All That is Wales Read online

  But it also manifests itself in my interest in exploring some of the, frequently competing, images of themselves the Welsh had, at different periods, inwardly digested and projected outwards. In the Shadow of the Pulpit, which I published in 2010, was accordingly an attempt to demonstrate how a whole, seminal chapter in the evolution of modern Wales – that relating to its nineteenth-century self-fashioning as a ‘Nonconformist nation’ – had been largely obliterated from cultural memory, with the resultant serious deficit in Wales’s awareness not only of its history, but of its own richly diverse potentialities as a nation.6 And finally, and most recently, The Nations of Wales, 1890–1914 concerned itself with the restless cultural pluralism of a period in which a Wales still (however belatedly) transitional between the pre-industrial and the industrial, the religious and the secular, the Welsh language and the English language, spawned a fertile number of rival versions of Welsh identity.7

  From the beginning until the present, my researches into the anglophone literary culture of Wales have consciously avoided foregrounding the work of Dylan Thomas. Contrary to erroneous supposition, this has not been for want of deep admiration of Thomas’s multifaceted genius. Rather, it is a strategy that was first consciously adopted, and has ever since been consistently implemented, with a view to correcting popular misconception (so revealing of the plight of the Welsh psyche) that Wales had never succeeded in producing any significant English-language writers, save for ‘Dillon’. Therefore my entire career, insofar as it has related to ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’, has been consciously devoted to the excavation and rehabilitation of the neglected writers of Wales. Moreover, whenever I have had occasion to address Thomas’s work directly, I have done so from a Welsh angle that some have deemed marginal, perverse and provincial, choosing to examine such topics as the Welsh-language reception of his poetry; the influence of Gwilym Marles and Welsh Unitarianism on his work; the similarities between his cultural situation and that of certain Welsh-language writers; and his relation to the culturally divided world of his Swansea. The reason for this is quite simple: I feel equipped by my own cultural background to explore these particular dimensions of Thomas’s output that remain very largely inaccessible to ‘mainstream’ criticism. And in addition, such an approach has enabled me to ‘reclaim’ Thomas for Wales – a necessary counterbalance, I would further argue, to the ‘international bias’ of so much contemporary Thomas scholarship.

  * * *

  As beguiling as it is no doubt misleading, personal retrospection suggests to me that the version of the culture of Wales that has gradually formed itself in my writings bears the imprint of my own early circumstances. To register that is also implicitly to admit that both the range and the likely appeal of my academic work have inevitably been limited in part by the particular personal conditions of its production. But there is one advantage of having been raised partly in a minority culture. It saves one from the arrogant presumption of supposing oneself to be the authoritative voice of ‘majority experience’ – a voice that in fact gives expression only to what John Stuart Mill famously termed ‘the tyranny of the majority’ – and it sensitises one to the extraordinary plurality (as well as the accordingly conflicted character) of any sociocultural collective. Wales is not only a community of communities; it is also a bewildering nexus of different cultures and of sub-cultures, which is not to deny that most of us inhabit several of these simultaneously. Such an awareness is implicit, wherever it is not explicit, in my own primary concentration on a single, dominant primary division between a Wales that is English-speaking and a Wales that is Welsh-speaking.

  To return briefly therefore to those early circumstances whose importance for my own development I have noted. Evening always reached us early in Ferndale as the sun abruptly disappeared behind the mountain high on whose slopes our terraced house was situated. But its light continued to grace the opposite slopes of our narrow valley of the Rhondda Fach, illuminating tiny Blaenllechau and etching, clear against the sky, the great spoil tip on the horizon where trams toiled steeply uphill like some Sisyphean ants only to roll back empty and exhausted. Although my own well-worn paths were always downwards – once I’d left the infants school directly behind our house I headed daily downhill to the primary school situated next to the pit-head and railway sidings at valley bottom – my fearful imagination was periodically haunted by tales of the bwci-bo whose distant figure I occasionally glimpsed stalking the hillside above. And from time to time I’d be thrilled by the exotic sound – and fleeting sight – of a hunt pursuing some poor fox high on the mountain ridge.

  My tiny personal world was, then, full of dualities from the very start, and now, as I look back, my whole environment seems studded with allegory. A stone’s throw from home was Darran Park with its swings, roundabout and public swimming pool, where I watched Ferndale play on a red-ash pitch that decidedly discouraged rugby – a rough game I therefore only came to know and very gradually to love much later. Consequently, one of the most pleasurable dualities in my life has involved the sharing of my passion equally between soccer and rugby, unlike some of my compatriots, who remain as obstinately monocultural in this sporting realm as they do in matters cultural!

  Particularly precious to me in memory – for reasons I don’t understand – is the native woodland that rises gently behind the park’s beautiful natural lake, ancient, still and deep. Only much later did I learn it was magically called Llyn y Forwyn and realise that the language so largely confined to my own little family was actually the original language of my whole native environment and that it had a history there that was every bit as deep as the lake itself. It had certainly not seemed so when I was growing up. By some quirk of good fortune, my best friend was golden-locked Gareth Jones who lived just a few doors away and spoke Welsh just like me. But we were exceptions. It was the English I learned at the late age of five that was to be heard everywhere – apart that is from the Welsh diffidently spoken in chapel by a few of the nostalgic older generation to whom I, therefore, was a permanent wonder. I well remember intriguing our friendly grocer by suddenly asking for ‘sudd cwrens duon’ – his residual Welsh no longer encompassed such an exotic term for Ribena. It seemed at that time so absurdly unlikely that my infants school would end up a Welsh-medium institution, a development that naturally gives me immense pleasure. But my early experience of speaking a language not understood by the majority of my contemporaries makes me apprehensively sympathetic to today’s generation of Rhondda youngsters who are subject to the same potentially alienating experience, except now sadly in reverse. Coming from English-speaking homes and neighbourhoods they are in danger of becoming distanced from their family, friends and neighbours by learning Welsh – an experience that could easily lead to a lifetime of resentment that would be hugely damaging both to them and to the language.

  The fact that my first world mainly spoke English meant I grew up never doubting that English was fully a Welsh language and furious whenever it was suggested otherwise. But nor did I suppose that Welsh was somehow an ‘illegitimate’ language of Valleys experience that had no right to speak of Rhondda life. The removal of Welsh to the margins, if not entirely from the scene, common in so much supposedly authoritative academic writing and popular imaging of ‘the Valleys’ makes me extremely angry, as if a vital element in my own identity were being casually erased. It was such a feeling that made me an ardent regular contributor to the late Hywel Teifi Edwards’s ground-breaking series recording the rich Welsh-language culture of the south Wales valleys, a culture that included the working class every bit as much as the bourgeoisie.8 I can therefore understand the feelings of innumerable minorities that daily suffer the same fate on an unimaginably greater scale – as also the feelings of monoglot English-speakers of Wales who are still occasionally susceptible to similar treatment by Welsh-speakers. And never in largely anglophone Ferndale did I feel the resentment at, or condescension to, my ‘other’ language. That was felt only after I’d
left the Rhondda just before my tenth birthday and moved to my second home district of Gorseinon and its environs, which was, compared to the Rhondda, much more bilingual in character, and it was an experience of disinheritance augmented by my aggressively anglophile education both at Gowerton Grammar School and at University College, Swansea.

  There is one further aspect of my Rhondda experience that, I feel, was to have profound consequences for my cultural development. Shortly after I had entered infants school, the first Welsh-medium primary school in the Rhondda Fach was opened just down the valley in Pontygwaith. As my mother, in particular, had long been a Plaid Cymru supporter (and had attended Plaid’s early summer schools) and had also been educated by the culturally enlightened and admirably pioneering Principal of Barry Training College, Ellen Evans, to value her Welsh-language heritage, and as the headmistress of the new school was an old friend of my father’s and lived just down the road from us in Rhondda Terrace, it seemed inevitable that I would be moved from my monoglot English school in Ferndale to Pontygwaith. But appreciative as ever of my neurotic anxieties as a little boy, and therefore unwilling to uproot me from a school into which I had begun happily and comfortably to settle, my considerate parents decided against any such move – an act that was totally contrary to their usually mild and accommodating natures. The result was that throughout my school days, as of course thereafter, I never experienced a Welsh-medium education. The consequences were long-lasting and mixed. On the one hand, I was left with a lifelong feeling that, while Welsh was my mother tongue and the language ever closest to my heart, my mastery of it as a medium for sophisticated intellectual discussion was imperfect, since English had so very early become the first language of what might be termed my ‘educated’ self. Decades later, it took a considerable effort on my behalf to improve my Welsh sufficiently to allow me – in response to the promptings of my conscience and in accordance with cultural choice – to produce articles and books in that language, although I remain frustrated by the relative lexical narrowness, idiomatic poverty, grammatical uncertainty, and limited range and register of my written Welsh, compared to that of more accomplished writers.

  But if it is convenient, at least, for me to blame such lamentable shortcomings on my English-medium education, I also have to admit that I owe it a debt of gratitude for enabling me to feel so thoroughly at home amongst the English-only speakers of Wales, whose company, after all, I have mostly kept, and whose Welshness I have so strongly asserted throughout my personal and professional life. And while my rather precarious ‘interstitial’ cultural position between two cultures has resulted in a misgiving, from time to time, that I am viewed as suspect by both Welsh-speaking and English-speaking Wales, it has also undoubtedly helped me gradually to mediate between my two cultures, exploiting my biculturalism in an attempt to demonstrate the complex, if deeply conflicted, unity of Wales as manifested by its writers on both sides of the major language divide.

  As I approached ten, I left the Rhondda for Penyrheol, Gorseinon, a locality I already knew extremely well from visits every school holiday without fail, as it was my mother’s home patch. But moving there was nevertheless an introduction to a very different Wales, even though it too, like Ferndale, was an industrial conurbation within the great South Wales coalfield – my maternal grandfather was a colliery winderman, just as my paternal grandfather had been a Rhondda miner, and my youth in the Gorseinon area was lived night and day to the accompaniment of the chug of the tinplate mills and the wailing sound of the works’ hooters. The coalfield writers of industrial Wales came naturally, therefore, to appeal to me in due course, and it never occurred to me to regard that extensive, internally diverse region that stretches, after all, as far west as the Gwendraeth valley, as the exclusive preserve of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ authors, as was strongly implied, I came eventually to realise, in the writings of several highly influential cultural historians.

  At that time, the village of Penyrheol was an entity totally distinct from the neighbouring township of Gorseinon that was in time to engulf it before in its turn being engulfed by the expanding city of Swansea. In character, it represented (as did so many of the industrial villages of the western coalfield) an intermediate zone between the rural and the industrial – although change was already physically evident when I arrived, in the form of the large council-house estate then in process of being built on many of its fields. Nevertheless, throughout the twenty or so unmarried years I lived there, several of the small side-roads were still attractively lined with hedges and many of the houses were detached, their extensive back gardens entirely given over to the vegetables the workmen managed to tend even after a day’s gruelling manual labour in mine or tinplate works. These plots guaranteed them a small degree of self-sufficiency. The thriving local farms were solidly integrated into community life, and the little local school was set amongst fields through which I daily made my way. There was an enchantment attaching to the place that won my immediate and lasting affection. As for the community of miners, tinplate workers and steelworkers, it was at that time largely Welsh-speaking, although children of my own age had already stubbornly begun to refuse to speak the language, with dramatic sociocultural consequences, and the residents of the new council houses were almost exclusively speakers of English only.

  In short, this was a transitional world, one corner of which had as much in common with the Welsh-speaking, chapel-going, rural communities of the gwerin as it did with the industrial world of the proletarian Rhondda. And Rhondda residents – many of whose grandparents had after all fairly recently arrived fresh from the Welsh countryside – recognised this difference. This was evident from their habit (so puzzling to me as a child) of referring to my family’s holiday visits to the Swansea area as ‘going down the country’. The great distance and difference this implied was amply confirmed by my tiring experience of travelling between the two localities. The journey to Penyrheol from the Rhondda (nowadays completed in an effortless three-quarters of an hour) used to take all day and involved taking a bus up through ‘Little Moscow’, Maerdy, and over the mountain to Aberdare – a tortuous route that to this day affords the most spectacular view in Wales – a long wait before the next long-haul bus journey down the Neath valley to Swansea, and then patient queuing for the final journey, again by bus, to my grandparents’ house. Once there I was – so unlike the Rhondda – lovingly entangled in a network of extended family, since quite a few in the village were related to me directly or indirectly. For good and no doubt for ill I had a complex ‘history’ and an already given community identity in Penyrheol, whereas in the Rhondda I had in comparison been history-less, known only as the son of my father and of the chapel. At the age of ten I thus found myself differently situated in Welsh time as well as in Welsh place.

  My sense of being ‘outsidered’ by my own country first began in earnest, I suppose, when I entered Gowerton Grammar School only to find that (apart from the annual ‘Eisteddfod’ and Welsh lessons) it was largely a no-go area for Welsh speakers, although there were many such among my contemporaries. My first language was there destined to be kept firmly ‘under the hatches’, although (and I later discovered mine was a representative experience in this regard) many, if not most, of my teachers were themselves Welsh-speaking (as was the headmaster, come to that). It was during study for my GCE exams and then my A-levels that I first experienced a devotion, which later was to prove lifelong, to canonical ‘English’ literature (I have never believed it meaningless to make qualitative distinctions: on the contrary, I believe them to be as inevitable as they are culturally essential, however time-bound and contested such value judgements may prove to be). But it was at that time, too, that I discovered that to read some of these texts was also for me, in some ways, a ‘foreign’ experience, even though they could also offer me from time to time a fascinating mirror of my own cultural plight, suspended (both stimulatingly and disconcertingly as in some ways I sensed I was), between two potentially antagonis
tic linguistic cultures. It was in the character of ‘Owen Glendower’, from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, that I found my most intriguing twin. On the one hand, I was already capable of dimly sensing (and personally resenting) the send-up of him by Shakespeare as an ineffectual hot-air romantic, a bardic ‘wizard’ as self-aggrandising as he is substantially impotent:

  GLENDOWER. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

  HOTSPUR. Why, so can I, or so can any man;

  But will they come when you do call for them? (Henry IV, Part One, III.i)

  And yet, this Glendower is treated by no means unsympathetically, responding as he evidently is to the provocatively superior airs of a Hotspur who repeatedly taunts him for speaking a base and barbarous tongue. Above all, I felt that Shakespeare had understood and voiced one of my deepest feelings when he had his Welsh-speaking Glendower haughtily (and indeed movingly) protest:

  I can speak English, lord, as well as you;

  For I was train’d up in the English court;

  Where, being but young, I framed to the harp

  Many an English ditty lovely well

  And gave the tongue a helpful ornament[.]

  And disarmingly even-handed as usual, Shakespeare also mollified me with his treatment of the meeting between Mortimer and his wife, Glendower’s daughter, who speaks only Welsh (‘O, I am ignorance itself in this’); for me, it demonstrated that tolerance for other tongues that Shakespeare himself no doubt had occasion to practise when lodging – by deliberate choice – amongst foreigners while working at the Globe.9 Spoken, as it very probably was, by members of his Globe company, Welsh was not only for Shakespeare the ancient, aboriginal language of Britain, it was also a contemporary tongue, one of the many languages spoken by the large immigrant community of London. Moreover, as a prominent signifier of conspicuous ‘regional’ difference within Britain, Welsh was no doubt recognised by Shakespeare as a marker of the rural ‘provincialism’ that, for all his metropolitan success, remained an indelible feature of his own character. My sensing of such matters, then, may have been an unconscious preparation for, or prefiguration of, my later interest in inserting Welsh into the context of an embryonically multi-lingual and multi-cultural Wales, and of reading the literatures of Wales against the background of various other literatures.