
hatred, but a post-colonial reading makes his work perfectly familiar as the
native culture destabilises itself like American black self-caricature or the
self-mocking Paddy comedians of the nineteenth century stage.
3.
First-contact romance did make a few gestures towards non-rural Wales --
in A Welsh Witch (1902) Raine has
some characters move to `the works’; in Glamorgan, and Joseph Keating, an
ex-miner, early in the twentieth century set some novels in the mining district
but they were improbably mounted in the romance genre and focus on love and
angst among the managerial class. This differential situation did not last. The
major force for the dominance of the English language in Wales was industry,
and by the first world war and the massive boom it generated in coal, iron and
steel, Cymraeg was being decreasingly used in the south eastern industrial
region. These people were soon to generate their own literature in English.
What we have here in terms of post-colonial analysis is a settlement
culture. When the colonised country does not generate an adequate labour force
for the purposes of appropriation, workers have to be settled there -- by
slavery in the Caribbean and America, by transportation and then emigration in
Australia. In Wales the first phase was internal migration, and as men and
women poured from the farms of West and Mid Wales into `the works' they
continued to speak Cymraeg. It was the second stage of development, in the
later nineteenth century, when English came to dominate, and so there grew up a
people who identified mostly as Welsh, but were in language and culture as well
as in work and socialisation separate from the long-established Welsh. But they
were not a colonising class in simple terms. Like the Irish and provincial
English who worked in Canada or Australia for wealthy landlords, of a similar
racial background but of a quite different class, they were a newly created and
increasingly self-aware settlement. As in Australia, such settlements can
generate a powerful self-identifying culture, and south Wales provides a
striking example of this process. Many features of the culture are non-literary
-- politics, singing, rugby, eating faggots and peas for example -- but the
second phase of Welsh fiction in English was the complex and remarkably varied
work of constructing the self-descriptive, self-evaluating literary culture of
the industrial settlement in the south.
As Raymond Williams has commented, this fiction was notable for being
written by men who were themselves working class, who described their world,
and urged its improvement. But that is not quite the whole story. Unlike the
Australian and American counterparts, the literature was hardly ever published
inside the settlement -- it depended on the colonial publisher, in London,
discovering a sympathetic audience in England in the left-leaning 1930s. And
the first person to write about the coalfield from the inside was in fact not
working class. Rhys Davies, usually regarded as a Welsh version of D.H.
Lawrence with a speciality in women's voices and short stories, in fact wrote
several industrial novels starting with his first, The Withered Root (1927) and notably producing a trilogy about
industrialisation, Honey and Bread
(1935), A Time to Laugh (1937) and Jubilee Blues (1938). The son of a
grocer who experienced at first hand the Tonypandy riots in 1910, London-based,
and clearly, if not openly, gay, Davies was always more interested in
working-class behaviour, bodies and bravura than working-class politics. He
tended to condense the idea of resistance to the coal-owners with a nativist
fantasy of Welsh resistance to all incomers, from the Romans on, but he did
have at least some radical sympathies -- he very much admired Dr William Price,
the nineteenth-century Llantrisant sage and anarchist -- and his stories are
strongly aware of the special colonisation imposed on women, and the role they
played in sustaining the world of the industrial settlement.
More directly involved, as a man and an author, in the industrial world
was the ex-miner Jack Jones, who when he found himself out of work in 1930
turned to writing in a vigorous, direct way about the world he and his family
had known in Merthyr and south Wales in general. He produced a massive
manuscript called `Saran', his mother's name, but it was cut down at the
publisher's insistence to Black Parade
(1935), which actually appeared after his second novel Rhondda Roundabout (1934). Black
Parade, much admired by Raymond Williams as an industrial saga is a rich
ethnography of the world Jones and his family knew as Merthyr grew both rich
and lurid and as people adapted to the demands and possibilities of this new
world of the industrial settlement, reaching to the present of the 1930s.
Jones's third novel Bidden to the Feast
(1938) is a longer and even richer account of the earlier period, while Rhondda Roundabout, despite its
promising title, is a narrower and less politically radical story, better
attuned to breaking through with a London publisher, and based on the
England-pleasing structure of a young man's education into morality and
romance.
Jack Jones was very well-known -- his autobiographies as well as his
novels -- and there is no doubt that many people, including my own family, read
his work as an authentic ethnographic account of the strange new world of the
industrial settlement in which they found themselves. The rough edge of his
writing, the digressions, the details of domesticity -- the women play major
roles in Jones's fiction -- all seem thoroughly convincing, thoroughly
recognisable. A more distanced and literary ethnography of the settlement was
Gwyn Jones's Times Like These (1938)
which deals with what Glyn Jones called a `tidy' family in the 1926 strike, and
reaches out to include respectable, even boss-class figures. Its opposite was
the angry, even rankly aggressive Sorrow
for thy Sons by Gwyn Thomas, not published until 1986 because Gollancz
rejected it for having no utopian or delicate qualities. A cooler account, in a
sympathy-seeking voice much admired among English liberals, was Bert Coombes's
quasi-autobiographical These Poor Hands
(1939), but much more politically focused was the account of the coalfield
produced by Lewis Jones in Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939). Jones died before quite finishing the second,
though his plans for the last sequence were known, and he had intended a third,
in which the Welsh members of the International Brigade returned to fight for a
British workers' state. Lewis Jones's work is strongly left-wing -- the hero,
Len Roberts, becomes a Communist and so does his active partner Mary Jones. The
novel was well known through the radical world for its statement of the issues,
including pacifism in the first world war, though it is far from a CP statement
-- Welsh anarcho-syndicalism is often on display.
Strongly realised as it was in these writers, the industrial settlement
of south Wales could also be treated negatively in terms of colonial romance,
as in the regrettably best-known of all the novels from this context, How Green was my Valley (1939). Richard
Llewellyn wanted to call his novel `Slag' to emphasise the ugly uselessness he
found in industrialisation, but his publisher went for nostalgia in the title.
That is fair to the book though: the story is set in the past, offers an
improbable view of early industrialism when workers earned handfuls of
sovereigns, when the rivers still ran clear and full of salmon, and when men
like the family patriarch believed in supporting the bosses. A potent mix of
melodrama, sentiment and stage-Welshness, the climax comes when the patriarch
gives his life to save the pit and its machinery from the cruel intentions of
the strikers -- and the hero, Huw, leaves the valley, with nothing but his
unrealistic memories. A way of deleting the industrial settlement, of unwriting
the experience of industrial south Wales, the novel serves colonialism fully,
from quaint representation of the natives to rich justification of their
treatment by the English, and the novel’s reputation in England and Wales
remains to this day, radically different.
Having been so powerful in its establishment and also in its literary
realisations, the industrial settlement remained part of Welsh fiction in
English, but with a difference. When Gwyn Thomas came to publish, just after
the second world war, his setting was the Rhondda but it was not the world of
nationalisation, rather a continuing memory of workless people coping somehow.
Thomas has been unduly forgotten in Wales, in part because his work is not
socialist realism, in part because of the undue hostility he showed to the
language movement and nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s -- he said some things
that have, not surprisingly, not been forgiven. But his work survives, and it
is the richest example I know of hybrid colonial fiction. Hostile to England
and capitalism, Thomas also works in the language and mode of that culture, and
his recurrent themes are complicity and the attempt to avoid the powerful will
of those who seek to shape our lives. His characters resist these forces with a
vigorous if also self-gratifying wit, a cunning that is often inoperative, and he
himself deploys native symbols and plots, like the oppressive giant Oscar who
owns a coal tip in the novella of that name or the recurrent
sovereignty-symbolising maidens who are sought by incomers and defended by the
natives -- with at least partial success. A fantasist and fabulist, a
celebrator of the settlement rather than an ethnographer of it, Thomas's finest
work was done in complex, unjustly forgotten novels like The World Cannot Hear You (1951) and The Thinker and the Thrush (not published until 1988) from the late
1940s and early 1950s. When he tried to please an international audience with All Things Betray Thee (1949) and when
he wrote specifically for an English audience in Punch he moved back to something like a first-contact romancer, but
he remains the most verbally gifted and subtle of the novelists, the parallel
in prose to Dylan Thomas in poetry.
A different move away from male radical fiction about industry was made
by Menna Gallie who, in two novels, brilliantly redirected the Jones boys’
tradition, in both genre and gender. Strike
for a Kingdom (1959) is about 1926, but it is also a mystery: there are two
deaths, one a mine manager and one a baby. It looks as if there will be
parallel narratives, political and domestic, but we finally find that the
domestic domain, focused on the strains felt by women, is actually dominant.
Witty and genial, Gallie's fiction is also remarkably searching in its
political reassessment of how women too are colonised. She pursued this more
strongly in The Small Mine (1962) -
also a mystery, but now more certainly taking a woman's viewpoint, tracing
three women's lives in the context of male industry, Sally, sexually available
and exploited like any coal-seam; Flossie, a devoted mother who loses her son
and the meaning of her life to coal; and Cynthia, who distances herself from
this claustrophobic world, survives the death of her boy-friend in a pit and,
like Gallie herself, moves on to England
at the end of the story.
But Gallie does more than this. Her work, like Michael Gareth Llewelyn's
largely forgotten Angharad's Isle
(1944), is a link to the third area I identify as the major movements in Welsh
fiction in English, namely, integration and independence.
4.
Gallie, from Ystradgynlais, was a native speaker of Cymraeg, and let
this show in her English fiction. In Strike
for a Kingdom the real detective, who guides the police inspector, is a
miner, a magistrate and a bard. Gallie's uncle W. R. Williams was all that --
but she renames him as D. J. Williams, so surely invoking the spirit of the man
who wrote the classic statement of gwerin culture, Hen Dy Ffarm (1953) and was one of the three who in 1936 set fire
to an RAF bombing school at Penyberth, the first overt act of Welsh
nationalism. Gallie makes a major move towards integrating the values of the
industrial area with those of the Cymraeg-speaking heartland. Not seen in the
first two domains of writing, first-contact romance and the ethnography of the
industrial settlement, integration of this kind is a recurrent feature of fiction
about Wales in English from the second world war on and I relate it strongly to
a increasing sense of the need for independence from England in a variety of
ways, including political devolution and local publishing.
The first major figure to do this is Glyn Jones. Famously generous to
other writers, both with his help and with his reviews, he also offered models
of writing about a Wales not offering itself for English consumption as
first-contact romance and not restricting itself to ethnographising the industrial
settlement. His early stories, influenced by Dylan Thomas's early surrealist
fiction, appear in The Blue Bed
(1937). Though Jones came from Merthyr they are not industrial at all: he uses
the European techniques of surrealism and symbolism to shape a heightened
imaginative voice for Welsh fiction, and his masterpiece in this mode was The Island of Apples (1965) where a
timid, small boy called Dewi – representing little Wales itself - meets the
mysterious continental visionary and fantasist Karl Anthony -- with the
initials of King Arthur to suggest her is another possible projection of the country. Myth, magic, aspiration are made
locatable in Wales, and this ambitious sense of possibilities remained the
undercurrent of Jones's work. He regained his familial Welsh, translated
ancient poetry, but also wrote stories that occurred across the country, on
farms as well as in working-class areas - a range asserted in the title of his
novel The Valley, The City, The Village (1956)
- and consistently claimed a leading role for imagination and myth of a
distinctly Welsh, and indeed Cymraeg, kind to guide the values and the self
identification of the Welsh who read English.
That seems to have been the mode in which Alun Lewis would have pursued
his fiction, if he had not been killed in Burma; that was the mode in which
Rhys Davies wrote his finest and most nationally self-conscious novel The Black Venus (1944). It was certainly
the mode, both integrative and independent, in which the major English-language
novelist of Wales has worked.
Emyr Humphreys, like Gallie and Lewis, was educated at the University of
Wales -- a new feature in a writer's formation in Wales -- and at Aberystwyth
he relearned his family's lost Welsh, experienced the impact of Penyberth, and
became both a nationalist and a pacifist. While working on farms as a
conscientious objector, he began the career in fiction that is still in
process, seventy years later. His first novel written was A Toy Epic which explores varied strands of Welsh identity through
the story of three boys growing into adulthood -- one represents rural society,
one the working class and one, Michael, is a boy of Humphreys' own class and
nationalist interests, but also has an unreliable degree of vanity and
over-enthusiasm: Humphreys is always rigorous in his examination of all
positions. Rejected by Graham Greene as, presumably, not stereotypically Welsh
enough, this appeared in 1958, after being a Cymraeg radio series, Y Tri Llais. It won the prestigious
Hawthornden prize, but Humphreys' career was already well launched with a
series of skilful, searching novels about moral responsibility - he called the
form `the Protestant novel' and while some of these were English in setting as
well as in their individualist focus, others dealt with Welsh issues. The Little Kingdom (1946), his first
published, interrogates the overenthusiasm and, decisively for Humphreys, a
tendency toward violence he found at times in Welsh nationalism, but more
importantly he produced his first major novel, and a much under-recognised
masterpiece of Welsh fiction in English, A
Man's Estate (1955). This is both a penetrating study of the physical and
moral decadence of Welsh nonconformist life, at both a gentry and a peasant
level -- as if Caradoc Evans could write like E. M. Forster -- and also a
brilliantly post-Joyce re-use of classical myth, here the darkness of the
Orestes story. A Man's Estate already
shows the power and command that Humphreys was to reveal in his masterpiece, Outside the House of Baal (1965).
This, unquestionably the most important Welsh novel in English, extends
its critique across the whole of Wales and the whole of the twentieth century.
Focusing on one half day in the life of a retired nonconformist minister and
his sister in law, the novel encompasses the politics and culture of
twentieth-century Wales to date -- the resemblance to Ulysses in structure and range is conscious. In turn Humphreys
deals with the weakening of the Cymraeg gentry, with pacifism and the horrors
of war, the complexities of nonconformist attitudes, the between wars peace
movements, the depression in south Wales, the onslaught of materialism, the
diaspora from Welsh Wales -- all forces to be associated doubly with the modern
world and the impact of England. Neither of the central figures is totally
impressive; both have weaknesses and complicities, but both also preserve a
sense of continuity with the surviving values of the Welsh community. Neither
naively nativist, nor banally hostile to the coloniser, nor yet quite
despairing of the situation, Outside the
House of Baal is a mature, subtle, demanding and artistically powerful
statement that Wales, its language, its people and their social culture are
worth valuing and preserving.
The complexity of the book has perhaps restricted its proper audience -
though that has also condensed and preserved its value, as with other
masterpieces through time. Humphreys seems to have decided to speak more
plainly on his chosen topic because he followed this with his seven-volume
series `The Land of the Living'. This offered in more straightforward form an
account of the century through the focus of a family. John Cilydd More, poet,
pacifist, solicitor and, above all, extremist, fights in the first world war,
wins an eisteddfod, becomes a nationalist and a pacifist. Eventually, with all
his hopes frustrated and a deep sense of failure, but also a sense of identity
with Myrddin the demented seer, he kills himself -- and has done so before the
time of the first novel, darkly entitled National
Winner (1971). He is survived by his second wife, the beautiful and always
flexible Amy, who has accommodated herself to the Labour Party and to worldly
success. Their three sons are Bedwyr, the dully faithful; Gwydion, the trickily
unreliable; and Peredur, the puzzled quester: Welsh myth is embodied and
projected in their names and lives. As Peredur seeks the grail of truth about
his father's life, Humphreys unrolls the process of Welsh history condensed
into Outside the House of Baal but
here in the powerful final volume Bonds
of Attachment (1991) he goes on to deal with those two poles of modern
colonisation, the investiture of the prince of Wales and the resistance, in
both language and politics, of the recent decades.
The novel itself was called up by historical changes: Humphreys
originally planned to end the series chronologically with its start, National Winner, but the resistance of
the seventies demanded a voice. As usual
with Humphreys, nothing is simple: Peredur's beloved Wenna is killed in a
pre-investiture bombing and his mother's deathbed conversion to the Cymraeg
cause is as dubious as all her commitments. But also as usual with Humphreys,
the ground is covered, fully, rigorously and integratively: south Wales and its
politics are represented, the fastness of Snowdonia can themselves be riddled
with Anglicized corruption. Massive in scope, an ethnography of modern Wales as
a whole, and bringing all the powers of a major European novelist to bear on
the country and its concerns, Humphreys' series, like Outside the House of Baal, is a major voice for, and constitutor
of, the concept of an integrated, independent, self-knowing, self-valuing
Wales.
Focused as he mostly is on the north and west and the Welsh language,
Humphreys is a striking parallel to the other major novelist of modern Wales,
Raymond Williams. He, unlike Humphreys, stayed in England, as a Cambridge
academic, but his work increasingly dealt with Wales and focuses on the south.
His trilogy dealt with the emotional aftermath of the 1926 strike (Border Country 1960), with Welsh workers
in the English radical movement (Second
Generation, 1964) and with the likely new exploitation of Wales (with local
quislings) by European capitalism in his most assured novel The Fight for Manod (1977). He also
wrote about Welsh radical political values in Loyalties (1985) and the maintenance of a local syndicalist spirit
in The Volunteers (1978) and as is
clear from the recent anthology edited by Daniel Williams, he thought hard about
Wales as a classic site of the communal values he most supported. Without
personal knowledge of Cymraeg or Welsh Wales he nevertheless in his last
unfinished work sought to speak in an integrative mode: in People of the Black Mountains (1989 and 1991) he used topographical
history as a focus, writing about the many peoples who over time had lived in
his own Black Mountains area. Place had for him a special value - probably
because of his own English displacement, parallel to the value Aaron sees in
the work of the socially disempowered women writers she has anthologised in A View Across the Valley (1999) -- and
place is the focus for his own increasing efforts to write in an integrative
and consciously independent ways about Wales.
A similar mood dominates the important novel Shifts (1988) by Christopher Meredith, one of the younger
generation who now publish in Wales and interrogate powerfully and often darkly
the condition of modern Wales, after the end of industry and in the growing
consciousness of a need to resolve the separate strands of Welsh identity. The
novel’s three main figures represent Welsh modernity: the diasporic Jack has
returned to work in the last days of steel mill, but will drift off again; the
colonisation of women -- Judith, glumly domesticated, thinks of work in the
absence of satisfactory emotional life, notably with Jack; Keith, her husband,
also soon to be out of work, fumbles toward integration, studying with some
limited success the history of his own world and at least starting to re-learn
the language of his own predecessors in the area.
This sense of anomie, resentment and undirected vigour is the main
negative thrust of recent writing. It can be found in Ron Berry's potent
pictures of post-industrial life from his first
Hunters and Hunted (1960) to
the muscular elegance of his final work This
Bygone (1996), in Alun Richards's wry accounts of the people of Aberdarren
-- a version of Pontypridd -- in his fine short stories and the powerful novel,
itself published in Wales, Home to an
Empty House (1973). This focuses on a woman, and much of the strongest
recent writing has come from the newly recognised women writers such as Penny
Windsor, Glenda Beagan, Sian James, Catherine Merriman -- Merriman's State of Desire (1996) condenses
explicit romance with post-industrial politics, and suggests that it is still
possible to live a life in Wales which is both emotionally full and
democratically engaged.
Implicitly arguing that there is vigour in Wales after industry and
without England, the recent fiction often focuses, like other post-colonial
writing around the world, on the image of disability, a vision of the self as
physically and emotionally damaged, but nevertheless active and capable of
self-fulfilment. This can be darkly negative as in Douglas Bush's Glass Shot (1991) and Richard John
Evans's Entertainment (2000): for
Bush a dislocated worker threatens most about him, while Evans imagines a
furiously powerful wheel-chair user. Or it can be cautiously positive as in
Lewis Davies's My Piece of Happiness
(2000) or Rachel Trezise's In and Out of
the Goldfish Bowl (2000): Davies suggests that there can be forms of
fulfilment for the handicapped and Trezise's central character finds her way
out of trauma into the life of writing.
All these operate in the south east, but Niall Griffiths' modern maimed
range west and north Wales as do characters in the many short stories published
recently -- an imposing fifty five in the Parthian anthology Mamma's Baby (Papa's Maybe) (2000) --
and as do characters in much of the recent resurgence of dynamically realistic
and challengingly aggressive Cymraeg writing typified by Wil Owen Roberts and
Angharad Tomos.
Not everything in Welsh fiction in English fits easily onto the three-part
and progressive scheme I have suggested. There was a flow of sentimental
historicism after the war, in the wake of How
Green Was My Valley, notably by Richard Vaughan, but some at least of the
later examples had some real vigour whether through political recreation in Alexander
Cordell or the realisation of women's experience by Iris Gower. And there are
still tourist novels of the first-contact kind, whether by occasional residents
like Kingsley Amis in The Old Devils
(1986), Bruce Chatwin in On the Black
Hill (1983) or exiles like Alice Thomas Ellis in The Sin Eater (1977).
But these are now exceptions. Welsh publishing houses with Arts Council
Support now produce many novels a year and they realise, explore, even
celebrate a different, culturally independent and increasingly integrative
country. It can integrate other ethnicities, as in Charlotte Williams's Sugar and Slate (2002), Stephen Knight's Mr Schnitzel (2001) or Trezza
Azzopardi's The Hiding Place (2000);
it can represent the complicit character of the nation's half-hearted capital
in John Williams's Cardiff Dead
(2000) and the thrillers by `David Craig’ (James Tucker) like Bay City (1999), or it can explore the
interrelations of kinds of northern Welshness as in Alison Taylor's
mystery-based novels. And it can of course write about other places, other
worlds, as do all the major literatures: increasingly Welsh fiction is not
about Wales. What was for Richard Hughes an escape is for some modern Welsh
writers a natural world-wide interest: I predict this trend will develop
rapidly, and the continued productivity of Emyr Humphreys remains a model in
this mode, showing how to write a Wales that is part of Europe, or more, as in Unconditional Surrender (1996) or The Gift of a Daughter (1999).
5.
There remain challenges, and problems. The audience is not large, and
the output is sustained both by government grants and by low-paid or even
voluntary work by both authors and editors. The future history of Welsh fiction
in English will owe a chapter to the dedicated staff at publishers like Gomer,
Seren, Honno, and the magazines that review and publicise their work, notably Planet and New Welsh Review.
But there is a vigorous fiction in place, often a rudely vigorous
fiction. Like the immigrant novel in England or the modern Scottish novel,
Welsh fiction in English no longer struggles with the embarrassing genres of
first-contact or romance. It has learnt how to do its ethnographic
self-describing work, and since the second world war has been moving on with
varied success but consistent production to write about a Wales which is aware
both of its current problems and its complex past and can interpret its
identity -- its many identities -- in a way that both claims and presages
independence.
Secondary References:
Jane Aaron, Pur Fel y Dur: Y
Gymraes yn LlĂȘn Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg (Pure Like Steel: The
Welsh Woman in Women’s Literature of the Nineteenth Century), Cardiff,
University of Wales Press, 1998)
Robert Crawford, The Scottish
Invention of Enlgish Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1998)
Moira Dearnley, Distant Fields: Eighteenth-Century
Fictions of Wales (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2001)
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland:
The Literature of the Modern Nation
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997)
Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of
Fiction: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff, University of Wales Press,
2004)
Ned Thomas, `Images of Others’, in John Osmond (ed.), The National Question Again: Welsh Political
Identity in the 1980s (Llandysul, Gomer, 1985), pp. 306-19
No comments:
Post a comment