All That is Wales Read online

  ALL THAT IS WALES

  WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

  CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies

  General Editors: Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams (CREW, Swansea University)

  This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.

  Other titles in the series

  Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1)

  Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1)

  Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8)

  Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)

  Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)

  Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (978-0-7083-2053-2)

  Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (978-0-7083-2153-9)

  Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2)

  Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)

  Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist (978-0-7083-2217-8)

  M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (978-0-7083-2225-3)

  Linden Peach, The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (978-0-7083-2216-1)

  Daniel Westover, R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (978-0-7083-2413-4)

  Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (978-0-7083-2483-7)

  Judy Kendall, Edward Thomas: The Origins of His Poetry (978-0-7083-2403-5)

  Damian Walford Davies, Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English (978-0-7083-2476-9)

  Daniel G. Williams, Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845–1945 (978-0-7083-1987-1)

  Andrew Webb, Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies: Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature (978-0-7083-2622-0)

  Alyce von Rothkirch, J. O. Francis, realist drama and ethics: Culture, place and nation (978-1-7831-6070-9)

  Rhian Barfoot, Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-Sexual Servitude (978-1-7831-6184-3)

  Daniel G. Williams, Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (978-1-7831-6212-3)

  M. Wynn Thomas, The Nations of Wales 1890–1914 (978-1-78316-837-8)

  Richard McLauchlan, Saturday’s Silence: R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading (978-1-7831-6920-7)

  Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century (978-1-7868-3029-6)

  ALL THAT IS WALES

  THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF M. WYNN THOMAS

  WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

  © M. Wynn Thomas, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

  www.uwp.co.uk

  British Library CIP Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN978-1-78683-088-3

  eISBN978-1-78683-091-3

  The right of M. Wynn Thomas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover image: Iwan Bala, Am dy Galon / For your Heart (2003), mixed media.

  Er cof am fy mam

  CONTENTS

  Series Editors’ Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Microcosmopolitan Wales

  1The Scarlet Woman: Lynette Roberts

  2Margiad Evans and Eudora Welty: A Confluence of Imaginations

  3‘A Grand Harlequinade’: The Border Writing of Nigel Heseltine

  4‘There’s words’: Dylan Thomas, Swansea and Language

  5‘A huge assembling of unease’: Readings in A Man’s Estate

  6Outside the House of Baal: The Evolution of a Major Novel

  7‘Yr Hen Fam’: R. S. Thomas and the Church in Wales

  8R. S. Thomas: ‘A Retired Christian’

  9Vernon Watkins: Taliesin in Gower

  10‘Dubious affinities’: Leslie Norris’s Welsh–English Translations

  11‘Staying to mind things’: Gillian Clarke’s Early Poetry

  SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

  The aim of this series, since its founding in 2004 by Professor M. Wynn Thomas, is to publish scholarly and critical work by established specialists and younger scholars that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. The studies published so far have amply demonstrated that concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies can illuminate aspects of Welsh culture, and have also foregrounded the potential of the Welsh example to draw attention to themes that are often neglected or marginalised in anglophone cultural studies. The series defines and explores that which distinguishes Wales’s anglophone literature, challenges critics to develop methods and approaches adequate to the task of interpreting Welsh culture, and invites its readers to locate the process of writing Wales in English within comparative and transnational contexts.

  Professor Kirsti Bohata and Professor Daniel G. Williams

  Founding Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (2004–15)

  CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales)

  Swansea University

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Most of the essays in All that is Wales have been previously published over the last two decades in a range of publications, the details of which have been carefully recorded at the conclusion of each piece. I am very grateful indeed to all concerned for permission to reprint here, as I am to the many authors and publishers the particulars of whose works have been duly cited throughout in my textual notes.

  Yet again, thanks beyond measure go to the wholly indispensable University of Wales Press, and most particularly to the following members of staff with whom I have liaised so profitably closely: Sarah Lewis, Helgard Krause, Siân Chapman, Dafydd Jones, Elin Williams, Elisabeth Edwards and Eira Fenn Gaunt. And, of course, friends and colleagues such as Helen Vendler, Tony Brown, Neil Reeve, Glyn Pursglove, Kirsti Bohata and Daniel Williams, who share my interests and have provided me with invaluable companionship and intellectual sustenance:

  As always, the present volume is, in its way, as much the product of my close family – Karen, Elin, Bob and, yes, little Joseph and littler Elliott too – as it is my ‘own’ work.

  But in the end this book – probably one of my last – is – indeed had to be – dedicated to the memory of my mother, who sadly died (as did my beloved father so very much earlier) before any publications of mine had seen the light of day. In my end is my beginning. But for my mother’s unstinting devotion, long outlasting my childhood and adolescence, I am acutely conscious I would have come to nothing: in her beginning, therefore, was this my end.

  The University of Wales Press gratefully acknowledges permissions granted for use of the following materials:

  New Directions Publishing Corp., for the following works by Dylan Thomas:


  ‘The Peaches’, ‘Old Garbo’ and ‘Return Journey’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1940 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  ‘After the Funeral’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  ‘The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ and ‘Especially When the October Wind’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1943 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  David Higham, for the writings and poetry of Dylan Thomas in the following works:

  Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings (London: Dent, 1971).

  Paul Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (London: Dent, 1985).

  Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (eds), Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934–1953 (London: Dent, 1988).

  Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning: Poems, Stories, Essays (London: Dent, 1974).

  Leslie Norris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Stories (London: Dent, 1983).

  Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins (London: Dent, 1957).

  The Dylan Thomas Omnibus, Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories and Broadcasts (London: Phoenix, 2000).

  Carcanet Press Limited, for material in:

  Lynette Roberts, Collected Poems, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005).

  Lynette Roberts, Diaries, Letters and Recollections, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008).

  Gillian Clarke, Letter from a Far Country (Manchester: Carcanet, 1982).

  Meic Stephens (ed.), The Bright Field: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Wales (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991).

  Meic Stephens, as literary estate, for copyright permission to use the work of Leslie Norris in the following publications:

  Leslie Norris, Albert and the Angels (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).

  Leslie Norris, Recollections (Provo: Tryst Press, 2006).

  Leslie Norris, Collected Poems (Bridgend: Seren, 1996).

  Leslie Norris, Translations (Provo: Tryst Press, 2006).

  Leslie Norris, Glyn Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973).

  Seren Books, for permission to use material from the following publications:

  Margiad Evans, The Old and the Young, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (Bridgend: Seren, 1998).

  Tony Curtis (ed.), How Poets Work (Bridgend: Seren, 1996).

  Colin Edwards and David N. Thomas (eds), Dylan Remembered, Volume One, 1914–1934 (Bridgend: Seren, 2003).

  Leslie Norris, Collected Poems (Bridgend: Seren, 1996).

  W. W. Norton & Company, for permission to use material from the following work:

  Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995).

  The University of Wales Press gratefully acknowledges the kind permissions granted to include essays in this volume published in their original form in the following:

  ‘“There’s words”: Dylan Thomas, Swansea and Language’, in The Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (New Series, 21).

  ‘“A huge assembling of unease”: Readings in A Man’s Estate’, in Katie Gramich (ed.), Mapping the Territory: Critical Approaches to Welsh Fiction in English (Cardigan: Parthian, 2010).

  ‘Vernon Watkins: Taliesin in Gower’, in The Journal of the Gower Society (64).

  ‘“Staying to mind things”: Gillian Clarke’s Early Poetry’, in Menna Elfyn (ed.), Trying the Line: A Volume of Tribute to Gillian Clarke (Llandysul: Gomer, 1997).

  Er bod hi’n fach mae hi’n ddigon.

  INTRODUCTION:

  MICROCOSMOPOLITAN WALES

  When, over thirty years ago, Jan Morris elected to write, with her customary brio, a highly personal history of Wales, she intriguingly sub-titled it ‘epic views of a small country’.1 This collection of essays has been fashioned in a similar spirit, and is an attempt to trace, in however preliminary a fashion, the surprisingly extensive and intricate cultural contours of a tiny area of negligible land. To foreground that ambition, and bring it into appropriate contemporary focus, I have ventured to title this introductory chapter rather grandiosely ‘microcosmopolitan Wales’, a term borrowed from a seminal essay by Michael Cronin, Ireland’s leading scholar of translation practice.

  Cronin’s declared aim in coining the term was to deliver ‘intellectuals from [small, “marginal”] nations such as Ireland, Scotland and Wales’ from ‘the facile dualism of macro perspectives’.2 ‘Macrocosmopolitanism’, in Cronin’s terms, encapsulates the unexamined supposition that only large politico-cultural units can nurture a tolerant, fluid, humane pluralism and a hospitable openness to others. From this perspective, small units are to be condemned for the inevitable narrowness of their mental horizons, the fixity of their essentialist identities, and their bigoted hostility to cultural variety. Cronin’s introduction of the concept of ‘microcosmopolitanism’ is therefore designed to break up this barren dualism.

  Microcosmopolitan thinking is not an approach which involves the opposition of smaller political units to larger political units (national or transnational), but one which in the general context of … cosmopolitan ideals … seeks to diversify or complexify the smaller unit. In other words it is a cosmopolitanism not from above but from below. (191)

  What he is advocating is a ‘defence of difference, not beyond but within’ even such small units as Wales. To this end, he mobilises the concept of ‘fractal differentialism’, a

  term [which] expresses the notion of a cultural complexity which remains constant from the micro to the macro scale. That is to say, the same degree of diversity is to be found at the level of entities judged to be small or insignificant as at the level of large entities. (192)

  The exploration of this micro-diversity could therefore be roughly described as the cultural equivalent of nanotechnology. To illustrate the point, Cronin borrows from the thinking of the French mathematician Benoir Mandelbrot, who in 1977 came up with an intriguing answer to the question he’d posed: ‘how long is the coast of Britain?’ Mandelbrot’s point was that ‘at one level the coast was infinitely long’, since a satellite’s estimation of it would differ exponentially from that of, say, an insect, traversing it laboriously pebble by pebble. The more fine-grained one’s mapping of the coast’s contours, the more, not the less, complex the whole process became. Much the same law, Cronin argues, applies in the case of cultural studies. Accordingly, ‘the micro-cosmopolitan movement … situat[es] difference and exchange at the micro-levels of society’, rather than at the ‘macro’ level customarily supposed to be the exclusive location of such progressive cosmopolitan practices.

  Instead, therefore, of engaging in current debates, fashionable but futile, about the respective merits of centripetal and centrifugal models of society, with attendant misgivings about such ‘loaded’ terms as ‘cosmopolitanism’, Cronin proposes we think instead in terms of equal – and equally rewarding – levels of complex sociocultural organisation at every supposed ‘level’ of a large geo-social unit. In his lexicon, ‘cosmopolitan’ is not a privileged term, an honorific reserved for the ‘centre’ and signifying a sophisticated mingling of international elements, but rather a signifier of a richness born of a constant process of cultural exchange wherever that is to be found and whatever distinctively local forms it takes.

  Thus defined, the microcosmopolitan approach mirrors the intent
ions that have prompted me to publish a series of English-language studies of the Welsh cultural scene over the last thirty years or so. As its title indicated, Internal Difference, the first of these, set out to show that what characterised Welsh identity was the distinctive, and constantly shifting, constellation of widely differing cultural practices and constituencies of which it was actually composed.3 In other words, Wales actually existed as a distinctive pattern, or system, of differences (or rather, as Derrida might have it, as a dynamic process of constant differencing).

  The different elements were in many respects competing as much as co-operating, and so Wales was defined as well by its distinctive pattern of internal conflicts and tensions, none of course greater than those associated with Wales’s two primary languages and cultures. And one of the most crucial aspects of that particular issue was obviously the grotesque asymmetry of sociocultural power between the two respective sectors. These perceptions were therefore further developed in Corresponding Cultures (as in my Welsh-language study DiFfinio Dwy Lenyddiaeth Cymru) primarily through an exploration of the largely taboo subject of the dynamic rivalries and interactions between Wales’s two linguistic cultures, but attention was also paid to the way in which Welsh imagining of the US provided a fascinating mirror to the constantly shifting, fractured condition of Wales itself.4 Through other publications, I also set out to consider the different ways in which Continental Europe had functioned, during the twentieth century, as the ‘Eutopia’ of many Welsh writers and intellectuals. Indeed, a simplified but fruitful cultural history of modern Wales could, I suggested, be written in terms of the division between those who favoured an ‘American Wales’ and those who were conversely attracted to the ideal of a ‘Welsh Europeanism’.5 A concern to understand Wales’s embeddedness in the wider world is, of course, a natural feature of the ‘microcosmopolitan’ approach, as is a respect for the complex inner dynamics of a myriad other small cultural units worldwide routinely overlooked by ‘macrocosmopolitan’ zealots.