In the shadow of the pulpit: literature and nonconformist Wales

Writing Wales in English

In the Shadow of the Pulpit Literature and Nonconformist Wales

M. Wynn Thomas

University of Wales Press

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In the Shadow of the Pulpit

Writing Wales in English

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CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies General Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (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, and, along with Gillian Clarke and Seamus Heaney, one of CREW ’s Honorary Associates. 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 (978-0-70831891-1) 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 (978-07083-1998-7) 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? (978-0-70832217-8)

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In the Shadow of the Pulpit Literature and Nonconformist Wales

M. WYNN THOMAS

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2010

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© M. Wynn Thomas, 2010 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 except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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 Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-7083-2225-3 e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2342-7 The right of M. Wynn Thomas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Eira Fenn Gaunt at the University of Wales Press Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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CONTENTS

General Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements List of Illustrations

vi ix xi

Introduction

1

Preacher’s Wor(l)d 1 A Bluffer’s Guide to Welsh Nonconformity 2 The Long Nonconformist Century 3 Bringing Nonconformity to Book

18 44 77

Writer’s Wor(l)d 4 War of Words: The Preacher and the Writer 5 Spoiled Preachers 6 Wales BC

116 153 182

Individual Worlds 7 ‘Marlais’: Dylan Thomas and the ‘Tin Bethels’ 8 ‘Fucking and Forgiveness’: The Case of Glyn Jones 9 ‘Solid in Goodly Counsel’: The Chapels Write Back

226 256 294

Epilogue

330

Notes Index

338 357

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GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

The aim of this series is to produce a body of scholarly and critical work that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. Drawing upon the expertise both of established specialists and of younger scholars, it will seek to take advantage of the concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies to promote a better understanding of the literature’s significance, viewed not only as an expression of Welsh culture but also as an instance of modern literatures in English worldwide. In addition, it will seek to make available the scholarly materials (such as bibliographies) necessary for this kind of advanced, informed study.

M. Wynn Thomas CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) Swansea University

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Er cof annwyl am mam-gu, un o ‘ferched Evan Roberts’, ac am mam a ’nhad.

I have thought about that very often – how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

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Evan Roberts and ladies. Mary Davies is standing, extreme right.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many friends and colleagues have readily and generously commented on this text. My very particular thanks go to Emyr Humphreys and Daniel Williams for reading it all. Parts of it were examined by Kirsti Bohata, Stevie Davies and R. Geraint Gruffydd, to all of whom I am deeply grateful. Catherine Belsey kindly helped me to grapple with Foucault. The information and advice provided by Jane Aaron and Sally Roberts Jones proved utterly invaluable. The substantial expertise of both in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries underpins my own discussions of this period. I am also very appreciative of the opportunities afforded me by the following universities and institutions to trial some of the ideas that appear in this book in the form of invited lectures: Bangor University, Lampeter University, the University of Wales (under the auspices of the National Eisteddfod). And I owe a substantial debt of gratitude to Siân Chapman, Dafydd Jones, Eira Fenn Gaunt, Sarah Lewis and others at the University of Wales Press for their contribution not only to this volume but to the series as a whole. For kind permission to use materials from works for which they hold the publication rights I am very grateful to the following presses: Carcanet, David Higham Associates, Gwasg Gomer, Honno, Parthian, Planet, Seren, University of Wales Press. Thanks are also due to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for permission to print eight lines from ‘Waking in the Blue’ from Robert Lowell, Collected Poems (Copyright 2003 Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell). And the extract from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (London: Virago, 2008) is reproduced with the kind permission of the Little, Brown Book Group. All the photographs in the body of the text are the work of John Thomas, a diligent chronicler of Welsh life in the later nineteenth century. They are reproduced here with the kind permission of the National Library of Wales.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As is apparent from the text, cherished memories of my mam-gu and of my mother and my father have been my constant companions throughout the period of researching and writing this text. And finally, I would like to thank my family – Karen, Elin, Bob and Joseph bach– for providing the warm supporting environment without which it would be impossible for me to function as a person or as a scholar. Diolch arbennig i chi, unwaith yn rhagor.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS With the exception of the first photograph, Evan Roberts and ladies, in the author’s own collection, all of the following belong to the John Thomas Collection held at the National Library of Wales.

Evan Roberts and ladies Bryn-crug chapel, Tywyn, with Nain Griff Brynglas

viii 1

Bwlch-y-Rhiw chapel, Cil-y-cwm

18

Calvinistic Methodist chapel, Trawsfynydd

44

Adults of Tabernacle chapel, Aberdyfi

77

Hawen chapel, Troed yr Aur

116

Officials of Y Ffor chapel, Abererch

153

Deacons of the Calvinistic Methodist chapel, Y Gyffylliog

182

Llwynrhydowen old (Unitarian) chapel

226

Baptist deacons, Llansannan

256

Cwm chapel and shop, Penmachno

294

Saron chapel, Bodedern

330

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Introduction

Bryn-crug chapel, Tywyn, with Nain Griff Brynglas

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Introduction

I cannot be sure what I remember, but it was Not a heroic escape, a grave Hypocrisy strangled, the cortège Of deacons stunned by one Honest stroke. Roland Mathias, ‘Testament’

On Wednesday 9 November 1904, a striking event occurred within the plain walls of Brynteg Congregational Chapel, Penyrheol, Gorseinon, a thriving industrial town on the outskirts of Swansea: One of the most remarkable utterances of this remarkable night was that of a woman who gave a vivid description of a vision which she had seen the previous evening. ‘I saw,’ she said, ‘a great expanse of beautiful land, with friendly faces peopling it. Between me and this golden country was a shining river, crossed by a plank. I was anxious to cross, but feared that the plank would not support me. But at that moment I gave myself to God, and there came over me a great wave of faith, and I crossed in safety.’1

A century later, it has become increasingly difficult for us to cross that plank to meet those from the time when ‘a preacher caught fire / and burned steadily before them / with a strange light’, so that they ‘sang their amens / fiercely, narrow but saved / in a way that men are not now’.2 One result is that we are cut off not only from the events of 1904–5 – the remarkable religious revival associated with the enigmatic

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figure of Evan Roberts – but from the whole Welsh Nonconformist experience of which it was one of the late, and most extraordinary, products. With his chiselled good looks, Evan Roberts was the Ivor Novello of evangelists. His Revival was to burn its searing way right across Wales and on into parts of England, Scotland and Ireland. It was even to attract people from ‘Australia, Africa, Asia, America, and various parts of Europe’.3 So why an interest in that particular moment, on that particular evening? Because my grandmother was there. Despite constant straining, my mind’s eye refuses obstinately to bring her into focus, but she must have been a figure somewhere near the centre of the scene. I find it impossible to believe she was the visionary herself. She may just, though, have been another ‘shy young lady’, who had nervously risen to her feet in that same chapel the previous evening to say ‘I have a corner in the house where I pray daily, and because of that I am not afraid to face the public in this manner.’4 Why do these words sound a little more convincingly hers? Because mam-gu was one of those young women, silenced by nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformist religion, who suddenly found their tongues in the legendary ‘1904–5 Revival’. As did many ordinary people of both sexes, because a central feature of the Diwygiad – and one probable key to its success – is the importance it democratically attached to audience participation. Public prayers, testimonies, confessions, groans, tears, exclamations – these were the electrifying evidence of the presence of the Spirit. Judged by the high histrionic standards of the nineteenth-century pulpit, Roberts was no sensational preacher and did not regard his (usually spontaneous) sermon as anything but a means to opening his listeners up to their own immediate experience of the power of the Holy Spirit. In so doing he was tapping directly into an old, deep, subterranean strain in Nonconformist culture that had been ignored in nineteenth-century Wales but that perfectly answered the needs of a generation of chapel-goers alienated by the cool conventionalism of fin-de-siècle preaching, bewildered by the threatening progress of industrialism into a new, confrontational phase, and guiltily excited by the extraordinarily varied entertainment culture of the period.5 Roberts, his admirers repeatedly stressed, was no grizzled minister, nor did he come from a family distinguished for its devotional gifts. He was one of the people; a hero for a new age; a revelation of the potential of the ordinary. Accordingly, he was also, like Jesse James and other characters of the Wild West, partly a product of the popular press.6

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As for mam-gu, she was just an ordinary, anonymous member of Brynteg. But two days after the service so dramatically featuring the visionary she reluctantly emerges from the shadows and steps briefly into historical record. On 13 November she is listed as one of the two named Mary Davies in the group of five young ladies who boarded a train at Swansea Station to accompany Evan Roberts on his ‘first missionary journey’.7 A famous photograph at that time shows her as one of those clustered supportively – or possessively – around Roberts. She stands in the second row, last on the right, and to me her face – I have studied it through a magnifying glass – looks touchingly serious, open, wistfully innocent. That first journey was to last several weeks, to convulse South Wales, to attract international attention, and to take in the great raw industrial settlements of the Cynon Valley and the two Rhonddas – Fawr and Fach. In such a region ‘chapel’ rubbed shoulders with rough neighbours. The chapel-going wife of the incomparable Jimmy Wilde, world flyweight champion, ended up in a ringside seat bawling raucous encouragement for her man.8 One of the towns Roberts’s evangelical troupe visited in Rhondda Fach was Ferndale, just up the valley from Wilde’s Tylorstown, and it was there I was born forty years later. But at some point mam-gu stepped off the gospel train, already sensing, I suspect, that followers were turning into groupies and that the Revival itself was turning into a media event: newspapers were listing conversions as if reporting football scores, and using the totals to compile a league table of venues. Maybe my grandmother could sympathize with one old deacon who kept his head while all about him were losing theirs at one Revivalist love-in. Asked, ‘Don’t you want to go to Glory, John Thomas?’ the old man replied, ‘Oh yes . . . but not with this excursion, thank you!’9 Around the time of my birth a subdued, perhaps depressed, Evan Roberts used to sidle into Penyrheol, incognito, to visit mam-gu.10 Some say they talked quietly of ‘Y Diwygiad’ – not exultantly, or nostalgically, but sadly, uncertainly, deploring its lurid melodrama, its gross hysteria, its vulgarity. It had, they agreed, gone wrong. It had failed. And they talked like this because Evan Roberts was no ordinary ranter, just as mam-gu was no ordinary evangelical: he ended up baffled by his own Revival as she, perhaps, looked back on her own youth as a foreign country. It certainly seems so to us today. Anyone interested in beginning to understand the peculiar cast of Evan Roberts’s mind should consult War on the Saints: A Text Book for Believers on the Work of Deceiving Spirits among the Children of God

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(1912).11 He co-authored this compelling book with Mrs Penn-Lewis, the formidable lady in whose house near Leicester he took refuge, finding what psychotherapists would term a ‘holding environment’ following his abrupt withdrawal from ‘his’ Revival in 1905. The work is, in effect, Roberts’s disclosure of his anguished perturbations of mind throughout the dramatic period of his evangelical ministry and it includes his deep misgivings about the ‘success’ of the Revival. In their relationship, Penn-Lewis seems to have acted as the equivalent of a psychotherapist, supplying Roberts with an acceptable (cosmic) religious language, and an acceptable (millenarian) religious narrative, for resolving his bewilderment at the events that had befallen him. I feel I owe Mrs Penn-Lewis an apology. I had naïvely envisaged her as an English vampire, an attention-seeker who battened on to Roberts and ‘his’ Revival like a succubus. Several ugly prejudices, some of them sexist, others ‘racist’, were, I now regretfully note, implicit in such assumptions. As was the supposition that the powerful figures in Welsh Nonconformity had invariably been men. In fact, Mrs Penn-Lewis was born in Neath (1861), the granddaughter of a Welsh Calvinistic minister.12 She was therefore every bit as striking – not to say as significant – a product of the Welsh chapels as Roberts himself. Her possession by evangelical fervour followed close on the heels of a marriage to a Neath-born English Borough Accountant that provided her with the material means of dedicating her life to the realization of her spiritual vision. As intellectually gifted as she was well informed, she had, by the time of her death in 1927, published more than a dozen books and almost as many booklets. Ranging far afield in her missionary endeavours, she never lost touch with Wales. The part she played in organizing a series of evangelical conferences at Llandrindod from 1902 onwards meant there was considerable justice to her feeling of having helped prepare the way for the 1904–5 Revival. Her visits to India, Finland and Russia reinforced her conviction, evident in War on the Saints, of being an actor in a global spiritual struggle. These trips of hers also remind us of the international dimensions of Welsh Nonconformity. The volume Cenadon Cymreig lists sixty-three ministers from Welsh denominations who had served in the mission field worldwide before 1897, plus a further ninety who were still active at that date.13 China, India and Africa were all prominently served, with Madagascar experiencing work almost unbroken for seventy years. Whatever our reservations today about such endeavours, it would be grudging (if not downright dishonest) not to acknowledge the heroism involved

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– these missionaries faced very real physical dangers from disease and from native populations alike. But nowadays it is the ‘colonial’ aspects of the work that command our attention.14 This is evident in the seminal role that Jessie Penn-Lewis played over several years in Welsh attempts to reclaim the Holy Land for Christianity and to convert the Jews. A like mistrust characterizes our current response to Evan Roberts. Magnetic in his heyday, he can seem disturbing in ours, his magnetism seemingly generated by an unbalanced mind. One incident that jars concerns his mother. A devout woman, she had attended one of the earliest of his meetings at their home chapel of Moriah Welsh Calvinistic Methodist chapel, Loughor. These services were characterized by Roberts’s neurasthenic sensitivity to sound – he insisted on complete silence, even if it meant stopping the clock.15 There was also the tense catatonic stillness in which he would sit for hours, awaiting the coming of the Spirit in an internal agony of uncertainty. On this occasion, it was approaching four in the morning, and despite many hours of desperate prayer, no spiritual quickening had been experienced. Exhausted, his elderly mother made for the exit, protesting that the poor people in the packed congregation would soon have to go to their work. Her son followed her to close the door in her wake: ‘these weeks he could not bear the door open, as he felt the world entering at once.’16 Although deeply upset by her departure, he continued to wrestle in spirit for several hours, finding relief so late that it was seven o’clock in the morning before he arrived home. At eleven he was woken by a voice crying ‘O! I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.’ He found his mother distraught, pleading with him for mercy and illumination. ‘What weighed on my mind’, she confessed, ‘after leaving the chapel, was the idea that Christ stood in the Garden in his agony, and I not staying in chapel until the end of the service.’ To a modern reader, the incestuous intensity of a scene otherwise typical of so many during the Diwygiad is likely to prove unnerving. As it demonstrates, Evan Roberts’s was a sensitive, troubled, anguished psyche. He, the Revival to which he gave his name – and mam-gu: they all, it seems to me, remain many fathoms too complex to be fully explained by any of the subsequent, reductive, explanatory models and discourses. No one has yet come near taking the measure of the man, his force, his psychic energy, his dramatic mood swings. And no one either has come near taking the measure of mam-gu, of what she stood for, of what she had known, of what she was, as a lifelong chapel-goer: an extraordinarily ordinary Welsh Nonconformist.

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Aged ten, I sat beside my father as he drove her to the unveiling of a memorial monument outside Evan Roberts’s chapel, Moriah, Loughor, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Revival and three years after his death. During the late 1950s I accompanied her many, many times to service at Brynteg Chapel. There were no visionaries then; no trace of the startling ‘transfigurations’ of character to which reference was made in reports of the 1904 service; no lingering stains of sweat and tears, or distant echoes of the groans, as an electric congregation gave painful birth to the Spirit; no sign of tinplate workers hot from the sheet-mills, still in their working clothes, afraid there would be no seats left if they went home for their food; no workboxes plonked on pews next to miners ready to rush to their morning shift straight from the service. Nor was there any sign of the young lady who had stepped onto that train in Swansea half a century earlier. Mam-gu and I were very close. My parents and I had moved back from Ferndale to Penyrheol to look after her, following my grandfather’s death. On a Sunday evening, mam-gu it was who would stay at home with me to play draughts, or dominoes, or snakes and ladders. She never complained when I insisted on playing hand-tennis on the Sabbath, using the wall in a highly public – and notably unsuccessful – attempt to improve my performance in the real game. True, there was evangelical piety in the family, but it wasn’t mam-gu who displayed it and she never showed the slightest sign of warming to it. If anything she seemed wary of it, just as she seemed coolly tolerant, at best, of the hot gospellers and Pentecostals who claimed to be the Revival’s real spiritual heirs. Like the mainstream Welsh Nonconformity to which she had humbly returned, she may, for all I know, have come to see the Diwygiad as an untypical, freak, even unfortunate event. She had one brother who might have stepped out of a Caradoc Evans story. Ostentatiously pious, he seemed to me cunning in business, niggardly in his personal dealings and priggishly censorious in his judgements. His son was to become an eminent evangelist in distant Chicago and to be voted one of the top seven preachers in the United States. But the brother mam-gu quietly favoured was the black sheep of the family, a generous-natured tinplate worker who never darkened the door of a chapel and was never kinder than when tipsy – which he frequently was. She never showed the slightest inclination to ‘convert’ him. She affectionately recalled her father – a warm-hearted stonemason whose wife had been gently ‘simpled’ by puerperal fever. Working in an industry – housebuilding –notorious in the locality during the industrial building boom for the fortunes it

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allowed the unscrupulous to make, he died penniless, leaving nothing but his tools. ‘Merch y diwygiad’ (a daughter of the Revival) though mam-gu was, she was also an open-minded liberal by the no doubt narrow standards of her culture; and undeniably impressive, in her weaknesses as well as her strengths. This book is written for her, dedicated as it is to her memory. And in being partly about Welsh Nonconformity it is also, I suppose, written about her; about her world, which was more multifaceted than we realize, more unpredictable, and utterly foreign to our own. Hers is the benign guardian spirit of this book, reminding me by her own example that Welsh Nonconformity cannot be reduced to ready stereotypes. Nor can it be readily understood today. It is a closed book to most of the present generation, who encounter it, if at all, only as represented (usually unfavourably) in other, very different, books – the novels and poems of the twentieth-century writers of an Anglophone Wales by whose culture it has very largely been replaced. Much of my professional life has been given to the studying of that culture. This book is, therefore, in part an attempt to bring the two different worlds of my experience together, and in the process to prompt reflection on the great, highly charged, problematic, and still largely unexplored transition of twentieth-century Wales from a predominantly religious to a predominantly secular culture. And, as will appear from this study, twentieth-century Welsh writing in English seems to me to have been, in some ways, not just a key product of this transition but actually a means of effecting it, an important actor in the process. To understand this is to read this literature in an entirely new light. In brief, this study aims to explore some of the diverse ways that, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a large body of Welsh Anglophone texts not only reproduced the life of ‘the Nonconformist nation’ but actively produced it in the discursive terms, and by the creative means, available to the authors. Given the fact that historians have emphasized that at no point, even at the very height of Nonconformist culture, did the majority of Welsh people attend chapel, a word of explanation seems in order about the use of the phrase ‘the Nonconformist nation’. It reflects the way in which a view of themselves as a pious, chapel-going people formed the very core of national being for most of those during the nineteenth century who entertained a belief that Wales was a separate, distinctive nation. It was the essence of what, in another context, has been called their ‘social imaginary’. In the useful terms coined by Anthony Smith, it was the mythomoteur,

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the dynamic, generative concept of identity, necessary for the emergence of a modern ethnie, or national community.17 In what follows, I have ventured to reduce my discussion in many places to bold, simple terms. Such a style of treatment may not unreasonably be objected to on the grounds that it is unscholarly. But it is meant to serve what I believe to be an urgent, legitimate, purpose. I have for several decades been teaching intelligent students many, if not most, of whom have had not the faintest notion of the difference between ‘church’ and ‘chapel’. In this connection I have no wish either to scold or to patronize, simply to suggest that in the context of Welsh literary, social and political history such a deficit of knowledge is ultimately damaging. Substantial sections of this book have therefore been written with this constant admonitory experience very much in mind. Much fuller, more scrupulous and exhaustively complex accounts of these culturally forgotten differences may be readily consulted elsewhere. I am additionally conscious that this deficit is a characteristic of contemporary scholarship as well as of lay readership, and this presents a problem well beyond the borders of Wales. Ferdinand Mount recently began a particularly instructive review of a new book on the history of Methodism in the Times Literary Supplement with the following arresting observation: Sometimes intellectuals develop such an aversion to a subject that they can scarcely be persuaded to pay it even passing attention. For several decades in the last century the free market became so repugnant to the intelligentsia that only professional economists – and by no means all of them – could bear to study its workings in any depth, let alone with any sympathy. Even less fashionable, and for far longer, has been the history of the Nonconformist Churches and of Methodism in particular.18

Food for thought, particularly since Mount goes on to note the nine million Methodists in the born-again Methodist George Bush’s America. Pentecostalism, ‘a lineal descendant of Methodism’ – and in Wales the most dramatic beneficiary of Evan Roberts’s revival – currently has 250 million members worldwide. At the present rate of growth there may by mid-century ‘be a billion Pentecostals – as many as there would then be Hindus’. Glancing back at the nineteenth century, Mount recalls how the Methodists in 1880 numbered ‘some 25 million members worldwide’. To record that is, alas, to note another of this book’s limitations: it pays no attention to the literary and cultural

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impact of Protestant denominations on any country other than my own, and even then examines only English-language culture, whereas the native language of Welsh Nonconformity was, of course, Welsh. It goes without saying that any comprehensive study of the cultural impact of Nonconformity on Wales should properly begin with a consideration of Welsh-language culture – a daunting undertaking, well beyond my personal capacities. Nonconformist belief and Nonconformist values came to permeate Welsh-language society by the later nineteenth century. Powerful and intellectually sophisticated, this sometimes dour and defensive culture was capable of penetrating and humorous self-criticism. In the three great ‘insider’ novels of the brilliant Mold novelist Daniel Owen (1836– 1895) – Rhys Lewis (1885), Enoc Huws (1891) and Gwen Tomos (1894) – it produced satiric comedy of the first order. In their pages may be found almost all the responses to Nonconformity, both positive and negative, found in the Anglophone works to be examined in this study. No other writer, however, with the possible exception of Emyr Humphreys, can seriously rival the subtlety, complexity, and rich ambivalence of Owen’s pioneering portraits of a remarkable society. To mention Owen, and the culture he represents, is to underline the serious limitations of my undertaking and to recognize the cost of its omissions. Many of the responses to Nonconformity considered in this study could readily be paralleled elsewhere, and had indeed been anticipated in English literature from as early as the Elizabethan age onwards. George Eliot, for instance, lamented in Adam Bede that ‘Methodism may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers and hypocritical jargon.’ The sentence neatly encapsulates the range of types thronging the pages of Welsh fiction in English. Determined to avoid a dreary inventory I may have failed altogether to note them adequately; for a related reason, I may have paid insufficient attention to the case of Caradoc Evans. To the English case may be added many others. From the eighteenth century onwards, American evangelism was closely interwoven with Welsh Revivalism, appropriately enough since Welsh Puritanism of the earlier, Dissenting, period, is not fully intelligible without reference to the seventeenth-century New England experiments, while the Welsh Quaker contribution to the founding of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania is a fact of ‘mainstream’ history. In some ways, the best introduction to the mental world of Welsh Nonconformity is Perry Miller’s wonderful, masterly volume The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century.19

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The briefest of visits to the Edvard Munch museum in Oslo serves as an arresting visual reminder of the cultures across Europe informed by beliefs and values analogous to those of nineteenth-century Wales. For me, both the repellent and attractive aspects of the legacy of Welsh Nonconformity in its ominously powerful and manifold nineteenthcentury manifestations are nowhere more memorably combined than in the case of Gwilym Hiraethog (William Rees), one of its outstanding figures. How he began to distance himself from the strict Calvinism of his upbringing remains a riveting human story.20 Raised a Methodist, he left the family church for the Annibynwyr (Welsh Independents/ Congregationalists) because of what happened to a friend of his who had broken the chilly High Calvinist rule governing Sabbath behaviour. And the foul crime Joseph Davies had committed? He had walked home on a Sunday to visit his wife who was dangerously ill. His punishment? Peremptory expulsion from the chapel. Hiraethog left with him. Later, he was to write one of the great love-flooded hymns of Nonconformity, ‘Dyma gariad fel y moroedd, / Tosturiaethau fel y lli.’ It is especially powerful when sung to T. Osborne Roberts’s Pennant, whose majestic melody, its magnificent bass line plumbing the depths, is an expansive celebration of God’s oceanic compassion. The compressions in the hymn’s second stanza are worthy of Emily Dickinson. On Calvary the pent-up fountains of the deeps tear themselves open in eruptive gushers. Spontaneously yielding to the pressure of divine love, heaven’s mighty dams ‘ymdywallt’ (outpour themselves) cascading their waters with impulsive, unstinting generosity onto parched human soil. Buoyed on this torrent, Hiraethog’s lines climax in an erotic vision, the epithalamium of a salvatory marriage: ‘A chyfiawnder pur a heddwch / Yn cusanu euog fyd.’ The treacherous embrace of Judas is here reversed as pure justice and peace fuse in a rapturous kissing of a guilty world. No wonder this spiritually sensuous hymn became known as the ‘love song’ of 1904–5.21 No religious culture capable of producing ‘Dyma gariad fel y moroedd’ could possibly be all bad. A hymn to die for, it is also a hymn to live by. And, fusing the practical and humanitarian with the personal and visionary in a way that characterized nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity at its best, Hiraethog became a fierce campaigner against injustice not only within the narrow limits of his own country but across the Atlantic. Over thirty years a minister in Liverpool, he wrote and preached like a tornado – his father had suffered from bipolar disorder. Much of the stuff is dated, worthless fustian, unsalvageable, but his

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adaptive translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has attracted admiring attention from a number of contemporary critics.22 It was of Hiraethog and his kind that Pennar Davies, himself one of the most attractively catholic, intellectually impressive and socially committed Nonconformist figures of the twentieth century, was thinking when, having listed the shortcomings of nineteenthcentury Nonconformist culture, he concluded: And yet when all this has been said it must be added that it was through their Bethels, plain and shy or vulgar and ostentatious or (here and there) dignified and tasteful, rather than through our cherished llannau [churches], that an awakened gwerin [ordinary people] became articulate and (whatever the limitations may be) creative.23

Pennar Davies was that rarity: a convert to Welsh Nonconformity at a time (the late 1930s) when the cultural tide seemed to be running strongly in the opposite direction. Although a scion of a particularly distinguished Nonconformist family, Saunders Lewis was one of the defectors from the chapel in this decade, opting in his unusual case for a particularly dramatic (and then culturally shocking) conversion to Catholicism. His was an unconventional instance of a wider phenomenon; the abandonment of Nonconformity by a number of Welsh-language writers some of whom turned sceptics while others found a new home in a different Christian community. Lewis was, therefore, no particular friend of the Welsh chapel, and so his typically trenchant celebration of Nonconformity’s central contributions to the development of Welsh culture is all the more arresting. Attempting to identify the defining characteristics of Welsh literature in 1965, he singled out its immense indebtedness to the Nonconformist tradition: The religious revival of the eighteenth century made Wales, for a century and a half, a Nonconformist and Calvinist community. There are historians and critics who are rather sorry about this. Nonconformity is in sad and sullen retreat and Calvinism is almost a dirty word. For English people of the upper-middle class – that is, the literary English – both Nonconformist and Calvinist have been rather smelly lower class attributes since the eighteenth century. That is the gulf that divides nineteenthcentury Welsh literature from English.24

Brusquely impatient of objections to the lack of ‘broad secular liberal interest’ that was the price paid by Welsh literature for its pact with

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Nonconformity, he insists instead on emphasizing the uniqueness of the Welsh case. ‘It tells of an experience no other nation knows in the same fashion.’ ‘Methodism was the form that the Romantic revolution took in Wales,’ he famously observes, adding of the hymns produced by the great Methodist religious revival that ‘their grandeur and intellectual power make them major poetry’ (p. 216). The English-language writers of Wales of Lewis’s generation were much more inclined to follow his example by placing a critical distance between themselves and their nation’s Nonconformist heritage than by acknowledging that heritage’s cultural richness in the way that he had. Yet, in their bones they too knew themselves to be inescapably flesh of the flesh of their Nonconformist ancestors, as Gwyn Jones memorably wrote of himself and his contemporaries: ‘This was the last generation that paid for emergence, with its fathers’ sweat and bruises; bible-blest and chapel-haunted, wrestle hard as we can, we stand confessed the last, lost nonconformists of an Age.’25 And in the light of Jones’s comment John Ackerman came to see Dylan Thomas as ‘the poet who speaks for the age immediately following the age of faith. The belief in Christianity is a diminishing one, but its ethos and its mythology still provide the coinage of language and thought’ (p. 59). Indeed, the indirect twentieth-century effects of Welsh Nonconformity were not only extensive but could be fascinatingly unpredictable. The man credited with launching Penguin Books, Sir William Emrys Williams, derived his commitment to popular education in part from his early Welsh Nonconformist background.26 I earlier singled out Gwilym Hiraethog as an exemplar of nineteenthcentury Welsh Nonconformist culture because I am aware of having been mercifully spared his original dilemma. I was raised in two chapels – first Tabernacle, Ferndale (Rhondda Fach) and then Brynteg, Penyrheol, Gorseinon (Swansea) – where members were uniformly kind and warmly supportive. No doubt there were those I might later have accounted bigots and fanatics even in this nurturing environment, but if so I was spared their oppressive company, perhaps safely cocooned in the spirit of liberal tolerance and loving inclusiveness radiated by both my parents.27 My family belonged to the Annibynwyr (Welsh Independents or Congregationalists), and that most unlikely of the denomination’s champions, the crusadingly anti-chapel Gwyn Thomas, might have attributed my warm early impressions to the fact that ‘Congregationalism was the most libertarian and humanistic of all the branches of Dissent.’28 Who am I to disagree? The fairly late

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development in my case of class consciousness I gratefully attribute to the formative impression made on my young mind by the chapels and their deacons. In my own limited experience, the latter included miners and tinplate workers as well as shopkeepers, undertakers and professionals such as teachers. As I experienced them in my indulged youth, at least, chapels were roughly egalitarian communities for better and for worse. Dawning retrospect was to make them rather more ambiguously so, and in particular I came to deplore a reluctance fully to admit women to the most important areas of power and responsibility (an exclusion I acutely felt my intellectually gifted mother had uncomplainingly suffered): thankfully, that reluctance has long-since been overcome. Nor did I fail ultimately to find the society morally restrictive and intellectually confining, even though one of my chapels tolerated at least one Sunday School teacher who was a known Darwinian agnostic. It was, no doubt, one of the reasons why I turned to Matthew Arnold’s alternative religion of literature, and although that, too, ultimately worshipped a god that failed, I have never ceased to be grateful for that decisive turn and for the intellectual stimulus and excitement it has continued to generate in me. I am therefore a product of Welsh Nonconformity and yet very much of the company of such Welsh writers as I discuss in a volume not offered as a comprehensive study but simply as indicative of the richness and importance of its overlooked subject. This study is deliberately inconsistent in structure, with the first section offering a rough chronological survey of Welsh Nonconformity and nineteenth-century creative responses to it, the second arranged contrastingly on a thematic basis, and the third singling out prominent individuals for attention. Whatever its demerits, such a structure offered me the flexible approach needed to indicate the multifacetedness of the remarkable cultural phenomenon of which this book is a preliminary exploration. One final comment seems in order. Implicit in what follows are two interconnected suggestions of potentially significant cultural resonance. The first is that, during the later part of the nineteenth century, Wales produced a body of Anglophone writing – possibly the first distinctive Anglo-Welsh ‘formation’ – concerned to construct and develop ‘the Nonconformist nation’ by discursive means. The second is that the next ‘Anglo-Welsh formation’ – the body of work produced approximately between the First World War and the middle decades of the twentieth century – is partly defined by its concern to deconstruct this nation. There were exceptions in both

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cases, but the cultural work accomplished nevertheless seems to me predominantly of this character. These suggestions are not, however, proffered as authoritative. Rather, the intention is to stimulate interest and thus hopefully to inspire examination of an important, underresearched subject: the rise and fall of the influential cultural, social and political ‘myth’ of the Welsh as a ‘Nonconformist nation’.

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PREACHER’S WOR(L)D Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people. John Montague, The Rough Field

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1 A Bluffer’s Guide to Welsh Nonconformity

Bwlch-y-Rhiw chapel, Cil-y-cwm

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‘The dark chapels, squat as toads, raised their faces stonily.’1 They gave ‘an appearance of grey gloom to Welsh life’,2 were ‘narrow’, harboured congregations full of ‘black certainties’,3 became the grim fortresses of an oppressive theocracy. At the same time, they were socially pivotal. They staged an incomparable theatre of spiritual struggle and echoed to hymns dangerously capable of bringing even the hardiest atheist to his repentant knees. Or so they still seemed to some writers and readers during the twentieth century. Even today, outrageously cross-dressed as nightclub, or social centre, or bingo hall, they dominate the physical landscape of every town and village. They are the ruined dolmens of some mysterious, departed civilization. Like those great stone faces on Easter Island, they still command physical space, but no longer invite comprehension. Yet to understand the Wales of today we need to be able to read ‘the obsolete map’ of our chapels.4 How to establish the relevant co-ordinates, though, if we lack basic bearings? If we don’t have the appropriate compass of historical information? In many respects, present-day Wales’s casual, uncomprehending acquaintance with the chapel-littered landscape of its chapel-ridden past is the legacy of a multifaceted process of secularization, of religious disenchantment. To this the English-language writers of twentieth-century Wales made a small but significant contribution. But the complex ferocity of their passion becomes incomprehensible unless we first know something of the powerful phenomenon that so appalled and allured them. Before, therefore, we approach those writers and their predecessors, it is necessary to attempt some sort of simple ‘map’ of Wales’s holy land, with its

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Penuels and Bethels, its Seions and its Tabernacles.5 This bluffer’s guide, intended for readers of a terminally post-Nonconformist generation, attempts to explain how Protestantism gave rise to Nonconformity, and Nonconformity once took Wales by spiritual storm. So: what can we say about ‘Protestantism’?6 Where, when and how did it begin? What form did it take? How, when and where did it give rise to its chronically obstreperous and fissiparous offspring, Nonconformity? And how did Wales come in (very late) on this astonishing new act? The date is 1517; Wittenberg the place; and it starts as one disaffected Catholic monk’s challenge to his Church. A limited local act of personal conscience, it became the cornerstone of modern secular individualism. But Luther owed more to the past than he could ever see of the future. In nailing his defiant challenge to public theological argument on the door of his church, he was giving expression to a long-standing impulse of reform within Catholicism itself. It had been differently expressed through the ‘heretical’ attempts by Wyclif and Hus to ground faith on every individual’s direct access to the Bible in the vernacular, and in the great Catholic humanist scholar Erasmus’ debunking, through learned application to original biblical sources, of several of the late medieval Church’s lucratively mystified cults and sacraments. Of all that Church’s grotesque excrescences, a particular, and immediate, source of contention with reformers was the cash value placed on salvation by the system of purchase of indulgences to allow the dead earlier release from Purgatory. For them, the turning of priests into brokers signified the way in which the Church as a whole had turned, under the oppressive dominion of the pope, into a greedy, exploitative, power-hungry institution. The way forward, for Luther as for all reformers, was the way back. In an age when Renaissance humanism was reshaping the world in the image of truths recovered from ancient classical civilization, these Catholic malcontents likewise looked to re-establish their faith on its ur-text, the Bible, on the example of the early primitive Christians, and on the teachings of the great foundational fathers of their Church. In particular, a Luther preoccupied with the issue of salvation looked for authoritative guidance to the Epistles of St Paul, as the insights there offered into the process of salvation had been systematized in the writings of St Augustine of Hippo. The result was the unnerving, and indeed prostrating, discovery of the complete sinfulness and utter worthlessness of every person consequent upon the Fall. No human feature or faculty had been spared. All were damned. Of his own accord, man could do nothing to redeem himself: he was helplessly dependent on God’s grace. But a wrathful God

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had sacrificed His only Son rather than punish this otherwise irredeemably sinful world, and Christ, alone, could be the channel of grace. Faith in Christ’s atonement for the filth of human sin was central to the process of salvation. Nevertheless, divine grace was still completely unpredictable in its movements. It could not be simply guaranteed by faith, enticed by priests, magicked up by sacraments, or guaranteed by any Church. So what meaningful function could be performed by any of these? What even was the role of faith? Was it a consequence of grace or somehow a condition of it? How did one know one was saved? If one had been saved, was a fall from grace possible, and if so how? What kind of sacrament was the Eucharist – what was the meaning of the bread and wine? Were images allowable? Or music? If God dealt unpredictably with individuals, couldn’t He visit His grace on women as well as men? And didn’t His unforeseeable actions make a mockery of social distinctions? If reading the Bible was the sole route to Christ, then what about those who could not read Latin Scripture? Or could not read at all? And what of those who could, but whose understanding differed from that of Luther? What was the role of baptism? Could one be meaningfully baptized as an infant, or only as a convinced, committed, adult? If one was predestined to damnation, what did it matter whether one lived a good life or not? And if one was of the ‘elect’, how could morality matter, there being no correspondence between it and salvation? How were the elect to live in a sinful, condemned world? Should they live alone or in groups? If in groups, what form should they take? What forms of worship should they follow? How should they relate to each other? Or to the secular state? Should they respect its authority? Could God bestow His grace on a whole people? If so, could there be a chosen people? Was the Bible all-sufficient? If not, could other textual sources of authority be accessed only through new educational institutions? These are simply a few of the questions to which Luther’s stand gave rise. The history of Protestantism is the turbulent, sometimes violent, and still unfinished history of the explosive working out of a bewildering array of different answers. That sprawling, untidy, frequently unedifying but utterly absorbing history is also very much the history of the emergence of the modern order. It is luridly evident and influentially active, for instance, in the USA: and every bit as much in its secular as in its disturbingly sectarian forms. Protestantism, as it came to be known, may have begun with Luther, but it quickly exceeded his grasp as it began to display its inexhaustible

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innate capacity for quarrelling violently not just with the Catholic Church but with itself. Already within a quarter-century of Luther’s first challenge, the civil war of Protestantism had displayed its full dizzying repertoire of variations. The menu of sectarian possibilities ranged from the grimly awesome authoritarianism of the severe Swiss experiments in the building of godly communities by Zwingli and Calvin to the wilder extremes of the Anabaptists (insistent on adult baptism by total immersion), with their penchant, by turns violent and captivatingly peaceful, for many forms of communal sharing. A ‘Reformed’ Protestanism split from Lutheranism. The main disagreement turned around holy communion. Lutherans retained the Catholic belief in the miraculous transformation (transubstantiation was the technical term) of bread and wine into Christ’s flesh and blood. The Reformed Protestants (from whom British Protestants are descended) regarded the communion as commemorative of Christ’s sacrifice. It reinforced faith, and instantiated the work of grace: it was ‘a means of sanctification for the elect who are already incorporated into Christ’.7 John Calvin, a great divider of the elect from the goats and grimly unbending believer in predestination, became the effective instigator of a Reformed, as distinct from the original Lutheran, Protestantism and the patron saint of British Protestants. His systematized formulation of Luther’s insights, coupled with his extraordinary experiment in constructing a godly social order, exerted an immense fascination. Even the Anglican Church succumbed to it, and most evangelical sects vied with each other in their devotion to the formidable city boss of theocratic Geneva. Also significant for the long-term development of Protestantism was the distinction between movements favouring strong central organization (the synodic structure subsequently to be dubbed Presbyterianism) and those who stressed the complete autonomy of each local gathering, or church. The former were naturally more inclined than the latter to think, like the Catholic Church, in terms of serving large communities and territories. They thus tended to become more readily involved in negotiations, and accommodations, with existing state powers. During the sixteenth century, northern Europe was slowly, and often violently, transformed as different versions of Protestantism steadily penetrated and undermined existing societies. Various rulers, motivated no doubt by a mixture of spiritual and pragmatic concerns, converted to one or other of the more stable and tractable – and politically advantageous – forms of this new faith. Not the least enticing aspect of it was the opportunity it offered rulers to break free from papal authority and

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to finance new initiatives, designed to consolidate their new-found power, by the expropriation of Church lands and funds. Henry VIII of England was not slow to take advantage of this intriguing new game, despite having been awarded the honorific ‘Defender of the Faith’ by Rome in his younger days. But, attracted though he undoubtedly was, when taking the irrevocable step in 1534, by the political potential of this new kind of ecclesiastical arrangement, he was also fully aware that in espousing Protestantism he would be riding a particularly dangerous, monarch-eating tiger. As contemporary post-Lutheran European history showed, this new faith could not be trusted: it quickly mutated into disturbingly radical forms. A year after Henry’s declaration of ecclesiastical independence, polygamous Anabaptists (Baptists), drunk on the Spirit, gathered in expectation of the Last Days at the ‘New Jerusalem’ of the German town of Münster and were massacred in bloody confrontation with papal forces. The town’s name became synonymous with anarchy: it was to ring ominously in the minds of the faithful of every Church and sect for two centuries. Lutheranism itself was already evolving into a relatively conservative form of Protestant settlement. Through the agency of such key figures as Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, the new state Church of England took a similarly cautious form. Careful to steer clear of evangelical radicalism, adopting and carefully adapting much of the framework of the Church it was deposing, including its priesthood and the sanctity of ritual and image, it nevertheless held firm to the essentials of Protestantism. Salvation could come to thoroughly corrupt man only through God’s grace, made available through Christ’s sacrificial atonement for human sin; the Gospel (consequently translated early into Welsh as well as English) was the sole, divine source of authority; the holy trinity of faith were the Bible, preaching and prayer. Even in this most eventually latitudinarian of settlements, the pulpit threatened to upstage the altar, while in other powerful Protestant sects it completely replaced it. While Elizabeth I reinforced the new English Church as a bulwark against the kind of Counter-Reformation extremism introduced briefly by Mary Tudor, and James I further consolidated Anglican moderateness in the wake of his early experience of fiercely Calvinistic Protestantism in his native Scotland, unrest grew among those individuals who felt the English settlement fell well short of a real cleansing of the medieval Church. Extremists in the eyes of Anglicans, these Puritans could legitimately claim to belong to the mainstream of European Protestantism. Not as yet fully separated from the Anglican Church,

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they were not infrequently aggressive in the voicing of their discontent, and worked towards complete purification, citing the early Christian church as their model and inspiration. Of their number was one Welshman destined to be regarded, centuries later, as the unconscious founder of Welsh Nonconformity. John Penry was inclined towards what became known as the Congregationalist, or Independent, model of Church organization (the Welsh Annibynwyr). Its members, gathered together by a common impulse of faith, worshipping without benefit of priest, image or ritual, prayerfully concentrating on the reading and interpretation of Scripture, held their ‘congregation’ to be an ‘independent’, self-sufficient unit. They would owe no authority to any larger, centralized structure or body. The potential social radicalism of such an anti-authoritarian and individualistically egalitarian spiritual movement alarmed the authorities. Baited beyond endurance by the inflammatory ‘Marprelate’ tracts wrongly attributed to John Penry, the Anglican authorities ordered his execution in 1593. Over fifty years later, Penry’s fellow Independent, Oliver Cromwell, was to deflect the course of history briefly by establishing a Puritan state regime. During that half-century, the initially inchoate evangelical impulses and movements had come to take much firmer, more distinct shape, partly in reaction against Anglicanism’s sharp turn back in the direction of Catholicism under Charles I and his Archbishop Laud. On the more radical wing of the Puritan alliance were the Independents and alongside them the socially even more subversive Baptists. Also believers in single, gathered churches, they laid stress on adult baptism by total immersion and emphasized that anyone, however uneducated, who had been moved by the Spirit, could preach the Word. The right wing was most powerfully represented by the Presbyterians who, as their names suggested, favoured a strongly centralized, firmly structured Church organization and an educated ministry capable of offering authoritative leadership. The worship of all sects was based on the defiant Protestant assertion ‘Every man his own priest’, but only the more radical, such as the Baptists, allowed women as well as men to proclaim this gospel. Almost as violently intolerant of each other as they were of Anglicanism and Catholicism, such sects in their turn readily splintered, under the pressure of opportunity, into a bewildering variety of turbulent movements, each of which exposed new, increasingly radical facets of basic Reformation theology. One such opportunity was provided by the gathering together of Puritans in Cromwell’s all-conquering New Model Army, a great talking shop and cauldron of libertarian ideas as

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well as a formidable fighting force. Democracy, primitive communism, free love, messianism, millenarianism, freedom of the press: all these ideas and more surfaced in this heady atmosphere that encouraged intellectual experiment. Particularly threatening were the new ‘liberated’ women who thronged some of the more radical sects, threatening the overthrow of the patriarchal ecclesiastical, social and political order. These were a particularly vocal and turbulent presence in Quakerism, one of the many new, mostly ephemeral groupings that were formed and one of the few to survive. Following earlier experimental ‘enthusiasts’ like the Familists, they trusted in nothing save the Inner Light of God’s illuminating presence. This made them scornful of all social niceties or rank, and anarchically inclined them towards disruption of any and every form of worship. Like many of the Puritans (and indeed the Anglicans) of the period, they believed themselves to be living in the Last Days before the Second Coming of Christ, and so felt called to prepare society for the millenarian revolution that was imminent. Exasperated by his failure to bring any of these sects to the discipline of order, Cromwell, the ‘strong man’ styling himself ‘Protector’, established himself as Puritan dictator and retained supreme power until his death in 1658. Memory of the Cromwellian dictatorship, and the chaos that had preceded and ended it, reinforced the Anglo-Catholic Charles II’s determination not only to restore the state supremacy of the Anglican Church but to police all sects quite rigorously. The result was a series of punitive and exclusionary measures, in part a tit-for-tat response to like measures against non-evangelical Anglicans introduced by Cromwell’s regime and implemented with considerable vigour in Wales by a small cadre of Welsh Puritans of genius among whom were Walter Cradoc, William Erbery, Morgan Llwyd and Vavasor Powell. The Dissenters, as they were known for their dissent from the established order of Church and State, were turned into ‘Nonconformists’ by their failure to conform to the set of laws branded the Clarendon Codes passed by Charles II’s Parliament between 1661 and 1665 and effectively excluding them from recognized social life. They were forced to hold their meetings – customarily held in houses or barns rather than churches – at a set distance from parish churches. In consequence, they were banished to the wilds, and also debarred from admission to the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as from political or other state service. It was this period of persecution that effectively resulted in the consolidation of a diffuse collection of sects into clear denominations

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bound, by common exclusion, together into a community dubbed ‘Nonconformist’ for its refusal to conform to the state Church. And with the easing of some legal restrictions from 1685 onwards they hastened to build, for the first time, fixed abodes – simple, whitewashed meeting houses – for their previously refugee faith. They continued, however, to be excluded from all positions of power and prestige, with the result that their energies were diverted, over the coming century and more, into work and business. They therefore by insensible degrees became important architects of the new bourgeois social and economic order, while their academies – alternative ‘universities’ – eschewed all conventional ‘classical’ learning, pioneering instead the study of the science not only of Physics or Chemistry but of the social and political order. But as the original flame of intense evangelical fervour burned somewhat lower, and the old Dissenting sects, now denominations, became more tolerantly rational and socially integrated during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, so, true to the essential spirit of Protestantism, new evangelical movements emerged both from the ranks of Dissent and within the Anglican Church. The most disruptively influential of these was Methodism. But before attending to that inflammatory phenomenon that emerged during the second half of the eighteenth century and was of such great eventual moment in the development of nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity, we need to summarize the history, to this point, of early Puritanism and Dissent in the country.8 By the time of the relaxing of the exclusionary laws following the accession of James II to the throne in 1685, only approximately a marginal fifth of the Welsh population favoured the Puritan, or Dissenting, cause. Down to Cromwell’s period and beyond, the Welsh had remained faithful not only to Anglicanism but to conservative religious practices rooted in the ‘Old Faith’ of Catholicism. Puritanism had penetrated Wales only as far as the border regions of Wrexham and Gwent, and it was from these regions that the extraordinary group of evangelicals emerged who became Cromwell’s Puritan satraps in Wales. The names of Walter Cradoc, Vavasor Powell, William Erbery and Morgan Llwyd were eventually to ring like a Puritan litany in the ears of nineteenthcentury Nonconformist faithful. Such retrospective beatification contrasted with Interregnum association of them by Welsh Anglicans with alien oppression of established priests, ignorant, vulgar, tub-thumping, and ruthless discrimination against all who did not measure up to their demanding evangelical standards. Yet, despite subsequent Restoration

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counter-repression the small, precarious, Puritan congregations in Wales managed to thrive and grow, so that by the end of the seventeenth century, both the Independents and (more slowly) the Baptists had firmly established a network of chapels. Thus Nonconformity began its slow but inexorable advance from its beach-head along the Wales– England border into the heartland of Wales. No doubt part, at least, of its appeal lay in its openness to the socially excluded, its warm embrace of craftsmen, tradesmen and others below the horizon of polite society’s regard. It was these outsiders who helped facilitate Nonconformity’s advance, as it helped facilitate their eventual social and political advancement. From its very beginnings in the Puritan sects, Nonconformity had had a (partly unconscious) potential for effecting socio-political reform, even for fomenting revolution. During the early part of the eighteenth century, the Anglican priesthood in Wales included in its ranks moderate evangelicals concerned to bring their congregations to salvation through direct experience of the Bible. That meant first teaching them to read, and so Griffith Jones, at Llanddowror, established what became known as a ‘Sunday School’, in which even the poorest of his parishioners could learn this socially as well as spiritually priceless skill. Such innovations coincided with the emergence – on the Continent and in America quite as much as in England – of a tsunami of evangelical fervour. In Wales it was to wash up a quite extraordinary sequence of Calvinist enthusiasts, all still faithfully contained within the confines of the Anglican Church. Daniel Rowland, William Williams Pantycelyn and the arrestingly controversial Howel Harris – the combined force of these three driven, eruptive, charismatic figures, all endowed with the same astonishing spiritual zeal but blessed with very different gifts, was to change Wales utterly.9 Through their marathons of peripatetic preaching, their organization of experimental religious communities, and the incomparable, visceral splendour of their hymns they shifted Wales completely off its old, settled axis. In this early period, women converts outnumbered men, and Methodism was sympathetic to the expression of female experience. The most brilliant examples are the Welsh-language hymns of Ann Griffiths of Dolwar Fach, the erotic love poems of an ecstatic who saw ‘Christ rising in April . . . his nakedness like a tree’, while her flesh trembled ‘at the splendour of a forgiveness / too impossible to believe in, yet believing’.10 The emotional excesses into which some Methodists could fall were viewed by the unsympathetic as dangerously Dionysiac. In Wales, as in England, these new evangelical believers were sniffily

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referred to as ‘Enthusiasts’ by a rational society alarmed at such mob displays of unbridled passion. But it was the term ‘Methodists’ that eventually prevailed, because it precisely identified one vital element in their success. Whatever the giddy spiritual transports to be experienced through their preaching, the leaders of this new sect shrewdly realized how quickly they were likely to evaporate. They accordingly laid great store on methodically constructing a system of meetings designed to underpin, reinforce and develop the initial enthusiasm. In the ‘seiat’, for example, the faithful gathered on a regular basis to revisit and share the experience of spiritual awakening and to subject it to the scrutiny of calmer understanding in order to integrate it into a mature state of lasting faith. In their combination of raw confessional testimony and analytical reflection, these ‘seiadau’ have been said to anticipate the modern model of psychotherapeutic counselling. Unremarkable in social class or background, called from plough or forge, the Welsh Methodists’ uncontrollable preachers were vivid proof of the explosive spiritual potential of everyman (and indeed woman). But still, they remained loyal sons of the Anglican Church. It was left to a new generation, headed by the formidable Thomas Charles of Bala, to declare unilateral independence. In 1811 the Methodists – increasingly dismayed that an English government, terrified into harshly reactionary policies by the French Revolution, treated them, along with the Nonconformists, as a threat to the social and political order and subjected them to severe policing – halfreluctantly declared themselves to be, indeed, a denomination apart. In Wales, they became known as the Calvinistic Methodists, or Welsh Presbyterians, because, true to the synodic or Presbyterian model, they did not recognize the sovereignty of each congregation. Instead, they established a rigidly centralized organization of chapels, and added to their ‘seiadau’ a hierarchical framework of local, regional and national assemblies. A denomination with no exact English equivalent, during the nineteenth century they played a powerful – but always uneasy – part in the Ascendancy of Nonconformity in Wales. During the Revolutionary period, some of the old Welsh Dissenters of the founding Nonconformist denominations had indeed emerged as social and political radicals.11 Theirs was a brief flowering of Dissenting rationalism before their denominations responded to the impact, and challenge, of Methodism by reverting (though not completely) to their Calvinist roots. That rationalism found particularly cutting political expression through the medium of Unitarianism, a form of belief that

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was anathema to all of Calvinist persuasion and evidence of the slide towards liberalism to which old Nonconformity, as its conservative stalwarts were very aware, was ever prone. If St Augustine of Hippo stood behind Calvin, then it was Arius, another towering intellectual figure of the early Church, who stood behind the Unitarians. At the time when exploratory understanding of the Christian mysteries had not yet hardened into orthodox ecclesiastical doctrine, the whole issue of the Incarnation and the paradoxical divinity and humanity of Christ was hotly debated, along with the riddle of the Trinity. Arius’ solution was to reject the Trinity completely, as simply a device of human nonsense, and to insist that Christ was not God-Man but a Man, whose perfection was prophetic of all human possibility. Since followers of his theology rejected the Trinity in favour of a unitary view both of the Godhead and of Christ’s nature, they came eventually to be designated Unitarians, as well as Arians, and to be viewed by mainstream evangelical Christians as atheists. Both their theology and their social anathematization naturally inclined them to a radicalism that found social, political, intellectual and artistic expression. Frank Lloyd Wright, that American architect of genius and of Welsh lineage, came from a family originally native to ‘Y Smotyn Du’. A region of the Teifi Valley in Cardiganshire, this hot spot of Unitarianism became a ‘black spot’ on the otherwise unblemished Nonconformist Wales in the eyes of the nineteenth-century evangelicals. Appropriately enough, Dylan Marlais Thomas was named for his uncle Gwilym Marles, a noted Unitarian preacher. As for the late eighteenth-century radical Welsh Unitarians who dangerously favoured the French Jacobin cause, they included Iolo Morganwg, inspired fabricator of Welsh cultural nationhood and founder of the Gorsedd, and David Williams, who actually joined the French revolutionaries in Paris and, following through on the logic of Unitarianism, ended up a Deist. Both were intellectual descendants of Richard Price, the Welsh Arian whose rational defence of a contractual model of government and subsequent Messianic welcoming of the French Revolution in a sermon ‘On the love of our country’ (1789) had provoked Edmund Burke to produce Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the great classic of political reaction. Even in their period, such figures were few and wholly unrepresentative of mainstream, Calvinistic old Dissent. But they were also premonitory, exemplifying a trend in the older Nonconformist tradition that would find expression in the radical Welsh Liberal politics of the chapels during the later nineteenth century, the Christian socialism of

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the turn of the century, and the theological and social liberalism of early twentieth-century post-Calvinist Welsh Nonconformity. With the commitment of Methodism to a Nonconformist future, however, the future of Welsh Nonconformity during the nineteenth century was very firmly set on a Calvinist course that entailed steering well clear at first of any social or political engagement, and thus passively supporting the status quo, but later veered decisively in the direction of a widespread social and political interventionism. It was to refashion Wales. *** Nineteenth-century Nonconformity, that remarkable phenomenon, has had a bad press. So much so it might consider retaining the services of Max Clifford. Prominent among its bad-mouthers were many of twentieth-century Wales’s brilliant generation of writers in English, their secular jeremiads betraying their origin in the culture they deplored. Their anathematizations followed hot on the heels of those of Welshlanguage writers of roughly the same period. Pompous, bullying preachers; lying, lustful, avaricious, hypocritical deacons; morally constipated chapel members; chapel stooges of industrial robber barons: these became stock characters in a liberationist carnival of scorn. They were staged as the twisted products of a stifling culture; ‘withered roots’ in Rhys Davies’s phrase. The fair-minded might add that these writers, self-professed liberationists, were only replicating the ferocity with which the denominations had in their heyday attacked each other, the Anglican Church, and, of course, the hated Catholics. And then there was the complex question of their attitudes towards the Irish, the Jews, colonial natives, the rural poor, the industrial proletariat – and women: the lowering patriarch character of this culture is undeniable.12 Add to that the harsh treatment of backsliders, sexual transgressors, ‘deviants’ and all the other numerous strayers from the straight and narrow. Posterity has become almost pruriently fascinated by the ‘secret sins’ of Nonconformity. The culture is understandably seen as existing in a chronic state of denial – denial of the havoc wrought by religious mania on both ministers and flocks, the seedy alliance between chapel prestige and social power, the mental deformations caused by moral and spiritual strait-jacketing, the lives wrecked by stigmatization, the secret drinking, the simmering violence of socially excluded groups and classes, the buoyant rates of illegitimate births sadly footnoted by the pathetic record of bungled abortions, and of course the thriving market in double standards. One is

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left dismayed at the ‘guilty silence’ of the pulpits. Infanticide and suicide statistics offer the darkest evidence of the ‘grotesque brutalities . . . hidden amongst the images of happy contented families’: modern historians find ‘the level of violence which existed within many marriages is shocking’. And as has been pithily remarked: ‘If the graffiti left on hymn books are any evidence of the matters which occupied the minds of Welsh youths, there was . . . public evidence of . . . preoccupation with the sensual.’13 The litany of charges is long, whatever the mitigating historical circumstances, the legitimate defences, the scrupulous qualifications, and the persuasive counter-claims to be cited. But in the end, it is back to the extraordinary, compelling power of Nonconformity one comes – to its deep penetrative power, nowhere more evident than in the creative writings of its alienated twentieth-century sons and daughters. In their parricidal attacks, they replicated their natal culture’s values. Alternatively, one might say they turned Nonconformity’s most powerful weapon – rhetoric – against itself. The obsessive, repetitive, ferocity of their onslaught is reminiscent of the Russian aristocracy’s desperate attempts to dispose, terminally, of Rasputin. Nineteenth-century Nonconformity was truly hegemonic, colouring consciousness and not just institutionally dominant. Such a powerful psychic hold did it continue to exert, long after its theological and institutional power had waned, that it could appear to be unkillable. And seeming such, it was duly subjected to overkill in the work of many English-language writers of Wales during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of their seminal rhetorical strategies are the subject of this book, but before we mistake their fiction for the fact, it is only fair to give even the ‘saints’ their due by attempting a snapshot of chapel culture in its sometimes blowsy nineteenth-century prime. In what follows, Nonconformity is granted the unhistorical privilege of getting its retaliation in first. The result is inevitably more of an airbrushed product than a wartsand-all portrait. *** Folk architecture they’ve been called, those simple early Dissenting buildings, those whitewashed examples of ‘vernacular’ Welsh architecture, those ‘granaries of the spirit’. As for their nineteenth-century descendants, the Nonconformist chapels, it is tempting to write off many of the later examples, in their bling and stony self-satisfaction, as the dated products of conspicuous consumption. In reality, the story of their

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construction is shamingly different. Chapel members were living precariously far above their means when they invested in these elaborate structures. ‘Build them and they will come’ was their motto. Before Ferndale in the Rhondda Fach was half-developed, four chapels had been built accommodating 2,200 people.14 No doubt the builders were egged on by interdenominational rivalry. Nevertheless, these chapels were also heroic acts of faith by congregations of struggling working people scarcely able to pay their ministers a living wage. They are also monuments of a new, mass imagination, fired by spurious scholarship about the designs of Old Testament tabernacles and sanctuaries. Conforming, in accordance with Nonconformist theology, to no single uniform design, and expensively customized, they were nevertheless produced on an industrial scale by this extraordinary new foreign society deposited, cuckoo-like, by industrialism in previously rural Wales. Eventually, these chapels were to be seen by the most thoughtful of their leaders as Respectability advertised in stone, the spiritually decadent deposits of a merely religiose society shamed and angered by the infamous Blue Books Report of 1847 into conspicuous conformity with Victorian values. Modernizing leaders intent on economic and scientific progress also emerged to steal the flame from the altar of Methodism and rekindle it in ‘the form of a utilitarian gas-jet’.15 But part of the chapels’ original function had been to supply the heart of a heartless capitalism. Through them, the proletariat and the rural masses could enter an alternative society, dwell in a parallel universe. And there, for roughly the first half of the century, chapel members remained, while their chapels tripled in number to keep up with an exploding industrial population. One a week they opened, and then sometimes four a week after 1850, to a rhythm set by a sequence of great revivals. For many years past they have been closing at much the same rate. As the nineteenth century progressed, emphasis within Welsh Nonconformity shifted from a preoccupation with the spiritual state of the individual to a concern for the welfare of the collective. Protestantism had been founded on a fearsome truth. At the core of every individual was the isolated soul. And one day it would stand naked and alone, directly answerable to its Creator, without the mediating presence of either priest or Virgin and saints. But this hard, radical individualism was complemented from the outset by a communitarianism; because emphasis was also placed on those structures of mutual support and spiritual reinforcement, the ‘gathered’ congregations of true believers. And some Protestant denominations were inclined to take a step yet

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further in the direction of the social. Encouraged by the Old Testament concept of God’s ‘chosen people’, they dreamt of a whole society dedicated – and indeed covenanted – to observing the Lord’s will. In nineteenth-century Wales, the shift of emphasis from the personal to the social resulted in the creation of ‘the Nonconformist nation’. There were several factors responsible for this development. By ignoring sectarian differences in the interests of associating Nonconformity as a whole with the ignorance and vice that was supposedly rife amongst the common people of Wales, the Blue Books Report welded the denominations together into a single outraged body bent on advertising its injured virtue. A similar sense of solidarity was formed in the countryside as denominations joined together to resist the oppressive alliance between ‘foreign’ landowners and a ‘foreign’ Church; and a spirit of shared resistance also grew in the new industrial centres as workers began to register the ‘feudal’ character of the new exploitative order. And then, as the best and the brightest of the next generation of ministers was sent to be educated to an advanced level at progressive institutions such as Glasgow University, new philosophies began to impact on Nonconformist consciousness. Particularly influential was the philosophy of Hegel. It seemed to offer, for minds infected by nineteenthcentury imperial confidence in Progress, a version of ‘evolution’ that was a most welcome antidote to the troubling Darwinian version. Hegel developed a complex teleological philosophy at the heart of which lay a belief in the Absolute’s steady evolution towards ever more complete self-consciousness through a dialectical History powered by the World Spirit. Advanced ethical human societies were the supreme product of this dynamic cosmic process. Hegelian philosophy proved particularly attractive to the Welsh. Painfully aware of their inferiority to the English as far as practical and material progress was concerned, they could take comfort in the belief that in ethical and spiritual matters they were far in advance of their mighty neighbours. Indeed, the superior light of the little Welsh Nonconformist nation seemed destined to shine on poor benighted peoples throughout Britain’s far-flung Empire. As a result of such developments as these, Welsh Nonconformity’s shift in the direction of the social had, by century’s end, become so extreme and so complete that to the hostile secular witnesses of the twentieth century the chapels seemed to have little more to offer than a moral and social orthodoxy that stifled every expression of the individual spirit. And yet it had all begun so differently. Preoccupied with personal salvation, Nonconformists were, for the first half of the nineteenth century,

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prevented by their strict Calvinism from addressing the distressing economic, social and political conditions produced by a predatory new industrial capitalism. Thereafter, as well as providing emotional safety valves for a population worked to the limits of its endurance, the chapels became the bases of a popular resistance movement. Nonconformist leaders and elders looked to politics and social reform as instruments not only of immediate social betterment but of eventual human improvement. They targeted the ogres of popular oppression: rural landlords, the established church, the demon drink. They took reactionary politics by the throat and forced concessions out of it. They provided downtrodden people with the platform shoes that allowed them, too, to walk tall. They produced five periodicals, twenty-five quarterlies, eight weeklies, totalling a circulation of 120,000.16 Through these they provided forums for sophisticated intellectual debate, forged a powerful rhetoric for political engagement, opened windows onto a wider, even international world. The affairs not only of Europe and the USA but of the Crimea, the Balkans and the South American republics were knowledgeably reported and passionately debated. Gwilym Hiraethog was an acquaintance of Mazzini and in touch with Kossuth. In this progressive mode nineteenth-century Nonconformity, however dark its alter ego, has its undeniably impressive, even heroic, aspects. Its overriding concern with the individual, however, and with that individual’s direct personal responsibility to his Creator, made it uneasy with every form of sustained collective action, state-sponsored or otherwise, and with any strong identification with social class. When, therefore, worsening industrial experience gave rise to mass proletarian consciousness, the defensive solidarities of unionism and the new secular religion of Socialism, Nonconformity became alienated from its own natural constituency, the ordinary people. Simultaneously, the social advancement it had itself helped make possible, both through the inculcation of socially profitable virtues and its effective political interventions, resulted in class distinctions. These manifested themselves not only within the chapels but also between chapel members and growing sections of the working community that had been Nonconformists’ historic power base. A far more complex phenomenon than is popularly realized, late nineteenth-century Nonconformity was fully aware of these and other problems, and in responding to them revealed the many very different tendencies within its nature.17 The response of the liberals and progressivists, eager to meet this new social consciousness on something like its own terms, took forms such as the preaching of a Social Gospel. But

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fundamental to the analysis of conservatives was a sense of a fall from grace, a declension from that golden age Nonconformists had supposedly known at the century’s beginning. They hankered after the High Calvinism that had provided the chapels with a huge, irresistible impetus of growth following the defection of the Methodists from the Anglican Church and their forging by John Elias, spiritual warlord of Anglesey – that ‘Methodist chapel without a roof’ – into a new army for the Lord. This hardening of the theological line had been reinforced by a threat from a new quarter – from the followers of John Wesley, who (contrary to both Luther and Calvin) believed that fallen man had retained, by God’s grace, residual power to initiate his own search for salvation. The belated arrival of the Wesleyan Methodists in Wales had also added a dramatic edge to the rhetoric of a group of preachers whose genius as saintly showmen continued to awe and fascinate later generations. Prominent among them were such pulpit giants as John Elias, John Jones Talysarn, Henry Rees and Williams o’r Wern, while over them towered the Himalayan figure of the one-eyed wonder, Christmas Evans, reputed to be not far off seven foot in height. This was the beginning of the nineteenth-century cult of the preacher ‘aflame with the fire of God’,18 consistent with belief in inspiration by the Holy Spirit. Festivals could feature several hour-long sermons delivered in climactic succession. Not all performers were stars. There was a preacher for every occasion, from the ordinary journeyman (‘pregethwr at iws gwlad’) to the superstars of the Big Meetings (cyrddau mawr).19 The gifted ones were the pin-up boys of their age. Posters of the ‘hoelion wyth’, the ‘big nails’ securing the fabric of Nonconformity, featured them arranged fetchingly as a tree of life. Their fanzines were the anthologies of sermon highlights and the hagiographic biographies (cofiannau), although, worried by the charisma of their heroes, some of these publications went to great pains to stress the humble piety evidenced in their intense devotions and ordinary daily ministrations. The best preachers were said to ‘compos[e] their sermons on their knees: every sermon was like a sword sheathed to the hilt in a sheath of prayer’ (GPW, p. 7). The wife of the sublimely solemn John Elias (he was reputed never to smile) was reverently reported to have entered the Gethsemane of the chamber in which he had spent tormented hours wrestling with his soul, and to have mopped up the puddle of his copious sweat and tears (GPW, p. 286). At the opposite extreme, humour could testify to the popular affection in which the subject was held. One character, exasperated by the sight of deacons napping, took two stones with him into the pulpit, placed

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them threateningly one each side, and glared a warning at the miscreants. The eventual demise of Nonconformity was unconsciously anticipated a century early by the rustic Dafydd Evans. So astonished was he by the new ‘fire carriage’ of the first train into Carmarthen, he innocently exclaimed ‘Great Lord! You’d better stick at it, or they’ll get ahead of you!’ A famous peg-legged minister was said to have retired for the night before a warming-pan had been applied to his bed. Unaware of this, a chambermaid entered the darkened room, fumbled under the bedclothes for the pan, mistook the wooden limb for a long handle, grabbed hold of it, and deposited a startled preacher on the floor. The story is liable to a rather different interpretation in our post-Freudian age.20 Preaching styles varied, and by the century’s end, ministers educated in the great theological academies headed by luminaries such as Lewis Edwards tended to preach more intellectually searching sermons. This dismayed many observers, who feared losing contact with ordinary listeners. But not everyone agreed. Some deplored the pulpit’s failure to get to grips with the new biblical scholarship, post-Darwinian science, and ‘social’ gospel of the period.21 Others remained confident of an imminent reconnection with the founding zeal of much earlier decades. ‘The age of the megatherium, the mastodon, and the giants, is gone they say. Not at all; let them but feed upon the pabulum of giants, and that age is yet to come’ (GPW, p. 286). In that age of the colossi, the ‘sanctified fancy’ (GPW, p. 220) of Christmas Evans could populate the air with characters and fill it with different voices. John Elias could famously galvanize a congregation by conjuring up an auction of souls. His rapt listeners heard the devil whispering, ‘Strike them down to me, I am ready to take them.’ The auctioneer, gavel poised, was on the point of clinching the deal. Then a quiet voice was heard: ‘I will take them: I will take them as they are, to wash them in My own blood’ (GPW, p. 270). Rabble-rousing, maybe, but Elias could also display the full panoply of his learning. He would refer ‘to Eastern rights and customs, to Jewish lore and tradition’, or recite ‘the views of Ainsworth, Pool, Lightfoot, Lowth, Horsely, Campbell, Macknight, Owen and Leigh’ (GPW, p. 289) – a Homeric list. These elite warriors weren’t afraid of testing their vaunted prowess against the most powerful opposition. John Jones Talysarn took on a ‘Vanity Fair’ at Swansea in the spring of 1827. Preaching in the open air, he disrupted proceedings, driving many to leave ‘their tables with the money on them’. The enemy had been thoroughly routed (GPW, p. 476).

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Jones could sometimes pretend to misfire rhetorically, oppressed by ‘the heavy weather’, only to electrify listeners with a sudden change of key (GPW, p. 495). The competitive instinct of these alpha males of the pulpit was as finely honed as the partisanship of their fan clubs. A young Jones Talysarn had been much put out by the unannounced arrival of the grizzled old stellar performer John Elias. Forced to yield precedence to his eminent senior, Jones (to his subsequent shame) sat behind Elias in the pulpit endeavouring to disrupt the sermon by coughing, restlessly moving and loudly scuffing his feet (GPW, p. 230). The histrionic style endured long. Late into the nineteenth century, the lovable ‘redneck’ Matthews Ewenni was renowned for ‘tearing up a Bible during the sermon, bending backwards over the edge of the pulpit or pulling his coat tails over his head like a hood’.22 At the end of the century, Y Cymro invited its readers to vote for the five top preachers, and offered a £5 prize to anyone correctly guessing who would turn out to be top of the pops.23 By then, preaching had long declined into a ‘cultural ritual, operating according to rules as strict as those governing medieval verse’.24 An acid late-century commentator distinguished between ‘the operatic airs’, ‘crescendos and diminuendos’ of the Independents, the ‘sedate, solemn, almost funereal manner’ of the Calvinistic Methodists, liable to swell ‘out in moments of passion into an angry roar’, and the Baptists with their ‘homeliness and geniality of address’.25 But he also argued there were only two fundamental methods of preaching: the ‘picturesque’ style of the Calvinistic Methodists and the ‘doctrinal’ of the Independents. During the middle years of the century, the growth of High Church movements in England had driven the Welsh Presbyterians nearer the old Dissenting denominations. Along with the Independents and Baptists, they divided the country almost equally, with the Wesleyans bringing up the rear, and the rivalry between them could sometimes take ludicrous forms. The ‘John Bull’ of the denominations, the Methodists, it was said, looked down on everybody with contempt, while ‘the Independents are envious of everybody . . . The Baptists are prejudiced against everybody; the Wesleyans try to win everybody; and the Established Church is arrogant towards everybody.’26 It was the ‘battle of the styles’, though, that raged on the chapelbuilding front. Following the shift in educated English architectural taste, the neoclassical style was challenged by the Gothic style: pointed arches and Romanesque windows threatened to displace ‘halo’ arches, tapering columns, interrupted pediments and Doric, Ionic or Corinthian orders.27

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Interior design was, however, always uniform. Around the prominently raised pulpit, positioned against the far gable wall and skirted each side by stairs, curved the ‘sêt fawr’, the Big Seat, reserved for the ‘diaconiaid’, the chapel’s exclusively male officers, all deacons, or elders. Embraced by the broad arc of the Big Seat was the plain Communion Table. The rest of what was still a relatively plain building was given over to the rows of rigid pews for members and ‘gwrandawyr’ (casual listeners). Arranged in serrated ranks, they also filled the gallery that ran around three sides of the chapel. There was also one other feature, increasingly prominent as the century wore on. This was the organ. A modest instrument in some chapels, in others it swelled into an imposing fantail of pipes that could dominate interior space, a pagan peacock’s feather that, for some, proved congregational hymn singing and the Gymanfa had displaced prayers and sermons. Similar concerns were expressed about the vestries that sprouted from the sides or backs of chapels, sometimes threatening to rival the main structure in size. These were visible indications of the ‘diversification’ of the chapel into social centres offering a remarkable range of services. Many of these were theologically impeccable. Prayer-meetings, Sunday Schools, Bands of Hope, Temperance Societies, Gospel Missions, Sisterhoods all contributed directly to the cause. But to these could be added ‘cyrddau diwylliannol’ (discussion groups addressing substantial issues, cultural, social and even political as well as religious), the ‘penny readings’, and carefully policed entertainments that eventually, with great caution, were extended to include dramatized readings from improving fictions and performance of didactic playlets. In addition there were ambulance clubs, cycling and walking tours, tennis, cricket and football teams and a myriad other activities.28 Such developments directly reflected the growing challenge from the vigorous, colourful mass-entertainment culture produced by industrial society, including popular sports and the new seductive technology of film. But they also emphasized how Nonconformity had become part of the very weave of industrial society, its lifestyle cut from exactly the same cloth. No wonder the architecture of chapels came to rhyme visually with that of the engine rooms of valleys pits. Nonconformity was not passively marked by new social and political developments; it contributed actively to the formation, and gradual humanization, of this new raw order.29 Regarded as a ‘moral property’,30 a secular social institution, ideologically divided but functionally largely unified, its performance is impressive. Its Sunday Schools had begun

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to make the masses literate long before state education reluctantly intervened; its numerous periodicals helped train up several generations of distinguished social as well as religious leaders; its academies equipped an elite to perform with intellectual confidence; its welfare system – it was closely associated with early Savings Banks, Friendly Societies and the like – provided unprotected workers with a basic safety net; its chapels acted as models of ‘self-governing republics’31 that became an engine of social reform and political democratization and produced a cohort of Liberal politicians of genius. The chapels were among the wonders of the industrial age. They were the moving product of an ordinary people’s imagination, indispensable plebeian institutions, the think-tanks of their period, laboratories of the spirit, an essentially noble experiment. But failed? In retrospect, perhaps so. Even in their social prime, they were hideously flawed; marred by intolerance, riddled with snobbishness, diminished by narrowness, animated by an ugly zeal. Yet Nonconformity did have its splendours. The great hymns and hymn tunes have an incomparable personal and communal power.32 Instinctively recognized by several eminent twentieth-century blacks as the spirituals of the Welsh, they too empowered voiceless individuals and bonded people, cut adrift from traditional societies and sucked in from all parts by the vector of industrialization, together into coherent, structured, orderly communities. These weren’t the work of the professional classes. Hymns and melodies were largely the product of shepherds, tinplate workers, blacksmiths, miners, shopkeepers. They were supplemented by catchy transatlantic favourites: the infectious evangelical ditties of Moody and Sankey were quickly translated, thanks to Sankey’s wife being Welsh. The first Gymanfa Ganu (Festival of Congregational hymn-singing) was held in 1859 in Aberdare, conducted by Ieuan Gwyllt, the man who coined the term. His hymnbook sold 17,000 copies in its first three years. By the end of the century, a single denominational hymnbook had sales of a quarter of a million. One in eight of the entire population attended a Gymanfa during 1896. The tonic sol-fa, imported from England, made ordinary people musically semi-literate, at least, and made possible the ‘muscular four-part congregational singing’33 that became the Welsh trademark. It also encouraged them to emphasize chords more than phrases, another feature of Welsh choirs. Chapels were known to organize the performance of up to three cantatas or oratorios a year, and the repertoire could range from Handel’s Messiah to Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha.

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Children’s oratorios frequently alternated with those for the adults. String bands came to the relief of the overworked organ. With the triumphs of the huge ‘Côr Caradog’ at the Crystal Palace competitions in 1872 and 1873, the chapel-going Welsh sealed their reputation as world-champion warblers. More than a quarter of a century later, as that reputation began to wane, a Welshman indignantly protested in the Daily Mail that the injustice being done to Welsh choirs was due entirely to the adjudicators being ‘unemotional’ Scots and English.34 And the place of women? Initially, a Nonconformity reinvigorated by Methodism enabled some women to find in the language of their everyday domestic experience an array of metaphors suited to the expressing of spiritual intensity.35 There were also colourful examples of pious women striking out in unconventional directions. Best known is the case of Betsi Cadwaladr, daughter of a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist minister who never renounced her father’s faith. A decidedly free spirit, she led a remarkably adventurous life on board merchant vessels sailing Britannia’s kingdom of the waves, was known to dress as a man, and ended up working with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. In the wake of the Blue Books Report of 1847, however, notorious for its censuring of Welsh womanhood for unbridled licentiousness, a Dissent desperately intent on restricting women’s minds as well as their unruly flesh reached for the tightest of cultural corsets. But spirits were never completely quelled even by the most rigorously prescribed Victorian virtues. While Cranogwen, for instance, could dutifully supply the pages of her notable periodical Y Frythones (The [Cambro]-British Woman) with articles and stories designed to improve her readers’ morals and manners, she lived out her own life in an intense homosocial (and possibly homoerotic) relationship. Flicking through the soporific pages of religiose guff in her remarkable publication, our hearts are sporadically lifted by intriguing insights into the way of life of Nonconformist Woman, a decidedly upright species, in the last half of the nineteenth century. A tug of war was going on between conservative and liberal instincts in tender female breasts jealously protected by the doughty shield of faith. Dutifulness is preached on every page – ‘denu ac anog i’r hyn sy’n bur a chanmoladwy ydyw prif swyddogaeth merched’ (attracting and encouraging towards that which is pure and praiseworthy is the primary function of womanhood).36 Class bias is consistently apparent – there are columns instructing young maidservants how to behave correctly when serving their superiors.

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The advice columns can feature agonies about matters of note such as on which side of a gentleman a lady should walk.37 The straight and narrow boundaries of propriety are, however, constantly being tested. ‘A.J. from Ysbyty Ifan’ poignantly laments the loss incurred by the chapels who insist on ‘keeping women under by condemning them so much to silence and stillness.’38 The Bible is scoured for evidence of the contribution of women.39 Active heroines of the period are lionized and colourful cases unearthed, such as Hannah Jones’s role in Christianizing China’s benighted millions.40 As editor, Cranogwen regularly dispenses sage, cautious advice to readers concerned to know whether, for example, it is proper for women to join the Young Men’s Literary Society in their chapel. And a censorious essayist (probably male) conveniently allows us to eavesdrop on women of the period cursing in the unlaced company of their sex, and even (Heaven indeed forbid) ranting behind the closed doors of their ideal homes.41 Through it all, Cranogwen pursues her cautious way, showing the limits of her tolerance when, for instance, she advises one enquirer that the best place for layabouts of either sex is America, because there’s plenty of empty space there.42 No doubt wastrels enough of the kind could have been found even in Nonconformist Wales to start up a racy Welsh settlement in the USA to rival the noble male utopian enterprises noted below. A culture that so fetishized the individual (male) could be expected to produce remarkable figures. Already by the end of the eighteenth century, Nonconformity could boast of a Morgan John Rhys, devoted anti-slavery campaigner, driven by the reactionary politics of his day to establish a liberated community named Cambria in western Pennsylvania. Fifty years later his example was followed by S.R. (Samuel Roberts), who led a group to settle for a period in Tennessee. An outspoken anti-imperialist pacifist, and anti-slavery worker, he advocated suffrage for all, including women, and became one of the heroes of the struggles against landlordism. Nonconformist zeal for religious and social causes has been seen, by some historians, as a crucial factor in the prevention of nineteenth-century Wales from developing the degree of national political awareness evident in other small European countries of similar size and frequently less highly developed national history. One exception in this connection was Michael D. Jones, whose own American venture at Cincinnati was terminated when he realized the Welsh language could never withstand the erosive power of English. Thereafter, he became the instigator of the movement that led to the establishing of the Welsh ‘colony’ in Patagonia.

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It was this glittering old tradition of radical leadership that produced Mabon, the great conciliatory leader of Welsh labour throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And it culminated, and climaxed, in the gilded generation of Liberal leaders that included the doomed golden boy, T. E. Ellis, and the magnetic, Messianic, poetic and opportunistic political genius, David Lloyd George. By then, Nonconformity had become the ‘kind of unofficial established religion’ of Wales.43 Through those imposing new national bodies the University, the Library, the Museum, it was busy institutionalizing Welsh cultural consciousness. It had also virtually fused politically with the reforming wing of the Liberal Party, their union being based on the old Liberal ethic of the ‘harmony of classes’ in opposition to a feudal aristocratic establishment.44 In Wales, that alliance held substantially good until 1914. Yet, in retrospect, the defeat of the politically aspirational Cymru Fydd movement, led by Ellis and Lloyd George, at the hands of the industrial south-east of Wales in the infamous 1896 meeting at Newport, was the first foreshadowing of the slow disintegration of the great Nonconformist establishment. The second was the remarkable Revival of 1904–5, the Ghost Dance of Welsh Nonconformity, to which we shall return. The third was the death in 1908 of Mabon, the miners’ leader who embodied his age’s experience that ‘the call of community was more powerful than the pull of class’.45 Puzzling over the remarkable collapse of the Nonconformist–Liberal Ascendancy, the best historians confess themselves daunted by its complexity: The crisis had no single cause, and therefore it had no simple or superficial explanation; those who put the blame wholly on such disparate malignancies of biblical criticism, the theory of evolution, liberal theology, the slackness of church discipline, ‘football mania’, encroaching Anglicization, or else ‘dead orthodoxy’, an otherworldly pietism, religious hypocrisy, bourgeois respectability, the churches’ coolness towards the labour movement, a failure to engage in the class struggle, or whatever, oversimplify a situation which was bewildering in its complexity and all-embracing in its influence.46

In some part, at least, twentieth-century Welsh writing in English may be said to have been born not only into this crisis but actually of it. It is symbolically appropriate that its annunciatory text, Caradoc Evans’s My People, was a war baby, appearing some nine months into the war in 1915. Just two years earlier, in a survey of Nonconformity’s contribution to literature that made little mention of poetry and none of

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fiction, the Revd Hugh Jones solemnly announced the chapels had ‘KEPT LITERATURE PURE’.47 It was obviously a capital achievement. To both Welsh-language and English-language writers of the coming decades it was to seem a capital offence. The Great War proved to be a religious and political watershed. It is very moving to think of the way their religion supported so many of the Welsh troops bogged down in mud, awaiting slaughter; of how Welsh hymns rose from the moon-cratered landscape. It is all the more nauseating to recall Lloyd George’s little butty, the militarily booted and gaitered John Williams, Brynsiencyn, minister turned Nonconformist recruiting sergeant, strutting his stuff around north Wales. There were plenty of honourable, powerful voices within Welsh Nonconformity pleading the peace agenda, but in the aftermath of carnage it was Brynsiencyn who was to stand in the dock of people’s memory as the representative of the perfidy of the denominations. There is, in the Royal Academy of Arts, a painting of Clio and the Children by Charles Sims. In its original form, as completed in 1913, it represented the Muse of History sitting in an idyllic rural landscape reading stories of the past to a group of children. The book on her lap was open at a page white save for its print. Three years later Sims retouched the painting. In 1914 he had lost a son at the front, and now he took a brush to those white pages and daubed them crudely with large splashes of red. For Clio substitute John Williams, let’s say, and the painting could stand as a powerful image of the post-war reputation of Welsh Nonconformity.48 In vain did Principal Thomas Rees, a regular contributor to endless debates about Welsh faith in The Welsh Outlook, end an address to the ‘bewildered ear’ of his age with an enlightened peroration: ‘The new theology that seeks to be at once Pantheistic and Humanistic? The industrial and social unrest that threatens to burst the bonds of the social order? They are the strivings of the spirit that created Nonconformity.’49 A different spirit was abroad. Filtered through the post-war minds of a generation educated by school and college in these new sceptical secular ideologies, bitter resentments found indirect voice in the writings of the talented inter-war generation of Welsh writers in English. But their achievement has eclipsed the remarkable body of English-language work engaging with a newly Nonconformist nation that appeared in Wales during the course of the nineteenth century. Far more extensive than has hitherto been realized, and substantial enough to constitute a distinctive and indeed defining cultural achievement, this will be the subject of the next two chapters.

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2 The Long Nonconformist Century

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Calvinistic Methodist chapel, Trawsfynydd

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By the end of the nineteenth century, distinctive Welsh identity seemed inseparable from Nonconformity. ‘Standing out pre-eminently as the most remarkable phenomenon in the National Life of Wales during recent years,’ wrote W. George Roberts in a 1903 article on ‘Nonconformity: a force in Welsh national life’, ‘is the overwhelming, almost magical, power of Nonconformity.’1 In 1890, Cymru Fydd, the voice of a Young Wales movement dreaming of bringing the ancient Welsh nation to full institutional and political maturity, confidently proclaimed that, even as rising young Welsh Liberal stars such as T. E.Ellis and Lloyd George were preparing to make their mark on the Westminster scene, ‘Politics form but a small part of the life of Wales. Religion is the breath of her life, religion without even a hint of politics.’2 Reaffirming this vision, the editors included a paean of praise to Calvinism in a later number of the periodical. It is worth quoting at length because it characterizes the ethos of Welsh Nonconformity at the height of its hegemonic power: [T]he present life of Wales is Calvinistic; the Celt is naturally Calvinistic, for Calvinism is but fatalism regenerated. ‘Calvinism’ is not merely the creed of Calvinistic Methodists . . . [it] is an aspect of thought rather than a creed, it forms the basis of all Welsh thought, – it is the deep undertone of seriousness in lyric Ceiriog, in grand old Hiraethog, in religious Cynddelw, in the exalted descriptions of Emrys. This touch of sadness, this ‘brand of Calvin,’ this poetic melancholy, this hopeful pessimism, – if such a contradiction in terms can be tolerated – will never depart from Wales. It is the true

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ring of the sound metal. It is the expression of the stern law which underlies all the gaiety and the recklessness of the Celt. This Calvinism, – so apparently strange to the Celtic nature, – is really its chief characteristic; no Reformation brought it to the Celtic lands, and no Reformation can take it away; it is God’s mark on the Celt . . .We have stated the simple truth that this ingrained characteristic of past Welsh thought will, sanctified and ennobled, be a characteristic of future Wales. (CF, p. 429) The passage is a heady mixture of nineteenth-century racial theorizing about the Celt, of Matthew Arnold’s seductive maunderings about the Celtic imagination, and of nineteenth-century Nonconformity’s passion for Calvinistic theology. And weak though subsequent time has proved it to be on prophecy, this ringing statement still offers us a sound, reliable summary of the mindset of nineteenth-century Wales; of the spirit and ideology of ‘the Nonconformist nation’. In Wales, then, the nineteenth century was indisputably the ‘Nonconformist century’. But to pretend one can dragoon history into centuries is about as convincing as trying to stuff an octopus into a decorous dress shirt. Although it was only with the alliance between Methodism and Dissent during the early decades of the nineteenth century that Nonconformity began to develop into the ‘national church’ of Wales, already by the end of the eighteenth century the advance of Methodist evangelicalism was effecting a silent social revolution and seriously undermining the ‘established’ Anglican Church of the state in Wales. And while it is to the Welsh language that one must turn for classic textual expression of this great sea change, there are also a handful of English-language texts that, in the present context, need particularly to be noted. Jane Cave’s was a family involvement with Welsh Methodism, begun when her father, an English exciseman, was converted by Howel Harris. Along with her elegy for George Whitefield, founder of English Calvinistic Methodism, Cave’s elegy for Harris in Poems on Various Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac and Religious (1783) shows the genre being given a distinctive Methodist inflection. One of her most passionate complaints about the mainstream Anglican clergymen of her day was that their sermons completely lacked the vividness and intensity of the best theatrical performances on the contemporary secular stage. For Cave, the greatest drama conceivable was the fateful struggle between Sin and Salvation for possession of the human soul, and the Calvinist

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plotting of the progress of grace through election to justification and sanctification was, she believed, the most gripping of dramatic narratives. She sought to convey something of the theatricality of this theological vision in her elegies. So she sets Whitefield’s death against the backdrop of global mourning for the passing of a ‘Saint in whom the life of God did shine’.3 Those ‘nocturnal luminaries’ the stars (PVS, p. 80) are exhorted to tell what they know of Whitefield, the Devil is conjured to proclaim how he had been overthrown by him, and the celestial Angels ordered to announce how they flocked as guardians around ‘his favour’d head’ (PVS82). The text is like a Methodist version of some grandiose Tiepolo painting. And the elegy for Howel Harris is almost equally expansive, centring on a Harris exalted to heavenly glory. This time it is the moon and stars that are summoned to witness how he ‘groan’d to GOD by night’ (PVS86), the rising sun must blazingly testify to his morning devotions, ‘walls, and closets, ev’ry secret place’ will tell of his reliance on grace, Lucifer himself will confess to his impotent persecution of the sinner, while the Angels will recall their guardianship of the great Welsh evangelist of Calvinistic Methodism. Cave’s is indeed ‘enthusiastic’ writing, not least in the sense of the word known to the eighteenth century. She writes as a ‘lover of the Saviour’s cross’ (PVS, p. 96), a sinful member of ‘the Blood-bought race’ (PVS, p. 92), and always with a keen sense of the key vocabulary of Calvinistic theology: ‘For when the last elect is gather’d in / Adieu! To all the advocates for sin’ (PVS, p. 95). Her verse is as uncompromising as it is theologically scrupulous in noting the unfathomable movements of divine grace: He may, ’tis true, his grace extend And ev’n in death commence his friend: So let the dying not despair, But oh! Let all the living fear; For on an awful chance depends A world of bliss that never ends. GOD may accept – and he may not – He may thy name for ever blot Out of his book of life divine And thy sad soul to Hell consign. (PVS, p. 142)

She is unwavering in her attachment to the forbidding theology of high Calvinism:

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Not every one who crieth Lord, Or hear, or pray, or preach thy word, Wilt thou in God-like accents own. (PVS, p. 149) A like passion is found in the poetry of the self-styled ‘blind poetess’, Elizabeth Crebor (née Morris) from Aberystwyth, author of Poems, Religious and Moral (1811). A Baptist, and therefore a member of one of the oldest of Dissenting sects, she specifically connects her faith with her search for consolation in affliction: ’Tis dark, ’tis dark, ’tis very dark A dull and dismal night In vain I grope, in constant [i.e. inconstant] hope Is flown with her fled light.4 Within a week of being rendered instantaneously sightless by the bursting of a blood vessel, she was beseeching Lord, ease my pain, take hence thy heavy rod Nor let me longer feel an angry God. Her emphasis always is on the salvific power of Christ’s blood released through His supreme sacrifice. Contemplating the crucifixion she vividly imagines Christ’s torment: Yes, yes, the glorious sufferer cries, Thus I, a willing sacrifice Am come to die for thee. (PVS, p. 3) In characteristic rapture, she dwells on the scene; every drop That issues from the heart of heav’ns great prop Safe in the bottle of my heart I’ll store The precious balm, a balm for ev’ry sore. (PVS, p. 14) Her work shows how, as the eighteenth century was turning into the nineteenth, Welsh Baptists had been re-enthused by the new evangelical fervour of the Methodists. And one important consequence of this reanimation of Welsh Dissent by a new passion was the eventual evangelical alliance between the old sects and the new that give birth

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to the Nonconformist nation and the Nonconformist century. The theological foundation for this alliance was provided by the Calvinism all sects held in common. Already in 1783, Jane Cave was emphasizing that sectarian divisions were of no significance; only total reliance on God’s unfathomable grace could make salvation possible. ‘Let bigots for the shell contend,’ she proclaimed, With me let names and parties fall, Thy love, my sov’reign God, my all; The substance this: – Of this possest Mid flaming worlds I stand confest. (PVS, p. 150)

As Jane Aaron has very ably demonstrated, while it was unrepresentative of the English-language culture of the Wales of their period, the religious work of Cave and Crebor mirrored in tone and substance the culturally important body of work being produced, under the auspices of Methodism, by Welsh-language women writers of the time, including the renowned Ann Griffiths. By contrast, the ‘polite’ English-language fiction originating from or connected with Wales during this early phase in the development of Welsh Nonconformity was, in keeping with the cultural norm in England, hostile to Methodism and all its religious and social manifestations.5 In Anna, or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress by the Merthyr-born Anna Maria Bennett (née Evans), the originator of all the misfortune that befalls the heroine is the son of a Welsh journeyman carpenter.6 Become an English Methodist vicar, this son (Mr Dalton), who cheats little orphaned Anna out of her inheritance, proves villainously devious enough to grace the stage of a melodrama and sufficiently duplicitous to bring a blush even to the cheek of hypocrisy. In the case of another novelist, Mary Robinson, Bristol-born but with strong Welsh connections, hostility to Welsh Methodism was rooted in personal experience. Deceived into marrying a husband she supposed to be Howel Harris’s nephew, she found that he was in fact only the illegitimate son of Howel’s brother, Thomas, and the belated discovery led to her living for a period in penury. Multiple concealments of true parentage, with all the consequent financial and social distress, are the drivers of the tangled plot in Robinson’s interminable, fourdecker, novel Walsingham, or, The Pupil of Nature, sections of which are set on the Glenowen estate in the Brecon area. But Methodism only explicitly puts in a baleful appearance through the mistreatment of

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Mr McArthur, an elderly tragedian, by an avaricious landlord with a ‘countenance demurely sanctified’.7 Resorting to the religious cant of satirized Methodist sermons, the landlord justifies his conduct by angrily attacking all poets as liars, useless layabouts and authors of ‘wanton books’.8 As Jane Aaron has shrewdly noted, ‘The battle between Methodism and Romanticism, as to who should wield most power over a vulnerable public, the preacher or the man of letters, was clearly being waged in the popular literature of the day.’9 As we shall see in chapter 4, it would be another century before this battle became a dominant, indeed obsessive, theme in the English-language literature of Wales. *** Full consideration of the way in which the growth of Welsh Nonconformity to cultural dominance during the nineteenth century was interpreted through a remarkable body of novels and poetry in English written by products of that culture will be postponed until the next chapter. The remainder of this chapter will instead be concerned with those other authors of that ‘Nonconformist century’ who were, for a variety of reasons, outsiders to the world of the chapels but who nevertheless sought to understand, to assess and to represent that world in their creative texts. One such was Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard who, with his wax nose, his liking for a noggin, and his snuffle seems, at least in colourful retrospect, the perfect man to have written a Punch-and-Judy kind of novel, a picaresque account of the roguish japes of Twm Siôn Catti, once patronizingly known as the Welsh Robin Hood.10 Not surprisingly, the Welsh Anglican Prichard was no great friend of the Methodists, a growing power in the land when the novel was first published in 1828. Darkening the country like a great cloud of evangelical witnesses, the Nonconformist alliance began to devour, locust-like, all the folk traditions of Wales – its dancing, its music, and its tales. Prichard’s novel was in part a one-man rescue mission, its author intent on gathering together the ‘floating anecdotes’11 about his subject and weaving an elaborately embroidered, parti-coloured, jester’s fiction out of them. Prologue to the adventures themselves is his detestation of the ominously encroaching Methodists. ‘The preface to the once popular farce of “Killing no Murder” informs us, that many a fry of infant Methodists are terrified and frightened to

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bed by the cry of “the Bishop is coming!”’12 Thus opens The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shôn Catti, the ‘freebooter’ and ‘prince of wags’ who could be styled ‘the Welsh Rob Roy’. Nonconformity is present in the very first sentence of one of the very first ‘consciously’ Welsh novels in English. Indeed it is as if this new literature were actually emerging as a ‘counter-construct’, an antidote to the infectious ideology of a rapidly developing puritan culture. The reference in that opening paragraph is to English Methodism rather than Welsh, but a comment a few pages later shows it was the latter Prichard darkly had in mind: ‘Before methodism spread its puritanic gloom over Wales, and identified itself almost with the Welsh character, mirth and minstrelsy, dance and song, emulative games and rural pastimes, were the order of the day’ (TSC, p. 22). Prichard’s response to the new killjoy spirit? To act as Cyfarwydd, or traditional story-teller; to stand in the new marketplace for the literate opened up by printed fiction and to recite his ballads and yarns. His animus against the Methodists had a very personal provenance. In an earlier poem, ‘The Drama’s Petition to the Ladies and Gentlemen of Aberystwyth’, he had drawn on his experiences of being a strolling player on a visit to the town. In this guise he railed against the ‘sullen Bigotry’ and ‘gaping Fanaticism’ he had encountered there. His resultingly jaundiced view of Methodism-on-Sea was confirmed in 1840 when his travelling company failed to get playbills printed in the town because ‘theatrical performances were [considered to be] emphatically and exclusively in the interests of the prince of darkness’.13 Twm Shôn Catti is a composite work, a not unskilful synthesis of the popular literary genres, styles and subjects of the previous century – despite its date of publication, it is essentially an eighteenth-century novel. Prichard knew his picaresque Fielding and Smollett, was familiar with the regional novel made popular by Edgeworth and Scott, had read sentimental tales and was obviously versed in the literature of the picturesque, the sublime and the beautiful. He knew of such devices as ironic authorial commentary, the tale-within-the tale, and meandering digressions to embroider and delay the main plot. His running commentary is witty, self-consciously literary and barbed with social criticism. Most significantly, though, in his earlier years Prichard had hovered on the fringes of the London Welsh set of patriotic Welsh intellectuals, antiquarians, folklorists, etymologists, grammarians, genealogists, historians, scholars and collectors, cultural nationalists all, who had restored to Wales the glimmerings, at least, of an awareness of its rich, ancient past.14 Prichard adopts the tone of an arch and knowing

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man of the world who is also a man of cultivated taste – and learning. The learning is important. It is paraded in the pedantic footnotes of an autodidact claiming the ‘fidelity of a true historian’ (TSC, p. 6), as well as in the ballads, tribannau, folk costumes and customs to which the novel lavishly introduces us. Belatedly, Prichard was cashing in on the Ballad Revival that had long been fashionable throughout Europe among scholars and poets. But he was doing it very much with Wales’s culturally neglected case in mind. In one of its many aspects, Twm Shôn Catti is a postcolonial novel avant la lettre, a consciously militant act of cultural assertion by reclamation. It starts by reclaiming for Wales a hero appropriated by the English stage. In London Twm Siôn Catti had metamorphosed into Twm John Catty, traduced by becoming a hero of a very different colour to the authentic one Prichard claimed to have recovered from ‘the varying and uncertain source of oral tradition’ (TSC, p. 5). In places his novel retains the distant traces of oral sources. It uses rhetorical devices such as syntactical repetition to arrest attention, and the folk fantastic of the tall tale: when pantomime ogre Jack Carmarthen gorges, ‘in every mouthful which he ground in his relentless mill, he felt the glowing satisfaction of having annihilated a foe’ (TSC, p. 33). There’s just the hint here of the raucous humour of authentic folk tradition, but it’s carefully processed for the genteel, just as a barely risqué double entendre is discreetly substituted throughout for the raw ribaldry of authentic popular humour. What Prichard does is paint a picture of ‘Merry Wales’. It is an imaginary world of long ago (the novel is set in the early seventeenth century). But it is also a world intended to represent a paradise lost to the sinister encroachments of puritanical Nonconformity. Prichard never lets us forget that ominous shadow falling across his picture. Puritanism is introduced only to be given a bad press. Half-way through the novel, trickster Twm comes face to face with a fanatical follower of ‘the Vicar Prichard’, the author’s famous seventeenth-century namesake revered for the edifying biblical rhymes in Canwyll y Cymry, a textual velcro designed to stick in the minds of a pre-literate peasantry. The zealot’s exasperated wife tells Twm That he was a miserable dreamer, whose brains had been turned by the ravings of fanatical preachers; that some months ago he ran three miles, howling, thinking he was pursued by the foul fiend, when it turned out to be only his own shadow: and that when a patch of the mountain furze was set on a blaze to fertilize the land, nothing could convince him that the

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world was not on fire, and the day of judgement come, till he caught an ague by hiding himself up to the chin in the river for twelve hours. (TSC, p. 155–6)

Prichard’s message to contemporary readers couldn’t be clearer: Methodism is bad for your mental health. That its effects can be even worse is the moral of another episode. Wat the mole-catcher, Twm’s old happygo-lucky buddy, is discovered in a very bad way. It began when he decided to disguise himself in the sober garb of a puritan, determined to become ‘grave and roguish as the most successful of my fellow men’. Having let his pious grandmother lead him to a chapel, he had not been ‘long in discovering that a sedate aspect was a goodly mask for the most profit’ (TSC, pp. 180–1). The systematic robbery he had practised under this disguise has culminated, however, not only in conspicuous wealth and respectability but in murder. When Twm meets him he is on the run. Prichard’s final skirmish with Methodism takes a fictional form that would be repeated, as we shall see, in twentieth-century Anglophone Welsh fiction. This time it is Twm, ever the resourceful con-man, who dons ‘the appearance of a grave puritanical mountain farmer, from the most remote district of Cardiganshire’. (Puritanism is damned by association with a backward rural area.) In this guise he infiltrates a meeting of the local magistrates’ court, where, piously absorbed in reflection, he is challenged as to the book he is reading. ‘“The wisdom of Solomon,” quoth the man of solemnity, drawing the muscles of his face most ludicrously long.’ But this, Twm adds, is a ‘Cambrian’, not a Biblical, Solomon – ‘that is to say, Catwg the Wise, the excellent and erudite abbot of Llancarvan, and teacher of the bard Taliesin.’ Invited to read Catwg’s proverbs aloud, he readily obliges: ‘“Were there horns on the head of every fool, a good sum might be gained by shewing a baldman”, “If the shame of every one were written on his forehead, the materials for masks would be surprisingly dear”, “If no tongue were to speak other than truth and wisdom, the number of mutes would be astonishingly great”’(TSC, pp. 219–30). The proverbs keep on coming in a sententious stream, a witty parody of the sayings of the wise and of the Scripture-toting preaching of Puritan divines. It’s a strikingly early example of that struggle over rhetoric, that ‘war of words’ between preacher and writer, to which attention will be given in chapter 4. ***

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At the far end of the Nonconformist century from Twm Shôn Catti, Marie Trevelyan’s story collection From Snowdon to the Sea (1894) also takes a view opposite to that of Prichard’s novel of latter-day Dissent’s relationship to an older Wales. Subtitled Striking Stories of North and South Wales, the collection strikes its dominant tone in its Preface, where Wales is seductively advertised as ‘the region of thrilling song and witching romance, of gloomy tragedy and quaint comedy’.15 Hers, claims Trevelyan, are stories woven out of ‘traditions, folk-lore, and romances’, and she owes these materials from her ‘native land’ ‘to itinerant preachers, to the humble and primitive peasantry, to the grandsire who holds the place of honour in the fireside corner of the settle, and to grand-dames, who, while knitting, croon at eventide over the long-ago’ (FSS, pp. viii–ix). In thus linking the preachers with the traditional oral story-tellers of the community, and her own work with both, she anticipates, as we shall see in chapter 6, one of the claims of writers of the next century. Trevelyan’s real name was Emma Thomas, and as the daughter of an Anglican priest at Llantwit Major she was, like Prichard, an outsider to Nonconformist culture. Indeed, in some respects she adopts an ethnographer’s or an anthropologist’s approach to her native country. It is no coincidence that her best-known work is Folk-lore and Folk Stories of Wales (1909), and her interest in folkloric materials is evident in the novel. In ‘Sweet singer of Valle Crucis Abbey’, one of the stories in From Snowdon to the Sea, two Calvinistic Methodist ministers actually take on the role of tribal tellers of tales, each scaring the other with ghost stories. Trevelyan sets their story-telling in an imaginary historical context: A great number of the itinerant preachers of Wales are born storymongers. All the good and bad stories of the Principality are included in their repertoire . . . In the ancient farmhouses of Wales, where once devout men of another creed – men whose carved crucifixes, quaintly bound missals, and curious rosaries, proved like a talisman everywhere – the itinerant preachers of Wales are to be seen. Cowled monk, mendicant friar, and wandering priest, who wended their way through the gloomy glens, shadowed ravines, or mountain passes, have been succeeded by the great dissenting brotherhood for which Wales is celebrated. (FSS, p. 99)

Trevelyan’s interpretation of Nonconformity as having at its core the ancient Welsh passion for story is reinforced by the very form of her

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work. Her accounts of ministers are embedded in a collection of stories that includes several dashing tales of Owain Glynd{r, a version of the folk tale about the lady of Llyn y Fan, and a translation from the Welsh by Taliesin Williams (son of the inspired yarn-spinner Iolo Morganwg) of ‘The legend of Rhitta the Giant’. Each story is attributed to a particular region of Wales, so that the collection as a whole constitutes a magical landscape of the country, a mapping of Wales through tales. And Trevelyan loves nothing better herself than to fashion lush prose into breathy, self-consciously spellbinding narratives of the mysterious, ghost-haunted past: ‘He thought of dim, mysterious nights, when the air was heavy with the breath of battle, and the Druids invoked Taranis in the grim shadows that surrounded rude and primitive altars’ (FSS, p. 392). Partial to the lure of the ‘primitive’, Trevelyan could also, however, patronizingly mock and deplore such conservative, traditional societies’ suspicion of outsiders. ‘The black bride of Caerwen’ concerns the outrage of ‘the minister of Salem’ and members of his flock upon hearing that one of the sons of the village has married a black woman in distant Africa. Deeply ashamed of such a misalliance, they betray their crude racism by railing against ‘blackamoors’, cursing all ‘black . . . heathen’ (FSS, p. 251), and voicing their physical revulsion (‘a black ’ooman – ugh!’ [FSS, p. 251]). Their discovery that the pair were ‘married by the Wesleyan minister’ (FSS, p. 254) in no way moderates their feelings: ‘she’s an African, and I can’t abide the blacks with their rolling eyes and big lips’ (FSS, p. 254). From time to time Trevelyan interpolates her own sardonic comments – the minister ‘is willing to go out to the heathen abroad, but unwilling to undertake the conversion of the heathen [African woman] who is expected at Caerwen’ (FSS, p. 250). Knowing Welsh as she clearly did, Trevelyan must also have known that by naming her fictional village ‘Caerwen’ she was characterising it as a ‘white fortress’, or fortress of whiteness. Her own enlightened, progressive views are, however, themselves somewhat compromised by the story’s ending. The African turns out not to be black after all, but a pretty white woman born on the Cape. Thus Trevelyan conveniently avoids having her story actually endorse interracial marriage between black and white. The period between Prichard’s work and Trevelyan’s saw the inexorable rise of Welsh Nonconformity, to the dismay of confirmed Anglicans. In Traits and Stories of the Welsh Peasantry the English-born Anna Beale displayed a comfortable condescension in portraying the life of

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what seemed to her to be a quaint, bucolic, fetchingly simple people. Uneasy with the stubborn presence of the Welsh language in the hovels of the ‘lower classes’, she assures her reader that Welsh servants are notorious liars and girls of the ‘peasantry’ far from pretty.16 A hint of conservative unease creeps into her text when she notes that ‘the people evidently require a Chartist meeting to arouse their energies’ (TSWP, p. 211). Perhaps to still her fears, she makes the church still the centre of community life in her imaginary small town, obviously modelled on Llandeilo. Four-fifths of her substantial novel are over before the firm social grip of Nonconformity is mentioned at all. ‘Such is the prevalence of dissent in Wales’, she then regretfully notes, ‘that whilst the churches are neglected, a sermon . . . preached attracts multitudes who say they “like something new, and not something over and over again”’ (TSWP, p. 261). Ministers, she dismissively continues with what she claims is Christian impartiality, usually lack learning and are ‘selfelected’ preachers, while chapel members attend mainly out of idleness ‘and often . . . finish the day in drunkenness and riot’ (TSWP, p. 262). And after a brief funeral episode involving a ‘dissenting’ preacher, normal (church) service is resumed in her novel. *** Most members of the wealthy older industrial families of nineteenthcentury Wales were Anglicans, and thus outsiders to the chapel world of the overwhelming majority of their workforce. Amy Dillwyn, a remarkable scion of the powerful Dillwyn family of Swansea, was no exception. But in her, the British Liberal politics of her father, Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, took a much more daring, radical, freethinking turn. This naturally inclined her to take a sympathetic interest in the social and political grievances of the Nonconformists and in the processes that had led to the politicisation of the chapels. Therefore, though its treatment of chapel society is slight and marginal, her novel The Rebecca Rioter (1880) is still of interest because in dealing with the obligingly colourful ‘peasants’ revolt’ of the early 1840s against new turnpike taxes it touches on one of Nonconformist culture’s first (unofficial) challenges to the social and political establishment. Evan Williams, a young man from the ‘rough’ district of Three Crosses and Upper Killay on the outskirts of Swansea, gets caught up in the violent local attacks on the hated toll-gates. As a boy, Evan was associated with his village’s Methodist chapel, acknowledged to be one of the few

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‘civilizing influences’ in a period before ‘schools, churches and chapels’ sprang up ‘in all directions over the country’.17 The opposition of Methodism in this earlier period to any form of political involvement, let alone lawless and sometimes bloody agitation, is implied by the description of the minister’s shrinking aversion to violence. But, writing almost forty years later, Dillwyn was well aware of the transformative effect Nonconformity had during the intervening years had on the Welsh political scene. Her own father’s return as Liberal MP for Swansea in 1855 had been due in no small part to local Nonconformist support for a man of moderately radical political views, of partly Quaker background and of reformist sympathies. And her novel, clearly intended to address serious social tensions by promoting better understanding between classes, deplores the ignorance displayed by the wealthy middle-class Anglican establishment towards the chapel culture of the mass of the population, while noting that such ignorance naturally bred an answering hostile incomprehension in ‘the Nonconformist nation’. Translated into the social and political realms, it was, the novel implies, this mutual incomprehension and contempt that, some forty years earlier, had provoked the popular direct action known as ‘the Rebecca Riots’. ‘None of the children of the place knew what going to school meant,’ observers the older Evan Williams (RR, p. 3). Another novel to show an interest, however slight, in the Rebecca Riots is The Sheep-Stealers by the Scottish novelist Violet Jacob, and it, too, hints that the disturbances are the result of mid-nineteenthcentury Welsh Nonconformity’s new turn in the direction of social and political intervention. Set in the border country region of ‘the Black Mountains’, surrounding ‘Crishowell’ (closely related to Crickhowell), the novel distinguishes between the valley dwellers and the farmers from the hill country. The latter are ‘a leaner, harder race’, relics of an ancient past time, dwellers in superstition and worshippers at remote Methodist chapels – ‘grim, square, unadorned little buildings’ suited to their bleak, semi-savage natural surroundings.18 It is a young man from these parts, Rhys Walters, son of a sternly Methodist mother, who ends up playing the part of Rebecca and paying a high price for his association with wild, ruffianly companions. In the end, however, the conventions of the romance form stifle any serious exploration of the relationship between Nonconformity and political life. The growing social and political power of Welsh Nonconformity is again briefly, but illuminatingly, addressed from an avowedly Anglican point of view in Henry Vaughan; A Story of Pembrokeshire by

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C. Morgan-Richardson. Published as late as 1902, but actually written twenty years earlier in 1882 (or so the Preface informs us) and set in that earlier period, it is a portrait of life among the squirearchy and minor gentry of south Pembrokeshire by an author who seems to have been the product of that Anglicized class.19 Cruelly treated by his stepmother, kindly taught by the local vicar, and then ill educated as a full boarder at an English grammar school (poor relation to the great public schools), the eponymous hero eventually, after many vicissitudes, ends up heir to a solicitor’s fortune. But the interest of the novel lies not in its conventional, competently handled plot but in the account it offers of the hunting, ball-going life of the minor county set living below the Landsker, the cultural divide between north, Welsh-speaking Pembrokeshire and the English-speaking south. An impoverished member of that coterie, Henry turns to the law as an appropriately genteel profession. A churchman, like all of his class, he is living through a period when Welsh Anglicanism was coming under ever more intense pressure from Nonconformity on a number of social and political fronts. By implication a Tory, Henry is challenged by the new Liberal politics of Radicalism. Set scenes in the novel allow for an exchange of views over such hot subjects as whether or not the Church continues to function in Wales as a ‘foreign’ Church, removed by language and by social class from the bulk of the population, and whether the tithe system continues to be defensible or not. While Welsh Nonconformity is granted some admirable qualities – the ‘Celts’, we are told, have been made eloquent by the opportunities early offered young people to excel at public prayer (HV, p. 247) – the villain of the novel is a chapel stalwart called Gronow. The Uriah Heep of the novel, he is fawning, dissembling, grasping, cheating and finally murderous. Officially recognized as the enemy of fair-minded, moderate Henry, he is the ugly epitome of everything that Vaughan’s Church-and-State class fears about the class that is rapidly rising to challenge its interests and that will eventually overthrow it. Gronow’s skill at cheating Henry out of his legitimate inheritance is, therefore, a perfect allegory of the course of late nineteenth-century history in Wales, as viewed by those of Vaughan’s class. *** As has been seen, Amy Dillwyn, Violet Jacob and C. Morgan-Richardson were all concerned with the ways in which the social and political power

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of Welsh Nonconformity was becoming ever more evident and telling as the nineteenth century progressed. By the beginning of the twentieth century the iron alliance that had by then been forged between Nonconformity and the Liberal Party seemed to be politically irresistible and nowhere is that fearsome coalition more clearly demonised than in The Ethics of Evan Wynne (1913). This novel follows the irresistible process of the implementation of Nonconformist values through a programme of radical political change to its early twentieth-century conclusion, viewing it from an Anglican viewpoint. Written by D[aisy] Hugh Pryce, a veteran author of popular romances, the competently written and ideologically compelling story is dedicated to the memory of a ‘well-beloved’ Anglesey rector and boasts a preface by the bishop of St David’s baldly stating that the ‘volume illustrates the injury that would be inflicted upon social life in Wales were the Government to be allowed to pass into law, behind the backs of the people, its mean little Bill for secularising the ancient religious endowments of Wales’. This is the message dramatized by a romance plot featuring the controversial marriage of the morally upright Enid, daughter of an archdeacon, to Evan Wynne, an ambitious, cunning, slippery, silvertongued Nonconformist and Radical Liberal MP risen from the ordinary working people to become the leading spokesman for the Disendowment campaign. Anxious to represent herself as a moderate, fair-minded defender of the established church, Pryce is careful to attribute weaknesses even to Enid’s saintly, courteous, hospitable archdeacon father. His hostility to the engagement, although eventually amply vindicated by the plot, is initially rooted as much in prejudice as in acumen. His Anglicized, ruling class attitudes become apparent when he refers to Wynne’s ‘coarser view of ethics . . . less punctilious code of honour . . . [and] mistakes of pronunciation’.20 According to the archdeacon (and probably to Pryce herself), the Radicals ‘don’t believe in religion – there are those amongst them who would like to see the whole country secularised – so they care nothing for the degradation of the priesthood’ (EW, p. 73). His daughter Enid likewise believes that ‘Politics form the only real religion of a great number of Nonconformists in Wales’ (EW, p. 98). She is also indignantly aware that the Nonconformists exclude sensible, middle-class women such as herself both from political debate and from the vote. The archdeacon’s son, Jack, more than endorses these views, regarding his father as the parish’s sole ‘link with civilization’ (EW, p. 73) and as provider of stable authority. While father and son fear Radical

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Nonconformist politics will lead to Home Rule and thus deliver all power into the hands of ‘Welsh-speaking Dissenters and Radicals’ (EW, p. 74), their response to such a threat is different. With the shrewdness of a new young generation, Jack realizes it would be politic to learn Welsh so that he can attack the Radicals in their own tongue and in their heartlands, and with this aim in mind he turns himself into a humble quarryman. This enables the author to provide confirmation of her thesis that, contrary to Nonconformist propaganda, there is little enthusiasm for either Disestablishment or Disendowment among the bulk of the working population. One ‘rustic’ speaks for all his kind when he says: This man [Evan Wynne] is all for pulling down, and spending money, and other folks’ money, by what I can make out, and that’s easy done, but there comes an end to it. Now Mr Jack, when he talks, goes to the very marrow of the matter. He is for building up, and helping those that are worth helping. (EW, p. 129)

The deserving workers are fine, because they know their place, are respectful of the Union, don’t threaten disorder, and know better than to support harebrained schemes either for uncoupling Church and State or for universal manhood suffrage. Moreover, they are decent, faithful Church members, flocking to hear the archdeacon’s sermons and leaving the large, newly built chapels empty. And in case Jack’s experiences in these connections don’t wholly convince the reader, Pryce supplies a scene in which, over a comfortable London dinner, Evan and his Radical Westminster cronies reveal their real aim. Disestablishment is just their first ‘war cry’, little more than a cover for a political agenda that will lead to communism and socialism. The showdown between Church and Chapel, Conservatives and radical Liberals comes at a political meeting and in the form of a Disendowment debate between Evan and Jack. This enables Pryce to summarize the main political arguments of her time. Wynne bases his arguments on ‘every false analogy, every misconception, and every old lie that could be raked together’ (EW, p. 217): the Church is an alien, English Church preying financially on the Welsh people; it despises and excludes the Welsh language; it cares for nothing but money and is corrupt; it supports an idle, pampered, class of clergy at the expense of ordinary people; it is ‘out of touch with the people, out of sympathy with national aspirations’ (EW, p. 218); it is class-based and hostile to

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‘equal opportunity for all’ (EW, p. 218). Then Jack replies, advertising his recently acquired credentials as an ordinary Welsh quarryman. For him, the Church is only the modern form of the ancient Celtic church, ‘the old Church of the country’; it is still the spiritual home of the bulk of the population; Nonconformity is not a church but merely a collection of bickering sects; since the Tithe Act of 1888, tenant farmers have paid no tithe; Anglican services in Welsh are widespread; Nonconformists covet Church money because their own obscenely large chapels are empty and bankrupt; if the Church is shorn of its power to sustain itself, the people will become godless; Radical politicians manipulate statistics unscrupulously; women, silenced by the chapels, are overwhelmingly in favour of the Church in Wales, ‘the only progressive religious body in Wales’. He concludes by claiming to speak ‘in the name of all decent and right-thinking people in my country – Church people and Nonconformists alike’ (EW, p. 225). Needless to say victory is delivered to Jack by the plot, which concludes with a reconciliation between Evan and the wife who had left him rather than betray her Anglican principles by defecting to the Disendowment cause. Their reunion is made possible by the nervous breakdown to which Evan has been driven by his extremist views. And the ‘moderate’ viewpoint professed by Jack and advocated by Pryce through her novel finds its appropriate, symbolic, romance expression in the birth to Evan and Enid of a son who has the intelligence of his father but the looks of his mother’s family, and who seems destined to grow up, as Evan genially puts it, a ‘bigoted Tory and a pillar of the Church!’ (EW, p. 317). *** By far the best-known and most widely read of nineteenth-century Welsh authors was, of course, the best-selling Allen Raine, and, although she was not a member of any of the denominations, she exhibits in her fiction a notable ‘outsider’ understanding of ‘the Nonconformist nation’ and a considerable, if measured, respect for it. In his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin offers a memorable picture of a congregation gathered for worship at the African-American Baptist chapel in which he was raised: ‘On Sunday mornings the women all seemed patient, all the men seemed mighty.’21 The women of the Welsh chapels were also ‘patient,’ and largely silent, and it is the breaking of this silence that becomes an issue for Raine in her culturally important novel Queen of the Rushes.

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The text registers unease at the socially disruptive licence granted by the 1904–5 Revival to women not only to speak in public but to voice their most private passions and even to vent their resentments against men. Raine skilfully uses the discourse, rhetoric, conventions and narrative grammar of the popular romance genre to speak her own mind under the additional disguise of a male pseudonym.22 Culturally considered, hers is a fascinating case. She was descended both from the great eighteenth-century Methodist evangelist Daniel Rowland, Llangeitho and from a line of Unitarians.23 Raine herself was strongly inclined towards the rational humanism and social humanitarianism of the latter (which was, for her, consistent with moderate Anglicanism), and it is from this she derives the conscious ideology of her novel. Queen of the Rushes ostensibly advocates good sense, fair-mindedness, a morally balanced personality, individual responsibility, social conscience, selflessness and personal kindness. Her favoured characters – Gwenifar and Gildas – are either naturally equipped with this quiver of qualities or, courtesy of the plot, receive experiential lessons in their mature development. Raine’s is a conservative philosophy, preaching social harmony and emphasizing human potential rather than original sin. In a sympathetically measured letter to the press, published at the time of writing Queen of the Rushes, she stressed that attention should be paid to the root meaning of the Welsh word for Revival – Diwygiad, meaning Reform.24 But while sticking to its ideological blueprint – the plot dutifully punishes those who opt for the Revival’s emotionalism – the novel derives its real power from a fast-running undertow of attraction to the nexus of dangerous passions released by Evan Roberts. But Nance was quite oblivious to the crowd around her. Alone in a whirlpool of stormy passions, she was pouring out her soul in a fervid appeal for help. Oh for an anchor to hold on to in the sea of unrest on which she was tossing! Oh for a breath from Heaven to fill her sails, and waft her to rest and peace! And as her voice rose in excited tones, a chorus of ‘Amens’ and ‘Bendigedigs’ arose from the assembled throng around her, and Gildas grew hot and cold by turns with a shrinking sense of shame. (AR, pp. 148–9)

The rationalism of Unitarianism comes under pressure from longrepressed Methodist feelings, as if the writer’s culturally restricted personality were allying itself with her frustrated gender instincts and seeking that in herself which was most lacking.

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The result is a rich picture of the Revival and its starring figure Roberts, who is treated with respect. He may be a Nonconformist shaman, but for Raine there is about him nothing of the sham. While shrewdly recognizing how much of his Revival’s power derived from the glamour with which, largely thanks to media frenzy, it had been surrounded, and the excitement of expectation generated by the heady advance publicity, she is careful to exempt Robert himself from all blame. He is no showman, although, with the sharpness of eye of one who was after all herself an immensely successful popular performer, she notes how the unpredictability of his act – there was always uncertainty whether or not he would turn up, and, when he did, no guarantee he would be moved to preach – greatly helped heighten the tension of every occasion. She readily acknowledges that the Revival could change lives for the good, and for good. But she also registers the powerfully regressive appeal of its hymns for a rural people bewildered by contemporary circumstances. And central to her whole story is an account of the displacement of sexual passion into febrile religiosity. A particularly subtle scene is where the passionate anti-heroine, Nance, is overheard by her properly suspicious husband singing a favourite Revival hymn. It is set to the tune of an old drinking song – a reference not only to the Revival’s powerful alliance with the Temperance movement but to its success in reactivating and baptizing all kinds of native instincts. And in lustily singing of a soul lost in tempestuous waters, Nance is unconsciously voicing an adulterous passion for her sailor lover. It is a Freudian moment, avant la lettre. But though there are these tantalizing glimpses of sophisticated reflection in Queen of the Rushes, it remains evident that a religious revival appealed to Allen Raine in part because it readily enabled her to reduce the complex phenomenon of nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity to the simple, emotionally vivid, and melodramatic terms favoured by popular romance, and this was the genre to which as a writer she was unimaginatively, if lucratively, wedded. *** Raine’s fascination with the socially disruptive and psychologically destabilizing effects of a religious revival was shared by another ‘outsider’ attracted to the charged atmosphere that Nonconformist culture could periodically generate. In a story entitled ‘The only girl’ (1912), Bertha Thomas considers the case of ‘feeble-minded’ Catrin, who falls

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victim to ‘the emotional strain of [a] revivalistic concourse’.25 Catrin is, however, not merely ‘simple minded’; she is fey, proof of the narrator’s ‘firm belief – corroborated by the most recent prehistoric research – that the original Pixyland was Wales’ (p. 35). As will become apparent in chapter 6, many ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writers of the twentieth century likewise favoured the setting of Welsh Nonconformity against the background of an imaginary, ancient, pre-Christian Wales. Born in Worcestershire, but raised in London, where she continued to reside, Thomas nevertheless valued her close connections through her father with Llandeilo, and it is perhaps because she thus stands in a semidetached relationship to Nonconformist Wales that her narrative prefigures an interpretive strategy (of evoking an ‘aboriginal’, ‘pagan’ Wales) favoured by later twentieth-century Welsh writers in English who were seeking to detach themselves from their inherited religious culture. Catrin’s death takes on a different meaning when viewed in the context of an ancient Welsh ‘pagan’ culture. There may have been ‘no more regular attendant at the meetings of Shiloh Tabernacle than Catrin’, but ‘what religion meant to her, of what nature were the fervent sensations that agitated her while she listened, entranced, to pulpit oratory or joined in a hymn, is unknowable’ (PT, p. 46). She appears to be a representative, and eventually a victim, of the meeting between Nonconformity and the older world of folktale, legend and superstition it has displaced. Catrin is an inhabitant of that preChristian order. Suggestively labelled ‘Caliban’s daughter’ (PT, p. 39) at one point in the narrative, she may partly be understood as instancing the process of the ‘colonization’ and eventual destruction of an aboriginal way of life by a more powerful, ‘advanced’, invading society and culture. Her native language seems not ‘even Welsh’ (PT, p. 37) (the perception of Welsh as a somewhat primitive tongue being characteristic of the condescendingly sympathetic attitudes of the selfconsciously ‘educated’, ‘civilized’ – and of course Anglicized – narrator). Supernaturally hard worker on her family farm though she is, her natural habitat is the boggy, mist-haunted upland in which the narrator is trapped, and by which she and her companion are thoroughly unnerved, at the beginning of the story. And Catrin’s head is full of what her mother dismisses as ‘silly tales’: she chases rainbows, favours cows with a white stripe down the back, greets a wandering fox as a goodluck omen and a white swan as ‘an omen of ill’ (PT, p. 45). Believing her dead betrothed has been metamorphosed into a rabbit, she abhors

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the killing of any wild creature. Her death in the Revival thus becomes emblematic of the inevitable victory of a new world of religious and rational enlightenment over the old world of feeling and imagination, It is a victory about which Bertha Thomas, like so many Romantic and Victorian writers, obviously felt very ambivalently – an ambivalence shared, as we shall see, even by the French psychiatrists who observed and analysed the phenomenon of the Evan Roberts revival of 1904– 1905. Working in a well-established English romance and Romantic tradition, the London-based Thomas sees Wales as the site of an ancient, primitive culture whose sublimely rugged and wildly beautiful features are discernible in the magnificence of the natural landscape. (At the same time, as is evident in another story, ‘The way he went,’ she was certainly capable of registering the ‘modern’ character of chapel society.) The device adopted in ‘The only girl’ of opening a story with a scene in which a rational, educated, sophisticated central character is unnervingly stranded and accordingly disorientated in a threateningly desolate and treacherous landscape is repeated in ‘A latter-day prophet’. Jaques Robinson – Oxford-trained civil servant and veteran Alpine climber – is further alarmed when, lost in treacherous moorland with dusk falling, he sees a ‘dancing’ fen-fire (PT, p. 234). There he finds a taciturn hillman who silently begins to lead him to safety: this strange figure ‘might be a criminal flying from justice, or an escaped lunatic, or a tramp of easy morality’ (PT, p. 235), an impression confirmed for Robinson when the stranger begins to mention his flock of evidently non-existent sheep. Although Robinson understands some Welsh, the man seems, metaphorically speaking, to be using an indecipherable language. As for his face, glimpsed only in dancing lamplight, it was that ‘of a well-known local type, as distinct from the tall, fair, languid Celtic tribe, as from the swarthy, long-headed, vivacious Iberian’ (PT, p. 235). The man’s ‘sheepfold’ turns out to be Hermon, a ‘small building of recent-looking erection but pre-historic simplicity’ (PT, p. 238), situated ‘on the fringes of civilization’ (PT, p. 237), where mountain gorge meets fertile lowland. This chapel – a split from one of the mainstream chapels in the village – was originally a forge, and it turns out to have retained something of that capacity to house a primitive, fiery energy. The stranger’s name is Zebedee, and Robinson becomes utterly enthralled by his weird, vatic, portentous preaching of a biblical rhetoric:

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Be still, ye inhabitants of this isle, whom the merchants that pass over the seas have replenished. The harvest of the river is her revenue, and she is a mart of nations. Behold now your joyous city, whose might is of ancient days: the tumultuous city – full of stirs – whose merchants are princes and her traffickers the honourable ones of the earth. (PT, p. 242)

Despite reassurance from Zebedee’s sensible, rational, English cousin Rhoda that such words are no more than ordinary biblical texts directed at the preacher’s own flock and the local community, Robinson is so overwhelmed by the experience that he becomes convinced Zebedee’s prophecies relate to the international situation. He has been intoxicated by the hwyl of the sermon, an ‘intoning, a practice whose origin seems lost in antiquity’, which seemed ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ (PT, p. 244). So Zebedee is figured as one endowed with mysterious, supernatural, pre-Christian powers, the powers alive and abroad in the very landscape itself. The attitude of Thomas to all this is, again, ambivalent, the narrative being characterized by its ambiguous ironies. And the story concludes with the taming of a Zebedee shorn of his strange, savage, sublime Welsh strength by Rhoda, his English cousin, who marries him and turns him into a sensible, highly successful, grocer. ‘As a rebel that repenteth’, the narrative ironically observes, ‘he had risen in favour; his store prospered, he had introduced Danish butter . . .’ (PT, pp. 250–1). However, ‘Jaques Robinson decided not to look him up, preferring to remember the seer of Hermon as he had parted from him, a lonely poet-figure, dreaming dreams in his garden, a “populous solitude” of bees and flowers’ (PT, p. 251). *** While Bertha Thomas had only a passing interest in the religious culture of Wales, Allen Raine made repeated attempts to explore it and its socio-economic implications in her fiction. In Garthowen,26 the Owens family of the Cardiganshire farm from which her novel takes its name is locally renowned for its long-standing fidelity to the cause of Dissent. But with the kind of shrewd calculation of self-interest that supposedly typifies the Cardiganshire peasantry, the family has also always prudently arranged for one son in every generation to train for the Anglican priesthood: after all, only the Established Church can guarantee a sound income and work the social magic of converting a poor inferior being like a Welsh-speaking Welshman into a tolerably

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polished English gentleman. Raine herself is a sardonic observer of this transformation. Her sympathies are evenly divided between a kindhearted Calvinistic Methodist minister, who gradually abandons his vision of a vengeful God for a more tolerantly forgiving and inclusive faith consonant with his own nature, and a Welsh Anglican vicar who is equally kind-hearted and generous. For her, the true touchstone of human worth is how loving and tolerant a person is, and in so far as such qualities can be actively nurtured it is ‘Nature’, as distinct from either chapel or church, that alone has the power to cultivate them. Morva, the heroine of the novel, is a simple child of nature, a dweller in a simple, picturesque shack on the open coastal moor, and a ‘shepherdess’ who also looks after the cows and the sheep. Saved from a shipwreck as a baby, she has been raised by Sarah Lloyd, a ‘menyw hysbys’, or wise woman, whose deepest faith, chapel-goer though she is, is rooted in folklore, old songs and legends. She is another figure embodying Raine’s belief that what is best in the religion of the chapel (and indeed of the church) derives from the ‘natural religion’ of ancient, pre-Christian, Celtic times. In that period mankind was open to the wonders of the cosmos and thus fully in tune with its Creator. Sarah it is whose primal, elemental wisdom encourages the Calvinist minister, Gwilym Morris, to exchange his gloomy, rigid theology for a more benign view of the potentialities of human nature. And it is this view that the novel as a whole endorses through the providential unfolding of a romance plot that concludes with a flurry of changes of heart, restorations of broken relationship, untangling of dangerously crossed threads, and of course the obligatory happy ending with the betrothal of true lovers. Once again, therefore, Raine uses the benign romance genre as a convenient solvent of many kinds of tensions in the Welsh society of her time – the class and cultural tensions between Anglicized gentry and Welsh peasantry, the Welsh language and the English language, and of course church and chapel. Cultural (and authorial) tensions also lurk under the surface of A Welsh Singer. Far more meekly subservient to routine romance convention than Queen of the Rushes, the novel is appreciably more interesting than the latter from a post-colonial point of view.27 The key to the successful transformation of its heroine, Mifanwy, from innocent Welsh shepherdess to star first of circus then of the musical stage – a transformation accompanied by social advance to the giddy heights of aristocratic circles – is her brown-skinned resemblance to an Indian exotic. In an embarrassingly revealing aside, Raine devotes a whole page

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to reassuring the reader that there was no actual hint of the tar-brush about her pure heroine. ‘Have I Indian blood in me? When the lads are angry with me, they say that.’ ‘Indian blood, indeed! anwl fach! Indian blood! not a drop of such a dreadful thing in thee, mer fach i! Thy mother had black hair, sure enough, and eyes black as the darkness of night, but she was fair as a lily! and as for thee, child, when I first took thee, thou wast a show of whiteness; and that’s what puzzles me; babies are often red, or even yellow, skinned; but thou wast so white, and soft skinned as satin.’ (WS, p. 99).

The whole plot cries out for analysis in terms of the repellent pseudoscientific racial stereotyping favoured by the English during the nineteenth century, and the lowly positioning of the Welsh, alongside coloured colonials, on the ladder of supposed racial evolution. It likewise invites analysis in terms of the changes necessary for a Welsh person to ‘pass’ in English society, the performance of an alternative ethnic and social identity that could be required. And it is in this context that Nonconformity passingly surfaces. When Mifanwy plucks up the courage to leave her rural home for the Gomorrah of industrial Merthyr, her old adoptive mother, Shân, urges her to seek immediate shelter and safety there with ‘Price the preacher’(WS, p. 112). Instead, on arriving in the town Mifanwy is much taken with the spangles and glitter of Pomfroy’s circus, and is thus set on a course of radical reinvention in the character of ‘Princess of Randelar’, the first stage of her metamorphosis into a cosmopolitan London sensation. At the end of the novel, a Mifanwy now known as ‘La Belle Russe’ is courted in that guise by her old Welsh suitor, Ieuan, only to reject him because in declaring his love for her he is deserting his early love, Mifanwy. The moment is her futile attempt somehow to reconcile the sundered halves of her personality. Finally, she returns to Wales as Mifanwy and is happily reunited with Ieuan. Anticipating her homecoming, Shân and Billy the Shop excitedly look forward to the ‘songs and hymns’ that will ‘go up with the smoke through our big chimney’(WS, p. 317). In this novel, Nonconformity is therefore for Raine both potentially restrictive and the litmus paper of authenticity, a personal and cultural asset so precious as to be a key marker of Welsh identity. When Ieuan arrives home, Robin the servant assures him that

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Mr Morris, the vicar, is very angry because the Methodists build a chapel close to the churchyard, sir; and Jones, the preacher, is bawlin louder than ever, sir; but I think he do Mr Morris good, because he wass get very sleepy sometimes in his sermons, and now he’s obliged to shout a bit, sir, or else we will hear Jones, the preacher’s, voice quite plain in the church, sir. (WS, p. 355)

His comments sum up the Anglican Raine’s own point of view. Nonconformity does the whole of Wales good: it is so integral a part of Welsh life that the country cannot be imagined without it. For Shân, Mifanwy’s homecoming is only complete when she discovers her ‘daughter’ ‘remember[s] the old hymns so well’ (WS, p. 345). And Mifanwy’s final unproblematic reassumption of her original personality is signalled when she promises ‘to sing them all to you tomorrow, if you like’. This is no unhappy Hardyesque return of the native. Through Mifanwy, a Raine who had spent years living outside Wales and had become a huge commercial success in London, is wistfully asserting that you can go home again. And, even for an Anglican Unitarian, Wales wouldn’t be home without its Nonconformity. Her own wish to see her Anglicanism reconciled with Nonconformity in Wales finds expression in By Berwen Banks. The romance genre has survived the centuries not only because its familiar devices are popular carriers of a ‘good story’, or because they allow very soft porn treatment of love interests, but because they are symbolic solvents of social tensions. In the case of Raine’s novel, the appropriately long-delayed union of Cardo and Valmai is the union of church and chapel, as well as of a ‘gentleman’ and one of the gwerin. Raine carefully prepares the way by establishing a middle ground between the two religious cultures, facilitating eventual reconciliation by making both hero and heroine ‘outsiders’ of a sort – Cardo is descended from Fleming settlers, Valmai grew up in Welsh Patagonia. When Cardo, son of a vicar, yields to a temptation to visit a Methodist ‘Sasiwn’ (festival of preaching), it is not to the preacher he listens – despite being regaled in advance with tales of the prodigious verbal feats of the monarchs of the nineteenthcentury pulpit – but to the hymns. And these seem to him not sectarian dirges but ancient tribal songs to which he can therefore himself lay claim. As for Valmai, niece of the minister Essec Powell who preaches only ‘from the brist [breast]’ not from any church’s book, she drinks in the sermon while under the influence of ‘the harebells and heather’ on the slopes where she is sitting.28 Later, claustrophobically confined to a

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chapel in which a preacher is bawling hellfire, she refuses to believe his message: ‘Her joyous nature could not brook the saddening influences of the Methodist creed’ (BB, p. 43). And Calvinistic Nonconformity’s harsh punitive patriarchalism is rejected when she rushes for the clear night air, ‘as an innocent child rushes to its mother’s arms’ (BB, p. 48). Raine’s preference for the stable culture of the printed, as opposed to the volatile culture of the spoken, word, surfaces repeatedly in the fiction, but always in a context suggestive of her wish to see here, too, something of a fusion. Cardo pities his father’s ‘cold face bending over the musty books’ (BB, p. 17), and regrets the loss of his congregation to the powerfully vocal religious opposition. The exhibitionist aspects of preaching are well brought out, and are linked to a gluttonous love of praise – a fat clergyman threatens to regale Valmai with a repeat performance of his sermon, while stuffing his face with food. That these apparently impromptu performances owe not a little to very careful advance study is neatly established. Whereas Shanw thinks it an insult to be asked how much time Essec Powell spends on preparing his sermons, we learn he keeps Valmai ‘reading and reading to him all day till she is fair tired, poor thing’. But it is recognized, too, that even Anglican clergymen used secretly to insinuate themselves into services to enjoy the hwyl. Raine’s own novel may be thought of as genially anticipating the strategy of twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh novelists, to be explored in later chapters, of appropriating for fiction the verbal powers of the pulpit. But unlike theirs, hers is a conciliatory, synthesizing approach, as romance becomes insensibly infused with the partly borrowed eloquence of a fictionalized morality. *** It will by now be evident that Allen Raine was much preoccupied as a novelist with the challenge of how to mediate Welsh Nonconformist culture credibly, successfully and interestingly to an English readership. A similar concern is apparent in the fiction of the resplendently named W. Edwards Tirebuck, whose connections with the Cymru Fydd movement meant he was particularly keen to bring the virtues of ‘the Nonconformist nation’ to the attention of a wider audience beyond its borders. Not the least interesting feature of his whimsical collection of stories Jenny Jones and Jenny (1896) is its back cover. It advertises James Harris’s English translation (1888) of Daniel Owen’s great novel Rhys Lewis (1885 ), an autobiographical account of the life of a Calvinistic

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Methodist minister and a classical fictional analysis of the state of Welsh Nonconformity during the second half of the nineteenth century. The cover is graced by an august tribute to Owen’s novel by the Prime Minister, W. E. Gladstone, Owen’s neighbour as squire of Hawarden and the darling of Welsh Liberalism. Alongside it appear complimentary extracts from reviews in various English newspapers, many of them based in the great northern industrial hotbeds of English Nonconformist Radicalism such as Liverpool, Sheffield and Manchester. As they praise the novel’s ‘quaint humour’, ‘sturdy religion’ and ‘pathos’ these reviewers betray the difficulties of translating the phenomenon of Welsh Nonconformity into terms intelligible to an English Nonconformist community entirely different in its social register, class awareness and religious temper. Similar problems and resulting distortions are apparent at one point in Tirebuck’s skilfully written story collection – its subtitle, Tales from the Welsh Hills, suggestive of Tales from the Raj, like the titles of many another late-nineteenth-century novel in English from and about Wales. The title story is a ‘quaint’, winsome tale about the old, pious peasant Jenny Jones. The place of her late husband in her life has been filled by another Jenny, the ‘wilful yet willing donkey’ that the old woman treats as a member of her family.29 On the wall of her ‘cosy little kitchen’ hangs ‘a portrait of John Bunyan: so big that it made all the other neighbouring portraits of favourite Welsh preachers – one with a face like Christian, another with a beard like the Giant, another with hair like an angel – appear as if they were the ministering miniatures of the characters of Bunyan’s famous dream’ (JJ, p. 3). A regular chapel-goer, Jenny also always has ‘her own brown Testament at hand’ in her cluttered kitchen where she ‘[breaks] bread and [gives] thanks as at the Sacrament’ (JJ, p. 8). It is still ‘with her finger in the brown Welsh Testament’ (JJ, p. 10) that Jenny is one day found dead by the neighbours. And so used is the donkey to being spared all duties on the Lord’s day that, when the undertaker’s men eventually turn up in their black coats on the day of Jenny’s funeral, the animal, ‘seeing and smelling the men in black, assumed a passive obstinacy in keeping with the Sabbath’ (JJ, p. 10). The story draws on the stereotypical outward signs of Welsh Nonconformist character in order to construct a cosy, humorous pastoral myth of a pious, ‘sturdy’, characterful peasantry. Tirebuck’s narrative is thus an instance of a deeply conservative, even reactionary, genre of late nineteenth-century writing, the product of an age of religious crisis

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that is full of a yearning for a lost Welsh Nonconformist idyll of simple, untroubled faith. By contrast, The Conflict of Owen Prytherch (1905), a novel by Walter Gallichan (‘Geoffrey Mortimer’), is, as the title suggests, a psychological study of a progressive minister driven out of a rural village, and out of the ministry itself, by the bigotry of his conservative congregation. Having started out with some sympathy for their ‘literalism’, he ends up the victim of their reactionary rigidity, wholly unable to persuade them to accept ‘the new spirit of latitudinarianism’, as his unorthodox, broad-minded friend Mrs Lathom puts it.30 His crisis is augmented by an unhappy marriage to a shallow, selfish and wilful wife. The novel’s sympathy is with Owen, who, enlightened by the Higher Biblical Criticism and other intellectual movements of the turn of the century, refuses to accede to his chapel members’ request that he respect orthodox Calvinist teaching regarding eternal damnation. The work was published in the very year (1905) which saw the great Evan Roberts revival reach its zenith – a significant fact given the scene in which Owen, happening to attend a meeting led by an unnamed revivalist, is left emotionally unmoved and spiritually untouched by what he regards as the vulgar theatricality of the occasion. Gallichan also draws on nineteenth-century racial theory and its stereotype of ‘Celtic’ character. Owen is thus represented as one whose Nonconformist Puritanism has resulted in an unwise repression of his ‘natural’ passions, particularly strong in an emotional Celt. Consequently, when in the grip of his crisis, ‘his sorrow was no longer of the character of that placid melancholy so common among the Celtic people; it was now an angry and indignant grief, a rage and conflict of revolt, and not the sadness of a gentle spirit’ (COP, p. 277). In its conservative, prudish, fashion, the novel anticipates the kind of reading of the Nonconformist character that was to typify its representation by subsequent generations of Welsh writers. ‘It is the ascetic who yearns for the orgy,’ the narrative sententiously notes, ‘he knows neither satisfaction nor satiety. At this climax in his unhappiness Owen looked back upon his austere life as a repentant gambler reviews a misspent past’ (COP, p. 277). *** Walter Gallichan’s novel deals critically with the way late nineteenthcentury Welsh Nonconformity was reluctant to respond to the challenge to liberalize itself in the light of new theological, social, political and

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intellectual developments. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Social Gospel being preached by R. J. Campbell and others had begun to attract the chapel-going working class and to make serious inroads into Welsh Nonconformity. One of the champions of this new humanist religion in English-language fiction was the Pencader pharmacist D. Derwenydd Morgan, for whom it connected with his own avid proselytizing work on behalf of the Temperance Movement. His American-style Temperance novel The Tavern across the Street (1915) includes a pub brawl between a drunken parson and a tipsy deacon. They are parted by an onlooker ‘well read in advanced thoughts’ who informs them that ‘Religion, true religion . . . is the life of God in the soul of man. Religion is the development of the soul’s life, or a man’s higher and nobler self. Creeds, dogmas and systems of Christianity are not religion.’31 Morgan’s work clearly shows how the language, style, conventions and forms of Nonconformist worship could be co-opted by a ‘progressive’ semi-secular, non-sectarian, movement intent on a practical ‘scheme for redeeming the people’ (TAS, p. 51), as Alwyn Pryse puts it, having turned his back on the chapels in order to minister to alcoholics. In the preface to his novel If Christ Came to Wales (1927) Morgan identifies himself as a Christian Socialist, and has his minister hero Glanmor Jones dedicate himself to the work of slum clearance and reform of the living conditions of the poor. Jones is the kind of ‘Revivalist’ Christ would be were he to come to Wales.32 Having first reconciled religion and science, he eventually succeeds in forging an alliance between all the warring ideologies and vested interests of his day, uniting the nationalist, the pacifist, the temperance orator, the trade union leader, the doctor, the educationalist, the politician and the minister (ICCW, p. 84). After his death, Glanmor’s legacy is carried on by his devoted widow Ethel, symbolic of a Christian Socialist vision that embraces women (albeit only in a strictly secondary and supportive role) as nineteenth- century Welsh Nonconformity had not. Morgan’s espousal of a social religion was paralleled by others who distanced themselves from what they regarded as a conservative, if not reactionary, Liberal Nonconformist establishment. In 1913 the Unitarian Cadvan Rh}s launched his vitriolic attack against the chapels in Daniel Evelyn, Heretic. Rh}s scoffs at the Nonconformist myth of the pious folk, the habit of ‘this corner of Great Britain’ of the natives ‘talking so hyperbolically of their country as the “land of the great privileges,” whose mission it is to convert and enlighten and civilise the whole world’.33 Rather, he announces, it is ‘the veriest hotbed of

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theological fanaticism and sectarian bigotry, the home of superstition and creedal strife, the training-ground of priestly pretension – the land of ecclesiastical tyranny, of denominational jealousy, and of religious persecution’ (DE, p. 4). The plot and characterization of his novel are designed entirely to bear out this claim and also to advance Rh}s’s own alternative Unitarian vision of a ‘liberal Christianity and rational religion’ (DE, p. 182), benevolent, humanist and universalist in spirit. Two of the author’s main heroes are Iolo Morganwg – the true author, it is claimed, of many of the greatest hymns of that plagiarizing Calvinist, William Williams Pantycelyn – and Gwilym Marles, Dylan Thomas’s nineteenth-century great uncle who actually figures extensively in the novel’s action. He first puts in an unscheduled appearance at Calvaria, a Calvinistic Methodist chapel in what is represented as a north Wales benighted because there is no region of enlightened Unitarianism there corresponding to that region of Cardiganshire dubbed by Nonconformists the ‘Black Spot’ on the otherwise fair face of Wales. The first exponent of this progressive, ‘evolutionary’ religion is the freethinking Old Salt, Captain Rees, who has been ‘among Savages and Hottentots, Mohammedans and Buddhists, Zoroastrians and Confucians, Brahmans and Hindoos’ (DE, p. 48) and quickly comes to realize Christians are in no way superior to these. Scornful of all talk of total human depravity, Atonement, election, predestination, sanctification, justification and all the other shibboleths of Calvinistic Christianity, he tends towards views eventually revealed in the novel to be those of a Unitarian Church willing to recognize the divinity of Christ (and hence of every person) but unwilling to acknowledge His deity. Captain Rees steers well clear of the chapels, where the grim doctrines of John Calvin in all their hideousness are proclaimed to simple and ignorant people with great unction in both chapel and church from Sunday to Sunday; and where the petty conceits of Martin Luther with all their anthropomorphic absurdities are enforced upon credulous minds with a gusto that is astounding and an enthusiasm worthy of a better cause. (DE, p. 142)

High Calvinism is represented in Evans’s novel through the caricature of the young minister of Calvaria, the Revd John Assyn [Ass] Llwyd, whose wrathful fulminations against all sinners turn out to be the sermons of a drunkard, an extortionist and a frequenter of prostitutes.

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Young Daniel Evelyn, the ‘heretic’ of the title, progresses from being a mischievous, irrepressibly curious little boy to being a persecuted Unitarian minister, forced to sacrifice everything, including his true love, for the sake of his religious and humanist principles. Throughout his adult life Daniel remains committed to ‘such unconventional themes as those of the Universal Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, the Leadership of Jesus, Salvation by Character, and the Progress of Humanity Onward and Upward for ever’ (DE, p. 183). Given that Rh}s’s novel appeared eight years after Evan Roberts’s great Revival of 1904–5, it is not surprising that he should be particularly anxious to distance himself from what he regarded as a highly dangerous species of religious hysteria. Accordingly, his fiction includes a scene where a debating society is addressed by an eminent local doctor on the subject of ‘Medical Aspects of Religious Revivals’ (DE, p. 346). In this address, the phenomenon of religious revival is dissected in the spirit of the new science of mind of the day and characterized as an epidemic of ‘more or less convulsive character’ (DE, p. 346). Licensing unbridled passion as every Revival does, it leads to predictable consequences: [The dominant emotion] in many instances, and especially in congregations of young people brought together to be excited by preaching, is very frequently an emotion of sex; and the records of many past revivals in this country are deeply stained by the profligacy which has been the immediate consequence of the hysteria. (DE, p. 348)

This line of argument parallels that advanced, as we shall see in the next chapter, by psychologists who attended Revival meetings during 1904–5, and anticipates the kind of deconstructive approach to Nonconformist religion that would be adopted by many ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writers of the first half of the twentieth century. *** That the lifespan of the ‘Nonconformist nation’ – a span exceeding that of the nineteenth century in both directions – was comprehensively measured by an interesting range of contemporary English-language texts has been extensively demonstrated in this chapter. But hitherto the concentration has been on works by writers who viewed the remarkable culture of the chapels from the outside. By contrast, the next

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chapter will show how during the nineteenth century the Welsh Nonconformist community itself produced a significant number of novels and poems in English that provided the nation with the means of understanding, exploring and communicating some of the key social, cultural and political implications of its definitive socio-religious ideology. This remarkable body of texts has hitherto been wholly ignored by students of Welsh culture. To attend to them is therefore to discover a new and important record of the life of the nineteenth-century nation for whom, to recall the comment from Cymru Fydd with which this chapter opened, ‘religion [was] the breath of life.’

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3 Bringing Nonconformity to Book

Adults of Tabernacle chapel, Aberdyfi

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As the nineteenth century proceeded, Nonconformity firmly established itself as the default religious culture of the Welsh, and a remarkable body of English-language work appeared from within this culture during the century’s concluding decades that explored the complex, multifaceted implications of this phenomenon. So extensive is this output, including poetry and drama as well as fiction, that it could be argued it represents – along with those texts by ‘outsiders’ considered in the last chapter – the first sustained attempt to produce a Welsh ‘national literature’ in English. Its identification with Nonconformity was, at that time, the definitive feature of the culture of Wales: it was the socio-religious characteristic most clearly demarcating it from its mighty imperial neighbour. The emergence of this corpus of texts (some of which have been considered in the preceding chapter) may therefore usefully be regarded as the foundational moment of a significant, distinctively Welsh, body of creative writing in English with a common national focus. And the writers of this generation may, perhaps, be considered as constituting what Raymond Williams would call the first Anglo-Welsh ‘formation’ – writers of unconsciously shared concerns and sociolect who, unawares, constituted a socio-cultural ‘movement’ clearly visible to us in retrospect. One of the recurrent concerns of this fiction is to set contemporary triumphant Welsh Nonconformity in its appropriate historical setting, and one novel of interest in this connection is Where Eden’s Tongue Is Spoken Still, by H. Elwyn Thomas, a collection of interrelated stories about life in a small Welsh rural village. Its name – ‘Llan’, meaning church

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or parish – deliberately belies the village’s Nonconformist character, because life there revolves around Ebenezer Chapel. The opening story creates a kind of originating myth of the iconic figure of the Welsh Nonconformist minister. Teddy develops into a fluent speaker with a compassionate imagination thanks to having had to bring the visible world vividly alive for his blind mother when he was a little boy. This makes him sensitive to the suffering human condition, adding depth and sincerity to his sermons. At the story’s end his boyish work in allowing his mother vicariously to enter the ‘normal’ human world of the sighted through his description of it finds its mature adult counterpart in the sermon he preaches. By now painting a picture not of this world but of the next as a heaven where every human being will be supplied with that of which she has been deprived on earth, he enables his mother to pass over. But it is not only Ebenezer Chapel that provides the hub of these stories. They also revolve around an axis of hostility between chapel and church. A repeated theme is love thwarted by a rich, socially influential churchman’s hostility to the marriage of his daughter to a chapel lad of no social position and little means. Such hostility is reinforced by a perception of the chapel folk as dangerous political radicals: a squire angrily refuses ‘to give his daughter to a man who had no higher aspirations than to minister to the Radical and Nonconformist colliers and ironworkers of South Wales’.1 But the Nonconformists are themselves far from immune to the promise of power and authority represented by the state Church. As Thomas puts it in one story: ‘Then began one of those struggles too often witnessed in Welsh Nonconformist families, whose fidelity to conviction is strong or weak according to the degree of their external prosperity’ (WETS, p. 86). The acquisition of wealth leads to a conversion to the Anglican faith. However, those who remain faithful to their chapels are always liable to find that God does, in the end, look after His own. The story ‘Gwyneth and Illtyd’ ends with a happy marriage between a chapel man and a young woman whose parents have renounced their Nonconformist faith, a marriage made possible by the fortune the young man has shrewdly made by investing in the profitable sinking of a pit in the previously rural area of Llan. The story is a kind of fable concealed within the conventions of a realistic narrative; a coded expression of late nineteenth-century Nonconformity’s deep, secret wish for normalization; its yearning for acceptance, respectability and social power. This is seen in the ending, where the new wealth and

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consequent power of Illtyd are shown to result in a transformation of his old, humble, marginalized chapel: It is no longer the Ebenezer whose out-of-the-way position, yellow walls, and gray slated roof apologized to the respectable folk of the Llan for its existence; but a solid and substantial Gothic structure whose very appearance is an argument for Christianity, and a double one for Nonconformity. (WETS, p. 95)

Thus are the humble eventually exalted. The overall theme of a collection alternating between sentiment and melodrama is the ongoing struggle of Nonconformity for full social recognition. ‘Y ffeirad’, the parson, is the villain of the piece. But the book ends on a magnanimous, conciliatory note. The ‘ffeirad’ turns out not to be such a thoroughly bad character at all. Some of the allegations levelled at him prove to be completely unfounded. Several of his more unworthy acts were no more than a cover for a melodramatically sad state of affairs. His son had become mentally disturbed and in need of treatment, and the parson had been attempting to conceal his own suffering from his congregation. The truth is discovered not by a churchman or by a chapel-goer but by the village ‘pagan’, who is described as the most tolerant and humane man in the community. Thus, Thomas offsets the Nonconformist bias of the stories as a whole with this concluding tale which shows the faithful in a somewhat less than favourable light and which implicitly pleads for more understanding between the warring camps of church and chapel. *** True to the cosy view of Ebenezer adopted in Where Eden’s Tongue Is Spoken Still, its minister is ‘white haired’ and preaches ‘helpful sermons from Sabbath to Sabbath’ to an enthralled and worshipful congregation. But it was noted in the first chapter of this study that one of the many stimulants of religious Revival at the end of the nineteenth century was popular dissatisfaction with the learned, cerebral preaching of a new, college-educated generation of Nonconformist ministers. The emergence of this generation, in the person of Rowland (‘Rowl’) Cadwallader, is the subject of Gwen Penri: A Welsh Idyll by John Bufton (1899). The novel is set in the town of Mold, home until his death of Daniel Owen, whose series of novels remain classic accounts

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of the internal complexities and rapidly changing character of late nineteenth-century Nonconformist culture in Wales – a suggestive coincidence from the perspective of today’s reader. The coy title of Bufton’s novel, blazoned on a cover correspondingly adorned with the golden emblem of a Welsh harp, leads one to expect the worst, and expectation is amply rewarded. Intent in part on introducing a Wales that congratulated itself on its piety to an English readership uninterested in its existence, Bufton writes in a tone in which complacent pride is embarrassingly blended with arch learnedness and condescension towards the sterling qualities of the ordinary, imperfectly educated chapel members and deacons. He tops this unsavoury textual confection with a generous serving of sentiment. As a work of fiction, Gwen Penri is past redeeming, but it offers a valuable glimpse of several of the most important movements in culture, education and theology that were transforming Wales as the nineteenth century drew to its close. The surname of the titular heroine is intended to refer us back to her famous radical ancestor John Penri/Penry, the great martyr of early Welsh Dissent. Gwen herself also becomes a figure precariously riding the crest of the advancing wave of her time. The momentous advance in Welsh cultural self-understanding effected by the scholarly recovery of the great masterpieces of the bardic tradition from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries along with the related translation of The Mabinogion is reflected in her youthful enthusiasm for these materials. In a prize-winning Eisteddfod essay ‘reproduced’ in full tedious length by Bufton, she argues that Sir Lewis Morris, the dire poet who had become the darling of Victorian England, is a worthy successor of the great medieval masters. The institutionalization of Welsh national self-awareness through the establishing of such bodies as the new fledgeling colleges of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and Bangor is what enables Gwen to gain her degree (and finally a doctorate) – an example, of course, of the gradual provision of women, at century’s close, with opportunities, qualifications and positions previously available exclusively to men. And Gwen’s degree in science (albeit in the soft, ‘feminine’ science of botany) makes of her eventual marriage to the young Nonconformist minister Rowl (the idyll of the story) a kind of benignly optimistic allegory of the reconciliation of science and religion following the terrible nineteenth-century rupture between the two occasioned by Darwin and his crusading followers. While working on her doctoral thesis, Gwen shares a study with Rowl:

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Gwen was preparing a thesis on the ‘Fossil Plants of Wales’; and it was very trying when seeking to discriminate between Pecopteris and Taenioptoris or Sigillaria and Lepidodendron to hear Rowl, oblivious of his surroundings, apostrophizing heterodoxy thus: ‘Yes, however far the Church may drift, she must always return to adjust her compass at the Cross. She takes her moral bearings there!’2

Gwen hesitatingly suggests it might be better for her to have a little study of her own. But Rowl insists, ‘I like you near me.’ In this brave new world, science (like women) is still expected to know its place. As for Rowl, his tiresome love of poetry (a love unfortunately shared and amplified by Gwen) not only allows Bufton to indulge in interminable quotation from the English and classical canon and even to inflict his own personal stale Romantic effusions upon the reader; it also encourages him to rehearse the myth (by then already shop-soiled and hoary) of Welsh poetic descent from those ancient poet-priests, the Druids. Bufton was aware of how potent this myth continued to be among the Nonconformist ministerial elite, who annually dominated proceedings at the National Eisteddfod. But fond though he may have been of such sentimental cultural stereotypes, he also clearly prided himself on being a theological progressive. One of the key scenes in the novel is the one in which Rowl, training for the ministry, seeks admission to a course at the theological college newly established by the Calvinistic Methodists at Bangor. At the interview, he comes close to rejection because he voices his reservations about orthodox strict Calvinist teaching on the subject of predestination. Basing his objection first on the grounds of the kind of reading of Calvin’s original texts only recently made possible by advances in theological education, he insults his reverend interrogators by concluding that, so far as I understand the profound views of Calvin, I respect them – as a logical system; but I fear I am wanting in respect for the views commonly called Calvinistic, which seem to me to approach those of Calvin in somewhat the same manner as eccentricity approaches genius. (GP, p. 101)

His second grounds of objection are the advances that have been made in modern understanding of the many different and interacting social, genetic and environmental influences on human conduct. These may amount to ‘predestination’ of a materialist and deterministic kind not envisaged by Calvin, and ‘yet in the narrowest compass of an atom there

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is ultimate freedom, there is choice, and there is – guilt!’ (GP, p. 102). ‘Rowl’ thus neatly demonstrates how the determinism of Calvinism rhymes with the determinism of its sworn enemy, Social Darwinism. In short, Bufton has created in Rowland Cadwallader a portrait of the young emerging minister as New, Modern Man; as the enlightened, progressive preacher of the Welsh Nonconformist future. Indeed, Bufton’s novel as a whole advocates the modernized religious vision exemplified by Cadwallader. The fiction is consciously an ally of progressive Welsh Nonconformity, an attempt to show how in its new, reformed, guise it incorporates the wisdom of Romantic culture (the poetry favoured throughout the novel, and produced by Bufton himself, is full of mystical nature religion), the insights of the new physical, human and social sciences, the learning of the new education system, and the enlightenment of the new theology (including such works as Renan’s Vie de Jésus). Background to Bufton’s attempt is, of course, the growing secular tide of religious scepticism against which late nineteenthcentury Welsh Nonconformity was having increasingly to struggle. One of the most impassioned sections of the novel is the one in which the temptation to relax comfortably into agnosticism is contrasted with the strenuous work of continuing to believe. When Rowland Cadwallader first gives public sign of his vocation by hesitantly preaching to the critical members of the chapel in which he has been raised, he begins by asserting that the Bible possesses a power to convince even agnostics like the notorious Darwinist (and Social Darwinist) Thomas Huxley of its wisdom: ‘Syllables govern the world,’ begins the preacher in deliberate tones, especially the syllables that are instinct with the thought of the Redeemer. And if ‘words are half battles’, these words are conquering words. ‘Never man spake like this man.’ To this bear all the prophets witness, religious and irreligious. (GP, p. 39)

It is a passage to bear very much in mind when reading the next chapter, which will be concerned with the challenge mounted by twentiethcentury writers to the sovereignty of the biblical word as uttered by prophets and preachers. Far from wanting to mount such a challenge, Bufton by contrast conceives of Gwen Penri as a fictive act of ‘bearing witness’ to the authority of religious, and specifically Nonconformist, language. ‘In a Welsh religious circle the minister is the man most reverenced, but often there are others who make a very good second

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in general regard. There is sometimes a distinguished bard who has brought renown to his Church by Eisteddfodic success.’ (GP, p. 27) Bufton does not wish, let alone seek, to change such an arrangement. His aim is not to replace that discourse with his own but rather to fashion a persuasive, fictional text out of the syllables that govern his world – out of the hegemonic language of late nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity. *** As has been noted, underlying Bufton’s ‘idyll’ there is the anxiety of a profound shift in Welsh culture away from Nonconformist belief, a recurrent concern of the religious fiction of this period. One way of handling this anxiety was to imagine a previous, golden age of chapel worship, untroubled by the anxieties besetting the faithful by the end of the nineteenth century. This scenario appears, for example, in Eleazar Roberts’s Owen Rees: A Story of Welsh Life and Thought (circa 1893), a novel that also, like Bufton’s, brings Daniel Owen’s fiction to mind. In Roberts’s case that is partly because he offers a meticulously full portrait of the Welsh Nonconformist culture of Liverpool during the middle decades of the nineteenth century (the same period covered by Owen who was writing his own novels in nearby Mold roughly at the same time), and partly because Roberts’s work is the only Englishlanguage fiction to bring to Welsh Calvinistic Methodism an insider knowledge of nineteenth-century Calvinism’s theological niceties and social ramifications every bit as authoritative as Owen’s. In the process, it brings out how resistant the Welsh Methodists still were to being lumped together with the theologically suspect ‘Dissenters’ (Independents/ Congregationalists, Baptists, etc.) under the single banner of ‘Nonconformity’. Much more a semi-fictionalized personal memoir than a novel, Roberts’s text is more a definitive handbook of Welsh ‘Presbyterianism’ than either. No other Welsh fiction in English better introduces the reader to the ‘five key points of Calvinism’, its preoccupation with resolving the paradox of predestination coincident with free will, and its distinction between general and particular grace, or to Welsh Presbyterianism’s definitive institutions and practices, such as the ‘Association’, the ‘seiat’, the Sunday School, the Calvinistic catechism and the complex, unyielding terms of full Church membership. Nor is there any better work for understanding the totalitarian theological and social character of Welsh Methodism, how it produced

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a theocratic culture and resulted in lives lived with rigid reference to its fearsome tenets and codes. Similarly, Owen Rees creates a powerful sense of the experiential aspects of Calvinistic Methodism, how it penetrated to the psychological, emotional and intellectual core of a person’s existence, moulding character in formidable ways that could be at once morally and spiritually impressive and (from the modern point of view) appallingly cramping. As the Preface makes clear, one of Roberts’s motives in writing the novel was to introduce his sceptical monoglot English friends, inclined to take a condescending view of ‘Taffy’s’ efforts, to the impressive culture of Welsh-language Nonconformity. Echoes of the Blue Books Report, and its devastating impact on the psyche of Welsh Nonconformity, are therefore to be heard, however distantly, in what is a sophisticated text – and self-consciously so, because from the beginning the novelist is very anxious to parade his intellectual, literary and cultural credentials in an attempt to prove to an Englishman that he, Roberts, is as fine and modern a metropolitan character as any. His Preface makes clear his intentions to blazon Wales’s qualities before the wider world: A thorough awakening has of recent years taken place amongst Welsh people, and they are now animated, not only by an earnest desire for education, and a fuller acquaintance with the English language as a means of education, but also an equally strong desire to cultivate their own language, both as a means and as an end. This awakening – or to use the word which has now come into general use – this deffroad has now aroused in them a strong sense of their distinct nationality. They consider that, owing to that nationality, they have claims to consideration which are peculiar to themselves; and they seem fully resolved to assert and maintain those claims by all legitimate means. They believe that Wales has a bright future before it; hence the charm that attaches to the words, ‘Cymru Fydd,’ i.e. that Wales that is to be.3

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the way it deals with the conflict of generations, and the related theological disputes, galvanizing Welsh Calvinistic Methodism at this time. And it shows how the factors generating this conflict were not only intellectual (the liberalizing tendency among the younger generation was trying to respond to the challenges of secular science and social science) but also social (success was producing, for the first time, a relatively affluent middle class of Welsh Methodists not only in Wales but in cities like Liverpool, with a resulting conflict between business and religious

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interests). It is in this context that Roberts has some of his older characters look back with nostalgia to the simpler spiritual age of giants such as John Elias and Henry Rees. As he writes in his Preface, [The author] believes that the great religious revival at the end of the last century [i.e. the last decade of the eighteenth century], and the intellectual, moral, and religious training of the people consequent upon that revival, have been the chief factors in developing the character of the Welsh people of the present day. (OR, p. vi)

His text is evidently intended in part to honour Cymru Fu (the Wales that was) by way of counterbalancing the contemporary attractions of the Cymru Fydd (future Wales) movement, a movement that was mobilizing Welsh Nonconformity to secure national social progress by political means. As has been noted, part of Roberts’s conscious purpose was to bring the virtues of Welsh Nonconformity to the attention of an ignorant, or sceptical, English readership. That English-language fiction could be useful for creating an export version of Welsh Nonconformity also dawned on Welsh expatriates much further afield than Liverpool. In 1886 the notable and productive Welsh press in Utica, New York, published Llangobaith: A Story of North Wales by the minister Erasmus W. Jones. This aimed to introduce US readers to a ‘democratic’ culture depicted as being at once homely (even folksy) and devout. The author is not bashful in his claims: ‘Ever since the great revivals under George Whitefield, Daniel Rowland, Howel Harris and others, there has been more preaching in Wales, in proportion to its population, than any other country on the globe.’4 The novel provides dramatic examples of epic sermonizing, and praises the vivid imagination of legendary pulpit performers: Williams o’r Wern is recalled as comparing the first preaching of the Gospel by Peter in Jerusalem to the testing of a cannon destined, in due course, for the decks of a great warship. Colourful anecdotes about the endearing eccentricities of the great preachers are supplied, and Jones is anxious to identify for his American readers the singular characteristics of hwyl: ‘It is the application of sentences, in a chanting style, to portions of the minor scale’ (LL, p. 80). One incidental theme aimed, perhaps, at reinforcing later nineteenthcentury American perception that the Welsh were a breed vastly superior to their Celtic cousins, the wild bog-Irish, is the way the chapels

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had educated the people out of ancient primitive habits, such as holding the Welsh version of an Irish funeral wake (LL, p. 84). ‘It is disgusting to me’, says chapel-prim Mrs Parry, ‘to see the coffin adorned with a huge plate of tobacco and a dozen pipes’ (LL, p. 85). There is also rejoicing at the victory of the ‘plain utterance’ of the Welsh pulpit over the scurrilous ‘Interludes’ of Twm o’r Nant (LL, p. 85). As for the main plot, it concerns the brave persistence of the pure-hearted Gwennie Lloyd in her ‘Methodist nonsense’ (LL, p. 139) of defying her Anglican father and marrying a young man training at Bala to enter the Methodist ministry. This, of course, she succeeds in doing, despite all the melodramatic plotting and murderous subterfuges of John Spike, a rival for her hand who does not enjoy the advantage of being a Methodist. What American readers made of Llangobaith (whose literal meaning is ‘church of hope’) is not on record, but predictably the novel met with the warm, complacent approval of Jones’s fellow ministers in the States. The work was, wrote one, ‘especially interesting on account of the insight it gives of the moral and religious phases of social life in our dear native land’. (LL, p. 362). Echoing such praise for its ‘pure tone’, another commended ‘the many incidents showing the religious warmth and tendencies of the Welsh people’. There is more than a hint, in Llangobaith’s self-indulgent recollections of the early phase of Welsh Nonconformity, of a late nineteenthcentury yearning for a period when faith seemed more pure and secure. Among the Mountains, or Life in Wales, by Ceredig [Owen Parry] offers a more confident, not to say complacent, view of its virtues taken by Welsh Nonconformity. The work is undated but since Ceredig is grandiosely puffed as ‘Competitionary at the Carmarthen National Eisteddfod’ it must have been published after 1867. The self-conceit of that self-advertisement is fitting prologue to a naively constructed and piously sententious narrative. In short, it is a remorselessly, insufferably ‘improving’ text. Its hero is young Arthur Williams. Consistent with the Nonconformist myth of the earnestly self-improving gwerin, he is ‘a quiet inoffensive lad, the son of a labourer who had striven hard, and had endured much privation in order to educate his children’.5 Not so his schoolmate, the mercurial, quarrelsome and thoroughly dishonest Bill Jones, who has the misfortune to be the son of a respectable tradesman of high standing in his society’s social hierarchy. Inoffensive Arthur falls victim to Bill’s deceitful ways when he is accused of responsibility for a theft committed by the latter. However, the plot is anxiously quick to right this wrong, setting Arthur on a career of

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immaculate moral and social progress. He plunges into a frozen lake to save a rich young lady from drowning and eventually, through a variety of drearily predictable episodes, makes his way to Liverpool. Not, however, before his pious mother dies an appropriately heartrending death, charging her children: ‘Let not the counsels of your mother and the prayers of your father be in vain . . . work them out in your lives, and may the God in whom I trust lead you and keep you from all sin. I am going to Christ, my Saviour and my Redeemer’ (AW, p. 41). Such a brazen pitch for sympathy is surely guaranteed to harden the softest heart. In Liverpool enterprising Arthur becomes apprenticed to a wealthy draper who becomes so smitten with the penniless youngster’s evident piety and probity that he ends up making him partner in his business. As the lawyer explains, He has determined to make you a partner in consequence of your noble conduct and intelligence. I am glad to understand that since you have been placed in the position you now hold, the business has more than double increased, and henceforth the firm will be known, not as Jones and Co., but as Jones and Williams. (AW, p. 105)

In this novel, virtue does not need to be its own reward, a heartening moral for all its original readers and a great incentive to them to improve their own ways. As for Bill, foredoomed of course to act as foil to this paragon, he quickly goes to the bad, after falling in with a group of rascally poachers. The climax of the novel is the scene where, perilously saved from the clutch of drink by his devoted chapel-going wife (cue for several barnstorming melodramatic scenes), Bill attends service and is touched to the quick of his conscience by the preaching of ‘a young man of noble mien, tall and slender, with a voice like a silver trumpet’ (AW, p. 107). Predictably enough, in such a clunking narrative, the Voice of the Spirit turns out to be none other than the ubiquitous Arthur. A(lfred) P. Thomas’s In The Land of the Harp and the Feathers, published in London in 1896, also advertises the abundant virtues of Welsh Nonconformist society. What English readers made of this extraordinary fabrication must be a puzzle to the modern mind. It is a collection of interlinked stories (some little more than anecdotes) about the relentlessly saintly Welsh rural village of Wengroes around the middle of the nineteenth century. A social hagiography, unremittingly

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absurd in its presentation of a gallery of impeccably kind Calvinists, all of whom are members of the single village chapel, it features a fairly full repertoire of cultural stereotypes. The characters are ‘devout, old-world Welsh people’, ‘dear old-fashioned people’ whose Calvinistic doctrines, ‘tossed aside at the present day as effete’, have ‘produced real Christians by the hundreds, where the religiosity of a later day finds it difficult to produce tens’.6 The schoolmaster who is narrating the story contrasts these spiritual prodigies of yore with the gutless ‘Sundaygo-to-Meeting’ religious of his own time, the closing decade of the century: these, its seems, lack the ‘grit’ to be Calvinistic Christians. The stories highlight several key distinctive features of Calvinistic worship, including the ‘Society’ (or ‘seiat’), the Sunday School (an occasion for the narrator to boast of the long-standing Welsh passion for education), and that most tasty of all Nonconformist occasions, the funeral. The hero of the collection is innocent, kindly, saintly Gomer Shinkin, a beloved deacon who, upon inheriting a fortune on the death in Australia of an old seagoing friend, completely flummoxes the suspicious, worldly London lawyers by stating his intention of spending the entire sum on the repair and renovation of his chapel. As the London setting of this particular story suggests, the infinite superiority of the Welsh to the English is one recurrent theme throughout a collection devoted to hymning the egregious godliness of all dwellers in Nonconformist Wales. Anxious to assert the ‘uniqueness’ of Welsh Nonconformity (ILH, p. 102), and to defend it against the slur that its chapels are all ‘Little Bethels’, the narrator distinguishes between it and its ‘sleepy’ English counterpart, attributing the difference to the sensitive poetic soul of the Welsh people. ‘You have never yet set eyes on a Welsh atheist,’ declares the Wengroes chapel minister the Reverend Jeffers, as he sets bravely off for London to rescue the son of one of his beloved old deacons from the clutches of the unbelief to which he has briefly turned, following his callous treatment at the hands of English Nonconformists. And Welsh Nonconformity is lauded also for its prescient recognition of the equality of the sexes. ‘O ye apostles of larger opportunities for women,’ the narrator scolds the agitators for Women’s Rights in his later day, ‘that Welsh Nonconformity long ago recognized little or no distinction of sex in reference to things spiritual’ (ILH, p. 105). There is, it seems, no end to the virtues of the chapel faithful. Or so once upon a time it used to be, before Nonconformity in Wales began to lose its way – thus the fiction voices the central anxiety of the chapels

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as ‘their’ century drew to its end. The characters Thomas idolizes were ‘no half and half Christian[s]. With modern theology and its learned tinkerings, [they] had no sympathy’ (ILH, p. 251). Such threats as existed to the purity of religion in those glorious mid-century days came entirely from distant, essentially foreign sources. A particularly telling section in the collection deals contemptuously with the Chartist march on Newport in 1839. The attack is characterized as a crude expression of mob violence, soon quelled by the noble soldiery: ‘a few soldiers, and fewer rounds of shot, soon effected a general stampede in the ranks of the silly expedition; the leaders of the mob succeeding only in making both themselves and their cause ridiculous and contemptible’ (ILH, p. 205). It seems that ‘the full extent of the cruelty practised by the “People’s Charter” party on that night will never be known’ (ILH, p. 206). Some ‘dozen wild hobbledehoys, calling themselves members of the Physical Force Party’ were so rash as to make their way as far as the remote village of Wengroes itself, only to be confronted and verbally thrashed by resolute Abel Oliver, another of the chapel elders. In this episode, Thomas unwittingly provides fictional confirmation of a thesis consistently advanced by modern Welsh historians of the nineteenth century: that the myth of the Nonconformist gwerin – the godly, morally upright and culturally sophisticated ordinary folk of later nineteenth-century Wales – was an ideological construct fashioned by a desperately anxious society to counter English perception (born of the Rebecca Riots, the Merthyr Rising and the mass Chartist demonstrations, and officially confirmed in the Blue Books Report by the Parliamentary Commissioners in 1847) of the Welsh working class as backward, ignorant, immoral, violent, unruly and socially disruptive. In The Land of the Harp and the Feathers nostalgically advocates a return to a simpler, more devout past and employs the pastoral genre. A cruder version of the same genre is David Davies’s Echoes From the Welsh Hills (1883), in which the fictional form, complete with cute illustrations, very thinly disguises the volume’s blunt didactic purpose. ‘I send the book forth in the fervent hope that in some measure it may prove worthy of its theme. My aim has been to illustrate in a popular form the religious and social life of the Welsh people.’7 Episodes centring mostly on an idyllic village smithy allow the author to record the performance of dozens of memorable preachers, their theatrical sermons, sayings and quirks, to relate at complacent length the heroic history of the development of Welsh Nonconformity from the

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martyrdom of the Elizabethan John Penry onwards, and to repeat the epic story of Mary Jones’s hike in search of a Bible. The whole text is keyed to the ineffable message, contrasting the Welsh with their wild Irish cousins, that accompanies the frontispiece illustration: It is the Protestant Christianity of the Welsh people, as lived and taught by their religious teachers during the last two centuries and a half, that has preserved them from ignorance, lawlessness, and irreligion, and made of them one of the most Scripturally-enlightened, loyal and religious nations on the face of the earth. (EWH, p. 177)

Davies, a Baptist minister in Weston-super-Mare, was clearly intent, like Eleazar Roberts, on producing the English export version of the Welsh Nonconformist myth. So successful was he that a sequel to Echoes from the Welsh Hills, imaginatively entitled John Vaughan and his Friends, or More Echoes from the Welsh Hills was published in 1897. It, too, aimed at ‘giving our English friends a better conception than they even now have, of the power of the pulpit and the Sunday School in Wales’.8 An interesting English view of Welsh Nonconformity is included in the novel Esther Wynne (1885) by Emma Jane Worboise (1825–87), a Birmingham writer of Congregationalist background.9 It traces the story of an orphan, from the teenage years when her passion for a young English ‘Dissenter’, Martin Soames, is thwarted by the three staunchly Anglican spinster aunts who are her guardians, to her eventual triumphant union with her beloved. Her aunts’ initial implacable objection to the match is based on the prejudiced perception that Nonconformists are no more than common tradespeople, or at best members of the learned professions, while their own Wynterthorpe family are impoverished gentry who can boast an aristocratic ‘pedigree’. Their resistance is exacerbated by resentment at Esther’s parentage. She is the daughter of a forbidden match between Llewellyn Wynne, son of a Welsh Nonconformist minister, and ‘the youngest Miss Wynterthorpe of Wyntercombe’ (EW, p. 3). While mention of Wales as the notorious hotbed of Nonconformity is thus made early, extensive examination of that country and its religious culture is delayed until the novel is three-quarters complete. At that point, Esther retreats to her father’s native country in the company of Uncle Harry, recently returned from India, in order to recover from the supposed loss at sea of her suitor Martin. She and

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her maid are at first unnerved at the prospect of entering ‘an outlandish country where English would be but little spoken’ (EW, p. 323). And indeed they do find themselves disorientated not only by a stereotypically wild mountainous country but also by ‘the flow of unintelligible language that fell upon our ears: was this the dialect of our barbarous forefathers, the ancient Britons? – I inly wondered’ (EW, p. 383). But, introduced to her kindly, dignified paternal Welsh grandmother, Esther quickly becomes attracted to the primitive simplicity of the locality and its people. These are the qualities also reflected in their religious faith, which turns out to have risen above mere sectarianism and to have assumed an ecumenical character. In this remote little mountain community, Congregationalists have become reconciled to Methodists, and both are charitably disposed even to Episcopalians, although ‘Our Congregationalism keeps us in the best order . . . it is a kind of spiritual backbone, as it were, to the whole community.’ (EW, p. 413) An important position is assumed at this point in the plot by Plas Rhyddyn, the ancient, rambling, ‘medieval’ mansion bought by Uncle Harry as home for his beloved widowed aunt, Esther’s grandmother Mrs Wynne. In the eyes of the English newcomers it seems at first a sinister relic from such spooky Gothic fiction as The Mysteries of Udolpho. But, thanks to Uncle Harry’s briskly practical and radical proposals for modernizing it, the ancient pile comes to serve as allegory, emblematizing the need for a spirit of change to sweep away most of the past and to replace it with modern beliefs and institutions. In social and political terms, this means embracing a cautious, moderate Liberalism in favour of softening class differences. In gender terms it means a stronger and more independent role for women in society. (Although Worboise is extremely nervous in advocating this: her novel is keyed to the anxious advice it urges on women to be moderate and modest and patient – the very plot is careful to reward Esther for honouring these qualities in the face of extreme frustration and provocation.) And in the context of religion, the alteration of Plas Rhyddyn signifies resistance to any move towards Puseyism, Ritualism and Romanism in the Anglican Church (the action of the novel takes place during the early 1850s) and the sweeping away of the ‘Romanist’ Archbishop Laud’s elaborate, ornate liturgies and rituals. What is needed is a new reforming spirit of Protestantism, Broad Church in outlook, generously catholic enough to include the experiences and practices of the Nonconformist denominations. So this little corner of Nonconformist Wales in an

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initially remote, foreign, backward and forbidding Snowdonia setting is turned by Worboise’s narrative into a model for cautious, gradual, socially inclusive English political and religious advancement. *** Thus Worboise offers an interesting, oddly corroborative, English perspective on the version of Welsh Nonconformist pastoral idyll found in the novels of Thomas and Davies. Both these authors exploit a genre ideally suited to their ideological purposes and capable of accommodating Nonconformity’s myths. In such connections it is useful to bear in mind Richard Slotkin’s working definitions of three ‘aspects of the culture-making process’. Ideology ‘refers to the dominant conceptual categories that [often unconsciously] inform [a] society’s words and practices’; myths are narratives and metaphors having ‘the power of symbolizing [a] society’s ideology and of dramatising its moral consciousness’; genres are the ‘expressive forms’ articulating both ideological concepts and myths.10 Two additional volumes revealingly expressive of several of late nineteenth-century Nonconformity’s most potent, interlocking, myths are The Old Welsh Evangelist (1893) and Welsh Hillside Saints (1896) by William Parry (‘Gwilym Pont Taf’). The books were dedicated to the memory of such luminaries as ‘the Three Great Apostles of Wales; John Elias, Christmas Evans and William Williams of Wern’. Parry was ambiguously blessed with a talent for multiplying clichés through facile versifying and may, perhaps, be most profitably (and forgivingly) viewed as a ‘naïve’ artist. His very lack of sophistication means he unconsciously lays bare some of Nonconformity’s most flattering images of itself. By circulating his popular verses Parry reinforced several of the myths that, by binding the quarrelsome sects together, constituted the core of Nonconformity’s preferred collective identity. His two volumes include several heroic poems of the faith, mini-epics of Nonconformity. ‘The Old Welsh Evangelist’, for instance, tells the story of a simple, untutored rural lad prepared by Nature for a career as a minister. ‘A yeoman-prophet’ and ‘God-anointed priest’, he embodies the Nonconformist myth of a pastoral gwerin whose natural piety has not yet been corrupted by formal education.11 Chapel introduces him only to the appropriate religious and patriotic heroes, from Illtud and Teilo through Luther to Howel Harris, and from the Druids to their descendants, the eisteddfodic minister-poets of the nineteenth century.

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‘Pastoral’, another enthusiastically lengthy poem, elaborates on this theme, stressing the alien satanic character of new, industrial, south Wales with its class conflicts (‘The old evangelists communion held, / With Nature . . . / Remote from smoky towns’ mechanic strife’ [OWE, pp. 58, 51]). ‘The Cymmanfa’ (the reference is to the great preaching meetings of the Calvinistic Methodists) celebrates the ‘founding fathers’ of nineteenth-century Nonconformity and its myth of origin. It begins with the traditional epic device of a youngster begging a revered ‘father’ to tell the ‘sweet story’ of the Golden Age when Thomas Charles and the ‘Three Apostles’ walked upon Wales’s pastures green, and When our hills from morn till even, Seemed to wear the garb of heaven; When the Pentecostal shower, Came in light, and joy, and power. (OWE, p. 79)

Elsewhere, the verse propounds the myth that Welsh Nonconformity derives from the early, pure, pre-Catholic, Celtic Church, true to ‘the faith of Christ, the doctrine taught by Paul’ before it fell victim to the missionising Romanist Augustine’s ‘cruel pride’ (OWE, p. 140). Parry again parades his Calvinistic Methodist beliefs over more than 150 pages in ‘The Society’ (a reference to the key Methodist forum of the ‘seiat’).12 A poem on the Llangeitho of Daniel Rowland (one of the sainted ‘founders’ of Welsh Methodism) shows that Nonconformity had developed its own cult of sainthood and sacred place. And a poem dedicated to the great William Williams Pantycelyn suggests that in him the chapels had found their own archetypal poet, their religious Homer. The overpoweringly masculine, and claustrophobically patriarchal, character of this mythic world is fleetingly alleviated only in a poem ‘In Praise of the Lamb’s Bride’, with its implicit reference to the remarkable Methodist hymn-writer Ann Griffiths of Dolwar Fach (WHS, p. 255). Unlike Pantycelyn, however, she remains significantly unidentified. Heading the list of subscribers to The Old Evangelist is Lord Aberdare, author of the celebrated report to the government in 1881 that resulted in the establishment of an enlightened system of secondary and higher education throughout Wales. The appending of his name highlights a central contradiction and continuing conflict in late nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity. Strongly inclined, as Parry’s volumes show, to view religion as being in decline and society correspondingly in decay, it was simultaneously forging an increasingly powerful alliance with

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the new class of influential Radical politicians and social engineers. As works such as Parry’s make clear, by the end of the nineteenth century being a Nonconformist was regarded as a marker (if not the marker) of authentic Welsh identity, and it was accepted as such beyond Wales’s borders. *** The utopian version of Nonconformist culture was slow to die. In 1915, Caradoc Evans would, of course, excoriate nineteenth-century Calvinistic Nonconformity in My People. ‘It is the ugly side of Welsh peasant life that I know most about,’ he told his publisher Andrew Melrose (Publisher’s Note). Yet nine years later Melrose published Little Calvary: Calvaria Fach, by Sydney S. Griffith, in an attempt to redress the balance, claiming it showed ‘the beautiful idealistic side of Welsh life’. A melange of the sentimental and the melodramatic, the novel pivots around the figure of ‘Cyfaill’ (Friend) who, in representing the Saviour’s loving care for humanity, affirms the benign side of the Nonconformity so ‘mercilessly satirized’, as Melrose put it, in Evans’s ‘startling and mordant collection of sketches.’13 Griffith’s work is the last gasp of the nineteenth-century myth of the virtues of Nonconformist culture. Decades before Griffith’s time – and indeed contemporaneously with Nonconformity’s gilded textual images of itself – the culture of the chapels was producing much more sophisticated and critical writers. A generation shift around the middle of the nineteenth century facilitated the translation by Nonconformity of some of its moral aspiration into social and political action by closely associating itself with the Radical wing of Liberalism. The result was a protracted period of Liberal Ascendancy in Wales that eventually broke the traditional foreign alliance between state Church and the landowner oligarchy. Angels in Wales, by Margam Jones, offers valuable means of entry – as much through its language, form and plot as its explicit comments – into the nexus of Nonconformity’s chief social and spiritual concerns at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the action is purportedly set in the middle years of the previous century, the issues with which the novel deals relate at least as directly to those of the Edwardian period when it was written. And for all the homespun philosophy, cosy tone and absurd complacency of the increasingly melodramatic plot, there is an undercurrent of unease. As Ianto the carpenter, one of the

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village chorus of sterling but picturesque rural characters, dolefully notes, ‘it’s a rush with everything now; religion and all . . . We are not like the old Methodists, slow and sure . . . The religion of our generation is a mixture of politics, science, and theology. And in a few years it will be nothing but a hollow profession.’14 Such worries are only partly dispelled by a convenient religious revival, which is allowed to occur offstage. A more imaginative means of addressing them is supplied by the main plot, which is an interesting Nonconformist variant of the staple romance form. Born to three close friends, the lead characters, a boy and two girls, are each given very different, allegorically significant, names. As the local soothsayer Shinkin, an ancient ‘dyn hysbys’ turned Methodist, sagely observes, the children ‘were educated according to the various tastes of their mothers. One was sent to Babylon, the other to Jerusalem, and the third to Athens’ (AW, p. 49). He is, of course, speaking symbolically. The boy, Gwyddon, who takes his name from a Welsh word for knowledge (hence the association with Athens), falls in love as a young man with each of the two young women in turn. His affections are first lavished on Faith (obviously a native of Jerusalem), otherworldly and meekly self-sacrificial to a fault, and then on the much more spirited Gwener, the Welsh for Venus, a goddess who entered Rome from ancient Babylonian mythology. As her name suggests, the latter is quite a handful. Originally conceited, predatory, snobbish and scheming, she has to undergo a moral and spiritual conversion, supervised by Faith, before the plot deems her worthy of marrying Gwyddon. In turn, he has had to mend his erratic ways a little in order to ground himself securely in the Methodist ministry. Only after Venus the goddess of love has become Venus the Morning Star to her husband’s dawning career in the ministry is Faith, who has nobly exalted her own sexual passion for Gwyddon into total devotion to heavenly matters, allowed to go to her reward by conveniently expiring. Long used for reconciling social tensions through the symbolic device of marriage, the romance plot is here put to somewhat different purpose. It is employed to resolve one of the key problems facing early twentieth-century Nonconformity; the question of how to marry traditional faith with the new knowledge made available by science, social science, psychology and, of course, the new biblical scholarship. Another of the crucial questions of the age was how to respond to the pressing social and political issues of the day, and to address the condition of the working classes. For the first part of the nineteenth century Nonconformity had held aloof from such matters, insisting on the

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primacy of the soul’s salvation in preparation for the hereafter. Consequently there is no mention of Nonconformity, for example, in Trewern (1901), a strong historical novel by R. M. Thomas about the turbulent movements for social and political change in the Wales of the 1830s.15 Angels in Wales, however, deals with the shift in the second half of the century towards supporting, and where possible leading, campaigns for radical reform. In the process, it anachronistically (and revealingly) conflates those issues that had actually concerned earlier, mid-nineteenthcentury, rural Nonconformity (the land question, Temperance, tithes) with those of importance at the time of the novel’s writing – in particular, the problem of the irresistible rise, in the industrial south, of political movements offering purely secular remedies for class tensions. Foremost among these, of course, was socialism. Persuaded that poverty is the breeding ground of sin, Gwyddon decides to follow the political path for securing sweeping social reform. ‘Reason and religion’, he proclaims in a speech, ‘commands you to grant equal privileges to rich and poor’ (AW, p. 127), an egalitarian philosophy manifestly at odds with the established social and political order. The voice calling for Liberty is therefore at once ‘the voice of the people’ and ‘the voice of God’ (AW, p. 128). While Margam Jones is sceptical of this way of putting it (he sees Gwyddon as lacking in the ‘higher vision’, ‘where the natural and the spiritual are merged in the real’ [AW, p. 124]), he is supportive of the aim of securing social justice. In his enthusiasm, Gwyddon gets involved in efforts to establish a Liberal Association, to the outrage of the vicar, who sees this as Nonconformity ‘sowing the seeds of socialism and anarchy among the people’ (AW, p. 130). And indeed, once the new spirit spreads beyond the respectable confines of the chapel folk, it does incite violent direct action, such as the burning of the squire’s ricks. A key scene dramatizes the two extremes which Gwyddon’s impetuous political actions have created. On the one hand, the forces of conservatism react by endeavouring to have a popular political meeting broken up by order of the magistrates; on the other, an unknown orator suddenly attempts to persuade the gathering to repudiate religion and to embrace a secular political vision. This preaching of atheism and anarchism, as one listener terms it, is hastily quashed through the intervention of a ‘godly’ archdeacon, who recalls the people to their God and to their senses by sinking to his knees to beseech forgiveness in prayer. The whole scene is powerfully expressive of Margam Jones’s own evident misgivings about the new politics and his care to demonstrate

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that, since mankind is inherently sinful, any attempt to act without constant reference to God’s grace is sure to result in evil, however socially and politically well founded and well intentioned it may be. As one of the characters observes of her village: ‘Tis not money or votes they need here but religion’ (AW, p. 210). In addition to being deeply, and in some ways sympathetically, revealing of the chapels’ conflicted response to the social and political challenges of the day, the novel also unintentionally lays bare the ugly side of Nonconformity. The text features the appearance of ‘The Woman of Babylon’ (the biblical term ‘Whore’ is too salacious for delicate Nonconformist taste) in the form of the feared and hated Roman Catholic Church. It is at this point that a plot previously sensible enough, within the limits of artificial romance convention, is gripped by the hysteria that causes it to degenerate into lurid melodrama. The upshot of it all is, of course, the foiling of a dastardly ‘Romish’ plot and the routing of the guilty. Behind the whole affair, we are told, were the notoriously cunning Jesuits, ‘the schemers of Rome’, whose ‘chief object is to get money into the coffers of the church’ (AW, p. 251). But the stout, honest, Nonconformists prove more than a match for such devilish machinations. Gwener, the former convent girl who was the proposed victim of this Romish cunning, is providentially saved for the chapel and for Gwyddon. *** In another novel, The Stars of the Revival (1910), Margam Jones produced the kind of text that was to provoke Caradoc Evans five years later to launch his notable career on a sea of anti-Nonconformist bile. It is a religious romance, larded with sentiment and melodrama, but its scene of brutal murder is nowhere near as sensational as its depiction of the serial conquests of the Holy Ghost. Like a celestial poacher, it lines up the village reprobates one by one, like sitting ducks, and pots them all. By means of pastoral idyll, Jones sets out to portray ‘the simple life of the old Welsh villager’, and to offer ‘a glimpse of the religious life of the Welsh Christians of former years’.16 The lead characters are irreproachably godly – Taliesin becomes a noted Revivalist and his sweetheart Gwen seems destined to beguile congregations into mass conversion by her sweet singing. But then she becomingly contracts TB and dies a suitably pathetic death as Nature (a capitalization of the noun seems appropriate) bathes her in the ineffable light of a glorious

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sunset. Both of these ardent young people have been transfigured by spiritual visions; the one has seen a host of white-robed riders led by a radiant leader who hands him a sword, while the other has been invited to join an ethereal chorus of angels singing to the accompaniment of golden harps. As for the villagers, they are for the most part simple, guileless, devout folk, and such dubious socially marginal characters as do haunt the place before it is vigorously cleansed by the Holy Spirit are almost all conveniently transformed by its coming. In any case, some of them were already softies at heart – Nancy the ‘witch’ has a heart of gold, Tom the Blacksmith is a rough diamond of a ruffian and Daffy Wirion is a wise simpleton. Jones rarely misses any opportunity for a cliché. From time to time he also ladles out hearty helpings of clodhopping bucolic comedy. The tale is narrated by an educated observer who observes the scene with indulgent irony and affectionate regard. Whatever the fiction’s literary merits, it is a classic Anglophone document of Nonconformist Welsh-language culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his Introduction Jones makes much of his attempts at ‘a faithful translation of Welsh sentiments and Welsh phrases’ (SR, p. v). And indeed his text is pitch-perfect when it comes to capturing the tone of that culture’s ideal version of its godly Nonconformist nineteenth-century self. His subject is the Great Revival – not the Evan Roberts phenomenon of the years immediately preceding the text’s publication but the legendary awakening of 1859, still viewed with awe as late as 1909 as having set the gold standard for all subsequent Revivals. Yet, his older chapel-going villagers go even further back for their ideal. They look back forty years to their youth and to their great icon, John Elias of Anglesey. Their proudest boast is that it was he who brought them to the light. By publishing his tale to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the great spiritual upheaval of 1859, Margam Jones thereby, and probably inadvertently, unmasks some of the sociocultural factors that had subsequently given rise to the 1904–5 Revival. It becomes clear that his novel is wistfully set in the period before convulsive change had begun to undermine the certainties of Nonconformist faith and before industrial unrest had begun to highlight the class differences within a religious society that had prided itself on being classless. ‘Back out of all this now too much for us,’ Robert Frost famously wrote in his poem ‘Directive’: ‘back in a time made simple by the weather.’ Such, indeed, is the time to which Jones’s readers are invited to revert when reading The Stars of the Revival, and it is this that makes it historically such an important cultural document; virtually the only

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English-language text to articulate fully and perfectly Welsh Nonconformity’s ‘false consciousness’, that self-deluded belief in its own impeccable virtues that Caradoc Evans was shortly, and vividly, to demonstrate constituted Nonconformist ideology. Within his story, Jones touches on a number of themes close to the Nonconformist heart at the turn of the century. Early on, he brings out the dangerously close connections between devout faith in Providence and ancient superstitious belief in miraculous powers and forces. He also emphasizes how by the mid-nineteenth century chapel worship had become conventionalized, conservative and rule-bound. Such failings had become a matter of acute concern to the late nineteenthcentury chapel faithful and had been one of the aspects of the religious status quo against which Evan Roberts had so memorably rebelled. Desperate though the devout may be in Jones’s novel for a Revival, they will never pray it into existence while they remain safely seated in their pews. ‘We won’t be any the wiser by setting a trap for the heavenly dove’ (SR, p. 31), is the tart comment of Betsan, one of the characters authorized throughout the work to pass sharp-witted comment on the proceedings. She it is who likewise mocks the ‘antediluvian’ preachers still treated by the chapel faithful with great reverence. The rigidity of formalism that has become the bane of chapel life is exposed through a scene where Gwen is placed on a bench of judgement because she and Tristan had gone walking together on the Sabbath eve. Found guilty, she is turned out of the seiat. It is only when Tristan starts taking the Gospel out beyond the chapel walls that things begin to change and the village comes to repent of its black sins with startling rapidity. There is an epidemic of dramatic, tearful conversions, accompanied by lavish descriptions of the transports that ensue as all heaven breaks loose. ‘Having wandered far into the realm of mysticism, Niah’s soul stood now on the verge of time, praising God for the eternal Covenant of Grace, and describing the divine aurora breaking over and into the darkness of a lost world’ (SR, p. 196). It is all conveniently in keeping with the thesis advanced by Jones in his introduction; that the Welsh are a ‘retiring and sentimental race’, in whom ‘we find a sweet blending of the natural and the spiritual. Poetry and religion are here united in holy wedlock, and the twain become one spirit’ (SR, p. vi). But perhaps the most interesting feature of the introduction is its attempt to argue that the ‘true religious history of Wales’ ‘will not be uninteresting both to the psychologist and the theologian’ (SR, p. vi). In other words, Jones is recognizing the need to reconcile the

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traditional theological language of religious experience with the new, and potentially challenging, ‘science’ of psychology. His fiction is consciously offered as an experiment in this regard, although in fact it nowhere takes on board the kinds of frequently uncomfortable insights into religious states that the most progressive psychology of the day was at that very time developing. Instead, like the Evan Roberts Revival with which it was almost exactly contemporary, The Stars of the Revival simply retreats into the outmoded language of faith as it also retreats into the comfortably reassuring genre of romance. And when it comes to dealing with women’s contribution to Revival experience, it promises only to deceive. Taliesin with a sad look on his face, prayed in silence, but Gwen had lost her self-control, and her petitions rushed forth from her heart in wild torrents of eloquence. This striking performance drew the attention of those that lingered outside the chapel; and when Taliesin rose from his knees, he discovered a great company of worshippers around the big seat. But Gwen heeded them not, for her soul had now forged its way through the human shadows into the light of the Divine presence; and there, in the dazzling splendour, clinging with one hand to a pillar of light, and pointing with the other to the Mediator, she pleaded, and argued, and demanded. (SR, p. 205)

But just when Gwen seems destined to become a singing star of Taliesin’s travelling spiritual circus, just like the celebrated ladies of Evan Roberts’s entourage, she is cruelly struck down by the callous author; silenced in her prime! *** The women of the chapels were not, however, to be definitively silenced. Both Mallt Williams and Sara Maria Saunders approach Nonconformity as intelligently probing products of its culture. In Williams’s ‘David’,17 a young man converted to Methodism is rejected by his sweetheart only to re-enter her life as a poor revered preacher years later and to nurse her little boy through a smallpox epidemic. Physically scarred in consequence, David feels called to missionary work overseas, rejecting a widowed Gwen’s invitation to a lucrative marriage. To emphasize the rightness of David’s decision, Williams adds an epilogue in which a giddy Gwen is glimpsed chiding herself for her silly

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infatuation and making ready to set her cap at a more attractive catch. Ostensibly set in 1846, the story is in fact wholly anomalous in its depiction of a suffering, outlawed sect. It is as if Nonconformity has established such a grip on Wales by 1896 (the date of the story’s publication) that only the haziest notion exists in some minds of its early days. As a writer, Mallt Williams is unmistakeably a child of this puritan culture and her story is very much of its precise time. It was published in the celebrated periodical Wales, whose editor, Owen M. Edwards, was becoming renowned as the great ideologue of the gwerin, the powerful social myth of a piously Nonconformist volk, ordinary people of natural cultivation, piety, probity and learning. In Williams’s story we see the elevation of the figure that was central to the myth: the fatherly, asexual, self-sacrificing, minister. Add to this that Williams was a member of the Young Wales movement, and it is plain how David takes on the role of cultural icon, a glowing anti-imperial image of pacific service, a personality developed in the fertile soil of Welsh Nonconformity but readily transplanted to distant regions. David is what little Wales has got to offer a world dominated by the Goliath of an imperial Britain. Mallt Williams was one who proudly wrote in the shadow of the pulpit. For her the shadow that fell so ominously across the pages of later Welsh authors offered sustenance and protection. As a writer she felt firmly held in its comforting masculine embrace. In contrast, Sara Maria Saunders’s ‘Nancy on the warpath,’ a story of the same period, deals with sisterly solidarity in the face of the harshly autocratic masculinity of chapel society. Mr Morris is a chapel deacon who tyrannizes his entire family, particularly his browbeaten wife. Severing relations with Edmund, his son, for marrying the wrong woman, he refuses to visit him even when he seems mortally ill. But his daughter-in-law, Nancy, beards him in his lair and forces him to let his wife visit her son Edmund’s bedside. Later she defies the autocratic Mr Morris again, to call on the sick mother-in-law her emasculated husband is too cowardly to visit. Before leaving, she confronts her fearsome father-in-law and accuses him of lifelong abuse of his wife. The old man got up and faced her. ‘Do you know to whom you are speaking?’ he asked angrily. ‘Oh yes, I am speaking to my husband’s father,’ Nancy said calmly. ‘and you have got to listen to me either here or in chapel next Sunday, whichever suits you best. You know my mother, I think; well, I’m her daughter, and my mother’s daughter has never yet been afraid of anyone, and she’s

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not afraid of you.’ There was so much determination in Nancy’s face that the old man visibly recoiled.18

Nancy issues an ultimatum: either he places Mrs Morris in proper nursing care or he accepts that she, Nancy, will be moving in to tend her on her sickbed. Refusal will lead to Nancy’s outing Mr Morris before the whole chapel as a closet wife-abuser. Grudgingly, the old man agrees that his uncontrollable daughter-in-law shall take over the running of his household. His terse, cold comment is that Edmund has married a woman of spirit. This story is not, however, the antiNonconformist tract such a summary would seem to suggest. After all, Nancy is herself a chapel member. Through his hostile frigidity, Mr Morris had endeavoured to put her to flight, and so Nancy’s fight is, in part, a struggle for the soul of the ‘old chapel, which was associated with the happiest events of her childhood’ (NWP, p. 27). And in her mastery of language – her victory is won through words, not by blows – Nancy may be said to be an avatar of the Welsh woman writer of the period; a writer like Sara Maria Saunders herself, unwilling to abandon the chapel by turning viciously on it like Caradoc Evans, yet forced to rebel against the ruling patriarchy of preacher and deacon. To some extent, her story may rewardingly be read in the context of the Welsh-language tradition of sympathetic insider critique of the Nonconformist establishment, a tradition memorably established by Daniel Owen. In a series of great popular novels published during a golden decade, 1885–94, this moderate Calvinist wracked by illness and depression had exposed chapel culture to searching fictional crossexamination. In the process, he had set a trend that would be strongly followed by Welsh-language literature of the early twentieth century.19 By the time Anglophone Welsh fiction’s enthusiastic chapel-bashing had got under way, Welsh-language writers had already compiled a formidable list of Nonconformity’s sins. And yet, as we shall see, twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh writers often persisted in representing their compatriot authors as chapel stooges and in associating the Welsh language with the dictatorship of Dissent. ‘Nancy on the warpath’ – in the macho age of Custer’s Last Stand, not to mention Rorke’s Drift, the title has a slightly nervous air of defensive self-mockery. But Nancy, it turns out, is a real warrior queen, a verbal Amazon, the invert of the shrew, scold, virago and harridan. Hers is a war of words – a struggle for gender liberation through language. The story involves role reversal. Here it is the male, not the female, who is

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struck dumb. Mr Morris has a minor speaking role. His attempt at selfassertion – ‘You had better pour out the tea, it’s woman’s work’ (NWP, p. 35) – is a pathetic last stand. Otherwise he is emasculated by silence, castrated by Nancy’s sharp tongue. We learn that he is a ‘cyhoeddwr’, a deacon charged with the solemn duty of reading out chapel notices; but in the story it is Nancy’s voice that is raised, threatening him with a chapel announcement of her own, woman’s pent-up revenge for all those instances of ‘torri maes’, of public humiliation and excommunication of unwed mothers. In the privacy of Nancy’s company the otherwise dumb Mrs Morris finds a faltering voice: ‘if Mr Morris’ll be in Heaven, I think I’d rather not go there!’ (NWP, p. 30). It is confirmation of the chapel patriarchy’s perceived power to rule over not only this world but also the next. ‘Nancy on the warpath’ is one of four ‘rural sketches’ Saunders contributed to Young Wales in 1897. All of them featured some aspect or other of chapel life, and revolved around the same basic characters.20 The first, ‘The courtship of Edward and Nancy,’ explains how the marriage of the pair that feature in ‘Nancy on the warpath’ is jeopardized by the long-standing feud between their parents – the old minister who is Nancy’s father and the prominent, powerful chapel elder who is Edward’s. As for the fourth in the series, ‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’, it features a young man from the chapel community whose reputation as a dazzling preacher derives entirely from his skill at plagiarizing other ministers’ sermons. But while both these stories quietly highlight shortcomings in Nonconformist society – its interminable quarrelsomeness and its separation of pious word from deed – it is the third sketch, ‘The ambition of Twm Sali’, that is most arresting. The son of Sali, a poor chapel caretaker, Twm is a secretly bookish young man with a thirst for education. He grows up resentful of a chapel community that, in the person of Mr Morris, has kept his mother in poverty, not least by making her dependent on charity and convincing her that her son’s lowly condition is the work of Providence. Accordingly determined not to become a preacher, Twm turns to the village schoolmaster instead, first for moral and then for financial support to allow him to proceed to college. The story thus deals succinctly with a process already under way in the 1890s – and frequently addressed as a vexed subject both in Cymru Fydd and in Young Wales – namely the rise of an educated, secular class and its relationship to the established Nonconformist elite of the pulpit. As will be seen later in this study, this process was eventually to contribute to the undermining of the authority of chapel

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and preacher and to the transfer of that authority to such figures as teachers, academics – and writers. *** A male writer who shares Sara Maria Saunders’s concern with the educating of Nonconformity is T. Marchant Williams. Indeed, The Land of My Fathers (1889) specifically advocates the redirection of Nonconformity’s energies into educational efforts and social reform. Williams (a notoriously acerbic man who became known as ‘the acid drop’) was later to be honoured with a knighthood for his public service. But when his novel appeared he was a barrister in his mid-forties whose earlier brief experience as an Inspector of Schools had turned him into a passionate supporter of Matthew Arnold’s attacks on the crude state system of payment by results. This had encouraged teachers to do nothing but teach by rote to ensure their pupils excelled at examinations. The whole of the second half of the novel is devoted to a subDickensian lampooning of this practice, of the morally corrupt teachers who implemented it, and of the power-drunk inspectors who policed it. The first half of the novel, however, is devoted to the dramatizing of the great change a young generation was bringing to Nonconformity. As Olwen, one of the young lead characters, puts it, ‘few if any of us, the younger members of the Calvinistic Methodist denomination, believe in Calvinism; not that we have given it up, but rather have never taken it up.’21 The emphasis throughout is on good works rather than on faith and grace and doctrine. Olwen passionately embraces the Temperance cause in the enlightened interests of improving the life of the working class. She is also quite clear on another controversial subject: ‘Nonconformist is not, of necessity, either better or worse than a Churchman or a Papist’ (LMF, p. 36). Accordingly, the most important distinction being drawn throughout the novel is not between Anglicanism and Nonconformity but between those of tolerant, progressive outlook in both church and chapel, and the reactionary old guard, entrenched in their ugly prejudices. A similar impatience is shown with the distinction between denominations: ‘Would that the distinctions of sects disappeared for ever from The Land of My Fathers!’ (LMF, p. 225). Williams sardonically lays bare the fierce struggle between church and chapel over the setting up of a state school system independent of Church control, and the equally ferocious struggle, this time not only between Anglicans and Nonconformists but also between the different

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Nonconformist sects, over the places to be filled on the schools’ boards of governors. Another of Williams’s subjects is the new understanding between the Tory Anglican squirearchy and its erstwhile Nonconformist tenantry following the passing of the 1867 Reform Bill and the end of the Tithe Wars. This has resulted in a transformation of class relations. Gone are the days of a ‘peasantry’ as secretly rebellious as it was ostensibly obsequious. Gone is the distinction between an educated ruling class and an uneducated, and sometimes illiterate, class of working people. Representative of the old generation is pious and intelligent Mrs Pugh: The events and occurrences of modern times interested her but little; almost was she persuaded that our Wellingtons and Napoleons were halfmythical personages, and that the campaigns in which they were said to have figured were fictions of the human brain; and yet she would have given all the known details of the conflict at Ramoth Gilead as if she had been an eye-witness of it; and such persons as Micaiah, the son of Imlah, and Zedekiah, the son of Chenaanah, would figure in her narrative as if she had enjoyed their close friendship. (LMF, p. 9)

The narrative spine of The Land of My Fathers is a plot featuring the close friendship between the squire’s son, Hubert, and a cottager’s son, Einon, augmented by the romance between Hubert and Einon’s sister Olwen. Both Einon and Olwen are Nonconformists but their detestation of the vulgar, thoroughly obnoxious vicar, Mr Moggs, is heartily shared by the Anglican Hubert; and when Moggs dies in his cups to be replaced by a saintly Welsh vicar, the Revd Emrys Lloyd, church and chapel alike unite in their devotion to him. As for the Reverend Lloyd, he enthusiastically introduces his church to seminal Nonconformist activities such as the Sunday School, the Band of Hope and the Temperance Society and ensures Welsh hymns are sung in his services. And while accepting that the old Dissenting sects might never be reconciled to the Anglican Church, he ‘persistently held that [the] raison d’être [of the] Calvinistic Methodist body . . . had ceased to exist, now that the mother Church had awakened from her torpor and was courageously grappling with her duties and responsibilities. He ever hankered after a reunion’ (LMF, p. 140). In return, he is prepared to support the movement to disestablish the Church in Wales so that it will no longer enjoy the trappings, privileges and power of a state church. ***

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Just as T. Marchant Williams is interested in the impact of education on Nonconformity, Charles Ellis Lloyd is concerned with the challenge to it represented by powerful new social and political developments. His Love and the Agitator (1911) uses the romance novel to trace the early twentieth-century narrative of transfer of power in industrial south Wales away from the chapels and to the new socialist movements, in particular the Labour Party. Although respectfully treated in certain respects, old-style Nonconformity is in the end condemned by Lloyd as ‘in some ways bigoted’.22 This message is illustrated by the announcement to all the members of Hermon Calvinistic Methodist chapel by John Rees that his daughter Mary had succumbed sexually before her marriage – a disgrace so painful to the decent old deacon that the shame of having to make it public drives him to an early grave. A good man is thus destroyed by the bigotry instilled in him by his narrow religious community. Contrasted to the stifling values of the chapel are those of Walter Llewellyn, a young miners’ union radical as steadfastly committed to championing the interests of his fellow workers as he is long-suffering in his love for Mary, who ends up first physically abused and then deserted by the English toff and cad she persists in marrying after her seduction. Still at least a token Presbyterian, Llewellyn is the acceptable face of the new politics in the novel. Less acceptable is his equally radical friend, the sceptical Nicholas Jones, whose agnosticism borders on outright atheism. And beyond the pale entirely are the Syndicalists and their kind who are passingly mentioned only to be anathematized as hotheads. As the novel draws to its close, the plot furnishes an opportunity for Lloyd to address, and to dismiss, the threat to emergent Labour politics presented by the 1904–5 Revival. The Revivalist himself is characterized with careful respect and cunning ambiguity as ‘a Welsh collier turned ministerial student . . . a soul charged to the full with spirituality, personal magnetism, psycho-electricity, what you will, directed by a power which it would be folly, if not sacrilege, to seek to analyse’ (LA, p. 249). But as the episode unfolds, it leaves the reader in little doubt that at the heart of the Revival experience lies an unhealthy hysteria. Walter Llewellyn leaps into action to fell Mary Rees’s abusive husband: he has erupted violently into the congregation to silence his wife, who has been driven by her unendurable sufferings at home to distraught public confession of her sins. In the process Llewellyn is also, in effect, striking a blow in the name of socialism against the ‘demons’ of an old religion that has for so long rendered the industrial workforce passive by

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directing all its energies of protest inwards and upwards to a heavenly kingdom. The encounter between traditional Welsh Nonconformity and the new politics is also the subject of several of J. O. Francis’s important plays. When starting out as a dramatist, in the years spanning the Great War, he lived through a period when the Nonconformist ascendancy in politics and society was in increasingly rapid retreat, and two of his plays explore the complex force-field of this naturally dramatic development. Change (1912) announces its subject in its title.23 Like many another work of literature it treats inter-generational family conflict as a conveniently manageable microcosm of social struggle.24 On the walls of John Price’s mining cottage are pictures of decaying Liberal Nonconformity’s heroes – Gladstone, Spurgeon, Henry Richard, nineteenth-century pin-up boys all. An ageing collier, and proud Superintendent at Horeb Sunday School, Price is stuck, to the increasing exasperation of his three sons, in the conservative religious mindset of the previous century when he was in his prime. He hates the ‘New Theology’ (‘it’s treating the Devil himself as if he was one of the twelve Apostles’), becomes incandescent at any mention of the Social Gospel, and views socialists of any colour, whether Syndicalists, Christian Socialists or Marxists, as ‘worse than the Unitarians’ (C, pp. 30, 29).25 Totally unbending, he throws out John Henry for daring to abandon a training course for the ministry – a preacher son is his father’s most cherished ambition. One of the factors involved in John Henry’s ‘backsliding’ is his regret at having so rashly committed himself in the heat of the emotional moment during the 1904–5 Revival. Price is equally hostile to his other son, Lewis, whose gifts for oratory are such that Gwen, his mother, feels he was born for the pulpit, but who turns into a militant leader of organized labour instead (C, p. 37). As for the third son, Gwilym, a gentler soul suffering from consumption, he, too, sides eventually with his brothers, and dies an unintended martyr to the new socialist ‘faith’ when trying to save Lewis from being shot by the militia during a mass, increasingly violent, union protest. The sympathetic Gwilym it is who sees his parents as ‘men and women growing old in a world that doesn’t understand them, and they themselves don’t understand’ (C, p. 48). Lewis, with his sharper socio-economic understanding, recognizes in John Price a member, at heart, of the pre-industrial ‘agricultural class – slow, stolid, and conservative’ (C, p. 48). The portrait of John Price is not altogether unsympathetic, and his wife Gwen, in particular, instances some of the milder, more attractive,

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sides of conservative Nonconformity. Splits in chapels and rivalry between denominations are made apparent, as is the hypocrisy involved in congregations praising a man after death who was known to have abused his wife when alive. The hegemonic power of Nonconformity is touchingly evident in the way in which Gwen instinctively brings to mind the Christian Endeavour Society when attempting to help her husband spell that intractable English word ‘endeavour’. The Bible, along with all activities associated with it, is the people’s only dictionary, and the chapels are the guardians of the word, the governors of language. Even in its weaker, residual, form Nonconformity still retains a considerable hold over the mind. The militantly agnostic Lewis, feeling guilt at Gwilym’s death, resorts instinctively to prayer, and on another occasion the three sons – non-believers all – involuntarily start humming one of the nineteenth century’s favourite hymns, ‘Bydd myrdd o ryfeddodau’. It is also apparent that the new unionism and socialism, with their stress on solidarity and the collective, are the secular beneficiaries of the Nonconformist mindset, the secular gospels of a new, postNonconformist age. Some ten years after Change, Francis produced Cross Currents (1922), a play dealing with the new Welsh politics of the immediate post-war period. In his interesting Foreword, he presciently notes that ‘Wales knows more than England of the contradictions of our times. The mind of Wales is a cockpit for forces whose struggle for mastery sweeps through Europe.’26 Anticipating the establishment of Plaid Cymru a few years later, Francis depicts a nation newly divided between the Red Dragon of nationalism and the Red Flag of Labour. It is in connection with the former that he primarily engages with Nonconformity, noting how the cultural nationalism it had promoted during the latter decades of the nineteenth century was now being converted into political nationalism and turning to the ‘gospel of our Welsh nationhood’ (CC, p. 73). He sees the Nonconformist middle class of north Wales as providing the seedbed for this new development, while south Wales is simultaneously moving in the direction of a socialist, working-class politics based on class warfare rather than national cultural solidarity. The representative of this new labour politics in Cross Currents is Gomer Davies, a native of the north who has been politically re-educated through his experience of working in industrial Glamorgan. That great guru of mid-nineteenth-century Welsh Calvinistic Methodism, Lewis Edwards of Bala, means ‘no more to him than the Grand Lama of Tibet’ (CC, p. 18). This ‘red hot Bolshevik’ talks ‘pure Moscow’. He

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alarms the Nonconformist middle class of his native district by threatening to lead it in ‘the way of Glamorgan’ (CC, p. 32). To their protestations that the north, a bastion of Nonconformist culture, is a class-free zone, he scathingly retorts that he knows differently, having been raised the son of a permanently poor and socially oppressed agricultural labourer. This landless class had seen itself exploited by the very same Welsh Nonconformist farmers who had themselves so famously and successfully waged historic class warfare on their own traditional oppressors, the great landlords. To emphasize how class identities trump national identity, Gomer points out that while it is the English who are always scapegoated by Liberal nationalists, some of these grasping landlords were in fact Welsh. As for the nationalists, their most eloquent representative is the Revd Trefnant Jones, an elderly minister closely associated with the Parrys, the leading Liberal family of the area. In the spirit of the closing decades of the previous century in Wales, the Parrys had embraced the cause of Cymru Fydd, the wing of the Liberal Party originally devoted to cultural nationalism whose turn to a more politicized nationalism resulted in its sad demise, defeated at Newport by the Anglicized Liberals of the industrial south. It is Trefnant who sets out to persuade young Gareth Parry, brother-in-law to a Nonconformist minister, not to accept a Chair in Political Economy at the new university college of Swansea but instead to follow in the footsteps of his long-dead father by becoming the Westminster candidate of a new, independent nationalist party. But Gareth has also become increasingly sympathetic to his friend Gomer Davies’s Labour politics, and the play ends with him deciding to accept the Swansea job after all, because it will allow him time to reflect on the great conundrum of his age across Europe – whether to go the nationalist or the Labour route. Both options have their attractive and unattractive, their constructive and destructive aspects. No doubt by writing his play Francis was conducting exactly such an intense intellectual argument with himself. This catholicity of spirit, a not unsympathetic attitude towards the Nonconformist legacy, and an outlook hospitable to several contradictory tendencies within his culture, helped set him apart from the generation of writers who emerged between the two world wars. Much more sharply inclined to reject Nonconformity and all its twentieth-century cultural and political progeny, they naturally turned for example and inspiration not to Francis but to Caradoc Evans, and some of the results will be considered in the following chapters. But in at least one respect, Francis

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did, in fact, exactly anticipate the most definitive psycho-cultural aspect of this young generation’s case. At the end of Change, John Price, exhibiting the profoundly biblical cast of his mind, accuses his son Lewis of having played Cain to his brother Gwilym’s Abel. In response, Lewis accuses him of patriarchal jealousy and leaves his father’s house precipitately because ‘If I stay here, sooner or later it will make me kill him’(C, p. 132). Indeed, so fearful is he of some such consequence that he quits Wales altogether, for Australia. Half a century later, the writer T. Harri Jones would head with like desperation for the same country, only to find there was no such easy escape possible from the dark dubious virtues of his Nonconformist fathers: And [I] hear above the long Pacific swell Stern voices of my fathers saying I lack Their faith, their courage, their black certainties. And everything they knew of Heaven and Hell.27

The final punctuation is telling. Standing starkly alone, the last accusatory line is a sentence of doom. It bespeaks the dread finality of Jones’s realization. It makes clear how the climax of Change registers a significant cultural instance of classically murderous inter-generational struggle; an example of the kind of violent father–son relationship Freud was broadly to classify as ‘Oedipal’. It dramatically highlights the parricidal aspects of the struggle between the emergent, mostly secular, inter-war generation of Anglophone Welsh and the Nonconformist culture, with its grim Calvinistic God and its patriarchal cult of preachers and deacons, so beloved by their forefathers. And as we shall see in the next chapter, the primary site of this parricidal struggle would be language itself. *** The dramatic decline of Welsh Nonconformity after the Great War has been well charted, with the chapels’ complicity with the warmongering often cited as a significant cause. But, as historians have shown, the actual response of the denominations to the 1914–18 war was complex, a fact acknowledged in Charles Ellis Lloyd’s A Master of Dreams (1921). This remains a revealing text for those interested in the rise of Welsh socialism – intriguing aspects of the thesis advanced through its plot include the claim that the humane, enlightened and

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cultivated traditional landed aristocracy are much more the natural allies of the new humanist ‘religion’ of socialism than the crassly utilitarian and graspingly individualist commercial middle classes (implicitly identified with Liberalism); and that the adoption of socialist values will promote the development of a ‘humane Imperialism’ leading to the creation of a British Commonwealth.28 But from the present point of view, most relevant is the sympathetic portrait offered by the novel of a conscientious objector, treated as a noble, saintly representative of Welsh Presbyterianism at its best. Although ultimately depicted as too worldly to live, Illtyd Berew is allowed by the narrative to present his case in the most compelling, and unsettling, terms, duly suiting his uncompromising actions to his challenging words. A bit part is also given in the novel’s concluding section to two Rhondda miners, the skills they learned as wartime sappers coming in handy for the excavations needed before a magnanimous, good-hearted nobleman can recover his rightful inheritance. Since that nobleman also turns out to be a socialist, the miners have in effect helped to advance the Labour cause and usher in the future by these means. By contrast, Illtyd, the representative of the rural ‘yeomanry’, the Nonconformist gwerin, is doomed to die for his idealistic cause. In this way, Lloyd’s novel offers an explanation for the subsequent twentieth-century decline of Nonconformity that is very different from that advanced in Caradoc Evans’s belligerent narratives and that is strikingly at variance with much of the treatment of Welsh Nonconformity found in the Anglophone poetry and fiction of the twentieth century. It is, though, another novel by Lloyd that best brings the present phase of our discussion to a conclusion. As its title suggests, Scarlet Nest is, beneath all its period flummery and deployment of the customary rhetorical conventions of romance, a serious attempt to address two issues of great importance to Nonconformity at the beginning of the twentieth century: its relationship to the rise of the working-class socialist movement and its response to the ‘New Woman’. Nest, the dark, passionate, ‘natural’ woman of conventional romance, is regarded by stalwarts of the chapel as a ‘Scarlet Woman’, while the narrative also links her, through the challenge she represents to conservative religion, with the red of socialism. The portrait offered of exotic Nest Rhys, local girl from an industrial valley turned star of the London opera stage, is revealing of the complexities of feeling such a turbulent new ‘type’ aroused even in the minds of ‘progressives’ like Lloyd himself. She is by turns sexually compelling and infantile, the life she lives

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being escapist and regressive but also excitingly liberating. She is the partly enticing, partly threatening woman of the future, yet is viewed as a throwback to the ‘pagan’, Silurian past of Wales. Although deep, the mutual passion that develops between her and the young, liberal minister of Soar Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, Gwilym Howell, is doomed to failure, as in the end Nest loses out, again in conventional romance fashion, to the gentle, fair-haired, chapel-going Gwenllian (Gwennie), who is stirred partly by Nest’s impulsive example to quietly heroic rebellions of her own against the bigotry of her background. In its treatment of the emerging struggle between socialism and Calvinism, Scarlet Nest is interesting not least for its specific acknowledgement of its debt to Change.29 Francis’s play is recommended to Gwilym by the militant, coolly rational socialist miner Owen John as an instance of how art (represented more irresponsibly in the novel by Nest) is now better equipped than religion to offer ethical insights into the intolerable conditions of industrial living. In this sense, Lloyd’s novel anticipates that shift from preacher to writer that will be considered at length in the next section of this study. And it concludes with an indictment of the part the chapels played, through their ‘business’ alliance with Liberal politics, in bringing about the Great War that was effectively to shatter their hold on Wales. Owen John further astonishes Gwilym by his assertion that, far from being a workers’ institution, the chapels have become the preserve of small businessmen and petty capitalists, and the fiefdom of the Liberal Party. Confirmation of John’s accusation comes when the sour ageing deacons of Gwilym’s chapel, the old dispensation, vote to expel him because of his engagement to Nest and his proposal to allow the socialists (with whose politicized language of confrontation he does not agree) to use the chapel as a meeting place. Gwilym consequently establishes a rival chapel of his own, founded on the teaching of a gospel of love, tolerance and forgiveness. Implicit in this development is Lloyd’s hope that a young post-war generation of members and ministers may effect a rapprochement with socialism. The alternative, which Lloyd clearly dreads, is that not only will the moderating social power of the chapels wane but the unions will become militant and socially disruptive. In short, Lloyd’s text, for all its shortcomings as fiction, offers a valuable audit of the state of Nonconformity at the pivotal moment when its nineteenth-century dominance was rapidly fading and its very different twentieth-century history was about to begin.

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*** In his 1924 collection The Legend of the Welsh, J. O. Francis reflected contritely on the way in which the leading pre-war dramatists of Wales, in both Welsh and English, had somewhat overdone ‘our indictment of the deacon’, to the point of making him a stock figure of ridicule on the Welsh stage.30 At that time, he shrewdly noted, ‘in all that concerned industry and religion there was . . . the age-long conflict between the power that waxes and the power that wanes’ (LW, p. 57). Dramatists were responding to what a once heroically libertarian puritanism had become, as outward form began to be honoured more than inner spirit. ‘To criticize Nonconformist Puritanism is not to attack religion,’ he insisted. ‘It might as well be said that to criticize the organization of the Liberal Party is to undermine the principle of political liberty the wide world over’ (LW, p. 58). What had been objected to was simply ‘the sovereignty of an organization’ (LW, p. 58). Now, with the war over, Francis called for a truce between dramatist and deacon, while calling the attention of the former to ‘the folk spirit’ of Wales as a valuable resource (LW, p. 60). His is a fascinating discussion, anticipating virtually every feature of the response that English-language poets and fiction writers of the next generation were to make to Wales and its Nonconformist inheritance. The irony is, of course, that the struggle that Francis the dramatist analysed so perceptively, thinking it was already over and done with, had, as we shall see, as yet barely begun in the fields of fiction and poetry.

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WRITER’S WOR(L)D The chapel has been a characteristic part of our idiom . . . no nation has come nearer to being a theocracy, a people in vassalage to its preachers . . . There is not a single artist in Wales today who, in his earliest years, was not made more aware and communicative by the cult of self-expression developed in the teeming vestries of our valleys. Gwyn Thomas, A Welsh Eye

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4 War of Words: The Preacher and the Writer

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‘I was born, the first child and only son of my parents, on the first of January, 1879, in the parish of Llwchwr, in a village called Rhosfelyn; the Great Western Railway had in 1852 rechristened it Gower Road, a name my father later got changed to the hybrid Gowerton.’1 That is the opening sentence of Free Associations: Memories of a Psycho-analyst. The author was Ernest Jones, one of the earliest and most cherished of the disciples of Sigmund Freud, whose biography in due course he wrote. Jones was not only born but raised in Gowerton, an industrial township in the Swansea hinterland where a blue plaque adorns his old home, directly overlooking what is now the disused railway line. It was very much in use in Jones’s time, and this key product of the new industrial age that had produced Gowerton provides an appropriate setting for the birth of one who would become a pioneer of new ways of thinking about human being. Likewise, his father’s success in having Jones’s natal town renamed ‘Gowerton’ conveniently prefigures the transformative power of the new descriptive, analytical and explanatory language Jones and his colleagues were to pioneer. Travel just two miles or so north west of Gowerton and you come to Loughor, an ancient borough turned industrial town ‘immortalised’, as the Revd D. M. Phillips rather grandly put it, as the launch pad of the 1904–5 ‘Diwygiad’.2 The charismatic leader of this last great Welsh Revival, Evan Roberts, was born in Island House, Bwlchymynydd, on the banks of the Loughor estuary. The estuary features one of the highest tidal swells in the world – a convenient symbol for the startling transformation Roberts himself was to produce, however briefly, throughout

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Wales. Strikingly, Evan Roberts was born just six months earlier than Ernest Jones. The pair could therefore scarcely have been geographically closer, nor more exact contemporaries. And yet they were to become complete mental strangers to each other, dwellers in totally different conceptual universes. From the exact same locality, they came, as adults, to inhabit mutually hostile cultural worlds, and these worlds effectively represented dramatically different eras. Evan Roberts’s Revival, however spiritually restorative and dynamically transformative it may have seemed at the time, appears in retrospect to have been the last dramatic gesture of a once hegemonic Nonconformist culture on the threshold of dwindling to a residual state. By contrast, the secular rationalism underpinning Jones’s analysis of the human psyche now seems the hallmark of an emergent culture, of which he himself was to be a fervent prophet and preacher. One omen of what was to come appeared in the form of the group of psychopathologists sent from Paris to investigate the extraordinary Welsh phenomenon of the Evan Roberts revival. As their presence indicates, the shift from Roberts to Jones, from one culture to another, entailed a change of language necessary for effecting a change of ideology – a change of language not only from Welsh to English but also from a religious discourse to a ‘modern’ discourse of an altogether different kind. This is very apparent, for instance, in J. Rogues de Fursac’s study, Un Mouvement Mystique Contemporain. Deeply sympathetic though he was to a phenomenon he had witnessed at first hand and had understood to be the unique product of a specific people moulded by a singular religious culture, Rogues de Fursac half regretfully saw in the Evan Roberts Revival the last gasp of a vanishing, primitive, pre-rational civilization.3 With characteristic shrewdness he noted that the vast majority of ecstatic converts were not only young and in their early sexual prime but also from a working class not as yet exposed to the state system of rational, predominantly secular, education. The middle classes in Wales that were indeed the recent product of this new system had, he observed, held scrupulously aloof – and the ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writers of the coming generation were, of course, to be the first children of the Welsh working class to follow that educational route to social advancement. That the old intellectual elite of the Welsh ministry was beginning to be challenged by a new secular intellectual elite produced by the great Education Acts of the latter part of the nineteenth century was already apparent to the perceptive in the 1890s. A leading Nonconformist of the day noted that ‘the Welsh

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pulpit is out of touch with an interesting section of the people who know more and think more than the preachers themselves’.4 As a new century dawned this process accelerated very rapidly. In A Welsh Eye Gwyn Thomas noted how ‘The chapels filled our early lives. Culturally and educationally they competed with the State schools.’5 The schools won out; but the culture of Evan Roberts had left its mark. ‘Few writers exposed to the more powerful myths of South Wales life’, wrote Thomas, can fail to be attracted by the name and mystery of Evan Roberts, the evangelist. He still rattles about inside the sounding shell of our experience. He came roaring out of the West, his own conscience on fire, and left a multitude of minds charred and astonished.6

The psycho-cultural struggle involved in the process of displacing Nonconformist culture can usefully be figured as parricidal. In Freud’s terms, it was a transformative moment in the ‘Family Romance’ of the Welsh. His most famous contemporary follower, Ernest Jones, would have understood this well. Indeed, his very own life offers a striking example of the anxiety and guilt involved. After rejecting his mother’s Anglicanism, he next fatally undermined, or so he came to fear, his first wife’s sustaining faith. While struggling to establish himself in London as a psychoanalyst, Jones had married none other than the toast of Welsh Nonconformity, Morfydd Llwyn Owen. Pretty and precociously talented, she had already acquired a legendary reputation as pianist, singer and composer and was made an Associate Professor of the Royal Academy of Music when she was only twentyfour. Possibly jealous of his wife’s abilities, Jones seems to have been oppressively patriarchal in his condescending attitudes. Theirs was to be a brutally short marriage. Having undergone emergency treatment at Swansea for appendicitis, Morfydd died quite suddenly from chloroform poisoning. As a doctor, Jones knew that lack of sugar due to wartime rationing had contributed to her death. He blamed himself for not having insisted on buying the box of chocolates they’d seen in a shop window shortly before she was taken ill. Turning Jones’s own psychoanalytic methods back on himself (as he both attempts and invites us to do), it is however possible to view the deeper root of his remorse rather differently. His irrational episode of guilt may be understood as involving the displacement of another, deeper, unease about his treatment of his wife. He wrote in his autobiography:

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Her faith and devotion, so admirable when related to her country and her people, were also unfortunately attached to very simple-minded religious beliefs, and it was at first a great grief that I did not share them. This had also its practical inconveniences, since she wished to attend her Church services, and even Sunday School, on the Sabbath, whereas I had long been in the habit of devoting that day to worship of the country. As time went on, however, love began to tell, and her ideas broadened. As may be imagined, my notion of adjustment in such matters consists in persuading the other person to approach my view of them, and that is what gradually and painlessly happened. (FA, p. 254)

Was the crusadingly atheistical Jones perhaps stricken by guilt at having so recently unmoored his wife from her Nonconformist anchorage? And was he right to be tormented by such remorse? Could Morfydd Llwyn Owen indeed have been the unwitting, inadvertent victim of an emergent culture’s aggressive war on the fading religious culture that had nurtured her? Significantly, perhaps, he associated his love for Morfydd retrospectively with his intense attachments to his mother and corresponding antagonism to his father. And a further aspect he underlines of the psycho-drama of his own marriage was that Morfydd seemed to him overly attached to her religiously devout father (FA, p. 54). Consequently, in his view, she resisted ‘deserting’ him even for someone like her husband. Jones goes on to record the old man’s subsequent response to the loss of his daughter: How I pitied Morfydd’s father, a devout believer, in [his] struggle! Poor man, death took from him his wife and all his children, his darling daughter and two sons, within the space of a year. Even his religion broke under the strain. After all, the belief in God owes much of its value to the expectation that He will protect and comfort in critical situations affecting our loved ones. (FA, pp. 255–6)

Ernest Jones’s interpretation of his marriage was, then, (guiltily?) steeped in his acute sensitivity to his own double act of parricide. One further strikingly prefigurative coincidence is worth noting. The year of Evans Roberts’s birth, 1878, also saw the birth of Caradoc Evans, the soi-disant father of modern Anglo-Welsh literature and the great self-appointed scourge of Welsh Nonconformity. Judged by its influence, at least, the founding text of twentieth-century Welsh writing in English remains Evans’s My People (1915), a notorious collection of

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stories exemplifying the ‘liberating’ shift in culture and change of language that brought modern Wales into being. Raised in rural west Wales, the very heartland of Nonconformity, Evans repeatedly exhibits in My People his parricidal hatred of his natal culture. The best stories are those in which this primal drama most powerfully reassumes its original raw, stark, naked form. Take the most anthologized story of all, ‘Be This Her Memorial,’ Evans’s violent reworking of such key forms of Nonconformist commemoration as the funeral address and the graveyard epitaph. In a form defensively disguised yet in essence piercingly clear, its plot outlines an archetypal psycho-cultural struggle. In order to buy the departing Respected Revd Josiah Bryn-Bevan the precious gift of a tawdrily grandiose, garishly illustrated bible, old Nanw sacrifices everything she has – food, clothing, her humanity, her life. Reduced to bestiality, she dies of starvation with a roasted rat clutched in her withered paws. She has fallen victim to The Word, in an obvious parody of the act of selfsacrifice on which the Christian faith is founded. For her, the preacher has become a divinized being. She worships him as her Father in the Faith. But the situation has disturbing psychological reverberations, because it was Nanw who had actually brought Bryn-Bevan into the world. Since it was she who had acted as midwife at his birth, ‘even Josiah’s mother was not more vain than old Nanni’.7 In effect, she is the minister’s surrogate mother; and so Bryn-Bevan is guilty of virtual matricide. The whole narrative is an unspeakable chapter from Freud’s Family Romance completed through the verbal enactment, by an outraged author who identifies with Nanw, of murderous revenge on the dictatorial representative figure of Nanw’s culture: the patriarchal minister. As is well known, Evans entertained early the belief that his mother had fallen victim to the baleful bigotry of chapel deacons. One reason, as we shall see, why Evans so strongly appealed to the following generation of writers, was that he had broken one of the ultimate taboos, the killing of the father, and the primal psychosocial drama featured in his writing was to be obsessively revisited, and reenacted, by successors who were to invoke him as their (alternative) cultural progenitor. Evans authorized his literary sons to challenge and overthrow ‘legitimately’ established authority. He was, in effect, the author of the numerous acts of cultural parricide performed by later Welsh writers. Prominent among them was Dylan Thomas, whose pilgrimage to Aberystwyth to visit his literary parent may be regarded as the equivalent, in its way, of Mary Jones’s famous historic tramp to

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Bala over a century earlier to beg the Methodist leader Thomas Charles for a bible. *** The psycho-cultural struggle instanced in Caradoc Evans’s writing was also a class struggle between a waning intelligentsia of preachers and an emergent intelligentsia produced by the new largely secularized educational system noted by Rogues de Fursac. Prominent among the latter were the Anglo-Welsh writers. Because this was a struggle in language over control of language, their texts did not simply passively reflect it, they were themselves a seminal part of it. By virtue of their form and language they participated in the very struggle between discourses and ideologies which they also, on occasions, dramatically depicted as a direct encounter between artist and minister. The euphoria of the outcome, the jubilation of liberation, sings in some of the writing. Keidrych Rhys’s periodical Wales, the powerhouse of the cultural revolution attempted by the thirties generation of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writers, proudly blazoned one reviewer’s comment: ‘I like its note and courage. It is easily the best thing that has come out of Wales. It is nice to look at a list of contributors without a Parch [minister].’8 Yet even Rhys, the turbulent priest of this new religion, could concede that ‘perhaps the professional poet-stance is respected [in Wales] because so often he is disguised as a parson [Rhys clearly means to include Nonconformist clergy]’, although he can’t resist adding ‘the very antithesis of ap Gwilym and poetry’ (W, p. 247). We shall return in chapter 6 to this liberationist strategy of invoking a pre-Nonconformist Wales. But, as will also appear in later parts of this study, liberation didn’t come easily, nor could be there a clean break. ‘Her father’s voice’, wrote Rhys Davies of one of his characters, ‘boom[ed] into her as though it was the very voice of God issuing from a mountainous altitude of rock and snow.’9 As for T. Harri Jones, that most tortured of products of ‘the huddled nonconformist hills’ where he’d felt ‘the presence of the ancient thunderer / Cloudy with terror of his images’, he knew himself as a writer to be verbally branded and scarred by his rebellion: ‘And yet with bitter competence of tongue / We crow the hymns our fathers proudly sang.’10 When entitling one of his collections The Colour of Cockcrowing, Jones intended both a joyous phallic tribute to Dylan Thomas with his colour of saying and a darkly self-accusatory allusion to Peter’s betrayal of Christ. All his life, he knew himself to be from ‘the land

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where every wind / Is the breath of guilt’, and that this land, alas, was ‘home’ (CP, p. 180). Attempting to purge this guilt through a scathing indictment of Nonconformity’s many sins, he finds himself concluding with the rueful reflection: ‘Look on this gallery, boy, and wonder / What these, your ancestors would think of you’ (CP, p. 123). Paradoxically, he knows himself to be most irrevocably at one with these ancestors when he is most the libertine and promiscuous libertarian. Jones knew precisely from whom the native language of his very being as man and poet had come. His remarkable poem ‘For my grandfather’ confesses as much. Wanting to ‘ballad the idiom of my ancestry’, he invokes his true patriarchal Muse, ‘the beginning men on the hills of speech’(CP, p. 190). It is a powerful recognition of how as poet he has been formed in their image. In their chapel words was his beginning. Jones sees how their speaking had so landscaped his early development as to have become for ever the country of his creative mind. They were ‘Old pulpitwalkers’ and they it was who ‘brought me . . . to this talking’ (CP, p. 190). In Kristeva’s terms, his entry into the symbolic order was ‘sermoned among their troubled consonants / On Allt-y-Clych’ (CP, p. 190). The beautiful Welsh name significantly means ‘slope of bells’. So forever after ‘the tongued wind turns the pages of a Bible / To mark my birthday in Llanafanfawr.’ He goes on to regret that he had not inherited the old people’s faith with their language, that ‘No fire spoke to me out of a thornbush’, but had instead taken himself off (as sailor and as poet) ‘to the great waters’ (CP, p. 190). His escape, however, proved illusory. He may ultimately have ‘Rhymed in the antipodes of language’ (the reference is partly to the Australia where he ultimately settled and died), but he never really escaped the thrall of his native vocabulary. Like ‘antithesis’, ‘antipodes’ implies its own polar opposite, and is held in place by its relation to it. The whole poem brilliantly analyses and exemplifies the hegemonic aspect of discourse, an aspect to which we shall return in chapter 5. It was, indeed, for Jones ‘the nonconformist ghost’ and he accepted it was futile for him even to attempt to exorcize it (CP, p. 62). As for the ‘antipodean’ nature of any challenge to that ghost, Gwyn Thomas understood the phenomenon only too well. As a boy, he’d alternated, like a yo-yo, between ‘libertarian fumbling’ and the ‘hot sirocco’ of evangelism.11 ‘Magnetised by both factions’, he’d ‘jumped like a grasshopper, back and fore between the charms of sin and that of redemption’ (FSE, p. 145). Nor had the adult left this early proclivity entirely behind. ‘A long part of the flow of my mind’,

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he remarked in High on Hope, ‘is made up of those marathon stints of piety that were the cultural paving stones of a Rhondda boyhood.’ In consequence, ‘even now the Sabbath catches me in alternating postures of enthusiasm, alarm, and sadness’ (HH, p. 64). The mythopoeic hyperbole of a born comic fantasist, perhaps, but then the fantasy itself was born of his early exposure to Nonconformity, as we shall later see. And the post-war Thomas had become somewhat disillusioned with the secular society of an increasingly hedonistic, consumerist Rhondda that had ‘never had it so good’. Discussing the swaggering antics of Jimmy Savile, a cult television performer of the day, he acidly depicted him as ‘so enchanted by the progress of his own fulfilment that there are now Messianic hints in his message’. However, he sadly forgave him because ‘there is a hunger in the souls of men and Jimmy Savile is the morsel that gives it comfort. Never have the needy sheep, expecting food, had to alter so little the angle of the expectant neck’ (HH, p. 50). *** In the context of Jones and Thomas’s experience of the hegemonic influence so tenaciously exerted by Nonconformity, ‘discourse’ is a crucial term. Modern sociolinguistics, and subsequently modern textual criticism, are the result of a ‘linguistic turn’ resulting in ‘discourse theory’. This theory derives from an insight fundamental to the last century: language does not so much reflect thinking as significantly fashion it. In Wittgenstein’s celebrated aphorism, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’ As thinking beings we are not only the producers but the products of the words we speak. ‘Language’ in this context does not only mean the major semiotic systems we know as Welsh, English, French and their like. It also includes all the distinct usages of language within those larger systems – the range of ‘discourses’ of which every primary system in practice consists. These discourses are of varying social reach and power, and the discourse which establishes the tone and sets the parameters of thought and values of mainstream society in any given period, thereby silently controlling it, is known as a ‘dominant discourse’, or alternatively as a ‘regnant discourse’. As Foucault demonstrated, dominant discourses are the inscription of a knowledge and thus inscriptions of power. The struggle of Wales’s new English-language writers was, therefore, part of the struggle over the ‘dominant discourse’ of modern Wales, and it necessarily involved the ousting of the nineteenth-century ‘dominant discourse’

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of Nonconformity. ‘Struggle’, in this connection, means ‘the process whereby social groupings with different interests engage with one another’.12 It is a power-struggle for social control, and it takes place both within discourse and behind it. As the sociolinguist Norman Fairclough has put it, ‘discourse is the site of power struggles and, in terms of power behind discourses, it is the stake in power struggle – for control over orders of discourse is a powerful mechanism for [gaining and maintaining] power’ (Language and Power, p. 74). There is no doubt who were the governors of discourse, the lords of language, and therefore the power-brokers in nineteenth-century Wales. The chapel ministers were indisputably the age’s ‘choice dealers in words’.13 No nation, said Gwyn Thomas, ‘has come nearer to being a theocracy, a people in vassalage to its preachers’ (WE, p. 25). ‘The chapel’, he tellingly added, ‘has been a characteristic part of our idiom.’ He well understood whose ‘language’ it was he himself had grown up speaking: ‘the great dynasty of preachers shaped our soul and established the rules of our not inconsiderable rhetoric’ (WE, p. 27). Rhetoric indeed. So many of the rebellious English- language writers of Wales were envious of the incomparable oratorical power of the great preachers in whose shadow, they felt, they feebly wrote. For them one word encapsulated it all: hwyl. ‘The rhetoric from the start was hot,’ wrote Thomas of one irresistible performer, ‘and the sermon would end in a spurt of howling shamanism, an ecstatic lycanthropic baying at the non-conformist moon. This was called hwyl or the spirit, except by anthropologists who just sat and took notes.’14 That anthropologist is the writer’s alter ego. As we shall see, modern anthropology was to combine with psychoanalytical theory to provide Welsh writers in English with new discourses; useful tools for distancing and coolly dissecting the otherwise perennially threatening power of Welsh Nonconformity. Thomas recognized how perfectly controlled and orchestrated the preachers’ apparently spontaneous verbal combustions actually were: ‘The hwyl was a miniature ballet of acted hopes and terrors, as precise as a bullfight in its rhythm of recession, advance, challenge, and triumph.’ Here Thomas’s education in Spanish allows him to ‘place’ incendiary Welsh Nonconformity in a safer, broader, international context. It is a rhetorical move, another necessary distancing device, at once self-protective and aggressive. Thomas readily conceded the gravitational power of these convulsive chapel experiences, their capacity to cause a seizure in several senses of the word – to trigger paralysis by seizing possession of the rational mind and individual will. Even more

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dangerous for one of Thomas’s temperament was the preparative of hwyl, the orgy of congregational hymn-singing known as a Gymanfa Ganu. In Meadow Prospect Revisited he recalls Percy, a drunk who would become emotionally transformed on these occasions. ‘He had a big, inaccurate voice which he flung at the hymn like a boulder’, as if he were warding off this demonic music in the very process of yielding to it completely. ‘During these sessions’, Thomas notes, ‘he was at the heart of an emotional storm. He would cry and sob and rescue names from corners of his shattered past’ (MPR, p. 44). It was a threat with which Thomas was obviously familiar from personal experience: the threat of infantile regression, of the prostrating, humiliating return of the repressed. As we shall see, modern psychoanalysis, as well as anthropology, was to offer writers like him alternative forms of secular discourse vitally necessary for their purposes. Like Odysseus’ moly, these secular discourses were a protective token, allowing writers of Thomas’s generation to venture into the dark cavernous underworld of their personal and cultural past. *** Another writer in need, from time to time, of the reassurance of protection against the potent discourse of Nonconformist culture was Rhys Davies. He thrilled, but also shuddered, to the tribal memory of John Elias’s extraordinary dramatic effects. ‘Prior to one meeting he had candles so arranged in the chapel that during his sermon on Belshazzar’s Feast the black shadows of his twitching fingers could write those words of dreadful doom on the whitewashed walls. On another occasion he described God speeding an arrow into the heart of evil and the congregation swerved apart to escape the weapon’s passage’ (SW, p. 24). In My Wales Davies anatomised his country’s state during the dreadful depression years of the 1930s. One sure index of the terrible lassitude of the Valleys communities in his native Glamorgan was the failure of a stump lay preacher to muster up even a token audience: standing on a street corner he ‘shouted from his memories of revivalism, but gained not one ear’.15 True, the writer found one exception to the grim rule of social despair. A local chapel was hosting Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the last of the great Welsh preachers, a Harley Street specialist turned celebrated evangelist. Unlike the sermons of the earlier Revivalists, those of Lloyd-Jones were highly intellectual but nonetheless irresistible to the masses. He packed the chapels. ‘The ground

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floor seethed in slow, awful movements of wedged humanity. The enormous gallery, which ran all round the building, steamed with bodies that were piled up to the walls in a warmth that was stifling’ (MW, p. 118). As Davies acidly remarks, ‘A pie could have been cooked nicely in the warmth.’ It is important for the total effect of Davies’s carefully constructed scenario that he register at this point the spiritual and human momentousness of the occasion: he wants to emasculate Nonconformity at its most potent. Exiting the chapel, Davies is approached by a man whom he shrinkingly mistakes for a chapel official ‘coming to try and induce me to be “saved”, as others had tried to induce me in my youthful Rhondda days. Not so’ (MW, p. 121). Instead, the man jokingly observes ‘I suppose we’ll find all this in your next novel,’ adding of the sermon that ‘as a Welshman it held and roused me, but as another man it left me cold’. It is for Davies a revelatory distinction; proof of a welcome generation gap, a culture shift. ‘These Welsh’, he concludes with evident satisfaction, ‘are new people now’ (MW, p. 121). And as the remark about his novels is meant to imply, it is Davies the writer who is the (new) ‘man’ for this ‘new people.’ The whole scene has been cunningly crafted as secular allegory. Davies is, to so speak, trumping the preacher, excelling him at the art of turning story to his own advantage. As, however, the allegorical scenario clearly suggests, for deeper, more complex, forms of rhetorical victory over Nonconformity, Davies had always to turn to his most potent weapon: fiction. Before leaving Davies for the moment, it’s worth noting one other encounter he has with chapel culture in My Wales. Again recalling the incomparable ‘one-man performances’ staged by nineteenth-century preachers ‘from ugly platforms of sham oak, in buildings bleak as workhouses’ (MW, p. 148), he emphasizes how theirs was a species of (religious) drama. In the context of comparing the emotions stirred by hwyl to those found in the intensest moments of Hamlet and Lear, and of regretting the passing of the great actor-preachers, he nostalgically reflects on how ‘the moderns are certainly taking away from the chapel its old theatre. And the chapels are emptying’ (MW, p. 155). The Welsh histrionic instinct is nevertheless still alive and well, its new outlet being the amateur dramatic societies thriving in every chapel vestry, and the work for professional theatre of an emerging generation of Welsh writers of English drama. These were, of course, kin and parallel to the emergence of Davies’s own generation of Welsh writers of poetry and fiction in English: these writers, too, regarded themselves as the secular heirs of the theatrical preachers as well as their supplanters.

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Like many Welsh writers of his time, Davies was a connoisseur of the ‘magic’ of the great preachers (MW, p. 158). He lumped them together with secular writers such as himself. They were ‘all children of Merlin, magically transforming ourselves into somebody – or something – of advantage to us’ (MW, p. 144). Drawing on the myth of an ancient Wales, potently rooted in a mysterious pre-Nonconformist, not to say pre-Christian, culture, he figures his people as fired by Idealism, imagination, isolation in a mountainous land – these create dreams and fantasy and the desire to be something we’re not . . . We have intuitive knowledge of other people’s characters and can slip into their skins and out again. Hence the Welshman’s reputation of being a wily, fishy cove, elusive as an eel, difficult to catch and dissect (MW, p. 142).

Davies is laying down the creative terms in which he can make peace and find common cause with his enemy, those mighty magicians the preachers who had preceded him as the grand artists of Wales. The chapels as the theatre of fantasy, the nursery of art. It is a rich perception, well worth our further attention. For the present, however, let us return to the sharp shock of aggressive encounter between preacher and writer in early twentieth-century Wales, and to the clash of discourses it entailed. In one very important sense, Caradoc Evans’s work is about nothing else. ‘We are what we have been made by our preachers and politicians, and thus we remain,’ he wrote bitterly in his essay on ‘The Welsh People’, attached as personal prologue to My Neighbours.16 It is a succinct summary of the insinuating, resourceful, irresistibly hegemonic power of Welsh Nonconformity as he experienced it. Evans’s style is short, stark and repetitive, rhetorically figuring his resentful sense of personal, cultural entrapment. His are the syntactical jabs and punches of one who knows he is facing an unbeatable opponent. His Foreword nevertheless attempts a full frontal attack on this enemy he unequivocally images as male: ‘Our God is a big man: a tall man much higher than the highest chapel in Wales and broader than the broadest chapel’ (MN, p. 3). Evans emphasizes the inescapable intrusiveness of this religion – his Big Brother God has ‘an eye at one of his myriads of peepholes, watching that we keep his laws’. It is the Welsh equivalent of Foucault’s panopticon, that ultimate instrument of surveillance at the dead centre of a society all of which is constantly under a single, central, hegemonic control.17

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T. Harri Jones was likewise to recall, with a shudder, the ‘violent unsleeping eye’ of his society’s God (CP, p. 5). No wonder readers feel Evans did nothing but compulsively rewrite the same, solitary, Cyclopic story all his life. Drawing repeatedly on the Bible to demonstrate the endless adventitious distortions of true doctrine by ruling Nonconformist theology, he represents the divinization of the preacher as a parody of the Incarnation: ‘God has favoured us greatly by choosing to rule over us preachers who are fashioned in his likeness and who are without spot or blemish’ (MN, p. 4). And while he goes on to demonstrate, as do his stories, how the ultimate aim of all these theological misprisions is social, economic and political power, the central thrust of his devastating exposé comes early: God is the author of Nonconformist language itself (MN, p. 4). It is the very language of the Almighty. The radical challenge facing Evans the author was what to make of this language. His answer was to master the specialized biblical jargon of religious discourse so as to fashion out of it his own mocking gargoyles of speech and character. Evans tracked his prey, those tribal lords of biblical language the preachers, all the way to their lairs. Of a Sunday, he would attend several services, stealthily moving from chapel to chapel. And like any good surveillance officer he kept careful notes. For all its air of being on the side of the angels, satire always enters into a Devil’s pact with its victims. Like any good satirist, Evans was obsessively in love with his target, as intimately knowing of it as any stalker with his prey. His journal during the Second World War has many such entries, all written in acid. One caustically records a minister ‘with a head of beautiful grey hair which he must brush morning noon and night’; another recalls a ‘preacher Methodist’ saying ‘“If you are sleepy, people, sleep . . . I will not say anything to startle you”’; on another occasion a deacon is heard scolding the Almighty – ‘“God bach, you are up to your old tricks again. Why don’t you stop having jokes with us now my hay is down and rotting . . . What a one you are!”’; Evans’s racism (also evident elsewhere) emerges as he observes how ‘praying Methodists . . . when they want Him to do something for them . . . wheedle Him and praise Him like Orientals’.18 All around him in wartime Evans, with sour satisfaction, found life imitating his stories. For him, the small farmers of rural Cardiganshire were cheats, profiteers – and ‘fifth columnists because they cause disaffection’ (MB, p. 157). It was satisfying. He loved living there, the secret Daumier of his locality. ‘It has been suggested’, he commented after a stray air attack on his neighbourhood, ‘that the Germans were after Caradoc Evans,

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since these were the first bombs dropped in Cardiganshire’ (MB, p. 154). Evans was out to explode bombs of his own. Cosily ensconced in Nonconformity’s heartland of west Wales, he was the fifth columnist in the midst of his neighbours. In a story pointedly entitled ‘The word’ he answered the hated preachers in their very own idiom, mimicking them to perfect mocking effect. Part of the consummate art of a histrionic preacher was to simulate presence at one of the Bible’s great theatrical events. In My Wales, Rhys Davies recalled being riveted by one such performance: I have myself seen a Calvinist minister act the part of Lot’s wife. And though he was whiskered, stiff-collared and frock-coated, the doomed woman stood there before me in all the terror of her flight. But she had to look back to the evil cities of the plain. A face full of greed, curiosity and horror swerved slowly before me, the protuberant eyes glistening with reflections of the flames; her hand rigidly shaded her brow. The heat of the burning cities was all about me. And there, yes, there in the pulpit a pillar of salt was stiffening! A kind of icicle stood stark there, a last halfobliterated sob could be heard as flesh was wholly changed into a rocky, grayish monument. (MW, p. 149)

As Evans shrewdly understood, in order to counter such a performance effectively it was essential not to parody it to the state of farce but to respect its sinister sublimity. His story has a mock Scriptural beginning: ‘According to the Word of Davydd Bern-Dafydd’.19 It is the minister, not the Lord, who is the Word of Life in this community, the Alpha and Omega of all who live therein. Moreover, the circularity, or self-referentiality of his name (‘Davydd Bern-Davydd’) linguistically figures the egotistic, narcissistic, claustrophobic nature of the mental universe in which we, along with the preacher’s congregation, will very shortly be nightmarishly trapped. He takes his text from the Gospel according to Luke, and very soon ‘Capernaum’ is mutating into ‘Capel Nain’ (in Welsh ‘grandmother’s chapel’). The chapel-littered landscape is sculpted out of the immediate Cardiganshire neighbourhood (‘the burial ground . . . measured more than from Shop Rhys to the tree on which Dennis sinned’, p. 19), slang idiom vivifies the scene (‘Natty were the stones over the graves. Come with me, little men, and peep at them we will’ [CS, p. 19]), rhetorical questions draw his rapt listeners in (‘who was he? Hap he had a shop draper or a walk mile [CS, p. 20]), and dialogue completes the drama (‘“Boys, boys”, he cries, “Are you waiting

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to see the funeral?”’ [CS, p. 26]). If we are thereby made immediate witness, along with the ‘congregation’, to a supposed event of two thousand years ago (appropriately enough, the biblical story itself is about the raising of the dead), we also see before our very eyes Caradoc triumphantly impersonating a preacher and appropriating his wor(l)d. In the process he is also implementing another aspect of the rhetorical strategy governing all his writing – demonstrating how the preacher, and therefore the writer, is in fact a traditional cyfarwydd, a great tribal story-teller, the creator of imaginative wonderlands. It is a point to which we shall return. Those who have mastered the dominant discourse are masters of their society. In Evans’s stories, it is not only the preachers who dominate; other men – and even women – quickly learn the arts of the master tongue to become the ‘big heads’ of their society. For Scripture as ‘the Word’ they substitute the Bible as the ‘Book of Words’ (MB, p. 73). The title of a late novel, Morgan Bible (1943), neatly makes the point: the book is the man, the man is the book. As always in Evans’s writings, the flesh is made Word. He gives us the picaresque adventures of a resourceful scoundrel, as inexhaustibly inventive as he is murderous; the result is a comically sinister pilgrim’s progress. Married to an outrageous ‘ham’ in his second wife, Marguerite, the inveterate sermontaster Caradoc loved the bravura theatricality of disreputable ‘pray-ers’ and preachers such as ‘B.A.’ in this novella (the initials a parody, of course, of the university degrees sported by the ministers of the day). B.A. melodramatically conjures up a ‘very dark night on a mountain. In the sky they were chaff cutting snow into slabs of an ox’s eyes and a poor dab of a preacher was stablanning through it’ (MB, p. 34 ). That the neologism ‘stablanning’ comes from the colloquial Welsh ‘stablan’, meaning to trample muck underfoot, is almost immaterial. Its function is to enrich the exotic Evans sociolect and to suggest the raw physicality of his bestial world. He relished language with all the uninhibited appetite of a thoroughly bilingual autodidact. He lays it on thick, like impasto in painting – it is interesting to see him mention the Llangyfelach (Swansea) artist Evan Walters in a journal entry, since there are suggestive similarities beween Caradoc’s chunky basrelief of a text and the thick whorls of colour that constitute form in some of Walters’s pictures. In both cases, the obtrusive medium is itself the message. It is counterproductive to deconstruct Evans’s singular English into the gnarled syntax, deliberately mangled Welsh and fabricated ‘Welshisms’ out of which it is constructed. And it is equally

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wrong-headed to insist on treating it as if it were transparent – as if the discourse aspired to be a clear pane of glass for viewing a historic, socially objective ‘reality’. Evans’s glass is always thick bottle glass, a surrealistically distorting medium. The goggle-eye of his limited but undeniable genius was more akin to Tolkien’s, say, than to George Eliot’s. His fiction is about language itself – it has to be to achieve its intended purpose: the construction of an alternative discourse by means of an assault on the dominant religious discourse. *** This discursive engagement with Nonconformist discourse is specifically highlighted in many of Evans’s texts. At the beginning of his late novel Morgan Bible we enter a schoolhouse pointedly converted into a house for the chapel caretaker. There is still a board with the alphabet on it, and a list of key words. Here, at the very root of language, the genesis of word and world, we find ‘Duw’ (God), ‘Iesu Grist’ (Jesus Christ) promiscuously mingling with ‘arian’ (money), ‘buwch’ (cow), ‘cariadfab’ (suitor – ‘loveman’ in Evans’s incomparable idiom). In this lascivious, mercenary society these are interchangeable terms, the verbal currency of sordid social exchange. It’s a scene straight out of one of Bourdieu’s theoretical studies: the ‘symbolic capital’ of attachment to a powerful religion can be converted into the hard cash that accompanies the resultant social success.20 For Evans, however, the writing on the blackboard is also for this society the writing on the wall – that only he (and therefore we) can see. Because Nonconformity has its own invisible writing, as emerges in a scene where the murderous scoundrel Morgan is attempting to exercise his power: ‘Stand up!’ Bible shouted. ‘The Big Man is writing on blackboard ceiling. Read you . . . ’ The other three said they could see no writing. ‘Oof coorse not,’ said Bible. ‘He is writing with black chalk and you need the eye spiritual to see.’ (MB, p. 62–3)

It’s a fine moment, revelatory of the power of the elect who alone can read the secret script of this society’s god and who are specially skilled at manipulating its language to their own ends. Evans’s own writing is aimed at making this invisible script visible. His, too, is the writing on the wall – for this ‘Bible’ society.

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As the substituting of ‘oof’ for ‘of’ indicates, part of his method for X-raying the life of language/language of life in this strange world is to twist what is being said not out of but into true shape. It is Evans’s necessarily paradoxical way of making the winding straight. The method is apparent right at the very beginning of the first story in his first collection. In his evil cunning, the morally stunted Sadrach, ‘a Father in Sion’, is intent on persuading his family to allow him to relegate his ageing wife, Achsah, to a mental institution. To this end, he employs family prayer, a device allowing him to converse directly with his Almighty and to receive from Him the necessary advice. He turns himself into the mouthpiece of God. As his own name indicates, his is a society which draws its language of identity wholly and directly from the Bible, and which has used the holy book to name its landscape into holy life – villages as well as villagers are called by biblical names. Wales has become the Holy Land, physical proof that the Welsh are indeed the Chosen People. This is the society’s founding fantasy, its myth of origin and of being. So, speaking in its terms, Sadrach can claim to be a latter-day Welsh Job, condemned by God to unspeakable sufferings, such as sexual deprivation due to his wife’s exhaustion following the birth of eight children. The whole odious family uses the unconsciously self-revelatory vernacular Evans has so brilliantly invented out of chapel idiom: ‘My children, heard you all my prayer? Don’t you be blockheads now – speak out.’ ‘There’s lovely it was,’ said Sadrach the Small. ‘My children?’ said Sadrach. ‘Iss, iss,’ they answered. (MP, p. 50)

His children are nothing but the echo of Sadrach’s speech. Chips off the old blockhead indeed. And as the reducing of ‘yes’ to the hissing ‘iss’ suggests, this is a family morally reduced to crawling like the biblical serpent on its belly. The only exception is Achsah, whose sanity is, in this topsy-turvy world, inverted by Sadrach into insanity. Distraught at the death of two of her children, she is driven genuinely out of her mind by her treatment at the hands of her husband. Melodrama is the natural prevailing climate of this fiction; therefore by the end of the story Achsah has indeed become a ‘lunatic’. But immediately previous to this concluding scene, Evans shows her standing in poignant isolation in the graveyard: ‘She parted the hair that had fallen over her face, and

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traced with her fingers the letters which formed the names of each of her six children’ (MP, p. 55). Language again. Achsah’s is a futile attempt to unravel the mad language of her deathly world, to follow every letter, to trace words back to their source so as to bury not her dead but the monstrously living. And needless to add, Achsah at this point becomes the surrogate for her author, who uses words in order to undo the preachers’ malign language. As Evans said of the wartime Churchill: ‘we like him because he casts out devils with energy and vigour’ (MB, p. 136). Complete with barbed biblical reference, this is a perfect description of Evans’s own goals as an anti-preacher writer. Of course, with sly humour he preferred to represent his work as disinterring the aboriginal religious truths buried deep under the treacherous ground of Welsh Nonconformist society. He was the true preacher come to drive out the false, a theme neatly pursued in ‘The talent thou gavest’. Pivoting, like several of Evans’s stories, around a well-known biblical parable, the story tells of the poor innocent simpleton, Eben. His life as a shepherd is transformed when, abiding patiently in the fields, he hears the voice of God instructing him to dig in a particular corner where a very special gift has been buried. There he discovers a divine talent for preaching, which he proceeds to practise – to his cost. His misguided pulpit zeal in denouncing his congregation leads to a selfimposed ostracism he cannot stand. Tempted by the cash offer of a wily deacon, he returns to the field and reburies his talent. Thereafter he resumes preaching, but now in the accepted, acceptable manner, praising the chapel fellowship for its godliness in its unsparing pursuit of money. Sardonically, Evans styles Eben’s experience of ‘seeing the light’ of common day a religious conversion and ends the story with a demonstration of Eben’s recovery of (acceptable) speech. As for the Sadrachs that composed his mean-minded, money-mad congregation, only very rarely does Evans allow us to see the historical causes of their graspingness. Having risen in rebellion against those great extortionists, their aristocratic landlords, they had then fallen prey to the money-lenders from whom they had borrowed the cash to buy their small farms.21 There is always a dark comic edge to Evans’s writing. In an entertaining early novel, Nothing to Pay, Amos, a young rookie in training for the ministry, is dazzled by the bounteous flesh of Miss Florence Larney, an actress with a touring company. On the secluded banks of the river, she woos him with protestations that she has never heard a real preacher come to verbal climax in the throes of ’hool’. He meekly obliges:

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Amos recited sermon pieces which he had read in Box-Bible. He was haughty and tender; he cajoled, whispered, shouted, and sang; he acted the violent ardour and the gentle warmth of the pulpit spirit. The woman’s gaze was far up the river, where the water was consuming the prodigal caresses of the dying sun. She slid to the ground and took him into her arms. (NP, p. 74)

It’s a lively variation on a familiar theme: hwyl is associated with uncertainly sublimated sexual desire. However morose his contemplation of the antics of the pulpit, Evans was not above being jealous of the preachers’ priapic powers. His answer, as here, was to expose the secret eroticism of religious language and the uses to which it could resourcefully be put. Similar sexual traps for preachers were regularly sprung by the plots of other writers’ stories, such as ‘The dilemma of Catherine Fuchsias’ by Rhys Davies. Given where the narrative will shortly lead, it is difficult not to detect the outlines of a four-letter word in the flowery ‘surname’ suggestively bestowed on the Scarlet Lady by her neighbours. The narrative’s pivotal moment is when Mr Lewis, a respectable pious shopkeeper, is to be seen dead in bed, having passed away in flagrante in the arms of Catherine. The local Jezebel is indeed a gentleman-killer and her hasty cover story is elaborate: as Mr Lewis had been taken ill when innocently passing, she had solicitously helped him upstairs. Of the villagers, the one most anxious to be persuaded of the story’s truthfulness is the minister, Mr Davies, concerned to safeguard the chapel community’s respectable reputation. For confirmation, he calls on Catherine and is rewarded by a virtuoso performance as her narrative climaxes in hwyl. Not for nothing had she sat all these years in close attention to Mr Davies’s famous sermons, which drew persons from remote farms even in winter. And, as she rocked on her thick haunches and her voice passed from the throbbing of harps to the roll of drums, Mr Davies sat at last in admiration, the rare admiration that one artist gives to another.22

Much more complex, and interesting, is the sexually charged portrayal in another Davies story of Mr Jeb Watkin-Watkins, a fierily tyrannical evangelical minister. When testing the biblical knowledge of Arfon, a strange boy lost in his own weird mental world, the preacher becomes inflamed by the string of lewd Old Testament verses the boy innocently recites. Clearly, he is possessed by demons that need to be

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exorcised by furious whipping. Warming to his task, Watkin-Watkins works himself into a sexual ecstasy, while Arfon, too, experiences a Lawrentian blend of pain and heightened sensual pleasure (RD1, pp. 20–1). His only defence is to withdraw into the private world of his own peculiar, agonised, drawings: He began to draw . . . fanciful things out of the Bible – the tablets of Moses, the does of Solomon, and the strange beasts of St John the Divine. But his pictures of these were so queer that he made people either laugh or illtempered. (RD1, p. 22)

Davies himself had been aroused physically and artistically, as a youngster, by seeing Beardsley’s drawings of Salome and John the Baptist. The sinuous, insinuating lines seemed to him erotic in their liquefactions of the solid outlines of flesh. His exposure to these Art Nouveau designs had been part of his self-awakening, as a homosexual and as an artist. Through Arfon’s experiences he is clearly revisiting his own and, like Beardsley, producing the alternative bible of his own art by turning the Old Testament into a ‘dirty book’. For Davies, Beardsley’s images were means of destabilizing religious language, demonstrations of art’s ‘sea-slides of saying’, suggestive of the secret code of a subversive sensual cult. Mosaic tablets of stone, the young Davies had learnt, could become malleable as clay. There was another, analogous, turning moment in Davies’s own early life which he records not once, but twice, in his writings, recalling it as his Damascus moment as an artist. The Revd Meredith Morris was a local vicar. One Sunday, he arrested the youthful Davies’s attention by preaching on Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. The following Sunday he delivered a sermon passionately enquiring, ‘“Are we to believe that a loving God would want to smear shit on people’s faces?”’23 This won Nonconformists over from their grim chapels in droves. On Palm Sunday he painted before his congregation’s wondering eyes a brilliant picture of a crucifixion he’d seen hanging on the walls of the National Gallery. This trinity of sermons seemed to Davies holy. They were a liberation. And they left him ‘wanting to become a painter’ (PHF, p. 82). He had found his true religion, art. A preacher’s language had been magically metamorphosed into an artistic medium. ***

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Gwyn Thomas’s escape route was different. All Things Betray Thee is a novel about the transition from rural to early industrial Wales. It is concerned not only with mass migration from the north and west to the Merthyr area but also with the gradual difficult transformation of consciousness as a politically quiescent rural people are fused into the new politically sophisticated industrial collective of the proletariat. Through a stylized fiction, Thomas dramatizes the slow painful birth of this new consciousness, concentrating on the violent birth pangs known to history as the Chartist attack on Newport. This formative historical process is imaged throughout as the emergence of a new ‘music’ associated both with the oratory of the emergent working-class leaders and with the tunes that Alan Leigh, an itinerant harpist, plays on his harp. Clearly, Gwyn Thomas sees himself as an heir of Alan Leigh, and regards his novel as an attempt to produce new rhythms and melodies that will serve as the marching songs of a politically radical industrial collective. But Thomas well understands the hegemonic power of ideology – the way that the values of the exploitative classes insinuate themselves into the consciousness of the classes they control so that they come to seem ‘natural’ and so constitute ‘normality’ for the masses. Thus working class subordination is perpetuated. Such is the invisible power of hegemony that it becomes extremely difficult to envisage an alternative social order, let alone believe in the possibility of realizing it. Lying at the heart of all Thomas’s writing, this theme is given particularly potent, and at times despairing, expression in his mature work. In All Things Betray Thee the struggle against hegemony is symbolized in part by the struggle for control of Alan Leigh’s music between the ironmasters and their acolytes on the one hand and the emergent leaders of an emergent working class on the other. And one of the key acolytes of the ironmasters, and therefore one of the main instruments of hegemonic control, is the minister, Mr Bowen, whose preaching seeks to persuade the proletariat ‘that their talk is intemperate and apt to make a mountain of gloom out of a molehill of grievance’.24 In one scene which illustrates the socially repressive nature and power of Mr Bowen’s religious (and class) discourse the minister is addressing a crowd of restive workers. He is dressed in ‘a black suit that hung well on his body with lapels of a deeper jet that shone with a lovely intensity’ (ATBT, p. 104). At the sight of him it becomes clear to the watching Leigh that the listening crowd can be divided into two sections – the meek, respectable, ‘timid, amenable’ ones at the front and the inarticulately disaffected ones further back, ‘sick with a new unwelcome

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consciousness’ and in search of a language that will give form and expression to their inchoate dissatisfaction (ATBT, p. 105). Bowen elaborates on the conventional, significantly rural and traditionally conservative, trope of harvest as a time of communal effort. He exhorts his listeners – whom his discourse characterizes simply as ‘hands’ – to discharge their duties in the ironworks in the same spirit. When some of the more restive begin to mutter rebelliously, the order is given to play some of the great Nonconformist hymns. At this, notes Alan Leigh, ‘it was wonderful to me to watch the fervent melancholy that rose in them wring all boldness and earthly desire from their faces’ (ATBT, p. 107). He is at once fascinated and dismayed by ‘the glugging absorption of the singers’ (ATBT, p. 107). The whole scene makes one thing clear: in order to change the lives of these workers it will first of all be necessary to change their minds. This can only be done by seizing control of the language of the governing class and altering it. In other words, the scene – one of many of its kind in All Things Betray Thee – specifically dramatizes class war in terms of a struggle for dominance between discourses. Through Mr Bowen, Gwyn Thomas shows how the masters of traditional discourse are the allies of the ironmasters themselves. He speaks of ‘the conspiracy of Church and landlord, chapel and ironmaster’(ATBT, p. 144). Nonconformist preachers control the new proletariat as repressively as the managers of the great Cyfarthfa and Dowlais ironworks. A similar thrust of social insight may be found in one of Thomas’s short stories, ‘My fist upon the stone’. In its climactic scene, Abel, an inadequate young man incestuously attached to his mother, attends chapel while awaiting some sign from the pit manager that he has gained the promotion upon which his heart is cringingly set. The white-haired preacher’s sermon is a storm. Every time he shakes his lion mane and looks up he hears ‘murmurs of admiration rising like marshmist from the scores of upturned mouths’.25 Such a man could, the manager approvingly feels, ‘have thrived as a coal broker. A pair of eyes like that could be relied upon to paralyse even the amoral antics of the Coal Exchange.’ At sermon’s end, as Abel is carrying the heavy collection box back to the big seat, the manager tips him the wink. He has, indeed, got the job; the sermon has done its work; Abel is evidently safe in the arms of the dominant discourse. And as the preacher resumes his sermon and enters into hwyl, Abel sublimates his ecstasy at promotion into religious fervour. In All Things Betray Thee, it is the artist Alan Leigh who is given a key role in the struggle to replace the dominant discourse of the old

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exploitative order with a new discourse. By re-educating and liberating the minds of the proletariat, this will prime them for radical political action. And, of course, by making Leigh his surrogate, Thomas is suggesting the Anglo-Welsh writer can play a key role in the production and maintenance of this new, anti-clerical, discourse. This struggle over dominant discourse, conceived of in the class terms just outlined, lies at the heart of all of Gwyn Thomas’s work, plays quite as much as novels and short stories. A good example is Jackie the Jumper, a 1963 play about Jackie Rees (alias Jackie the Jumper), an anarchic rebel and dionysiac, neo-pagan figure whose wild liberated ways attract a popular following so that he comes to represent a threat to the powers of established society. In the kind of rhetorical move we shall examine more closely later in this study, Thomas utilizes the myth of a pagan, pre-Christian, priapic Wales, represented by the figure of Jackie. The setting is again the early industrial period, roughly the time of the Merthyr Rising, and again the work features a confrontation between a counter-cultural figure identified with a new, liberating discourse and the masters of the old social, political and of course discursive order. Once more, the struggle takes place in and over language. Jackie’s opposite and his discursive rival is his uncle, the popular evangelist, The Reverend Richie ‘Resurrection’ Rees. Gwyn Thomas is a master of a vitally important Anglo-Welsh myth: Nonconformity is the handmaiden of the ruling classes, from ironmasters and pit owners to managers and overmen and on to the militia and the police. As Jackie ruefully notes of the Reverend Rees’s power, ‘You’ve got them, uncle. You [and the ironmaster Luxton] have found the words, the mood, that put the snuffer on their dreams.’26 He refers to the duo as ‘Ironhead Luxton’ and ‘Resurrection Rees’ (TP, p. 103). The preacher’s language reinforces the brutally direct power of the owners and managers themselves, who ‘keep humanity so much on the hop no wonder the thing has got a chronic hernia’. The power of hegemonic discourse is vividly illustrated towards the end of the play in terms of the power of the Reverend Rees’s linguistic ability to mesmerize the people. Jackie, briefly come to power, chooses to take revenge on his uncle by sentencing him to preach interminably to a conscripted congregation. The audience will, so the Jumper is convinced, quickly tire and see the sermon’s vapidity. Instead, the Reverend Rees’s eloquence transports his listeners and transforms them into his zealous votaries. The confrontation between preacher and author, involving a conflict of discourses, is serially repeated in Thomas’s fiction. Its recurrence

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indicates its deep psychosocial significance for him. It is a confession of an abiding fear of never being able to nail the unquiet ghost of his Nonconformist past. The Dark Philosophers features the case of Reverend Emmanuel Prees, a poor young man enabled to prepare for the ministry by the calculating generosity of Mr Dolbie, a pit manager. Unwisely beginning his pulpit career with stirring attacks on the capitalist system, he suffers a nervous breakdown in consequence, after which he meekly preaches only the virtues of obedience to one’s social superiors. At the end of the novella he briefly recovers the resolution to preach the unspeakable social truth once again, but the risk involved agitates him so much he experiences a stroke, mid-sermon, in the pulpit. It is a complex parable, one of whose meanings is how psychically dangerous it is for Thomas himself to risk challenging the faith in which he was raised. As is said of the old religious fanatic Granch in his play The Keep, ‘If he could have found a bible big enough he would have had us inside drying like rose leaves.’ (TP, p. 33) The Bible is not a book to be trifled with. Such comments throw interesting light on the source and character of Thomas’s humour, hysterically funny not least because its tap root is sunk deep in psychic unease. He was certainly alive to the temerity of his undertaking. In Sorrow for Thy Sons an Apostolic rebukes the miner Alf for his ‘foul language’.27 Thomas’s writing was itself composed of ‘foul language’, thick with metaphor because ‘Metaphors were powder barrels of disaffection. They exploded under one’s nose’ (STS, p. 40) – a splendidly witty summary of the discursive demolition work on which he was engaged all his life. *** ‘There’s a service in the chapel to make us meek and mild.’28 It could be Gwyn Thomas but is Idris Davies, another writer from the industrial south. Like Thomas, he savaged the unholy alliance of Church and Capital: ‘To the glory of Mammon / Church, chapel, tavern, slag-heap all rose together.’ Both loathed the institutions they believed to have ruthlessly limited, not to say damaged, human potential. ‘Dark gods cursed my people’ (ID, p. 214), wrote Davies, and the result was a society engulfed in ‘barbarous gloom’. These savage powers demanded human sacrifice: men already slaving underground were made ‘the trembling slave[s] of theology’. Davies the regicide would depose the Calvin whom man had ‘enthroned in Heaven’ (ID, p. 214). His hatred, too, assumed gendered form. In ‘the brown and bare’ chapel he’d attended

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as a boy, granny had given him toffee but had failed to sweeten the preacher’s baleful message: he’d ‘toddled’ home at service’s end, A little troubled man within, And so afraid, afraid Jehovah Would burn [him] for some sin. (ID, p. 138)

Later, his fear turned into a parricidal anger to which his poetry acted as a burning-glass. Railing at a Wales that ‘was in the preacher’s pocket / Like a shilling watch gone wrong’ (ID, p. 186), he fiercely dreamt, as we shall see in a later chapter, of an alternative, man-centred gospel. Salvation, he was convinced, could only come from the kind of transformation of people’s imaginations a poet or artist alone could ignite. He fantasized about the fear he might one day induce in the minds of such as his ‘lay preacher’, who regarded a poet as a wild and blasphemous man; . . . Poets are dangerous men to have in chapel, And it is bad enough in chapel as it is With all the quarrelling over the organ and the deacons. (ID, p. 63)

Preachers Davies contemptuously believed to be lost in ‘the wilderness between the Word and the word’ (ID, p. 216). His wish was to play Moses and to lead his people out of that desert into the promised land the secular socialist word alone could deliver. With appropriate irony, he therefore described his transformative encounter with poetry in biblical terms: Now it came to pass, as they say in the Bible, That one of my books was full of poetry Written by a nice young man called Keats. (ID, p. 202)

It was the beginning of his radical re-education as a militant socialist. It wasn’t just Keats though. One of Davies’s most liberating encounters was with another writer, because his education was completed in the ‘city on the Trent . . . the land of D. H. Lawrence / And his savage Testament’ (ID, p. 83). ‘In Nottingham’ is an elegy for a poet whose song, Davies fervently believed, ‘shall echo / Down the dangerous centuries’:

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And out of the gloom comes a man Bearded like a Syrian god, A man of many sorrows, And tortured by a thousand passions That the waters of the Trent can never wash away. (ID, p. 186)

This Messianic Lawrence was indeed a man acquainted with grief – the kind of grief experienced by Davies himself. Many another chapelscarred Welsh writer of his generation was to look on Lawrence as a saviour who could deliver him from the evils of Nonconformist society. To read such early work by Rhys Davies as Rings on Her Fingers and The Withered Root is to realize how steeped it is in the work of Lawrence (whose friend he became). The Nottingham writer alerted him to the sado-masochistic nature of all powerful passionate relationships, particularly sex. The early Glyn Jones likewise found in Lawrence models for his own writing, as did Geraint Goodwin. Such self-identification is hardly surprising. Lawrence, too, was a chapel man of the working class who had rebelled, yet whose mature creative mind had stubbornly retained and reproduced, in its own extraordinary fashion, the deep structures of thought and experience of his early Nonconformist background. As for Gwyn Thomas, though, it was not to Lawrence but to Dylan Thomas he looked for deliverance from his grimly chapel-haunted past. An extraordinary lyrical section of A Welsh Eye invokes Dylan, too, as a man of sorrows. Originally painted by Augustus John as ‘a radiant youth’, a ‘handsome paladin’, he later acquired ‘a face . . . conscious of all the world’s setting suns. The eyes are big, sad, deathcharged and wise almost beyond reason’ (WE, p. 94). For Gwyn Thomas, his namesake Dylan was a ‘folk-figure’, ‘ a piece of twentiethcentury Welsh mythology’, important because he ‘was a sort of living revenge on all the restrictions and respectabilities that have come near to choking the life out of the Welsh mind’. Crucially, he had enabled ‘the restoration of joy to a people who for years had taken their religious sanctions too grimly and their pleasures too grossly’ (WE, p. 95). We glimpse here Gwyn Thomas’s terror, as writer, of being trapped between the similarly empty extremes of chapel and of pub. Dylan Thomas, his ideal alter ego, was important to him because he succeeded in ‘turn[ing] the most decisive back in Welsh history’ on this double bind (WE, p. 97).

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*** Another writer deeply indebted, in his struggle against the powerful word of the preacher, to Dylan Thomas was T. Harri Jones. He felt a strong personal and cultural need to Adam the world into new verbal being. But, unlike his hero Dylan, he experienced himself simultaneously as pre-lapsarian and post-lapsarian. In an extraordinary succession of poems, the young Jones rewrote Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ obsessively, because it so perfectly yet tormentingly fitted the paradigm of his own desired being. It was as if he hoped to write ‘Fern Hill’ spontaneously anew, word by word, so that it became as much his as Dylan Thomas’s. It reminds one of the celebrated case of Borges’s Pierre Menand, whose wish ‘was not to compose another Quixote – which is easy – but the Quixote itself’.29 Through phrases echoing other famous Thomas texts, each of Jones’s poems also becomes a kind of microcosm of Thomas’s poetry as a whole, an alternative textual universe in which Jones takes refuge in order to gather his poetic strength. Jones’s poems are a Thomas textual conserve, as it were, so desperate is Jones for poetic reinforcement. And why? Because Dylan Thomas was for T. Harri Jones what Caradoc Evans had been for Dylan Thomas: a saviour to whom he looked for deliverance from his Nonconformist inheritance; a writer who offered him a rich lexicon of experience excluded from Nonconformist discourse. The ‘humped’ hill country of mid-Wales (the adjective, suggestive of deformation, is imported from ‘After the funeral’) had for ever fatefully shaped Jones in its harshly beautiful image. His impossible struggle was to separate the harshness from the beauty – impossible because he ultimately knew that for him the only entry to the landscape could be through the dark chapel door. Nature could therefore provide no mental exit from childhood religion itself. Chapel belief was far easier to leave behind than chapel mentality. Surveying ‘the colours / of time,’ ‘Poem’ recalls a boyhood and youth when Jones became ‘Orphaned by indolence and dreams’ (THJ, p. 7). This is his recurrent nightmare version of the Welsh Family Romance. Attempting to kill off his religious forefathers, he ends up feeling parentless, utterly bereft. The poet who felt so ‘tormented by the withering worm of sin’ that he could never escape his dread god’s ‘violent unsleeping eye’ also experienced the desolation of agnostic existence; the ‘loneliness’ of living in disbelief, ‘unwatched by God’ (THJ, p. 5). In ‘Poem’ (THJ, pp. 7–8) he ‘mouth[s] the seasons’ of his troubled youth, his mouth

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music (‘cerdd dafod’ is tongue music in Welsh) ‘mour[ning] undying time. / Lost in the quick and tangle of the groin’. The beauty of ‘fishcold brooks’ is offset by ‘the night-infested woods’: he ‘hymn[s]’ a ‘dark hope’. Nature may be fecundly arousing for his adolescent imagination, but he also sees in it ‘the spit of God’ whose ‘dirty tears / Made sea and slime’. ‘In my green ruins / I sang like the rain,’ he writes mis-shaping the childhood idyll of ‘Fern Hill’ to fit his own mid-Wales boyhood, and then proceeds to undergo his own crucifixion, ‘Nailed . . . with silver to the four, crossed hills’. Resurrection does indeed follow, as he ‘[breaks] and bloodies the holy circle’. But his poem ends where it and he began, with a confession that his imagination never has, and never can, leave his chapelled ‘home’. As poet, he just cannot break free of the religious language of Nonconformity. Companion to ‘Poem’ is the ‘Ballad of me’, another futile attempt to ‘mouth’ himself into free being, to speak the words that will bring spiritual release. ‘Fern Hill’ is there from Jones’s and the poem’s very beginning: in his remembered boyhood ‘the birds sang / As everlastingly as the grass enchanted’. Other Thomas poems are summoned to lend their weight as well: Tall men, tall women, went walking like trees On my blue horizons, and catkin children Swung in adventurous breezes to the tunes Behind the chapels and cowsheds. (THJ, p. 9)

But Jones himself could never really do anything behind the chapels’ back. Idyllic though his lyric evocations in this poem then become, over them hangs the grim question that appears at the poem’s dread centre: ‘Shall the voice of the preacher be silenced?’ (THJ, p. 10). The answer duly follows: boyhood’s immortal kingdom is still In the words of the preacher, the weave Of the otter, the pad of the badger.

Thanks to Dylan Thomas, Jones is here able to gain such limited and uncertain respite from his chapel past as he was ever capable of experiencing: the preacher’s words are not so much seconded as counterpointed by the ‘words’ of the natural universe. For Jones, his poetry was always to move in hope and despair from the one lexicon to the

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other, but he remained for ever fearful that for him they would prove ultimately to be one and the same. After such a remarkable pair of poems, it is fitting that a ‘Poem dedicated to the memory of Dylan Thomas’ should follow, opening joyously: From gorse and cinder hills I Adamed out To take to name to praise all things I breathe Before I burn in other breath.

By claiming to speak in Thomas’s voice, Jones is briefly able to break free of his own thwarted, chapel-crossed lyricism. He is thus able to re-enter Eden, because for his purely Adamic Thomas ‘five green season named the world for me’ (THJ, p. 12). Unlike Jones himself, his Thomas convincingly possesses the mighty poetic power to break the preachers’ world-making Word: five green seasons named the world for me . . . the world is spinning and the world is named, Adam unribbed and waking to his dream (THJ, p. 12).

Brave new world indeed, that has such poets in it. As the broken T. Harri Jones sees him, Dylan Thomas is the mid-Wales poet’s own fragmented self made whole: ‘Five senses rule the world, and five / Are lucky in the last and burning name’ (THJ, p.12). As for Jones himself, his late poetry in particular is full of attempts to become his own, self-made Adam. For him, it’s not easy. Condemned by his Nonconformist boyhood to be ‘witness to a world of sins’, he cannot escape his ‘frightened’ self: Across the desert wing the hideous birds Whose cry is the remembered childhood nightmare, The sweating Adam stammering for words. (THJ, p. 19)

Trapped in this ‘stammering’, Jones multiplies his tropes of language throughout his poetic career. The topos of speech recurs compulsively in the writing of one who knows not ‘all our mouthings brought us nearer God’ (THJ, p. 117). He speaks, for instance, of escaping his ‘withered landscape’ (THJ, p. 19) by restoring the ‘demoded vocabulary of promise’. It is pure fantasy. This is an Adam who knows he has come

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far too late to language; that it has long been spoken for; that in his case the chapel will have the last word as it had the first. In one poem, at least, he seems to concede defeat by toying with the possibility of making a ‘sullen claim’, as an adult, to sit in those harsh pews . . . to learn a name And slowly spell my shame. (THJ, p. 128)

It is a confession that he is not his own man but for ever the child of the chapel that baptised him. He must relearn its alphabet. So what has brought him to this pass? The sour realization of having got nowhere by trying to speak his own name as a poet: Pulpit and pew forgot The only sermon heard Mine upon the word That is my own like snot Or the sweetness of my turd.

He is trapped in the torment of disgust at his own poetry. However, in his final collection, The Colour of Cockcrowing, he stages a recovery. Flaunting a bawdy title, it begins and ends with the theme of Eden. The opening poem seems sullen with helplessness, as Jones ‘tr[ies] to say / How that incessant fall falls through my veins’. The reference once more is to having been born a chapel child, and therefore ‘dangling, always from God’s hand’ (THJ, p. 170). The bulky collection ends, however, in an altogether different key. ‘Against wantonness’ celebrates a ‘Grandfather Adam’ whose delight in first using his ‘divining-rod’ (the religious and sexual allusions are both obvious) leads to God’s (futile) chastisement. It is one of Jones’s many versions of the Fortunate Fall. As for ‘A Welsh poet finds a proper story’, it allegorizes Jones’s youth in terms of a ‘story told in the beginning garden’ and fuses his sexual awakening with his awakening to poetry by talking of his finding ‘the woman’ in ‘the treed paper’. As the poem proceeds, a Jones anxious to bring this strained allegory to a psychologically satisfactory conclusion ends up turgidly fusing the Eden story with the story of Noah. It is his attempt to make

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the treed paper . . . a white covenant Damn-Adaming him to be his proper marker, Initial syllable. (THJ, p. 223)

The poem is thus sadly revealing. It is a failed attempt by Jones, a damned Adam, to become his own ma[r]ker; to find through his poetry the genesis of a new post-Nonconformist alphabet; to speak himself into full, free, independent existence. The final, and title, poem, ‘The colour of Cockcrowing’, is an achievement of an altogether different psychological hue, gaining its energy by summoning up, in that title phrase, the ghost of Dylan Thomas to be its Muse. It imagines the ‘first morning / Of creation’, and the coming into being of fish, flesh and fowl in a glorious dionysiac riot of creation. And Jones’s Adam and Eve are no sooner created than they immediately recognize themselves and their world as the creation not of God but of sexuality, of what Yeats called ‘the honey of generation’. The poem ends with a series of triumphant, exultant imperatives addressed to this strutting cockerel of a world, culminating with Crow, until God revoke his first decree That Earth and all the inhabitants thereof Should wear forever the colour of cockcrowing. (THJ, p. 225)

It is not surprising that the author of such a poem, knowing his most fruitful generative theme to be sex, should make one attempt, at least, to invoke a female Muse in the hope of defeating his terrible castrating childhood God. ‘Cwmchwefri Rock’ – Cwmchwefri being Jones’s native district – is dedicated to his wife, Madeleine. It begins with his ‘virile’ ten-year-old self killing a rabbit and then creeping to chapel to worship ‘The God who killed me like that rabbit’ (THJ, p. 134). No wonder his adult hope is that ‘no rocky god can ever again supplant / The goddess who is nourished by my blood’ (THJ, p.134). And who is that goddess, encouraging him to dare defy ‘the buzzard Jahveh’? It is his ‘breasted goddess’ Ceridwen, the Welsh version of Robert Graves’s White Goddess. Another, different, rhetorical escape strategy Jones adopted was to distance his Welsh Nonconformist experience by displacing it geographically and culturally. Identifying New England with the godly settlements of the Pilgrim Fathers, and no doubt recalling Edwin Arlington Robinson’s splendidly bleak portrait of a region ‘where the wind is always north-north-east’, ‘Joy shivers in

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the corner where she knits / And Conscience always has the rockingchair’,30 Jones provides one of his poems about Allt-y-Clych (where ‘you can be terribly close to God’) with an epigraph about early New England Plantation life in ‘162–’. More direct is his dramatic monologue, in the voice of Cotton Mather, about the Salem witchcraft trials of the later part of the seventeenth century (THJ, p. 193). It is powerfully done, and historically scrupulous in its not unsympathetic attempts to convey, through pastiche and quotation from Mather’s celebrated text, The Wonders of the Invisible World, the honest torments of a terribly misguided and tragically mistaken intelligence. Mather comes across as the unconscious victim of a deluding religion. Jones was to find elsewhere in the American literature in which he specialized other models for personal poetic deliverance from the chapel’s clutches. In ‘Homage to Wallace Stevens’, he gratefully honours a great poet whose airs on a blue guitar were briefly able to drown out the siren sound of Welsh hymns. *** Amongst a ‘Portrait gallery’ of the cramped Nonconformist characters he had known as a boy, Jones includes ‘Tomos / Who is married to the old language, / And resentful of everything English’ (THJ, p. 123). It brings us to a complex, thorny issue – complex because of the multiplicity of factors and dimensions, both cultural and personal, involved; thorny because of the sometimes irrational hostility directed at the language by some English-language writers of Wales of the inter-war period particularly. When Caradoc Evans waspishly observed the Almighty Himself had authored Nonconformist language, he added, ‘the language of God and his angels and of the Company of Prophets is Welsh, that being the language spoken in the Garden of Eden and by Jacob, Moses, Abraham, and Elijah’ (MN, p. 4). Nineteenth-century Welsh-language culture had only itself to blame for this complete identification of the language with the chapel: after all, ever since the Blue Books attacks (1847), it had praised itself loudly and nauseatingly in exactly these terms, while strongly inclining to treat Wales’s new Anglophone industrial society as scandalously irreligious and consequently immoral. At century’s end this zealously promoted self-image of the Welsh gwerin as moral, pious, literate, cultured and responsible well beyond other peoples – and certainly well beyond possibility – reached its zenith in the popular works of Owen M. Edwards (1858–

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1920). Evans’s My People (1915) was in part his counterblast to such hype. The seminal collection also announced Evans’s ‘conversion’ to the new Social Gospel being preached in the industrial Valleys of south Wales. This evangel of social, political and economic progress through the nurturing of a new spirit of the collective became a proletariat’s utopian dream held to all the more stubbornly in the face of the economic and social devastations very shortly to blight the south Wales coalfield. Anglicizing very rapidly, these Valleys were distancing themselves as quickly as possible from the rural Nonconformist heartlands of the north and west they regarded as incorrigibly backward and benighted. In addition, Evans’s animus against Welsh and Welshlanguage Nonconformity was powered by family experience of what he consequently came to regard as destructive chapel bigotry. In all these respects, his case previewed the personal, social, cultural and political factors that were to impact on his literary ‘sons’. The result was a generation’s virulent detestation of the Welsh language and the religious culture to which it seemed so darkly wedded. Such an assumption of complete complicity between chapel and language was in part the fruit of wilful ignorance. Wedded to their own prejudice, some of these writers were closed to the knowledge that Welsh-language culture itself had anticipated by almost half a century their own rhetorical attacks on Nonconformity. The great originator of this sustained onslaught had been Daniel Owen, to this day still the preeminent Welsh novelist. His remarkable fiction of the closing decades of the nineteenth century featured several of the searching angles of narrative approach and probing rhetorical strategies later used by the English-language writers in their hostile engagements with chapel culture. Owen was anticipating what was to come. When T. Gwynn Jones initiated the twentieth-century renaissance of Welsh-language literature in 1902, it was with ‘Ymadawiad Arthur’, a richly sensuous poem that in turning to the ancient realm of legend for subject, turned its back on the nineteenth-century conventions of puritanical writing. Several of the most prominent poets of the Renaissance were to be either self-styled ‘pagans’ (R. Williams Parry) or at least sceptics (T. H. Parry-Williams). As for the dramatists of the same period, they were even more unsparingly direct in their critique of Nonconformity. From D. T. Davies to W. J. Gruffydd they turned for inspiration and example to the likes of Ibsen – whose plays had brought not so much a breath of fresh air as a hurricane-force wind into the stiflingly Calvinistic society of his own early upbringing. Saunders Lewis, scion of a

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famous preaching dynasty, turned Catholic; Aneirin Talfan Davies converted to Anglicanism, as did Euros Bowen and, for a period, Gwenallt: no longer could Welsh Nonconformity retain its hold on its children. Many of Wales’s leading English writers, though, still preferred to treat all Welsh-language writers as if they were either neurotically inhibited ministers of religion or their pathetic stooges. Even someone like the bilingual Idris Davies, far better informed about the older culture and far more sympathetic to it, still seemed to associate the language instinctively with hapless piety. Although sufficiently up to date with developments to know that in ‘Capel Calvin’ they ‘don’t like Williams Parry much’ (ID, p. 90), he reverted, in Welsh, to writing a saccharine hymn to gentle Jesus, as if the spiritually fastidious language could only tolerate such a weakly pious effusion (ID, p. 169). His was no doubt a case of arrested linguistic and cultural development: damaged by his irksomely confining childhood exposure to chapel culture, Davies clearly found it extremely difficult to integrate his mature knowledge of the twentieth-century progress of Welsh literature with his infantile experiences. In other writers, years of similarly damaging early exposure to a systemically Nonconformist culture resulted not in meek, emasculated expression but in a very adult vengefulness. With brilliant creative malice, Caradoc Evans concocted a ‘see-through English’, designed to give the illusion of direct access to the underlying Welsh actually being spoken by his characters. The implication was clear: this grotesquely deformed language was made in the very image of its oafishly evil speakers. These were, indeed, ‘his people’ – entirely the products of his venomously inventive innovative expression – but readers formed the impression that the grotesques were also entirely representative of his native Welsh-language society. No other writer approached Evans in the outrageous audacity of his attacks on the language, but several shared his view of it as the lair of chapel culture. ‘The language of the chapels was, of course, Welsh, which we did not know,’ wrote Gwyn Thomas (WE, p. 124). ‘If I demanded that my theology be funnelled to me in Bantu as a change from Welsh I was cuffed as a renegade’ (MPR, p. 41), he added, effortlessly recording a double racist bull’s eye in the process. One could not ask for a better example of the post-colonial predicament than such an imperialist equating of the despised ‘Bantu’ with Welsh. Elsewhere ebulliently recalling being engulfed as a youngster by a preacher’s

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hwyl, he remembered best appreciating such ‘an ecstatic lycanthropic baying at the non-conformist moon’ when it reached the ‘last phase of convulsive exaltation’ (MPR, p. 42). For then, ‘it transcended language and creed. It would have had as exciting an appeal to an Eskimo as to a young Congregationalist, and indeed there were times when, flanked by the chiller types of sidesman, that chapel gallery felt a little like Baffin Bay.’ It was Rhys Davies, however, who most fully and nakedly exposed his anti-Welsh prejudices in his writings about the hated chapels. Appreciating even the most ‘depressed’ pubs as offering ‘an emptiness unmolested by the Welsh tongue’ (MW, p. 117), he entered with gusto in My Wales on his pet subject, unabashed by his ignorance – there were, he supposed, ‘very few books . . . printed in the Welsh language’ (MW, p. 221ff.). ‘The writing of Welsh is entirely a spare-time job,’ he ringingly proclaimed, ‘a hobby, undertaken mostly by university professors and ministers of the Gospel.’ This was fine for ‘a good Welsh lyric’ which could ‘be thrown off after chapel duties’, but it could never result in serious work like his own. Consequently, ‘young people of quality . . . seem to fly from the Welsh language as from the plague.’ Complacently thinking of his own example, he urged ‘all young people of artistic talent’ to ‘leave Wales for a few years after their eighteenth or twentieth year. Otherwise they will be cramped by a parochial outlook, in their minds a little at least of the fog of moral judgment, in their souls patches of the dampness of Nonconformity.’ The invective is effortlessly sustained. After paying condescending respects to the likes of Kate Roberts and Saunders Lewis, he resumes with new vigour. Welsh is a beautiful sensitive language and invites quiet literary experiment. But surely it must for ever remain subdued. It is . . . impressive roared out by old-style preachers; it is very much a language of sound. But business is to be done in the world, and the interchanges of modern life exclude Welsh from their consideration. (MW, p. 229)

He likens the treasuring of the language to keeping Persian cats, or cultivating orchids, continuing in like biliously inventive vein for another seven pages. Davies concludes with a paean of self-congratulatory praise to the London Welsh, living as they so fortunately do where ‘there’s no need to touch Welsh again for weeks’ (MW, p. 235). ‘The sense of living there is in London refreshes them after the watchful repressive powers of Nonconformist Wales. They love London like a

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sin.’ (MW, p. 236) Paragons all, evidently; heroes fit, in the eyes of a new ‘liberated’ and ‘enlightened’ generation of post-Nonconformist writers, to replace the nineteenth-century idols of the Welsh pulpit.

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Officials of Y Ffor chapel, Abererch

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Even after being long settled in Australia, the poet from the Welsh upland country, T. Harri Jones, bitterly confessed himself nevertheless to still be at heart a ‘a member of a narrow chapel, and a boy From a hungry parish, a spoiled preacher Guiltily taking the surplus of your sunshine, And still afraid of hell because I’ve been there.1

That last phrase is explosively compact. The ‘hell’ referred to is both the one so vividly evoked by the preachers in Jones’s ‘narrow chapel’ at Beulah and the hell that his childhood became because of such preaching. Religion and landscape and locals are, as always in his poetry, merged into one. God becomes ‘a crabbed shepherd on a misty path’ (THJ, p. 7). Nonconformity entered early the very marrow of his being. His was a classic case of childhood development under what might broadly but suggestively be termed a hegemonic power. Man is culturally (re)made in the image of language: this became the hot gospel of modern linguistics. As such a truth became self-evident, it attracted notice from psycho-cultural analysts and political theorists. Attention came to be paid to the individual’s point of entry, via language, into the symbolic order as a whole – into the entire complex realm of culture – and therefore into the distinctive nexus of power inhering within every cultural system. As was noted in the previous chapter, such an interest found systematic expression in discourse theory, a theory sensitive to the way in which what Gramsci famously termed hegemony

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– the insensible moulding of people’s minds, and therefore lives, in any given society by the values of a dominant group – actually played out at the level of language.2 Pierre Bourdieu, a later theorist, characterized the process by which hegemonic control was established as one of ‘symbolic violence’. It involves ‘the imposition of systems of symbolism and meaning (i.e. culture) upon groups or classes in such a way that they are experienced as legitimate. This legitimacy obscures the power relations which permit that imposition to be successful.’3 In his classic summary of such a concept, Raymond Williams emphasized ‘the depth and thoroughness at which any cultural hegemony is lived’.4 But while its grip on a society is indeed ‘totalizing’ it is not totalitarian: It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own. We have then to add to the concept of hegemony the concepts of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony, which are real and persistent elements of practice. (RW, pp. 112–3)

The previous chapter was concerned to show how in part Welsh writing in English emerged, in its modern form, by constituting itself as a counter-hegemonic practice. Emphasis was there put on the linguistic, or more precisely discursive, character of such practice and one of the most celebrated and influential of recent explanations of how every dominant, hegemonic discourse inevitably produces its own counterdiscourse has been that of Foucault. In his seminal study of sexuality, he showed how, through obsessively detailed itemization and compulsively repetitive systematization of the personal energies and social potentialities it most fears, an established order becomes the agent of its own downfall by effectively generating its dreaded opposite. Foucault’s example was the Victorian way with sexuality. Far from being prudishly ignored, it was fetishized, as the Victorians minutely tabulated all the dangerously ‘aberrant’ forms it could assume.5 Consequently, in the process of giving it precise shape and sensual substance they largely invented ‘sexuality’ in the terms in which the twentieth century was to know it and to experience it. The previous chapter was accordingly concerned to consider some of the ways in which the language – and hence the values – of Nonconformity dominated Welsh culture in the nineteenth century, in order to examine some of the ways in which this hegemonic discourse produced the challenge to it that came in the form

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of soi-disant counter-hegemonic English-language writing of the first half of the following century. This chapter will return to the same subject but eventually with the reverse intention of emphasizing how writers tend to re-produce aspects of the hegemonic order in the very act of repudiating it – how their counter-discourse of dissent can remain disquietingly informed by some of the very terms of thinking they are radically concerned to reform. ‘Disquietingly’ because many of them were very aware of this; acutely, and uneasily, conscious of how ambivalent and doubtful a process was their rebellion. There was an uncomfortably narrow line between a liberating redeployment of religious discourse to form a subversive counter-discourse, and entrapment within the terms and values of the old religious discourse slyly masquerading under the secular style of a new. Whereas Foucault emphasizes how hegemonic discourse creates its own anti-self, these writers were very aware of how the anti-selves they were trying to create might succeed only in re-creating the hegemonic discourse against which they were fated to define themselves. Gwyn Thomas was one who well understood the danger of a continued internalization of chapel experience. He used many rhetorical strategies to objectify it: ‘A few weeks ago I saw the old chapel again. I stood at a certain distance away, as if afraid that the vibrant delight and ironies of the past might still have the power to touch, enchant and hurt me.’6 But however carefully measured that wary self-protective distance might be by humour, it could still be crossed – ‘Faces and voices came out of the place’; and those voices could not be easily silenced. For one thing, they were not easily identifiable and pinned down. The impression must be avoided that hegemony is in essence a single, easily locatable power. Not so. As Raymond Williams stressed, it is multiform, its seemingly inexhaustible plasticity and adaptability accounting for its insidious reach and penetrative power. Writers such as Caradoc Evans, Rhys Davies and Gwyn Thomas were consequently right to imply, in their respective personal portraits of Wales, that to convey their experience of the influence of Nonconformity meant evoking a society’s whole state of mind; tracing its insidious psycho-cultural geography. ‘We are what we have been made by our preachers and politicians, and thus we remain,’ wrote Evans. ‘Our God wears a frock coat, a starched linen collar and black necktie, and a silk hat, and on the Sabbath he preaches to the congregation of Heaven.’7 As for the rest of the week, it is a time when ‘Our God is by us in our hagglings and cheatings’ (MN, p. 6). For Rhys Davies, ‘Puritanism and Nonconformity

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have given an appearance of grey gloom to Welsh life; few buildings, for instance, are more depressing to look at, or to sit in, than the chapels. For generations earthly beauty was evil; even a slice of cake must not be too rich.’8 He complained of ‘the harm a mishandled religion could work in a people capable of luminous gaiety’ (SW, p. 27). Responding in more rational, analytical terms to the blanketing power of hegemony, Williams was later to emphasize how to oppose it effectively necessitated not a single impulse of revolt but a ‘plurality of resistances’ (RW, p. 95). In the Welsh case, this is illustrated by the range of responses to hegemonic Nonconformity improvised by some of its most powerful self-appointed adversaries, the English-language writers of Wales, during the first half of the last century. Yet, time after time, these responses laid bare a frustrating truth: these anti-Nonconformist writers were in fact spoiled preachers. Haunted by the term, T. H. Jones actually made it the title of one of his poems, tellingly dedicated ‘to many contemporaries, and some in especial’ (THJ, p. 175). It is a poem of self-contempt, arising out of a nightmare he’d suffered in the sticky Australian night: what if he’d been baptismally ‘dipped’, like the local sheep, in the Chwefru, had ‘learned from the ghosts of Chrismas Evans / And Evan Jones “the man from Eglwyswrw”’, and had become a hellfire preacher with ‘hair flowing all over the place’ (THJ, p. 175)? But what Jones is really, agonizingly realizing is that in fact, of course, he had been baptized. With a bitterness of truth, he realizes how his lecherous and secretive serial pursuit of students and secretaries is no more than the inversion of a sexually repressed preacher’s obsessive railing against the sins of the flesh. So much for being ‘emancipated’ – a word he spits out in pure self-derision. *** ‘Today’, wrote Foucault in the late decades of the twentieth century, it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form – so familiar and important in the West – of preaching. A great sexual sermon – which has had its subtle theologians and its popular voices – has swept through out societies over the last decades; it has chastised the old order, denounced hypocrisy, and praised the rights of the immediate and the real; it has made people dream of a New City. (F, pp. 7–8)

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From D. H. Lawrence to T. Harri Jones, the writers of sexual liberation were spoiled preachers. As Foucault further observed, ‘the statement of oppression and the form of the sermon refer back to one another’ (F, p. 8). As a lapsed Nonconformist (the term ‘lapsed’ is as apt in such cases as it is in that of Catholics) Jones very well knew he was caught in that double bind. When he wrote that phrase about being ‘still afraid of hell because I’ve been there’, it was in the context of worshipping nothing but the ‘emblem’ of his wife’s body (THJ, p. 122). And when he composes his ‘Gorse idyll’, a Blakean song about making a ‘gold to do’ with his girl on the hillside, he hears a deacon sighing in their love-making, and recognizes that whatever lands he may ‘walk through now’, he has the ‘double heart’ of deacon and pagan lover (THJ, p. 11). That ‘double heart’ may be said to have been the fate of many another Welsh writer. But before pursuing that theme, it’s important to note how thoroughly Jones understood the phenomenon we now term hegemony. In poem after poem he painfully reflects on how inescapably a Nonconformist Welshman he is protestingly doomed to be. The phrase ‘double heart’ is itself indicative of his awareness of what might be called a cultural, as well as a biological, genesis; of the need to use biological, metabolical, physical terms for describing personality development. Nonconformity is experienced by him as part of his genetic inheritance; a sense of sin is part of his very DNA; it is in the double helix of his individual nature. Writing of his ancestry, he notes: ‘I inherit their long arms and mountain face, / The withering worm sleeps too within my blood.’ The latter reference is to his inbred sense of sin (and, by analogy, to the male sexual organ), which is as much part of his genetic inheritance as ‘the long arms and mountain face’. And whereas, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Dylan Thomas is elsewhere invoked by Jones as his saviour from Nonconformity, here the echo of one of Thomas’s celebrated phrases (‘at my sheets goes the same crooked worm’) serves to suggest the opposite; that they are both of them Nonconformist brothers under the skin, spoiled preachers both. Such helpless awareness of his double heart surfaces everywhere in Jones’s poetry. He even sees himself as passing on this curse to his daughter. A contemplation of her innocent baby sleep is suffused with a sense of how she is doomed to be ‘dragoned by days and nights to weary hell.’ He anticipates the time ‘When you have grown to stature and to guilt’. His blessings on her are couched in religious terms:

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This childgrace is a benediction of the blood, Promise and resurrection: sleeping it signs The argosy and ark its fathers made (THJ, p. 13).

No wonder a companion poem ‘Out of Wales’ for his daughter abjures her to remember ‘today the land from which / You come, the huddled nonconformist hills’ (THJ, p. 14). His agonies of soul over the burdens of an ineradicable Nonconformist identity assume gothic form in ‘Eclogue’ (THJ, p. 62), an arresting brief variant on Coleridge’s ‘Ballad of the Ancient Mariner’. Merging the latter’s gaunt ghostliness with the figure of an early itinerant Nonconformist preacher obsessively frequenting ‘wedding feast or country fair’, he dwells with appalled fascination on the spectacle of the resulting figure of doom. His spectral preacher, haunted as well as haunting, damns ‘the unregenerate’, warning them of the torments of the life to come. ‘That unrelenting ghost / Is tenant of a narrow heaven,’ and while a terrified Jones is clearly aghast at such a vision, he is Nonconformist enough to scorn the escape routes that alternative faiths make available. When his preacher thunders against ‘sins too readily forgiven / By easier churches, milder gods’, Jones’s double heart is with him, all the way. Taking his title from Psalm 121 in another poem, ‘From whence cometh my help’ (THJ, p. 240), he impatiently dismisses passing thoughts about how he might have grown up differently had he known what he now ‘unholily’ knows when he was a boy ‘on holy hills, long, long ago’. The coinage ‘unholily’ is a confession that he exists only as the pale negative of his positive childhood faith. He is still ‘ineluctably’ his early chapel self, darkly gifted with ‘that hillborn appetency for pain’. At moments like this he seems almost like one traumatized young; as if he’d been dealt a psychic wound that is beyond healing. So palpable is Jones’s constant awareness of the presence of his early Nonconformist past in his adult life, that he repeatedly turns to the landscape, as has already briefly been noted, for adequate embodiment of his psychological experience. The ‘obsolete map of chapels’ is ‘dominant as a cloud’ (THJ, p. 7), the image exactly conveying the mixture of psychosomatic oppression and frustrating nebulousness of the hegemonic power from which he suffered in his early days, in his experience of it as an adult victim. No wonder he can painfully write of how ‘Old compulsions, insistent as rain, / Distort our language’ (THJ, p. 132). Addressing elsewhere a poem to Aneirin Talfan Davies, a son of the manse who had turned from Nonconformity for refuge in the

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Church in Wales, Jones confesses his imagination still cowers in ‘the presence of the ancient thunderer / Cloudy with terror of his images’ (THJ, p. 6). Such a God was native to a landscape alive with predators, from buzzard and carrion crow to fox and weasel. He was the only possible genius loci of a ravaged land of ‘howling solitudes’, ‘bitten grass’, and ‘wind-torn trees’. And like some abused partner bound by very suffering to the abuser, Jones finds himself still irresistibly drawn to recovering ‘old pictures of blackthorn and of pine’, and to thus recalling ‘the only god that was ever mine’ (THJ, p. 6). ‘No, the landscape never sweetened us’, he wrote in another poem again tormented by memories of ‘Archaic fathers nearly anonymous, / Their poor paths chapelled and precarious’ (THJ, p. 117). When his little daughter mentions Ayer’s Rock, his instinctive reaction is to recall Allt-y-Clych, ‘holding like a threat / The wild religion’ (THJ, p. 116). There, God’s loud voice had been ‘more urgent than thorn’ (THJ, p. 167). And if it is Dylan Thomas who is his Welsh hero, for having more or less successfully used poetry as an escape route, then it is with the R. S. Thomas of The Stones of the Field (1946) and subsequent collections that he obviously feels the closest personal rapport. Welsh Anglican priest though Thomas may have been, Jones shrewdly registers that his temperament and sensibility are really those of a Nonconformist. The language for landscape in Jones’s poems is taken straight out of Thomas’s favourite lexicon. And in ‘Back (to R. S. Thomas)’ he places the chapel at the physical centre of the text, thereby implicitly recognizing its centrality for Thomas’s Wales and for his own. And while the two Thomases, Dylan and R. S., may have been the primary landscapers of Jones’s poetic mind, behind both, always, loomed the figure of Caradoc Evans. He it was who had first graphically imaged the human sacrifice offered by the peasant Welsh, in the form of their own flesh and blood, to their savage God: ‘We trim our few acres until our shoulders are crutched and the soil is in the crevices of our flesh that his estate shall be a glory unto this awful God.’9 To the end of his life, Jones knew he had ‘A bible in his mind, / A pulpit for his mouth’ (THJ, p. 177); his was ‘a god / Renounced, but not forgotten’ (THJ, p. 172). He still, he realized, retained an idealism deriving from his early, believing days. ‘Goodness and mercy / Are what I believe of the parables and thunders’, he wrote, even though life had taught him the contrary. As a boy he had seen its reality in ‘a dead sheep / Stinking in what we called a meadow’ (THJ, p. 172). The main repository of his idealism came to be his unassuageable love of

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women. His ambition as a poet was to be ‘direct, / To be sensuous as a girl’s body’ (THJ, p. 164), and one of his favourite tropes, in the erotic love poems that constitute the bulk of his output, is that of Adam’s sexual discovery of Eve in Paradise. This was Jones’s version of the Fortunate Fall. In ‘Adam’s song after Paradise’ the speaker is ‘content that I have lost / That half-regretted Paradise’, his sweet consolation being ‘the long allurements of your thighs’ (THJ, p. 145). As for Eve, the ‘merriest words’ taught her by the serpent was ‘All fall down’ (THJ, p. 79). Yet, this recurrent trope inevitably betrays the anxiety in which it is rooted. Chapel upbringing had ensured that, in Jones’s case, sex and guilt were inexorably wedded, though the latter could sweeten the former as well as blight it. Did Adam ever imagine before the creation of Eve, Jones wondered, that sweat of intercourse Or thought might stain and strain His bright prophetic body? (THJ, p. 73)

For him, sexuality was the great stimulant of the imagination. What he believed to have been true of the post-lapsarian Adam – ‘The sensual landscape in his mind / Flowered in sudden fury’ – was, in his own experience, manifestly true of his poetic self, procreator of ‘the mandrake poem’ (THJ, p. 23). Many of Jones’s very numerous love poems take the form of song or ballad. He was certainly conscious of the distinguished pedigree of this literary tradition – at various stages in his development his writing echoes the work of Blake, Yeats and Dylan Thomas, for instance – but equally important was the feeling he shared with other Welsh poets that these were unbaptized genres, folk forms, anonymous carriers of the naked voice and uninhibited passions of the people, ever the same throughout both the Christian and the pre-Christian ages. Idris Davies favours the very same genres for the very same reason. Indeed, he consciously identified with the balladeers of the ordinary people: Where once the minstrel wandered And sang his roundelay, The slag-heap and the chapel Darken the summer day.10

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And it was in the form of ballad or song that he chose to write most of his autobiographical verse: They tried in a Primitive Chapel To teach his soul to be sad, To make him blind to the body And the joys the body had, O the joys the body had! (ID, p. 62)

Subject and form combine to remind us of ‘The garden of love’, one of Blake’s famous ‘songs of experience’. There, too, the chapel is figured as an institution of sexual repression: ‘And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds / And binding with briars my joys & desires.’11 *** One who shares the sensitivity of both Rhys Davies and T. H. Jones to the way in which the chapel commands both the natural and the human landscape in Wales is Gwyn Thomas. When Alan Leigh is beginning to orientate himself in the foreign industrial landscape of Moonlea, he takes his bearings from such buildings as ‘the big new greystone chapel in which Mr Bowen kept hell on a gilt leash’,12 noticing how it plays its part in the triangulation of power in this new community – the other fixed points of reference for Leigh being the house of Mr Pemberton, the owner of the ironworks, and the Town Hall (closely associated in his mind with the County Gaol). The looming physical presence of the chapel is the outward sign of the hold the Nonconformist religion has over the minds of the workforce: ‘They are mostly ironworkers here, but they talk little of it. Religion and the lives they lived before they came to Moonlea . . . are the two big topics you’ll find on the lips of these men’ (ATBT, p. 38). In one of the key scenes of the novel, the workforce is instructed to congregate in an open space where the views of the owners will be persuasively couched in chapel terms by Mr Bowen. The place is ‘well chosen’ (ATBT, p. 102), because ‘it was . . . where the main street of Moonlea had been cut almost exactly in half to make room for the new splendid chapel in which Mr Bowen had built up the greatest single following of any divine in Moonlea’. The chapel thus clearly demarcates the space of social living, as its location also marks it off decisively from the workers’ cottages, physically emphasizing the subordination of the embryonically proletarian masses to their ideological masters. ‘There

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was still twenty clear yards between the chapel and the first of the small, constantly similar houses that trailed right along to the very foot of the hill’. The consequence of religious Nonconformity is the social conformity and uniformity it breeds in the minds of the faithful. In such passages, Thomas is using a historical narrative in part to express his sense of the continuing presence of his chapel upbringing in his own adult life. Dissent though he may from the Welsh Dissenters, their values and patterns of thinking remain stubbornly imprinted on his imagination. After all, as he admitted, ‘the chapels filled our early lives. Culturally and educationally they competed with the State schools’ (WE, p. 122). And just like T. H. Jones, he is particularly sharply aware of their continuing influence when dealing with the charged area of sex and sexual experience. ‘We make love’, says Ben in The Keep, ‘with chapels hanging from each wrist.’13 For them, Rudolf Valentino was therefore ‘a bad model. He wasn’t hindered by the chapels’ (TP, p. 81). When in Sorrow for Thy Sons the poor downtrodden and abused wife, Mrs Beatty, is preparing the way for a clandestine affair with Hugh, beginning by bribing him to write a blistering obituary notice of the death of her baby, he confesses how A minute ago I had a feeling that I was playing around on the verge of a great sin. That shows how raw and sensitive my skin is, doesn’t it? . . . It sprang from my Methodist parentage. My father and forefathers have been strict Nonconformists since the days of the great Revival. They’d look with horror at what we are talking about now.14

In The Keep, Ben recalls how ‘even lovers on the hillside at the very peak of their carnal passion would signal their urges to one another with lines from the hymnals’ (TP, p. 34). The grandchildren of Granch, the old religious bigot, have long since liberated themselves from his chapel religion, yet their secular dreams of escaping their stifling Valleys environment remain steeped in religious language; ‘let’s drink to the exodus, the great dispersal’ (TP, pp. 54–5). Likewise the local drunk, Willie Wedlock, has a guilt complex ‘as thick as a wall’ when in his cups, and runs around naked shouting, ‘I am the living God’ (TP, pp. 54–5). And should the younger generation ever turn on Granch and mock his hypocritical piety, then they are sure to be reminded by their father that the old man ‘dug the foundations of Moab chapel with his own two hands . . . Moab, the chapel you’ve worshipped and sung in since you were a child’ (TP, p. 33).

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The plot in The Keep revolves around the family’s reverence for Mam, who had departed years ago for a visit to the States, literally hymned on her way by the whole family. Rumoured to have been killed in a tragic rail accident, she has been worshipped in religious awe by them ever since. They intend to unveil a plaque to her in ‘the chapel she attended all her life’ (TP, p. 70). The speaker at the event will be Mr Wyndham Smillie, ‘a prince of the prayer meeting. A voice of gold and, on a line of genuine communication with God, a tongue of love.’ They plan to sing the revival song they sang when she left, ‘Sin. It’s everywhere’ (TP, p. 73). (For them, the USA is the land of Moody and Sankey and the burnt-over districts.) But their plans are shattered when Miriam discovers that Mam did not in fact die. In the States she met and married a man she’d known and loved at home before ever her dismally puritanical husband had arrived on the scene. The whole scenario is expressive both of Thomas’s own yearning to follow ‘Mam’ and make a clear break with his Valleys chapel past and his fear that, like her family, in attempting to escape the clutches of Nonconformity he will simply end up translating its salient features into an alternative secularized mode. One instance among many of the ambiguous, rhetorically and ideologically compromised, attempts Thomas made to break free of the chapel is provided by the way he draws on his love of music as a theme and structural principle in some of his writing. It is from music, of course, that he draws the dominant nexus of metaphors by means of which he attempts to trace the evolution of a new, proletarian consciousness in All Things Betray Thee. As in many of Thomas’s fictions, the action in the novel is in places loosely modelled on the kind of plot one finds in grand opera. And opera is again a dominant motif and intermittent structural principle in The Dark Philosophers. The gang of young local layabouts and subversives who act as Thomas’s collective persona in that novella meet in the café of Idomineo Faracci – a Valley Italian (named after a Mozart opera) who has in his back room an old cabinet gramophone with a collection of operatic performances. The café’s stove ‘must have been a pipe organ to explain the presence in it of so many pipes’, and one of the group, Ben, is urged to crawl into it and give a rendering of ‘Lead kindly light’.15 In a gesture of defiance deeply expressive of Thomas’s own feelings as an author, the gang one Sunday carry the gramophone through the town’s streets, on their way to presenting the precious records ceremoniously to a sick woman. For the group, ‘Music is the sweet side, the side of us that not even the

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combined princes, priests and profiteers can ever make a thorough mess of or properly destroy’ (DP, p. 163). Infused with human passion, the operatic extracts contrast with the lugubrious music of hymns. But one could equally say that they are the secular version of hymns, because Thomas very well knew he owed his passion for music directly to the chapel. Moreover, it wasn’t only hymns he’d learnt there. In A Welsh Eye, Thomas recalls how a Sunday School teacher named Bryn, struck dumb by his wife’s elopement with a ‘travelling-china salesman’, found vent for his feelings by playing operatic records to the youngsters in his Sabbath care. These featured the voices of Caruso, Chaliapin, Melba and others in extracts from the great classics of the genre. His passions also more predictably ran to biblical cantatas (WE, p. 129). Even when as an author Thomas later turned to opera to escape the hegemonic power of the chapel, and to furnish an alternative language for understanding human experience, he therefore found himself drawing upon the very ‘idiom’ in which he had been instructed as a young attender at Sunday School. Thomas’s feelings about the legacy of Welsh Nonconformity were clearly very mixed. In places, for instance, he could accuse it of breeding a passivity in the industrial population that made them politically inert. In Sorrow for Thy Sons Hugh comments that ‘The religious revivals were a good basis for the Means Test. Our ancestors did so many damned silly things for the good of their souls there’ll be some of their latter-day descendants willing to take investigators and Labour Camps on the same basis’ (STS, p. 240). In the light of such a reading of chapel influence, Thomas’s own writings may be seen as acts of individualistic rebellion, expressions of a secularized intelligence freed from the inhibitions of the meekly faithful. The notorious eloquence of his ‘voters’ then becomes the antithesis of the dumbness of the chapel-bred herd. Interestingly enough, Rhys Davies’s version of the long-term political consequences of Welsh Nonconformity was exactly the opposite. According to him, the repressiveness of religion bred a backlash: ‘these restraints brewed strong passions. The industrial rebellions in south Wales, for example, might not have been so fierce and riotous but for the accumulation of emotion kept in leash by a puritan Nonconformity.’16 In some places Thomas, too, reverses his view of Nonconformity as the nursery of political quietism into the exact opposite. In a particularly intriguing section of A Welsh Eye he contrasts his experience of Welsh Nonconformity with his exposure to the violently reactionary Catholicism of Spain when he spent a year in the mid-thirties at

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university in Madrid. ‘To anyone who has known a country like Spain’, he writes, ‘where you have a profound imposed religious unity, the brittle spiritual body of a place like Wales is a thing to wonder at’ (WE, p. 122). He celebrates the chapels’ encouragement of ‘a rage to dispute and divide’, even seeing in it some ‘fundamental wish to reject the whole doctrine of revelation’ – as, of course, he himself had done. Such disputatiousness, inculcated at Sunday School, resulted in fissiparousness – there were splits galore, and ‘new chapels flew through the air like shrapnel’. Thomas was, in his way, still respectfully appreciative of his own denomination, the Welsh Independents, ‘the most libertarian and humanistic of the branches of Dissent’ (WE, p. 123). And so, although clearly ultimately more attracted to ‘the Library and Institute’ where ‘an artillery park of irreligion boomed’ (WE, p. 124), Thomas implicitly recognized that his own eloquence, even his own liberated argumentativeness and anti-authoritarianism, had as origin not only the secularized institutions he so admired but also the chapels about which he had such powerfully mixed feelings. Indeed, if the kind of unfocussed, individualistic, radical leftist, vaguely anarcho-syndicalist politics Thomas favoured owed most to the political climate of the Rhondda of his young days, it also owed not a little to the chapels, too. The very rhetorical powers he used to mock and savage Nonconformity were powers he had in part developed through attendance at service and at Sunday School. He would occasionally admit as much, as when he writes of ‘Our long tradition of radical dissent and humanitarian evangelism’.17 One recurrent theme in Thomas’s fiction is the way religious language, biblical quotation and scriptural reference inform the minds of his characters. For instance, the old deaf winderman Hayward in Sorrow for Thy Sons is fond of reciting the Sermon on the Mount. He takes particular pride in doing so with speed. ‘Every time he recited it, he’d ask whether he was taking it too fast or too slow, because his hearing made him a bad judge’ (STS, p. 46). Attendance at chapel ensured the Scriptures were engraved on people’s minds if not in their hearts. In Thomas’s own case, this resulted in biblical episodes being more or less consciously recycled as fictional episodes. In some instances it is a form of the return of the repressed – silent evidence of how difficult it was to escape the forms of religious thinking even if one had renounced religious ideology. As Thomas had, after all, ruefully noted, the chapel had ‘become a characteristic part of [my] idiom’ (WE, p. 25), not to be fundamentally altered even when he’d become a militantly secularist writer.

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His memorable novella, Oscar, climaxes with the disillusionment of its young monologist, Lewis. Having come to invest Hannah, the attractive and virtuous wife of his sickly friend Danny, with all the qualities of gentleness, kindness and sensitivity missing from his brutally exploitative environment, Lewis is appalled when, reduced to widowhood and penury, she succumbs (and with seeming pleasure) to the brutish, piggish, powerful Oscar, owner of the mountain that looms intimidatingly over the Valleys town. Biblical reference figures large in the key seduction scene. Prologue to it is Lewis’s visit to Hannah following Danny’s death. ‘“It passeth all understanding,”’ she says, to which he replies, ‘“It doth.”’18 ‘I remembered the word “doth” from the chapel and I thought it sounded all right.’ Together they have hatched a plan to deal with Oscar’s lustful pursuit of Hannah. She is to agree to his visit, with the aim of killing him with a hammer once he starts making his advances. Lewis sets up the scene by leading Oscar to the house and then stays to peep through the window. His attention is first caught by ‘a big picture’ on the wall, ‘showing Moses bringing a sackful of frogs down on the head of some Egyptian’ (O, p. 68). Then, moving his eyes down from the picture to the sofa beneath it he sees Oscar about to mount Hannah. Expecting her to reach for the hammer, Lewis is dumbounded when she yields herself sexually instead. It is clearly a reworking of the Jael and Sisera scene (Judges, 4), with the biblical picture not only designed as a commentary on the episode but also intended to tune us in to the appropriate scriptural allusion. All Things Betray Thee similarly draws heavily on biblical sources at several significant points. Penbury is the owner of the great ironworks that have brought Moonlea into existence, and so his power over the town is as absolute as that of a feudal lord. But ruthless though he is in so many respects, Penbury is also a man of delicate conscience, which troubles him and brings sleepless nights. Awake in the small hours, he summons the travelling harpist Alan Leigh, as a medieval Welsh prince might peremptorily command his court harpist’s services. But the reference intended by the feverish, melodramatic episode is also quite clearly to the young David, summoned to soothe the troubled mind of the sleepless King Saul. And Penbury’s mind is agitated in part by the human world of industrial society, as molten and malleable as the heated ore in the foundries that are destined to reshape it materially into revolutionary new form. He feels himself to be a kind of sinister divinity, his brain tormented by a vision of the world he is bringing into being – a new world intended to be eventually more kindly than

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the old, but also involving the stunting of bodies and the crippling of minds in the process. His vision is indeed that of Genesis – ‘that’s how it was at the beginning, the very beginning, you must have heard about that, harpist, with all things molten and awaiting shape’ (ATBT, p. 58). *** In All Things Betray Thee the harpist Alan Leigh becomes a cautiously hopeful champion of the new industrial society’s heroic attempts to discover a new language for comprehending its unprecedented experiences and painfully to evolve new forms of social and political organization to allow it to cope with industrial capitalism – even eventually to challenge it. But in Thomas’s play Jackie the Jumper the emphasis is rather on the difficulties of ensuring these new formations don’t become fatally compromised by reproducing some of the flaws of the old. The ambiguous hero of the play is Jackie the Jumper, a priapic, Pan-like figure who mesmerizes people just like a great Revivalist. One of Jackie’s responses to the dominant discourses of the religious and industrial ascendancy is to burlesque the standards and the language of the ruling classes. But while the play celebrates his wild disruptive energies in this respect, it is also finally critical of his values and methods. Both are seen as infantile and as fatally compromised by their inverse relationship to, and internal dependency on, the very values that they challenge. They are infantile because they are the enactment of a regressive, rather than progressive instinct. Alan Leigh the harpist had also known this temptation to which Jackie falls victim. In Leigh’s case it is symbolized by a yearning to return to a pre-industrial and pre-Christian rural idyll. But he is cured of such escapist dreams by his education, under the tutelage of his friend John Simon (a leader of the emergent proletariat), in the harsh conditions and the violent realpolitik of the new industrial communities. Leigh is led to realize that the workforce of Moonlea is coming ‘to know from the feel of their every day that they are well within the doorway of a changed world’ (ATBT, pp. 31–2). All Things Betray Thee is set in the early part of the nineteenth century, when a new industrial society was still under process of construction in Wales. As such, it represents a kind of escapist dream for Thomas himself, as through it he can indulge in an epic recounting of the struggles involved in the making of a proletariat. But Thomas was living through a very different period. The depression years of the thirties had led into the

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rapid post-war progress of de-industrialization. Thomas was (rightly) fearful that this process would eventually result in the fading away of the socialist dream in the light of a new, consumerist society. He intuited that in the long-term people might be lured away from a vision of a just society by the seductions of entertainment. Gwyn Thomas, like Idris Davies, believed that entertainment and religion, like the earlier duo of chapel and pub, were brothers under the skin: expressions of human immaturity and incompleteness. He saw society in the industrial Valleys as pulled in opposite but kindred directions: ‘Between the two poles of howling revivalism and militant besottedness there was little free and gracious territory’ (WE, p. 35). The point is made not only in Jackie the Jumper but in another of his plays, Loud Organs. Wmff converts a chapel into a club, a humanly restrictive and exploitative environment just like the chapel itself. He turns out to be an unscrupulous opportunist trading, for his own personal gain, on a secularized version of the religious language of salvation and liberation. He had offered the people release from their depressed, guilt-ridden lives only to treat them contemptuously as slaves of their primitive wish for pleasure. From the puritan point of view of an old-fashioned social humanist and spoilt Nonconformist like Gwyn Thomas such treatment was typical of the humanly degrading material to be seen on television and elsewhere, the product of the sixties boom economy and consumerist revolution. At bottom, he was as chronically uneasy about the pleasure principle as his Nonconformist forebears had been. Jackie fails, then, to develop the kind of radically different discourse, the profoundly different and radically reconstructive socio-political vision, with which Alan Leigh is associated in All Things Betray Thee. The Jumper acknowledges this when he admits to being not only the Reverend Rees’s opponent, but also his twin: the two of them are rarely more than a light flickering between two identities. I could have spoken all the words he spoke. And he, I suppose, could have doubled for me. We inhabit a procession of wombs that grow darker, and we avoid the one authentic birth by acts of clownish mischance. (TP, p. 109)

In so far as Jackie represents a failure to develop a genuinely different dominant discourse he represents for Gwyn Thomas a dangerous distraction for the Anglo-Welsh writer, as for the industrial proletariat. But in so far as he also highlights continuities between an old discourse

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and a new, he makes apparent the otherwise concealed connections and continuities between the rhetoric of Anglo-Welsh writers and the rhetoric of the preachers they oppose and replace. Jackie is very aware of himself as a spoiled preacher, and as such he partly represents Gwyn Thomas’s fear that a similar fate may have befallen him as author. *** This fear is partly rooted in Thomas’s awareness of how it was, after all, the chapels that had unintentionally provided the seedbed for the kind of secular socialist politics he and many others of his generation had espoused with such a religious fervour. Nonconformity had thus helped nurture the secular religion that then proceeded to undermine its social authority in Wales during the early decades of the twentieth century, in the process providing this secular religion with its basic values and even with some of its basic vocabulary. In this respect, Wales furnished only an extreme, and therefore dramatic, instance of a wider phenomenon. During the second half of the nineteenth century, socialism had been a very broad church, more an intellectual tendency than a clear, coherent movement, and featuring a number of different groupings and initiatives. These seemed to agree only on a general, blanket condemnation of competitive ‘individualism, the ideology of capitalism’.19 Informing many forms of socialist protest were values deriving directly from Christianity, and most particularly from Nonconformity, since the denominations (particularly Methodism) had far more quickly and successfully adapted to early industrial conditions than had the Church of England. Consequently many of the most influential socialist groups and societies espoused what later came variously to be termed utopian or ethical forms of socialism. More to our present purpose would be the phrase ‘religious Socialism’, a term first used by William Morris in 1885 in the manifesto of the Socialist League (TC, p. 165). This again assumed a variety of forms. While Christian socialism represented the more genteel and intellectual end of the spectrum, Labour ‘chapels’, widely established amongst the proletariat and the lower middle class, featured secular texts, rational commentaries and socialist hymns. One of the most notable promulgators of the socialist gospel in the 1890s was Robert Blatchford. In his widely read Clarion newspaper he promoted ‘the New Religion’, and based his political doctrine on a celebrated passage from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, which, in adopting, he also adapted for his own socialist purpose: ‘[i]n place

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of Anglicism with its gentility, Romanism with its pomp and circumstance, and Calvinism with its fire and brimstone, it gives us a charity which “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things” of men and endureth all things for men’ (TC, p. 166). Towards the turn of the century, relations throughout industrial society between management and labour began to worsen dramatically as British productivity began seriously to be challenged by the development of far stronger industrial bases in other countries. Class lines began to clarify and harden, and during the first decade of the twentieth century, inchoate nineteenth-century socialism came to be first reinforced and then transformed and systematized through its adoption as the ideology of a new, effectively organized, militant unionism and associated labour movement. With the effective absorption of the Independent Labour Party into the new consolidated Labour Party, socialism began to take on a serious political life. At the same time, nineteenth-century ethical socialism briefly found an important new lease of life among chapel members through the work of socially progressive ministers such as R. J. Campbell. Minister at the great cathedral of Congregationalism, London’s City Temple, the Reverend Campbell was one of the preachers Caradoc Evans recalled with grudging admiration in his essay ‘My preachers’. ‘Mr Campbell’s white, accusing chin attracted the Puritan in my soul,’ Evans recorded (FNLU, p. 110). But Campbell’s impact on working-class Wales was through his seminal books. Highly respected by many of the Welsh chapel-going workforce, these taught that the essence of the Christian gospel was radical social reform intended to secure justice for all, a reform that could be accomplished only by broadly socialist means. Campbell was himself a member of the ILP (Independent Labour Party).20 Evan Roberts’s Revival was, among other things, a response to the challenge of Campbell and his followers, an attempt to mobilize a more traditional form of religious faith, based not on a collective vision of social welfare but on the desperate need of every individual soul for salvation. *** It was out of this socio-religious culture that several of Wales’s most important early twentieth-century writers emerged. One of the bestknown and most important examples would be that of Gwenallt, a famous product of the Welsh-speaking proletarian culture of the lower Tawe/Swansea Valley. Brought up in the Calvinistic Methodist faith, he

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rebelled against its theological dogma as a young man, passionately embracing the new alternative religion of socialism. Within a few years, however, he had begun to suspect he was worshipping a God who had failed. He thereupon embarked upon a spiritual quest, eventually ending up back where he had begun, convinced that only Calvinism provided an intellectual and experiential framework robust and sophisticated enough fully to register and remedy the depths of human depravity. In his great poem ‘Y Meirwon’ (‘The Dead’), he provided a compressed version of his journey towards recantation. He recalls how, in his youth, he and others of his fierily socialist generation had learnt from the terrible atrocities they had seen perpetrated by the capitalist system – neighbours, for instance, slowly choked to death by pneumoconiosis or (like Gwenallt’s own father) instantly burnt to a cinder by molten metal – to chant ‘Collects of red rebellion, litanies of violence.’21 But looking back at it all at the end of the poem from the perspective of middle age, he registers the fading of that early socialist faith: Utopia vanished from the summit of Gellionnen, The abstract humanity, the world without frontier or class, And nothing remains today at the bottom of memory But family and neighbourhood, man’s suffering and sacrifice.

And in another poem of his later period, starkly entitled ‘Pechod’ (‘Sin’), a confrontation with the primitive savagery of supposedly civilized man’s ineradicable sinfulness prompts him to the Calvinistic conclusion that ‘Like wolves we lift our nostrils, ravenous, / Howling for the Blood that ransomed us’ (TCWP, p. 94). Gwenallt was, then, that relative rarity; an adult returnee to Welsh Nonconformity after initial heady youthful conversion to the powerfully seductive modern secular faith of socialism. For Idris Davies, his exact contemporary and rough counterpart as ‘proletarian poet’ amongst Welsh writers in English, the path away from Nonconformity towards a social gospel was to be a one-way route only. Davies would readily have recognized the term ‘spoiled preacher’. Indeed, when he was a boy, his uncle had hopefully prophesied ‘that I should be a Methodist preacher, / And perhaps the greatest of them all’ (ID, p. 195). Instead, all Davies’s zeal for conversion was to be channelled into a passion to transform the capitalist society whose rapaciously exploitative character was cruelly evident to him in the conditions of living in the mining society into which he had been born. Davies became a devout believer

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in the social gospel and his poems were hymns to inspire the working class. The nineteenth-century strain of idealistic socialism described as ‘utopian’, ‘ethical’ or ‘religious’ was also sometimes characterized as ‘Romantic’, in recognition of its derivation initially from the social visions of Shelley, and subsequently from the writings of Carlyle, Ruskin and others. This was a brand of socialism which, unlike its politically aware and economically minded twentieth-century successor, particularly honoured the figure of the artist. Concerned not merely with the practicalities of ensuring social justice but with dreaming into existence an alternative society in which all human potentialities might at last be fully realized, it was most at home when deploying the language of spirit and of soul. Such a movement placed a high value on the visionary artist, and it was with it that Idris Davies belatedly identified, as, in his arrestingly unorthodox way, did D. H. Lawrence, however loosely, during his early years. An important organ of this kind of intellectual socialism at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was read by Lawrence, was the ‘cultural weekly’ The New Age, under the singular editorship of A. R. Orage (TC, p. 195). On its masthead it carried not only the word ‘socialism’ but also ‘politics, literature, and art’. Its heroes were writers like Shelley, Arnold Bennett, Edward Carpenter, G. K. Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Walt Whitman. ‘All our institutions’, wrote Orage in one of his editorials, ‘are the work primarily of imaginative people, who invented the State, the Nation, Religion, Love, Art, Business, and all the rest’ (TC, p. 199). Such a statement helps explain the periodical’s reverence for painters, writers and musicians. It also helps us understand Idris Davies’s writing. In his case, a reading of the Bible as a humanist text about social transformation had been blended with a young autodidact’s passion for the more socially radical among the Romantics and then refined by a process of education in basic socialist principles. The word to which so much of his poetry is faithfully keyed is the word ‘dream’, his preferred term for vision of a better human world. In ‘The arrogant saviours’, he contrasts the narrow bigotry of the dark religious salvationists with the open-mindedness of those who are aroused to journey in a contrary direction, towards the light of a better human future. It is they who shall move with delight To the windows of the imagination and know the surge and the thrill

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Of creation rejoicing from height to sunlit height, The eagle athwart the sunrise, the lion on the golden hill. (ID, p. 220)

This is a millenarian poem and, in the tradition of visionary social reformers from Blake and Shelley right through to Lawrence, it adopts and adapts to secular purposes the kind of prophetic tone and sublime imagery most supremely associated with the Book of Revelation. It is a rhetorical move of a kind familiar in working-class history, parallel for instance to that which turned Bunyan’s great, classic Calvinist text The Pilgrim’s Progress, from the eighteenth century onwards, into the bible of the movement for working men’s advancement. Moreover, behind Davies’s phrase describing the move ‘to the windows of the imagination’ there lies a memory of the dove’s return to the windows of the Ark, carrying in its beak a green leaf, first proof of the emergence of a bright new world out of the flood that had swept away an old world sunk in corruption. In his several long autobiographical poems, Idris Davies repeatedly spoke of his early upbringing on a Welsh (and Welsh-speaking) hearth, ‘a colliery worker’s home, quiet and plain’, where ‘There was a Bible in each room / And Spurgeon’s photo hanging on the wall’ (ID, p. 194). His religious education was, he explained, somewhat eclectic, since by turns he attended the different chapels in which his father and his uncle were members and the parish church of his mother’s Anglican faith. Several times, too, he recalled his disillusionment upon coming to realize how chapel and Gymanfa functioned only ‘to make smooth the way without imagination’; in other words they served to reconcile the people meekly to the grotesque unfairness of the established order. Hence his lifelong subsequent commitment, once an adult, to the nourishing of that starved imagination, the working person’s potential instrument of revolt. Just as the preachers ingeniously and powerfully exercised their own imaginations to quell the imagination of rebellion, Davies would do everything within his power to counteract their sinister confining influence. In ‘Cwrdd Mawr’ (the ‘Big Meeting’, when chapels were addressed by stellar visiting preachers), he witheringly recalled seeing a minister standing ‘belching behind the biggest Bible’, And all would be so embarrassed if Jesus Christ Came with pick and shovel to the colliery yard, Seeking a stent in the four-foot face. (ID, p. 217)

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Davies thus brings the collier’s specialised but socially despised vernacular of the coalface into the respectable chapel and into the sacred precincts of middle-class ‘Poetry’. In one of his most powerful brief vignettes, Davies imagined how On sultry summer nights by the Severn Sea Ghosts in pitclothes will rise among The wet black boughs, singing Savage songs of the Industrial Revolution, Shaking maimed and angry fists. (ID, p. 215)

As a poet he was of their company and proud to stand in their ranks. Like the young Gwenallt, he saw his society as subject not to the wrath of an angry Calvinist God, as the chapels he attended had so loudly taught, but to the malign forces into whose power capitalism had callously delivered the working people. ‘Dark gods of all our days, / Have mercy upon us’ was therefore his secular, socialist prayer in Gwalia Deserta (ID, p. 7). These were the ‘dark gods of grime and grief’, whose servants were ‘the high priests’ of the Stock Exchange and the other central institutions of the capitalist economic, social and political order, ‘who deal in blood and gold’ (ID, p. 8). Religious imagery resonates like this throughout his writing. ‘O what is man that coal should be so careless of him / And what is coal that so much blood should be upon it?’ (ID, p. 4), he cries echoing the desolation of the Psalmist. No wonder he scorned the way in which in this god-forsaken world of the Rhymney Valley ‘The white deacons dream of Gilead in the Methodist vestry’ while ‘The unemployed stare at the winter trees’ (ID, p. 3). Here there is implied parallelism underlying superficial contrast, because Gilead was the place in the Bible associated with a healing balm, and so the deacons are exposed as being as desperate for social help as are the hopeless multitudes of the chronically unemployed. Other parallels are also hinted at. While the ‘adolescents jazz in the mining village’, ‘The Sabbath choristers in Bethel praise the Lord’ (ID, p. 3). It amounts, so the poetry implies, to much the same thing: jazz and hymns are both socially ineffectual forms of brief escape. Elsewhere, Davies can bitterly parody the grandeur of biblical rhythm and phrasing as he pillories the false idols of a rotten society: Consider famous men, Dai bach, consider famous men, All their slogans, all their deeds,

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And follow the funerals to the grave. Consider the charlatans, the shepherds of the sheep! (ID, p. 17)

*** Davies presents himself in his poetry as one who was rejected by the chapels he was himself rejecting. He had been ejected, he claimed, for his temerity in refusing the salvation on offer. ‘Because I was sceptical in our Sunday School’, one poem in the Gwalia Deserta sequence begins, And tried to picture Jesus crawling in the local mine The dozen deacons bred on the milk of Spurgeon Told me I was dangerous and in danger. (ID, p. 13)

It is his imagination, one notes, that is the source of the trouble, more so even than his rational, sceptical intelligence. Then, at this same poem’s end, he shifts into a different key to record the kind of vision which had led to his liberation: I remember I used to stare through the chapel windows Watching the sun like a perfect tomato touching the hill, And a swarthy young man wandering on a purple ridge, And his body was bent and his smile was compassionate. And sometimes in mid-week I would see him again, And he would smile and understand. (ID, p. 14)

It is a passage consciously paralleling the kind of graphic visualization of a biblical scene, such as that of the crucifixion, at which some of the great nineteenth-century Welsh preachers had so famously excelled. Their intention is also Davies’s. To work upon the listener/reader’s imagination so as to effect a conversion, a recognition of the truth of the Christian, or socialist, gospel. But Davies consciously paganizes his vision. Drawing upon early twentieth-century anthropology, he figures his Christ as a version of the ancient Sun God, who is in turn an embodiment of the power of natural fertility manifested in the resurrection of new life out of the death of the old. In a world where, for many long months of the year, the miner might scarcely ever get to see the sun, it was indeed the absent Lord. And in a community confined between hills that reduced even the longest and brightest of summer days to the relatively short period of hours when a blaze of light might directly

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penetrate the narrow cleft, the briefly present sun might naturally become an object of avid worship. Yet, of course, Davies’s redeemer figure is also a creature of flesh and blood, first glimpsed in Davies’s favourite location of dream – the wild freedom of the mountain edge, overlooking the imprisoned town. And that figure bears the signs of having himself experienced the suffering with which in others he humanly sympathizes – his bent body is the guarantor of the authenticity of his compassion. What is more, like the Christ of the New Testament, he is with Davies and his people always – he is the potential within every man and every woman; ‘the son of man returning to Miners’ Row’ (ID, p. 221). Davies’s quarrel was, however, not with the Gospel but with the chapels, and in this respect he was heir to the kind of Christian socialism preached by socially progressive ministers such as R. J. Campbell. Davies could contrast the way in which his working-class generation had gradually taken its ‘speech’ less and less from the Bible with the devotion of his forefathers to the Holy Word – Out of the big brown Bible My fathers took their words, And flung them in their anger As stones are flung at birds That rob the ripening cherries. (ID, p. 75)

Yet he could conclude the same poem with the hope that Out of the big brown Bible, If we read again, and aright, Perhaps there may come a language To banish the darkest night. (ID, p. 75)

What he doubted, unlike R. J. Campbell, was whether that language would ever be adopted by the chapels. They, after all, had risen with church, tavern and slag-heap ‘to the glory of Mammon’ (ID, p. 215). Consequently, his hopes were ‘verily’ set on the appearance ‘out of Gwalia’ of a ‘prophet great in anger’. It would be his words, and not religious faith, that would ‘move the mountains’ (ID, p. 75) – not the real hills of the coalfield Valleys but the mountains of slag that covered and obscured them. It was a prophetic role Davies obviously passionately desired for himself, and so when he wrote of broken-down

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parsons whose shuffling ‘remind you of the wilderness between the Word and the word’ (ID, p. 216) it was in the implied context of seeing himself as a kind of Moses of a Social Gospel who might yet guide the masses to the promised land. Yet he feared the worst: ‘perhaps the world has grown too bitter or too wise / To breed a prophet or a poet ever again,’ he sadly reflected in an age when no champions had appeared ‘Except the boxing, tennis, golf and Fascist kind’ (ID, p. 18). ‘Among Anglicans and Baptists / And Methodists I grew’ (ID, p. 76), he wrote in ‘I was born in Rhymney’, but judging by his poetry, at least, the greatest of these three when it came to influencing Davies’s young life had been Methodism. His early companions had been a ‘man who saw Calvin enthroned in Heaven’ (ID, p. 214). His Uncle Edward, ‘Solemn and stern and grey’ (ID, p. 77), had been ‘A Calvinistic Methodist’, and his severe theology was to leave a lasting mark. The Calvinistic message was the writing on the wall for Davies as a boy – And I woke on many mornings In a little oblong room, And saw the frown of Spurgeon: ‘Beware, my boy, of doom.’ (ID, p. 77)

It left him with a lifetime’s distaste for all who ‘sought another kingdom / Beyond the common sky’ (ID, p. 14). As has been seen, the name of C. H. Spurgeon (1834–92) recurs in Davies’s poetry, functioning as metonym for chapel religion: Let Spurgeon hang on childhood’s wall That shook at your grandfather’s prayers In the hard brown night When Wales was in the preacher’s pocket. (ID, p. 186)

A British Reformed Baptist, and widely admired as ‘the Prince of Preachers’, Spurgeon delivered a sermon at the Crystal Palace in 1857 to a record crowd of 23,654. Four years later, in 1861, he became the founding minister of Metropolitan Tabernacle at Elephant and Castle, Southwark, one of the biggest chapels in the world. Spurgeon became a household name in Nonconformist Wales, so much so that when Caradoc Evans came to name one of the two odiously self-preening ministers in his play Taffy, he called the younger of them Spurgeon Evans. Too young for the taste of some of the graver deacons (‘I like a

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whiskery man in the pulpit. In the Beybile with pictures Apostle John has whiskers – very long whiskers. And Peter and Paul are also hairy’ [FNLU, p. 170]), he is condemned, too, by them for his immature preaching: ‘His sermons would not put fear in a lame hen,’ proclaims his pompous clerical rival, the Revd. Ben Watkins (FNLU, p. 176). ‘We have fooled ourselves that a Heaven / Awaits our bodiless selves’, Idris Davies wrote scornfully (ID, p. 12). He saw such a yearning as infantile, as no more than the pitiful cri de cœur of the helpless, the socially disempowered. ‘Come out of your Methodist dream, boy bach,’ he consequently wrote, ‘And fight your sorrow in the sun’ (ID, p. 186). Shrewdly, he noted how the despairs of the working class were being displaced into a futile religious passion, the hills of the proletariat’s imprisonment becoming replaced in its imagination by ‘the hills of Galilee’ (ID, p. 77). Of his Methodist uncle he registered how he ‘was furious against Pharaoh’ without ever recognizing his own class enslavement in the enslavement of the Jews. Davies also implicitly acknowledged how his own secular discourse of social revolution – its lexicon, imagery, intellectual structure and tone – was itself a direct translation of the religious language with which he had been surrounded as a boy. In his uncle’s enchanted talk of ‘golden days’ can clearly be heard the kind of rhetorical phrasing with which Davies’s poetry abounds. But for him, his was not a case of ‘spilt religion,’ in T. E. Hulme’s celebrated phrase, but rather of infusing life and meaning into religious language by reconnecting it with the Reality Principle – with the social, economic and political realities of the proletariat which it had so obstinately, persistently, and culpably avoided facing. ‘Once he crawled in the barbarous gloom’, he wrote of the south Wales miner, ‘As the trembling slave of theology’ (ID, p. 11). *** T. H. Jones’s admission that he was a ‘spoiled preacher’ clearly applies then to Idris Davies, as it also does to Caradoc Evans, who openly confessed as much on several occasions. Witness his comment in Morgan Bible: The Welshman is never happy for long. His mind is seldom free of capel religion and the doubts and fears and omens that rise from it. A happy Welshman is as rare as a bee in the snow – though he does not believe in God, he knows the Devil is waiting for him and will take him down into Hell.22

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When the Western Mail mounted one of its many savage attacks on his writing, in the name of the honour of Wales, Evans’s wife, the colourful Marguerite, fiercely retorted that her husband was a ‘flaming Welshman, a Calvinistic Methodist who will never be able to extricate himself from Calvinism’. Her instincts were right – throughout his career, Evans’s satires of chapel culture were permeated by a Calvinistically black sense of the evil, the sinfulness, of the Nonconformist ‘elect’. But she was theologically wrong, as her husband proceeded to explain in a coda to her outburst: ‘My wife . . . said I am a Methodist. I am not. I am a Congregationalist [Annibynnwr] and just as bad as a Methodist’ (FNLU, p. 80). Such a distinction was of vital importance to – and only to – anyone raised in a nineteenth-century Welsh chapel; after all, it was literally a matter of life or death; of eternal salvation or of eternal damnation. While Evans could (partly ironically, of course) make such public statements with one breath, with another he could sardonically note: ‘We have given over God. Each man has his own Deity: a slim woman with long legs is one man’s, a saxophone performer is another’s, and a smart woman gifted in obscene epigram is another’s’ (FNLU, p. 110). It wouldn’t be difficult to say which of these deities was Caradoc’s own favourite. During the course of one highly entertaining address delivered to a Publicity Club, Evans first observed that ‘most photographs, in the interest of their owners and of their owners’ starving wives and families, should be held from the public’ (FNLU, p. 138). He then recalled offering the publisher of a cheap edition of his books an image for the back cover. ‘“What is the matter with your face?”’, the editor sympathetically enquired. ‘I answered “It is God’s.” “Not a bit like Him,” he said’ (FNLU, p. 138). But of course it was – Evans’s whole being had been formed in the spitting image of the God he claimed he’d encountered (and once encountered, never forgotten) in the chapels of his boyhood and youth. If there was a spoiled preacher, it was Caradoc Evans, a fact so evident it would be tedious to demonstrate it from his stories. An inveterate ‘sermon taster’, he wrote a typically acid, yet genuinely appreciative short essay on the preachers who had influenced him. At its centre stands a sentence that rings loud and true: ‘I am proud that I belong to a people whose god is a preacher and whose heaven is a chapel’ (FNLU, p. 110). Part of his meaning was that such a subject was good copy – excellent matter for his satiric purpose. ‘Cant and humbug and hypocrisy and capel belong to Wales and no one writing about Wales can dodge them. I do not think my stuff has done Wales any good. It is not

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in me to do that. It is not in anyone’ (FNLU, p. 106). But another part of his meaning was that Welsh Nonconformity got permanently into your head as well as under your skin. With this, at least, as we have seen, many of his younger contemporaries would have fervently agreed. Capel belonged to them as they to capel, and no one writing not only about their Wales but about their world, even when that might be as distant as Australia, could ever possibly dodge that. ‘We are’, said Caradoc Evans balefully and conclusively, ‘what we have been made by our preachers’ (FNLU, p. 157).

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6 Wales BC

Deacons of the Calvinistic Methodist chapel, Y Gyffylliog

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When the autobiography of the eminent Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones was published posthumously in 1959, it was prefaced by his widow’s verses ‘For my husband: on the first anniversary of his death.’1 In them, Jones appeared as the triumphant victor in an ancient battle for the human mind between the forces of reason and unreason. In the manner of the great epic heroes of legend he had travelled intrepidly ‘through the darkness, thunderous’. ‘Through murk and terror striding’, he had confronted and defeated the fearsome ‘dragons in eternal circles rising’. His widow’s verses thus draw on the archetypal images of pre-scientific, reputedly ‘superstitious’ cultures. And they do so in order to celebrate the achievements of Jones in his own terms, since he saw himself as one who had destroyed such cultures by translating their primitive language into the rational explanatory terms of modern science. In adopting these images, Jones’s widow was, therefore, following in the footsteps of Freud, who had sought to demonstrate how ‘primitive’ cultures had produced symbolic narratives powerfully expressive of the primal psychic dramas of the human subconscious, the true character of which only scientific psychoanalysis could elucidate. Welsh writers between the two world wars were products of this ‘enlightened’ secular culture, one of whose icons was Jones’s model and mentor, Freud. It was he and his followers who allowed the likes of Gwyn Thomas to claim that ‘In the South Wales of the ’20s politics and religion twisted the arm of the libido with a consistent ferocity.’2 In novel after novel, story after story, ecstasy was depicted as moving ‘swiftly from the mystical to the sexual’ (MPR, p. 15). These writers also

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shared the psychoanalyst’s fascination with modern secular culture’s supposed opposite. This was the pre-modern world labelled ‘primitive’ by ‘scientific’ rationalists, and supposedly animated by energies that were uninhibitedly sensual and sexual. For the writers, this had been the ancient world of Wales, and, combined with the theories of Freud, the work of ethnographers and anthropologists provided them with rational explanatory models of its cultural products. Several of the writers believed Nonconformity had displaced that ancient world and all its beliefs and practices only to reproduce them in a new, impoverished, desexualized and desiccated form. When Gwyn Thomas looked at a ‘white-haired preacher’, what his imagination saw was a ‘lion, wondering how to fit the machinery of his vast, unearthly lusts into the limited background of religious nonconformity’.3 Ignoring the fact that Wales had been Christianized for almost two thousand years, and totally overlooking the part played consecutively by the Celtic, Catholic and Anglican Churches in the lives of ordinary Welsh people, such writers evoked an imaginary ancient world that had, they supposed, existed BC in two senses. In their unhistorical version of it, the Welsh world Before the Chapels became virtually indistinguishable from the Welsh world Before Christ. And that imaginary pre-Christian world was most conspicuously connected in their minds with the Wild West of Wales. When Gwyn Thomas came to mention Evan Roberts in his series of autobiographical essays A Welsh Eye, he described the young Revivalist as a leader of ‘jehad’ who had surfaced explosively, like the return of a culturally repressed primal force, ‘from a hamlet in Cardiganshire’.4 Another revivalist is evoked in similar terms in Meadow Prospect Revisited: ‘he burst forth from some Calvinistic Death Valley in the far Welsh west, his eyes mesmeric with conviction, his tongue a thunderclap of sonorous hallelujahs’ (MPR, p. 16). As has already been noted, Roberts was in fact a native of a densely populated industrial region not dissimilar in many ways to the Rhondda Valleys with which Thomas himself so closely identified. And while it is true that he had experienced his transformative conversion in the region of New Quay in Cardiganshire, even that was a busy little port with extensive international connections through its seafaring past, rather than a mere ‘hamlet’. But such facts didn’t fit the required image. The ‘astonishingly handsome’ Roberts had to be fashioned into a semi-mythical being; a Christianized version of an old pagan god, instinct with raw sexual power; a product of the Nonconformist nation’s unconscious: ‘[T]o legions of women, excited by

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his images into a vision of a million doors opening all over the earth, he remained the unforgettable paladin of a life raised for an instant above littleness and tedium’ (WE, p. 175). There was, however, more than a grain of historical truth in this image of a nineteenth-century Nonconformist culture precariously and ambivalently superimposed upon a much older ‘primitive’ social order. In his recent social study of nineteenth-century Carmarthenshire, Russell Davies has noted an engrossing detail. After withdrawing from his own Revival to make his unlikely home in suburban Leicester with Mrs Penn-Lewis, Evan Roberts collaborated with her in the writing of War on the Saints, a work of ‘complex demonology’, revealing ‘the deceptions of the Devil and Evil Spirits in the modern times’.5 The book is dramatic textual evidence of a wider phenomenon; the overlaps and continuities that existed, particularly in nineteenth-century Welsh rural communities, between older belief systems and the new. Davies has summed up this situation neatly: ‘The religious realm extended beyond the chapels and the churches, indeed beyond Christianity, to encompass an abundance of pagan magic and superstition . . . They were not a counter-religion to Christianity, but rather the two co-existed and complemented each other’ (Davies, p. 210). Stories about spirits and fairies continued to circulate; the Devil was sighted in a variety of guises; corpse-candles still presaged an imminent death; liminal figures such as wise men and women were respected and consulted; bone-setters and herbalists plied their mysterious crafts. As Davies shrewdly observes, ‘the world-view of the characters in Caradoc Evans’s short stories borrows freely from the practices and dictates of established religion, while at the same time drawing heavily upon superstitious beliefs.’ (Davies, p. 218) The work of twentieth-century cultural anthropologists tended towards not dissimilar conclusions. In his classic study of the village of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa in the heart of rural Powys, Alwyn D. Rees emphasized how deeply the distinctive structures of experience of natives of the area had continued, even down to the middle decades of the last century, to be influenced by patterns of value and habits of cosmic perception as old as the pre-Christian world of the Celts.6 Such an interpretation confirmed Idris Davies’s mournful claim: I come from a Celtic land, Where the pagan has been slain

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By the roaring of the pulpit And the dull mechanic brain.7

A century and a half earlier than Rees’s study, the same village of Llanfihangel had been the home of the remarkable young Methodist hymnologist, Ann Griffiths. Her impassioned hymns became standard accompaniments to ‘the roaring of the pulpit’, but could be regarded in an entirely different light, as a translation of ancient anxieties about the unpredictable ubiquity of evil into the new Calvinistic language of sin, grace and redemption. The kind of anthropological reading of Welsh societies instanced by Rees’s work had its roots in the period when twentieth-century Welsh writing in English was beginning to pride itself on the supposedly ‘enlightened’ social outlook that is so evident in its deconstructive response to contemporary Welsh Nonconformity. One of the founders of this school of Welsh anthropology was the ethnographer H. J. Fleure, whose writing on the ancient aboriginal character of the inhabitants of rural and upland areas appeared alongside the work of Dylan Thomas and other writers of his generation in the seminal publication Wales. Indeed, just as Freud may usefully be considered not as a scientist of the sick mind but as a modernist writer, so too Fleure and his colleagues could be regarded not as academic anthropologists but as creative writers whose work fed into that of the poets, novelists – and indeed the dramatists – of the period.8 A Fleure-like figure actually appears in J. O. Francis’s play The Dark Little People (1922), first performed in Fleure’s university town of Aberystwyth. Professor Hughes-Lewis, a distinguished member like Fleure of the University College of Wales, arrives to visit a large farm. Again like Fleure, he is an anthropologist intent on measuring skulls with callipers to determine racial origins. Francis well knew the controversies of his time on this subject. In his essay ‘Against measuring heads’, he teasingly rails against the anthropological fashion for compiling a ‘Cephalic Index’, not least because it results in the claim that ‘real’ Celts are found not in Wales but in such places as Sussex and the English Midlands.9 He identifies the play’s hero, Dai, as of original pre-Celtic Iberian stock – he is one of the dark little people of ancient Celtic legend. Hughes-Lewis also draws attention to the fort on the brow of neighbouring Bryncerrig hill to which the native Iberians withdrew when invaders came, and informs the locals of how these foreigners (‘bullies’ to Dai) had the advantage of being users of iron and so were able to defeat and subjugate the natives.10 Significantly, his ‘scientific’

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story is related on the night when the whole community is gathered to celebrate ‘Noson Calan Gaea’, the traditional occasion for story-telling and the night when ghosts walk abroad. Dai is a humble ‘serving man’ on ‘Derwenfa’, a large farm owned by the Pritchard family that prides itself on its social eminence and distinguished pedigree. And ‘Iberian’ Dai is particularly despised by these latter-day Celts because he has worked in the mines down south – an area notorious in pious rural Wales for its serial strikes and its trouble-makers. Francis’s drama is therefore an important attempt to establish the native Welsh identity of the supposed ‘newcomers’, the suspect working class of the south Wales coalfield with their reputedly un-Welsh activities. In his play, the south Wales proletariat are reconfigured, transformed from the alien invaders of rural Nonconformist myth into the autochthonous inhabitants of Wales. A new counter-myth of the Welsh proletariat is born. The notorious insurrectionary character of the Welsh working class is here provided with a powerful myth of authentication and legitimization. And this myth also throws an entirely different light on rural Welsh Nonconformist society. The Pritchard family who own Derwenfa are also, in effect, the owners of the local chapel and take a correspondingly proprietorial view of God. In Professor Hughes-Lewis’s terms they are the descendants of the invaders who subjugated those Iberian Welsh aboriginals, ‘the dark little people’. When Dai’s sweetheart Teleri (also revealed to be of Iberian stock) suggests to Mrs Pritchard that the Almighty may, on Judgement Day, take a view of Teleri’s own impoverished family rather different from that of the starchy community that is the lordly Pritchards’s fiefdom, Mrs Pritchard indignantly replies, ‘Judgment Day? Am I to be talked to about the Judgment Day by a slip of a girl without a home or penny to her name?’ (DLP, p. 14) *** Like Francis, the swaggering editor of Wales, Keidrych Rhys, was also interested in ethnography and adopted the persona of an anthropologist when making one of his characteristic ex cathedra pronouncements about Welsh Nonconformity: ‘Anthropologically speaking, one can, in the end, perhaps say that this unlovely, soul-destroying and violent Puritanism with its resultant effect on our morals didn’t even benefit our culture. It doesn’t even seem to die a natural death.’11 Like Augustus John, Rhys looked to the travelling people for deliverance from the

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smothering embrace of Welsh Nonconformity: ‘It was left to our gipsies to defy Puritanism and preserve a handful of folk-dances’ (W, p. 247). It is possible that Fleure’s work had some influence not only on Rhys but on the gifted generation of writers that his extraordinary magazine was mentoring, and even on those of a slightly later generation. Recording, with characteristic brio, his youthful experiences of chapel, Gwyn Thomas recalled a ‘spurt of heady shamanism, an ecstatic lycanthropic baying at the non-conformist moon. This was called hwyl or the spirit, except by anthropologists who just sat and took notes’ (MPR, p. 42). Thomas was himself a mixture of shaman and anthropologist. Direct influence or not, what is certain is that the academic anthropologists and the writers shared a hermeneutical discourse widely influential in the period. Keidrych Rhys and Augustus John were far from the only artists of the time interested in the Romantic topos of the gypsy. Such a colouful figure living on the margins of society is encountered in Gwyn Jones’s novel The Walk Home. Feisty, wild and sexually liberated, she proves to be a magnetic attraction for the book’s hero, David Rowlands, an orphan in search of his father. The work is set in the time of ‘the Great Peace’, the period immediately following the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars, and is concerned with the raw living conditions of a working people struggling to adapt to the new phenomenon of an early, uncontrolled industrial environment. Dealing with this wild frontier experience, the novel is a kind of industrial romance, laced with swashbuckling episodes of intelligent melodrama. David’s missing father turns out to be one of the early ironmasters in the Tredegar area, and young Rowlands’s journey to discover him brings him into contact with a host of vivid figures. One of these is a Wise Man living in a remote, rough-built farm on a hillside with black cat, fat toad and lizard for company. Their presence is enough to make even ‘the back of the [youngster’s] neck’ start ‘listening.’12 With his ‘cat-whiskers on his broad cheeks’, the Wise Man, part shrewd ham, part shaman, is undeniably imposing: ‘You could imagine him in the pulpit of a Sunday, acting out the parable of the Prodigal Son, honking over the floor for husks, and ending up all greasy as he broadened his breadth with loin of Fatted Calf’ (WH, p. 31). Thus Wise Man becomes fused (and confused) with Nonconformist preacher. Not content with this bizarre character, Gwyn Jones adds a Sin Eater to his gallery of grotesques. There is again about this outcast – an ‘Ishmael’ as much despised as feared by the society – the aura of a preacher, which is what David first thinks he may be (WH, p. 44). His

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role as scapegoat is one he performs with a grim, intense seriousness that awes all who meet him, and when he practises his ‘craft’ he does so dressed in the sombre garb and with the sober demeanour of a preacher. Having conducted the funeral service and led the hymn-singing, he officiates at a black sacrament by solemnly and ritualistically consuming the bread and salt he has first placed on the breast of the corpse (WH, p. 80). Indignantly responding to an accusation of fraudulence, he passionately confesses his belief in sin and claims to have been so damned by assuming the sins of others that he ‘cannot afford to die’ (WH, p. 82). He is as much of a Calvinist, in his distorted way, as any Methodist. The implication of such portraiture is clear. For Gwyn Jones, Calvinistic Methodism is a kind of mutant version of old preChristian practices, and Christ the Redeemer is only a modern version of ancient figures such as the scapegoat and sin-eater. We can see this mutation of pagan into Christian actually taking place in Caradoc Evans’s first novel, Nothing to Pay. Its opening pages introduce us to Bensha Wedding Bidder, a native of west Wales who performs an important role in his rural society. To mark the engagement of a young couple, Bensha is asked to preside over a very special ceremonial occasion. For it, he wears the antic dress of a vivid, particoloured coat and arms himself with a staff adorned with red ribbons, then sets out to sing bawdy songs and recite ribald tales. The purpose of this social rite of pagan celebration is to encourage the community to lavish gifts on the newly engaged couple. Bensha is a powerful giant of a man, an enthusiastic drinker and an inveterate womanizer whose strength is legendary. He has wrestled a bull to its knees on one of the lonely beaches of the west, and has carried a calf on his lusty shoulders for twenty-five miles across forbiddingly rough ground. Another time, he traps a merman in his nets and kills it by slinging it against the stone walls of a lighthouse. But one day, as Bensha is returning home from one of his engagements, he is attacked by a huge ram and although he manages to defeat it, he is convinced that it was the devil come to claim his own. Instantly converted, he is transformed into a charismatic evangelist. There are obvious biblical dimensions to a narrative that nevertheless belongs to the communal store of tales and tall stories. The wrestling with the ram is surely meant to call to mind Jacob’s wrestling with the angel in the Old Testament. And as we shall see, the episode also inverts Caradoc’s view of himself as a product of Nonconformity and its biblical ‘tales’ who has ‘converted’ himself into a secular storyteller, the modern equivalent of the old traditional cyfarwydd.13

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As for Evans’s younger contemporary, Rhys Davies, he found several figures (both historical and otherwise) in the Welsh past corresponding to the unregenerate Bensha Wedding-Bidder. Davies hated ‘the grey gloom’ given to Welsh life by ‘Puritanism and Nonconformity’.14 According to him, people were so cowed they were afraid to hang underwear out on the line on washing-day (SW, p. 37) and so fearful of beauty that ‘even a slice of cake must not be too rich.’ In reaction, he sought out residual evidence of the ‘luminous gaiety’ (SW, p. 27) of Old Welsh figures through whom ‘sentimental romanticism and a Celtic imagination’ found expression. One of these was T. J. Llewellyn Pritchard’s old anti-Methodist hero, Twm Siôn Catti, ‘always sticking out his tongue from the pages of Welsh history’ (SW, p. 25). A folk character from ‘remote pre-Nonconformist days . . . that is, before the Great Blight’, Twm was a relief from ‘preachers, revivalists, mournful singers, hymn composers’ and the like.15 Davies loves the gusto of his rascality, the rudeness of his irreverence, the peasant guile of his exploits. Only when the modern, chapel Welsh get drunk does the ancient spirit of Twm rise irrepressibly within them, and then they ‘sing not in the mourning accents of the chapel, but with a delirious roll of the tongue that makes spinsters turn the key in the lock and virgins move restlessly in their beds’ (MW, pp. 198–9). Only then are the modern chapel Welsh ‘liberated from the shackles of that powerful form of debased Puritanism which resides in them yet’ (MW, p. 198) and an observer briefly acquires ‘a subtle intoxicating sense of the pre-puritan past’ (MW, p. 199). Davies relates several familiar tales about Twm’s exploits, noting in passing how ‘He would pass from amusing the husband to singing penillion to the wife’s charms. If there was a coarser development of these light tactics, à la Boccaccio, the later Nonconformist generations of Wales have deleted it’ (MW, p. 208). Twm has, then, survived only in emasculated form, but he remains for Davies a heroic symbol of the Welsh artist liberated from the cultural shackles and mental inhibitions of Nonconformist culture. Like Llewellyn Pritchard, Davies regards Twm as the true Muse of Welsh writing in English and particularly important in this connection is Twm’s satiric role – his exploits are a ribald, sardonic commentary on all pomposity. In relation to Welsh Nonconformity, Davies as writer aspired to perform a like function and if there was more than a hint of Freudian influence in his reading of Twm as a ‘bastard’, one whose very existence is a transgression of ‘respectable’ sexual norms, then Davies was fully aware of this. He knew that his, and Wales’s, ‘Twm’ had little or nothing to do with the actual

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historical figure of the sixteenth-century Thomas Jones of Tregaron. He recognized that Twm’s adventures belonged to an ancient stock of international folktales and that modern folklorists had constructed a taxonomy of such narratives. This allowed him to represent Twm as a character from the pre-Nonconformist memory of the Welsh folk, a rebellious product of the collective imagination of Welsh culture. Through Twm, claims Davies, one experiences a return of all the healthy, natural instincts that had been culturally repressed by Welsh Nonconformity. Twm’s exploits were ‘merely the wish-fulfilment of respectable Welshmen gathered round an inn fire to weave tales . . . He is a figure selected by us for the encrusting of those unlawful desires which most of us suppress . . . He is an Ideal of all good Welshmen’ (MW, p. 212). But if Twm was a figure only tenuously anchored in historical fact, recent history could vouch for the authenticity of another of Davies’s colourful icons of liberation. Dr William Price of Llantrisant died, the same age as the century, in 1893, and is remembered as the pioneer of cremation, but for Davies he was ‘the last character to display, in the old-style trumpeting manner, the spirit of Wales’ (SW, p. 25). With his fox-skin head-dress, his weird psychedelic costumes, his preaching of free-love, and his dramatic habit of standing ‘on a prehistoric stone in Pontypridd’ to ‘chant pagan addresses to the moon’, Price was the perfect riposte to Nonconformity, a living protester against ‘the harm a mishandled religion could work in a people’ (SW, p. 27). Like a pagan version of an Old Testament prophet, he existed on the fringes of ‘respectable’ chapel society, turning his incomparable showmanship into a form of rebellion – ‘mainly a vocal rebellion arrayed in much warpaint’ (SW, p. 27). Even more important than Price’s neo-paganism, with its strong sexual charge, was his resumption of the role of the traditional Welsh bard: ‘He is of interest as a true oratorical son of rebellious loins, and also he maintained the continuous tradition of bardic poetry’ (SW, p. 27). If he is a kind of pagan anti-prophet, then, he is also an anti-preacher, the alter ego of the great showman performers of the nineteenth-century Welsh pulpit. As a closet homosexual, whose sexual orientation was fiercely condemned alike by chapel and by law, Davies naturally thrilled to a Price who displayed his sexuality so openly: ‘he would have no smut or holeand-corner behaviour . . . [but] treated physical passion as something that was not objectionable and was not to be deplored’ (MW, p. 177). And Davies celebrated Price’s devotion to cremation. ‘The Welsh love a burial,’ Davies wrote; ‘thoughts of going into the earth do not fill us

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with mortification. In this the intensity of our religious training has greatly aided us. A six-foot hole in the earth is only a door to a palatial glory’ (MW, p. 169). Accordingly, Price’s atavistic fire-worship was viewed by Nonconformist Wales as Satanic: ‘Fire has associations with evil, destructiveness, devils, hell’ (MW, p. 169). To reinforce the point, Davies turned, as he regularly did in his fiction, to the images of eating in order to convey the secret sexual appetites of the flesh: ‘the quick, shrill destructiveness of it; to be consumed sharply in slim jumping jaws of flame! Flames crackling over one, red malicious tongues eating one to nothing in no time’ (MW, p. 170). But liberated or not, Davies’s own imagination remained indelibly marked by his Nonconformist heritage. He was always inclined, as here, to link sex to the forbidden and thus to flavour it with the frisson of the sado-masochistic. In his way, he, too, was rather afraid of hanging out his underwear on his textual washing-line. *** Rhys Davies was not the only writer of his time to find in the folkloric figure of Twm Siôn Catti a pre-Nonconformist hero. Between the two wars, J. O. Francis delighted Welsh theatre-goers with a set of plays based on the single, lovable character of Dicky Bach Dwl. Weak of mind but quick of wit, Dicky became a folk-hero for the Wales of the period. Like Twm Siôn Catti and Charlie Chaplin, he represented the innocent little man’s victory over such petty forms of authority as policemen, mine owners, justices of the peace, landowners – and chapels. In His Shining Majesty, Francis pokes indulgent fun at Welsh religion, by having Dicky Bach Dwl violently resent his friend Twm’s attempt to disabuse him of a belief in the Man in the Moon. For Dicky, Twm’s attitude is irreligious, and tantamount to atheism. Dicky is a moon worshipper, because the moon presides over the night-time kingdom of wood, field and river in which he and Twm so resourcefully practise their dark arts as poachers. As in the other plays in which he stars, Dicky seems to be in part a character out of ancient folklore, a lawless relic of Wales’s pre-Nonconformist past, a Welsh Puck, a mischievous sprite in league with the forces of nature.16 In Tares in the Wheat, Francis focuses his amiably rebellious attention more fully on Nonconformity. And in doing so, he re-enacts the archetypal modern Welsh literary scenario explored in chapter 4; the power struggle between preacher and writer for control of the wor(l)d. In this

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play, it is Dicky, of all people, who becomes a surrogate for the author in this seminal drama of cultural confrontation. He is bullied by the godly harridan, Rebecca Morgan, the proud proprietress of London Stores, who wants to make a Calvinistic Methodist out of such unpromising material.17 Forced to attend Bethania chapel, Dicky predictably disgraces himself by falling asleep in the middle of the sermon and, lost in a poacher’s paradisal dream of green fields, blurts out loud ‘Quick, Twm! Pole and net!’ (TIW, p. 35) In such an incongruous setting, he seems a disruptive changeling. Dicky does, however, undergo an unorthodox conversion, because he has been swept away by the preacher’s ‘fine juicy words! You can roll ’em round your mouth like rich gravy . . . “The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and the trees of the field shall clap their hands”’ (TIW, p. 44). Never has the poachers’ Four Valleys landscape been so idyllically evoked. What’s more, the ‘grand words’ from Revelation have triggered in Dicky a renegade revelation all of his own. In his vision, he claims to have seen ‘angels . . . some blowing on those long trumpets and some fishing . . . For salmon! . . . And the fish were rising in thousands, all singing hymns’ (TIW, p. 37). But that was just the beginning. Next came a ‘vision of wings. Wings everywhere. Angels’ wings beating steady; snipe flashing zigzag; wild geese flying high; partridges winging from the corn; then – pheasants: that’s what made me boil over – the pheasants going up whir-r-r!!’ (TIW, pp. 37–8) In a neat semantic turn, sermonic language is deconstructed into natural sounds and thus becomes the native patois of a poacher’s Eden. After all, it takes just the slightest readjustment of letters to turn ‘preacher’ into ‘poacher’. One only of the preacher’s words has survived stubbornly intact, to ring enticingly in Dicky’s puzzled ears: the very biggest and most theologically resonant of Calvinistic words, ‘Predestination’. Learning that it means ‘the belief that everyone has had his destiny arranged for him; fixed from the beginning beyond any change,’ he realizes it exactly describes the feelings he and Twm have about their own illicit calling. They are both preordained to be poachers. And at the end of the play a Dicky who has triumphed over his pious adversary Rebecca by rescuing Twm from her clutches, beamingly announces, ‘And now – we can all go on with our Predestination!’ (TIW, p. 92). It is the classic ploy – the adoption of a mask of an innocent to expose and satirize the pretensions of the powerful. As has traditionally been the way with the comic writer, Francis is waging war on the preacher, and has succeeded,

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through employing a motif from pre-Nonconformist lore, in combining the innocence of the dove with the cunning of the serpent. The same contrasting qualities are again successfully employed in The Poacher.18 Here, Dicky manages to entice Twm Shôn, who has converted to respectable chapel-goer, to revert to his old surreptitious trade, by revealing that Dafydd Hughes the Shop, a pious deacon of whom Twm is in awe, has gone off in secret search of Old Soldier, a legendary rabbit reputed to be uncatchable. Twm has recently resolved the mystery of Old Soldier’s whereabouts, and has rashly confessed the secret to Dafydd Hughes. Twm is therefore incensed when Dicky reveals the deacon is hotfooting it to take advantage of this new information. The play ends with Twm and Dicky renewing their nefarious old partnership, in the certainty that they will succeed in snaring Old Soldier ahead of their pious rival. In this case, Francis’s gentle humour has allowed him to develop an ingenious new strategy for undoing Nonconformity quite literally from the inside, because it is by attending Carmel that Twm comes to realize how the rabbit escapes to its secret burrow. Sitting in the chapel literally affords him a new perspective on his old poaching life, since from Carmel’s windows he is able to see for the first time how Old Soldier’s tunnels run directly into a cave that must therefore be the rabbit’s escape hatch. Poaching also figures as a trope for liberating trespass – transgression not only of the unjust Law but of the chapel’s ‘unnatural’ moral law – in Geraint Goodwin’s splendid story ‘The Shearing.’ As the narrative draws to its conclusion, young Lewis John, who has abandoned the beautiful Gwenna to marry the starchy neurotic chapel-prim Blodwen for her money, recalls the idyllic night before his marriage when, chased by the keepers, he found refuge in Gwenna’s bed. The result had been a child for whom Lewis had refused to accept responsibility. It is this foul ‘trespass’ of abandonment that dismays his rural neighbours. The story is set primarily in a barn at shearing time, when the village men perform the ancient, annual ritual of fleecing the sheep. Their skilled work proceeds to a primitive, sexually suggestive rhythm reminiscent of the one celebrated at the beginning of Lawrence’s The Rainbow. And keeping time with their work is the rhythm of barbed badinage that accompanies it, the dominant note of the exchanges being struck by the oldest, most experienced and most provocatively risqué of the shearers, old John Shadrach Ifans (John Shad). He needles Lewis John so much that the lad’s hand loses its cunning, a sheep is nicked, and in the ooze of blood John Shad implicitly recognizes both the wounding of Gwenna and the hurt Lewis John has caused his own true nature.

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John Shad thus presides, like some old pagan priest of nature, over a male assembly that is partly an alternative court of law in which natural justice is dispensed and partly a religious ritual of social bonding. But it is also an anti-seiat. John Shad is the embodiment of the ancient, undiscoverable life of the mountain farms, which Christianity had touched but not altered. Even in the rapt ecstasy of redemption that followed the first revivals, this old worn, pagan life endured: the things of the earth, the ways of man with women, these they knew as the psalmist did, for it was their life.19

Blodwen’s parents, poor cottagers who have made a fortune selling milk in London, are the leading lights in the village’s Calvinistic Methodist chapel. Her mother is ‘a magistrate and a deaconess in Shiloh’, and Blodwen’s own wedding had been a three-minister affair. Hostile to such female power, John Shad speaks for a much older dispensation. Steeped in the Bible, he instinctively recognizes in the Old Testament the sacred text of a natural religion, the wisdom literature of a pre-Christian rural society. Therefore, switching abruptly from flippant to earnest, he can slip effortlessly into the idiom of Scripture. It is after all the native language of his own experience: And then his voice, like a preacher filled with the spirit, went mounting up in invocation: ‘And who is right, ’machgen i? Nature, in all her wonderful glory who sendeth the spring into the valleys and giveth drink to every beast of the fields: yea, yea, who appointed the moon for seasons and who toucheth the hills and they smoke . . .’ (GG, p. 225)

So John Shad appropriates pulpit style for his own ‘pagan’ purposes. Rhys Davies also had his strategies, like Goodwin and Francis, for confounding preachers by confronting them with figures embodying the ancient instincts suppressed by their culture. ‘The old Adam’ has about it something of the vulgar simplicity of comic folktale or of the popular anticlerical fabliaux of the Middle Ages. It is set in the ancient village of Clawdd, ‘which possessed two valiantly thriving Nonconformist chapels, as well as the esteemed theological college’.20 But ‘Clawdd was here long before the college’ (RD2, p. 298) and one of its inhabitants is Jane, a buxom young woman seized by the fashionable desire to sunbathe naked. An ‘up-to-date mania’ (RD2, p. 296) this may be, but it

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is also a reversion to the old pagan instinct for sun-worship. Innocent of the modern ‘fads as a nymph of the old dispensation’, Jane one day dozes off among the daisies unaware of a neighbouring voyeur. He is a young theological college student who, having glimpsed Jane in chapel on May Day, and having heard of her attractive habit, is anxious to avail himself of an inviting opportunity. The parallel with such biblical stories as the one about Susannah and the lecherous elders is, of course, obvious. The poor student, Tudor Edwards, has been caught in the female trap, and once detected in his crime, he is relentlessly pursued for practical reparation by Jane and her mother, who submit him to public exposure and humiliation. ‘“There’s bound to be a goat even in a college like ours”’, pronounces one local over his leisurely pint (RD2, p. 297). Tudor is even quietly offered the excuse that he was just a poacher out after salmon, as the village attempts to avoid being engulfed by sexual scandal. The incident turns into a battle between the two formidable mothers. In response to Mrs Morgan’s calculating, carefully stage-managed outrage in the name of her wronged daughter, Mrs Edwards claims her son has been bewitched and that in any case he is vulnerable to the phases of the moon. But in the end, it is the Morgans who prevail, by condescendingly offering to forgive Tudor if he marries Jane. Their eyes are fixed solely on the several valuable properties owned by the Edwards family and marriage negotiations are accordingly conducted solely in these mercenary terms. But Tudor has his own cunning. On the night before the wedding he makes his silent apologies, fleeing down a drainpipe on his way to distant parts. In the furious encounter ensuing between Mrs Morgan and Mrs Edwards, the latter triumphantly succeeds in reclaiming something from the wreckage of the wedding arrangements. Of all the presents lavished upon Jane, Tudor’s incensed mother insists on grabbing back a statuette of the great Nonconformist divine Christmas Evans. He is plucked from the booty, treated like a fetish, clasped to her bosom with a positively sexual fervour. The pagan god Pan, who has presided over all the proceedings in the story, thus triumphs over the chapel to the very end. A revered giant of the pulpit is no more safe from his power than is an innocent young theological student. *** Rural west Wales continues to provide fertile ground for Davies’s anticlerical imagination in all his fiction, because he associates the region

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with pre-Christian beliefs and practices. His novel The Black Venus is a notable case in point. One of its powerful characters is Moesen Rowlands, Esq., a wealthy, weighty, worthy; a justice of the peace, cattlebreeder and governor of both the local grammar school and the local hospital. But although socially sophisticated, worldly wise and a figure of the establishment, Moesen is at bottom a powerful tribal chief in the ancient Celtic manner: ‘in olden days it was such as he who would have been that leader of the horde to whose side all the tribe’s women came, until a younger man challenged his failing powers.’21 His social ascendancy is inseparable from his sexual potency. He radiates primitive power. His name, Moesen, is the Welsh for Moses, and Rowlands is an embodiment of Rhys Davies’s perception that the preachers and elders who dominated the patriarchal culture of the Welsh chapels were no more than thinly Christianized versions of those male figures whose primitive power and sexual potency made them the leaders of ancient tribal societies. But modern anthropology had taught Rhys Davies that the most ancient cultures were probably not patriarchal but matriarchal, and this theme is also explored in The Black Venus in a number of ways. When a case of ‘courting in bed’ is brought before the court in which Moesen is sitting as magistrate, he dismisses the Nonconformists’ claim that it is an instance of criminal immorality by citing classical texts proving such a custom is at least as old as the pre-Roman period. Disapproval of it is, he argues, an understandable feature of English society (hence the condemnation of Welsh female immorality in the Blue Books Report), because ‘a new and foreign race like the English have not yet had time to settle successfully in Britain’ (BV, p. 31). Moesen understands very well modern anthropological accounts of early fertility cults, in which a recognition of the sacredness of sexual fecundity found expression through the sacrificial worship of a Mother Goddess. Consequently, when Moesen attends chapel, what occupies his attention is not the preacher or the sermon but the pulpit itself: ‘during most of the service the opposed sexes slanted respectfully towards the pulpit below, which was a mass of bellying wood carved with oaken fruit, leaves, floral emblems, and other decorations’ (BV, p. 46). The pulpit’s decorations signify something important in this novel. They prove the legitimacy of Nonconformity: for all its crippling faults, it is heir to ancient Welsh cultural beliefs, forms and traditions. Not so the Church, which is depicted as more reactionary than the chapel, because for all its ‘hoariness’ it is an alien institution. And Davies’s

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complex view of the chapel is brought out in the varied reactions of the elders to the practice of courting in bed. Shôn ap Shenkyn represents a throwback to the rigorously censorious Puritan past, but is also progressive in his argument that the practice often leads to the stigmatizing and abandonment of a pregnant woman (BV, p. 15). The tolerant Tomos Hywels (BV, p. 12) represents the ‘nature will out and the young will be young’ school of thought. Even the minister, Cynog Thomas BA, is deeply ambivalent on the subject, having himself courted in bed as a youth, but he reluctantly concedes that society has since ‘progressed’ in a different direction. Ellis Prosser, by contrast, takes the practical line, arguing (BV, p. 14) that the custom is a pre-marriage trial by the male of female fertility. As for Olwen Powell, or ‘Olwen T} Rhosyn’, the attractive and formidable young woman accused of the ‘crime’, she rounds on the men for even presuming to sit in judgement on a woman (BV, p. 14). Presenting herself as a ‘new woman’ (and thereby a modern figure representative of the ancient matriarchal world) she highlights the patriarchialism both of the chapel and of the whole society it serves. Courting in bed is, she argues, a practice useful not for the man (as generally supposed) but for the woman. It allows her to test her suitors to find out which of them is of sufficient mental substance, and mettle, to be worth marrying. Olwen is seconded by her mother, who rails against the assumption that women are fit only for domestic life. Mrs Powell is herself implied to be a wise woman, a local healer, full of herbal lore (BV, p. 44). In her way, Mrs Powell’s daughter Olwen is a highly modern version of ancient goddesses of love such as Venus. Her fine four-poster bed has a canopy ‘on which was embroidered in rainbow wools a marine design of fishes, shells, boats and anchors’ (BV, p. 40). This is not, however, the domestic counterpart of the bellying pulpit. Where that signified fertility, the canopy symbolizes a purely sensual sexuality that is uncoupled from the function of reproduction, and at its very centre is, ‘for no reason at all, a buxom young negress holding up a large key’. But that figure is not as lacking in reason as it seems. It is given a lively, varied, complex symbolic life throughout the novel, its multifacetedness and ambivalence providing Davies with the means of exploring several aspects of love and sexual passion. Some of these belong to the realm of the ‘socially deviant’, like Davies’s own sexual inclinations – themselves, of course, unconnected with the process of reproduction. Thus, the passionate physical infatuation of the foul-mouthed old crone Lizzie

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Pugh with the beautiful Olwen is infused with unacknowledged lesbian desire. ‘If a man I was! I’d give that Olwen a courting in bed! A riot we women ought to make against her. A bull to toss is too good’ (BV, p. 37). She proposes to the village women who are plotting Olwen’s downfall that a woman should court the girl in male clothing and thus shock and shame her (BV, p. 51). And Lizzie Pugh it is to whom Moesen Rowlands has given a strange present of a black Venus. In this context, the blackness is obviously a signifier of the socially transgressive, of what is regarded as culturally ‘perverse’. The Venus has, in fact, a mild, respectable face, but Lizzie fetishizes her, and her totemic treatment includes covering her nakedness on Sundays. If Olwen is a Venus, a powerful female figure, whom chapel society at once fears, condemns and nervously endorses, then Lizzie and her Venus are beyond the chapel pale altogether. In an unconscious attempt to seduce Olwen, Lizzie praises her for a loveliness ‘better than my black statue’ and croons over the ‘curd and honey’ of her flesh (BV, p. 112). Having covertly flirted with such illicit forms of sexuality, Davies ends the novel with a kind of equivocal reconciliation between ancient pagan forces and the chapel. Olwen chooses for husband not Rhisiart Hughes, Moesen’s illegitimate son and the socially ostracized Laurentian force of nature who fathers her child, but the stout minister Noah Watts. He, too, has undergone her test of courting in bed, and marriage to him seems in part to indicate not the acceptance of the fig-leaf of respectability or submission to conformity, but rather Olwen’s attempt to protect herself from those most urgent and imperative sexual instincts aroused in her as if by sorcery by Rhisiart’s love-making. These lead only to the loss of the kind of self-possession so highly prized by the new woman, as by Davies himself. It is as if Davies were becoming aware of the patriarchal character of the new sexual politics being preached by his friend Lawrence, whose novels had been such a great influence on his own. And if some such reading is partially true, then Davies seems to be recognizing that an enlightened, liberal, chapel ideology, moderately and resourcefully tolerant of the instinctual, may after all have something to commend it. Significantly, Noah Watts devotes himself to the women’s cause. He even accepts the Black Venus into the house, although perhaps only because he misinterprets her meaning: ‘He had a liking for the sweet-faced Venus with her meek little smile: her banishment seemed to him undeserved’ (BV, p. 195). But that alerts us to another dimension of the case, a counter-impulse at work in the novel, because within Olwen’s veins the ‘old wild soul of

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Wales’ still pulses triumphantly (BV, p. 183). Hers is a very uncertain, and therefore inherently unstable, submission to marriage with the chapel. She had really only married the minister Noah at her parents’ insistent prompting reinforced by Moesen and his own weighty arguments. Noah himself had courted her with sermonic eloquence and chapel cunning. A part of Olwen still yearns to be fully independent (like Davies himself) and in so far as she feels comfortable with companions it is not with Noah but with the spinster Miss Eurgain and the lesbian ‘witch’ old Lizzie Pugh, two sides of the same sexual coin no doubt. By the end of the novel she and Noah are living apart, although they meet regularly and he continues to have the capacity to surprise her and to upset her stereotypical image of him and his world. At the end, he is preparing to preach a sermon on ‘The Blessed Tree’, ‘Y Pren Dedwydd’, a term referring to an old competition between young men to see which of them can squeeze through a narrow natural slit or division in a tree’s trunk. Watts proposes to turn the folk rite into a religious allegory, but his words belie his actions. Waiting until Olwen has retreated to her bedroom, he throws pebbles at her window and then, making his laborious way up the ladder, effortfully pushes his stout frame through her casement. The old story of the Blessed Tree is no longer read sermonically as an allegory of Christian redemption. It has been re-turned by Noah’s enterprising actions into an allegory of the old love custom and fertility rite of courting in bed. By these means the resourceful minister Noah Watts cunningly gains access to his wife’s bed – although whether he is then also allowed access to her body the novel deliberately refrains from letting us know. What is certain is that at the end of the novel the minister has proved capable of adapting his biblical rhetoric to radically new, and sexual, purposes, and that he has, in the process, effected a kind of discursive and practical marriage between Nonconformity and ancient, pre-Nonconformist popular culture. The Black Venus’s treatment of the encounter between the world of the chapel and the world of an older ‘religion’ is therefore complex, as is Davies’s sustained attention to the theme across the range of his fiction. But that complexity is refracted by the medium of some of the short stories, with the result that one or two elements become isolated for much simpler treatment. Pugh Jibbins, in the story ‘Blodwen’, is a primitive force of nature. ‘He was of the Welsh who have not submitted to industrialism, Nonconformity or imitation of the English’, and by the end of the story his uninhibited sensuality has triumphed over

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Blodwen’s respectability.22 (Once one learns that her suitor, a solicitor’s son, is fond of poetry one knows it is going to be no contest.) Many of Davies’s characters conform to the same type. Colourful Dinah Cockles, prostitute turned costerwoman, as big of heart as she is of frame, generous with her affections as with her cockles, a lover of drink and a greater lover of bawdry, goes into a steep decline once she marries respectable, pious – and correspondingly grasping – Job the Grinder: ‘the old pagan spring in her dried up and the propriety of her tongue was like a page in the parish magazine’ (RD2, p. 45). Seeming immortal when she was in her promiscuous prime, she ends up dying young, ‘choked by a wedding ring’. *** Davies’s longer fiction during the 1930s allowed him greater scope to develop this obsession with pre-chapel Wales into more psychologically interesting forms. A couple of his novels contrast the period before the First World War, when life ‘in the puritan-blasted Valley’ had turned desire into ‘a skulking back-lane disgusting promiscuity’,23 with postwar conditions when Nonconformity’s grip was loosened. Although ‘the [chapel] worshippers [still] preferred the long drawn-out bleats and cat-a-wauls of the bowel-moving Welsh hymns’, a generation of young people turned in relief to new attractions. During the lead-up to the war, young Iorwerth, in The Red Hills, ‘hated the inflammable people around him, because of their shallow fervours and ecstasies, that were as eruptive surface-diseases over their repressed pagan souls’.24 His disgust is visceral, and he exhibits the symptoms of what might today be termed ‘abjection’. He feels a physical repugnance at ‘their grotesque religious orgies, when the natural poetry of their wild, craggy souls became abortively alive in a disgusting way. Then this War. People yelling and sweating with patriotic fervour’ (TRH, p. 25). A link is clearly established between the hysteria of the 1904–5 Revival and the jingoism that sent a generation of young men to their death and broke Nonconformity’s spell over the Welsh. Eventually Iorwerth flees to the magical, druidical, Celtic peninsula of Cornwall – the very region where, of course, Lawrence had spent part of the war. The early Davies didn’t so much imitate his friend Lawrence as attempt to work out the implications of his sexual gospel for a Wales caught in the grip of a puritan culture. The Red Hills is one of Davies’s most important novels in this regard – the hills coming to feature a wild

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zone, a region of freedom from the narrow physical, social and psychological constraints of the valley floor, and a region where the ancientness of a pre-Christian land is still manifest in the natural geography. Raised in a rigidly Nonconformist home, Iorwerth rebels, seeking escape at first by embracing a secular socialist politics aimed at the mobilizing of the proletariat. This politics is thriving in the aftermath of a war that has left the workers feeling they’ve been cheated and exploited. ‘Even God seemed a bit of a fraud: and the massive stone chapels began to lose the young people, though the old continued, with a frightened terror, to believe in the ultimate good of the ogre’ (TRH, p. 34). Longerterm, however, it is not politics that is to bring Iorwerth redemption but sexual passion, although, in true Lawrentian fashion, he has first to work his somewhat violent way through forms of sexual experience that enthral rather than liberate. His dissatisfaction with politics follows the realization that while his fellow young socialists ‘pretended some kind of revolt from religion, they lived by the principles placed in them in their Sunday-school chapel days’ (TRH, p. 55). He grows impatient with the proletariat themselves, seeing their passivity as originating in ‘the evilly puritanical forces of the enslaved’. With typical Lawrentian fervour, he hates ‘their sour resentment . . . an offspring of the Christian meekness grafted into them’ (TRH, p. 167). Through a long, and again violent, process of sexual wrestling with a woman named Veronica, who has previously spent years in a lesbian relationship, Iorwerth manages eventually to break free of a social landscape where ‘at intervals chapels squatted, like slimy grey toads risen out of the oozy mud. He remembered their fetid interiors, with humans feeding on death-worship like vultures on carrion’ (TRH, p. 180). Home for the couple is a hut in a ravine in the hills, a place where Veronica ‘seemed to hear the slow and steady beat of great gongs, thrilling and implacable, sounding for some primitive ritual. Was she . . . an initiate the dark hills awaited?’ (TRH, p. 207). Iorwerth and she regard themselves as a pair arisen from the tomb of a puritan faith, and the novel ends with a kind of pagan, sensual version of the Christian resurrection, as Iorwerth and Veronica are miraculously released from entombment following the deliberate collapsing, by their enemies, of the shaft of an old drift mine. Not all of Davies’s chapel-tormented protagonists are so fortunate. Reuben Daniels, in The Withered Root, grows up fascinated by a capriciously powerful God and comforts himself with a correspondingly sentimental view of Christ. Narrowly avoiding several temptations of the flesh, he is briefly stirred by an evangelical meeting in which the

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preacher ‘writhed and sprang about the pulpit like a wrathful angel’,25 and subsequently experiences a shattering religious conversion. His emergence as a charismatic evangelist is reported with all the clichés thereafter to bedevil every representation of such an event in Welsh fiction. Given the ‘mysterious religious fire of the Welsh’, ‘a revival belongs to everybody, like the sea at the seaside at Bank Holiday’. But disillusionment and nervous breakdown follow, sexual passion offers no adequate source of recovery, and, after wandering Cardiff streets tormented by hellish visions from which he is rescued by a prostitute with the mandatory heart of gold, he ends up returning to the valley, sick of mind, and hallucinating the faces of his dead. At several points in the narrative Reuben the evangelical preacher is seen as the lineal descendant of the bard, one who would in other days ‘have carried his harp from village to village’ (WR, p. 33). His popular sway is attributed to his indigenous cultural characteristics: ‘The old fearful soul of the Welsh recognized him: ever through the ages there had been men such as he – poets, bards, seers, prophets, born to the simple, worshipping people, reared among them and at the suitable period arising to open the scroll of their sacred talents’ (WR, p. 194). The perception of the preacher as the modern reincarnation of an ancient, archetypal Welsh cultural figure is central not only to the treatment of Nonconformity in the work of many twentieth-century writers but also to their understanding of themselves and their postNonconformist function. Many of the writers saw themselves as heirs both of the preachers and of the older figure of the cyfarwydd, or tribal story-teller, so revered by earlier Welsh culture. *** No one was more eager to reclaim the art of story than Gwyn Jones. ‘For thirty years I’d been justifying myself with the thought: “If you can’t make the Welsh Fifteen, translate the Mabinogion”,’ he reminisced in 1977.26 And translate it he eventually did, in collaboration with the distinguished Welsh-language scholar Thomas Jones. Subsequently, he quarried some of the material, and added to it more stories from the Middle Ages, to produce a beguiling collection of Welsh Legends and Folk Tales (1955). And all this in addition to being an authority of world renown on Icelandic Saga.27 In other words, Gwyn Jones was magnetically attracted, both as practitioner and as scholar, to the ancient art of narrative. Introducing his collected stories, he represented the whole

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history of his writing life as the amplification of two stories he recalled of his childhood experiences. ‘Compulsive imaginings’, he called such life-fictions, ‘only tenuously linked to fact’ but with the power to rule an entire life. Also recalling a story he’d heard many years earlier in Greenland, he could still feel how ‘the whole story – my whole story – had burst open in my chest. Chapel, altar, Father, Mother, Son, Man the Destroyer – myth, legend, wondertale – the human and the brute creation – never, I thought, was there a story so made for me.’28 Gwyn Jones was consciously indebted to the traditions of skald, bard and cyfarwydd. And his acknowledgement of this takes fictional form in his long story ‘The green island’ (the very title containing an echo of ‘Greenland’). According to a legend narrated in the text, the Welsh king Bleddri once hurled a goblet at his wayward wife as she departed with her lover, the rival king Maredudd. He missed his target, but the goblet may be seen, upturned, floating in Cardigan Bay in the form of a green island. The Englishman Merrill believes, at the beginning of Jones’s story, that such a fantastic old wives’ tale is proof of the ineffectual nature of the Welsh, their inability to deal with realities and their penchant for retreating into fantasy. Their gullibility, Merrill believes, has long been exploited by their English neighbours. By story’s end, however, he has himself been deceived and outwitted by the Welshman Dafydd Absalom, whose wife the Englishman had seduced on the green island of King Bleddri. Mid-way through ‘The green island’, the main characters head for Cornel Ofan (Welsh for Fear Corner) to consult the Dyn Hysbys, the Wise Man. He lives in a remote, primitive cottage in the very heartland of a west Wales wild enough even for George Borrow to have relished. Half-prophet and half-charlatan, this giant figure possesses ancient powers: he is able to bewitch, to foretell the future and to heal the sick, and is clearly a relic of a pagan world. He is described as one of the descendants of the legendary Merlin. But in his dark parlour hang two pictures – one of St John holding a quill, the other of St Matthew over whose shoulder a bull is peering. The suggestion, of course, is that the Dyn Hysbys is an example of the way in which paganism mutated into Christianity, and proof of the pre-Christian beliefs still coursing through Nonconformist veins in the far west of Wales. At one point in the proceedings, the Dyn Hysbys invites a collier who is also visiting him to recite a long narrative poem about a mine explosion. One of Gwyn Jones’s own formative experiences was a memory ‘of being caught in the reverberations of a pit explosion at

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the age of six’ (CSS, p. 1). Although he acknowledged the memory was as much fiction as fact, it had left a deep mark on his imagination: ‘in story-telling [it] gave me fixations on darkness underground as an ultimate horror, and fire anywhere as our most fearsome destroyer’ (CSS, p. 2). The collier is, therefore, Gwyn Jones’s own alter ego – a representative of his story-telling self. Caught up by his narrative, the miner launches into hwyl, the rhetorical transport of the true oral artist and of course the oral signature of the great preachers whose eloquence nineteenth-century Wales had found so irresistible. The collier’s audience is likewise spellbound, their silence at his story’s conclusions eventually being broken by a single, sighing tribute: ‘“What a preacher you would have made, Mr Thomas from South Wales”’ (CSS, p. 151). No higher praise could have been lavished. And no clearer sign could there be of Gwyn Jones’s acknowledgement of his debt, as ‘Anglo-Welsh writer’, not only to the skald and the cyfarwydd but also to their nineteenth-century descendents, the legendary story-tellers of the Welsh pulpit. Implicit in his narrative, however, is the view that the preacher is a counterfeit story-teller, one who practises an old art to new and suspect ends. Caradoc Evans was likewise indebted to both preacher and cyfarwydd, but identified most strongly with the latter, whose ancient social role had been usurped by the preacher. In his acidic portrait of the Welsh people he noted of the preacher how ‘temptations such as art, drama, dancing, and the study of folklore he has removed from our way’; and, both early and late in his writing career, Evans fed his imagination on counter-cultural, folkloric materials. His first novel, Nothing to Pay, includes a splendid contest between the trainee minister Eben Lewis Pembroke and two drunken exponents of the ancient art of spinning a tall tale. Wearing his ‘hat preacher’, Eben is standing outside the Red Cow preaching with sonorous eloquence against the devil drink. He recalls a vision: ‘“the vision of a man who bellowed like a bull at the sight of a heifer. His sneezes were like fuses on fire. Now for the interpretation. The bull-man was the Diawl. The sneezes hell fire”’ (NP, p. 84). At this point Tomi Miami and Joni Bogus come reeling out of the pub, and after Tomi has first had his sally, Joni weighs in with his: ‘“Bogus is the one boy for the bull. In the India a tiger ran to me for to eat me. What did Bogus do? I pushed my arm into his mouth and caught hold of his tail and turned him inside out.”’ Now that he’s started, Joni is egged on by the bystanders, ‘“Tell, Bogus,” one cried, “about the lioness who tickled your feet when you were kissing the

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Indianness.”’ Realizing exchanges are taking a dangerously salacious turn, Eben and his sidekick Amos rapidly wind up their temperance meeting. The implication is clear: the preachers may have tried to rid the land of folklore, but the old-style stories still circulate amongst the common people, and moreover the preachers themselves exploit such materials for their own ‘bogus’ purposes. No wonder Eben contemptuously refuses a fashionable bowler when it is offered to him in favour of a ‘hat preacher’ so glossy he can gratifyingly see his face in it (NTB, p. 83). The preacher’s magical tall hat is needed to cover his tall biblical tales. What his landlady reverently styles ‘Eben’s preaching hat’ (NTB, p. 78) is the indispensable prop of a verbal conjuror, a circus barker, a mountebank. Nowhere does Evans’s love of folk tales appear more graphically than in his late work, Pilgrims in a Foreign Land. Starting in Evans’s familiar vein of savagely comic grotesquery, the stories in the collection quickly modulate into a fantastic fiction. It is as if there had been a counter-flow of influence during the later thirties from the young writers like Dylan Thomas and Glyn Jones, whom Evans had influenced in the earlier part of the decade, back to their old master himself. Their surrealistic fantasies seem to have released in the ageing Evans a taste, partly repressed or displaced in his earlier writing, for the richly inventive folklore of his native region. Both God and the devil take very material forms in the collection – the Evil One even leaving a hole in Nain’s head where he exited.29 The stories include lots of magical animals. People metamorphose into squirrels, powerful owls, talking cockerels and foxes, as well as garrulous parrots. The narratives seem to be Evans’s own distinctive version of traditional folk-tales and they also draw not infrequently on Welsh customs and sayings. Belief in the supernatural power of owls is a running theme in ‘Bliss in the night’, a story including an onomastic account of how the hare came to have its harelip (PFL, p. 19). The climax of ‘Robbers do not look’ (PFL, p. 45) turns directly on the saying that whoever hears a certain phrase spoken about death will certainly die. A dyn hysbys assumes the shape of a blacksmith in ‘Do not praise your marriage day in the morning’, and the story also features a ‘spirit grave-digger and coffin-maker’ (PFL, p. 95). Tricksters and shape-shifters, ogres, wizards and witches, these or their modern equivalents are the figures populating a collection of stories richly marinated in the grotesque, and the preacher fits comfortably alongside them as a similarly fantastic figure out of folklore.

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*** Not the least interesting feature of the stories is the way they repeatedly foreground the orality of the story-telling tradition Evans is intent on recovering by literate, textual means. In his classic study Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong distinguishes between ‘primary oral societies,’30 where literacy is unknown, and ‘residual oral societies,’ where a literate, or semi-literate, society retains some of the features of its pre-literate predecessor. For much of the nineteenth century, Nonconformist west Wales was, in many respects, a residual oral society, and for Caradoc Evans the preacher not only afforded an example of the enduring power of some oral skills but also figured as a revered and feared ‘folk’ character in the orally circulated communal narratives of rural subculture. Evans’s stories were demonstrations of both these aspects of the preacher’s role in the maintenance of an oral culture, and were themselves conscious exercises in a residual oral style. Ong has analysed the stylistic features of such writing, emphasizing the characteristic ‘psychodynamics’ of the textual performance of orality. The terms he coined can help us identify key features of Evans’s peculiar style of writing in Pilgrims in a Foreign Land. Take the following representative passage: A voice cried in the air. It was the parrot’s voice. ‘Witch-bird and cattle thief and broken out preacher! Jail him.’ Thrice the parrot cried that and thrice is the number of heavenly warnings. Sail was taken in by his ears before a justice, and the cow and fowls stood as witnesses against him. ‘How-what?’ bellowed the justice. Sail began to sermonise his innocence. ‘A preaching tone is Satan’s sting,’ said the justice, ‘Clap him in jail.’ Cythraul, surfeited with beer and longing for a heavenly drink, sent his brewer to bring Sail to him. The brewer conferred with the parrot and they agreed upon a plot, for the complaint of the one was that of the other; and he snatched Sail from jail and carried him to the brewhouse, and there he fell into a vat of beer and pretended he was drowning. (PFL, p. 71)

According to Ong, one feature of oral narrative is its proliferation of mnemonic devices – rhetorical strategies intended to aid memory. Repetition of various kinds is one such device, and triadic structure is a typical Welsh example of it. The reference to the ‘magical’ number

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three at the beginning of the extract is thus evidence of Evans’s familiarity with this typical stylistic feature of traditional oral story. It is also an instance of his practice of interpreting the Bible as a collection of folk narratives. In this case he demonstrates his ability to detect the tell-tale signs of orality in Scripture, because the reference is clearly in part to one of the most famous of biblical triads – Peter’s triple denial of Christ, before the crowing of the cock. There are also distinctive syntactical markers of orality in this passage. One of these is a stylistic preference for the additive over the subordinative when it comes to building meaning out of a sequence of phrases or sentences (OL, p. 37). There are three ‘ands’ in the final sentence of the extract, whereas a textual style would have substituted explanatory links such as ‘so’ for the second copula and ‘then’ for the third, thus clarifying the logical progression of the events. As it stands, the narrative leaves it unclear why one action follows another in this particular order – the modern rational analytical and explanatory mind is left baffled by the failure to highlight cause and effect. Evans’s stories in the collection abound in this disconcerting stylistic feature, which is one reason why they are so difficult to fathom at first reading and seem so primitive in their narrative structure. The passage quoted also deals with a fundamental premise of oral verbalization. As Ong has noted, ‘among “primitive” (oral) peoples generally language is a mode of action and not simply a countersign of thought’ (OL, p. 32). He adds: ‘The fact that oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, and hence power-driven’ (OL, p. 32). One consequence is the association of the exercise of language with the struggle for power. ‘Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyles’ (OL, p. 43). Ong instances riddling contests, competitive recitation of tall tales, ritual rival bragging sessions, and exchanges involving flytings (mutual verbal tongue-lashings). Such practices, he points out, still survive all over the world – for instance in the ritual of ‘dozens’, a verbal competition amongst young blacks in the USA to see which of them can most inventively abuse another’s mother. In Evans’s passage this ritual of verbal combat typically takes the form of a confrontation between a preacher and his lay opponent. Sail is the unfortunate preacher and in pleading his innocence of the ‘crime’ of which he is accused, he begs his accusers to ‘“Let me now prove myself

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with a sermon”’ (PFL, p. 71). But his wish is denied. He is talked down by a raucous parrot and hauled in front of an unsympathetic magistrate. In court no sooner does he attempt to ‘sermonise his innocence’ than he is abruptly shouted down again – this time by the justice. For poor Sail these verbal contests are more agonizing than agonistic. He is resoundingly defeated before ever he can get started. Evans’s own agonistic struggle with the figure of the preacher in his fiction is all the more vicious because he and his reverend opponent agree on one vital thing: language is rooted in the power of the sacred. Therefore to control it is to possess the capacity to mobilize the living energies both of man and of cosmos. When Sail is brought before the magistrate, ‘the cow and fowls stood evidence against him.’ This could be translated into plain, tame prose by being conventionally understood as meaning no more than that the creatures were brought to court as visual proof that Sail was a thief. But take the phase literally, as Evans intended, and the animals seem actually to have turned up in court of their own free will to accuse Sail of guilt. Their words are added to those of the vociferous, scheming parrot. Adam’s Edenic power of naming the animals into full existence was an expression of the dominion he had been given over the world of the beasts. Lord of language, he was thereby lord of all he surveyed, and those latter-day lords of language the preachers modelled themselves on him. But in this passage the situation is reversed. Freed at last from their long biblical servitude to dumbness, poor brute creatures are empowered by being endowed with a voice to bring their erstwhile human masters to justice. The natural cosmos itself thus conspires the overthrow of tyrannical biblical, and chapel, language. No longer all mouth, poor Sail is ‘taken in by his ears’ in more than one sense of the phrase. The yearning to recover the powers of an oral culture, and in the process to escape the more oppressive features of Nonconformity, is nowhere more interestingly and thoughtfully expressed than in Wyn Griffith’s neglected novel, The Wooden Spoon (1937). From the beginning, the narrator (Ned Roberts, a poor farm boy recently returned to Ll}n after decades of seafaring) is self-consciously concerned with his narrative and his role as narrator. In particular, he’s anxious to develop an ability to write as he speaks: ‘For I have learnt to write, not as a scholar would write, but much as I talk.’ He resents the way in which texts are written for readers whom he will never meet, because he urgently needs to ‘tell my story to someone whom I know to be listening.’31 Any form of textual expression is very different from recited

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story: ‘at every telling the story has to be introduced uniquely into a unique situation, for in oral cultures an audience must be brought to respond, often vigorously . . . Writing separates the knower from the known’ (OL, pp. 42, 46). The lack of such an existential context for the telling and the receiving of his story is what frustrates Ned. His aim is to fill a reader’s mind with a vivid sense of the ingrained poverty of his early life in the rural neighbourhood of Rhiw on the Ll}n Peninsula – R. S. Thomas’s locale half a century later. He therefore tries by quasi-oral textual means to establish a living link with his readership. Recuperating something of the immediacy of the oral by textual means is a daunting task: ‘in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups’ (OL, p. 74). What The Wooden Spoon is concerned with is nothing less than the disappearance of community as Ned had known it in his younger days. So, reflecting sadly that he is doomed to write in a period when listening no longer happens (WS, p. 10), he invites his anonymous readers to ‘take [their] mind back to the days when someone told you a story and had time to listen’ (WS, p. 17). During the course of his narrative, Ned nostalgically recalls the remarkable powers of the traditional story-tellers to whom he had listened, spellbound, during his youth as a farm labourer. These were ‘story-tellers by vocation’, ‘men who knew the art of making others listen. Men who knew the powers of the spoken word’ (WS, p. 245). Through their art they bound their group of avid listeners together and thus helped sustain a sense of community. Oral narration of this quality had been a key social ‘ritual . . . creating its own pattern’ and weaving togetherness. Regretting the change he has himself experienced from orality to literacy, Ned realizes ‘that the words themselves cannot be transferred in the flesh from lips to paper without loss of power and character’ (WS, p. 266). Moreover, he appreciates retrospectively that traditional stories also bound the community to its past, a past stretching back as far as the ancient, pre-Christian world of Wales. ‘This art had, even in my boyhood, something of the flavour of a survival. It was a kind of magic faintly prolonging its independent existence into an age of religion’ (WS, p. 266). What, then, was the fate of this ‘last . . . of the public magics’ (WS, p. 268) in what was a rural community in Ll}n at the dawn of the twentieth century where life continued to be dominated by ‘religion’,

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in the looming form of the chapel? There are two kinds of minister featured in The Wooden Spoon, each representing one aspect of Nonconformity as viewed by Wyn Griffith. One is a hellfire preacher, who leaves his study when bread is being baked in order to watch the flames in the oven, ‘so that he might be reminded of the tortures of the damned’ (WS, p. 185). He represents the joyless, grim, oppressive and fearsome side of Nonconformist culture, and his sermons are a perversion of the story-teller’s art. His opposite is the itinerant preacher Ifan Owen, an incomparable story-teller in the old style. Ned still vividly remembers, forty years later, how Ifan could hold his ‘congregation’ rapt in the half-light of a farmhouse kitchen while he related a long, lingering ghost story about a silent grey horseman who had kept ominous pace with him on one of his lonely journeys through the wilds of the Welsh hills. Story-telling is one of the crucial crafts Ned feels have been lost from the Welsh countryside, ousted by a religious faith increasingly intellectual and rational in character. Other victims of the modern as represented by Nonconformity are folk-beliefs in magical creatures such as the Corpse-Bird and folk practices likewise reflecting the community’s instinctive respect for its rich historical store of symbols. The novel actually takes its title from the custom for a lad to carve a wooden spoon, decorated with emblems, and to present it to his sweetheart as a love-token and covenant. Like the traditional stories that gave narrative expression to them, these symbols were uniquely capable of providing mankind’s deepest and most ancient hopes and fears with shape, form and expression. Ong has contrasted the ‘technology of writing’ (OL, p. 82) and the state of human consciousness it promotes with orality and the world it nurtures: ‘Talk implements conscious life but it wells up into consciousness out of unconscious depths, though of course with conscious as well as unconscious co-operation of society . . . Writing or script differs as much from speech in that it does not inevitably well out of the unconscious’ (OL, p. 82). Such a distinction lies at the heart of The Wooden Spoon. ‘The government of life’, Ned concludes, ‘is in the hands of two powers, the emotions we know and can relate to our familiar actions, and those that derive from an older dynasty, from a kingdom within us ruled by symbols’ (WS, p. 289). Wyn Griffith himself is obviously in full agreement with Ned’s seasoned observation. The Wooden Spoon concludes with Ned resolving to go on learning the ‘new craft’ of writing. He thinks of it in terms of the traditional terms of weaving – his father, a crofter, had been a weaver of cloth as well as a master of many other functional peasant

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skills necessary for basic survival. Ned’s first instinct is to suppose that his crafted text may eventually serve him as ‘an old man’s basket of memories’. But then he has second thoughts. ‘No, I think not, for when I feel that my craft is equal to my ambition, I shall tell a story’ (WS, p. 318). This is also a summation of Wyn Griffith’s own intentions as an English-language novelist intent on ensuring his texts serve the needs of the rural Welsh-speaking community in which he himself had been raised. The dust jacket blurb of the reprinted novel actually ascribes oral qualities to the text, describing it as ‘a collection of delightful Welsh stories, anecdotes and musings’. Griffith’s aim is to break the chapels’ monopoly of both the spoken and the written word in Wales. In The Wooden Spoon and his other fiction he is attempting some kind of marriage between the oral and the textual, between story and novel. He hopes to bypass the chapel and to reconnect modern, literate Wales with its oral, pre-literate past. His project is thus as much cultural and political as it is textual and literary. It is an attempt to recover an organic sense of Welsh identity, as he understands it. ‘Persons whose world view has been formed by high literacy’, writes Ong, need to remind themselves that in functionally oral cultures the past is not felt as an itemized terrain, peppered with verifiable and disputed ‘facts’ or bits of information. It is the domain of the ancestors, a resonant source for renewing awareness of present existence, which itself is not an itemized terrain either. (OL, p. 98)

The Way Lies West, another novel by Wyn Griffith, also demonstrates an interest in the deposing of cyfarwydd by preacher. It is a work not unsympathetic to the Nonconformist culture of the early nineteenth century, recognizing that ‘it provided the quickest way of escape from the troubles of this world’.32 But it includes an encounter between a young ‘apprentice preacher’, John Jones, a representative of the Methodism that was beginning to make very serious inroads into rural society across Wales, and the wanderer Dic, a ‘rolling stone’ clearly representative of old pre-Nonconformist Wales. When they meet on the road, their encounter brings out clearly the difference between two distinct and antagonistic discourses. The preacher possesses his own eloquence, but Dic, too, is a fine speaker, who boasts it is his trade: ‘Same as you, you being a preacher, only I talk as I find people, not trying to turn them into good or better’.33 ‘It’s you ought to be preaching, with the words galloping off your tongue’ (WLW, p. 35), jokes Jones.

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Understanding that Dic is illiterate, the preacher expresses the wish to teach him and his kind to read. Griffith consistently gave credit to Nonconformity for educating the nation, but he felt ambivalent about the transition from a pre-literate to a literate culture. In addition, as noted, one of his objections to the preacher is that he has confined the power of the oral within the straitjacket of the didactic. Griffith’s own novels are, of course, intended as a release of the powers thus forcibly restrained. They, too, claim like Dic to take people largely as they find them, and avail themselves of residual oral resources for such a purpose. *** Residual orality is a characteristic and widespread feature of the English-language fiction produced in Wales between the two World Wars, and it is often found in conjunction with the authors’ engagement with Nonconformity. It finds expression, for example, through the grotesque, although there are also psycho-cultural forces involved in the production of this phenomenon. ‘Oral memory works effectively’, Ong has noted, ‘with “heavy” characters’, persons whose deeds are monumental, memorable and commonly public. Thus the noetic economy of its nature generates outsize figures . . . to organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form . . . The same mnemonic or noetic economy enforces itself still where oral settings persist in literate cultures, as in the telling of fairy stories to children . . . Bizarre figures here add another mnemonic aid. (OL, p. 70)

Gwyn Jones’s fiction is vividly alive with such characters and characteristics. ‘All we like sheep’ opens by registering the sinister power the chapel retains to reclaim even the most rebellious of its sons. Gwion Lewis had been a colourful reprobate, a notorious womanizer and sensually sweet singer, but he turned ‘weakling’ (CSS, p. 45) at the last and opted for a funeral in Capel Siloh. Or so Cadno believes – Cadno (the name is Welsh for ‘fox’) is a hard-bitten farmer, as unyielding in his opposition to the chapel as is the bare upland he farms on the edge of the industrial valleys of Monmouthshire. But then, Cadno has conducted a long-running feud with Gwion as well as the chapel. First, Cadno had brought a biblical justice on Gwion’s head, after the latter had stolen his sheep. Conducting The Messiah, Gwion

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had just reached ‘All we like sheep’ when he and the choir were mortified to hear a chorus of tremulous bleats rising from the congregation. However, Cadno had then been ostracized for that act of vengeance. Stripped of his fertile land he had been forced to retreat to the barren hills. Now, at Gwion’s funeral, he turns up to mock the preacher and the chapel members for their unctuously sentimental view of their God. The bearers and the officiating minister, he knows, are really there only for the money. As for Cadno, he is true to the old Calvinist belief in a God of wrath; a God who plays his grimly humorous games with humanity; a God who promotes capriciously to Paradise or condemns to the Pit; a ‘hard and subtle God’ who is a ‘grim Ironist’ (CSS, p. 48). This God is the creator of the ‘brute’ world, who twists the lives of the pious into grotesquely comical shapes. Nonconformist religion is thus seen by Jones in this story as the nursery of the grotesque, whether in the form of the hypocrisies of the chapel faithful or of the warped psyche of any society that has chapel religion at its heart. In its stark simplicity of outline, ‘All we like sheep’ bears some resemblance to a folk tale. Jones takes a deeper step into the fantastic in ‘Down in the forest something stirred’. The simple plot is typical of the vulgar and bawdy anticlerical tales popular during the medieval period. Two cracked prophets of doom, Manmoel Pliny-Evans and Gellius Sant-Owen, are living out their feral lives in the Welsh wilderness. Their violent rivalry entangles John Lot Padog, a ‘weasel-jawed, fish-eyed, horse-mouthed poacher’ (CSS, p. 237), and his sluttishly attractive paramour, Becca. The narrative centres on an apple-tree in the heart of a sinister Wild Wood, a tree believed by Pliny-Evans to be of the very seed, metaphorically speaking, of Eden’s Fatal Tree. The tale climaxes with the monstrously bulky Sant-Owen’s arrival at the spot to keep tryst with Becca and satisfy his lecherous desires. Lot Padog, alerted by PlinyEvans to a portentous event at that location, creeps up on the pair believing he is stalking his own hated rival, Jenkins the keeper. But tripping over one of Jenkins’s trap-wires in the dark, he accidentally discharges his shotgun, hitting Sant-Owen fairly and squarely in his ample rump at the very moment he is about to enjoy his entry into post-lapsarian paradise. The power of the story, however, lies not so much in its meagre, conventional plot as in the gusto of the telling – a gusto that is positively gustatory. Like an exuberantly virtuosic oral narrator, Jones savours every mouthful of a word, heavily embossing his text with gothic detail. Take the opening sentence: ‘A great black double clap of thunder tore

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itself from the heart of flame in the dead maw, the hell-gap, the treetoothed swallow of the oak-apple-starred, the moss-and-ivy-haired, the dead-bough-fingered woods of Supra Maelor’ (CSS, p. 237). These words are evidently ‘power-driven’, in Ong’s terms, contagiously felt to have been generated by an enjoyable expense of muscular effort. And just as another’s yawn can trigger one’s own, so Jones’s ‘oral’ performance can set a reader silently reading aloud. ‘Oral cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility,’ writes Ong. ‘Rhetoricians were to call this copia’ (OL, p. 41). Fulsomeness is the essence of Jones’s style, and it is used, as in fairy tale or The Mabinogion, to fashion lexical gargoyles. He writes of ‘the gnarled goblin thickets of the oak’, while Sant-Owen is fashioned in the manner of the unkempt giant Ysbaddaden Bencawr in Culhwch and Olwen: ‘His breadth from deltoid to deltoid was as his length from occiput to knee-ball. Nine jowls depended below his toadstool ears, his belly he bore on a trolley before him’ (CSS, p. 238). Extravagance is the relish of this performative art. Sant-Owen’s cumbersome advance towards the waiting Becca is a tour de force of descriptive writing: Exactly a week later a round black object descended the hill that stood to the east of Supra Maelor. It felt the strong pulls of wrath and gravity, and it proceeded by such headlong rushes and temporary arrests as to mark the progress of a barrel down a stumpy bank. (CSS, p. 242)

The preacher (in the outrageous forms of Pliny-Evans and SantOwen) is not merely the incidental target of such an exuberantly grotesque narrative; he is its very progenitor. As theorists have indicated, there are as many styles of the grotesque as there are psycho-cultural needs to which it gives expression. Keyed as so often it is to the grotesque, the English-language writing of Wales between the two World Wars demands discriminating analysis in the light of such distinctions. Take the case of Glyn Jones. The grotesque in his fiction is usually expressive of his exceptional sensitivity, and vulnerability, to the disgusting, disquieting aspects of human nature – aspects greatly magnified, if not actually produced, by the Nonconformist vision to which Jones remained faithful all his life. There is real tension to his handling of the grotesque, expressive of the anxiety in which it is rooted. It shows how the mode can be a form of self-defence – the psyche’s projection outwards, to a self-protective distance, of demonic feelings threatening its integrity from within. As for Caradoc Evans, it is the angry contempt

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born of his own early experience of Nonconformity that turns his aggressively grotesque narratives into the vengeful acts of savagely satiric comedy they are. The equilibrium of good nature to which his writing sometimes likes to lay claim is wholly unconvincing. The grotesque in Evans’s hands is the spearhead of an attack on his perceived psychic aggressors and an instrument for lancing the festering boil of his own damaged psychic nature. The style is self-assured, yet its obsessiveness betrays his anxiety at the enduring power of what is being attacked; his world has about it the sinister magnitude and solidity of a threat permanently existent for the writer. In his fiction, the grotesque emerges at the point where the comic and satiric fuse with the monstrous and the terrible. Reading his stories we are engulfed by the grotesque to a sometimes oppressive and disquieting degree. The writing of both Evans and Glyn Jones clearly highlights one defining feature of the grotesque: its fusion of extreme, opposite, passions. This is again apparent in the work of Gwyn Jones, a grotesque writer of quite a different cast. He responds to the absurd collision in the lives of the Nonconformist faithful between their demanding expectations of themselves and the inalterable realities of their human natures. While Caradoc Evans also highlights this collision it is with the psychic intensity noted above. Not so Gwyn Jones. The opposites with which he is concerned inhere solely in the Nonconformist world he is depicting and arouse no disquieting echoes in his own psyche. The clash of such opposites could, of course, give rise to tragic writing, but in Jones’s hands it produces its polar opposite, as can be seen in ‘Down in the forest’. His is an instance of what Bakhtin called the ‘carnivalesque’ spirit of joyous transgression, and his grotesque writing, full of high spirits and panache is, like that of Rabelais, ‘sometimes satirically oriented, sometimes indulged in out of a spirit of sheer exuberance and a love of the scurrilous and extravagant’.34 As Gwyn Jones well knew, there is no richer source of grotesque materials than the Old Testament. In ‘Their bonds are loosed from above’ (CSS, p. 102) he avails himself of it to fashion a modern ghost story. A prim, respectably religious widow is revealed as a murderess when her deceased husband, his grave conveniently disturbed by an air-raid, turns revenant to visit her in all the horror of his physical decomposition. Into his forehead, it then becomes apparent, a nail has been driven. Before his stinking corpse subsides again into decay, he has succeeded in dragging his wife back to the grave with him. This story is rooted in the familiar passage from Judges 4 and 5 extensively

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quoted as its epigraph. It tells of how Jael lured Sisera into her tent and there killed him by hammering a nail through his head. And in Gwyn Jones’s reworking of the narrative the ‘well-dusted Bible with gold clasps’, so piously occupying the place of honour in Mrs Manod’s parlour, opens up like the grave itself to engulf her in horror: ‘the Bible, its leaves humped up at her like two unbroken waves of the sea, displayed in glittering black letters the tale of Jael and Sisera, not word by word but verses, chapters, simultaneously’ (CSS, p. 112). There could be no more powerful image of the predatory evil that, for several Welsh writers of Jones’s generation, lurked not only within Nonconformity but within the frequently grotesque pages of Holy Scripture itself. The episode is surely in part a parody of that famous incident in the Old Testament when the waves of the Red Sea first parted and then closed over the heads of the hapless Egyptian forces in pursuit of the fleeing Israelites. *** ‘The Welsh’, wrote Caradoc Evans, ‘have no God and capel is a playhouse where one hears tales about a being who is sometimes a good fairy and sometimes a good ogre.’35 He, too, was particularly partial to meaty Old Testament books such as Judges – from which he took the title of one of his early stories. Thanks to his Calvinist uncle, Idris Davies similarly came to associate Scripture early with fantasy: ‘And his stories were as magical / As Aaron’s magic rod’ (ID, p. 77). All these writers were also responding to the grotesquely dysfunctional relationship between chapel creed and members’ actual practice. Denied legitimate expression, raw human instincts were ever liable to erupt into the light of day (like Gwyn Jones’s revenant husband) with all the vengefulness of the savagely repressed. Add to this the fact that at the very heart of Calvinistic theology lay an uncompromisingly stark and ominously heightened contrast between Damnation and Redemption, Sin and Grace, and it is not surprising Nonconformity acted as the perfect nursery of a grotesque imagination. The Grand Guignol of Calvinistic theology could give rise to the most wonderfully baroque conceits and the most powerfully surrealist images. The Welsh poet Gwenallt’s searing sonnet on ‘Sin’ ends with a remarkable set of images for the human condition born directly of his Calvinist faith:

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Roaming the forest, free and primitive, We sight between the twigs a bit of Heaven, Where the saints sing anthems of grace and faith, A full Magnificat of His salvation; Like wolves we lift our nostrils, ravenous, Howling for the Blood that ransomed us.36

And no more brilliant examples of Calvinistic Baroque can be found than those in the work of the contemporary neo-Calvinist poet Bobi Jones. His ‘splay-legged’ engine-driver from the age of steam may work in ‘a swineyard of blasphemies, a garden of grease’ but as he sings out lines from one of the great Calvinist hymns celebrating the saving blood of Christ he becomes transfigured: So in his cab he considers who makes the best of Gods – Is it an axle-riding God or a God of hot cinders? He savours this – like the genealogy of horses, Or petals of new-washed coal held to the nose, Or the cogwheels that he pets with ruined hands.37

Extraordinary though these effects produced by Gwenallt and Bobi Jones may be, they are closely related to the kinds of coups de théâtre the English-language writers of Wales between the two World Wars associated with the Nonconformist pulpit. Gwyn Thomas’s reactions were typical of his generation: The preachers of the period were all of the classic cut and any one of them who preached for less than ninety minutes at a stretch were considered something less than frank. The rhetoric from the start was hot, and the sermon would end in a spurt of howling shamanism, an ecstatic lycanthropic baying at the non-conformist moon. (MPR, p. 42)

The image, once again, connects the preachers with figures and forces from the primitive past before the land was polluted by chapels. That, by now, is to be expected. What is more arresting is the observation that follows. ‘While it lasted’, Thomas writes of one such insanely orgiastic performance, ‘we leaned forward on the balcony of the gallery drawn with a joyful helplessness into that vortex of tremendous, candent, worldshaping phrases of which we did not understand a single syllable’ (MPR, p. 42). What is usually forgotten is that Gwyn Thomas, Rhys Davies, even

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to some extent Idris Davies and Glyn Jones, attended chapel services in a language (Welsh) of which they had at best only an incomplete grasp. The psychological result is well worth considering. The experience of the sublime, we have known since the eighteenth century, arises at the point where some phenomenon seems so vast, so powerful, so towering as to exceed our capacity fully to grasp it. At that point it becomes at once exalting, exhilarating, prostrating and terrible. The grotesque similarly is ‘suggestive of abysmal ominousness’.38 This is precisely the experience of those youngsters listening all agog to awesome sermons in a language they very imperfectly comprehended. And given the nature of what they vaguely apprehended – the perfervid imagery of damnation, the ecstatic rhetoric of salvation – no wonder the whole event appeared to them as the equivalent of the sublimely apocalyptic landscapes of a huge John Martin painting crossed with the grotesque world of a Hieronymus Bosch. No wonder, either, if in later life the repressed anger and fierce resentments of their fearful youthful bafflement found expression in their grotesque re-creations of chapel worship. If the great John Elias could terrify huge crowds to mass repentance in the opening decades of the nineteenth century when he conjured up, by candle-light, the shadow of the devil on the walls of a chapel, then how frightening must it have been for Gwyn Thomas, an impressionable boy as yet unprotected by sardonic humour, to discern, by the half-light of his imperfect understanding, the terrifying images evoked by a Welsh sermon. Thomas liked to describe himself as having been born in ‘a place where piety has begotten more shapes in wood and stone than anywhere else in Britain’ (WE, p. 13). In the case of his own psyche, what piety begot was mis-shapen. ‘Theologically, as a child, I had a tangled time of it,’ he wrote. ‘ I was one of the Rhondda generation whose language, with an almost malignant ease, had changed from Welsh to English. But the chapel’s teaching had remained in Welsh’ (WE, pp. 13, 14). It was, so to speak, a grotesque situation and the implications for his imagination proved to be profound. In adulthood, he reverted, as ever, to zanily inventive humour to cover his seminal childhood confusions: The acoustics of childhood are terrible. The basic failure to give or receive messages up to the age of twelve accounts for most of the bewilderment that keeps many faces rigid from then to the grave. Most of what a child hears is muffled or deplorable. That he assembles the elements of some kind of sanity before it gets time for manhood is the most formidable bit of craftsmanship in our experiences. That most of the sanity is not shaken

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off the plate again before the age of thirty is due only to the fact that we learn to keep very still. (MPR, p. 32)

Comic hyperbole was Thomas’s chosen medium for expressing penetrating wisdom, and (as here) for searing acts of oblique self-exposure. He was an incomparable comic mythologizer of his own condition. ‘We were thrust’, he wrote of his boyhood, ‘into a cosmos of moralizing and mourning conducted totally in Welsh’ (MPR, p. 39). The turn of the century had seen the Rhondda Valleys reach their linguistic tipping point: down to the end of the nineteenth century the majority of their population had been Welsh-speakers, but with the dawn of the new century the language melted away with alarming rapidity. Consequently, during Thomas’s later years at primary school the Education Authority introduced a policy intended to reverse this trend. He recalled being taught useless phrases of conversational Welsh by ‘brutal teachers’ (MPR, p. 39). Almost all of these phrases were, he claimed in no doubt highly selective retrospect, religious in tone, such as ‘Y mae mam fy mamgi [sic] yn y nefoedd. “My grandmother’s mother is in heaven”’ (MPR, p. 39). In particular, he recalled one ‘darling phrase’, popular even with the politicians of the day: ‘Rhwyn weld y bedd y dydd yn dod. “Beyond the grave the day is rising”’ (MPR, p. 39). There could be no better example of poor acoustics. Of the eight words of the Welsh three are wrong, for a number of reasons. And the ‘translation’ is not only wholly inaccurate, it is a garbled confusion of elements from several well-known hymns. To a Welsh-speaker, Thomas’s sentences, both Welsh and English, are utterly grotesque. And that is the point. This example lays bare some of the roots (if not the very tap root) of Thomas’s grotesque (mis)representations of Welsh Nonconformity. Its messages, its milieu, its moralizing, all had been received by the young Thomas on very faulty mental equipment and the resultant bad acoustic was then brilliantly augmented and broadcast by his mature comic prose. The furious frustration, and occasional fear, he no doubt experienced as an exceedingly bright, impressionable boy unable to understand the preaching to which he was regularly doomed to listen, turned into the vengefully aggressive comedy of his mature writing. Sound: for the young Thomas those Welsh sermons were mostly sound and fury signifying if not nothing then something mysterious, arousing, terrifying – and primitive. ‘Three attendances each Sunday at the Welsh chapel were compulsory,’ wrote Thomas, ‘and if I demanded that my theology be funnelled to me in Bantu as a change from Welsh I

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was cuffed as a renegade’ (MPR, p. 41). At the time he was writing, ‘Bantu’ could still be used, like ‘Hottentot’, to signify ultimate primitiveness. The exclusive use of a largely incomprehensible Welsh in the chapels of his boyhood gave Gwyn Thomas the feeling he was stepping back into a primitive world: the Christian shaded darkly and seductively into the pre-Christian, the pagan. Sermons were dionysiac rites; hymns were orgiastic chants; congregations became instinctually aroused. Although Rhys Davies took a less primitive view of chapel services, he also noted how the main performer, the preacher, donned an ancient actor’s mask. ‘We have to feed an imagination which is, they say, the result of our being a conquered, suppressed, people,’ he wrote of his fellow Welsh: ‘We used to love a preacher who could picture for us in livid colors hell’s houses of torment, and we would render him the tribute of our groans and writhings in chapel’ (MW, p. 143). He also saw the preachers and their tribe as ‘children of Merlin, magically transforming ourselves into somebody – or something – of advantage to us. We do not boast, we only indulge in artistic fantasy’ (MW, p. 144). Some of the greatest artists of this kind had been the legendary preachers. Davies specifically recalled John Elias: Another time he had the lights of a chapel so arranged (before the congregation had assembled) that, during a sinister description he was giving of Belshazzar’s Feast, by lifting his arm and manipulating his fingers, a huge shadow of a hand appeared writing on the white wall behind him. (MW, p. 147)

In such preachers, Davies clearly saw his own distant ancestors as a writer: ‘one-man performances they gave, certainly, and from ugly platforms of sham oak, in buildings bleak as workhouses’ (MW, p. 148). He loved the power they possessed to ‘people all the chapel with characters’ (MW, p. 148). The word hwyl, he warned his English readers in an attempt at preventing them from following the Gwyn Thomas path from Welsh preaching to the primal, should not be confused with its near homonym ‘howl’ (MW, p. 153). Instead it should be considered equivalent to ‘inspiration’. By such means, Davies clearly means to acknowledge his own artistic kinship, after a cautious fashion, with the preachers. For him, the missing link connecting him to them is the theatre. If the chapels were the great theatres of the Welsh imagination during the nineteenth century, the twentieth had seen all that dramatic talent imprisoned within the four

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bare walls of a place of Nonconformist worship released into the secular community. Tracing the remarkable development, between the two World Wars, both of a talented generation of Welsh dramatists (including J. O. Francis) and of an astonishing grass-roots culture of amateur dramatics right across Wales, Davies implies that he and his generation of fiction writers are the fortunate beneficiaries of these recent expressions of an ancient theatrical instinct. Although these new theatrical societies were ‘attached to chapels, as is proper, and are in the nature of a stimulant for a dazed invalid’ (MW, p. 157), Davies had high hopes of their helping to develop a rich, secular, culture. *** For such writers as these, then, Nonconformist Wales was well on the way to becoming not BC (as it was before the chapels, and even before Christ) but PC (post-Christian, like much of their own secular writing). At long last, a Nonconformist Wales ‘careless of [its] heritage’ (ID, p. 162), as Idris Davies put it, was rediscovering its ancient self, recovering it, and reawakening. Owain Glynd{r, he felt, might also now return from his long sleep. In his absence, ‘the land he loved has grown a Calvinistic beard / To guard its nonconformist conscience’, and become ‘full of little squalid chapels / Where the solemn sit down to squabble and sigh’ (ID, p. 163). The hope, and aim, of the writers was to level those chapels and to restore the spiritually ravaged land. As ever, Davies turned to the simple, strong, primary colours of ballad to convey his defiantly hopeful vision of the return of the energies characteristic of a Wales BC: I come of a passionate people Who will sin in sun or snow, And who speak the tongue of Caradoc Who was passionate long ago. Where once the minstrel wandered And sang his roundelay, The slag-heap and the chapel Darken the summer day. And yet in her desolation The land of my birth to me Is for ever the land of Merlin Bright by the Severn Sea. (ID, p. 221)

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‘The sons of Caradoc’: thus Gwyn Jones was in due course to style the largely anti-chapel English-language writers of his Welsh generation, with reference, of course, to Caradoc Evans. Idris Davies’s ballad allows us to use the same term of them but with an additional, revelatory, force and meaning. In the composite figure of ‘Caradoc’, the Wales BC of the ‘Ancient Britons’ and the Wales PC of the thirties writers are fused into one, obliterating the Wales of the long, unfortunate, Nonconformist interregnum.

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INDIVIDUAL WORLDS And yet with bitter competence of tongue We crow the hymns our fathers sang. T. H. Jones

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7 ‘Marlais’: Dylan Thomas and the ‘Tin Bethels’

Llwynrhydowen old (Unitarian) chapel

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‘Dylan always had the Caradoc Evans complex about the Welsh parson [sic],’ observed Bert Trick, the poet’s Communist grocer friend.1 As we know from Glyn Jones, a visit to Caradoc Evans in Aberystwyth in 1934 had been a particularly significant event both for himself and for the young Swansea friend who accompanied him. ‘Last week-end I spent in Aberystwyth with Caradoc Evans,’ wrote Thomas to Pamela Hansford Johnson. ‘He’s a great fellow. We made a tour of the pubs in the evening, drinking to the eternal damnation of the Almighty & the soon-to-hoped-for destruction of the tin Bethels.’2 This ‘famous Caradoc expedition’ (CL, p. 179) left an indelible mark. Thomas spread the word about Evans’s writing in London literary circles, ensuring his books ‘a highbrow success owing to an uninterrupted praise of them’ (CL, p. 177). The Aberystwyth meeting had been a liberating experience for a young Thomas who, in a 1933 letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, had theatrically rejoiced in his recent escape from a cub reporter’s routine involving ‘my daily call at the mortuaries, the houses of suicides – there’s a lot of suicide in Wales – and Calvinistic “capels”’ (CL, p. 43). That Thomas hated the ‘Calvinistic “capels”’ is no news, although when commissioned during the Second World War to script documentary films for raising national morale, he dutifully resorted to unconvincing cliché. As counterweight to ‘the new war’ he celebrated, with calculated nostalgia, ‘the old singing in the mountain villages, in the squat grey chapel at the grey butt-end of the street’:

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But the singing in the chapel is never grim or grey. The voices of the quarrymen, or shepherds, colliers or small farmers, tradesmen from the scorched valleys, or ploughmen from the long fields, the voices of children brought up to play Indians on the slag heaps, or pirates in the cattle-voiced meadows, are sweet and powerful, wild and gentle.3

And there is more in the same vein; lyrical hymning of how the ‘old and the young come to sing and worship . . . to listen to the poetry and oratory of the preacher’ in ‘Bethesda, Smyrna, Horeb, and Seion’ (FS, p. 30); vignettes of the members ‘talking at the chapel doors when the service is over’; sentimental memories of the whist drives, jumble sales, concerts and Eisteddfods in chapel halls, and of dances where, just like Blake’s ‘The Echoing Green’, ‘the young people dance, and the old, remembering, watch them’; there is even po-faced praise of vestries as places where ‘bards and minstrels meet’. Boloney, agreed. A nostalgic view of community such as the age, and the authorities, demanded. Years later Thomas was to exact his revenge for such forced effusions in Eli Jenkins’s hymn. And yet no doubt the egregious insincerity of the film script was at least slightly tempered by feelings of genuine debt to his chapel background. As he admitted in a letter to a young American enquirer in 1951, the Books of the Old Testament, along with the Gospel of the New, had reached him first through the chapels, where ‘the great rhythms [of the Bible] rolled over me from the Welsh pulpits . . . all of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood.’4 He also included ‘a few lines of hymns’ alongside the ‘nursery rhymes and folk tales’ he listed as the kind of materials that had first kindled his passion for words (EPW, p. 157). All this is already very well known, as is the fact that Thomas had had his bellyful of Nonconformist culture as a child, having been subjected by his mother (daughter of a Congregationalist deacon) to three solid helpings of worship a day at the Paraclete Congregational Church, Newton, Mumbles. That chapel was a kind of claustrophobic family club was brought home to him by the fact that the minister at Paraclete was his mother’s brother-in-law, a sophisticated intellectual figure with a marked distaste for his young urchin of a nephew. Thomas retaliated in due course by turning him, with vengeful relish, into a crude comic pomposity in the figure of the Reverend Bevan in the short story ‘The Fight’. Venturing down to Swansea sands at holiday time, the adolescent had his ears assailed by the voices of ‘the strangled preachers, promising all their days a heaven they don’t believe in to

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people who won’t go there’ (CL, p. 110). Flight to his mother’s people in the Llansteffan area brought no escape. There he was taken to Smyrna Congregational Chapel to be preached at in incomprehensible Welsh by the amiable Mr John. No wonder he felt beleaguered, encircled by ‘Calvinistic “capels”’. And yet . . . Recalling the young man he had known so well during the early thirties, Bert Trick insisted ‘he was very religious. He felt there was a supreme being with which you could get in touch direct’ (DR, p. 164). ‘It was religious in the sense that I understand religion,’ Trick went on, adding a definition of religion that this chapter will later attempt to explore. He also identified the tension that seemed to lie at the very core of Thomas’s personality: On the one hand, he was in revolt against his father’s agnosticism. On the other hand, he was in revolt against the narrow Puritan conventions of his mother’s Congregational background, and it was from these tensions that the personality of Dylan Thomas developed. (DR, p. 166)

Following up such hints as this, John Ackerman (one of the shrewdest interpreters of the ‘Welsh Thomas’) understandably concludes that ‘the picture of Thomas as a lost Nonconformist, wrestling with an inherited, albeit declining religion, is close to the truth of his poetry . . . Dylan Thomas is the poet who speaks for the age immediately following the age of faith.’5 Persuasive though such a view is, it seems to me somewhat mistaken. Thomas certainly needed to reject the recent family legacies both of agnosticism and of Congregationalism, but in the process he (largely unconsciously) connected himself with another, older legacy which he had inherited both from his family and from Nonconformist culture. We shall come to that later. *** Thomas’s rejection of the ‘Calvinistic “capels”’ is as transparent as it is well known, and it readily assumes the forms already explored in this study. The war for the word, the traumas of the spoiled preacher, the dream of ‘Wales BC’, these are all topoi prominent in his writing. Take first one of the most celebrated instances in his work of his conscious attempts to displace what remained of the erstwhile regnant discourse of the Nonconformist Wales which had produced his parents, and against which his father had rebelled. ‘After the funeral: in memory of

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Ann Jones’ is openly presented to us as the very site of a linguistic struggle between Dylan, ‘Ann’s [dionysiac] bard on a raised hearth’, who commands the power to ‘call all / The seas to service’, and the ministers and deacons of a repressed and repressive patriarchal culture, with their ‘mule praises, brays’ and ‘hymning heads’ as they soberly preside over Ann’s chapel funeral service.6 In this inverted version of the Old Testament story about the contest between Elijah and the priests of Baal, it is the champion of nature, the anti-chapel Thomas, who emerges triumphant. That triumph is variously expressed in the poem as a power to raise an ‘alternative’, verbal tombstone in Ann’s memory, and as a power to resurrect the dead fox, so that its ‘stuffed lung . . . twitch and cry Love / And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill’. The outrageous phallic thrust of that final image is, of course, utterly unmistakable. As for his appropriating the term ‘Love,’ that is a particularly interesting rhetorical move in the light of the adolescent Thomas’s self-baffled, guilty letter to Trevor Hughes about his failure to love an aunt who had poured her love so unstintingly over him (CL, p. 13). In its mature, published, form, ‘After the funeral’ is therefore an attempt by the adult Thomas to make amends, but to do so on his own terms, the modern terms – very different from those of his aunt’s conventional chapel culture – in which he understood ‘love’. It is already evident in ‘After the Funeral’ that, to coin an image from Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas is a Polly Garter of a poet. He defies the respectable chapel-cowed community not only by flaunting the fecund sexuality of his poetry but by delightedly indulging in promiscuous verbal liaisons, encouraging words to copulate and thrive so as to breed unpredictable and uncontainable meaning: ‘I like contradicting my images, saying two things at once in one word, four in two words and one in six . . . Poetry . . . should be as orgiastic and organic as copulation, dividing and unifying . . . Man should be two tooled, and a poet’s middle leg is his pencil’ (CL, p. 182). Implicitly imaging Nonconformist discourse as authoritarian to the point of being totalitarian, this poetic Polly Garter rebels by becoming a connoisseur of polysemy, the fertile proliferation of meanings. From the beginning Dylan Thomas consciously uses puns, double-entendres and a whole wild menagerie of suspect forms and socially proscribed kinds of ‘language’ to reflect on the uninhibited nature of ‘language’ itself. ‘Llarregub/Llarregyb’ – a word he had already coined and patented as his own in the stories of the early thirties – was always Thomas’s true native place, a place made exclusively out of the potentialities of language to turn itself back to

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front, inside out, upside down. In his poetry topsy-turvy language proves itself to be an incorrigible contortionist and shameless shapechanger. ‘Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will’, he told a Texan postgraduate in 1951: ‘old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paronomasia, paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm’ (EPW, p. 158). ‘Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes,’ he added disingenuously. But there was always much more to it than that. To the Calvinistic minister’s implicit model of human words as solidly and respectably underpinned by the Divine Word, Thomas, from his teens onwards, opposed an alternative, radically different model – of the ungovernable liquefactions of language, ‘the sea-slides of saying’ as he suggestively phrased it. His lifelong infatuation as poet, as shortstory writer, and even as letter writer, was with ‘the procreant urge of the word’, to misquote Walt Whitman, one of his poetic heroes. In a poem like ‘After the funeral’, Thomas adopts an openly confrontational stance towards the dominant discourse of Nonconformity and constructs what sociolinguists term an ‘anti-language,’ an alternative discourse of his own. But elsewhere his approach could be more circumspect, and even ambivalently nuanced. Thus, Eli Jenkins’s celebrated morning hymn and evening prayer in Under Milk Wood, now piously sung by Welsh male voice choirs to rapt applause, are in context a splendid mimicry of a preacher-poet’s sentimental effusions and are beautifully poised between Thomas’s affection and mockery. In some ways, Under Milk Wood is Thomas’s answer to Eli Jenkins. An alternative hymn of praise and thanksgiving for all the inventive ways of the incorrigible flesh in a small Welsh seaside town, it is also a kind of extended nursery rhyme for adults, such rhymes having been the cradle of Thomas the poet. This wasn’t the first time that Thomas had undermined the preacher through mockery. ‘The Peaches’, the classic opening story in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, features a wonderfully comical sermon, solemnly delivered by the would-be preacher Gwilym, a twenty-yearold ‘with a thin stick of a body and spade-shaped face’.7 Marlais, the little towny, seated in the barn that passes for Gwilym’s chapel, listens to ‘his voice rise and crack and sink to a whisper, and break into singing and Welsh and ring triumphantly and be wild and meek’, until the sermon reaches its grand solemn climax: ‘Thou canst see and spy and watch us all the time, in the little black corners, in the big cowboys’ prairies, under the blankets when we’re snoring fast, in the terrible

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shadows: pitch black, pitch black: Thou canst see everything we do, in the night and day, in the day and the night, everything, everything: Thou canst see all the time. O God, mun, you’re like a bloody cat.’ In the silence that follows ‘the one duck quacked outside.’ ‘“Now I take a collection,” Gwilym said’ (CS, p. 128). Then, as the narrative proceeds, Gwilym’s Calvinistic sermon (the emphasis is on a humanly distant, prying, preying God) is implicitly trumped by the story-weaving power of Dylan Thomas’s alter ego, the little boy Marlais, as he plays with his towny friend Jack Williams in the secret dingle on the farm: ‘There, playing Indians in the evening, I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living story, and my body was my adventure and my name’ (CS, p. 132). One of Thomas’s favourite strategies for confronting Nonconformity was to contrast the story-telling power of the preacher, who drew his materials from the Bible, with that of the writer. And like the Nonconformist preacher, Thomas delighted in turning to the Bible for his narratives, except that he reinterpreted the Good Book in mythic fashion, in the process implying, of course, that the Bible was the product not of the Calvinistic Almighty but of creative writers like himself with a positively Freudian imagination. Nowhere is this appropriative and subversive strategy more strikingly evident than in the Jarvis Hills stories Thomas wrote in the mid-thirties. Informed by his wary fascination with the weird metamorphoses and sexually suggestive shapes of surrealist art, this fantasticating collection is set in a mythopoeic west Wales, a rural region imagined by Thomas, like some other urbanized AngloWelsh writers of the period, as sheltering hidden enclaves of preChristian pagan practice. Take ‘The Tree’ (CS, pp. 5–11) as a notable example. It is interesting from the point of view of self-referential narrative, since it is a parable about how all human beings invent their own stories of personal identity and thus live, like little Marlais, ‘in the exact middle of a living story’. And ‘The Tree’ is also about how the New Testament story, which for Thomas is a dark primitive story of savage sacrifice, still serves as a master narrative for Christian societies. The bare bones of the narrative are as follows. A young boy is entranced by the biblical stories an aged gardener tells him, particularly the mythic story of Christ’s crucifixion on a magical tree. The boy takes a tree in his garden (which the gardener dismissively identifies as a common elder) to be this magical tree, and he becomes obsessed with it. When an ‘idiot’ from the land east of the Jarvis Hills suddenly arrives in the garden on Christmas Day, the boy

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persuades him to act a role in the master narrative by allowing himself to be ‘crucified’ on the garden tree. The boy is all the more intent on crucifying the idiot because he feels cheated – the gardener has, as promised, given him for Christmas the key to a neighbouring tower that contains secrets, only for the boy to realize, upon entering it, that the tower is empty and contains nothing. The boy therefore reacts to this modern demythologizing of his world like a believer or preacher, by savagely reasserting the ‘true’ primitive power of story, the Christian story of crucifixion and Atonement as understood by ‘the Calvinistic “capels”’. In another Jarvis Hills story, ‘The Enemies’ (CS, pp. 16–20), Thomas relates how a minister, Mr Davies, wanders into the Jarvis Valley and ends up (‘a tired, white-haired old man . . . almost invisible against the panes and the white cloth of the chair)’ in the home of the Owens. This odd couple seem to be neo-pagans, worshippers of the rampant fertility of the valley’s strange natural world. Mrs Owen is represented as a kind of white witch (‘for the old powers were upon her’). The ending of the story features a meal, where Mr Davies says grace, while the Owens silently mouth a subversive pagan prayer of their own: ‘[Mr Davies] could not see what they said, but he knew that the prayers they spoke were not his prayers.’ ‘Outside the window was the brown body of the earth, the green skin of the grass, and the breasts of the Jarvis hills . . . there was creation sweating out of the pores of the trees; and the grains of sand on far-away sea shores would be multiplying as the sea tolled over them’ (CS, p. 19). Mr and Mrs Owen sense the besieged Mr Davies’s mounting terrors: ‘He is frightened of the dark,’ thought Mr Owen, ‘the lovely dark.’ With a smile, Mr Owen thought, ‘He is frightened of the worm in the earth, of the copulation in the tree, of the living grease in the soil.’ They looked at the old man, and saw that he was more ghostly than ever. The window behind him cast a ragged circle of light round his head. (CS, p. 20)

The story concludes with Mr Davies again kneeling to pray: ‘He stared and he prayed, like an old god beset by his enemies’ (CS, p. 21). Although no ‘pagan’ (as we shall see), Dylan Thomas was himself one of those ‘enemies’, a member of the same anti-chapel brotherhood as Mr Owen. Both ‘The Tree’ and ‘The Enemies’ are aggressive narratives in which mainstream Nonconformist Wales is depicted as remaining in dangerous thrall to old stories, the exhausted fictions of a superannuated

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discourse. The liberating narratives of modern life are, by contrast, the work of a new class of post-chapel writers, who exploit the mythopoeic potential of biblical stories for modern neo-pagan ends. But as ‘The Tree’ demonstrates, in displacing the preacher the modern writer was thereby required to perform the traditional central function of religion, which was to produce ‘living adventures’, that is, stories for people to live by, stories that linked human beings to the cosmos. Otherwise there would be nothing at the centre of human life save that desolating empty tower that disillusioned and thereby maddened the little boy in ‘The Tree’. Thomas therefore repeatedly contrasts the dead letter of Nonconformist sermons with the creative word of post-chapel poets. And to that desolating tower he opposes, in ‘Especially when the October wind’, a tower of an altogether different kind, at once humanly imprisoning and phallically creative: Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark On the horizon walking like the trees The wordy shapes of women . . . Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches Some of the oaken voices. (CP, p. 18)

One of Thomas’s most revealing parables of the creator-artist is his early short story, ‘A Prospect of the Sea’ (CS, pp. 87–94). It is about a boy on the brink of pubescence, who enters a fantasy world, built out of materials from film, fairy tale, romantic fiction and other sources, in which a girl half-initiates him into the terrors and wonders of sexualized life, so that ‘out of love he came marching’ and began to see the world in miraculous new detail. The setting of the story is again the rural west – for Thomas the ‘other’ of his suburban industrial milieu in Uplands, Swansea, and a world ripe with fertility and teeming with sexual energy. One of the most interesting passages in the story is the following: This was the best summer since the first seasons of the world. He did not believe in God, but God had made this summer full of blue winds and heat and pigeons in the house wood. There were no chimneys on the hills with no name in the distance, only the trees which stood like women and men enjoying the sun, there were no cranes or coal-tips, only the nameless distance and the hill with seven trees. He could think of no words to see how wonderful the summer was, or the noise of the woodpigeons, or the lazy

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corn blowing in the half wind from the sea at the river’s end. There were no words for the sky and the sun and the summer country: the birds were nice and the corn was nice (CS, pp. 87–8)

Twenty years later, in a splendid radio talk (never broadcast), Thomas was to declare that one of his ‘big dislike[s was] “nice.” Nice sunset, nice pint, nice girl, nice weather, nice chap, nice poem. A thoroughly nasty word’ (EPW, p. 164). ‘He did not believe in God, but God had made this summer’: the contradiction neatly captures Thomas’s own situation as a writer who doesn’t believe in the God of the ‘tin Bethels’ but who needs the discourse of religion in order to express the nature of cosmic life as he experiences it. And then there is the whole issue of language upon which the passage is fixated. We are given a rural landscape ‘cleansed’ of the established signs and signifying words of society; an Edenic landscape inviting the naming of its parts. It is a kind of fantasy of Thomas’s own situation as a first-generation, post-Nonconformist, Anglo-Welsh writer, wanting to create a new discourse that will name his world into different, singular existence. Thomas the mature artist creates such a discourse in ‘Especially when the October wind’, but in ‘A prospect of the sea’ the young pre-pubescent boy is impotent to create it. Instead, all he experiences is the inadequacy of language itself, since, in his liminal pre-pubescent state, he is trapped in limbo between two discourses, the one he’s inherited and the one he needs to invent, one dead and the other as-yet powerless to be born. And Thomas turns the youngster’s very inarticulateness, his resort to repeated cliché, his lame reliance upon ‘nice’, into an unconscious, stammering attempt to articulate radical innocence. ‘A Prospect of the Sea’ also explores the primal human need to control life by turning it into ‘story’, as the boy runs through his limited repertoire of stories, taken from all the naïve sources already mentioned. And again, as with language, his passage into adulthood will alone invest him with the power to invent his own life story. and to fashion his own living discourse. *** Thomas will, then, have no truck with ‘the Calvinistic “capels”’ and their killjoy theology. Explicating the early poem ‘Incarnate devil’, from Twenty-Five Poems, Ralph Maud roundly, and fairly, asserts it to be ‘Thomas’s apostasy from his inherited Calvinism’.8 Quoting a remark

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from an early Thomas letter – ‘God was deposed long ago, before the loincloth in the garden. Now the Old Boy reigns’ – Maud points out how the poem reverts to ‘the dualist heresy, where God is not all-powerful but shares the stage of eternity with forces of evil that could triumph . . . God fiddles while the world worms’ (WH, p. 145). The poem is thus very much in the spirit of Thomas’s despair at Europe’s social and political state during the thirties. But the early poems are also, as Maud and others have pointed out, full of hopes – inchoate revolutionary ones of the kind Thomas, when pushed to do so in his correspondence, tended to articulate rather awkwardly in the amateurish communistic terms he’d learnt from his friend Bert Trick. But Thomas was no atheistic, cardcarrying Communist of the day. Trick himself had no doubts about the religious impulses at the root of all his young friend’s revolutionary dreams, recognizing their collective character to be powered by an anarchic individualistic libertarianism: ‘He believed in the freedom of man to be man, that he shouldn’t be oppressed by his fellows, and that every man had the stamp of divinity on him, and anything that prevented that divinity having full play was an evil thing’ (DR, p. 164). This was what Trick meant by styling Thomas ‘religious’, but, as far as I know, neither he nor any of Thomas’s later commentators have given any thought to the origins of this kind of socio-spiritual vision in the interestingly mixed character of Thomas’s heterodox nonconformist family legacy. To understand that we need to attend more fully than has hitherto been customary to the implications of his full name: Dylan Marlais Thomas. That the name ‘Marlais’ was chosen in respectful commemoration of the singular life and achievements of D. J. Thomas’s uncle, Gwilym Marles (William Thomas, 1834–79), is very well known. Biographers have bothered to research the history of ‘Marlais’s’ ancestor just enough to learn that he was a Welsh Unitarian minister renowned, in rural Carmarthenshire, as a militant leader of the ordinary tenant farmers’ struggles against their oppressive, vindictive and mostly alien, Anglican landlords. From there, it is easy to make the leap and to see how Thomas’s hatred of oppression, even his inchoate dreams of personal liberation and social revolution, were very much in the spirit of this particular militant tradition. He seems to be paying specific homage to that religious tradition of radical action in the film script for Rebecca’s Daughters, a fictional dramatization of events from the Rebecca Riots in which a minister, Mordecai Thomas, is given a prominent part. The parallels with the actions of Gwilym Marles are obvious, and in this text

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Thomas is unmistakably recognizing how much his own social radicalism owes to Welsh ‘Nonconformity’. But there one needs to pause. Because, as a Unitarian, Gwilym Marles was in fact very much the black sheep of the chapel fold – indeed nineteenth-century Calvinistic Nonconformity refused to acknowledge Unitarians as fellow Christians, let alone as belonging to the unofficial religious community of the mainstream denominations. Hence the famous stigmatization of the small region of northern Carmarthenshire and southern Cardiganshire in which the Unitarians were concentrated as ‘Y Smotyn Du’, the ugly Black Spot on the otherwise spiritually unblemished face of Welsh Nonconformity. And if one wants to understand Dylan Thomas’s ‘religious’ vision further one needs to understand the basis of this hostility – the difference between Calvinistic theology and the theology of the Welsh Unitarians. In other words, one needs to explore the fascinating case of Gwilym Marles considerably further than Thomas’s biographers (sometimes transparently impatient with ‘Nonconformist’ culture) have hitherto been prepared to do. The Unitarians owe their name to their belief in the singleness of God – in other words, to their anti-Trinitarianism. For them, Christ is not part of the Godhead, is not God made flesh, nor is he Saviour, in the orthodox sense of His having died on the cross as atonement for human sin. Refusing to believe in the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, Unitarians likewise reject orthodox belief in the Resurrection – this, like many of the other key tenets of Christian orthodoxy, possesses only a metaphoric significance for them. Such a conversion of Christian vocabulary into metaphor is, in turn, one prominent feature of the Thomas who once wittily styled himself an incorrigible ‘Symbol Simon’. The Jesus of the Unitarians is ‘divine’ only in the sense that God’s grace enabled him, uniquely, to be a wholly complete, impeccably perfect human being. This Jesus is God’s supreme revelation of what it would mean for human nature to realize its full potentialities. And in explicit contrast to the God of Calvinism, the God of the Unitarians is a God not of stern judgement but of unstinting love. The Unitarian newsletter for south-east Wales (a region including Swansea) in the very period during which the young Thomas was writing his poems in Cwmdonkin usefully summarizes that faith’s main tenets: Satan is a superstition. There is no such being who is represented as the successful rival against God – only one to heaven and one to hell (as Robert Burns said). That horrible doctrine is a gross superstition. God is

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Love – that almighty love which cannot fail to save every human soul that He has made. Our Unitarian Faith sets us free from the falsehoods of a paganised Christianity which forced upon the gospel of Jesus not only the Trinity but the notion that all men are answerable for Adam’s sin, and made Jesus into an atoning and substitutionary sacrifice. We are delivered from that libel on human nature which orthodox theology declares in its doctrine of the natural depravity of the human soul. Our faith asserts the natural Divinity of human nature fresh from the hands of God, which always when true to itself is Godlike. As God’s children all souls are partakers of the Father’s nature. So Unitarianism is an emancipating Faith, with a grand trust in God, and an unshakable reliance upon His love and His everlasting mercy.9

The social implications of such a vision are underlined in a contribution to another issue of the same bulletin: ‘So we feel sure of the universal Fatherhood of God, and we know of the Divine Unity. One God and Father of all mankind. That implies the natural and universal Brotherhood of the whole human race.’10 Unitarians trace the fundamental tenets of their faith back to the fourth-century Arius (Presbyter), who, denying the Trinitarianism established by the Nicene Creed, insisted that Christ was not consubstantial with God; and to Faustus Socinus in the sixteenth century, who emphasised salvation could come only through recognition of the human perfection represented by Christ and in the resurrection that signified the ultimate resurrection of all human beings. Unorthodox Christians who inclined to such views became known as Arians or Socinians. But modern Unitarianism is very much a rationalist product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and its articles of faith were formulated by such distinguished individuals as Joseph Priestley, the great chemist. Unitarianism took root in Wales from the late eighteenth century onwards as an expression of the dissatisfaction some Dissenters felt at the influence on their sects of the reactionary high Calvinism that characterized the rapidly growing Methodist movement.11 A word here about Gwilym Marles’s training in the ministry would be in order. As one authority has noted, Dylan Thomas’s great uncle ‘went to college in 1851 an “Annibynnwr” (Welsh Independent) . . . but he came from it a Unitarian.’ 12 The college in question was that jointly established at Carmarthen by ‘Annibynwyr’ and Presbyterians. ‘The Presby’, as it became affectionately known, was not only typical of Nonconformist academies in the progressive programme of education it offered; it also quickly established a reputation for being an

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exceptionally tolerant institution. During the eighteenth century it proved capable of accommodating both Calvinists and Arminians and Arians (those forerunners of Unitarianism). By the last decades of that century, many of the senior professors at ‘the Presby’ were professed Unitarians. William Thomas therefore entered a college noted for the strain of theological radicalism it readily tolerated. The result was its production of remarkable individuals, none more progressive than David Williams, the Deist whose Letters on Political Liberty (1782) argued passionately for universal suffrage. ‘Gwilym Marles’ was to prove a worthy product of ‘Presby’s’ radical tradition. A severe critique of Calvinistic theology became commonplace amongst Welsh Unitarians and it found extensive expression in the series of articles Gwilym Marles13 contributed in 1863 to the Welsh Unitarian paper Yr Ymofynydd (The Enquirer) on the poetry of the great poet laureate of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism, William Williams Pantycelyn. What Gwilym Marles objects to is predictable enough – the entire theological package centring on a severely judgemental God the Father, His self-appeasement through the bloody sacrifice of His Son on the Cross, and the Salvation flowing unpredictably through Christ’s blood to an otherwise irrevocably doomed and damned mankind. But what is more interesting, from the point of view of attempting to understand his great-nephew Dylan Thomas, is Gwilym Marles’s relish for the sensuousness of some of Pantycelyn’s hymns and his praise of their enthusiastic, celebratory tone. Poetry was clearly important to Marles – who was himself a poet of modest achievement and reputation, as Thomas’s biographers have repeatedly (and condescendingly) noted: he even taught himself German in order to read Schiller and Goethe. In a series of articles on his conversion from Calvinism to Unitarianism, Gwilym Marles specifically singles out the experience of reading the pietistic and pantheistic Romantic poetry of the USA at the beginning of the nineteenth century as having opened his eyes to a much more generous view of the divine spirit benignly and creatively abroad both in nature and in human nature. This had led him to doubt the Calvinist distinction between the elect and the damned, and to adopt a universalist view of human ‘salvation’. He came under the influence of the writings of James Martineau, a radical English Unitarian who placed an extreme emphasis on the divinity within everyone. ‘The Incarnation is true’, Martineau controversially declared, ‘not of Christ exclusively but of man universally and of God everlastingly. He bends into the human to dwell there and

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humanity is the susceptible organ of the Divine.’14 Then, three years after the appearance of Gwilym Marles’s pages of spiritual confession in Yr Ymofynydd, he published a series of articles in the same organ that would separate him off as a radical from other Welsh Unitarian ministers and help set Unitarianism in Wales on an even more controversially progressive socio-spiritual path. This innovative body of work was intended to serve his readers as an introduction to the work of the recently deceased Theodore Parker, the maverick Boston Unitarian and leading American Transcendentalist whom Gwilym Marles had come to revere. In a way, an intriguing Wales–American link was thus brought full circle, because Parker had been indebted to the notable Unitarian minister W. E. Channing (also quoted in the pages of Yr Ymofynydd), an acknowledged forerunner of the Transcendentalists. And Channing’s work had, in its turn, been significantly influenced by the writings of the great Welsh Arian (proto-Unitarian) rationalist Richard Price, himself a product of Nonconformist academies in Wales and England. (It was Price’s tract on personal, social and political liberties that had incensed Edmund Burke, prompting him to write his great conservative, anti-Jacobin classic Reflections on the Revolution in France.) And thanks to Gwilym Marles’s championing of Theodore Parker’s theological and social views, Dylan Thomas’s great-uncle has come down to us in scholarly history as the effective ‘founder of modern Unitarianism in Wales’ (WBO). It is in the heroic guise of a liberator that he appears in Cadvan Rh}s’s novel Daniel Evelyn, Heretic (1913), as was noted in a previous chapter, and while, true to Unitarian doctrine, Rh}s represents Marles as an enlightened rationalist opposed to the sinister, superstitious emotionalism of Calvinism, he also brings out the ‘nature-worshipping’ element in the progressive, hetorodox brand of Unitarianism that Marles preached. This is the link between Gwilym Marles and the Unitarians who played such an important part in the emergence of American Transcendentalism. *** The figure most important for Marles was Theodore Parker, whose somewhat singular version of Unitarianism led him to end his days as a Massachusetts crusader against slavery in the USA, an example that undoubtedly inspired Gwilym Marles in his own fight against the enslavement of Welsh farmers by the wealthy, socially prominent, politically powerful class of great landowners who had exploited them so ruthlessly.

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More pertinent to our present interests, however, is that Parker was a close associate of the sometime Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson with whom he founded (in 1841) the culturally influential periodical The Dial. Part of the editor’s prospectus for this new, historically momentous, publication reads as follows: It will attempt the reconciliation of the universal instincts of humanity with the largest conclusions of reason; and in religion, it will reverently seek to discover the presence of God in nature, in history, and in the soul of man. The Dial, as its title indicates, will endeavour to occupy a station on which the light may fall; which is open to the rising sun; and from which it may correctly report the progress of the hour and the day.15

The very first number of The Dial featured an extended essay by Parker on ‘The divine presence in nature and in the soul’, which includes passages such as the following: The divine energy never slumbers nor sleeps: it flows forth an eternal stream, endless and without beginning, which doth encompass and embrace the all of things. From itself proceeds, and to itself returns this ‘River of God.’ The material world is perpetual growth, renewal which never ceases, because God, who flows into it, is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He fills the world of outward nature with his presence. The fullness of the divine energy flows inexhaustibly into the crystal of the rock, the juices of the plant, the splendor of the stars, the life of the Bee and the Behemoth . . . Nature ever grows, and changes, and becomes something new, as God’s all pervading energy flows into it without ceasing. Hence in nature there is constant change, but no ultimate death. The quantity of life is never diminished. The leaves fall, but they furnish food for new leaves yet to appear, whose swelling germs crowd off the old foliage . . . . Since God is essentially and vitally present in each atom of space, there can be no such thing as sheer and absolute extinction of being. (D, p. 59)

While this could never be mistaken for a passage by Dylan Thomas, it is nevertheless not too far removed from the sentiments of such a poem as ‘And death shall have no dominion’. What we see in Parker’s passage is one important aspect of the process of the ‘Romanticization’ of Unitarianism, a process taken several stages further by Emerson, and then to its final extreme by Emerson’s uncontrollable protégé, Walt Whitman. But the process had begun several generations earlier, with

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Coleridge’s translation of his youthful Unitarian beliefs into a form consistent with German Romanticism. One of the results was the development of his celebrated theory of the creative imagination – that ‘echo’ of divinity in which resides the greatest liberating potential of human beings. The influence of Coleridge’s theory remained immense on a late Romantic, or Modernist, or postmodernist, writer such as Dylan Thomas. Whereas the original late eighteenth-century Unitarians had, in keeping with their Enlightenment roots, taken it for granted that the reason was the seat of divine potential in human beings, the development of the Romantic cult of the imagination changed all that for nineteenthcentury Unitarians of a more questing, adventurous spirit – of whom there was no shortage – attracted to the new Romantic emphasis on a human creativity spiritually linked both to the cosmos and to God. From the first there had always been a strong connection between Unitarianism and creative thinking. One of the earliest of Welsh Unitarians was Iolo Morganwg, that extraordinary fabricator of mythic history, ‘forger’ of ancient poems, inventor of cultural tradition and impresario of the eisteddfod. It is ironic that the Gorsedd of Bards, the invention of a freethinking, intellectually freebooting Unitarian poet, came so much to seem the preserve, down to Dylan Thomas’s time, of Welsh Calvinistic Nonconformity that he describes the literary tents on the eisteddfod field as ‘black with parchs [ministers]’. As has earlier been noted, Welsh Unitarianism also indirectly produced, in Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most remarkable of ‘romantic’ architects of the modern period and a towering ‘Taliesinic’ figure who, through the mediating influence of his great senior and mentor Louis Sullivan, had himself been, as his architectural style made clear, the conspicuous beneficiary of American Transcendentalist teaching about man and nature. And then, moving back to the Wales from which the Unitarian Lloyd family had emigrated to escape the persecuting landowners against whom Gwilym Marles was campaigning, there is the unforgettable example of that most eccentric of Unitarians, William Price of Llantrisant, a figure so important, as we have seen, to Anglo-Welsh writers of Dylan Thomas’s generation. To return, though, to Gwilym Marles’s intellectual hero, Theodore Parker. ‘The divine energy and substance possess the human soul,’ he asserted, ‘no less than they constitute the law and life of outward nature. God is present in man as well as in matter, and not idly present in him. The presence of God in the soul is what we call Inspiration; it is a breathing in of God’ (D, p. 61–2). In his great essays, some of which

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appeared first in The Dial, Emerson translated beliefs such as these into a grand, intoxicating vision of the creative spirit simultaneously at work within us and abroad. He elaborated a theory of language as originating in metaphor, of symbol as the unique vehicle of creative imaginative apprehension, of words as in need of liberation into their full splendour of revelation. The body–cosmos analogy Dylan Thomas encountered in the sermons of Donne was famously worked up in the new spiritual gospel of Emerson into a glorious vision of the spiritual unity of the human and the natural world. Emerson even hymned the splendours of the human body – only to be totally nonplussed when Whitman, a writer he had rashly convinced himself was the new Messiah to whom he had been merely John the Baptist, thoroughly sensualised and sexualized his corporeal vision. And Whitman, as is well known, became so important a figure for Dylan Thomas that he pinned a large photograph of him to the wall of his celebrated boathouse workshop in Laugharne. Of none of this could Gwilym Marles possibly have approved. To prevent any possibility of misunderstanding, it may be necessary to emphasize at this point that Dylan Thomas was not a Welsh Unitarian, of however heterodox a kind. But he was the descendant of a theologically radical Welsh Unitarian and it does make sense to discern traces in his work of this rich cultural legacy neglected by Thomas’s biographers and commentators yet perhaps not entirely unknown to Dylan Marlais Thomas himself. *** Ideas such as the above seem to sit comfortably with Thomas’s declared thoughts on poetry and society during the thirties, expressed though his views were in the attitudinizing rhetoric of an egotistical young man understandably anxious to impress. The letters abound in relevant material. There is the letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson ranting about the stifling by his monstrous age of the genius of creativity. ‘The old buffers of this world still cling to chaos, believing it to be Order. The day will come when the old Dis-Order changeth, yielding to a new Order. Genius is being strangled every day by the legion of the old buffers’ (CL, p. 55). He calls for ‘Revolution. There is no need for it to be a revolution of blood’, urging her to join him in membership of a visionary company, ‘poets and voicers not only of our personal selves but of our social selves’. And, in phrases that would not have seemed altogether unintelligible to Gwilym Marles, he prays ‘that all

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that is in us of godliness and strength, of happiness and genius, shall be allowed to exult in the sun’. Such impeccably Unitarian wishes are reinforced by an attack, in his great-uncle’s spirit, on the establishment of the chapels: ‘Everything is wrong that forbids the freedom of the individual . . . the churches are wrong, because they standardize our gods, because they label our morals, because they laud the death of a vanished Christ, and fear the crying of the new Christ in the wilderness’ (CL, p. 55). This last phrase helpfully glosses the Bunyanesque passage of prose by Thomas that Keidrych Rhys placed in the summer of 1937 on the very first page of the very first issue of his remarkable, culturally transformative, periodical Wales. Entitled ‘Prologue to an Adventure’, the ringing passage therefore acts as prologue to Rhys’s adventure of launching such an audaciously experimental Anglophone publication from the Wales of the Depression thirties, and the temerity of launching it in the face of hostility from Rhys’s fellow countrymen and of the looming threat of World War – a threat imaged by Thomas in a ‘City of Destruction’. As I walked through the wilderness of this world, as I walked through the wilderness, as I walked through the city with the loud electric faces and the crowded petrols of the wind dazzling and drowning me that winter night before the West died, I remembered the winds of the high, white world that bore me and the faces of a noiseless million in the busyhood of heaven staring on the afterbirth.16

Bearing in mind the echoes here not only of the Dissenting Baptist Bunyan but also of the Welsh Unitarian Gwilym Marles, this signature passage could reasonably be represented as a personal and poetic manifesto born of radical Unitarianism. And in its mythic tribute to a ‘high, white world’ from which the spirit is born and with which the creative imagination strives to maintain a creative connection in the face of the brutality of established existence the passage develops a vision parallel to that advanced in ‘I fellowed sleep’, one of the original 18 Poems (1934). There, the sleeping speaker flees the earth (CP, p. 25) for the ‘upward sky’, a realm full of ‘angelic gangs’ he associates with ‘your fathers’ land’ (CP, p. 25). These are angels he needs to expel, recognizing them as being not authentic spirits but the figures produced by the empty dreams of the chapel faithful. By ejecting these ‘angelic gangs’ he is slaying the orthodox Welsh Nonconformist legacy of his

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‘fathers’ lands.’ Once he has thus cleared a psychic space for himself he is able to release the creative potential latent not only in his ‘personal’ and his ‘social’ (or representative) self, to paraphase the letter to Hansford Johnson, but also in the whole God-created cosmos: Then all the matter of the living air Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words, I spelt my vision with a hand and hair. How light the sleeping on this soily star, How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

It is an anamnaesiac vision, consistent with a Christianized Platonism; a vision of awakening from the illusion of the established order of life to life in its real aspects. There is a deliberate twist on conventional chapel notions of an angel-peopled heaven that had been ‘cloudy’ (nebulous and insubstantial, in the sense intended by the phrase in ‘After the funeral’) in their vagueness. In a 1933 letter to Trevor Hughes, Thomas had written of a ‘knowledge of the actual world’s deplorable sordidness, & of the invisible world’s splendour’ (CL, p. 11). The latter, he added, was ‘not heaven with God clothed like a deacon, sitting on a golden cloud, but the unseen places clouding above the brain’. Thomas’s alternative heaven of visionary awakening is therefore one of ‘worlded clouds’ – that is mental clouds teeming with possibilities of life. And this awakening is couched partly in terms of the image of a kind of Jacob’s ladder of language – the ‘raising’ of the voice through a ‘climbing on words’. There is much in such a vision that Gwilym Marles might have approved. The Unitarian belief in a pure Jesus who was purely human is consistent with the vision of Christ implicit in ‘This bread I break’ (CP, p. 36), with its unconventional view of the sacrament of Communion. In this parable for the murderous thirties, the man-Christ begins by noting how fallen man lives by ingesting other forms of life. Bread was once the oat, wine once a grape, until man’s fallen, destructive nature turned the one into nutrient the other into life-sustaining liquid. We therefore live in the ruin we have ourselves made of the original cosmos – ‘Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down’ (CP, p. 36). By the poem’s end, this human Christ notes how the sacrament, as interpreted and administered by conventional Christians, is nothing but the symbolic expression and monstrous sanctification of fallen humankind’s murderous impulses – the impulses otherwise evident in our treatment of our fellows are expressed in the cannibalistic orthodox theology of atonement: ‘My wine

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you drink, my bread you snap’ (CP, p. 37). A fully sexualized creature of flesh and blood – the embodiment, indeed, of man’s physical as well as moral and spiritual prime – this human Christ sees in Holy Communion nothing but a torturing ‘of the sensual root and sap’. Thomas’s debts to Romantic Unitarianism is evident in the fierce comments he made in a letter he addressed to the editor of the Swansea and West Wales Guardian following a Fascist rally held by Oswald Mosley and his blackshirt thugs in the town. Thomas had accompanied Trick to a meeting at which an unlikely common front of outraged opposition had spontaneously been formed by the Socialists, Communists and Welsh Nationalists. In the wake of this turbulent event, his letter was a clarion-call to the paper to stop temporizing, to abandon its prudent caution, to forget its role as self-appointed guardian of social respectability and the morality of language, and to speak out both against Fascism and against the Tory capitalist policies that had reduced a starving working class to desperate sympathy with Oswald Mosley’s obscene politics: It is within your power to force up to the very limits of censorship, upon all your readers some little consciousness of the immoral restrictions placed upon them, of the humbug and smug respectability that works behind them all their handcuffed days, and to do this, not from any political bias, but from the undeniable conviction that the divinity of man is not to be trifled with, that the manna of God is not the lukewarm soup and starch of the chapels, but the redhot grains of love and life distributed equally and impartially among us all, and that at our roots of being lies not the greed for property or money, but the desire, large as a universe, to express ourselves freely and to the utmost limits of our individual capabilities. (CL, p. 143)

There is much in this diatribe that rhymes with Gwilym Marles’s Unitarian beliefs and practices, as a crusader for social justice.17 The rhetorical outburst also makes clear some of the social dimensions of the young Thomas’s obsession with the processes of the human body, as he spits out his contempt for the controllers of contemporary social mores who lack all sense of the individual as a ‘world, a structure of bone, blood, nerves and flesh, all made miraculous by the miracle of the mind’ (CL, p. 143). As he made amply clear, the objects of his attack included the chapels, full of ‘Christ-denying Christians’,

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Anti-Christs who have crucified Him and His children since the kiss of a man who wanted thirty pieces of silver in order, perhaps, to bribe one of the councillors of Jerusalem, with a sack of coal or a cask of wine, or, as a member of the Jerusalem Road Improvement Committee, to buy a row of houses that the committee had decided to knock down for extension purposes (CL, p. 143).

Parallel to this is Thomas’s attack on conventional images of Christ in ‘There Was a Saviour’, a poem from Deaths and Entrances well described by Maud as full of ‘a loathing for the confined thinking that organized Christianity appears to him to be’ (WH, p. 246). For three stanzas Thomas deals with a faith that he regards as a form of human imprisonment, that decorously observes a murderous silence in the face of the inhumanity of the contemporary world, that culpably dreams of escape to a ‘cloud-formed shell’ of a world (the false heaven of conventional sentimental Christians). In another 1934 letter to the Swansea and West Wales Guardian he fulminated against a pious local politician who promis[ed] his audience a celestial mansion on the condition that they give themselves to Christ, and asking them to be content, while on the earth, with any sort of insanitary hovel, ragged garments, and bad and meagre food that the powers of the land feel it fit to provide them. (CL, p. 150)

But then at the very end of ‘There Was a Saviour’, Thomas discovers, emerging out of the blackness of wartime black-out, the true, alternative Christ ‘exiled in us’, and imagines the release of ‘the soft / Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks’ (CP, p. 105). *** The young Thomas was fascinated by the Nativity, and in two stories exactly contemporary with those letters to the Swansea and West Wales Guardian he recorded his own revolutionary interpretation of it. In ‘Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar’, the kind of violent workers’ uprising he had so feared in his letter about the Mosley rally has actually occurred, bringing bloody mayhem in its wake. The story starts with that terror at the prospect of an air-raid that seized so many imaginations in the thirties even before Guernica had happened: ‘a flying fleet came out of the shadow, and . . . dropped death upon the cities’ (EPW, p. 19). On the ground, the workers loot shops, rape widows and ‘burgl[e] the

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hearts of the dead, finding the keys of hate in the opened pulses’ (EPW, p. 19). ‘Street rose against street, and city against city’ (EPW, p. 20). Moving among all the devastation the narrator spots two ghosts, who seem to be peering intently at the bodies of slain women. Following them he sees them pause before the corpse of a pregnant female, and then witnesses the birth of a child ‘through the flesh’ of the broken body. At this, the two kneel down, offering respectively gold and frankincense. Kneeling in his turn, the narrator adds his own gift to theirs by suffering a violent death: ‘bitter as myrrh, my blood streamed . . . on to the emerging head’ (one version of the text on p. 21). Thus is born, and bloodily acknowledged, the Christ doomed to suffer within every human being. ‘For we are born in others’ pain & perish in our own,’ Thomas had written to Trevor Hughes just a year previous to the story’s completion (EPW, p. 11). As a very young man, he thus couldn’t ‘reconcile life & art’, because the first spelt suffering, the other beauty. It was through developing a sense of the ‘art’ implicit and potential within ‘life’, of the Christ ‘exiled within us’ – a development in the direction of a radicalized form of Unitarian belief – that he seems to have found his way forward. There is a hint of this development in ‘Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar’. It is a Nativity for the thirties, a Nativity very much in the spirit of Unitarian teaching. As for ‘The Burning Baby’, the seeds of the story were sown when Dylan Thomas, lying on a bed in an Aberystwyth boarding-house, was galvanized by hearing Glyn Jones tell the astonishing story of William Price of Llantrisant, the Unitarian minister and self-styled Druid (in the tradition established, of course, by Price’s fellow Unitarian, Iolo Morganwg) who burnt the corpse of his infant Iesu Grist on a funeral pyre in full view of horrified chapel-goers. In Thomas’s gothic twist on the story, the baby (who is, indeed, viewed as the promised ‘son of man’ [EPW p. 23]) is born of the incestuous passion between Vicar Rhys Rhys (the very name is incestuous) and his daughter. The key to the story seems to me, however, to be that it is implicitly narrated from the point of view of the scandalized community of the chapel faithful. The opening paragraphs repeatedly emphasize that the events are experienced not at first but at second hand. The text therefore becomes a reporting of a report (‘They said’, ‘They heard’). What we consequently have is the chapels’ version of the life of a man notoriously committed to sensuously exploiting and divinizing the life of the flesh, a man who is deemed to be monstrous and is demonized and mythologized accordingly. That the fate of the renegade Unitarian William Price in

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the guise of Vicar Rhys Rhys is a version of young Thomas’s view of his own fate, as a poet ‘monstered’ by his own society, is clear enough. And as has already been noted, the identification of oneself, as suspect, ostracized writer, with the legendary Price was a commonplace of Thomas’s anti-chapel Anglo-Welsh generation. The story ends with a cry of ‘Eeeh’ from the burning baby, as the ‘flame touched its tongue’: ‘and the illuminated hill replied’ (EPW, p. 28). It is a strange, inverted Nativity, and this conclusion underlines the story’s indebtedness to two famous Nativity poems, Robert Southwell’s ‘The burning babe’ and Milton’s ‘Ode on the morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (one of Thomas’s very favourite poems). It was not the impeccably orthodox Salvationist theology in the famous Catholic Metaphysical’s poem that attracted him, one suspects, but particular moments in the poem, such as when the Christ child speaks of how newly borne, in fierie heates I frie Yet none approach to warme their harts or feele my fire, but I; . . . Love is the fire, and sighs the smoake, the ashes, shames and scornes.18

As for Milton’s gorgeous great poem, it was undoubtedly its celebration of the peace that descended upon the earth in the ‘happy morn’ of Christ’s birth that appealed most powerfully to Thomas in the thirties, along with the incomparable word-music so powerfully in tune with the vision of cosmic harmony. The impression of a joy re-echoing limitlessly throughout the natural world is given a grim twist by the ‘illuminated’ hill’s reply to the burning babe’s flame-tongued cry. In other words, Thomas’s Burning Babe is like the baby born in ‘Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar’, a terrible victim of human barbarity, the Christ of full human possibility tortured into grotesque life and death within everyman. ‘Before I knocked’ is perhaps the poem that most fully articulates this vision, with its image of the human ‘Christ’ child already marked in the womb by the sufferings of mortal life, a child who at the very first moment of breathing is ‘struck down by death’s feather’ (CP, p. 12) and who begs the reader to pity his Father ‘who took my flesh and bone for armour / And doublecrossed my mother’s womb’ (CP, p. 12). But if such writing is very much in the spirit of the nightmare thirties, there are also poems of the time full of moments of a visionary hope clung to in the face of everything that encouraged a hopelessness to which Thomas himself was far from immune. Emphasizing the remorseless, inescapable cycle of generation and decay, ‘process’ poems like ‘The

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force that through the green fuse’ were always liable to turn into metaphoric expressions of a pessimistic social, as well as cosmic, vision. Thomas recognized this temptation, and in one letter associated it frankly with ‘paganism’. The victim of his attack was D. H. Lawrence: He preached a doctrine of paganism, and, to the best of his tubercular activity, attempted to lead a pagan life . . . Lawrence preached paganism, and paganism, as the life by the body in the body for the body, is a doctrine that contents man with his lot. It defies the brain, and it is only through the brain that man can realise the chaos of civilisation and attempt to better it . . . Lawrence . . . would condense the world into the generative principle, and make his apostles decline not cogitare but copulare. (CL, p. 70)

Body-worshipping apostle of human sexuality though Thomas, too, was in his way, he opposed to the philosophy of Lawrence the figure of his version of Christ: ‘a product of good, red, living vitamins rather than of sticky balsam for embalming the bodies of the dead’ (CL, p. 150). This was not the Christ of the ‘tin Bethels’, a ‘Christ . . . clothed in a shroud. The wounds are still bleeding, the cry of despair and abnegation still on his colourless lips. [A] Christ, like an ethereal sexton, sits waiting in the clouds for man to die.’ Thomas’s Christ was one arisen in the human body, ‘the raised and living Christ [come] out like a man from anaesthetic, a symbol of life, a reawakened, revolutionary force, not a walking corpse with the words of a dead message stale and yellow on his mouth’ (CL, p. 150). This was the Christ he saw imaged in Leonardo’s Last Supper, ‘with a bellyful of wind and chicken’, who demonstrates ‘the living energy [of] His Messiahdom’ (CL, p. 151). Again, allowance must be made for polemic – Thomas was deliberately turning the language of the chapel faithful against them – but there remains a vision, however metaphoric its Christian references may be, clearly in the tradition of the completely human, revolutionary Jesus of Gwilym Marles. ‘Power was contagious in my birth’, announces the speaker of ‘I dreamed my genesis’, a poem imaging psychic rebirth into creative freedom as being so difficult a process that it has to be painfully attempted twice before final breakthrough into new life can be achieved. The result is the young Thomas’s version of the resurrection of the Christ in him, and ends with his achieving ‘vision / Of new man strength[.] I seek the sun’ (CP, p. 26). When he stated to Pamela Hansford Johnson that he was ‘in the path of Blake’, he was recognizing his affinities with a poet who had pioneered his own eccentric, anti-rational version of what

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was to become Romantic Unitarianism. His case is broadly comparable with that of Alun Lewis. As Roland Mathias shrewdly pointed out, he came from a Unitarian family, and ‘Unitarianism . . . throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was often the creed of those who were gradually leaving Christianity for humanism.’19 Lewis himself inherited a secularized form of the family’s belief in human potential, which found expression both in his socialist politics and in his devotion to ‘beauty’. Hence his comment to Brenda Chamberlain ‘that he wanted the Caseg Broadsheets “to reach people – with beauty & love”’ (RW, p. 127). ‘I dreamed my genesis’: as in the Book of Genesis, and the beginning of the Johannine Gospel, life began for Thomas with the word. It is a constant theme of his poetry, some of whose implications have already been explored earlier in this chapter. The emphasis there, however, was primarily on Thomas’s corporeal, sexual, organicist sense of language. But there are many other aspects to his life in language as a poet which can best be explored not through an organicist metaphor but through a model of deliberate mental deconstruction and construction. Indeed, in this context, it is the sexual aspect of language – the readiness of words to couple and thus produce meaning – that is most dangerous. Criticizing Hansford Johnson’s poems – as he did with impassioned consistency – for their tendency to resort to cliché, he expressed distaste at the readiness of her words to ‘leap together’. His own struggle was against this adhesive tendency in language, the tendency of words to stick together in conventional combinations: in an attempt not to ‘express only what other people have felt; I want to rip something away and show what they have never seen’ (CL, p. 25). His devotion to rhythm and sound was partly due to the recognition that they had the power to seduce words away from their faithful marriage to their customary verbal partners, a form of constancy that ensured the drab predictability of ordinary expression. ‘God’, he said to Pamela Hansford Johnson, ‘moves in a long “o”’ (CL, p. 73). That movement was, for the young Thomas, the birth of Christ – the awakening of the mind to revolutionary new possibilities of meaning and therefore being. As the late Thomas put it in that previously quoted letter to a Texan postgraduate in 1951, ‘The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God’ (EPW, p. 160). An earlier passage in the same letter made it crystal-clear that Thomas’s saving religion had always been language. Recalling his early childhood discovery of ‘what went on between the covers of

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books’ (the implying of verbal sexual shenanigans is interesting), he wrote of such sand-storms and ice-blasts of words, such slashing of humbug, and humbug too, such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, such and so many blinding bright lights breaking across the just-awaking wits and splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces all of which were words, words, words, and each of which was alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light. (EPW, p. 156)

But Thomas was also ever aware of how, congealed by congenial conventional use, words resulted in the petrifaction of the mind. . . . from the first declension of the flesh I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts Into the stony idiom of the brain, To shade and knit anew the patch of words Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre, Need no word’s warmth. The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer, That but a name, where maggots have their X. (CP, p. 22)

From that first pun (‘declension’ both in the grammatical sense and signifying physical ‘decline’) the passage actually instances what it sets out to explore: the ambivalence of language. It can be deathly – the vocabulary of the past – but also life-giving; malignant (cancer) yet also not only benignant but positively blessed. *** Radical Unitarians had not dissimilar feelings about the supposed Word of God itself, the Bible. The reason why James Martineau and Theodore Parker’s new ideas were so unacceptable to conservative mainstream Unitarians was that, as between the human understanding (identified by the ‘reason’) and biblical witness, they seemed to give precedence to the former. Strongly influenced by the new ‘Higher Criticism’ of their day, both thinkers regarded the Bible not as Revealed Truth but as a hodgepodge of materials assembled over centuries by fallible human beings. Only the human understanding, under the guidance of the spirit, was capable of determining what was valid and what invalid

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in biblical testimony. ‘Whatever is consistent with reason, conscience and the religious faculty’, wrote Parker, ‘is consistent with the Christianity of Jesus, all else is hostile.’20 And he went further, stating challengingly that ‘the religious teachings of Jesus have this chief excellence, they allow men to advance indefinitely beyond him. He does not foreclose human consciousness against the income of new truth.’ Only the constantly questing, creative human reason could ensure Scripture did not become a dead letter and the Divine Word a ‘stony idiom’. Emerson was, of course, to take such assumptions much further by investing the human mind (and in particular its powers of imaginative apprehension) with divine power. As a confirmed disciple of Martineau and Parker, Gwilym Marles was thus stepping on to the slippery slope that was to lead to his great-nephew’s fetishizing of the creative power of the word – and to his fears as a mature writer that such a seemingly omnipotent power might actually mask a deeper substantive impotence. When, in ‘Prologue’, Thomas represented himself as building a ‘bellowing ark’ (CP, p. 2) out of language to save the world threatened by the ‘flood’ of nuclear annihilation he was giving an old religious symbol a modern inflection. According to traditional biblical typology Noah prefigured the Saviour Christ. First the Catholic and then the Anglican Churches had each, in its turn, claimed exclusively to be Noah’s ark, before the Puritan sects arrived on the theological scene to argue that no organized Church could claim to be the ark that Noah/ Christ would build only by transfiguring the soul of each member of His elect. With the radical Unitarians the image would be implicitly understood in yet a different way, as figuring human reason awakened, by the example of Christ, to enlightened spiritual understanding. Thomas’s ark is built of words and his poem is full of the kind of praise to natural creation Gwilym Marles had so approved in the hymns of the Calvinistic Methodist Pantycelyn. Indeed, to praise, one might say, was Dylan Thomas’s instinct as a poet – an instinct characteristic, as A. M. Allchin and others have argued, of the religious and literary culture of Wales itself down the centuries.21 But if it was Thomas’s instinct, his need, and also perhaps his strength, as a poet, it was also his problem. Because his difficulty as a spiritually challenged late Modernist was what, exactly, to make of his instinct – what, for him, could provide dependable grounds for praise? In his mature poetry he wants to trust to the ‘ark’ of language but simultaneously fears that (as he puts it in ‘Prologue’) it may be no more than ‘hubbub and fiddle, this tune / On a tongued puffball’ (CP, p. 2). He wants to root his praise in

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a celebration of the creative imagination, but is worried that in the end what it celebrates is no more than itself. He wants to praise the allcreating word, but as early as ‘Especially when the October wind’ fears that it is no more than man’s imprisoning tower. It is these self-reflexive aspects of Thomas’s poetry that are so congenial, and therefore so interesting, to postmodernists. These aspects make him an Emersonian Romantic manqué and mean that he is repeatedly drawn, if only as an impotent exile, to the believing world of his lost childhood when phrase and experience, imagination and reality were one and the same thing. Under Milk Wood ’s Llarregub/Llarregyb is as much about that world as is ‘Fern Hill’: both are haunted by a child’s Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels. (CP, p. 88)

And it is the same late adult misgivings about the grounds of praise that charge with tension his late assertion that ‘The joy and function of poetry is . . . the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.’ In other words, the work of the mature Thomas still echo with the kind of paradox experienced by the boy in the early work ‘Prospect of the Sea’: ‘he did not believe in God, but God had made this summer.’ Such an ambiguity was itself a legacy of the kind of ambiguity that characterized radical Unitarianism – mainstream Unitarian opinion in Gwilym Marles’s day, as expressed in Yr Ymofynydd, was that his hero Theodore Parker’s thinking had carried him beyond the fold of believers.22 But whatever the postmodern aspects of related ambiguities in Dylan Thomas’s case, his stubbornly harboured, firmly declared wish needs to be taken seriously. When, in the celebrated final sentence of his prefatory note to his Collected Poems (November 1952), he wrote ‘These poems . . . are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t,’ it is very tempting to dismiss the statement as nothing but another of his typically exhibitionist rhetorical flourishes. But when, in 1951, he concludes his transparently honest answers to a series of questions about his work by an obscure Texan postgraduate with the comment that ‘the joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God’

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(EPW, p. 160), one is forced to take him seriously. One may even perhaps conclude that to the end Dylan Thomas continued to want to be a ‘religious’ poet in much the sense of that term understood by his early close friend Bert Trick. If so, then it’s worth noticing the phrasing of his final answer to the student: ‘the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God’. Such a syntactical equating of human powers with the powers of the Almighty (an equation over which Thomas himself constantly equivocated) was diametrically at odds with the theology of the ‘tin Bethels’, those ‘Calvinistic capels,’ but it was not altogether inconsistent, after an extremely radical fashion, with the Unitarian beliefs of the great-uncle who had given him his middle name. As poet as well as man, then, perhaps Dylan Marlais Thomas the poet was indeed closely related, however distantly and confusedly, to Gwilym Marles Thomas the Unitarian preacher after all.

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8 ‘Fucking and Forgiveness’: The Case of Glyn Jones

B

Baptist deacons, Llansannan

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As his reminiscences make clear, Glyn Jones’s awareness of being that singular new phenomenon, a Welsh author writing in English, developed only gradually, and somewhat incredulously, between the two World Wars through a series of meetings with other writers. These were indubitably Welsh, he realized, although writing in English like himself. Even as he advanced deeper into old age, he could recall each of these transformative encounters of his youth with a sensuous exactness. He saw them as furtive assignations, moments of cultural (or perhaps counter-cultural) epiphany, shocks of recognition, initiations into a secret brotherhood of Anglophone Welsh writers (no women were involved). The hybrid, indeterminate character of his classic, culturally emblematic text The Dragon Has Two Tongues – memoir, literary criticism, cultural history, poetic manifesto – is true to this enduring sense Jones had of himself as a member of a perplexing, perplexed, liminal generation of writers, conforming to no established category of cultural experience or expression. Typically, the study is prefaced by an open letter to one of the band of brothers, Keidrych Rhys, which begins by tracing the origins of the work itself to a seminal moment, a conversation between the two friends on a Cardiff bus one wartime Sunday afternoon. I was on my way to the Welsh Sunday school I attended, and you were going to catch your train back to London. ‘I don’t suppose’, I said, ‘that many poets will be going to Sunday School this afternoon.’ Ah,’ you replied, ‘not English poets. But you are not an English poet. You are a Welsh one’.1

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No Sunday School attender, Rhys. Rather, he was an aggressively loud apostate from Welsh Nonconformity while Glyn Jones was a quietly humble believer. But ‘chapel’ was, for both of them, a central, complex, cultural signifier. A social landmark, it obtruded even into their creative texts like some strange bookmark. It was an integral part of their identity, as Welsh men and as writers. The question of ‘literary nationality’ had long preoccupied Glyn Jones, but only that afternoon did he realize that the question was really much bigger than I had thought, and that it was by no means entirely a literary one. It involved somehow my going to a Welsh Sunday School as well as the fact of my being a Welshman who wrote in English. (DHTT, p. 1)

Mature reflection on the question led Glyn Jones to realize that ‘More Anglo-Welsh writers of the first half of the twentieth century [Jones’s own generation] come from a background of Welsh-speaking radical nonconformity than from any other’ (DHTT, p. 40). This ‘“genius belt”, or at least talent belt’, was the Welsh equivalent of the wealthy, welleducated, culturally creative English middle class. With the educating of a Welsh generation exclusively in English, from the late nineteenth century onwards, a critical mass of intellectuals emerged, most conspicuously in the heavily populated and cosmopolitan industrial south-east, whose experience was to find expression in the writings of Glyn Jones and his Anglophone contemporaries. In all these respects, Glyn Jones felt himself to correspond perfectly to this new cultural norm. But in one other he knew himself to be different from many, perhaps most, of his fellow writers from this ‘talent belt’: Anglo-Welsh story writers have been on the whole more faithful to the traditional politics of their background than to its traditional faith. What many seem in fact to have rejected is not so much nonconformity as organized religion, and yet much of the work of the Anglo-Welsh is inevitably permeated with Christian feeling, with a sense of humanity, with sympathy for the young, and the suffering and the cheaply-held. (DHTT, p. 50)

As we shall see, that concluding phrase would seem to epitomize Glyn Jones’s own sense of what it meant to be, unlike so many of his writing contemporaries, a chapel-going Christian. He had been cradle-chapel, so to speak, raised in a family characteristic of Welsh Nonconformity in that it cherished its roots in a

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religious, poetry-loving nineteenth-century culture. In this Welshlanguage culture, ministers and poets were merely different sides of the same coin. Poetry – in the form of the great hymns – enriched chapel worship, while chapel in its turn kept poetry honest, pious, and wholly undistinguished. Glyn Jones was born (1905) at what then seemed the auspicious height of the last great Welsh Revival, and his native Merthyr, a world pioneer of industrial society more than half a century before the opening up of the adjacent south Wales coalfield, had always been much more keenly appreciative than its raw upstart neighbours in the south-eastern Valleys of the debts it owed Welsh Nonconformist values. Not that Glyn Jones was to learn anything of this at Cyfarthfa Grammar School, impeccably intent as that notable colonial institution was on the work of education through cultural alienation – a process of self-estrangement Jones was to recognize, in The Dragon Has Two Tongues, as having played a seminal part in the making of a generation of Welsh writers marked almost as indelibly by English cultural values as by the English language. No, Jones’s experience of the rich Welsh Nonconformist heritage came only through attendance at the Welsh Independent (Annibynwyr) chapel – services held in Welsh, all other events in English – where both his parents were members. Not that his parents were equally devout. His adored mother was indeed ‘a very religious woman’, but not a bigoted ‘Annibynwraig – unlike one well-known Welshman of the time, who claimed to be not a Christian but a convinced Calvinistic Methodist’.2 Kind-hearted, catholic in her sympathies, she seems to have set the tone for Jones’s ultimate lifelong attachment to her faith, as to her denomination. His father, however, was a very different character. ‘A very complicated man’, part-dreamer, part-sceptical rationalist, he ‘was a chapel-goer, and at the same time something of an agnostic’ (MP1, p. 69). Glyn Jones was to acknowledge that this temperament, too, was part of his own make-up. Indeed, the indifference to chapel worship that characterized his adolescence and early manhood was, to a not inconsiderable extent, the expression of precisely such an aloof, increasingly soul-corroding scepticism. Although, in obedience to his parents, he joined Minny Street Welsh Independent Chapel upon the family’s move to Cardiff around the time he first became a young teacher in the town’s slums, Glyn Jones took no interest in the ‘hymns, the sermons, the prayers’ of a chapel that sported a warning on the wall of the minister’s room: ‘Welsh is the sole language of this pulpit.’3 ‘Religion and Welshness,’ he reminisced decades later, ‘to be perfectly honest, neither the one

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nor the other meant very much to me in those days, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five’ (MP2, pp. 74–5). All that was to change in 1930. Thereafter ‘religion and Welshness’ were increasingly to seem in his experience to be indissolubly interconnected and to be directly material to his own personal and creative development. Before exploring that ‘conversion’, at once spiritual and cultural, however, it is worth underlining the mature Glyn Jones’s awareness of how atypical his relationship to the chapel was of the golden generation of the thirties by returning to The Dragon Has Two Tongues. ‘It would be difficult’, he there ruefully noted, ‘to find Anglo-Welsh stories in which formal religion, or those who practise it, whether ministers, deacons or church members, is treated with seriousness, respect and understanding’ (DHTT, p. 50). With typical scrupulous fair-mindedness he lists the possible reasons for this frequent derision and contempt; the influence of a powerful pioneer like Caradoc Evans; the vulnerability at all times of “the unco’ guid”; the general decay of religion in our time; the inability of the anglicized AngloWelsh to realize the positive role the chapel has played in the social, cultural and religious life of Wales; the fear in the young of not being on the jeering side. (DHTT, p. 50)

Most indirectly revealing of his own peculiar case is his conclusion: Almost one is tempted to say that the frequency and the ferocity of an Anglo-Welsh writer’s attacks on the chapel are an index to the extent of his Anglicisation and his acceptance of English values. Modern Welsh literature, which understands the contribution of nonconformity to Welsh society, is not notable for such attacks. (DHTT, p. 51)

That last comment is not entirely true, which makes Glyn Jones’s tenacious belief in it all the more significant. His own rediscovery of Welsh Nonconformity in 1930 had been inseparable from his rediscovery of the Welsh language, its literature, its culture; and it was this rediscovery that in retrospect seemed, for him, to have made possible the realization of his Welsh identity, even as an English-language author. One persistent, quiet note of criticism in The Dragon is of Glyn Jones’s Anglo-Welsh contemporaries for having acquiesced in their alienation from their native culture by travestying their Nonconformist inheritance. While he readily recognized there was some truth in Caradoc

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Evans’s depiction of the mercenary character of Welsh Nonconformist rural communities – the only books he himself had ever seen in his uncle’s house in west Wales, he admitted, ‘were the Bible and the ready reckoner, and the second of these was in use much oftener than the first’ (DHTT, p. 72) – he firmly objected to the way Evans had ‘intensif[ied] his vision’ only by ‘complete ignorance of history, or . . . disregard of it’ (DHTT, p. 72). With some gentle heat, Jones pointed out that the people of rural Wales were kept down, as they themselves well knew, not by ‘the capels, but the lack of education, and the oppressive and brutal landlordism and its resultant poverty, which drove thousands into the squireless but amply-chapelled industrial valleys, and to the United States, and into the Welsh “colony” in the Argentine’ (DHTT, p. 72). He notes how heavily marked, however unawares, his AngloWelsh generation had been by the chapel values of their culture – Jack Jones, he shrewdly noted, ‘is a novelist of the type, if not the order, of John Bunyan . . . a writer who achieves style by not caring about it and by aiming, like the fast clippers, at some other excellence’ (DHTT, p. 91). Gwyn Thomas had also been indebted as a boy to chapel culture, Glyn Jones sadly observes, yet ‘he sees the chapel . . . not as one of the custodians of the language, or historically as the disseminator of culture and education, of singing and music, of the poetry of its hymns, the democratic training ground for oratory, for speaking and for organizing’. No, ‘for him it is merely an object of derision, good for an easy laugh, and those who support it are represented, quite falsely in my experience, as little better than amiable imbeciles’ (DHTT, pp. 115– 116). Knowing that Gwyn Thomas was, like himself, a product of Annibynnia Fawr (the Great Empire of Welsh Independents), he then appends a footnote referring to the Revd Professor R. Tudur Jones’s definitive history of that denomination. There it is established that, wholly contrary to the prejudiced impression given in Gwyn Thomas’s writings, the Annibynwyr attended diligently to the needs of the indigent working class in the south Wales Valleys throughout the Depression years. It was important for Glyn Jones to counter the false impression given by other Anglo-Welsh writers that Nonconformity and political radicalism, at least in its modern Labour incarnation, were mutually irreconcilable. Similarly, it was a matter of personal importance to set the record straight regarding the Nonconformist stance during the First World War:

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Merthyr in fact had a strong pacifist tradition, a combination of the pacifism of Welsh nonconformity and of left-wing politics . . . Some of the nonconformist ministers of the town had preached pacifism from their pulpits with great courage even when the First World War was in progress. (DHTT, p. 31)

Jones’s own pacifism during the Second World War – a pacifism for which he suffered social ostracism and threatening personal vilification – was itself very consciously a courageous act of witness in this Nonconformist tradition. The one figure who, more than any other, came to represent for Glyn Jones the terrible personal and cultural cost to be paid by any AngloWelsh writer of his generation for the renunciation of Welsh Nonconformity was, of course, Dylan Thomas. As is well known, Glyn and Dylan had happened upon each other in 1934, when the latter had scarcely glimpsed fame. The special bond of kinship thus early established between two culturally isolated and socially homeless writers was to last the whole of Thomas’s short lifetime, and Glyn Jones’s portrait of that friendship in The Dragon remains a complex masterpiece. In remaining true to his Nonconformist conscience, he ensures the picture he paints is scrupulously balanced and just. Nothing is omitted or extenuated, much is regretted, unstinting recognition is paid to Thomas’s genius, and Jones delicately registers his sense of continuing affection, sympathy and respect even as he conscientiously persists in weighing his friend’s shortcomings. The result is a moving elegy for a remarkable poet who had also, for Jones, come to seem the tragic victim of cultural alienation, as is apparent from the following account he offers of one of the reasons for Dylan Thomas’s popularity: he seemed to have no unacceptable convictions, no strongly-held principles of any sort. In all the variations of his environment he seemed a chameleon figure, always the complete conformist. There was neither in himself nor in his work any stumbling-block, no ‘sword’ in the New Testament sense, to separate him from those around him. I listened to him applaud in one company opinions which he would deride in another . . . One of the heroes of the nonconformist pantheon is the man who stands alone, the Daniel figure who dares to do and to utter what he thinks right though the heavens fall. Measured by this sort of standard Dylan seemed to have no courage at all, to be entirely accommodating and compliant. A more charitable view would have seen him playing at that time a heroic part in a war of conquest. (DHTT, p. 176)

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There is no hint of sanctimoniousness in this assessment, rather a kind of honestly grieving bafflement combined with a feeling that in Thomas one encountered not just a distinct, ultimately tragic, temperament but also a victim (as well, no doubt, as a creative beneficiary) of cultural collapse. Glyn Jones’s sensitivity to Thomas’s case was furthermore undoubtedly heightened by an awareness that when the two had first met he, Jones, could well himself have followed a path not dissimilar to that of his friend. The gradual cooling of their early friendship was, Jones fully realized, the direct result of Dylan Thomas’s growing disappointment that Jones, who when young had promised to be a rebellious fellow spirit, had reverted to cultural type – that he had, in effect, proved to be a ‘complete conformist’ after all. In commandeering that phrase and turning it, so unexpectedly, against Dylan Thomas himself, Glyn Jones was therefore in one brilliant (but patently sincere) rhetorical move turning the tables on one who had implicitly found him guilty ‘of not having rejected enough, of representing too clearly for him [Thomas] what he always wished to put behind him’ (DHTT, p. 187). In short, Glyn Jones had, in Dylan Thomas’s disappointed eyes, turned backslider, had reverted to being a good conventional chapel boy, after all; while Dylan Thomas had, in Glyn’s sad opinion, proved at the last to be a little boy desolatingly and touchingly lost, a ‘marvellous boy’ whose creative brilliance (and Jones never sought to doubt or otherwise diminish that) had been made possible only by the severance of all ties to the stabilizing socio-religious culture that might have saved him. *** Thomas was, then, Jones’s tragic alter ego, an extreme instance of a generation’s repudiation of ‘the religion of the community in which so many of them were brought up, i.e. nonconformity’ (DHTT, p. 194). What, he wondered, had made such wholesale repudiation possible? ‘Did those Anglo-Welsh who lost their Welsh and their Welshness do so because they abandoned the traditional religion of their families? Or were they constrained to reject a whole way of life, including nonconformity, because of their ignorance of or indifference to the language?’ (DHTT, p. 194). These, Glyn Jones decided, were unanswerable questions, but they do clearly reveal the persistent identification, in his own mind, of Welshness with Nonconformity and with the Welsh language and its traditions. It was precisely through the embracing of this identification that Jones had himself found salvation from 1930

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onwards. His awakening to full religious life seems to have been not only simultaneous with but inextricable from his full awakening to the Welsh language, resulting in a laborious education of himself in its great literary tradition. Glyn Jones recorded in many places his desperate sense of loneliness down to 1930. ‘My overwhelming concern’, he was to write decades later, ‘was my own unhappiness.’4 But during that year he underwent a hazardous operation for appendicitis, met his future wife, began to explore Welsh-language culture, and also began to ‘write poems and stories about Wales, in English’ (GWWY, p. xiv). Traces of his spiritual struggles during this time of embryonic religious belief, a period when, it seems, he was still haunted by the threat of the return of his earlier barren desolation, may be discerned in his early poems and stories. These thus help us understand the kinds of consolation Glyn Jones was seeking from Nonconformist faith. Influenced as his writings selfadmittedly were by Dylan Thomas’s work during this early period they accordingly initiated an important intertextual relationship he thereafter sustained throughout his long life: it was also a means for Jones to conduct an open-ended conversation with himself. Perhaps the only point at which this surfaces openly is in ‘Selves’, one of Glyn Jones’s earliest extant poems. It takes the form of an internal dialogue: ‘within the I-womb, two lives lust / And wrangle endlessly.’5 Finding voice, these two ‘lives’ speak not of the conventional dichotomy of body and soul, flesh and spirit, but of an altogether more modern binary; a soul eager for trusting, celebratory flight and a ‘serpentsubtle’ intelligence, full of a Satanic scepticism, with a ‘tongue slow except / To mock’ and a ‘root-knowing, fruit-ignoring eye’. This dialogue is suggestive both of the scepticism that honeycombed the life of Glyn Jones’s father and of the soul-less relativism to which Jones was briefly attracted during his lonely youth, and which he identified as the eventual undoing of the serially socially distracted Dylan Thomas. The poem ends with a prayer to God to release his young self from this hell of selfdivision: Remain, stand still In thy creation, Lord, till mind learns flight, So that my soul may wing her way to thee And not wheel round like mother waterfowl Whose young float squeaking in the mighty reeds.

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It is a prayer for psychic integration, kindred at least in spirit to the ‘Ode to Duty’ in which, exhausted by his feverishly distracted self, a Wordsworth bidding goodbye to his dazzlingly creative but turbulent youth yearned for a rest that ever is the same. Struggling towards belief, Glyn Jones was, as an outstarting writer, the helpless prey of the two great antitheses of which life then seemed to him disastrously to consist – beauty and suffering. The former attracted the ‘soul’ and stimulated the creative imagination, while the latter fed the cynical, deconstructive intelligence. Beauty and suffering: the soiled hand-me-downs of a largely discredited Romanticism these concepts might well have been, but they remained for the confused and culturally belated young Glyn Jones useful for articulating his shocked experience of the dread realities of the thirties – the contrast between his yearning conception of poetry and the bestiality he witnessed in the Cardiff slums, the illness and degradation he saw in the Valleys during the Depression years, the massing totalitarian horrors of Fascism and Communism. How, as a young aspiring writer, could he cope with these? Was any kind of affirmation of life possible under such conditions, or could the sceptical intelligence alone triumph? He strongly felt the attractions of the latter within himself. ‘The modern dilemma’, he suggested in an early poem of that name, is the realization of a Heaven and hell to let, Milton’s religion Rid of the Father, Son And Holy Pigeon. (GJCP, p. 183)

In 1931 he published a poem about Maelog, a hermit of the Middle Ages reputed to have had a cell near what became Merthyr, and at the head of the text he printed a summary of its content: ‘The beauty of the scene in which [Maelog’s] cell is built causes him to abandon his search for God’ (GJCP, p. 179). The equivalent of the ‘Holy Pigeon’ of the Paraclete in this poem is a little linnet that pays the monk a visit, implicitly bearing, rather like the llatai (bird messenger) Glyn Jones was no doubt then beginning to encounter in Welsh poetry of the Middle Ages, a message about the wonders of the natural creation. The linnet is thus an embodiment and confirmation of the pseudo-Wordsworthian religion of nature Maelog has, in his lonely isolation, come to embrace:

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These and many thousand more sights And sounds have been long since my sacramental Bread and wine, my Resurrection and my Holy Grail, whose influences have power To consecrate, sustain and quicken the whole Of being. For now I do not hope to see A universal transubstantiation. (GJCP, p. 180).

While there are the seeds here of the exultant psalms with which the mature, spiritually convinced Glyn Jones was to celebrate the miracle of the created world, this early poem, seemingly a text witnessing to the uncertain transition of his life from doubt to faith, ends by floating the possibility that such rapturous delight in the natural world may itself be sustenance enough for human life. It may be enough, Jones ventures to suppose, for religious language (‘sacrament’, ‘resurrection’, ‘Holy Grail’) to function as poetic metaphor for merely human experiences. It may not matter whether or not the wonders of life are underpinned by a Divine Creator: Starlight upon the face And breast is very sweet. Does some God blow The stars, or do they throb upon the pulse Of nothingness? One thing is certain. Starlight Upon the face and breast is very sweet.

Such a non-committal, equivocating stance was not, however, to prove existentially sustaining enough for the young Glyn Jones, even though, in his view, it had sufficed his friend Dylan Thomas. In Jones’s experience, it could not bear the weight of the frighteningly brutal frontal assaults of an unredeemed world during the sinister decade of the thirties. In 1933 ‘Cassation’ appeared, a poem whose flow is interrupted by the following unidentified prose quotation: ‘We must accept the inscrutable fact with resignation that there are an increasing number of antitheses in the world of our experience which science exhibits no sign of resolving’ (GJCP, p. 182). As for the poem itself, it alternates between a pair of antitheses. On the one hand it vividly registers the beauty of ephemeral, sensuous experience: The black uneven lacquer of the road Shines under the varnish of the last shower

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. . . Out of the darkness behind the hill A car puts two rods of light Against the shining bundle of telegraph wires Sagging through the night,

while ‘a tenuous thread of music spins steadily into the dim room’. On the other hand there is the lugubrious registering of Darkness, mutability, Irreconcilability; Sum of all our certainty — Hail, unholy trinity!

From this latter perspective, human life seems to have been delivered up entirely into the hands of an infernal trinity. Faced with this irreconcilable antithesis – the sweetness of life at the superficial level of quotidian sensory experience and the nullity of life at any deeper level – Glyn Jones can find consolation in terms valid within the narrow, artificial limits of his poetry alone: We can at least keep our juices within us, And, except at times, Permit ourselves no poetic inversions, And no easy rhymes. (GJCP, p. 183)

Similarly, in ‘The modern dilemma’ he achieves a brief, if ultimately unsatisfactory, equilibrium by noting how the poem itself has been turned into a passing ‘cure’ for the age’s ills: ‘I from the ills themselves / Have made six stanzas’ (GJCP, p. 183). One of his most ambitious attempts during this transitional period at accepting life on a religious basis that is equivocal at best is the relatively long poem ‘The miner’s evening’ (GJCP, pp. 207–11). The setting is a mining town in the Valleys, viewed initially from the vantage point of the overlooking mountain. Already inscribed in this opening description is the antithesis by which the whole poem is dominated, because even as the appreciative eye notes how shadows ‘turn to charcoal black the lonely trees’ while ‘one small rag of steam / . . . flutters white upon a blackened stack’, the dissatisfied mind is recalling how, since ‘first those squatting buildings spidered there’, this valley has suffered a disastrous change from prosperity to hardship. This antithesis is then developed

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in the main body of the poem until, no longer possible for the poet to bear, it gives rise to the modern equivalent of a despairing Old Testament prophet’s cry to Jehovah: Why do you deny yourself to us, O Lord, and daunt our sense with endless time And space? We sift each scoop of skiey gain But find you not, and thought who, circling, sweeps The rims of time, sees but your skirt’s hems twitched Away in darkness. (GJCP, p. 209)

In the face of such implacable evasion of human need by divinity, of God’s apparent indifference to ‘senseless pain as purposeless as life’ and to ‘foul diseases that consume the mind’, the poet feels ‘my faith and protestations die, / A crawling rocket shattered on the night’. His ever-deepening despair begins to infect and darken even his delight in nature, and it is only intensified by an encounter with a cripple glaringly defiant in his resentful deformity and by seeing an epileptic’s fearful fit. Feeling his life ‘is on the crossing-place of shadows / Each time that evening’s paradox returns’, the speaker ends with a tentative attempt to resolve his dilemma by hoping that such initially bewildering experiences of life’s irreconcilable antinomies may eventually turn into a path which leads Not from, but onward to the tents of God, This is a hope that can sustain my life Almost as if it were itself a faith. (GJCP, p. 211)

All these poems of the early thirties, then, reveal a Glyn Jones unable to accept life either on strictly secular terms or on the unsatisfactory terms that a fully committed religious belief at that time seemed to him to offer. At no point in his later writings did he ever reveal, as far as I know, exactly how his attitude came to change, how it was he came to enter into full active membership of Minny Street Welsh Independent (Annibynwyr) Chapel and to embrace its Christian teaching. Nor did he ever spell out the theology underpinning his lifelong religious belief. Such clues as do exist to the nature of his belief are available only in the form of his creative writings and other occasional comments. For instance, one thread of affirmation running throughout his mature writing is most clearly set in its religious context in a relatively late

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poem ‘Thirty-one dolls’ (GJCP, pp. 226–7). Written in simple, ballad form, it tells the story of Miss Rees, a spinster who runs a home for orphan girls. With Christmas approaching, she prays her thirty young charges may each miraculously be given a present of a doll. As time passes, and she grows ever more resentful of God’s failure to answer her prayer, she is one morning shamed by the unlooked-for delivery not of thirty dolls but of thirty-one – a delivery all the more miraculous because the additional doll is a present for a new orphan she has been unexpectedly asked to admit to her orphanage at the very last minute, on the very eve of Christmas itself. However, her rapturous, if shamefaced, gratitude to God is short-lived, because the new orphan girl Mair has, she discovers with a shock, no arms with which to embrace her cherished present. Miss Rees’s immediate reaction is one of disillusionment: She could not pray, though God had hung Bleeding at side and feet and palms – God who remembered dolls – who yet Forgot to give His daughter arms. (GJCP, p. 227)

This, of course, is the reappearance of the underlying despair that had so haunted Glyn Jones during the early thirties. But this time he does not remain helplessly nailed to ‘this crossing-place of shadows’. Instead, the poem moves on to a rather lovely resolution: Forgot? Miss Rees saw clearly In Incarnation’s sudden glare How imperfection was love’s life – What’s flawed, and failed, and in despair. Unwanted, armless Mair, her doll Bound to her breast with a grey shawl, Screamed with the thirty through the Home. Miss Rees wept. God endures all. (GJCP, p. 227)

Her God, like the God of Glyn Jones, ‘endures’ because He is a loving God who suffers with His creation, accepting such suffering as an inescapable aspect of the ‘imperfection’ that makes possible the fallen world’s precious, miraculous, variegated, unpredictable character. Given the poem’s conclusion it may even just possibly be relevant that ‘Mair’

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is the Welsh for ‘Mary’, the name of the suffering Virgin Mother of the suffering Christ. For the mature Glyn Jones, Welsh Independency, as he had experienced it first through his mother’s faith and as he experienced it later through his membership in Minny Street, seems to have made possible the ‘endurance’ of life through a belief grounded in an appreciation, suffering and celebratory by turn, of its inherent ‘imperfections’; an acceptance of the beautiful and the ugly, as of pleasure and pain, as interdependent aspects of God’s extraordinary creation in its fallen aspect. Glyn Jones worshipped a God who had affirmed the continuing goodness implicit in his fallen Creation by choosing to submit Himself to its joy and its suffering alike. In this respect, his God was, like Blake’s, a God still self-crucifyingly in love with His productions in time. No better, more endearing, warmly human, example of the value Jones placed on his own membership in a liberal, humane Independent chapel inexhaustibly accepting of life’s more minor imperfections, may be found than the anecdote tucked discreetly away in Meic Stephens’s footnotes to the Collected Poems. It is intended to gloss the mention, in Glyn Jones’s poem ‘Merthyr,’ of ‘Refined Miss Rees; Miss Thomas ditto’ (GJCP, p. 44): GJ once told me an amusing anecdote about these ladies. They were members at Soar, the chapel he attended as a boy in Merthyr; during a meeting called to discuss the fate of an unmarried girl who had become pregnant, one of them had astounded the congregation by complaining that the girl was not, after all, to be expelled from membership, and exclaiming, ‘In this chapel it’s all fucking and forgiveness!’ He chuckled heartily while recounting the anecdote. (p. 148)

‘Fucking and forgiveness’: these are the kinds of ‘f words’ Glyn Jones was happy to associate with his denomination. For almost every other Anglo-Welsh writer of his day, Miss Rees and Miss Thomas would have seemed the censorious voices of the chapel. For Glyn Jones they are characters rendered comic by their condemnation of the humane tolerance which he had experienced in chapel as he knew it. Whereas Dylan Thomas wished his aged aunt Ann Jones to be freed from the ‘sour cramp’ of her religion so that ‘her love [could] sing and swing through a brown chapel’,6 Glyn Jones felt a plain Welsh Nonconformist chapel had contained all such love as he valued. Such an experience provided Glyn Jones with an invaluable Christian modus vivendi throughout his

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life, and without it he might well not have been able to exist, let alone function. And yet, while it undoubtedly made his harrowing psychic tensions bearable, they were never resolved into final, definitive, tranquil harmony. Even in Seven Keys to Shaderdom, the major extended work of his advanced old age, he could baldly juxtapose the tendencies to despair and to rejoice, continuing to find it difficult to reconcile such contrary impulses through the articulation of any kind of mediating and unifying religious faith. *** Yet Glyn Jones’s religious faith, centred as it was on the chapel, was undoubtedly real and vitally important to him. And in embracing his kind of faith, he was in effect embracing Nonconformity in the liberal, largely post-Calvinist form that had developed into an important tendency within it from the late nineteenth century onwards. By the middle of the twentieth century one of the leading figures of this tendency was a young minister with the Annibynwyr (Jones’s own denomination of the Welsh Independents) between whose life and that of Glyn Jones there are several broadly suggestive parallels. Born and raised in a collier’s family in Mountain Ash, just across the mountain from Merthyr, Pennar Davies had turned out to be a young man of intellectual brilliance whose stellar academic career led him to Balliol College, Oxford and Yale. Also a gifted creative writer, he seemed destined to be, like Glyn Jones, a promising member of the remarkable thirties generation of Anglophone creative talent. His poems appeared (under the pseudonym Davies Aberpennar) alongside those of Dylan Thomas and others in Keidrych Rhys’s Wales. But he underwent a surprising, dramatic and in important respects counter-cultural conversion both to a deep religious faith, which resulted in his induction into the Nonconformist ministry, and to the Welsh language and its literary culture. Although Nonconformity was also producing at this time gifted new young theologians and ministers of a subtle, robust, neo-Calvinist character, Davies inclined strongly to the contrary, becoming a leading, speculatively daring theologian of the liberal tendency. His theology developed hand in hand with his new Welsh-language creative writing, which is correspondingly experimental and daring, and which makes clear that Davies was one for whom sensual and sexual experience could take on a sacred, sacramental aspect. It also reveals the rapt, ecstatic core of his nature. Like Glyn Jones, Pennar Davies stood wondering, amazed and worshipful

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before the inexhaustible glories of the created world. Viewing an almond tree, he hailed it with rapture as revelatory of the Saviour, as ‘the tree that hides its scar, the rash, life-giving tree’. At such moments he felt he was in the presence of the ‘frolicsome numen’ and understood what St Paul meant by ‘the joy of the Holy Ghost’.7 Pennar Davies’s theological hero was not the St Augustine of Hippo so revered by the Calvinists but rather the ‘heretical’ Pelagius, the Cambro-Briton (and therefore, for Davies, the proto-Welsh) figure who had emphasized the residual, potential, spiritual goodness both of human nature and of the created world. In his historically suspect, theologically unconventional but altogether riveting and inspiring essay ‘The fire in the thatch’ he explained the grounds of his attachment to Pelagius: Grace for him was not merely a remedial intervention necessitated by the Fall: it danced in the activity of creation itself . . . the earliest extant Welsh hymn, ‘Gogonedawg Arglwydd, hanpych gwell,’ sees the marvels of earth and heaven, nature and history, art, learning and religion as uniting to bless the Lord of Glory. (FT, p. 107)

Believing this to have been the generous religious vision informing the work of the early Celtic Church, he was convinced it was subsequently inherited by some of the greatest Welsh ‘Puritan’ Dissenters of the seventeenth century such as Walter Cradoc, Vavasor Powell and above all Morgan Llwyd (all Annibynwyr/Welsh Independents, like himself), only to be lost when, under the influence of the new, Calvinistic, evangelical leaders of eighteenth-century Welsh Methodism, what eventually became known as ‘Welsh Nonconformity’ succumbed to a narrower, and ultimately darker theology. While (like Glyn Jones) Pennar Davies greatly approved the social conscience developed, however belatedly, by Nonconformity during the later nineteenth century, and endeavoured to put it into active practice himself, it was to a millenarian sense of the potential for transfigurative self-fulfilment, a potential latent in all the human and natural creation, that he was most irresistibly attracted. Accordingly, he worked to restore to Nonconformity the visionary, Pelagian, outlook on life he believed it had lost. While Glyn Jones certainly did not commit himself explicitly to a similarly Pelagian outlook, or share Davies’s millenarian hopes, he seems to have belonged to the prominent liberal wing of Welsh Independency so charismatically instanced by Pennar Davies, and he also

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shared Davies’s ecstatic belief that the Creator was manifest in the sublime fertility and bizarre inventiveness of His sensuous creation. It is also interesting to note that Davies found in the praise-poetry of the great poet of the Welsh Catholic Middle Ages, Dafydd ap Gwilym, traces of a ‘Welsh-Christian delight in God’s largesse against an alien ecclesiasticism which was still felt to be an intruder’ (FT, p. 110). For Davies (as for Glyn Jones) what finally and fully validated such delight was its being the product of a religious outlook that also comprehended ‘the imaginative intensity of the agony – and the vomit – of Christ on the cross’ (FT, p. 111). The awakening of both Pennar Davies and Glyn Jones to a Nonconformist faith was intimately connected to their discovery of the rich Welsh literary tradition, and it was in the medieval Catholic Dafydd ap Gwilym above all other writers that Jones found a fellow spirit and Muse. He produced a series of translations, tribute poems, and imitations all honouring the great eos Dyfed (nightingale of Dyfed), invoking him as spinther, maker, more, Rain-finery’s fisherman, Netter of downpour’s glitter. (GJCP, p. 75)

‘Spinther’ is an esoteric term for the splinter of Divine Light lodged in every human consciousness. An extravagant comparison indeed, daring as Dafydd’s. Conceit was Jones’s preferred form of trope, as of course it was for Dafydd, because it alone could incarnate the unlikely extravaganza of creation. *** Strong believer as Pennar Davies was in universal salvation and in the benignity of the Creator, and fierce protector and ecstatic connoisseur as he was of the inalienable individuality of every form of created life, he was naturally drawn to an ecumenicism of religious vision. The concluding lines of his essay are accordingly written in the spirit of spiritual inclusiveness Glyn Jones had so valued in his chapel-going mother and eventually chose to inherit from her. Davies sees the walls of partition between catholic sacramentalism, humanist ethicism and evangelical solafideism melt away: I see no reason why the universal priesthood of believers should not delight in colour, sound and symbol,

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or should not see Christ in one of the least of his brethren in the Third World. But to find the renewal without which all our synods and assemblies cannot save us we must meet the Iesu who claimed nothing and gave all and who eludes all our systems and even the marvellous and marvelling hints towards a theology strewn all over the New Testament itself. There is still none other name under heaven given men. (FT, pp. 115–16)

This seems quite close to the vision reached by Glyn Jones, but at the outset, during his transition to faith in the early thirties, he was liable to feel the fertility and grotesqueness of the world of the flesh to be so deeply disquieting, even psychically threatening, that it was only with the maturing of his religious belief that he seems to have been able to gain a degree of creative and personal composure. The evidence for this is found not in the poems of the period but in the strange, semi-surreal short stories, written no doubt with those of Dylan Thomas very much in mind. Some of the stories are so labile in form, and they undergo so many morphings and shifts, that they are no doubt expressive of a whole range of restlessly interchanging psycho-sexual and existential anxieties. But from the undoubtedly central, if partial, point of view of the evolution, at this time, of Glyn Jones’s mature religious outlook, they make for interesting reading. One recurrent anxiety in these stories centres on the alien life of a body whose being is never solid but fluid, endlessly metamorphic and processual. This is the dark side of Jones’s revelling in what Whitman (whose poetry we know he was reading at the time) called the ‘procreant urge of the world’. This anxiety gives rise to the Gothic figure of a revenant, fashioned no doubt in part out of the materials of contemporary cinema as mediated through the work of Dylan Thomas, a revenant arisen in the flesh to disturb the repose of the living. No more vividly terrifying image could be produced of the body’s having a separate fearful life, of its inexorably going its own, grotesque, uncontrollable way. It can produce the wonders of the flesh but it also can run to deformity and decay. In ‘The Kiss’ a collier killed in an underground fall literally pushes up daisies in order to haul his putrefying body back into the air. Later, in mature poems like ‘Morning’ and ‘Bethania’, Jones was to celebrate the raising of Lazarus and the appearance of the risen Christ in the flesh, but in this early story the corpse struggling to reawaken to life ‘groaned and fell back, knowing there was no voice to call him Lazarus out of the rock’.8 Eventually he succeeds in making his way homeward, where his mother faints at his appearing,

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while the story ends with his brother bending ‘forward and kiss[ing] the putrid flesh of his brother’s hand’ (GJCS, p. 48). With its tentative Christianized conclusion, the whole story seems to be Glyn Jones’s attempt to face up to his sense of revulsion at life’s physical ugliness and thus to face down one of his deepest anxieties. The same theme is pursued in ‘The Little Grave’, a melodramatic story in the sentimental Victorian vein about a little boy so traumatized by the loss of his grandmother he is haunted by the image of the grave opened for her. He makes his way to the graveside and kindles a fire in a vain effort to warm the cold earth. Disappointed by the failure of his bonfire, he is discovered in disconsolate tears by his grandfather who wraps him in an old sack just as the moon comes out, bathing in its light the statue of Christ in the act of blessing the living and the dead. ‘He [Christ/the moon] has warmed the grave for her,’ the grandfather gently explains (GJCS, p. 126). This note of salvation, in the form of psychic integration through religious belief, is repeatedly struck in the early stories. ‘The Wanderer’ (1943) conjures up a wild, sinister, surrealistic scene. It starts with a hideous creature, a kind of living corpse, halfseduced by ‘the voices of poverty and sickness tempting him to tryst with worm or fish’ (GJCS, p. 110), and yet haunted by memories of the warmth, comfort and serenity of his childhood home with his ferryman father. He makes his way to his ‘sea slum’ through a mad, blasted world, populated by sick hags, whores and ‘a daft negress’ who dances ‘with her back to him, howling over the sea-muds and the yellow fields brilliant under buttercups, keeping the stumbled pigeons in the air with her ape-like hands’ (GJCS, p. 111). It is, of course, a landscape fashioned in the image of socio-sexual terror. Having found refuge in his shack, the ghostly apparition closes his eyes to remember ‘himself again a child with the gold-wearing hair who, hearing the ferry bell, ran through sunlit flowers and silver-seed rain to the blue-oared boat’ (GJCS, p. 112). At this point the story cuts to a different scene, to the figure of an old, but physically vigorous, ferryman sitting in a small dim chapel, listening to the sermon preached ‘from the lamp-lit prow of [a] pulpit’ (GJCS, p. 113). Perhaps recalling Father Mapple’s celebrated sermon from MobyDick, one of his favourite novels, Glyn Jones here produces a sea sermon of impassioned eloquence: I heard the voice of prophecy and rose in the darkness from the roots and shadow of my palm; walking the rocks in the glare of a moon on

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fire, I came at last to the shining sea and a slit of dawn like a lid lifting and flat glass of delight floating green on the water. Here with dawn-dew thick as lamb’s- wool on my bones I watched the work of the Lord and the breaking of His day, until the voice of prophecy called me like a bell across that blue, that leopard-sided sea. Oh burning sands, oh green burn of the foreign leaves, oh blowing sun hot on my fleshless bones, oh young she-swallow, sliding before her shadow from the shore, I salute you and enter the paths of the sea. (GJCS, p. 113)

There are inescapable echoes of Bunyan at the beginning of this passage, as of course there are at the beginning of the very first piece of prose by Dylan Thomas to appear in Keidrych Rhys’s Wales.9 The sermon (like Jones’s entire story) is about a pilgrim’s progress towards salvation, and as the preacher explains, the love of God is like the tolling of the bell to summon the ferryman. ‘Now my soul knows’, he announces in the climactic conclusion to his peroration, God’s love is not a beam for me alone or the turning wheel of the few elect, the love of God envelops like a vast sphere of sound, the tower fills the world with music every heart can hear. The souls abandoned by all, and the souls abandoned by all but their enemies, the Father remembers. Amen. (GJCS, p. 115)

His faith reinforced and redirected by this revelation, the old ferryman returns to his work, and rings his great bell to notify all who seek to cross the estuary of his services. The third, and final, part of the story returns to the hideous figure of the poem’s beginning, now revealed to be a beggar employed by his seaside village to scare away gulls. Hearing the ferryman’s bell, he makes his grotesque way down to the water’s edge and into the sea itself, where he is seen desperately wading by his ferryman father: ‘His heart was filled with joy and a great tenderness for even in the darkness he knew the call of his bell was answered’ (GJCS, p. 118). The story is Glyn Jones’s version of the parable of the Prodigal Son, translated into the semi-surrealist terms he needed in order to bring his residual psychic fears and his dawning Christian hopes into healing relationship. The result is a distinctive genre – that of Christian Surrealism. Expressive of his visceral fears of the social and political horrors of the thirties and the wartime years, ‘The Wanderer’ is also frankly revealing of the anxieties of a young man belatedly awakening to the body and to sex.

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One interesting feature of the story is that, as Glyn Jones himself pointed out, it is based at an actual location – the Llanybri side of the Taf estuary directly opposite the Laugharne side where Dylan Thomas was eventually to make his home in a boathouse perched directly overlooking an old ferryman’s cottage. Although at the time of the story’s writing Glyn Jones was not to know that Thomas would later live in the locality, he already strongly identified the area with Thomas, having explored the local terrain some years earlier, during the thirties, in the company of his Swansea friend. This enabled Jones to construct a textual terrain that is surely intended to provide the ground for a meeting between his own writing and that of Dylan Thomas, with the aim of highlighting the difference between their visions. As we have seen, Thomas’s early stories similarly employed pseudo-surrealistic means of exploring psycho-social tensions and anxieties. Those stories also constantly feature a religious discourse, as has already been noted, but do so not, like Jones’s story, in order to validate mainstream Christian faith but to discredit and displace it. In other words, ‘The Wanderer’ may be regarded as being, in part, Glyn Jones’s answer to what he saw as his young friend’s anti-religious, secular vision. It thus anticipates the kind of reading of Thomas as his anti-Nonconformist alter ego developed by Glyn Jones in The Dragon Has Two Tongues. In Jones’s early stories, religious experience, in one or other of its forms, repeatedly possesses the power to provide an otherwise tortured narrative with some kind of meaningful resolution. Nor is Dylan Thomas the only contemporary writer with whose work these stories enter into intertextual conversation. ‘The Saviour’ is unmistakably modelled on the short fiction of D. H. Lawrence. Another melodramatic surreal tale, it features a young woman semi-crazed by her incarceration by her sinister hag of a mother, whose ‘erect brow was firm still and the small black eyes brutal and active but the skin of the cheeks and the puffed underlids had begun to pucker and to decay’ (GJCS, p. 100). The young woman is eventually released by a vigorous young workman who has spied her ‘terrorised head’ (GJCS, p. 106) peeping, eyes aglitter with ‘alarm and revulsion’, through the cottage window as he mows a neighbouring field. A dark thunderstorm provides him with his chance. Battering down the cottage door in search of refuge from the rain he tears her from her mother’s grip, in the process dealing the old woman a mortal blow. The story ends, as it began, with the girl’s crying out to Jesus, but whereas earlier her cry had been wrung out of one tortured both in body and in soul, at the conclusion of the narrative it emerges as an

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exclamation over the death of her mother, an exclamation in which relief promises to outweigh guilt. The Lawrentian theme of salvation through sex – a gospel in which which Glyn Jones was never a believer – is here implicitly given a more conventionally Christian twist. The invocation of Jesus is no empty expression of profane despair and hope but uttered rather in the spirit of belief born of personal experience. There are also Lawrentian overtones to parts of another story, ‘Knowledge’, in which the chapel appears as a refuge, a ground of strength and a site of psychosomatic integration. As an outsider to a community in the industrial valleys Penn is baffled by the hillside chapel which is important to local life, and finds his own refuge from work as a pitman in an intense fascination with flowers and growing things. Watching him, his wife Gwyn sees ‘his magnificent body fused down to . . . intense observation of an unbudding flower, giving himself up without any reserve of doubt or fear’ (GJCS, p. 52). Gwyn herself is a chapel member, and persuades Penn one evening to attend a service where, although initially attracted to the communal hymn-singing, he becomes thoroughly angered and alienated by the minister’s invitation to his wife to pray aloud before the whole congregation. Knowing of her shyness, he imagines her to be inwardly mortified and terrified, and so mistakes the tears that flow from her when she is on her knees as coming from her sense of public humiliation. But as they leave for home at the end of the meeting Gwyn explains the real, different, reason for her crying: ‘“It was nothing, Penn,” she said, “only I love our people and I so seldom show it. Smell the gillies in the garden after the rain. I am so busy fighting”’ (GJCS, p. 55). The last phrase is an important one. It indicates that for Gwyn her chapel experience is no retreat from the challenges of her community’s working life into the consolations of religion. Rather, the chapel supplies her with the inner strength that allows her to fight with ‘her’ people against the injustice they suffer. Although Penn had not realized it, it was this sense of solidarity with each other and with God that he had instinctively recognized in the congregation of miners and their wives upon first entering the chapel: ‘They sat around him . . . some with their eyes shut, solid and finished, wanting nothing; they had been hurt often and had suffered, and they looked uncouth, almost monolithic, with no desire in them, only the warm look of knowledge and understanding’ (GJCS, p. 53). Lawrentian rhythms and phrasing here take on an entirely un-Lawrentian, Christianized form. It was important for Glyn Jones to highlight the means offered by Nonconformity for people like himself, who were not actual members

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of the working class, to make social and political cause with the miners whose lives he had shared all the years of his growth to adulthood. After all, the feeling that the chapels had nothing to offer the Valleys communities during the Depression years was one to which Glyn Jones had clearly been prey before his entry into full chapel fellowship. His ambitious early long story ‘I Was Born in the Ystrad Valley’ makes this clear. Building on the strong tradition of revolutionary socialism in the coalfield, it imagines what might have happened had the path of violence implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, advocated by such an ideology actually been followed by one or more of the south Wales industrial communities in the aftermath of the failure of the General Strike of 1926. Fearing that he has been educated out of the working class into which he was born, the young intellectual Wyn eagerly seizes his opportunity to join an armed uprising to establish a more just society. By the end of the story, the uprising has failed to attract widespread popular support and a Wyn broken by his experiences returns to his native valley to be digested by the forms of life in its natural landscape: ‘Stone-crop breaks out like green fire along the folds of my flesh and the cock-owl that issued at sundown out of the thunders of my ears burst with his wings the hung webs of fishing spiders’(GJCS, p. 40). This process of psychosomatic disintegration may, or so the passage seems to imply, be only a stage in the greater process of rebirth. In such a conclusion there is, of course, no mention of the chapel, but down to the story’s very end Wyn is haunted by the visit he had paid to his parents’ chapel shortly before the abortive revolution had begun. In their forms and faces he had seen nothing but resignation and defeat, a vision that had reinforced his determination to act politically and violently. After the revolution had failed and he was on the run, Wyn had found shelter in a rural village with Alun, a friend whose mother had just died: ‘she was a fighter, small in body and often ill, and in pain, but it was she who had schemed and struggled to get him to college’ (GJCS, p. 38). Then as he surreptitiously approached his native valley on his final visit he had seen a small, decent working woman hurry by ‘concerned only with her own grief and absorbed under the night in the bitterness of her suffering’ (GJCS, p. 39). In both these figures he clearly discerns the figure of his chapel-going mother, and so, read in the light of these episodes, the story’s conclusion inclines, although only with the greatest uncertainty, towards a suggestion that Wyn’s earlier passion for social justice lives on, re-emerging, through the disintegration of his violent revolutionary self, in the form of a new,

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religiously inflected, affirmation of the combined horror and beauty of life. *** As his faith matured, Glyn Jones came to see membership of a chapel as in part an expression of solidarity with the wider working community. This is made clear in stories like ‘Robert Jeffries’. Its frame narrator is Mr Herbert, an Anglican curate newly arrived in a coalfield community and finding it ‘strange and perplexing’ (GJCS, p. 233), but the actual story is told to him by Robert Jeffries, a bilingual native of the valley. It concerns Dafydd Morris who, having frequented pubs and disreputable company in his youth, experienced a conversion during the 1905 Revival which did not so much transform his character as transfigure it. Having joined the local chapel, he not only developed into an imposing character of lovable, warmly inclusive piety but also distinguished himself first as precentor and then as leader of cymanfaoedd canu: what he loved was to see the whole valley unobscured by rain or mist or darkness and lit by the bright sun of the morning. I heard him speak of it often in prayer meetings; he saw there, in the sunlight, the landscape of his favourite hymns, where his Saviour stood among myrtles, or strode out of Eden conquering, more lovely than the breaking of the dawn. (GJCS, p. 235)

But Dafydd is devoted to his greedy, shrewish wife and she it is who eventually breaks the old man’s heart by (justly but mercilessly) accusing one of his simple-minded friends of theft of Dafydd’s property. By the conclusion of Robert Jeffries’s story, Mr Herbert realizes he now understands what Valleys life is all about: ‘Love and illumination were upon me that night. I wept over the lined face, on my knees I shed my tears into the bosom of Christ at his suffering, and the suffering of the valleys, and the suffering of all the world’ (GJCS, p. 255). Chapel religion is genuinely the heart of a heartless world, a belief of Glyn Jones’s reinforced in another story ‘The Boy in the Bucket’. This is a simple tale about Ceri, a little boy from a respectable, chapel-going family who worries himself sick about what his mother will say when she discovers he has broken a streetlight while playing with the naughty boys of the district. Expecting the local policeman to knock any minute

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on his door with a summons, he attends chapel with his parents. There his fears take the form of nightmares when he falls asleep, only to wake with a start as the pew door against which he has been leaning suddenly flies open. Sitting outside in the porch he confesses his ‘sin’ to his mother, who is understanding and forgiving just as ‘from the chapel behind them came the singing of the last hymn’ (GJCS, p. 223). As this story suggests, Glyn Jones regularly associated the God he worshipped as a Welsh Independent with the traditionally maternal warm embrace of total forgiveness. In one of his most beautiful late poems, ‘Goodbye, what were you,’ he fused recollections of his childhood hearth with the story about Christ’s birth in a manger. For him, it was ‘at the voice of the mother on a warm hearth, / Dark and firelit’ that ‘This world had its beginning / And was here redeemed’ (GJCP, p. 66). In this place, ‘God’s boy was born, loving, by lantern light, / His church built of the breathing of cattle’, even as the storm thickened ‘hair by hair / Its blinding pelf of tempest on the window panes’ (GJCP, p. 67). Here clearly evoking memories of his mother, he elsewhere attaches not dissimilar qualities of nurturing to the powerful figure of his grandmother. She appears as one of the most potent positive images in the long poem ‘The dream of Jake Hopkins’, a poem organized around the dialectical relationship between ‘Blessed Memory’ and ‘Undesired Memory’, respectively representing spiritual belief and unbelief, religious hope and despair. In places the poem seems helplessly fixated on images from the concentration camps (‘Do you remember how their screams broke out / From that seven times heated furnace, where walked / No comforter with the image of the Son of Man?’) and other unspeakable horrors. But these alternate with images such as that of his grandmother emerging unscathed from a fire of an entirely different order: Do you remember, when the whole sky was ablaze, And the crimson sun-ball, evulsed and fiery, stood Dissolving on the hillcrest? A heavy figure, broad And black, floated out of that bonfire, as it were Upon a rolling raft of warm illumination. (GJCP, p. 30)

These lines, and the passage of extended description from which they are taken, then reappeared shortly thereafter in The Valley, The City, The Village, the novel of 1956 which offers us the most multifaceted and so the most richly complete insight into the relationship between Glyn Jones’s chapel faith and his creative writing.

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In the novel, his grandmother proves to be the most powerfully influential presence in Trystan’s growth from childhood to adulthood. Orphaned early, he is raised in an industrial valley by her and her unmarried son, Uncle Hughie, and when young ‘my granny was always a warm and visionary being’. Sometimes, the whole sky ablaze, and the crimson sunball dissolving hot as rosin upon the hill-top, a tall black figure seemed to float out of that bonfire as though riding a raft of illumination. Her heavy progress was laborious, her shoulders rose and fell against the dazzling hump of hillcrest radiance with the rock of a scalebeam. She shepherded her rolling shadow down the slope; returning from the prayer-meeting she wore over her vast flesh her long black boat-cloak, with the brass buttons like a dramatic row of drawer-knobs down the front of her.10

The whole passage is modelled on the celebrated vision of the angel standing in the sun in the Book of Revelation. Alongside the figure of Trystan’s grandmother solidly sits his uncle, who is a winderman: ‘The job of winder was always given to someone reliable, to a man connected with a chapel often, to someone who was known not to drink; it was responsible and well paid’ (VCV, p. 16). Between them the pair nurture, support, and guide the lad’s development, although in adulthood he realizes that their Edenic view of the biblical innocence of children was very far from the reality he experienced (VCV, p. 33). As a child, Trystan loves to play with irreverent naughty boys like Benja, leader of the gang that likes to head up to the freedom of the mountain to make camp. Benja proves to be an inspired oral inventor of fantastical tales in the tradition of the Mabinogion and of the wonderful textual forger Iolo Morganwg, both of them with strong connections with Glyn Jones’s native Merthyr, the thinly disguised Valleys town of the novel, and both of them avatars of his own creative writing. And at the end of one of the gang’s adventures, Benja douses the fire, ‘giving the performance a mock benediction in a nasal and liturgical sing-song. ‘“Yn enw’r Tân [In the name of the Fire]”, dropping a big charred stone upon it. “A’r Mwg [and the Smoke]”, dropping another. “A’r Ysbryd Drwg [And the Evil Spirit]. Amen”’ (VCV, p. 39). The incident recalls the celebrated blasphemous Benediction and Black Mass with which James Joyce opened Ulysses and thus points up the chasm separating the Welshman from the Irishman. Not for Glyn Jones, either as man or as writer, the Luciferean Non Serviam of Stephen Dedalus.

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His granny’s fervent wish is to see Trystan become a minister of the Gospel, preferably even a missionary. But he knows his vocation to be altogether different. Early manifesting an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtlest gradations of form and colour in the surrounding world, he gradually develops a wish to become a painter. This, he knows, his grandmother will find deeply disquieting: In the austere theology of her faith, music and poetry, traditionally employed by the hymnist and sacred composer, had received, as surely as Magi gift or pascal offering, the divine approbation. But painting, an idolatrous art, appeared by its nature to fall under the Mosaic ban. Furthermore, how was the dedication of an entire life to the vain pursuit of worldly fame, through the application of colours to paper or canvas, to be justified? Was so dubious an activity anywhere, in parable, or epistle, in mountain, plain, or seashore sermon, was this anywhere held to be a furtherance of the divine plan, the Eternal’s arfaeth fawr [great providential plan] for humankind? (VCV, pp. 75–6)

Assailed by both a religious and a social conscience, the young Glyn Jones had, we know, entertained similar doubts about the validity of his creative writing. So outlandishly modernist was it that neither his society nor his chapel could possibly comprehend how it could be of serious, substantial use. Through his early friendship with Dylan Thomas he had briefly sought and found reassurance that such writing could, after all, serve a legitimate purpose. Under pressure from his grandmother, abetted by his grammar school headmaster, Trystan briefly weakens in his resolve on the threshold of leaving school, but even the extremely faint hope he then obediently seeks to cherish that he may one day hear and obey the Lord’s call quickly disappears once he has attended the induction of a new minister in his chapel. Significantly, he and his young friend find themselves seated in cwtsh y geifr which, as Glyn Jones explains, is ‘the name given to remote or unused seats in a chapel, always upstairs and normally occupied by very infrequent attenders’. Sitting there, impressed by the evident spiritual and moral integrity of Dafydd Hanmer and the young man’s serene security in his calling, Trystan instantly registers the difference between such divinely inspired single-mindedness and his own ‘proliferating’ mind: ‘My life seemed to be lived minute by minute, I enjoyed or endured things as they happened to me, but I had experienced no burning sense of vocation such as Mr Hanmer had described’ (VCV,

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p. 90). Nevertheless, he is persuaded by his uncle to accept a compromise. Rather than proceed directly to Art College, he will first study at university in the city in order to gain a degree, thus allowing the Spirit more time to realize his grandmother’s dearest dream. This early, valley, phase of Trystan’s life includes details and episodes one can readily imagine being treated very differently by other, agnostic, Anglo-Welsh writers of his golden generation. His sensitivities genuinely disturbed by his chapel’s ugliness, Trystan feels ‘the pulpit was an offence to me, a shiny wooden structure, almost black, very ornate and ugly, with carvings and hideous handrails’ (VCV, p. 88). In another writer’s hands, this kind of detail would lead to an exposure of the similar ugliness of the chapel’s faith. Not so in Glyn Jones’s novel. A similar dissimilarity between his work and that of his contemporaries appears when Trystan recalls his youthful practice of sitting in the gallery, sketching the heads of the deacons and the members of the congregation seated directly below. He scrawls his baroque designs ‘in the borders of my hymn-book where “Joanna,” or “Constance,” or “Arweiniad” left wide margins’ (VCV, p. 77). Where a Dylan Thomas or a Gwyn Thomas would surely have treated such a scene as the triumph of secular creative intelligence over religious text, the literal invasion, defacement and displacement of the word of the Lord by the word of the writer, Glyn Jones does no such thing. In his account, the resulting hybrid product – hymn-book complete with wild marginal drawings – signifies instead the opposite: the union of the creative and the religious imaginations. Similarly, rather than represent Trystan’s drawings of the grotesque features of his pious subjects – ‘Williams the tailor . . . with his parrot beak, polished ivory bald-spot, and black-dyed moustache . . . Richards the overman . . . a raw, hairy lump like a meat-loaf glaring across the back of his neck’ (VCV, pp. 77–8) – as revealing the human deformities of their faith, he does something entirely different. Through these figures, Trystan writes, ‘what was odd in them, or sorrowful, or noble, or comic, or beautiful, I learnt the love to which the sermon of Mr Prys Huws, which I was ignoring, exhorted me’ (VCV, p. 78). Art proves to provide only an alternative route to a spiritual insight wholly, sensuously, corroborative of the faith of the minister and his congregation. Arriving in the city, Trystan finds the aptly named Markethall, the chapel to which he repairs in the company of his new friend Zachy, to be different from and altogether spiritually inferior to Caersalem [Jerusalem], the Valleys chapel in which he was raised.

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All sat in Caersalem on a Sunday morning, all within the clean bare walls, all together in the building with the long plain-glass windows where nothing was decorated or ornamented, where the forms in which wood and cloth and stone had been worked were simple. Markethall, after the austere and comely bareness of Caersalem, seemed elaborate and pretty and unreal. (VCV, p. 107)

Its pretentiousness, he discovers, images the social ambitions of its classconscious members, many of them assiduous social climbers. In this parodic New Jerusalem, the stone embodiment of the worldly aspirations of its members, the social rank of significant individuals is anxiously acknowledged – ‘Mrs Captain Davies’ and the like. The salivating Zachy points out ‘with some proprietary satisfaction some of the more important members of the chapel: a barrister, the wife of a surgeon, the son and daughter of a high-ranking civil servant, a newspaper editor’ (VCV, p. 108) and gets excited that ‘Lord Lisvane’ is a member. Trystan’s disappointment in Markethall is all the more dispiriting because he is in search of some kind of genuine refuge from the life of a dissolute city by which, from the very outset, he finds himself morally and spiritually disorientated. In ‘Cwmcelyn’, a poem of the same period as the novel, Glyn Jones had depicted Cardiff as a city ‘where now the sacrifice of love is not enjoined’, a city populated by unbelievers, belittling fools. Where there is no king, no shrine, no sanctuary, Whose is the name to which every knee In that city’s empty-hearted wilderness Shall bow? (GJCP, p. 46)

Like the City section of the novel, the poem is in part a recollection of Glyn Jones’s early experience of ‘the soul’s dissonance and . . . despair’ when, newly qualified at Cheltenham Training College, he began teaching in a school in the Cardiff slums and had not yet really found his home in the Minny Street Chapel. Trystan’s nightmare experiences of the City in The Valley, The City, The Village range from a brief visit to the Club, whose members constitute a kind of anti-chapel, a riotous body of cynically clever, precociously knowing young students contemptuous of moral and spiritual values and dedicated to the careless worship of a nihilistic hedonism, to his uneasy friendships with a series of substantively unsound friends. With

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one of these, Alcwyn, the young Trystan tries to defend his Christian faith from the kind of attack launched against it by Glyn Jones’s AngloWelsh contemporaries. At a fashionable café in town, Alcwyn explains he regards the Bible as ‘obscure’ and ‘inept’: ‘And then think of the appalling ruffians the Hebrews had for heroes. And the prophets and the patriarchs, always whoring and bargaining with God, and eating dung and living in adultery’ (VCV, p. 122). Alcwyn is dismissive of Trystan’s mild, but pointed, objection that ‘the New Testament was surely the important part of the Bible’, countering by highlighting the weaknesses of Christ’s followers: ‘I always think Luke ought to have called his book “The Acts of the Impossibles.”’ The joke is in the spirit of Glyn Jones as much as of his character, save that, unlike Alcwyn, the Christian author regarded human imperfection as ‘love’s life’. Of Trystan’s friends and casual acquaintances, two are particularly important in the present context. Nico is a thick-set, rugby-playing product of Welsh rural Nonconformity who has lost sight of the spiritual, moral and cultural values of his background. Gwydion (named after the celebrated wizard, story-teller and shape-shifter of Welsh medieval legend) is the kind of exotic figure encountered again in Karl, the elusive, charismatic boyhood friend and hero in Glyn Jones’s other major novel, The Island of Apples. Well travelled and correspondingly sophisticated, Gwydion is intellectually gifted, socially poised and, as a budding connoisseur of literature and the arts, totally antipathetic to any form of moral or spiritual commitment. Dismissing Trystan’s seemingly naïve belief that great art is always placed reverentially at the service of life, Gwydion insists that, on the contrary, art is superior to life in that it is produced by the human imagination in compensation for life’s total lack of substance, form and depth. The very best life can manage is occasionally to imitate art, as when a gorgeous sunset fleetingly resembles a Richard Wilson painting. It is worth pausing with the character of Gwydion because he is in part compounded of the fatalistic scepticism characteristic of Glyn Jones’s father (whose favourite text was ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’) and of a similar strain in his son’s make-up. And given Jones’s abiding feeling that Dylan Thomas was an extreme instance of this tendency in his own character, there are also links between Gwydion and the young Swansea poet, most evident when Gwydion addresses his greatest obsession: the nature of art. He accuses Trystan of having a chapel-bound mind, ‘of wishing all art to tend to the condition of the homily, to the pronunciamentos of the great prophet-poets and

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artist-didacts of the Old Testament’ (VCV, p. 157). As for Gwydion himself, his creed is that ‘the artist is the creator of values but only of artistic not moral values’. With this Trystan heatedly disagrees. Made aware by Gwydion of the belief he has inherited from his grandmother’s chapel culture that everyone, artist or not, should be dedicated to the realizing of some deep moral and human cause, he argues (citing Shelley’s famous description of creators as the unacknowledged legislators of the world) for an art through which we recognize ‘our fellowship with the suffering, the humiliated, the browbeaten, the cheaply held’ (VCV, p. 170). He even believes that ‘Gwydion’s manifest unhappiness’ derives from his realization he cannot share such a belief in the artist’s role – a judgement not unlike Glyn Jones’s sympathetic view of his morally and socially unmoored friend Dylan Thomas who drove himself so young to self-destruction. Not that Trystan’s views are to be completely identified with those of Glyn Jones, any more than Gwydion merely represents another aspect of the author and of his friend Dylan Thomas. These are independent fictional characters fully consistent only with their function within the economy of the actual novel. There is no mistaking certain accents Glyn Jones would no doubt have recognized as true in Gwydion’s defence of aestheticism and formalism, even in his word fetishism (although this, again, is suggestive of a narcissism against which Jones himself, passionately infatuated though he was with the arcane, the exotic, the lexically rare, fought and to which he felt his Swansea friend had fallen victim). Similarly there is a callow earnestness, even a certain priggishness, in Trystan’s frequently pompous defence of the morality of art, though Glyn Jones may have very well been inclined to accept some such view. In short, the dialectic between the contrary points of view voiced respectively by Trystan and Gwydion allowed Glyn Jones both to give expression to the dialectical tendencies of his own imagination and to highlight certain dangerous potentialities in both sides of the argument that could cause an artist – the example Glyn Jones had in mind being probably Dylan Thomas – to spin off on a potentially disastrous, even tragic, track. At the end of the novel, Trystan sorrows over Gwydion as Glyn Jones did over Dylan, wishing he could forget the offensive generations, gravebound and swarming into oblivion . . . the strange existence in the lower bowel . . . the grave, the insatiable eater of loveliness and philosophy . . . forget, do not believe . . . your hiraeth for the uterine oblivion, the oblivion of innocency and the oblivion of death. (VCV, p. 251)

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One of the weaknesses in Gwydion’s stance that most worries Trystan is his complete separation of the artist from society; his denial of social affiliation and responsibility. This, as we have seen, was a charge Glyn Jones sadly levelled at Dylan Thomas, and also, in a much weaker form, against his Anglo-Welsh contemporaries who, in attacking Welsh Nonconformity, were in fact denying a faith and its culture that had in many ways made possible their own art. The theme becomes most prominent in the third, and final, section of the novel when Trystan, psychologically broken by his sojourn in the City, takes his friends Gwydion and Nico down to Llansant, the seaside village in the rural west in which Trystan’s family has its roots. For Trystan, the move to this utterly different world is a deeply restorative one. Primed by the reading he has been doing in Welsh-language literature, he finds in Llansant – a village still informed by the values Trystan (and to some extent Glyn Jones) associates with the Welsh chapel – the kind of close-knit community in which he strongly believes. Therefore, the defections of his friend Nico, a native of a similar district, seem to him all the more deplorable. He urges him inwardly (in embarrassingly rhetorical terms) ‘to remember your house, and your blood, and your inheritance, and the prosecutions and martyrdoms of your puritan ancestry; remember, and do not be content to remain only their sensual and decadent epigone’ (VCV, p. 252). ‘Because of what I have been thinking,’ Trystan adds, suggestive of Glyn Jones’s suspicions about how Dylan Thomas viewed him, ‘I expect to be addressed in mockery as some heroic pulpiteer or horseback Bibleman, Hywel Harris or Christmas Evans or Williams o’r Wern’ (VCV, p. 252). *** In his rhapsodizing over Llansant, Trystan partly represents the kind of sentimentalization of the pious gwerin Glyn Jones had encountered in the Welsh literature he had read during the thirties and with which he felt only a guarded sympathy. But not only is Trystan a selfdistancing parody of values Glyn Jones himself actively espoused; he is used to paint a cultural picture of rural west Wales very different from the ones Dylan Thomas so influentially painted both in his stories and poems and, also, of course, most influentially in Under Milk Wood, a work completed only some three or four years before Glyn Jones’s novel was written. Contrast, for instance, the secular comedy of Thomas’s play with the would-be religious spirit with which Trystan

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wistfully regards the comic aspects of the crowd thronging Llansant square on fair day: This is not for me, I know it, the moment of the pigeoned head, or epiphany, or pentecostal fire, but the salute only of elate and harmonious flesh. Upon whom does the infidel or unregenerate heart, beholding such created loveliness, the cosmic splendour and the comicality, bestow the oblations and sweet odours of his gratitude and praise? (VCV, p. 245)

Particularly in this its final section, The Valley, The City, The Village seems to enter into a relatively sustained conversation with Thomas’s depictions of west Wales, and central to that conversation is the respect Glyn Jones shows for the socio-religious values of that basically Nonconformist society. His outlook is succinctly summarized in a poem he wrote contemporary with the novel. ‘Cwmcelyn’ is, in its way, an answer to poems like ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘After the funeral’, with which it shares the setting of the Llansteffan– Llanybri area from which both Dylan Thomas’s paternal family and his own had originated. It starts with an idyllic evocation of the estuarine setting complete with beautiful sunlight, buzzards and cornfields, ‘silent and sunburnt encampments / Of wheat-stooks’ (GJCP, p. 45). Homing in on the farm itself, however, the poem recognizes the travails of the sinful flesh of his toiling ancestors, with the poet insisting Let me not, in the repose of this sunlight, Tranquil on fields and on heaving estuary, see Their symbol and image; or falsify Toiling and poverty, rebellion And bitterness of theirs to a pastoral Heaven. Defilement was theirs, and folly, Suffering, questioning and death. And yet Between them and the Eternal, a harmony. (GJCP, p. 45)

In that insistence on anti-pastoral, Jones both grows close to the Dylan Thomas of ‘After the Funeral’ and also distances himself alike from the Thomas of ‘Fern Hill’ and the rhapsodies of Trystan. But in his quiet, firm, insistence on honouring his ancestors’ Nonconformist faith he distances himself from every version of the area Dylan Thomas had to offer and draws closer to the spirit in which Trystan views Llansant.

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‘Cwmcelyn’ also implicitly highlights one feature of Trystan’s experience of the village of Llansant which corresponds very exactly to that of Glyn Jones himself. As he explained in The Dragon Has Two Tongues, his own experience of the Llanybri area, from childhood onwards, had convinced him that far from being the kind of pious gwerin community so vaunted by Welsh literature it was, in fact, less deeply informed by the best of chapel values than was the Merthyr community of the industrial Valleys. Accordingly, one of the most profound of Trystan’s experiences in Llansant is when he hears a Valleys male-voice choir consisting mostly of miners ‘singing with concerted passion the exultant poetry of their faith’ (VCV, p. 266) in the village square. Gwydion, as ever, is sceptical of such emotional intoxication, prompting Trystan to protest, ‘We are a deeply religious and musical nation’ (VCV, p. 266). There seems to be an unmistakable serious affirmative turn given here to the celebrated phrase mockingly put into the mouth of the Revd Eli Jenkins in Under Milk Wood. And Trystan reinforces his argument by pointing out that the hymns represent a potent fusion of powerful music and of the great religious poetry of the hymns of Ann Griffiths, Morgan Rhys, Thomas William Bethesda’r Fro and the like. It is Trystan’s grandmother who is the real Muse of his Llansant vision. Her chapel values haunt his mind. And so when The Valley, the City, the Village concludes with an extraordinary dream fantasy of the Last Judgement, it is she who presides over the crazy farrago of the proceedings. The whole extended scene gives stylized expression to the divine comedy of imperfect human life and it climaxes with the judgement passed by Granny on Nico, who stands at the last indicted of having deserted the ways and the values of his Nonconformist ancestors: ‘In the carouse, in the debauch, in the love-grip, in the sweat of lechery, you shall remember. Not for you the loss of paradisial meadows, not for you the sulphur and eonial fire. You shall learn and remember . . .’ (VCV, pp. 313–14) If the hazards of the artistic temperament are explored in some complexity in The Valley, the City, the Village, they are brought to a single, burning focus in The Island of Apples, a novel whose dominant theme is the ambivalent power of the imagination. Drawing freely on the great English Romantic tradition of treating this subject, Glyn Jones inflects it in the light of his own specifically Nonconformist mentality. The kinds of ‘puritan’ misgivings voiced about painting by Trystan’s granny were indirectly expressive, too, of Glyn Jones’s concerns about literature. In the poem ‘Merthyr’ he wryly confessed to a ‘fancy’ for words (the word

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‘fancy’ itself connoting sexuality, empty fantasy and idle ephemerality), added an admission that art was partly rooted in vanity and ended by saying: And thus I see the point when puritan Or mystic poet harried under ban Sensual nature. (GJCP, p. 43)

Rather than crippling him as a writer, however, such guilty misgivings served only to add energy, intensity and seriousness to his practise of his art. Convinced of the human and spiritual dimensions of poetry and fiction, he never lost sight of the danger of their being infected by moral corruption. The fallen human imagination could serve God and the devil alike. It could lead and mislead, be the instrument of sympathy or of self-absorption. The latter point is powerfully and movingly established in the major late poem ‘The common path’, in which the author rebukes himself for having passed a mortally sick woman so many times in his walks. He has blithely imputed to her all sorts of thoughts and experiences while wholly failing to register the desperation with which she was silently facing her own death. Walking on by, absorbed like any novelist in his own imaginings, he had failed to act the Samaritan. He had Rejected her, and so rejected all The sufferings of wars, imprisonments, Deformities, starvation, idiocy, old age – Because fortune, sunlight, meaningless success, Comforted an instant what must not be comforted. (GJCP, p. 71)

Art is not incapable of callousness. Sombrely treated in ‘The common path,’ the subject of the ambivalent power of the imagination is handled altogether more lightly and sympathetically in The Island of Apples, woven as the novel is out of the (frequently indistinguishable) facts and fantasies of a pre-adolescent mind. Glyn Jones had spent a lifetime teaching youngsters, and so knew well of the strange, mythic, semi-artistic world of a boy’s imaginative life during his schooldays.11 Far too rich and complex to be considered here, the novel has much to say about the kinds of issues regarding the imaginative life which preoccupied an artist of a chapel background, yet the chapel itself is never substantively featured in the narrative.

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Perhaps the single most interesting aspect from present perspective is the novel’s conclusion in which the journey of Karl on a boat in stormtossed waters is a kind of Boy’s Own version of Rimbaud’s ‘Le bateau ivre’. It was Dylan Thomas who styled himself ‘the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’, and there seem, again, to be distant, seductive echoes in Karl’s fate of that of Dylan Thomas as Glyn Jones saw him. Karl has become wholly the creature of imagination – his own and that of the book’s narrator, Karl’s great friend. And it is his imagination that drives him to an apocalyptic ending, the imagination in precisely the form feared by Nonconformity, the imagination placed entirely at the service of narcissistic, fantastic and egotistical self-aggrandisement, the imagination of a ruthlessly self-serving artist. A rootless figure, like Dylan Thomas, owning no allegiance to any social bond or tie or tradition, Karl is an exotically liberated and liberating creature. The very figure of the limitless freedoms necessary in one respect to the creative imagination, he is also doomed, lacking the ballast of commitment and belief with which Glyn Jones’s Nonconformist attachment mercifully provided him. The need for such a counterbalance is neatly figured in The Valley, The City, The Village through the images of the two trees featured at different points in the narrative. The one is associated with the artistfigure of Trystan’s Llansant Uncle Gomer, an incomparable raconteur, a cyfarwydd in the great oral tradition, a teller of tales in the spirit of the Mabinogion. His listeners are held spellbound not least by his long, artful digressions, and so, listening to him, Trystan finds himself imagining a wondrous, majestic, ever-branching tree rising from magical ground. This is an emblem of the ‘proliferating’ artistic mind, with its prodigal gift for indirectness. But counterbalancing it is the image of another tree, a picture nailed to the wall of his grandmother’s house next to the wedding photograph of his parents: It was large and at the bottom of it an open Bible was pictured firmly gripped by the claw-like roots of an enormous oak. The trunk of this oak, although of great girth, was squat, and the greater part of the picture was taken up by the gnarled and heavily foliaged branches which grew out of it. Among the branches were inset the photographs and pictures of perhaps a dozen men, most of them bearded and venerable; they were the ministers of Caersalem, our chapel, from the time it was founded at the end of the seventeenth century to the present day. (VCV, p. 40)

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Dylan owed his very name to the Mabinogion and it was to that tree that the majority of his Anglo-Welsh contemporaries felt exclusively drawn. But Glyn Jones felt drawn to both trees, and in his works he sought to demonstrate gratefully his indebtedness to them both. ‘Beautiful to be free, to be forgiven, to create’, he wrote in a poem he addressed to Taliesin, the reputed father of Welsh poetry (GJCP, p. 73). In these two ‘f words’, just as much as in ‘fucking and forgiveness’, are enshrined the chapel faith that had, for Glyn Jones, made ‘creation’ possible.

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B

Cwm chapel and shop, Penmachno

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‘Most of those who tried their hands at the form in English relied too much on the impulse of rebellion against the shackles of their society to make the efforts required to try and understand it.’1 That is the elderly Emyr Humphreys’s scathing verdict on the ‘Anglo-Welsh’ novelists of his generation. He has in mind their treatment of Welsh Nonconformity, and particularly their failure to recognize how, following the collapse of chapel culture, ‘the Welsh condition represented the spiritual crisis of the West in microcosm’. This has been his own ‘epic’ theme, pursued through the writing of more than twenty novels over a career spanning more than half a century. ‘To understand a nineteenth-century Welshman, and indeed for a twentieth-century Welshman to understand himself,’ Emyr Humphreys has further written, ‘it is essential to know to which denomination or religious sect his immediate ancestors belonged.’2 Much of his creative writing has been based on that assumption, which has helped make him the supreme interpreter of twentieth-century Wales’s Nonconformist inheritance. So when little Amy Parry, in the Land of the Living sequence, first goes to school, she finds herself sitting next to ‘Gwyneth Mair, a large diligent Calvinistic Methodist’.3 For those versed in the complex social and theological niceties of Welsh Nonconformity the terse designation speaks volumes. The rivalry between the nineteenth-century denominations is repeatedly highlighted in the novels. When Amy’s uncle, the permanently disaffected Lucas Parry, hops from the Wesleyans to the ‘Arminian’ Independents, his elderly father contemptuously views it as a defection to the ‘dry dissenters’ (FB, p. 116). Lucas is in

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part the victim of the increasing conformity of late nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity. Excluded, through class and poverty, from the theological seminaries, he struggles to improve himself through selfeducation. But become a pedant, like many an autodidact, he is still rejected as a candidate for what has become an educated, stuffy, socially snobbish ministry. In a review essay, Emyr Humphreys demonstrated the long-lasting significance of denominational attachments by showing how the social ambitions and reverence for high culture of Huw Wheldon, BBC arts guru and arch-British establishment figure of the sixties, could be traced back to his roots in nineteenth-century Welsh Presbyterianism. The family first came to eminence through the achievements of Wheldon’s great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Jones Rhoslan, a revered figure in the early pantheon of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the work of such figures ensured that the ‘Welsh Nonconformist world [became] a tighter and more demanding polity than some of the eastern European communist states’, Humphreys noted, adding that it was also probably more durable ‘because it was based on a deeper intuitive understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of human nature than the more abstract intellectual analyses of Marx and Engels’.4 But whereas like other patriarchs of the founding generation, Robert Jones had been visionary and evangelical, his descendants, in keeping with nineteenth-century Welsh Methodism itself, became increasingly cautious, conservative, institutionalized, and preoccupied with English-style respectability. The ‘rogue Welshman’ Huw Wheldon’s triumphant social success as cultural ambassador of the English establishment, Humphreys argued, could best be understood as the logical outcome of a family, denominational and Welsh national history of growing preoccupation over more than a century with winning the respect of the English and succeeding in London. What, then, of Humphreys’s own denominational background? Raised an Anglican, he is the son of a father who had converted from the Annibynwyr (Welsh Independents) and a mother, daughter of a Wesleyan, who had become a Calvinistic Methodist before joining her husband in the Church in Wales. As a young man Humphreys toyed first with joining the Catholic Church and then with entering the Anglican ministry,5 but following his marriage into Nonconformity he joined his father’s old church, the Annibynwyr, in which his father-inlaw was a respected minister. Such a ‘conversion’, counter to the drift away from Nonconformity by most writers of his generation, was part

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of Humphreys’s rebellion not so much against Anglicanism as against the Anglicized world in which he had been raised. Having turned nationalist in sixth form and subsequently learnt Welsh, he came to regard Welsh Nonconformity as the generator of modern Welsh nationhood. In the eighteenth century, a galvanizing emphasis on religious conversion, he slowly realized, had been the means of creating a ‘new man’ and in the process ‘a new Welsh nation’ had been made ‘a historic possibility’ (TT, pp. 95–6). The eighteenth-century Methodist Revival had thus inadvertently led to the rebirth of Wales, an event Humphreys associated with two dates – the convening of the first Gorsedd by Iolo Morganwg in 1819 and the separation of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism from the Church of England (and from English Methodism) in 1811. The latter was the institutional expression of a new consciousness. Methodist leaders like the great evangelist and hymn-writer William Williams Pantycelyn were to shape ‘the emotional life of his country’ for more than a century, introducing ‘new psychological features that would soon be accepted as integral parts of the Welsh peasantry’ (TT, p. 95). Humphreys thus developed his own interpretation of the course of nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity, and this has deeply influenced all his fictional portrayals of twentieth-century Wales. According to this ‘enabling myth’, the first phase of the development of a Nonconformist nation, approximately to the middle of the nineteenth century, had seen the powerful spiritual convictions of an inspired generation lay the theological and institutional foundations for a remarkable new popular religious society. Then, between 1848 and 1868 this Nonconformist alliance began ‘to lead the emerging nation in the direction of middle-class radical reform’ (TT, p. 155). Thus ‘workingclass movements, trade unionism, manifestations of rural and industrial discontent, all had their origins among chapel peoples’ (CR, p. 47). Matthew Arnold’s instincts during this period had been right: every chapel was indeed ‘a potential political cell’ (CR, p. 46). But then, under the ‘spiritual dictatorship’ of its leaders, a Nonconformity dominated by Welsh Calvinistic Methodism began to ossify: outraged by the attacks upon it in the government’s Blue Books Report of 1847, and increasingly middle-class in its ambitions, it became obsessed with respectability and social advancement, abandoning its tradition of radical dissent and its ties with the working class. Materialism replaced idealism, and, recognizing English to be the language of advancement, of science and the modern world, Welsh Nonconformity struck its devil’s bargain

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with that culturally threatening language. However, it still championed middle-class causes such as Temperance, popular education and the disestablishment of the Anglican Church and, through Cymru Fydd, it attempted during the last decade of the nineteenth century to secure a degree of self-government for Wales. For Humphreys, then, the history of modern Wales is rooted in the history of Welsh Nonconformity, although he does not by any means espouse the complacent view of the matter adopted by Nonconformity in its decadent decline – a view pointedly attributed to the self-satisfied, resentful and muddled Lucas Parry at the beginning of the Land of the Living sequence.6 The close alliance between Welsh Nonconformity and progressive Welsh Liberalism reached its zenith with the illustrious career of Lloyd George, the darling of the chapels and the embodiment of the kind of English (and thus international) success they had come to crave. But for Humphreys this was the nadir of the chapels’ history. He pointedly contrasts the Baptist showman Lloyd George, who entertained Hitler with rousing imitations of such pulpit luminaries as John Elias, Matthews Ewenni and John Jones Talysarn, with the Revd Lewis Valentine, the Welsh Baptist and nationalist who delivered an impassioned, culturally committed sermon on the eve of his participation in the burning of the government bombing school site at Penyberth in 1936. Whereas the former represented the Anglophile decadence of Welsh Nonconformity, the latter represented a principled personal, social, cultural and political dissent. This, Humphreys came to feel, was the real and valuable Nonconformist legacy. Once the First World War had destroyed ‘the bourgeois culture of Europe, of which Welsh nonconformity was a small but not altogether insignificant part’ (TT, p. 202), this legacy was inherited by Plaid Cymru and eventually by Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, which saw ‘the children of Dissent in Wales’ becoming responsible ‘for the creation of the first authentic dissident movement in Britain’ (CR, p. 179). *** Dissidence and dissent – these take us to the very heart of what Humphreys most values in Welsh Nonconformist tradition and to the core of the personal convictions shaping all his writings. Looking back, towards the end of his career, at his early essay, ‘A Protestant view of the novel’ (1953), Humphreys reaffirmed his commitment to the views expressed there, both as ethical credo and as authorial statement, while

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noting he would now ‘like to change [protestant] to the word “protesting” – or adopt the much later expression of a “dissident novelist”’ (CR, p. 59). With more than a glance at his own work as novelist, he added that ‘in the Welsh-language context these dissident writers are necessarily conservative – fighting against the threat to the culture to which they belong. In that sense they are both dissidents and insiders, unlike the mainstream of dissident writers who are outsiders’ (CR, p. 60). The commitment to personal principle stressed throughout the essay is consistent with the important early poem, ‘The Nonconformist’, with its telling mention of the speaker’s ‘faint picture / Of Jesus quietly pointing at my courage’ and challenging him to follow the Saviour’s example ‘in the face of hostile crowds’, even as far as Gethsemane itself.7 But as is openly admitted in another poem, Such honesty I cannot face Seeking my comfortable place Among the pillows Of the love of others. (EHCP, p. 29)

‘A Protestant view of the novel’ provides us with a convenient template for interpreting Humphreys’s fiction from the point of view of its committedly Nonconformist (or ‘Dissident’) aspects. His concern is ‘the expression of religious and moral problems in terms of technique; or, if this sounds too rarified, how a novelist’s attitude governs the way in which he writes’ (CR, p. 67). He therefore draws attention to the way in which ideology is not only present as content in fiction but also inscribed in its deep structure, determining form as well as substance. In particular, Humphreys reveals his own understanding of the function of plot, and in the process highlights a central characteristic of his own novels: ‘A plot . . . presents the independently living characters of a novel with situations in which they are forced to act, to make a choice, to consider right and wrong, human destiny, their own destiny and salvation’ (CR, p. 71). All his novels pivot on the ethical, social, cultural and political implications of the characters’ choices. This defining characteristic reveals Humphreys to have been, as he admits, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard, who emphasized the individual’s responsibility to gamble everything on the fateful extremity of choice, and to live with the consequences. This is the Christian existentialism inscribed in Humphreys’s Nonconformist aesthetic of the novel.

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The post-war novelist, the young Humphreys further argued (unconsciously displaying his indebtedness to the Annibynwyr – Independents by nature as well as by English name), needed to recover ‘the Protestant principle of personal responsibility’, otherwise ‘our way of living will never recover any degree of stability and meaning’ (CR, p. 74). Faced by the Cold War, the threat of nuclear catastrophe, and the challenge of rebuilding civilization in Europe, post-war novelists could not afford to disregard ‘the crude strength of the Protestant conscience – that constant, hoarse, dynamic whisper’ (CR, p. 74). Only by honouring it, he added, could the novel reconnect itself to ‘the prophetic, rather than the priestly tradition, and professionally the novelist has more to learn, more to gain from the prophet than the priest’. It was his way of distinguishing himself from writers such as Joyce and Greene, both of whom modelled their ‘priestly’ role as secular novelists on their conflicted relationship with Catholicism. In the latter stages of his career, Humphreys modified his sense of his ‘prophetic’ role, preferring to connect more directly to Nonconformity by describing himself mockingly as a sort of preacher manqué (DPR, p. 112), a novelist plagued by the urge to moralize. His novels may be thought of reductively as a series of moral tableaux, allegorical episodes crystallizing revealing life-choices. As a novelist, Humphreys has always therefore been fascinated by the way the mentalité of Welsh Nonconformity – the distinctive structure and texture of consciousness it promoted – continued to permeate the secular thinking of twentieth-century Wales, informing intimate personal experience but also shaping social, cultural and political action. Many of his works are designed to explore this subterranean dimension – to reveal the religious subconscious of an unsuspecting nation. It surfaces, for instance, in A Man’s Estate, in the form of Hannah’s desperate preoccupation with a saviour, her expectation of the arrival of a personal messiah who will usher in a millenarian transformation in her life. Raised in a family unhealthily obsessed with the cultivation of their souls, she harbours a yearning for ‘renewal and redemption’.8 As Humphreys noted elsewhere, ever since the Methodist Revival survival and salvation had been one and the same in Wales (CR, p. 63). The Welsh, Humphreys suggests in all his writings, are particularly prone to Messianic illusions because such always appeal to a subjugated people. In Bonds of Attachment the political and cultural nationalist John Cilydd More yearns for a redeemer figure, a ‘Mab Darogan’ (Son of Prophecy) who will lead the people to the safety of independence, ‘like the children of Israel in

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the desert’.9 The same dangerous yearning is explored in Humphreys’s first published novel, The Little Kingdom. Owen Richards, the hero, is the son of a Nonconformist minister who had taken a prominent role in socialist politics. Richards thus regards himself as part of the Welsh aristocracy, and arrogantly believes he is God’s agent. He scorns ministers like the Reverend Morgan, a sensitive and correspondingly ineffectual spirit who is an avid reader of the neo-Calvinist social theology of Niebuhr and who devotes himself to the salvation of souls. Instead, Richards chooses to attempt nothing less than the salvation of his nation. Recognizing that this can be achieved only by violence, he initiates the process by murdering his uncle, Richard Bloyd, who is threatening to sell his land as a site for a bombing school.10 And in A Toy Epic, based on the very first (unpublished) fiction Emyr Humphreys wrote, the character of Michael, son not of a chapel house but of a parsonage, is another obvious study in messianism. His conversion to Welsh nationalism leads to a grandiose dream of saving the nation.11 Humphreys’s reading of the history of Nonconformity is inseparable from his understanding of Welsh history. Ever since the fabled loss of the Island of Britain to the Saxons, the Welsh have craved a leader (whether Arthur or Lloyd George) who will reinstate them at the centre of power. And ever since Henry VII shrewdly persuaded them that the British throne had been recovered through the victory of the Tudor dynasty, they have been obsessed with exerting power in London. As Humphreys sees it, the history of Welsh Nonconformity was of its increasing corruption by this Anglocentric myth, which found expression through the chapels’ espousal of Liberalism and culminated in the imperial regency of Lloyd George. And in his novels, he consistently suggests that the political and cultural history of a twentieth-century Wales dominated by an Anglophile, centralizing Labour party is the secular legacy of decadent Nonconformist ideology. This journey towards the imagined ‘centre’, always involving some kind of betrayal of Wales, is undertaken by a myriad characters in Humphreys’s fiction. The most clear and elaborate case is, of course, that of Amy Parry’s career in The Land of the Living. Over the course of seven novels, it takes her from a chapel caretaker’s house, via a brief flirtation with utopian socialism and Welsh nationalism, to Labour activism and finally the giddy English establishment heights of a peerage. A fascination with totalizing systems of explanation is another legacy of Welsh Nonconformity, and in particular of Calvinistic Methodism. In the thirties figure of the Communist Pen Lewis, in the

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Land of the Living sequence, Humphreys offers us a secularized version of a Methodist theologian, a believer in salvation although not in sin. Evangelical Marxism, with its moral fervour, rational utopianism, millenarian tone, and belief that the victory of the working class (the elect of history) is predestined, naturally appealed to a rapidly secularizing people raised in the chapels. So did Freudianism, an ideology Humphreys never explicitly deploys but that is a covert presence in all his fiction. In his seminal study of William Williams Pantycelyn (1717– 1791), Humphreys’s hero Saunders Lewis had demonstrated how, in his great long poem Theomemphus, Pantycelyn had anticipated Freudian understanding of the psycho-sexual dynamics of human consciousness.12 As a psychologically probing novelist, Humphreys himself may be regarded as the heir of Pantycelyn quite as much as of the anonymous author of the Mabinogion. The kind of self-examination so brilliantly demonstrated by the great Methodist poet became the staple diet of the ‘seiat’ (society), that extraordinary institution of public confession. The rough secular equivalent of this psycho-spiritual self-scrutiny in Humphreys’s novels is the interior monologue, a recurrent rhetorical technique in his fiction. A striking instance are the monologues of the minister Idris Powell in A Man’s Estate, with their ruthless ‘confessional’ analysis of his sexual and spiritual weaknesses. They culminate with his accusing himself of insufficient awareness of personal sins. In Powell one also encounters another of Humphreys’s recurrent themes; the translation of the yearning for spiritual salvation into sexual terms. Powell comes to treat the promiscuous, sensually alluring Ada as his saviour (ME, p. 382), just as John Cilydd is repeatedly to hymn Amy’s salvific powers – to her embarrassment and disgust – in the Land of the Living Sequence. Thus as the hold of Nonconformity slackens, a new religion of sentimentalized sexual romance takes its place. No wonder Prue, in The Gift of a Daughter, ascends the pulpit in a derelict chapel to sing a love aria from opera.13 Displaying a lifelong fascination with that classic Nonconformist conundrum the relationship between predestination and free will, Humphreys may have carefully avoided offering a deterministically Freudian reading of any of his characters, but he has consistently suggested the possibility of unacknowledged psychosexual factors at play in personalities and relationships. So, for instance, Kate’s loss of an eye, poked out by a briar, in Outside the House of Baal, exactly coincides with her discovery that JT, the man with whom she is secretly infatuated, has become sexually and emotionally involved with her sister, Lydia.

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Humphreys has talked about the Iliad of good and evil, and in his novels the stark, tense drama within the human psyche between these great polarities of Calvinistic orthodoxy often takes the form of darkly grotesque melodrama. Indeed, in his hands, Gothic fiction could be said to have become a Nonconformist genre. This is conspicuously evident in A Man’s Estate, where (echoing Hamlet) the narrative centres on the gradual exposure of the harrowing, psychologically murky consequences of the involvement of the godly Vavasor Elis (so named after the fiery seventeenth-century puritan missionary Vavasor Powell) in the suspicious death of his brother Elis Felix Elis MP and his subsequent marriage to his widow. The similarly Gothic late short story ‘Penrhyn Hen’ features the grim story of Malan’s vengeful care for her adulterous husband, now a helpless cripple, and her successful stratagem for ensuring that her sister Sioned, with whom he had once enjoyed a sexual relationship, is also trapped into becoming his carer. The incipient liberal, Sioned, is thus drawn back into the dark religious culture of her natal world and ends by embracing a theology reconciling predestination and free will: ‘We are as we are made and we are what we make.’14 The real loser in this incestuously intense and macabre Calvinistic ménage à trois is Sioned’s partner, the hapless Bryn. His is a nature-loving, sentimental belief in forgiveness, in contrast to Malan’s uncompromising belief in the wages of sin. He is a wimpishly well-meaning, ineffectual late-Nonconformist figure who recurs in Humphreys’s fiction. Williams in the early novel Voice of a Stranger is another example of the type, a Welsh ‘conchie’ working in the post-war refugee camps in Italy. A respectable, married chapel man and correspondingly naïve, he allows the sentimental pity bred of his soft-centred theology to betray him into a brief affair with a beautiful young Spanish girl isolated (like him) in a strange country. Williams lacks the resources to survive in this post-war world as full as any Jacobean drama of social confusion, political intrigue and personal rivalries. Broken by guilt, he takes to drink, bitterly accusing himself of being Judas. At the novel’s end, he is resolving to return home to Wales where he hopes to be reconciled to his domineering wife through abject confession.15 A similar ‘wimp’ is poor Iorwerth in A Toy Epic, the cosseted child of a pious rural hearth. Like many another such in Humphreys’ work he is emasculated early by his culture, embodied by the all-too-kindly, lovingly protective and efficient father whom he reveres. Here again the soft-centred sentimental version of Nonconformity is revealed to be as potentially damaging as its harsh Calvinistic counterpart. Iorwerth’s

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whole vocabulary of self-understanding is taken from his chapel culture. After quarrelling with his friend Michael, Iorwerth reflects, ‘I forgive you for calling me a Methody quack-quack and a goody-goody’(TE, p. 41). But he is a physical coward, and runs away when his friend is attacked by school bullies. Even as a schoolboy, he loves to stay obediently ‘within the shadow of authority, away from the lawless field’ (TE, p. 42), pathetically anxious to please and to placate power. Unsurprisingly, he nurtures the dream of becoming a preacher, a vocation ‘chosen to please us all, father, mother, and me’ (TE, p. 47). A diligent reader of his Bible every night, the growing boy becomes unhealthily pious and, while staying in town with his other friend Albie, desperately ‘wants to be saved’ (TE, p. 56) by a seaside evangelist. Isolated by his Welsh piety, he cultivates a martyr complex, believing himself to be an ‘Israelite in Babylon’ in school (TE, p. 67). While the adolescent Michael is reading a French book about married sex, Iorwerth fantasizes in Bunyanesque language about ‘saving’ his friends from the cities of destruction and the wiles of the wicked world. Not for him the alternative religion of Communism (Albie) or of Nationalism (Michael). While they experiment with the discourses of their new ‘faiths’, Iorwerth clings to his old vocabulary, his fears excited by a preacher’s feverish narration of the story of the Deluge. But then comes disaster as he proves unable to step practically into his ill father’s shoes, and when Iorwerth loses him he also loses his faith. Disheartened, confused, lost, he casts around for another vocation, determining at the novel’s conclusion to train as a doctor. For Humphreys, Iorwerth’s is a not untypical case of the development of a young Welsh chapel boy in the thirties. *** Taken as a whole, Humphreys’s work illustrates the different phases of twentieth-century Welsh Nonconformity as he understands it. In a novel like Flesh and Blood we are introduced to the complexities of its history around the time of the First World War. The rivalry between the denominations, the snobbish hostility between church and chapel, the suppression of women, the elevation of nineteenth-century Nonconformity to iconic status, the solidifying of the chapels into middleclass social institutions, the worship of social advancement and worldly success – all these and more are dramatically instanced. Several of the key features of the age are focused in the personality and career of the

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increasingly egotistical and tyrannical Lucas Parry, the quarryman who struggles to become a minister, and in his relationship with Esther his wife and his step-daughter Amy. The likeable downtrodden Esther, skivvy and general dogsbody, has no illusions about Nonconformity past or present, secretly viewing it as patriarchally exploitative. With the coming of the First World War everything changed. The response of the Nonconformist leadership to it was divided. Ministers like the Reverend Breeze, who appears in Bonds of Attachment, could remain bellicose even after devastating personal loss; others, like the old minister glimpsed in the same novel officiating at an ecumenical wartime service, found their anti-war protests to be of no avail and were broken by the strain of having to face the suffering of their chapel members. In the novel, John Cilydd More is shown to have joined up partly to escape the clutches of his puritanical, overbearing grandmother and her stifling chapel culture. His psychically disturbing and disorientating experiences surface years later, as in the nightmare memory of the drunken Welsh soldier, a notorious ‘bum boy’, Cilydd saw being crucified on a gun-carriage as punishment, all the while mockingly singing Welsh hymns. Emerging from the war, he can feel nothing but anger at those who, ‘with biblical protestations about God’s will . . . patch up the broken pieces of the less worthy and the wicked that providence saw fit to exempt from the slaughter so that they can walk the world and possess it’ (BA, p. 301). His friend Val Gwyn sums it up: ‘The Great War has blown a great hole through the armour-plated complacency of the nonconformity in which we were brought up’ (BA, p. 268). Val’s concern at this is less spiritual than cultural, ‘because for us the [Nonconformist] church is native, but the state is alien. We have no control over the state. If the church is crumbling from within, who can protect us from the tidal wave of the new barbarism?’ This is very close to Humphreys’s own view of the situation of twentieth-century Wales. It helps us understand why he has written novels, and why those novels have taken their distinctive, characteristic form of sustained preoccupation with twentieth-century post-Nonconformist Welsh society. It is not surprising that The Best of Friends, the second novel in the Land of the Living sequence, set in the aftermath of the Great War, opens with Amy – already aspiring to be a liberated woman of the new age – poised to throw the Bible, her uncle’s gift, out of the train carrying her off to college. ‘We are the people of the Book,’ she exclaims bitterly, ‘a chosen People.’16 That, she adds, is precisely the problem:

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‘We’re buried under a load of Bibles, like insects under a heap of stones.’ She comes to believe Nonconformity to be ‘the religion of serfs’, blames it for the supine servility of her people, and fights to escape from the ‘museum of Methodistical miseries’.17 Amy’s views are, however, offset by those of her gentle, spirited, intellectually gifted friend Enid, steadfast in her belief that ‘if we want to rebuild we can only do that on sound religious foundations’ (BF, p. 385), and the dialectic between the two allows Humphreys to convey his ambivalent estimate of Welsh Nonconformity. Needless to say, Enid is destined to die young, leaving her child to be raised by the great cultural defector and opportunist Amy, to whom the Welsh future belongs. The Great War is the Great Divide separating twentieth-century Wales from nineteenth-century Nonconformity. Post-war ministers like Tom Arthog Williams (the limits of whose liberalism Amy challenges by arguing for belief in ‘God the Mother’ [BF, p. 92]) and Tasker Thomas (an eternally eager boy scout) are a new breed. They attempt to lead the remnants of the churches in the direction of militant pacifism, remedial social action and politico-cultural nationalism. The latter cause emerges as a new, secular religion, and produces leaders like the saintly, self-sacrificial (or masochistic?) Val Gwyn, a charismatic figure of Arminian background, irresistibly attractive to the idealist in Amy but lacking flesh and blood enough to satisfy her sensually and sexually. For this she turns to Val’s opposite, and rival in politics as in love, Pen Lewis. A Marxist leader of the south Wales miners, he finds fertile ground for recruitment in the valleys where 124 members of a single chapel can be unemployed (BF, p. 302). Pen used to attend chapel (‘although I couldn’t understand a word of it’ [BF, p. 331]) but came to feel ‘it’s peddling the wrong medicine’ (BF, p. 331). And if the working class is rebelling, so are the artists, increasingly convinced that there ‘can’t be a viable culture in the twentieth century dominated by nonconformist ministers’ (BF, p. 361). One such artist is John Cilydd More. Spiritually adrift, he becomes a major, tragic figure in the Land of the Living sequence. He is, says his friend, and would-be lover Eddie Meredith, ‘a man on a raft made from a box of matches’.18 Cilydd’s strongly homoerotic nature allows Humphreys to explore the continuing destructive grip of sexual guilt on the Welsh mind. This is a theme extensively aired in the early novel A Change of Heart where Howell Morris, the son of the principal of a theological college and of a chapel deacon, conceals his homosexuality by marrying Lucy, who retaliates by resorting to promiscuity. The truth of the unhappy relationship only

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gradually emerges after Lucy’s death, through the persistent enquiries of Lucy’s brother, Frank. The novel is a harsh exposure of the layers of deceit and of self-deception that could envelop a sexually repressed Nonconformist community.19 Ironically enough, it is a disillusionment with Welsh Nonconformity that helps bring John Cilydd and Amy together – ‘our innate scepticism, our inability to trust in absolutes, our reliance on opportunism, our reluctance to hope or believe’ (BA, p. 311). But it proves too weak a cement, and Cilydd is driven to suicide in part by the final, bleak realization that there was insufficient communication and love between him and his wife ‘for the rest of our journey through a bewildering and increasingly hostile wilderness of a world’ (BA, p. 311). The echo of the Baptist Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in that final phrase is, of course, telling. Relics of the past still survive in this transitional inter-war period. Great Uncle Ezra, one-time crusader of the Temperance movement, his hair still pomaded in the style of the nineteenth-century pulpit stars, has been effectively silenced by a tracheotomy. Immobilized by arthritis, another old minister, Nathan Harris, struggles to maintain a distinction between class struggle and class war, while lamenting that ‘the war has turned poor old nonconformity out of its home-made earthly paradise’.20 Then there is the redoubtable Mrs Lloyd. Ever ready to invoke the temptations of sin as a whip to keep her cowed family in line, she is a reminder that Nonconformity could produce tyrannical matriarchs as well as oppressive patriarchs. Although not without complications – her defiance of the chapel during the First World War in a courageous stand against militarism shines out in one memorable episode – she tenaciously controls her grandchildren John Cilydd and Nanw. Mrs Lloyd’s reverence for religious forefathers makes her sour Calvinism the sinister epitome of ancestor worship. But although Nonconformity is shown by the novels to cripple people psychosomatically, they also contain morally and spiritually indecipherable characters who not only represent Humphreys’s ambivalent view of Welsh Nonconformity but challenge readers to examine their own prejudices and preconceptions. One such is the quixotic Tasker Thomas, with his beatific smile and wispy halo of fine fair hair, a comi-tragic type of the ‘new minister’ produced by Welsh Nonconformity partly in reaction against the shameful part some of its leaders had played in the jingoistic recruitment of the Great War. He is a liberal in theology, persisting in believing (whatever the evidence to the contrary) that, as his admirer Enid puts

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it, ‘the will of God is love’ (SE, p. 75). Tasker is prone to tediously eloquent pontificating on such a subject. Intent on suiting his actions to his words, he throws himself into social causes and good works and ends up, tramp-like, sleeping in a hut at the bottom of a garden so that two families from the slum cottages can live in the Manse (SE, p. 142). Suspicion and resentment of him by the chapel establishment eventually deepen into an accusation of paedophilia – the possibility that spirituality might, after all, be no more than sublimated ‘deviant’ sexuality recurs in fiction haunted by memories of Freudianism. Tasker proves politically inept, is ineffectual in his naïve attempt to salvage the marriage of John Cilydd and Amy, and the last we see of him he is wasting away after the Second World War in an old people’s home, still refusing to acknowledge the dark truth about his friend John Cilydd’s suicide. Life is never kind to naïve/saintly idealists in Humphreys’s fiction. Yet they recur in his work like a nagging Nonconformist conscience, a standing rebuke to our secular age. Insularity, provincial suspicion, intolerance, xenophobia – during the Second World War Nonconformity falls victim to all of these, as shown in the chapels’ hostile response to refugee children in Open Secrets. The few members who extend a welcome to these waifs and urchins are exposed as innocent idealists who then struggle to reconcile the reality with their naïve imaginings. Cilydd is hounded locally for his nationalist objection to the war, and his nightmare of cattle trucks, a flashback to his suffering in the trenches, is uncomprehendingly interpreted by his family as no more than guilt for not paying his chapel membership dues. Complementing Cilydd’s traumatic recall is Tasker Thomas’s touching public admission of how scarred he had been by his own experiences as padre at the front, and how they had turned him into a committed pacifist. Amy is driven as much by a desire to escape from this moral quagmire as by raw ambition when she joins an international set of socialist intellectuals in London and begins her career as a Labour politician. Following the Second World War, Welsh Nonconformity rapidly receded into the background of Welsh life, the noise it continued to make seeming as remote as the distant echoes of the originating Big Bang that continue to reach the ears of modern radio telescopes. Sam Halkin, in The Gift, resolves ‘to take out those old hymn books [one day] and see what they meant’.21 Raised in chapel, he has become an actor and is an example of the way in which the histrionic aspects of Welsh Nonconformity could be carried over into the secular theatre,

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while its values (the ‘language’ of belief) faded away. Sam is a worldly opportunist, faintly cynical but amiable. The only real dissenting ‘Nonconformist’ principles in the novel are practised by old Alfred, the anti-nuclear campaigner who politely asks the sergeant sent to arrest him whether he is familiar with his Bible, before going on to compare his own impending situation with that of Paul and Silas in gaol (G, p. 273). When Peredur, the son of John Cilydd, revisits the old family home, an old local stonemason is dismayed he doesn’t know whether his family had been Baptist or Congregationalist.22 Humphreys’s fiction has explored this post-Nonconformist culture from a number of different angles. Even the atheistical Peredur, for instance, yearns for the old certainties still faintly discernible behind ‘mid-twentieth-century evangelical bohemianism and the well-meaning posters of Christian Aid and Third World concerts’ (BA, p. 119). His quest to discover the truth about his dead father, John Cilydd More, is evidently a secular pilgrimage. It is therefore appropriate that his physical base is a sprawling, decaying old manse once belonging to the Annibynwyr and rescued from the clutches of an avaricious property developer. Peredur’s moral drift is the common fate of many of Humphreys’s post-war characters. Having left her chapel-centred rural village for the freedoms of the big city, flame-haired Mel, in ‘Mel’s Secret Love’, tries to substitute romantic passion for her lost religious belief, but succeeds only in securing furtive liaisons with married men. The offer of the safety of marriage to a farmer from her native locality promises only a form of imprisonment, yet she can find no lasting substitute for faith in her ‘independent’ city lifestyle. Lonely, exploited, and finally abandoned, she ends up committing suicide.23 An analogous case is that of Jones, in the novel of the same name, an ageing academic long domiciled in London who has repudiated all connections with his severe, and austere, origins in a puritan rural culture. For early faith he has substituted the religion of art, acquiring a particularly fine collection of Benin heads. Incapable of maintaining any lasting sentimental relationship, he shies away from marriage to Glenys, a girl of his own background, yet, eventually dissatisfied with philandering, he resorts to lengthy transatlantic ‘confessions’ to her by airmail. As Jones becomes increasingly withdrawn and narcissistic, and his flat comes to resemble the pigsty on the family farm that had occasionally been his prison when he was a boy, his puritan inheritance takes on a modern, hellish form. It is the Jewish Annie, one of his occasional lovers, who best understands him: ‘that’s what the Welsh nonconformists

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are, or were, I suppose. Pale imitation Jews. Natural born ghetto-dwellers . . . strip away or remove the metaphysical dimension and what has a Puritan left? Nothing but a self-regarding concern that he submerges himself in like a preservative.’24 Jones’s late, unreciprocated, infatuation with the young Welshlanguage activist Lowri is the final, sad, displaced expression of his puritan culture’s idealistic Dissenting tradition. It is the kind of relationship replicated in other Humphreys novels. In Bonds of Attachment, the secular puritan Peredur, victim of a number of hang-ups, finds brief ‘salvation’ through loving sexual union with Wenna, a young Welsh nationalist. Although she is a chapel organist, she is willing to countenance physical violence against property to advance her cause. ‘We have to take into account this very sensitive Welsh nonconformist reverence for human life. Okay, I don’t mind. Blood has substance and meaning or I wouldn’t be playing the organ in chapel when called upon, would I!’ (BA, p. 344). Plans to blow up a sub-station in an attempt to disrupt the 1979 Investiture of the Prince of Wales go disastrously wrong and Wenna dies in the resultant explosion. The episode is one of many in which Humphreys, a conscientious objector on religious and nationalist grounds during the Second World War and a supporter of Plaid Cymru and Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (both non-violent organizations), wrestles with the insoluble problem voiced in Bonds of Attachment by John Cilydd: there has never been a state of any shape or form in the history of this world that was not founded on bloodshed, not given its shape by violence and maintained by the cohorts of brute force in fancy dress. How can we ever be different? Wales of the singing festivals and white gloves? (BA, p. 275)

*** Peredur’s relationship with Wenna is a variant on a key topos in Humphreys’s writing: the infatuation of middle-aged experience with youthful innocence. It is an attraction potentially fatal to both parties and, when innocence takes female form and experience masculine, sexual desire becomes disturbingly mingled with nostalgia for lost idealism. It is an explosive combination, and there are predatory, even vampiric, aspects to the relationship as well as moving ones. This might be called the Nonconformist version of the Lolita complex, and it is one

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of the two means (the second will be explored shortly) employed by Emyr Humphreys to explore the ambivalent inheritance of ‘soft’ Nonconformity. Crudely contrasted with the ‘hard’, Calvinist strain with its uncompromising emphasisis on original sin (an artist’s only subject, argued Humphreys’s Catholic mentor Saunders Lewis, echoing W. B. Yeats), ‘soft’ Nonconformity, a liberal variant prominent (alongside neo-Calvinism) during the twentieth century, emphasizes love of the good (voiced by the conscience) as the potentially universal redemptive bond between God and man. This subject is explored in a novel like The Anchor Tree, in which Morgan Reece Dale, a Welsh chapel boy turned middle-aged American academic, becomes fascinated with the two contrasting settlements established by Welsh ministers in Pennsylvania during the last decade of the eighteenth century.25 Cambria Nova, founded on a communal principle of idealistic love and universal salvation, has long since disappeared, its very name replaced by the pragmatic American one of Bootlick. Its counterpart, Idrisburg, securely founded on a Calvinistic acknowledgement of human sin and rigid distinction between the elect and the damned, has thrived and become a practical, prosperous town. The latter is therefore close to the hearts of modern, practical, businesslike Americans. Morgan’s attempts to recover the history of the former become entangled in his infatuation with the beautiful young Judith, a Jewish baby rescued from the war by a GI. She has turned into an American idealist of the sixties variety and is therefore deeply attracted to Cambria Nova. His pathetic attempts to seduce her fail, not least because she has become sexually besotted with ape-like Alva, who finally enables her to escape entrapment within the romantic images of her idealistic innocence entertained by Morgan and others. The same topos is powerfully explored in Humphreys’s late novel, Gift of a Daughter, during the course of which Aled transfers his romantic image of redemptive idealism from his dead daughter (Rhiannon) to a voluptuous young Italian, Grazia (whose very name, of course, signifies Grace). Both he and his wife Marian left chapel in their youth, subsequently returning to it only to ensure Rhiannon was raised in Welshlanguage culture. But in the case of the whole family the values of that moribund Nonconformist culture find alternative, secular expression through Rhiannon’s fatal infatuation with New Age spirituality, Marian’s nostalgic but barren revisiting of her grandfather’s theological writings (he, too, had experienced a crisis of faith), and Aled’s futile search for redemption through romantic love of Grazia. In the end, the absence

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of a sustaining spiritual faith and of a supportive, connecting culture effectively destroys the whole family relationship. A second major topos, connected to the first, is that identified by Emyr Humphreys in a late interview, where he suggests that all Nonconformist ministers are ‘Holy Fools’ of a kind (DPR, p. 6). From Don Quixote to Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote, fiction has been fascinated by the enigma of this phenomenon, nowhere more powerfully evident than in the ‘idiot’ Prince Mishkin of Dostoyevsky, one of the great Russian novelists admired by Humphreys for showing human life as a ‘strange sea in which humanity thrashed about like a powerful, bewildered whale, harpooned by death, and still consumed with a desire for immortality’ (CR, p. 71). It is through the Holy Fool that Humphreys is best able to show how ‘the Protestant Reformation cracked the safe we call the New Testament, and like the spirits of Pandora’s box the terrible ideas of justice, brotherhood, equality, love, freedom, service, have infected the whole of mankind and perhaps driven them mad’ (CR, p. 73). Nowhere in Humphreys are the consequences of this more disturbingly explored than through the character of that reckless, crazy hero of the spirit, the mild-mannered JT, in Outside the House of Baal, the supreme novel of Welsh Nonconformity. But JT does not stand alone in Humphreys’s fiction. He lives in the company of others such as the Revd Curig Puw in The Shop, whose commitment to his unworldly ideals leads first to breakdown, reducing him in the process to the pariah figure of a pathetic tramp, before he eventually becomes the community’s unlikely hero.26 Tasker Thomas is another figure of this puzzling type – a reminder that those I’ve unkindly styled ‘wimps’, ineffectual males such as Idris Powell in A Man’s Estate, even Val Gwyn in the Land of the Living sequence, all belong to the same brotherhood. And brotherhood it is – there are no female equivalents, which is indeed an issue specifically addressed by Humphreys in his treatment of the figure. The possibility of sublimated homosexuality is explored in the case both of Tasker and of Bayley Lewis in Outside the House of Baal: ‘I don’t think you’ve ever really forgiven me since I said Bayley Lewis was a homosexual,’ JT’s son remarks. ‘Certain things should never be talked about’ (OHB, p. 375). Sexuality is a problem for Val, too, who can never bring himself to consummate his love for Amy. And Ada is irritated by Idris Powell’s sentimentalization of what is for her straightforward sexual desire. There are also other problems, such as the sexism evident in the conduct, if not the attitude, of even the most gentle, liberal and considerate

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of such men. With his wavy fair hair and film-star looks the young, shy, impressionable JT, intensely aroused by sexual passion, would seem to be the perfect match for the vivacious, rebellious and uninhibited Lydia, but their marriage founders on his increasingly impractical conduct in the name of his spiritual beliefs. Charmed at first by his idealism, she grows impatient and then bitterly resentful of the damaging consequences for her and their children. Their relationship is one of many through which Humphreys examines the collision between the decline of Nonconformity and the rise of the New Woman. However, the novel’s judgement on the situation is not simple, because Lydia can also appear to be a representative not so much of her own sex as of the mass of ordinary people, who are wholly unequal to the standards set by the likes of JT. Their reactions vary from blank indifference to puzzled respect and angry resentfulness. JT is a great enigma and the Gordian knot of his character can never be untied. By centring on him, Outside the House of Baal attains the stature of a tragic elegiac meditation on a whole vanishing culture, and the novel is all the more impressive and authoritative because it does not flinch from embracing a range of characters and situations that reveal the seedy, unsavoury and downright ugly aspects of the chapels. Drunkenness, sexual hypocrisy and moral dishonesty, petty tyranny, meanness, avarice, social ambition, self-deception, sexual inhibition, sexual abuse, bigotry – these and more are laid squarely at the chapels’ door. Nor is JT himself immune from constant, suspicious scrutiny in the light of all this. Is he selfless or selfish, guileless or manipulative, creative or destructive? The questions are insoluble and tease us out of thought. The very process of reading provokes internal debate of a radical kind that tilts the axis of our customary value judgements, forcing us to ask searching questions of ourselves. There is nothing clear-cut about JT and his web of relationships. His maternal grandmother regards her little ‘Joe Miles’ as unconsciously cunning: seeming weak, he always succeeds in getting his own way. Lydia’s autocratic, grimly puritanical father declares him roundly to be an incompetent idiot; JT’s sister-inlaw, the practical and pragmatic Kate (exasperated Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote), tartly deplores his readiness ‘to be nice to everybody’ (OHB, p. 91); her brother is even more severe when, in his senility, he calls him an ‘old fool’ to his very face. So many of JT’s well-intentioned actions result in disaster not for himself but for others. Stubbornly setting out to save a wounded soldier stranded under fire in no man’s

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land, he gets his companion stretcher-bearer killed; intent on sacrificing his salary to show solidarity with the striking miners, he virtually starves his wife and children out of house and home; preparing to forgive his wife for what he suspects is her adultery, he succeeds only in driving her away. As a First World War pacifist, JT courageously heckles a politician (clearly modelled on Lloyd George) who is delivering a fiery recruitment address from the Eisteddfod platform, but it is his soldier friend Griff who has to rescue him from the clutches of the police and the local thugs as they start to beat him up. When we first encounter JT, he is an old man waking up in the morning and viewing the grey world through the golden haze of the bedroom curtain. Many would see that as expressive of his escapism, his lifelong lack of realism: but then he claims to live by a definition of reality entirely different from the ordinary – a belief in the hidden, unrealized goodness of humankind. An incorrigible, and in many ways intolerable, spiritual extremist to the very end, he wagers everything – his whole life – on his beliefs, but in the process implicates others willy-nilly. Passing judgement on him we readers inescapably reveal the values and choices on which we are gambling our own lives. The novel thus brings us to an uncomfortable knowledge of ourselves. To JT may be applied the remark made of a character in Unconditional Surrender, ‘his presence was a strain because it imposed a constant pressure of painful self-analysis.’27 *** Twentieth-century Welsh history provides corroborative evidence for the existence of the fictional JT. For instance, his character owes something to Emyr Humphreys’s experience of his elderly father-in-law, who was living with the family throughout the time the novel was being written. The fine elegy ‘Twenty-four pairs of socks’ addresses the same subject, painting a portrait of a good man, a preacher who left not only a pile of warm socks when he died but also a desk ‘packed tight with sermons.’ The paradox in such a nature is caught in the reminiscence that whenever the old minister ‘modestly implied GOOD WORKS by his concern for others / . . . I would like to point out that he never cleaned his own boots / until his wife died’ (EHCP, p. 98). Yet the overall tone of the poem is of affectionate respect. Important aspects of JT’s life and experiences seem, however, more fully modelled on two other contrasting Nonconformist ministers, Tom Nefyn (Thomas Williams, 1895– 1958) and George M. Ll. Davies (1880–1949).

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Two important episodes from the descriptions of the Dardanelles campaign in Outside the House of Baal are directly based on Tom Nefyn’s accounts of his experiences, and another draws on the dramatic religious event (a vision Tom Nefyn had after being moved to Gaza) that led to his committing himself to the Christian ministry. A rebellious Presbyterian (Welsh Calvinistic Methodist) minister, Tom Nefyn proved a remarkable stormy petrel of a figure between the two wars. A constant thorn in the side of his own denomination, he involved himself in social campaigns on behalf of the miners of the Gwendraeth Valley and refused to subscribe to some of the key doctrinal teachings of his Church – like JT, the liberal Nefyn clashed with the Calvinist wing of Welsh Presbyterianism. He was also prominent in the activities of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an inter-war pacifist organization founded by the charismatic, otherworldly, even saintly George M. Ll. Davies, who was also a deeply unconventional minister with the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists and author of the remarkable memoir Pilgrimage of Peace. Imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War One, he subsequently became a Christian Pacifist MP, played an important part in bringing Lloyd George and de Valera together, worked in the valleys of the south during the thirties providing relief through centres such as the Quaker Settlement at Maes-yr-Haf, and took his own life probably because of the unbearable distress caused by the detonation of the two nuclear bombs in Japan, the twelve million refugees in post-war Europe and the curse of Stalinism. JT’s own episode of depression in Outside the House of Baal echoes Davies’s breakdown, and other episodes in the novel provide fictional equivalents to Davies’s visit to the Oberammergau Peace Conference (1926) and to his role as unofficial peace envoy between Britain and Ireland. One of Davies’s distinguished admirers spoke warmly of how he sought to ‘find and expand the soft spots in every chance acquaintance’.28 The hallmark of his nature was his ‘faith in human goodness’, and along with this definitive trait he also shared with JT a belief that, as Emerson put it in a quotation with which Davies opened Pilgrimage of Peace, ‘we are always hoping to get settled down . . . [but] there is only hope for us so long as we are unsettled’ (PP, p. 12). ‘George M. Ll. D – an idiot busy body . . . or a saint?’, Emyr Humphreys jotted in his working notebook when preparing the novel: exactly the same puzzling question is posed by the character of JT. Like Tom Nefyn and George M. Ll. Davies, JT is viewed with suspicion not only by society at large but by his own denomination because of his liberal, socially progressive beliefs. His pacifism during the First

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World War is unacceptable not only to conservative Calvinist bigots like the little weasly deacon Jac Brain but to the eminent principal of his own theological college. His fellow students, precociously wise to the ways of the world, treat him with amused contempt. To Lydia’s growing horror and disgust, he finds refuge only in the economically depressed, socially devastated and politically turbulent south Wales valleys where his ministry can assume the crusading social forms that satisfy his conscience but blight his family’s life. His allies are agitators, oddballs and mavericks. Rejecting the dogma of original sin, as he’d rejected the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, he outrages the orthodox by replacing their God of retributive justice tempered by unpredictable grace with his hungry advocacy for a God of universal love – the kind of love, one might note, of which JT himself had been so conspicuously starved as a boy. His helpless, impractical nature may move women to mother him, but they often then find themselves trapped in a relationship they find irritating or worse. Late in life his daughter, Thea, keeps him affectionately at arm’s length, leaving the increasingly heavy duty of care to Lydia’s exasperated sister, Kate, once a young secret admirer of JT and still, perhaps, grumblingly fond of him in ways which her puritan nature prevents her from admitting. Conspicuously refraining from judging others, he ends up hearing that Ronnie has been made to feel inadequate all his life by his father’s unconsciously demanding moral stature: the success at Oxford that JT so resents on cultural grounds has therefore been his son’s way of gaining self-esteem. Everything that JT does seems subject to the law of unintended consequences. Time’s verdict on him is also cruel. An exceptionally moving scene is the one where a JT driven to the edge of emotional breakdown by the insufferable dawning of the nuclear age, struggles with the new technology of a tape recorder to send a tearful message to distant relatives in North Dakota. Much more than his trials with the machine, the real obstacle to communication between the generations is the dated language into which JT automatically lapses, as he is painfully aware: We are bound into the same family by the bonds of love. You know I am a preacher so you will not blame me for preaching . . . Just as the distance between us is annihilated by this device and I am speaking now in your hearing, so it is with the means of salvation that quickens our lives with purpose and with meaning . . . (OHB, p. 382)

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Words fail him as he is overcome with emotion. But words fail the ageing JT in any case, as he repeatedly discovers that his language no longer has any meaning. A brashly importunate seaside photographer, armed with a pigeon as his prop, fails to understand JT’s allusion to the dove of the Holy Spirit. Yet he struggles to persist in forgiving a morally and spiritually errant Wales just as his favourite prophet, Hosea, had forgiven his adulterous wife. JT vainly attempts to apply the Old Testament allegory of Israel’s relationship with God to the situation of his cuckolded nephew Norman. The divide between the old minister and the next generation is well summed up from the latter’s point of view by the unbeliever Marian in Gift of a Daughter, as she pores over the manuscript of her preacher grandfather: Penetrates your brain like a perfume. It’s such an effort sometimes to stay with it. You know what I mean? They talk so freely about God and all that. He was there because the word was a constant part of their discourse. They could go on at such length because they could assume that there were others – a whole cross-section of educated humanity – who knew just what they meant. We can’t. That’s the difference. That’s all. (GD, p. 73)

And it is everything: JT’s life bears testimony to that. Somehow he survives: the last glimpse we have of him being, appropriately enough, as he sets out to book a mystery tour of north Wales – the place where he was born has now become alien to him. No longer does that word ‘mystery’ bear, in common parlance, the biblical meaning (‘Behold, I show you a mystery’) that it has for the old minister, whose response to his nephew’s disbelief in an afterlife was ‘There are mysteries’ (OHB, p. 387). Nor does JT provide the only example in the novel of how to survive, to outlast one’s generation. There are plenty of other old people featured, each with his or her own manner of coping. The most powerful contrast to JT, though, is offered by Kate, with her simple, stubborn, effortful persistence in the labour of merely living. In her grumpily pragmatic way, she exhibits a toughness, a resilience, a resourcefulness and even a degree of adaptability, that is foreign to him. And the novel ends with her preparing for an outing with her niece, Gwyneth, with the characteristic words: ‘Got to have the address or we won’t know where to go.’ With his preacher’s eye for an allegory, JT would undoubtedly have placed a metaphysical meaning on that sentence, and the novel, too, has primed us for that possibility. But for the practical

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Kate, whose religious belief has long dwindled away to a mere vague hope that life’s meaninglessness may after all reveal some hidden purpose one fine day, the sentence means no more than it says. In its magisterial, challenging, moving and inimitable way, Outside the House of Baal remains the major fictional work of Welsh Nonconformity. It is proof that the comment made by Aled in Gift of a Daughter is one that lies close to Emyr Humphreys’s heart as a novelist: After all I had, so to speak, an insider knowledge of the decline and fall of Welsh nonconformity: of the strength and the weakness of a way of life that had in some sense been the high-water mark of community strength and civilization in this corner of the globe. (GD, p. 34)

And in being an elegiac celebration of that way of life, the novel deserves to be ranked alongside other great classics of the melancholy memorialization of a culture, such as Lampedusa’s The Leopard and the Yoknapatawpha novels of William Faulkner. *** Roland Mathias has best identified the central feature of Humphreys’s most powerful writing: The uncertainty he leaves begins at the point where our serious ideas about life fall off the edge of the world as we know it. Where has our society been and where is it going? What is good? How is a good man or woman created? How can our ideas of good best be applied to our society, to other people, to ourselves, so that more good may result? Are good standards passed on by the establishment of just organisation, by the example of an individual’s absolute integrity, or by such integrity conjoined with political or social wisdom? Emyr Humphreys does not claim to know: he inclines only, and not infrequently with different emphases.29

‘There was’, Mathias perceptively adds, ‘something in the community of Wales . . . in the past three centuries that made such seriousness about the salvation of the world or of the individual or both a preoccupation – an idea that one would never glean from twentieth-century caricatures of the Puritan community, whose chief characteristic was apparently hypocrisy’ (RTW, p. 209). Mathias’s perceptiveness derives from the fact that he himself belonged to ‘the [Welsh] Puritan community’. Both his parents were

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staunch Nonconformists – his father continuing in post as a peripatetic army chaplain even though his mother was an unwavering pacifist. Mathias’s life as schoolmaster, educationalist, editor, critic, cultural analyst, poet and fiction writer was heavily marked by their stress on conscience and on social responsibility, which found further expression in his different case through public service. Unlike most writers of his generation in Wales he never felt the need for a ‘heroic escape’ from his Nonconformist inheritance, the impulse to strangle hypocrisy, to stun ‘the cortège of deacons’ with ‘one / Honest stroke’.30 As he put it in ‘Testament’, he remained what he had always been: the vulnerable ‘child / Of belief’, ‘a little trembling / Fellow who had known love’. In the antics of his contemporaries’ ‘drunken tales’, he shrewdly and devastatingly saw ‘only greed / And false heart’ (RMCP, p. 190). But even in this powerful tribute to his Nonconformist upbringing there is a kind of bleak self-irony, a disapproving glimpse of his own prudish arrogance of judgement on the ‘bullyboys kicking the pews / In’. His vision, like his judgements, is always scrupulously complex so as to keep faith with the manifold truth of the situation. In representing these atheistical young turks as breaking up ‘The shabby, unmuscled parades / Of the old Model Army’, he implicitly passes judgement not only on the vandals but on how far twentieth-century chapel ‘puritanism’ (as instanced also in himself) has deteriorated since the Cromwellian age. Yet at the same time the reference to the smashing of the pews brings to mind the vandalism of the New Model Army itself under Cromwell. Mathias’s dismissal of these modern wreckers as vulgar louts is next partly undercut both by the sweeping, naïve language of the condemnation (‘stirring their history up / In a pint-pot’) and by the characterizing of his own cowardly obedient conduct, by contrast, as that of a ‘little trembling fellow’. And yet, the original and fundamental judgement on the mindless and infantile wreckers of Welsh Nonconformity nevertheless somehow still stands, and Mathias’s defence of the chapels remains stout. One of his charges against the modern ‘anti-Puritan’ vandals was that they were culpably ignorant of their own history, particularly the religious history of the society that had produced them, and in all his work as educationalist, critic, editor and creative writer Mathias himself strove to remedy this deficiency. In one of his poetic reconstructions of an Elizabethan episode, he has a character regret his inability to save a brave Catholic recusant for want of weapons:

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O Where are the swords in earnest For one more blow? (RMCP, p. 148)

And in that character’s further rueful comment may be discerned the roots of Mathias’s own puritan ethic, poetic, and aesthetic: ‘We have only the words now, Morgan, / Weapons are slack in our hands.’ Yet, as ‘Testament’ indicates, Mathias felt constantly discomfited by his own stern probity, hence his singular power as a poet. The God ‘who questions me / Of my tranquillity’ also prompted him involuntarily to pass inexorable judgement on every act and on every individual and he constantly deplored his own stern censoriousness. At the same time, he felt himself to be acting, and writing, under judgement, and to be constantly found wanting – not only by God and his own conscience, but by his puritan ancestors. So many of his poems are, in their way, attempts to propitiate these insatiable ghosts. ‘Olchon’, for example, finds him entering, in fear and trembling, what is for him a sacred space, tentatively treading the spot near a brook identified as one of the places of origin of Welsh Baptists. It is one of the rare occasions in his poetry where he feels recognized and accepted by his Puritan forebears: The separate trees cry generously “Come”, The green close fields Talk of my entry in a stride. (RMCP, p. 145)

More often he is awed by a moral courage and spiritual heroism he feels to be grievously wanting in himself. ‘The fool in the wood’ (RMCP, pp. 195ff.), for instance, is Mathias’s treatment of Humphreys’s recurrent figure of the Holy Fool. It is the retelling of a Breton legend about a simple-minded, saintly figure who retreated to live high in the branches of a tree, reducing his speech to gabbled Breton invocations of the Virgin Mary. In this peaceful fool’s violent murder by a band of marauding soldiers may be discerned Mathias’s retrospective reflections on his own relatively unheroic experiences as a pacifist briefly imprisoned during the Second World War. Implicit in this unspoken parallel is, as ever, Mathias’s dark doubts as to the marrow of his own principled actions. No wonder, in a poem like ‘A stare from the mountain’, he looks in vain for ‘a gleam / Lining my shadow’ when the sun falling on bleak, wind-swept upland briefly back-lights a mountain pony making it numinous: ‘But nothing there / Satisfies’ (RMCP, pp. 202–3).

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The poem ends with a strikingly ambivalent judgement on the settlement in which Mathias himself lives: ‘The town, taken by sun and arked, / Burning its pages from the Domesday Book’. Brecon remains uncertainly and precariously poised between Salvation and Eternal Damnation. Mathias’s view of his society is always as conflicted as is his view of himself. One recurrent feeling is of a society disorientated, disaggregated, disjointed, disintegrated – the result of ‘puritan’ individualism anarchically freed from the constraints of social, as of personal, conscience. In ‘Porth Cwyfan’ he is attracted by the legend of how the Celtic saint possessed, like St Beuno, the power miraculously to reunite heads with the bodies from which they had been violently severed. The prayer at the heart of the poem is thus an urgent plea out of Mathias’s reading of the desolate plight of his own society: Can you, like Beuno, knit me back severed Heads, Cwyfan, bond men to single Living? (RMCP, p. 205)

All Mathias’s poetry starts from a convinced sense of moral and spiritual shortcomings – those endemic to a fallen humanity, those characteristic of his own complaisant times, and those personal to himself. Permanently fearful of moral laxity, of sinful self-indulgence (he ruefully admitted to an ingrained sentimentality), he responded to the blandishments of language by treating it with a kind of punishing, and self-punishing, sensual severity. Nervously alive to the static electricity lurking in the nap of words, he handles them with circumspection, of which his poetry’s guarded syntax is the outward and visible sign. Fully to appreciate it one needs to reflect on the ethics of the sentence, and on the spiritual ideology inscribed in grammatical structures. Seeking to pick his scrupulous way past the plain lies of seductive rhetoric, Mathias tends to advance his thinking not in straight lines but zigzag as a knight manoeuvres in chess. He thus deliberately cramps his style in order to ensure that moral conscience keeps pace with verbal fluency, and consequently some of his lines are almost prickly with integrity. The resulting embrangled poetry could be described as modern puritan baroque, its harsh music echoing what is for Mathias the only durable song of the lapsarian earth:

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Patently It is the grasshoppers I Must listen to, as they intersperse A hard leg-music with mad Travels from tussock to bleaker Tuft, to broken stick or random Protuberant stone. (RMCP, pp. 273–4)

This ‘hard leg-music’ is fitting accompaniment to mankind’s errant and erratic ways. Writing an elegy for his mother, he likewise writes All lenient muscles tensed, I’ll practise long After dark, if she remember too (RMCP, p. 252).

The tensing of muscles may result in painful cramps and verbal spasms: a magisterial distaste for all things shoddy can degenerate into merely schoolmasterly disapproval; moral rigour can begin to sound disconcertingly like prissiness; the sustained dialogue with history may seem no more than the meanderings of a mandarin antiquarian. These are not, of course, failings in the man but rather the effects of periodic failures of the style, and since at its best that style unselfconsciously creates an effect of humbling moral integrity, it is in related terms – more moral than aesthetic – that one tends to register the shortcomings of the poetry. The successes of that poetry are, however, as singular in kind as they are notable in quality. Mathias’s strenuous tongue (to misappropriate Keats’s phrase) has for example given us ‘Testament’, ‘Porth Cwyfan’, ‘Brechfa Chapel’ and ‘Burning brambles’. ‘Onset of winter’ is concerned with the way the cold lays deathly claim to a landscape, threatening to chill faith itself to the very marrow. That, however, is not the end of the story because . . . for all the miss In the steady beat Of the walking blood Stopped at the bark The lamed man keeps his heat Aware, like the cold, shut clod, An ancienter oath will answer this. (RMCP, p. 252)

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That use of ‘oath’ is in part faith’s robust response in kind to the first stanza, where early snow was heard to ‘swear’, with a crude swagger, that winter would soon arrive to make good its threat to annihilate all life. But the phrase ‘ancienter oath’ also has the effect of transposing the argument between life and death into a decisively different key, since in this context ‘oath’ additionally signifies a solemn undertaking, the binding promise of life’s eternal triumph over death, made by the One whose presence in these concluding lines is all the more powerful for being left unspoken, as ‘clod’ is allowed to rhyme silently with ‘God’. Metaphysical turns of wit and sleights of tone of this kind are always a feature of Mathias’s writing, but this is one of those telling occasions where they are seen to originate in the knot of feelings associated with his deep personal faith. In ‘Expiation’, he seeks to make a kind of amends to a grandfather he feels he has previously slighted in print, because to deny The dead a voice is to falter In justice. (RMCP, p. 260)

Enfolded in such phrasing is Mathias’s belief in the obligation to develop a responsible historical imagination, one that can appreciate the deep human import (i.e. moral legacy) of materials even from the remote, legendary past. In ‘Cynog’ he wonders from which clifftop, and into which of two possible streams, was the sixth-century Breconshire saint hurled to his death by Irish raiders, because for the searcher what is ‘At stake is benison / Not history’ (RMCP, p. 262). For Mathias, the present is to be understood as bound to the past by a complex ‘entail of dependence’, as Burke put it, the moral terms of which have repeatedly been explored in his poetry through a process of interrogation as fierce as Jacob’s wrestling with the angel. For this purpose, Mathias – the historian agonistes – has notoriously chosen to employ a wrenched syntax and an archaic language sometimes resembling Browning’s pastiche of the vernacular of past times. He loves it when words sound so chunky that they seem to stand proud off the page like Braille, hence in part the enlistment of a lexicon like ‘chalybeate’, ‘gamboge’, ‘frowsty,’ ‘skullhead’, ‘flummoxed.’ These are, one might say, words that are not mealy mouthed, not afraid to stand up and be counted. When he describes Cynog’s ‘bulking robes’ he could as well be describing his own practice of filling out meaning by bestowing sharply

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physical presence on abstract qualities or fleeting phenomena (the ‘blunt faces’ of monks; a tern’s ‘blade-bone / Cleaving the wavelets’ / Interface’; ‘these spasms of wittering’ that characterize sanderlings; Ronan’s ‘few spindle-stick / Tries to sharpen / Thoughts’). Implicit in such a practice is Mathias’s reluctance to sunder flesh from mind or spirit. His is a world in which all things, and all people, body forth what they most truly and intimately are, revealing their inner moral being in their physical bearing and demeanour. That is why he is an instinctive allegorist, one of the tribe of Bunyan for whom moral attributes have their own tell-tale body language, and the corporeal realm bears everywhere the marks of the great moral struggle of which existence itself essentially consists. The greatest expression of it in his work comes in ‘Brechfa Chapel’, an attempt to come to moral grips with an unsavoury world moulded out of ‘the slimed / Substantiation of the elements’ (RMCP, p. 222). The profanely raucous Consistory of Fowles conducted in this landscape ominously threatens what remains operative in a chapel so desolate ‘the black half-world comes at it / Bleaks by its very doors’. A handful of the faithful struggle to bear witness in the teeth of the insolence of the shillyShally of birds quitting the nearer mud For the farther, harrying the conversation Of faith

– Mathias’s distaste for the shoddy moral laxities of modern life shudders through the lines. In the end, ‘Each on his own must stand and conjure / The strong remembered words, the unanswerable texts against chaos.’ Couched as they are in terms of strength and struggle, his ethics and poetics alike take on a markedly gendered character, as is true of much Nonconformist writing. ‘The Path to Fontana Amorosa’ records – in a form strongly reminiscent of the old allegorical topos of the bivium – a northern puritan male’s ambivalent response to the ‘feminized’ landscape of ancient Mediterranean cult and culture. Setting out on the paths to the Baths of Aphrodite, in Cyprus, Mathias uneasily allows himself to be seduced by the lushness of the landscape in this, ‘the white goddess’s country’ (RMCP, p. 257). Wantoning in abundance, the whole coastline, as ‘reckless’ as it is ‘magical’, seems to beckon him towards ‘the spring / Where the gush is all women’s abandon’ (RMCP, p. 257).

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However, within this sensuous Eden there lurks a serpent, a snake that has turned an amorous lizard into a corpse lying bloated on the path. Morally sobered by the sight, Mathias is recalled to his senses, and to a minatory awareness of the history of this place. For if it is, on one ‘reading’ of its past, the legendary haunt of Aphrodite, it is also, on another such ‘reading’, the site of the ancient and long since extinct city of Marion: Eucalyptus Trees, a grove half skirted with bamboo eyots Cursed in with gravel and sea-water, Quiver where Marion was. That speaking grave For all you know despairs with its words Awash. (RMCP, pp. 257–8)

Chaos has, then, prevailed against whatever strong remembered words the ancient city of Marion had to offer, but Mathias implicitly honours the spirit of those words, and thus reaffirms the realm of order, when he chooses not to proceed to Aphrodite’s baths. Cautioned by death, he recovers his prudence, and is able to withstand the dangerous solicitations of the extravagant flesh. When writing a second elegy for his mother, Mathias’s greatest compliment to her is to represent her in terms of a masculine image. Rather than describe her as a home-maker Mathias recalls how for thirty-nine narrowing years My mother it was kept the house Squared at its peers.

Such a designation goes with his (ambivalent?) reflection that his parents’ home, although named ‘T} Clyd’ (Cosy House), was anything but that in moral reality: Cosy was rarely its state Over decades of waiting when clyd White-lettered the gate. Principled rather, two storeys of deeds Slapped on word, a house with all chance crusades Abandoned, a crux of definitive shades Attacking the quiet. (RMCP, pp. 253–4)

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One might suggest that it is some such house as this – ambivalently characterized as bleak, straitened, but impressively ‘principled’ – that Mathias strove to build through his own life, just as he strove to keep the word ‘clyd’/cosy out of the text he wrote to accompany that life. And one might further surmise that some such figure as that which he makes of his mother in this elegy has served as a kind of Muse of his poetry – equal but opposite in power to Graves’s White Goddess. ‘The Path to Fontana Amorasa’ concludes with a reaffirmation of Mathias’s faithful service to that salvific Muse, but not before he has feelingfully questioned the terms of such service. Just for a moment, he entertains the possibility that what he has regarded as the preconditions of moral strength may be no more than the expression of psychological weakness – a concern that also haunts Emyr Humphreys’s writing; that he has stuck to the straight and narrow only because he is afraid of death, afraid of risk, afraid of the unruly sprawl of the senses, afraid of the ‘female’. Likewise, his tribute to his mother is humanly strengthened, as poetry, by the mere possibility allowed for in the elegy’s phrasing that her particular kind of strength was purchased at a price, at the cost of nurturing warmth, of a curtailment of the ‘feminine’ virtues. Mathias’s disapproval of moral egotism is unmistakable, and no doubt all the stronger for his understanding of it as a tendency in his own nature. He had to struggle to keep his distaste for contemporary life within proper bounds, and in his poetry this struggle takes the form of a flinching from any signs of spiritual pride in his own bearings towards the world. These reactions are interwoven in ‘Jazz festival’, where he begins by testily objecting to the ‘rumpus / In the small hours of the afternoon’ (RMCP, p. 275). His underlying fear of Circean revelry emerges in his depicting the event as being as viscerally primitive as the vainglorious shapes of riot Which the shuffling out-island slaves Would put on when Picton had The reins in Trinidad.

‘The vexed bass’, which is all the sound the ear can detect as it sets protective distance between itself and the town, is a humbling reminder of the pulse of the fallen flesh which is common to both the ‘rioters’ and himself.

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*** ‘What I am trying to say / Looks foolish, doesn’t it,’ Roland Mathias reflects at the poem’s outset, ‘With all this noise going on?’ Part of the poignancy and power of the later writings of both Mathias and of Humphreys is the feeling they generate of writers who have grown old in the service of values and beliefs the world has increasingly held to be foolish. The dignity and consequentiality of Mathias’s achievement as a poet is, however, rooted in his unwavering determination to make poetry rhyme with principle. The same impulse to rhyme form and substance with conscience underlies all of Humphreys’s fiction. As a result, the work of both these remarkable and redoubtable Nonconformist writers possesses those inestimable qualities identified by Roland Mathias in the concluding lines of ‘A field at Vallorcines’: The run down the gorge to the frontier, the silent place We peered at this morning with so little In mind, will be full of jerks and slowing Like the blind climb up. But the station has grace. It has borne The faces of doubts, the comings and goings Of millions. We shall stand there solid in The goodly counsel with which a world back we set out. (RMCP, p. 268)

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EPILOGUE O Bible chopped and crucified in hymns we hear but do no read, none of the milder subtleties of grace or art will sweeten these stiff quatrains shovelled out four-square – they sing of peace, and preach despair; yet they gave darkness some control, and left a loophole for the soul. Robert Lowell, ‘Waking in the blue’

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Epilogue

Saron chapel, Bodedern, chapel interior with minister and congregation

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Wherever Evan Roberts spoke, and his ladies sang, the colliers – excited by news of this newcomer with his searing visions – left their pubs, shuffleboard and dice; they abandoned their whippet-training, pitch and toss, mountain fights to the finish, the dog and cock fights. They left off browsing great literature in the first of the miners’ libraries and stopped listening to the first foreign teachers of socialism – all to return to the empty chapels to listen to a man tell of a holy God’s requirement that his people be holy too.1

We end, then, where we began, with the Revival. More than a century after it occurred, it can still serve, in the literary as well as the popular imagination, as a burning-glass for all the mixed emotions with which Wales continues at times to reflect on its Nonconformist inheritance. The passage comes from Tom Davies’s revised edition of One Winter of the Holy Spirit (1984), published to coincide with the centenary of 1904– 1905. As this extract suggests, the novel is written to the popular romance formula familiar from innumerable earlier treatments of chapel life, and it runs through the repertoire of expected topoi – the Revival’s impact on rugby, its libidinous character, the moral bigotry it fuelled, the suspicion with which it was viewed by socially established denominations, the ambiguous ‘liberation’ it offered women, the challenge it faced from medical science, and its struggle with the emergent alternative religion of socialism. True to further stereotype, the Revival is also viewed as a visceral modern expression of the chthonic, tribal passions of the Welsh. But for all the sometimes lurid simplifications the novel

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deploys, it is careful to make Evan Roberts himself a complex, enigmatic phenomenon – sexually confused, mentally disturbed, with sinister overtones, and yet charged with some mysterious shamanistic power that still demands to be recognized as spiritual. A convincing creation, Davies’s Roberts resembles a Welsh puritan Rasputin. One Winter of the Holy Spirit is an intermittently powerful recent reminder that the nation’s relationship with its Nonconformist past remains unfinished business. Indeed, the twentieth century might well be dubbed the ‘post-Nonconformist’ era in Wales, as for much of that period an increasingly secularized country sought to work out a modus vivendi with its recent past. This study has attempted to explore several aspects of the struggle as registered in literary texts, a complex and extensive process that even features, in a romanticized way, in the popular novels of Jack Jones and Richard Llewellyn. In the case of the latter’s How Green Was My Valley, the ugly bigotry of old-style chapel society is contrasted with the new, liberal outlook of the young minister. The process of engagement has continued, albeit fitfully and at a much lower temperature, down to the present day. New aspects of the Nonconformist legacy tend to be highlighted, such as the largely neglected question of the position of women in the society of the chapels. One of the strengths of Siân James’s A Small Country is its capture (rare in English) of the texture of life in a rural, Welsh-speaking, Nonconformist community during the First World War. The novel shows sympathy for the young soldier-farmer Tom’s measured revaluation, in the anarchic carnage of the trenches, of the solid socio-religious values of his upbringing: ‘I’m sure the sterner religious element was negative and cramping in many ways . . . all the same, something about it was fine and worth preserving.’2 But James also faithfully registers the plight of a young, unmarried mother, Miriam, whose tough embrace of ‘paganism’ in the face of coldly correct chapel disapproval fails in the end to save her from isolated suicide. Similarly fine-grained is the account of a wartime Welsh society solemnly keyed to chapel faith in James’s Love and War.3 Once more, there is a refusal simply to denounce and renounce those values in the name of female liberation, constrained though the lives of two of the novel’s central characters, mother (Mrs Lloyd) and daughter (Rhian), are by their religious upbringing. Balancing the petty, amply documented, censoriousness of their chapel culture is not only the decency of a well-meaning minister but an affirmation, voiced by a Rhian caught in the toils of an ecstatic ‘adulterous’ passion, that in both the actual teachings of Christ and

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in the Song of Solomon may be found a benediction of instinct and a glorious language for erotic love. Through the complex pressures exerted by experience of the Second World War, this closed traditional society is slowly opened up to fundamental realities of the human condition that do not cancel chapel teaching but challenge it to rediscover the real biblical truths in which it is rooted. Menna Gallie’s fine novel The Small Mine, set in the Swansea Valley in 1961, also reflects on the chapel’s ambivalent role in the lives of women trapped, this time, in a late industrial, working-class community. While their men ‘pay the price for coal’ in a life-and-death struggle with the humanly cramping conditions of the mining industry, the women pay a price for finding a kind of limited space for themselves in chapel, a sustaining ritual in Sunday attendance, and a consolation in vague, faded, sentimental belief: they are rendered passionless and passive by religious values. So pervasive are these that even behind the bar, the owner’s wife looks ‘more like a deacon’s wife than a publican’s . . . Her angularity, like a pair of tongs in a knitted cardigan, was the epitome of Nonconformist respectability.’4 The few daring spirits who escape this blight find themselves cast socially adrift. Gallie shared with Caradog Pritchard and Gwenallt, two Welsh-language writers with whom she enjoyed a close affinity, a conviction that at the heart of industrial capitalist society lurked a savage, pent-up violence. This finds appropriate narrative expression in the melodramatic plot lines of both The Small Mine and Strike for a Kingdom, her other Swansea Valley novel, which concludes with the crisis of conscience experienced by Davy Williams, gentle miners’ leader and chapel stalwart. Faced by the confessions of a hapless, inadequate friend driven to murder by the murderousness of his social circumstances, Davy feels ‘defeated, bewildered . . . a good man who no longer knew by instinct what was right and what was wrong’.5 Gallie’s criticisms of Nonconformity are always deeply informed by a respect for the humanity it struggled to nourish in dehumanizing conditions, and a consequent sympathy for its inevitable limitations. She does not, however, overlook chapel society’s unfortunate record of subordinating women. Nor does Gillian Clarke, who in ‘Letter from a far country,’ one of the creative works in which the experience of women in late twentieth-century Wales is most richly interwoven with female experience of the past, noted how, in the ‘hill country’ where the landscape seemed most ‘feminine’, farmers’ wives were closed behind white gates by ‘father and minister’, and the homes to which they were summarily confined were themselves imprisoned in ‘the crook of the hill /

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under Calfaria’s single eye’.6 In rural graveyards, the menfolk are commemorated as ‘Diaconydd’ (deacon), or ‘Trysorydd’ (treasurer), while the women’s work is stonily unreferenced. Clarke’s eventual response is to commandeer that most magisterially masculine of Welsh Nonconformist forms, the ‘Cofiant’ (memorial biography) reserved for distinguished ministers, and to infiltrate women into this sacred record. By these means she is able to pay tribute to her ancestors of both sexes. The Nonconformist inheritance has also been a hitherto underestimated concern for prominent late twentieth-century writers like Raymond Williams and R. S. Thomas. No mature understanding of the latter’s stance either on Welsh culture or on religion, for instance, is possible without a serious consideration of the Nonconformity against which Thomas was constantly testing himself. To map the complexities of this vexed relationship would take the best part of a book, but one might start from a nucleus of suggestive instances. Take his extraordinary post-war (1948) essay on ‘Dau gapel’ (‘Two chapels’). It speaks of his deep attraction to two contrasting old chapels from the remoter upland areas of Wales. ‘Maes yr Onnen’ he calls ‘The Chapel of the Spirit’, because, standing alone in the fields, it prompts a vision of both human and natural life as a single ‘fountain welling up endlessly from immortal God’.7 Yet he is even more irresistibly drawn to ‘Soar y Mynydd’, the scattered upland farmers’ chapel, sheltering behind a row of beeches from the winds sweeping over the bare unpopulated hills. Here he glimpsed ‘the true soul of my people. Speaking of denominations, I must admit that Nonconformity still wins hands down. The formal ostentation of Catholicism won’t do here. And the Church in Wales isn’t any longer Welsh enough in Spirit’ (RSTSP, p. 46). In that last observation one hears the bitter disillusion that later drove the spiritually ‘unchurched’ clergyman to his bleak, lonely, spiritual meditations. ‘Maes yr Onnen’, he had written, had been built for ‘the scattered ones’. It is a description that perfectly fits Thomas himself. Of course, his disillusion embraced the whole of a Wales that, in his eyes, had lost its soul in losing what, in its early, pristine, prime, the spiritual and cultural values of Nonconformity had represented. Thomas’s own attempt to find compensation for that loss by joining the older denomination of the Church in Wales had also ended in despair. His imagination was attracted to figures like Ann Griffiths of Dolwar Fach, who, as a Methodist before that powerful reform movement had split with the Anglican Church, could for him represent the perfect fusion of two contrasting modes of worship to which he felt so

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powerfully attracted. In his extended homage, ‘Fugue for Ann Griffiths’, he imagined her as living in a countryside not fenced in by cables and pylons, but open to thought to blow in.8

Seen as ‘figure-head of a ship / outward bound’, she surely serves as the muse of his own imagination. But she is also the Joan of Arc of the Welsh: her achievement the sensitising of the Welsh conscience to the English rebuke. (RSTCP, p. 473)

The patron saint of the chapels, she bequeathed them a great religious poetry to ensure that the dust settling on the Welsh language ‘is blown away in great gusts / week by week in chapel after chapel’ (RSTCP, p. 471). Dolwar Fach becomes a shrine, and his poem a pilgrimage to it – a journey all the more shamefully overdue, since Thomas had, it is implied, neglected to embark on it throughout the years he had been Ann’s near neighbour at Manafon. For him, her example survives as a challenge to the modern intellect, a question, teasing us like the undying echo of an Amen high up in the cumulus rafters over Dolanog. (RSTCP, p. 473)

‘O but God is in the throat of a bird; / Ann heard him speak’ (RSTCP, p. 43), wrote Thomas in ‘The Minister’, a text that might serve as a third initial point of reference. This blackly compassionate portrait of a young preacher in ‘religion’s outpost’, the ‘untamed land’ of the mid-Wales uplands (RSTCP, p. 44), pictures the idealistic newcomer as increasingly besieged of a Sunday ‘by a lean-faced people in black clothes / That smelled of camphor and dried sweat’ (RSTCP, p. 46). Learning the hard way to recognize his flock as animated not by the Spirit but by sex and money – ‘God’s mistake and the devil’s creation’ (RSTCP, p. 47) – Morgan the preacher retreats to fire random shots of innuendo from ‘the block house’ of his pulpit. As for the natural

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world, his sentimental, anthropomorphic view of it renders him helpless in the face of its neutral, casual ferocities. Beginning by sadly mocking the Nonconformist nation’s view that Wales is ‘[God’s] peculiar home’ (RSTCP, p. 43), the long poem ends with the narrator’s diatribe against the ‘castration’ of art by Protestantism as a whole, and the way its ‘botching’ of flesh ‘left us only the soul’s / Terrible impotence in a warm world’ (RSTCP, p. 54). And through the text’s concluding lines rings Thomas’s condemnation of the narrowing of God to fit into the four-square Calvinistic chapels, the exclusion of the sense nature can give of divinity as vast, humanly baffling and radically alien. What is important to note, however, in the present context is that by the end of the poem Thomas has deliberately eroded the difference between chapel and church (and therefore between the chapel minister and his own priestly self) by speaking much more generically of ‘Protestantism’. In other words, the poem has moved from a measured, distanced, outsider view of a minister whose life exemplifies the distinctive strengths and weaknesses of the Welsh Nonconformist chapel, to a conclusion that implicates R. S. Thomas, a priest of the Church in Wales, in the minister’s failures. Such a decisive rhetorical shift is a reminder of just how complicated was his response to his nation’s Nonconformist past and present. As has frequently been remarked, ‘The Minister’ in part invites autobiographical reading. All the instances considered above, then, point beyond the confines of the present study in the direction of further, and fuller, discussions of textual representations of Welsh Nonconformity. It remains a major subject for proper cultural investigation. And the time may even prove ripe for such an undertaking. Having absorbed what postmodernism has to offer by way of insights into human life, it could be that we are now ready for a period of retrenchment, along the perceptive lines recently suggested by the poet and critic Jeremy Hooker in a passage of thoughtful, measured eloquence: [T]he nonconformist heritage [was] defined by Roland Mathias as ‘that Puritan seriousness about the purpose of living, about the need for tradition and the understanding of it, about the future of the community as well as the individual.’ . . . We are familiar in Wales with comic caricatures of Chapel culture, caricatures in Caradoc Evans and others, driven by anger at what is seen as life-denying and hypocritical attitudes. But the time will come when it is more generally recognised that the Puritan heritage gave rise in Wales in the twentieth century, in the novels of Emyr Humphreys and the poetry of Roland Mathias, to a ‘seriousness about

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the purpose of living’ comparable to that of Hawthorne and the American Transcendentalists.9

Such conclusions are, though, to be distinguished from any wish to see the return of the chapels of Wales to their one-time dominance. A generation ago, Gwyn Thomas commented acerbically on any such sentiment: It is a big part of the Welsh ethic to believe that with the lapse of the chapels a light of paradise drained out of Welsh life. Many of the people who hold this view would, if promised a return to their old dominion by the religious ministers, emigrate to Boffin Bay.10

Secure in the knowledge that Boffin Bay will never beckon, contemporary Wales would do well to explore its ‘Nonconformist heritage’ with some sympathy. In his even-handed study of the phenomenon of nationalism, Anthony D. Smith has argued that the core of any ethnie (ethnic community) is its ‘myth-symbol complex’, which is the mythomoteur, the driving force, of the community’s development.11 Throughout the nineteenth century, Wales’s ‘myth-symbol complex’ centred on the nexus of ideas associated with its conception of itself as a ‘Nonconformist nation’. This self-definition played a crucial part in the maintenance of the Welsh as a single ‘people’ in the face of tumultuous, turbulent changes on a previously unprecedented scale. Communities are strong, Smith adds, when their history is ‘full’; that is, when their history is successfully converted into a persuasive, potent myth-symbol complex. They are weak, and correspondingly vulnerable, when their history becomes ‘drained’. At a time when some writers and intellectuals fear that Wales may now be subsisting in a ‘drained’ condition, a full, thoughtful, examination of the process of constructing, and deconstructing, ‘the Nonconformist nation’, and of the role of writers in that process, might well prove instructive.

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3 4 5

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John Harvey, Image of the Invisible: The Visualization of Religion in the Welsh Nonconformist Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 65–6. (Here Brynteg is wrongly located near ‘Llanelli, Carmarthenshire’); D. M. Phillips, Evan Roberts: The Great Revivalist and His Work (London: Marshall Brothers, n.d.), p. 209; Y Diwygiad a’r Diwygwyr: Hanes Toriad Gwawr Diwygiad 1904–1905 (Dolgellau: E. W. Evans, 1906). The two meetings at Brynteg, a chapel barely a mile from Moriah, the Calvinistic Methodist chapel that was Roberts’s home base, are particularly significant, because they provided the first powerful proof that his magnetism was ‘exportable’. As my grandmother’s case illustrates, they were the real launch pad for the Revival. R. S. Thomas, ‘The Chapel’, in Collected Poems (London: Phoenix, 1993), p. 276. Phillips, Evan Roberts, p. i. Ibid., p. 208. Roberts and his Revival need to be set in the context of this particular strain of puritan, and subsequently Nonconformist, history – a strain largely foreign to nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity. Its extraordinary history during the Interregnum years has been authoritatively mapped in G. F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). See the brilliant treatment of James in these terms in Desmond Barry, The Chivalry of Crime (London: Vintage, 2001). Phillips, Evan Roberts, p. 249. Gareth Williams (ed.), Sport: An Anthology (Cardigan: Parthian, Library of Wales Series), p. 169. Russell Davies, Secret Sins: Sex, Violence and Society in Carmarthenshire, 1870–1920 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), p. 198.

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As is well known, the story of his later years is every bit as extraordinary as those of his Revival period, but in an entirely different fashion. It includes his living as part of a strange, platonic ménage à trois in Leicester with Mrs PennLewis (see below), his eventual return to live inconspicuously in Cardiff, and his death in an old people’s home where no one even knew who he was. Mrs Penn-Lewis, in collaboration with Evan Roberts, War on the Saints: A Text-Book for Believers on the Work of Deceiving Spirits among the Children of God (Leicester: The ‘Overcomer’ Office, Toller Road, and London: Marshall Brothers, 47 Paternoster Road, EC, 1912; reprinted Burgess Hill: Diggory Press, 2005). Mary Garrard (ed.), Mrs Penn-Lewis: A Memoir (Leicester: Excelsior Press, 1930). G. Penar Griffith, Cenadon Cymreig (Caerdydd: Gwaith Argraffu Deheudir Cymru, 1897). See, for instance, Nigel Jenkins, Gwalia in Kasia (Llandysul: Gomer, 1995). Phillips, Evan Roberts, p. 201. Ibid., p. 207. Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Review, TLS, 27 May, 2005, p. 10 of David Hempton, Methodism (New Haven: Yale University Press). Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954). Ioan M. Williams, Capel a Chomin: Astudiaeth o Ffugchwedlau pedwar llenor Fictoraidd (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Caerdydd, 1989), p. 46. Hiraethog’s final break with the Calvinistic Methodists was the result of a long spiritual struggle he suffered between High Calvinism and Arminianism. For the distinction, see chapter 1. See also Ioan M. Williams, ‘Gwilym Hiraethog (William Rees, 1802–83)’, in Hywel Teifi Edwards (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c.1800– 1900 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 48–68. Phillips, Evan Roberts, p. 208. He also furnishes (p. 206) a tepid translation of the first verse by Principal Edwards: ‘Here is love vast as the ocean, / Lovingkindness as the flood, / When the Prince of life our ransom / Shed for us His precious blood. / Who His love will not remember? / Who can cease to sing His praise? / He can never be forgotten, / Through heaven’s everlasting days.’ Melinda Gray, ‘Uncle Tom’s Welsh dress: ethnicity, authority and translation,’ in Alyce von Rothkirch and Daniel Williams (eds), Beyond the Difference: Welsh Literature in Comparative Contexts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 173–185. Pennar Davies, ‘The Fire in the thatch: religion in Wales,’ in R. Brinley Jones (ed.), Anatomy of Wales (Cowbridge: Gwerin Publications, 1972), p. 114. ‘Welsh literature and nationalism’, in Harri Prichard Jones, Saunders Lewis: A Presentation of his Work (Springfield, Ill.: Templegate, 1990), p. 215. Lewis elsewhere referred to the ‘black barbarism of . . . Nonconformity’, and argued that ‘Nonconformity and English landlordism have made us what we

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are, and it will take many generations, a century perhaps, to recover’, Saunders Lewis, Letters to Margaret Gilchrist, ed. M. S. Jones, N. Thomas, and H. P. Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), pp. 442, 471. Quoted in John Ackerman, Welsh Dylan: Dylan Thomas’s Life, Writing and his Wales (Bridgend: 1998), 58. Sander Meredeen, The Man Who Made Penguins: The Life of Sir William Emrys Williams (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Darien Jones Publishing, 2007). For the contrasting case of one of the friends of my chapel youth, see M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Portrait of the artist as a young (Brynteg) man’, Planet 172 (August/ September 2005), 14–22. In fairness, it should be noted that his understandable loathing of hellfire preaching did not originate in Brynteg. Gwyn Thomas, A Welsh Eye (London: Hutchinson, 1964), p. 123.

Chapter 1 1

2 3

4 5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Meic Stephens (ed.), The Collected Stories of Rhys Davies, 1 (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996), p. 192. Rhys Davies, The Story of Wales (London: Collins, 1923), p. 24. Julian Croft and Don Dale-Jones (eds), The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (Llandysul: Gomer, 1987), p. 119. T. Harri Jones, p. 7. How the Bible has informed Welsh attachment to place is explored in Dorian Llywelyn (ed.), Sacred Place, Chosen People: Land and National Identity in Welsh Spirituality (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999). In the discussion that follows I am indebted particularly to Diarmaid MacCallough, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Penguin, 2004). Philip Mairet (tr.), François Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Philosophy (London: Collins, 1969), p. 354. Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 1642–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Dyfnallt Morgan (tr.), Derec Llwyd Morgan, The Great Awakening in Wales (London: Epworth, 1988). Starting with Methodism, Welsh Nonconformity was to be marked by the international provenance of its evangelical impulses. See David Ceri Jones, A Glorious Work in the World: Welsh Methodism and the International Evangelical Revival, 1735–1750 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). Still the fullest survey of the history of Nonconformity down to the second half of the nineteenth century is Thomas Rees, History of Protestant Nonconformity in Wales from Its Rise to the Present Time (London: John Snow and Co., 1883). R. S. Thomas, ‘Fugue for Ann Griffiths’, in Welsh Airs (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), pp. 53, 55. John Davies, Hanes Cymru (London: Allen Lane, 1990), pp. 324–7. The fictional, as well as the theological, consequences of the nineteenth-century struggle

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between hard-line Calvinism and a more liberal doctrine are astutely traced in Ioan Williams, Capel a Chomin: Astudiaeth o Ffugchwedlau pedwar llenor Fictoraidd (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1989). See such studies as Nigel Jenkins, Gwalia in Kasia (Llandysul: Gomer, 1995); Jasmine Donahaye, ‘“By whom shall she arise? For she is small”: the Wales– Israel tradition in the Edwardian period’, in Elton Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (eds), ‘The Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 161–82. The generalizations in this paragraph are based on the detailed evidence in Russell Davies’s authoritative study, Secret Sins; Sex, Violence and Society in Carmarthenshire: 1870–1920 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996). This conforms, in several important particulars, to the picture of west Wales Nonconformist society offered by Caradoc Evans in his fiction. Quotations in this paragraph come from pp.175, 184, 185 of Davies’s work. Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Communities: Essays in the Social History of Victorian Wales (Llandysul: Gomer, 1987), p. 148. Emyr Humphreys, The Taliesin Tradition (Bridgend: Seren, 2000), p. 122. Davies, Hanes Cymru, p. 401. The fullest and most brilliant picture is provided by R. Tudur Jones, Faith and the Crisis of a Nation: Wales 1890–1914, tr. Sylvia Prys Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). Owen Jones, Some of the Great Preachers of Wales (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1885), p. 14. Hereafter GPW. Harri Parri, Y Pregethwr at Iws Gwlad (Gwasanaeth Llyfrgell Gwynedd, 1998). Anon, Hynodion Hen Bregethwyr Cymru gydag Hanesion Difyrus am Danyn (Wrexham: Hughes and Son, n.d.), pp. 43, 52, 17. See the eloquent, barbed comments in The Welsh Pulpit: Divers Notes and Opinions (London: Fisher Unwin, 1894). Advertised as being by ‘A Scribe, A Pharisee and a Lawyer’, the book was commonly known to have been written by Robert Arthur Griffith (Elphin), John Owen Jones (ap Ffarmwr), and David Edwards (manager of the Nottingham Express). See Faith and Crisis, p. 126. Jones, Faith and Crisis, p. 119. An event scourged in Jones, Faith and Crisis, p. 125. Jones, Faith and Crisis, p. 118. Welsh Pulpit, p. 43. From the works of ‘Goleufryn’ (W. R. Jones) as quoted in Jones, Faith and Crisis, p. 41. Anthony Jones, Welsh Chapels (Cardiff, National Museums and Galleries of Wales: Sutton Publishing, 1996); John Harvey, Image of the Invisible: The Visualization of Religion in the Welsh Nonconformist Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999). For the work of imaging the Nonconformist nation in the nineteenth century, see Peter Lord, Imaging the Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000). And for further discussion of the visual culture of Nonconformists, see Martin O’Kane and John Morgan-Guy (eds), Biblical Art from Wales (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2010).

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31 32

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34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

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Jones, Faith and Crisis, chapter 5. ‘If religion was shaped by the industrial forces so also was the progress of industrialisation conditioned by the existence of religion.’ (Jones, Communities, p. 216). W. R. Lambert, ‘Some working class attitudes towards organized religion in nineteenth-century Wales’, Llafur, 2.1 (Spring 1976), 4–17. Ibid., 5. Delyth G. Morgans, Cydymaith Caneuon Ffydd (Aberystwyth: Pwyllgor y Llyfr Emynau Cydenwadol, 2006). Gareth Williams, Valleys of Song: Music and Society in Wales, 1840–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), p. 34. Williams, Valleys of Song, p. 101. See chapter 2 of Jane Aaron, Pur fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llên Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998); and Aaron, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), chapter 1. Y Frythones, IV (1882), 189. Y Frythones, V (1883), 35. Y Frythones, IV (1882), 160. Y Frythones, V (1883), 86. Y Frythones, V (1883), 48. Y Frythones, V (1883), 129. Y Frythones, V (1883), 131. Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980 (Oxford and Cardiff: Clarendon and University of Wales Press, 1981), p. 17. Morgan, Rebirth, p. 53. Morgan, Rebirth, p. 55. D. Densil Morgan, The Span of the Cross: Christian Religion and Society in Wales, 1914–2000 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. 2. Also Robert Pope, Seeking God’s Kingdom: The Nonconformist Social Gospel in Wales, 1906– 1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999). A comprehensive survey of Welsh Nonconformity’s assessment in this period of its own contributions to the life of Wales may be found in James Evans (ed.), Dylanwad Ymneilltuaeth ar Fywyd y Genedl, sef Adroddiad Dathliad Pumed Jiwbili 1662 yng Nghymru (Llanelli: James Davies, 1913). Evans, Dylanwad Ymneilltuaeth, p. 133. Tim Barringer (ed.), Opulence and Anxiety: Landscape Paintings from the Royal Academy of Arts, a catalogue of the exhibition, 24 March–10 June 2007 (Warwickshire: Compton Verney, 2007), p. 92. Evans, Dylanwad Ymneilltuaeth, p. 110.

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Chapter 2 1

2

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4

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8 9 10

11 12

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W. George Roberts, ‘“Nonconformity” a force in Welsh national life’, Young Wales, 9 (1903), 86. Cymru Fydd: Cylchgrawn y Blaid Genedlaethol Gymreig, 3 (1890), 36. Hereafter CF. The italicized passage is my approximate translation of the Welsh: ‘Crefydd ydyw anadl ei bywyd, crefydd heb wawr gwleidyddiaeth arni.’ Jane Cave, Poems on Various Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac, and Religious (Winchester: printed for the author by J. Sadler, 1783; 1796 edition), p. 77. Hereafter PVS. Elizabeth Crebar, Poems Religious and Moral (Aberystwyth: James and Williams, 181l), p. 26. Hereafter PRM. Jane Aaron, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). Anna Maria Bennett, Anna, or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress, 4 vols. (London: William Lane, 1785). Mary Robinson, Walsingham, 4 vols. (London: T. N. Longman, 1797), II, p. 316. Ibid., II, p. 318. Aaron, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing, p. 28. The definitive study of Prichard’s life and work is Sam Adam’s elegant and learned essay, Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000). Prichard acquired his wax nose subsequent to the publication of the first edition of his novel. His snuffle and liking for rum became prominent when, in his old age, he lived like a sad dosser in a Swansea slum, ‘World’s End’. There’s an interesting article on Prichard by C. Wilkins, who knew him, in Young Wales (1904), 166–8. For a lively fictional account of Prichard’s life, see Sam Adams, Prichard’s Nose (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2010). Quoted in Adam, Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard, p. 78. T. J. Llewelyn Prichard, The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shôn Catti: Descriptive of Life in Wales Enterspersed with Poems (Aberystwyth: John Cox, 1828). Hereafter TSC. Quoted in Adam, Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard, pp. 31 and 66. See Prys Morgan, The Eighteenth-Century Renaissance (Llandybïe: Christopher Davies, 1981). Marie Trevelyan, From Snowdon to the Sea (London: John Hogg, no date, but Preface dated 1894), p. vii. Hereafter FSS. Anna Beale, Traits and Stories of the Welsh Peasantry (London: Routledge, 1849), pp . 150, 25. Hereafter TSWP. Katie Gramich (ed.), Amy Dillwyn, The Rebecca Rioter (Dinas Powys: Honno, 2001), p. 3. Hereafter RR. The tension between church and chapel as manifested in the Rebecca Riots is left largely implicit in Anna Beale, Rose Mervyn: A Tale of the Rebecca Riots (London: Griffith Farran Browne and Co. Ltd, n.d., but originally published in 1879).

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Violet Jacob, The Sheep-Stealers (London: William Heinemann, 1902), pp. 4, 6. Hereafter TSS. C. Morgan-Richardson, Henry Vaughan: A Story of Pembrokeshire (London: Thomas Burleigh, 1902), pp. 101, 205. Hereafter HV. D. Hugh Pryce, The Ethics of Evan Wynne (London: Everett and Co., 1913), p. 28. Hereafter EW. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (London; Corgi, 1966), 15. See the valuable introduction by Katie Gramich to Allen Raine, Queen of the Rushes (Dinas Powys: Honno, 1998). Hereafter AR. Sally (Roberts) Jones, Allen Raine (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999). As Jones points out, Raine was also sent away from home to stay with a Unitarian family in England during her formative years. Jones, Allen Raine, pp. 54–5. Picture Tales from Welsh Hills ( London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), pp. 39, 48. Hereafter PT. For the best account of Thomas’s life and work see Kirsti Bohata (ed.), Bertha Thomas, Stranger within the Gates (Dinas Powys: Honno, 2008). Garthowen (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1900). Allen Raine, A Welsh Singer (London: Hutchinson, n.d.). Hereafter WS. See the stimulating discussion of it as a ‘first encounter’ text in Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Welsh Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 19–21. See also the discussion of it in the context of Nonconformity and the Welsh woman in Aaron, Pur fel y Dur, pp. 168–80. Allen Raine, By Berwen Banks (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), pp. 31, 37. Hereafter BB. W. Edwards Tirebuck, Jenny Jones and Jenny (Wrexham: Hughes and Son, London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1896), p. 2. Hereafter JJ. W. Edwards Tirebuck (1854–1900) was born and raised in Liverpool. He began to work as an errand boy and then started up his own satirical newspaper. He then became a journalist on the Yorkshire Daily Post before retiring to Scotland, owing to ill health. He subsequently moved to Wales, with which he may have had some family connections, and became a regular contributor to Young Wales. His publications included Dorrie (1891), a novel about the life of the poor in Liverpool, Miss Grace of All Souls (1891), a novel addressing the issue of capital and labour, Sweetheart Gwen (1893), Meg of the Scarlet Foot (1898), The White Woman (1899), and the posthumous novel Twixt God and Mammon (1903). During his later years he was intent on becoming ‘the novelist of Wales’, and among the admirers of his fiction was Tolstoy. For information see Harold Williamson, Modern English Writers – Being a Study of Imaginative Literature 1890–1914 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1918); W. Edwards Tirebuck, ‘Welsh thought and English thinkers’, Young Wales, 2 (1896), 205–12; T. Artemus Jones, ‘An evening with W. Edwards Tirebuck’, Young Wales, 2 (1896), 284–8. Jones mentions Tirebuck’s ‘Welsh blood’, and his detailed physical and psychological portrait is accompanied by a photograph of the author he describes as Wales’s ‘first notable representative in English fiction’.

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Walter M. Gallichan, The Conflict of Owen Prytherch (London: Watts and Co., 1905), p. 105. Hereafter COP. D. Derwenydd Morgan, The Tavern across the Street (London: Temperance Publishing Society, 1915), p. 47. Hereafter TAS. D. Derwenydd Morgan, If Christ Came to Wales (Carmarthen: W. M. Evans and Son, Ltd, 1927). Hereafter ICCW. Cadvan Rh}s [Daniel Delta Evans], Daniel Evelyn, Heretic (London: Drane’s, 1913), p. 5. Hereafter DE.

Chapter 3 1

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6

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9

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H. Elwyn Thomas, Where Eden’s Tongue Is Spoken Still (London: Allenson, and Newport: Bell, n.d.), pp. 162–3. Hereafter WETS. John Bufton, Gwen Penri: A Welsh Idyll (London: Elliot Stock, 1899), p. 166. Hereafter GP. A native of Radnorshire, Bufton became a Congregational minister in Daniel Owen’s town of Mold before seemingly emigrating to Tasmania. There he published two collections of poems and Tasmanians in the Transvaal War (Newton, Tas.: S. G. Loone, 1905). See Young Wales (1901), 94ff. Eleazar Roberts, Owen Rees: A Story of Welsh Life and Thought (London: Elliot Stock and Liverpool: Isaac Foulkers, n.d.), pp.v–vi. Hereafter OR. Erasmus W. Jones, Llangobaith (Utica, NY: Thomas J. Griffiths, 1886), p. 79. Hereafter LL. Ceredig (Owen Parry), Among the Mountains, or Life in Wales (Ebbw Vale: J. Davies and London: J. Clarke. No date, but later than 1867), p. 6. Hereafter AW. Alfred P. Thomas, In the Land of the Harp and the Feathers: A Series of Welsh Idylls (London: H. R. Allenson, Paternoster Row, 1896), pp. 31, 51. Hereafter ILH. David Davies, Echoes from the Welsh Hills: or Reminiscences of the Preachers and People of Wales (London: Alexander and Sheaphard, 1883), Preface. Hereafter EWH John Vaughan, or More Echoes from the Welsh Hills (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., Ltd, James Clarke and Co., Fleet Street, 1897). Emma Jane Worboise, Esther Wynne (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1885). Hereafter EW. For information about Worboise see the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America (Norman: University of Oklahama Press, 1998), pp. 5–8. William Parry, The Old Welsh Evangelist (Bristol: William F. Mack, 1893), p. 29. Hereafter OWE. William Parry, Welsh Hillside Saints (Manchester: J. Roberts and Sons, 1896), pp. 67–221. Hereafter WHS. Sydney S. Griffith, Little Calvary: Calvaria Fach (London: Andrew Melrose, 1924), Publisher’s Note.

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Margam Jones, Angels in Wales (London: John Long, 1914), p. 306. Hereafter AW. R. M. Thomas, Trewern: A Tale of the Thirties (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901). Margam Jones, The Stars of the Revival (London: John Long, Norris Street, Haymarker, 1910), p. vi. Hereafter SR. ‘David’, in Jane Aaron (ed.), A View across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales, c.1850–1950 (Dinas Powys: Honno, 1999), pp. 14–26. ‘Nancy on the warpath’, in View across the Valley, p. 34. Hereafter NW. Saunders was the wife of a Calvinistic Methodist minister. See Jane Aaron, Pur fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llên Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), pp. 198–201. Saunders continued to attempt to advance the cause of women within Nonconformist culture in other fiction, most notably in an interesting collection of stories about the 1904–5 Revival, Y Diwygiad ym Mhentre Alun (Wrexham: Hughes and Son, 1907). A central character is the redoubtable, bossy Mrs Powell. Robert Rhys, ‘Daniel Owen (1836–95)’, in Hywel Teifi Edwards (ed.), A Guide to Welsh literature, c.1800–1900 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 146–65. ‘The courtship of Edward and Nancy’, ‘Nancy on the warpath’, ‘The ambition of Twm Sali’, ‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’, Young Wales, 3 (1897), 28–32, 54–8, 101–6, 246–9. T. Marchant Williams, The Land of My Fathers (London and New York: Longmans, 1889), p. 34. Hereafter LMF. (Charles) Ellis Lloyd, Love and the Agitator (London: Century Press, 1911), p. 108. Hereafter LA. J. O. Francis, Change: A Glamorgan Play in Four Acts (London: Samuel French, n.d.). Hereafter C. For epigraph it takes famous lines from Ceiriog’s ‘Alun Mabon’, a great favourite in Victorian Wales: ‘Ar arferion Cymru gynt, / Newid ddaeth o rod i rod; / Mae cenhedlaeth wedi mynd, / A chenhedlaeth wedi dod’ (‘To the old familiar ways of Wales / Change has come from step to step; / One generation has passed away / Another generation has come into its own’). For critical discussion see M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference: Literature in Twentieth-Century Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), chapter 1: ‘All change: the new Welsh drama before the Great War’; Martin Rhys, ‘Keeping it in the family: Change by J. O. Francis, The Keep by Gwyn Thomas and House of America’, in Katie Gramich and Andrew Hiscock (eds), Dangerous Diversity: The Changing Faces of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), pp. 150–77. Cross Currents (Cardiff: Educational Publishers Ltd, n.d.), pp. 6–7. Hereafter CC. T. Harri Jones, ‘Wales–New South Wales. May, 1961’, in Julian Croft and Don Dale-Jones (eds), The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (Llandysul: Gomer, 1977), p. 119.

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Charles Ellis Lloyd, A Master of Dreams (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921), p. 315. Hereafter MD. Charles Ellis Lloyd, Scarlet Nest (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919), p. 232. Hereafter SN. ‘The deacon and the dramatist,’ in J. O. Francis, The Legend of the Welsh and Other Papers (Cardiff: The Educational Company Ltd, 1924), p. 56. Herafter LW. For instances of such attacks, see Thomas, Internal Difference. Aspects of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century responses in Anglophone Welsh literature to Nonconformist culture are briefly but illuminatingly considered in Jane Aaron, ‘“At eternity’s window”: representing church and chapel in the Anglophone literature of Wales’, in Christopher Meredith (ed.), Moment of Earth: Poems and Essays in Honour of Jeremy Hooker (Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 2007), pp. 257–72.

Chapter 4 1

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10

11

Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psycho-analyst (London: Hogarth, 1959), p. 11. Hereafter FA. D. M. Phillips, Evan Roberts the Great Welsh Revivalist and His Work (London: Marshall Brothers, no date but Introduction dated 24 July, 1906). J. Rogues de Fursac, Un Mouvement Mystique Contemporain: Le Réveil Religieux du Pays de Galles (1904–1905) (Paris: Felix Alcan, Éditeur, Librairies Félix Alcan et Guillaumin Rénnies, 108 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 1907), p. 185. The response of these psychologists to the Revival is discussed by Gareth Miles, ‘Y Diwygiad trwy lygad Ffrancwr’, Taliesin, 124 (2005), 22–6. A recent example of the ‘deconstruction’ of the Revival is Robert Pope, ‘Dadfythu “Diwygiad Evan Roberts”’, Y Traethodydd (Gorffennaf, 2004), 133–52. . Principal Edwards, quoted in an article by J. A. Jenkins on ‘Higher education in Wales in its relation to the Nonconformist colleges’, Young Wales 1 (1895), 269. Gwyn Thomas, A Welsh Eye (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 122. Hereafter WE. Gwyn Thomas, High on Hope (Cowbridge: D. Brown and Sons, 1985), p. 47. Hereafter HH. John Harris (ed.), Caradoc Evans, My People (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1987), p. 109. Hereafter MP. Wales, 3 (Autumn 1937), inside cover. See reprint of Wales, Nos 1–11 (London: Frank Cass, 1969). Hereafter W. Meic Stephens (ed.), Rhys Davies, Collected Stories (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996), I, p. 44. Hereafter RD1. Julian Croft and Don Dale-Jones (eds), The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (Llandysul: Gomer, 1987), 14, 6, 132. Hereafter CP. Gwyn Thomas, A Few Selected Exits (Bridgend: Seren, 1993), p. 145. Hereafter FSE.

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24

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Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (New York: Longman, 2001), p. 34. Rhys Davies, The Story of Wales (London: Collins, 1933), 23. Hereafter SW. Michael Parnell (ed.), Gwyn Thomas, Meadow Prospect Revisited (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992), p. 42. Hereafter MPR. Rhys Davies, My Wales (London and New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1938), p. 117. Hereafter MW. Caradoc Evans, My Neighbours (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), p. 7, Hereafter MN. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 201. John Harris (ed.), Caradoc Evans, Morgan Bible and Journal 1939–1944 (Aberystwyth: Planet, 2006), pp. 136, 134, 130, 140. Hereafter MB. Caradoc Evans, Capel Sion (London: Melrose, n.d.), p. 17. Hereafter CS. Bridget Fowler, Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture (London: Blackwell, 2000); Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes (eds), An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu (London: Macmillan, 1990). Caradoc Evans, Nothing to Pay (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), p. 121. Hereafter NP. Meic Stephens (ed.), Rhys Davies, Collected Stories (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996), II, p. 87. Hereafter RD2. Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot (Bridgend: Seren, 1998), p. 81. Hereafter PHF. Gwyn Thomas, All Things Betray Thee (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 62. Hereafter ATBT. Michael Parnell (ed.), Gwyn Thomas, Selected Short Stories (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1988), p. 47. Hereafter SS. Michael Parnell (ed.), Gwyn Thomas, Three Plays (Bridgend: Seren, 1990), p. 105. Hereafter TP. Gwyn Thomas, Sorrow for Thy Sons (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 34. Hereafter STS. Dafydd Johnston (ed.), Idris Davies, The Complete Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), p. 8. Hereafter ID. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (London: Penguin, 1970), p. 65. Morton Dauwen Zabel (ed.), Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), p. 221.

Chapter 5 1

2

Julian Croft and Don Dale Jones (eds), T. Harri Jones, Collected Poems (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1987), p. 122. Hereafter THJ. Paul Ransome, Antonio Gramsci: A New Introduction (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1992).

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4

5

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8 9

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13

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17 18

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Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 104. Hereafter PB. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Hereafter RW. Robert Hurley (ed.), M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (London: Allen Lane, 1979). Hereafter F. Gwyn Thomas, A Welsh Eye (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 130. Hereafter WE. Caradoc Evans, My Neighbours (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), p. 3. Hereafter MN. Rhys Davies, The Story of Wales (London: Collins, 1943), p. 24. Hereafter SW. John Harris (ed.), Caradoc Evans, Fury Never Leaves Us (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1985), p. 157. Hereafter FNLU. Dafydd Johnston (ed.), Idris Davies, The Complete Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), p. 221. Hereafter ID. Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), William Blake, Complete Writings (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 215. Gwyn Thomas, All Things Betray Thee (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 25. Hereafter ATBT. Michael Parnell (ed.), Gwyn Thomas, Three Plays (Bridgend: Seren, 1990), p. 81. Hereafter TP. Gwyn Thomas, Sorrow for Thy Sons (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 210. Hereafter STS. Gwyn Thomas, The Dark Philosophers (Cardigan: Parthian, Library of Wales Series, 2005), p. 119. Hereafter DP. Rhys Davies, My Wales (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1938), p. 25. Gwyn Thomas, High on Hope (Cowbridge: D. Brown and Sons, 1985), p. 55. Gwyn Thomas, The Sky of Our Lives (London: Quartet Books, 1972), p. 65. Hereafter O. For fuller discussion, see the opening pages of chapter 7, ‘The English Whitman’, in M. Wynn Thomas, Transatlantic Connections: Whitman US/ Whitman UK (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005). Hereafter TC. W. C. R. Hancock, ‘R. J. Campbell: Christianity interpreted as socialism,’ Journal of the United Reformed Church Historical Society, 6, 8 (2001), 619–27. ‘Y Meirwon’, translated as ‘The Dead’, in Joseph Clancy (tr.), Twentieth Century Welsh Poetry (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982), pp. 97–8. Hereafter TCWP. John Harris (ed.), Caradoc Evans, Morgan Bible and Journal 1939–44 (Aberystwyth: Planet, 2006), p. 26. For Evans’s use of biblical language, see ‘The body and the book: Caradoc Evans’s My People’, in Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 47–69.

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Chapter 6 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12 13 14 15

16 17

18

19

20

21

Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psycho-analyst (London: Hogarth, 1959), 10 Hereafter FA. Michael Parnell (ed.), Gwyn Thomas, Meadow Prospect Revisited (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992), p. 14. Hereafter MPR. Michael Parnell (ed.), Gwyn Thomas, Selected Short Stories (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1988), p. 47. Hereafter SS. Gwyn Thomas, A Welsh Eye (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 174. Hereafter WE. Russell Davies, Secret Sins: Sex, Violence and Society in Carmarthenshire, 1870– 1920 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996) p. 210, Alwyn D. Rees, Life in a Welsh Countryside (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1950). Dafydd Johnston (ed.), Idris Davies, The Complete Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), p. 228. Hereafter ID. See M. Wynn Thomas, ‘R. S. Thomas: war poet,’ Welsh Writing in English, 2 (1996), 82–97; Linda Adams, ‘Fieldwork: the Caseg Broadsheets and the Welsh anthropologist’, Welsh Writing in English, 5 (1999), 51–85. J. O. Francis, ‘Against measuring heads,’ in The Legend of the Welsh and Other Papers (Cardiff and London: The Educational Publishing Co., Ltd, 1924), pp. 29–33. Hereafter LW. J. O. Francis, The Dark Little People (Cardiff: The Educational Publishing Co., Ltd., n.d.), pp. 55–6. Hereafter DLP. Wales, 3 (August 1939), 246. See reprint of Wales, Nos 1–11 (London: Frank Cass, 1969). Hereafter W. Gwyn Jones, The Walk Home (London: Dent, 1962), p. 31. Hereafer WH. Caradoc Evans, Nothing to Pay (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989). Hereafter NP. Rhys Davies, The Story of Wales (London: Collins, 1943), p. 25. Hereafter SW. Rhys Davies, My Wales (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1938), p. 196. Hereafter MW. J. O. Francis, His Shining Majesty (London: Samuel French, n.d.). J. O. Francis, Tares In the Wheat (Cardiff: William Lewis, 1943), p. 24. Hereafter TIW. J. O. Francis, The Poacher (Cardiff: The Educational Publishing Co., Ltd, n.d. E.P.C Welsh Drama Series, no.10). Sam Adams and Roland Mathias (eds), The Collected Stories of Geraint Goodwin (Tenby: The Five Arches Press, 1976), p. 224. Hereafter GG. Meic Stephens (ed.), Rhys Davies, Collected Stories (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996), II, p. 296. Hereafter RD2. Rhys Davies, The Black Venus (London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1944), p. 5. Hereafter BV. For relevant studies see Kirsti Bohata, ‘The Black Venus: atavistic sexualities’, in Meic Stephens (ed.), Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), pp. 231–43, and Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004).

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23 24 25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32 33

34 35

36

37

38

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Meic Stephens (ed.), Rhys Davies, Collected Stories (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996), I, p. 81. Hereafter RD1. Rhys Davies, Rings On Her Fingers (London: Harold Shaylor, 1930), p. 24. Rhys Davies, The Red Hills (London: Putnam, 1932), p. 26. Hereafter TRH. Rhys Davies, The Withered Root (Cardigan: Parthian, 2007, Library of Wales Series), p. 105. Hereafter WR. Gwyn Jones, Being and Belonging: Some Notes on Language, Literature and the Welsh (Cardiff: Qualitex Printing Ltd, 1977, BBC Wales Annual Lecture), p. 9. Gwyn Jones (ed.), Welsh Legends and Folktales (London: Oxford University Press, 1986). Gwyn Jones, Collected Short Stories (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), p. 3, Hereafter CSS. Caradoc Evans, Pilgrims in a Foreign Land (London: Andrew Dakers, 1942), p. 63. Hereafter PFL. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 31. Hereafter OL. Ll. Wyn Griffith, The Wooden Spoon (London: Dent, 1937), p. 16. Hereafter WS. Ll. Wyn Griffith, Word from Wales (London: Allen & Unwin, 1941), p. 23. Ll. Wyn Griffith, The Way Lies West (London: Dent; reprinted Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1969), p. 35. Hereafter WLW. Philip J. Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 59. John Harris (ed.), Caradoc Evans, Morgan Bible and Journal 1939–44 (Aberystwyth: Planet, 2006), p. 48. Hereafter MBJ. ‘Pechod,’ translated as ‘Sin’, in Joseph Clancy, tr., Twentieth-Century Welsh Poetry (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982), p. 94. ‘Gyrrwr Trên’, translated as ‘Engine Driver’, in Robert Minhinnick, tr., The Adulterer’s Tongue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), p. 3. Ulrich Weisttein (tr.), Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 182.

Chapter 7 1

2

3

4

5 6

David N. Thomas (ed.), Dylan Remembered: Volume One (1914–1934) (Bridgend: Seren, 2003), p. 165. Hereafter DR. Paul Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (London: Dent, 1985), p. 172. Hereafter CL. John Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Film Scripts (London: Dent, 1995), p. 29. Hereafter FS. Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas; Early Prose Writings (London: Dent, 1971), p. 158. Hereafter EPW. John Ackerman, Welsh Dylan (Bridgend: Seren, 1998), pp. 58–9. Hereafter WD. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (eds), Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934– 1953 (London: Dent, 1988), pp. 73–4. Hereafter CP.

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17

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Leslie Norris (ed.), Dylan Thomas, Collected Stories (London: Dent, 1986), p. 126. Hereafter CS. Ralph Maud, Where Have the Old Words Got Me? (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), p. 145. Hereafter WH. Monthly Calendar, 30 (April 1935), 52. Monthly Calendar, 29 (March 1935), 38. See D. Elwyn Davies, ‘They Thought for Themselves’: A Brief Look at the History of Unitarianism in Wales and the Tradition of Liberal Religion (Llandysul: Gomer, 1982); D. Elwyn Davies, Cewri’r Ffydd: Bywgraffiadur y Mudiad Undodaidd yng Nghymru (Llandysul: Gomer, 1999); John Gwili Jenkins, Hanfod Duw a Pherson Crist (Liverpool: Hughes Evans a’i Feibion, 1931). Dewi Eirug Davies, Hoff Ddysgedig Nyth: Cyfraniad Coleg Presbyteraidd Caerfyrddin i Fywyd Cymru (Abertawe: T} John Penry, 1976), p. 114. The discussion of the college that immediately follows is heavily indebted to this study. For a concise summary of Marles’s life and career, see the entry on William Thomas (Gwilym Marles) in Welsh Biography Online (National Library of Wales website). Hereafter WBO. T. Oswald Williams, Undodiaeth a Rhyddid Meddwl (Llandysul: Gomer, 1962), p. 274. The Dial 1 (1840–4) (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961). Hereafter D. Wales No.1 (Summer 1937), 1. Reprinted in Wales, Nos 1–11 (London: Frank Cass, 1969). Hereafter W. For Gwilym Marles’s leading role in the rebellion against landlords, see Nansi Martin, Gwilym Marles (Llandysul: Gomer, 1979). Also Aubrey J. Martin, Hanes Llwynrhydowen (Llandysul: Gomer, 1977). Helen Gardner (ed.), The Metaphysical Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1936), p. 39. Roland Mathias, A Ride Through the Wood (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1985), pp. 208, 127. Hereafter RW. Theodore Parker, The Essential Excellence of the Christian Religion. Website: http//www.geocities.com/capitolhill1764/truefaith.html?200814. A. M. Allchin, Praise above all: Discovering the Welsh Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991). ‘Parker a’r enw Cristion’, Owen Evans, Yr Ymofynydd 5 (December, 1863), 275–8; Yr Ymofynydd 6 (January, 1864), 16–22.

Chapter 8 1

2 3

Tony Brown (ed.), Glyn Jones, The Dragon Has Two Tongues (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), p. 1. Hereafter DHTT. ‘The making of a poet’, 1, Planet, 112, 69. Hereafter MP1. ‘The making of a poet’, 2, Planet, 113, 74, 75. Hereafter MP2.

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Glyn Jones, Goodbye, What Were You? (Llandysul: Gomer, 1994), p. xiv. Hereafter GWWY. Meic Stephens (ed.), The Collected Poems of Glyn Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), p. 200. Hereafter GJCP. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (eds), Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934–1953 (London: Dent, 1988), pp. 73–4. W. T. Pennar Davies, ‘“The Fire in the Thatch”: Religion in Wales’, in R. Brinley Jones (ed.), Anatomy of Wales (Cowbridge: Gwerin Publications, 1972), p. 115. Hereafter FT. Tony Brown (ed.), The Collected Stories of Glyn Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. 42. Hereafter GJCS. ‘As I walked through the wilderness of this world, as I walked through the wilderness, as I walked through the city with the loud electric faces . . . ’, in Wales,1 (Summer 1937), 1. Reprinted in Wales, Nos 1–11 (London: Frank Cass, 1969). Glyn Jones, The Valley, the City, the Village (London: Severn House Publishers Ltd, 1980), p. 12. Hereafter VCV. Belinda Humfrey (ed.), Glyn Jones, The Island of Apples (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).

Chapter 9 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Emyr Humphreys, Outside the House of Baal (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), p. 10. Hereafter OHB. Emyr Humphreys, The Taliesin Tradition (Bridgend: Seren, 1983), p. 101. Hereafter TT. Emyr Humphreys, Flesh and Blood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. 67. Hereafter FB. M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Emyr Humphreys, Conversations and Reflections (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), p. 141. Hereafter CR. Arwel Jones (ed.), Emyr Humphreys, Dal Pen Rheswm (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), 6. Hereafter DPR. The Land of the Living sequence consists of seven novels: National Winner (1971, but the sixth novel in the sequence of the narrative); Flesh and Blood (1974); The Best of Friends (1978); Salt of the Earth (1985); An Absolute Hero (1986); Open Secrets (1988); Bonds of Attachment (1991). Emyr Humphreys, Collected Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. 5. Hereafter EHCP. Emyr Humphreys, A Man’s Estate (Cardigan: Parthian, Library of Wales series, 2006), p. 31. Hereafter ME. Emyr Humphreys, Bonds of Attachment (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), p. 269. Hereafter BA. Emyr Humphreys, The Little Kingdom (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1946). Hereafter LK.

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M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Emyr Humphreys, A Toy Epic (Bridgend: Seren, 1989). Hereafter TE. Saunders Lewis, Williams Pantycelyn (London: Foyle’s, 1927). Emyr Humphreys, The Gift of a Daughter (Bridgend: Seren, 1998), pp. 35–6. Hereafter GD. Emyr Humphreys, Ghosts and Strangers (Bridgend: Seren, 2001), p. 164. Hereafter GS. Emyr Humphreys, The Voice of a Stranger (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949). Hereafter VS. Emyr Humphreys, The Best of Friends (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. 10. Hereafter BF. Emyr Humphreys, An Absolute Hero (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 86, 87. Hereafter AH. Emyr Humphreys, Open Secrets (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 42. Hereafter OS. Emyr Humphreys, A Change of Heart (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951). Emyr Humphreys, Salt of the Earth (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 138, 63. Hereafter SE. Emyr Humphreys, The Gift (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963), p. 307. Hereafter G. Emyr Humphreys, National Winner (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 51. Hereafter NW. Emyr Humphreys, Natives (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968). Emyr Humphreys, Jones (London: Dent, 1984), p. 119. Emyr Humphreys, The Anchor Tree (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980). Emyr Humphreys, The Shop (Bridgend: Seren, 2005). Emyr Humphreys, Unconditional Surrender (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), p. 129. George M. Ll. Davies, Pilgrimage of Peace (London: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1950), p. 9. Hereafter PP. Roland Mathias, A Ride Through the Wood (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1985), p. 208. Hereafter RTW. Sam Adams (ed.), Roland Mathias, Complete Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 190. Hereafter RMCP.

Epilogue 1

2 3 4

Tom Davies, One Winter of the Holy Spirit (Llanrwst: Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2004), p. 120. Siân James, A Small Country (Bridgend: Seren, 1989), p. 180. Siân James, Love and War (Bridgend: Seren, 2004). Menna Gallie, The Small Mine (London: Gollancz, 1962), p. 11. A much more stereotypically sour imaging of Nonconformity’s treatment of women is found in Hilda Vaughan’s Her Father’s House (London: Heinemann, 1930). Raised in the narrow household of her mean, bigoted killjoy uncle, who is a chapel

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stalwart, young nature-loving Nelly makes rebellious contact with a sensual rake, the dissolute ‘fine gentleman’ who is her father. But although she, too, shares his sensuous delight in life, she possesses a moral fibre capable of withstanding all the dreadful trials the novel’s melodramatic plot heaps upon her. Eventually, she wins through not only to a loving, stable marriage but to inheritance of her father’s great house and with it the elevated social status that, in her eyes, requires the exchange of chapel for church. Menna Gallie, Strike for a Kingdom (Dinas Powys: Honno Classics, 2003; first published 1959), p. 151. Gillian Clarke, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), p. 46. Sandra Anstey (ed.), R. S. Thomas, Selected Prose (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1983), p. 44. Hereafter RSTSP. R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 471. Hereafter RSTCP. Jeremy Hooker, Putting the Poem in Place (Inaugural Lecture, University of Glamorgan, 11 December, 2007), p. 10. The indebtedness of twentieth-century Welsh secular society to the nineteenth-century Nonconformist culture that preceded it is very thoughtfully and thoroughly considered in Jeremy Hooker, Imagining Wales: A View of Modern Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Gwyn Thomas, A Few Selected Exits (Bridgend: Seren, 1993), p. 161. Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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INDEX

Aaron, Jane 49, 50 Aberdare 39 Aberdare, Lord 94 Aberdyfi 77 Abererch 153 Aberystwyth 48, 51, 81, 121, 186, 227, 248 Abraham, William, see Mabon Ackerman, John 13, 229 Adam Bede (Eliot) 10 ‘Adam’s song after Paradise’ (T. Harri Jones) 161 Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shôn Catti, The (T. J. Ll. Prichard) 50–3, 54 Africa 3, 5 ‘After the Funeral’ (Dylan Thomas) 143, 229–30, 231, 245, 270, 289 ‘Against measuring heads’ (Francis) 186 ‘Against wantonness’ (T. Harri Jones) 146 Ainsworth, Henry 36 All Things Betray Thee (Gwyn Thomas) 137–9, 162–3, 164, 167–8, 169 ‘All we like sheep’ (Gwyn Jones) 213–14 Allchin, A. M. 253 Allt-y-Clych 148, 160 ‘Ambition of Twm Sali, The’ (Saunders) 104

Ambrose, William, see Emrys Among the Mountains (Ceredig) 87–8 Anabaptists 22, 23 Anchor Tree, The (Humphreys) 311 ‘And death shall have no dominion’ (Dylan Thomas) 241 Angels in Wales (Margam Jones) 95–7 Anglesey 35, 59, 99 Anglicanism 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 35, 37, 46, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60–1, 62, 66–7, 69, 79, 87, 91, 92, 105, 106, 119, 150, 159–60, 171, 178, 184, 197, 236, 253, 280, 296–7, 298, 334; see also Church in Wales; Church of England Anna, or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress (Bennett) 49 Annibynwyr 11, 13, 24, 238, 259, 261, 268, 271, 272, 296, 300, 309; see also Independents; Congregationalists Aphrodite, 234–5 Arianism 29, 238, 239, 240 Arius 29, 238 Arminianism 239, 295, 306 Arnold, Matthew 14, 46, 105, 297 ‘Arrogant saviours, The’ (Idris Davies) 173–4

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Arthur 301 Augustine of Canterbury, St (‘Apostle of the English’) 94 Augustine of Hippo, St 20, 29, 272 Australia 3, 111, 123, 154, 157, 181 Ayers Rock 160 ‘Back (to R. S. Thomas)’ (T. Harri Jones) 160 Bala 28, 87, 109 Baldwin, James 61 Balkans, the 34 ‘Ballad of me, The’ (T. Harri Jones) 144–5 ‘Ballad of the Ancient Mariner, The’ (Coleridge) 159 Balliol College, Oxford 271 Bangor 81, 82 ‘Bateau ivre, Le’ (Rimbaud) 292 Baptists 24, 27, 37, 48, 84, 91, 178, 244, 256, 298, 307, 309, 320 bardic tradition 81, 191, 203, 204; see also Gorsedd of Bards ‘Be This Her Memorial’ (Caradoc Evans) 121 Beale, Anna 55–6 Beardsley, Aubrey 136 ‘Before I knocked’ (Dylan Thomas) 249 Bennett, Anna Maria 49 Bennett, Arnold 173 Best of Friends, The (Humphreys) 305–6 ‘Bethania’ (Glyn Jones) 274 Beulah 154 Beuno, St 321 Bible, the 20, 21, 23, 27, 41, 83, 91, 109, 122, 123, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 140, 141, 173, 174, 175, 177, 195, 208, 216–17, 228, 230, 232, 251, 252, 253, 261, 268, 274, 282, 286, 305–6, 309 Birmingham 91 ‘Black bride of Caerwen, The’ (Trevelyan) 55

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INDEX

‘Black Spot, the’, see ‘Smotyn Du, Y’ Black Venus, The (Rhys Davies) 197–200 Blake, William 161, 162, 174, 228, 250–1, 270 Blatchford, Robert 170 ‘Bliss in the Night’ (Caradoc Evans) 206 ‘Blodwen’ (Rhys Davies) 200–1 Blue Bird, The (Maeterlinck) 136 Blue Books Report (1847) 32, 33, 40, 85, 90, 148, 197, 297 Bodedern 330 Bonds of Attachment (Humphreys) 300–1, 305, 310 Borges, Jorge Luis 143 Borrow, George 204 Bosch, Hieronymus 219 Bourdieu, Pierre 132, 155 Bowen, Euros 150 ‘Boy in the Bucket, The’ (Glyn Jones) 280–1 ‘Brechfa Chapel’ (Mathias) 322, 324 Brecon 49, 321 Brittany 320 Browning, Robert 323 Bryn-crug chapel (Tywyn) 1 Brynteg Congregational Chapel (Penyrheol) 2, 7, 13 Bufton, John 80–4 Bunyan, John 71, 174, 244, 261, 276, 304, 307, 324 Burke, Edmund 29, 240, 323 ‘Burning babe, The’ (Southwell) 249 ‘Burning Baby, The’ (Dylan Thomas) 248–9 ‘Burning brambles’ (Mathias) 322 Burns, Robert 237 Bush, George 9 Bwlchymynydd 117 Bwlch-y-Rhiw chapel (Cil-y-cwm) 18 By Berwen Banks (Raine) 69–70 Cadwaladr, Betsi 40 Calvin, John 22, 29, 35, 45, 74, 82–3, 140, 178

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INDEX

Calvinism 12, 22, 23, 27, 28–9, 30, 34, 35, 45–9, 70–1, 72, 74, 82–3, 84, 88–9, 95, 103, 105, 111, 113, 149, 150, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178, 180, 184, 186, 189, 193, 214, 217–18, 222, 227, 229, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 255, 272, 303, 307, 311, 316, 336; see also Methodism, Calvinistic; neo-Calvinism Cambria (Pennsylvania) 41 Cambridge 25 Campbell, John McLeod 36 Campbell, R. J. 73, 171, 177 Canwyll y Cymry (Rhys Prichard) 52 capitalism 32, 34, 113, 140, 168, 170, 172, 175, 246, 333 Caradog of Llancarfan 53 Cardiff 203, 257, 259, 265, 285 Cardigan Bay 204 Cardiganshire 53, 66, 74, 129, 130, 184, 237 Carlyle, Thomas 173 Carmarthen 36, 238 Carmarthenshire 185, 236, 237 Carpenter, Edward 173 Caruso, Enrico 165 Caseg Broadsheets, The (Chamberlain, Petts) 251 ‘Cassation’ (Glyn Jones) 266–7 Catholicism 12, 20, 22–3, 24, 26, 30, 98, 150, 158, 165, 171, 184, 253, 273, 296, 300, 311, 319, 334 Cave, Jane 46–8, 49 Ceiriog (John Ceiriog Hughes) 45 Celtic Church 61, 94, 184, 272, 321 Celts, Celticism 46, 58, 65, 67, 72, 86– 7, 185–6, 187, 190, 197, 201 Cenadon Cymreig (Griffith) 5 Ceredig (Owen Parry) 87–8 Chaliapin, Feodor 165 Chamberlain, Brenda 251 Change (Francis) 108–9, 111, 113 Change of Heart, A (Humphreys) 306–7

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Channing, W. E. 240 chapel-building 26, 31–2, 37–8 Chaplin, Charlie 192 Charles I, king of England 24 Charles II, king of England 25 Charles, Thomas 28, 94,122 Chartism 56, 90, 137 Cheltenham Training College 285 Chesterton, G. K. 173 Chicago 7 China 5, 41 Christian Endeavour Society 109 Christian Pacifism 315 Christian Socialism 29–30, 73, 108, 170, 177 Christian Surrealism 276 Christianity 6, 13, 20, 24, 29, 41, 74, 91, 170, 184, 185, 195, 204, 237, 238, 247, 251, 253, 268, 277, 299 Church in Wales 61, 296, 334, 336 Church of England 23, 170, 297 Churchill, Winston 134 Chwefru, river 157 Cil-y-cwm 18 Cincinnati 41 ‘City of Destruction, A’ (Dylan Thomas) 244 City Temple (London) 171 Clarendon Codes (1661, 1665) 25 Clarion 170 Clarke, Gillian 333–4 class 12,13–14, 30, 34, 39, 40–1, 42, 57, 58, 59, 71, 73, 85–6, 90, 92, 94, 96–7, 99, 104, 106, 109–10, 111–12, 118, 122, 137, 138–9, 168, 171, 175, 179, 187, 240, 246, 261, 278–9, 297–8, 304, 307; see also proletariat, the Clifford, Max 30 Clio and the Children (Sims) 43 ‘Cofiant’ (Clarke) 334 Coleridge, S. T. 159, 242 Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel 39 Collected Poems (Dylan Thomas) 254 Collected Poems (Glyn Jones) 270

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Colour of Cockcrowing, The (T. Harri Jones) 122, 146 ‘Colour of Cockcrowing, The’ (T. Harri Jones) 147 ‘Common path, The’ (Glyn Jones) 291 Communism 60, 227, 236, 246, 265, 304 Conflict of Owen Prytherch, The (Gallichan) 72 Congregationalists 13, 24, 84, 91, 92, 151, 171, 180, 228, 229, 309; see also Annibynwyr; Independents Côr Caradog 40 Cornwall 201 Counter-Reformation, the 23 ‘Courtship of Edward and Nancy, The’ (Saunders) 104 Cradoc, Walter 25, 26, 272 Cranmer, Thomas 23 Cranogwen (Sarah Jane Rees) 40, 41 Crebor, Elizabeth 48, 49 Crickhowell 57 Crimea, the 34, 40 Cromwell, Oliver 24, 25, 26, 319 Cromwell, Thomas 23 Cross Currents (Francis) 109–10 Crystal Palace 40, 178 Culhwch and Olwen 215 Cwm chapel (Penmachno) 294 ‘Cwmcelyn’ (Glyn Jones) 285, 289–90 ‘Cwmchwefri Rock’ (T. Harri Jones) 147–8 Cwmdonkin Drive (Swansea) 237, 292 ‘Cwrdd mawr’ (Idris Davies) 174–5 Cwyfan, St 321 Cyfarthfa 138, 259 cyfarwydd, the 131, 189, 203, 204, 205, 212, 292 cymanfaoedd canu 39, 126, 174, 280 Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg 298, 310 ‘Cymmanfa, The’ (William Parry) 94 Cymro, Y 37

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Cymru Fydd 42, 70, 85, 86, 110, 298; see also Young Wales movement Cymru Fydd 45–6, 76, 104 Cynddelw (Robert Ellis) 45 ‘Cynog’ (Mathias) 323–4 Cynon Valley 4 Cyprus 324 Dafydd ap Gwilym 122, 273 Daily Mail 40 Daniel Evelyn, Heretic (Cadvan Rh}s) 73–5, 240 Dardanelles campaign 315 Dark Little People, The (Francis) 186–7 Dark Philosophers, The (Gwyn Thomas) 140, 164–5 Darwinism 14, 33, 36, 81, 83 ‘Dau gapel’ (R. S. Thomas) 334 Daumier, Honoré 129 ‘David’ (Mallt Williams) 101–2 Davies, Aneirin Talfan 150, 159–60 Davies, D. T. 149 Davies, David 90–1, 93 Davies, George M. Ll. 314, 315 Davies, Idris 140–2, 150, 161–2, 169, 172–8, 179, 185–6, 217, 218–19, 222, 223 Davies, Joseph 11 Davies, Mary viii, 3, 4, 6–8 Davies, Pennar 12, 271–3 Davies, Rhys 30, 122, 126–8, 130, 135–6, 142, 151, 156–7, 162, 165, 190–2, 195–203, 218–19, 221–2 Davies, Russell 185 Davies, Tom 331–2 de Valera, Eamon 315 Deaths and Entrances (Dylan Thomas) 247 Deism 29, 239 Depression, the 126, 168–9, 244, 265, 268, 279 Dial, The 241, 243 Dickinson, Emily 11 ‘Dilemma of Catherine Fuchsias, The’ (Rhys Davies) 135

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Dillwyn, Amy 56–7, 58–9 Dillwyn, Lewis Llewelyn 56 ‘Directive’ (Frost) 99 Disendowment (of the church) 59, 60, 61, 298 Disestablishment (of the church) 60, 106 Dissent 10, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 37, 40, 46, 48–9, 54, 60, 66, 81, 84, 103, 106, 163, 238, 272, 295, 298, 310 ‘Divine presence in nature and in the soul, The’ (Parker) 241 Diwygiad, y, see Revival 1904–5 ‘Do not praise your marriage day in the morning’ (Caradoc Evans) 206 Dolanog 335 Dolwar Fach 27, 94, 334, 335 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 312 Donne, John 243 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 312 Dowlais 138 ‘Down in the forest something stirred’ (Gwyn Jones) 214–15, 216 Dragon Has Two Tongues, The (Glyn Jones) 257–8, 259, 260–3, 277, 290 ‘Drama’s Petition, The’ (T. J. Ll. Prichard) 51 ‘Dream of Jake Hopkins, The’ (Glyn Jones) 281 Druids, the 55, 82, 93, 248 Easter Island 19 Echoes From the Welsh Hills (David Davies) 90–1 ‘Echoing Green, The’ (Blake) 228 ‘Eclogue’ (T. Harri Jones) 159 Edgeworth, Maria 51 education 13, 24, 33, 36, 38–9, 43, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86–7, 89, 93, 94, 104, 105–6, 107, 118–19, 122, 163, 174, 213, 220, 238, 258, 259, 261, 279, 298; see also Sunday schools Edwards, Lewis 36, 109 Edwards, Owen M. 102, 148–9

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Edwards, Thomas, see Twm o’r Nant Eglwyswrw 157 Elias, John 35, 36, 37, 86, 93, 94, 99, 126, 219, 221, 298 Eliot, George 10, 132 Elizabeth I, queen of England 23 Ellis, Robert, see Cynddelw Ellis, T. E. 42, 45 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 241, 242–3, 253, 254, 315 Emrys (William Ambrose) 45 ‘Enemies, The’ (Dylan Thomas) 233– 4 Engels, Friedrich 296 England 3, 27, 33, 37, 39 English language 10, 23, 41, 58, 85, 91, 118, 124, 219, 220, 257, 258, 259, 297 Enlightenment, the 238, 242 Enoc Huws (Daniel Owen) 10 Erasmus 20 Erbery, William 25, 26 ‘Especially when the October wind’ (Dylan Thomas) 234, 235, 254 Esther Wynne (Worboise) 91–2 Ethics of Evan Wynne, The (Pryce) 59–61 Evans, Caradoc 7, 10, 42, 95, 98, 100, 103, 110, 112, 120–1, 122, 128– 36, 143, 148, 149, 150, 156, 160, 171, 178–80, 185, 189, 190, 205– 9, 216–16, 217, 223, 227, 260–1, 336 Evans, Christmas 35, 36, 93, 94, 157, 196, 288 Evans, Dafydd 36 Evans, Marguerite 131, 180 ‘Expiation’ (Mathias) 323 Fairclough, Norman 125 Familists 25 Family Romance 119, 121, 143 Fascism 246, 247, 265 ‘Father in Sion, A’ (Caradoc Evans) 133–4

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Faulkner, William 318 Faustus Socinus 238 Fellowship of Reconciliation, the 315 ‘Fern Hill’ (Dylan Thomas) 143, 144, 254, 289 Ferndale 4, 7, 32 ‘Field at Vallorcines, A’ (Mathias) 327 Fielding, Henry 51 ‘Fight, The’ (Dylan Thomas) 228 Finland 5 ‘Fire in the thatch, The’ (Pennar Davies) 272, 273–4 First World War 14, 42, 43, 111, 113, 114, 201, 261–2, 298, 304, 305, 306, 307, 314, 315–16, 332 Flesh and Blood (Humphreys) 304–5 Fleure, H. J. 186, 188 folk-lore, folk narratives 50, 51, 52, 54, 64, 67, 114, 161, 188, 191, 192, 195, 205–6, 208, 211, 214, 228 Folk-lore and Folk Stories of Wales (Trevelyan) 54 ‘Fool in the wood, The’ (Mathias) 320 ‘For my grandfather’ (T. Harri Jones) 123 ‘Force that through the green fuse, The’ (Dylan Thomas) 249–50 Foucault, Michel 124, 128, 155, 156, 157, 158 Francis, J. O. 108–11, 113, 114, 186–7, 192–4, 195, 222 Free Associations (Ernest Jones) 117 French Revolution, the 28, 29 Freud, Sigmund 111, 117, 119, 121, 183, 184, 186, 190, 232 Freudianism 302, 308 From Snowdon to the Sea (Trevelyan) 54–5 ‘From whence cometh my help’ (T. Harri Jones) 159 Frost, Robert 99 Frythones, Y 40–1 ‘Fugue for Ann Griffiths’ (R. S. Thomas) 335

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INDEX

Gallichan, Walter 72 Gallie, Menna 333 ‘Garden of love, The’ (Blake) 162 Garthowen (Raine) 66–7 ‘Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar’ (Dylan Thomas) 247–8 Gaza 315 General Strike (1926) 279 Geneva 22 Gift, The (Humphreys) 308–9 Gift of a Daughter, The (Humphreys) 302, 311–12, 317, 318 Gladstone, W. E. 71, 108 Glamorgan 126 Glasgow University 33 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 239 ‘Goodbye, what were you’ (Glyn Jones) 281 Goodwin, Geraint 142, 194–5 ‘Gorse idyll’ (T. Harri Jones) 158 Gorsedd of Bards, the 29, 242, 297 Gorseinon 2, 13 Gowerton 117 Gramsci, Antonio 154–5 Graves, Robert 147, 326 Great Western Railway 117 ‘Green island, The’ (Gwyn Jones) 204–5 Greene, Graham 300, 312 Greenland 204 Griffith, Sydney S. 95 Griffith, Wyn 209–13 Griffiths, Ann 27, 49, 94, 186, 290, 334–5 Gruffydd, W. J. 149 Guernica 247 Gwalia Deserta (Idris Davies) 175, 176 Gwen Penri (Bufton) 80–4 Gwen Tomos (Daniel Owen) 10 Gwenallt (David James Jones) 150, 171–2, 175, 217–18, 333 Gwendraeth Valley 315 Gwent 26 gwerin, the 12, 69, 87, 90, 93, 102, 112, 148, 288, 290

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Gwilym Hiraethog (William Rees) 11–12, 13, 34, 45 Gwilym Marles (William Thomas) 29, 74, 236–40, 242, 243–4, 245, 246, 250, 253, 254, 255 Gwilym Pont Taf, see Parry, William ‘Gwyneth and Illtud’ (H. Elwyn Thomas) 79–80 Gyffylliog, Y 182 gypsies 187–8 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 303 Handel, G. F. 39, 213 Harris, Howel 27, 46, 47, 49, 86, 93, 288 Harris, James 70 Harris, Thomas 49 Hawarden 71 Hawen chapel (Troed yr Aur) 116 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 337 Hegel, G. W. F. 33 Henry VII, king of England 301 Henry VIII, king of England 23 Henry Vaughan; A Story of Pembrokeshire (MorganRichardson) 57–8 Hiawatha (Coleridge-Taylor) 39 High on Hope (Gwyn Thomas) 124 Higher Criticism, the 42, 72, 96, 252 Hinduism 9 Hiraethog, see Gwilym Hiraethog His Shining Majesty (Francis) 192 Hitler, Adolf 298 ‘Homage to Wallace Stevens’ (T. Harri Jones) 148 Home Rule 60 Homer 94 Hooker, Jeremy 336–7 Horsely, ? 36 Hosea, prophet 317 How Green Was My Valley (Llewellyn) 332 Hughes, John Ceiriog, see Ceiriog Hughes, Trevor 230, 245, 248 Hulme, T. E. 179

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humanism 13, 20, 43, 62, 73, 74, 75, 111–12, 166, 169, 173, 251 Humphreys, Emyr 10, 295–318, 320, 326, 327, 336–7 Hus, John 20 Huxley, Thomas 83 hwyl 66, 70, 86, 125, 126, 127, 135, 138, 150–1, 188, 205, 221 hymns 11, 13, 20, 27, 39, 43, 63, 68, 69, 74, 106, 109, 122, 138, 148, 165, 176, 186, 193, 201, 218, 220, 221, 228, 239, 253, 259, 261, 280, 290, 305; see also cymanfaoedd canu ‘I dreamed my genesis’ (Dylan Thomas) 250–1 ‘I fellowed sleep’ (Dylan Thomas) 244–5 ‘I Was Born in the Ystrad Valley’ (Glyn Jones) 279–80 Ibsen, Henrik 149 Icelandic saga 203 identity 8–9, 13, 45, 68–9, 93, 95, 110, 133, 159, 187, 212, 258, 260, 263–4; see also nationality, nationhood; ‘Nonconformist nation’, the Ieuan Gwyllt (John Roberts) 39 If Christ Came to Wales (Morgan) 73 Illtud, St 93 ‘In Nottingham’ (Idris Davies) 141–2 ‘In Praise of the Lamb’s Bride’ (William Parry) 94 In the Land of the Harp and the Feathers (A. P. Thomas) 88–90 ‘Incarnate devil’ (Dylan Thomas) 235–6 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 171 Independents 24, 37, 84, 166, 238, 259, 268, 270, 272, 281, 295, 300; see also Annibynwyr; Congregationalists India 5 industrial society 33, 38, 99, 148, 167, 168, 171, 188, 259

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industrialism 3, 32, 33, 34, 39, 200 Interregnum, the 26 Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) 29, 55, 74, 242, 248, 282, 297 Ireland 3, 315 Irish, the 30, 86–7, 91 Island of Apples, The (Glyn Jones) 286, 290, 291–2 Jackie the Jumper (GwynThomas) 39, 168, 169–70 Jacob, Violet 57, 58–9 James I, king of England 23 James II, king of England 26 James, Jesse 2 James, Siân 332 Japan 315 Jarvis Hills stories (Dylan Thomas) 232–4 ‘Jazz festival’ (Mathias) 326–7 Jenny Jones and Jenny (Tirebuck) 70–2 Jews 6, 30, 179 John, Augustus 142, 187, 188 John Vaughan and his Friends (David Davies) 91 Johnson, Pamela Hansford 227, 243, 250, 251 Jones: A Novel (Humphreys) 309–10 Jones, Ann 229–30, 270 Jones, Bobi 218 Jones, David James, see Gwenallt Jones, Erasmus W. 86–7 Jones, Ernest 117, 118, 118, 119–20, 183 Jones, Evan 157 Jones, Glyn 142, 206, 215, 216, 218– 19, 227, 248, 256–93 Jones, Griffith 27 Jones, Gwyn 13, 188–9, 203–5, 213–15, 216–17, 223 Jones, Hannah 41 Jones, Hugh 42–3 Jones, Jack 261, 332 Jones, John (Talysarn) 35, 36–7, 298 Jones, Katherine 183 Jones, Margam 95–101

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Jones, Mary 91, 121–2 Jones, Michael D. 41 Jones, R. Tudur 261 Jones, Robert (Rhoslan) 296 Jones, T. Gwynn 149 Jones, T. Harri 111, 122–3, 124, 129, 143–8, 154, 157, 158–61, 162, 163, 179 Jones, Thomas, see Twm Siôn Catti Jones, Thomas (Welsh-language scholar) 203 Joyce, James 282, 300 Keats, John 141 Keep, The (Gwyn Thomas) 140, 163, 163–4 Kierkegaard, Søren 299 ‘Kiss, The’ (Glyn Jones) 274–5 ‘Knowledge’ (Glyn Jones) 278 Kossuth, Lajos 34 Kristeva, Julia 123 Labour ‘chapels’ 170 Labour Party 107, 110, 112, 171, 261, 301, 308 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di 318 Land of My Fathers, The (T. Marchant Williams) 105–6 Land of the Living, The (Humphreys) 295–6, 298, 301–2, 305, 306, 312 land question 97 Last Supper, The (Leonardo) 250 ‘Latter-day prophet, A’ (Bertha Thomas) 65–6 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury 24, 92 Laugharne 243, 277 Lawrence, D. H. 141–2, 158, 173, 174, 194, 199, 201, 202, 250, 277, 278 ‘Legend of Rhitta the Giant, The’ (Taliesin Williams) 55 Legend of the Welsh, The (Francis) 114 Leicester 5, 185 Leigh, Edward 36 Leonardo da Vinci 250

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Leopard, The (Lampedusa) 318 ‘Letter from a far country’ (Clarke) 333–4 Letters on Political Liberty (David Williams) 239 Lewis, Alun 251 Lewis, Saunders 12–13, 149–50, 151, 302, 311 Liberalism 29, 39, 42, 42, 45, 56, 57, 58, 59, 71, 73, 92, 95, 97, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 298, 301 Lightfoot, John 36 Little Calvary: Calfaria Fach (Griffith) 95 ‘Little grave, The’ (Glyn Jones) 275 Little Kingdom, The (Humphreys) 301 Liverpool 11, 71, 84, 85, 86, 88 Llanafanfawr 123 Llandeilo 56, 64 Llanddowror 27 Llandrindod 5 Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa 185, 186 Llangeitho 62, 94 Llangobaith (Erasmus W. Jones) 86–7 Llangyfelach 131 Llansannan 256 Llansteffan 229, 289 Llantrisant 191, 242, 248 Llantwit Major 54 Llanybri 277, 289, 290 Llewellyn, Richard 332 Lloyd, Charles Ellis 107–8, 111–13 Lloyd George, David 42, 45, 298, 301, 314, 315 Lloyd-Jones, Martyn Lloyd 126–7 Llwyd, Morgan 25, 26, 272 Llwynrhydowen chapel 226 Llyn y Fan, lady of 55 London 64, 89, 151–2, 195, 296, 301, 308 London Welsh 51, 151–2 Loud Organs (Gwyn Thomas) 169 Loughor 6, 7, 117 Love and the Agitator (Lloyd) 107–8 Love and War (Siân James) 332–3

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Lowell, Robert 329 Lowth, Robert 36 Luther, Martin 20, 21, 22, 35, 74, 93 Lutheranism 22, 23 Mabinogion, The 81, 203, 215, 282, 292, 293, 302 Mabon (William Abraham) 42 Macknight, James 36 Madagascar 5 Madrid 166 Maelog 265–6 Maes-yr-Haf settlement 315 Maes yr Onnen chapel 334 Maeterlinck, Maurice 136 Manafon 335 Manchester 71 Man’s Estate, A (Humphreys) 300, 302, 303, 312 Marion (Cyprus) 325 Marles, see Gwilym Marles ‘Marprelate’ tracts 24 Martin, John 219 Martineau, James 239–40, 252, 253 Marx, Karl 296 Marxism 108, 302, 306 Mary I, queen of England 23 Master of Dreams, A (Lloyd) 111–12 Mather, Cotton 148 Mathias, Roland 2, 251, 318–27, 336–7 Matthews, Edward (Ewenni) 37, 298 Maud, Ralph 235–6, 247 Mazzini, Giuseppe 34 Meadow Prospect Revisited (Gwyn Thomas) 126, 184 ‘Meirwon, Y’ (Gwenallt) 172 Melba, Nellie 165 Melrose, Andrew 95 ‘Mel’s Secret Love’ (Humphreys) 309 Merlin 128, 221, 222 Merthyr 49, 68, 137, 259, 262, 282, 290 ‘Merthyr’ (Glyn Jones) 270, 290–1 Merthyr Rising 90, 139 Messiah (Handel) 39, 213–14

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Methodism 9, 10, 26, 27–8, 40, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 56–7, 62, 92, 96, 101, 129, 163, 170, 172, 175, 178, 179, 186, 213, 238, 297, 334 Calvinistic 5, 6, 11, 12–13, 28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 54, 67, 69, 70–1, 74, 82, 84–5, 87, 88–9, 94, 95, 105, 106, 107, 109, 130, 171–2, 178, 180, 182, 189, 193, 195, 239, 253, 259, 272, 295, 296, 297, 301, 315 Wesleyan 35, 37, 55, 295, 296 Methodist Revival 297, 300; see also Revival (1859); Revival (1904–5) Metropolitan Tabernacle (Southwark) 178 Miller, Perry 10 Milton, John 249, 265 ‘Miner’s evening, The’ (Glyn Jones) 267–8 ‘Minister, The’ (R. S. Thomas) 335–6 Minny Street chapel (Cardiff) 259, 268, 270, 285 Moby-Dick (Melville) 275 ‘Modern dilemma, The’ (Glyn Jones) 265, 267 Modernism 186, 242, 253, 283 Mold 80, 84 Monmouthshire 213 Monsignor Quixote (Greene) 312 Montague, John 17, 225 Moody, Dwight L. 39, 164 Morgan, D. Derwenydd 73 Morgan Bible (Caradoc Evans) 131, 132–3 Morgan-Richardson, C. 57–9 Moriah chapel (Loughor) 6, 7 ‘Morning’ (Glyn Jones) 274 Morris, Lewis 81 Morris, Meredith 136 Morris, William 170 Mosley, Oswald 246, 247 Mount, Ferdinand 9–10 Mountain Ash 271

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INDEX

Mouvement Mystique Contemporain, Un (Rogues de Fursac) 118 Mozart, W. A. 164 Munch, Edvard 11 Münster 23 ‘My fist upon the stone’ (Gwyn Thomas) 138 My Neighbours (Caradoc Evans) 128 My People (Caradoc Evans) 42, 95, 120–1, 149 My Wales (Rhys Davies) 127, 130, 151 Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Radcliffe) 92 Nain Griff Brynglas 1 ‘Nancy on the warpath’ (Saunders) 102–4 Napoleonic Wars 188 National Eisteddfod 81, 82, 84, 242 National Library 42 National Museum 42 nationalism 51, 109, 110, 246, 297, 298, 300, 301, 304, 306, 308, 310, 337 nationality, nationhood 8–9, 29, 78, 81, 85, 109, 258, 297; see also identity Neath 5 Nefyn, Tom (Thomas Williams) 314–15 neo-Calvinism 218, 271, 301, 311 New Age, The 173 New England 10, 147, 148 New England Mind, The (Miller) 10 New Model Army 24–5, 319 New Quay 184 New Religion 170 New Theology 108 Newport 42, 90, 110, 137 Nicene Creed 238 Niebuhr, Reinhold 301 Nightingale, Florence 40 ‘Nonconformist, The’ (Humphreys) 299 ‘Nonconformist nation, the’ 8–9, 14–15, 33, 46, 49, 57, 61, 70, 75, 297–8, 336, 337

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‘Nonconformity: a force in Welsh national life’ (W. George Roberts) 45 Nothing to Pay (Caradoc Evans) 134–5, 189, 205–6 Novello, Ivor 3 Oberammergau Peace Conference 315 ‘Ode on the morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (Milton) 249 ‘Ode to Duty’ (Wordsworth) 265 ‘Olchon’ (Mathias) 320 Old Welsh Evangelist, The (William Parry) 93, 94 ‘Old Welsh Evangelist, The’ (William Parry) 93 ‘On the love of our country’ (Richard Price) 29 One Winter of the Holy Spirit (Tom Davies) 331–2 Ong, Walter J. 207–12, 213, 215 ‘Only girl, The’ (Bertha Thomas) 63–4 ‘Onset of winter’ (Mathias) 322–3 Open Secrets (Humphreys) 308 Orage, A. R. 173 Orality and Literacy (Ong) 207–12, 213, 215 Oscar (Gwyn Thomas) 167 ‘Out of Wales’ (T. Harri Jones) 159 Outside the House of Baal (Humphreys) 302, 312, 313–14, 315–18 Owain Glynd{r 55, 222 Owen, Daniel 10, 70–1, 80–1, 84, 103, 149 Owen, John (Puritan and theologian) 36 Owen, John, bishop of St David’s 59 Owen, Morfydd Llwyn 119–20 Owen Rees (Eleazar Roberts) 84–6 Oxford 25 pacifism 41, 73, 262, 306, 308, 314, 315–16, 319, 320 pantheism 43, 239 Paraclete Congregational Church (Newton, Mumbles) 228

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Paris 29, 118 Parker, Theodore 240–1, 252–3, 254 Parry, Owen, see Ceredig Parry, William (Gwilym Pont Taf ) 93–5 Parry-Williams, T. H. 149 ‘Pastoral’ (William Parry) 94 ‘Path to Fontana Amorasa, The’ (Mathias) 324–5, 326 Patagonia 41, 69, 261 Paul, St 20, 171, 272 ‘Peaches, The’ (Dylan Thomas) 231–2 ‘Pechod’ (Gwenallt) 172; see also ‘Sin’ Pelagius 272 Pembrokeshire 57–8 Pencader 73 Penmachno 294 Pennant (T. Osborne Roberts) 11 Penn-Lewis, Jessie 5, 6, 185 Pennsylvania 10, 311 ‘Penrhyn Hen’ (Humphreys) 303 Penry, John 24, 81, 91 Pentecostalism 7, 9 Penyberth, burning of bombing school 298 Penyrheol (Gorseinon) 2, 4, 13 Philadelphia 10 Picton, Thomas 326 Pilgrim Fathers 147 Pilgrimage of Peace (George M. Ll. Davies) 315 Pilgrims in a Foreign Land (Caradoc Evans) 206, 207–9 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan) 174, 307 Plaid Cymru 109, 298, 310 Platonism 245 Poacher, The (Francis) 194 ‘Poem’ (T. Harri Jones) 143–4 ‘Poem dedicated to the memory of Dylan Thomas’ (T. Harri Jones) 145 Poems, Religious and Moral (Crebor) 48

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Poems on Various Subjects (Cave) 46–8 Pontypridd 191 Pool, ? 36 ‘Porth Cwyfan’ (Mathias) 321, 322 ‘Portrait gallery’ (T. Harri Jones) 148 Portrait of the Artist as a young Dog (Dylan Thomas) 231 postmodernism 242, 254, 336 Powell, Vavasor 25, 26, 272, 303 pre-Christian Wales, myth of 64, 66, 67, 113, 128, 139, 161, 168, 182– 223 229, 232, 233 pre-Nonconformist Wales, concept of 122, 128, 190, 191, 192, 193–4, 200, 201, 212 Presbyterianism 22, 24, 28, 37, 84, 107, 112, 238, 296, 315 Price, Richard 29, 240 Price, William 191–2, 242, 248–9 Prichard, Caradog 333 Prichard, Rhys (Vicar Prichard) 52–4 Prichard, Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn 50–4, 55, 190 Priestley, Joseph 238 proletariat, the 30, 32, 34, 137, 138, 139, 149, 162, 164, 168, 169, 171, 172, 179, 187, 202 ‘Prologue’ (Dylan Thomas) 253 ‘Prologue to an Adventure’ (Dylan Thomas) 244 ‘Prospect of the Sea, A’ (Dylan Thomas) 234–5, 254 ‘Protestant view of the novel, A’ (Humphreys) 298–9 Protestantism 9–10, 20, 21–3, 24, 26, 32, 92, 336 Pryce, D[aisy] Hugh 59–61 Pryse, Alwyn 73 Puddicombe, Anne Adaliza, see Raine, Allen Puritanism 10, 23–5, 26–7, 52, 53 , 72, 114, 187, 188, 189, 229, 253, 272, 318, 320, 336

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INDEX

Quakerism 10, 25, 57, 315 Queen of the Rushes (Raine) 61–3, 67 Rabelais, François 216 Radicalism 58, 59–60, 61, 71, 79, 94–5 Rainbow, The (Lawrence) 194 Raine, Allen (Anne Adaliza Puddicombe) 61–3, 66–70 Rasputin, Grigori 31, 332 Rebecca Rioter, The (Amy Dillwyn) 56–7 Rebecca Riots, the 56–7, 90, 236 Rebecca’s Daughters (Dylan Thomas) 236–7 Red Hills, The (Rhys Davies) 201–2 Rees, Alwyn D. 185–6 Rees, Henry 35, 86 Rees, Sarah Jane, see Cranogwen Rees, Thomas 43 Rees, William, see Gwilym Hiraethog Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 29, 240 Reform Act (1867) 106 Reformation, the 24, 46, 312 Renan, Ernest 83 Restoration, the 26–7 Revival (1859) 99, 163 Revival (1904–5) 2–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 42, 62–3, 65, 72, 75, 99, 101, 107, 108, 117–18, 171, 185, 201, 259, 280, 331–2 Revivalism 10 Rhiw 210 Rhondda Valleys 4, 7, 32, 112, 124, 126, 166, 184, 219, 220 Rhosfelyn (Gowerton) 117 Rhymney 178 Rhymney Valley 175 Rh}s, Cadvan 73–5 Rhys, Keidrych 122, 187–8, 244, 257–8, 271, 276 Rhys, Morgan 290 Rhys, Morgan John 41 Rhys Lewis (Daniel Owen) 10, 70–1 Richard, Henry 108

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Rimbaud, Arthur 292 Rings on Her Fingers (Rhys Davies) 142 ‘Robbers do not look’ (Caradoc Evans) 206 ‘Robert Jeffries’ (Glyn Jones) 280 Roberts, Eleazar 84–6, 91 Roberts, Evan viii, 2–3, 4–5, 6, 7, 9, 62, 63, 65, 72, 75, 99, 100, 101, 107, 117–18, 119, 120, 171, 184, 185, 331–2 Roberts, Hannah 6 Roberts, John, see Ieuan Gwyllt Roberts, Kate 151 Roberts, Samuel, see S. R. Roberts, T. Osborne 11 Roberts, W. George 45 Robinson, Edwin Arlington 147 Robinson, Mary 49–50 Rogues de Fursac, J. 118, 122 Romanticism 13, 50, 65, 82, 83, 173, 239, 241, 242, 246, 251, 265, 290 Rough Field, The (Montague) 17 Rowland, Daniel 27, 62, 86, 94 Ruskin, John 173 Russia 5 S. R. (Samuel Roberts) 41 Salem 148 Sankey, Ira D. 39, 164 Saron chapel (Bodedern) 330 Saunders, Sara Maria 101, 102–5 Savile, Jimmy 124 ‘Saviour, The’ (Glyn Jones) 277–8 Scarlet Nest (Lloyd) 112–13 Schiller, Friedrich 239 Scotland 3, 23 Scott, Madeleine 147, 158 Scott, Walter 51 Second World War 33, 129, 244, 262, 308, 310, 320, 333 ‘seiat’, the 28, 84, 94, 100, 302 self-government 298 ‘Selves’ (Glyn Jones) 264–5 Seven Keys to Shaderdom (Glyn Jones) 271

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Shaw, Bernard 173 ‘Shearing, The’ (Goodwin) 194–5 Sheep-Stealers, The (Jacob) 57 Sheffield 71 Shelley, P. B. 173, 174, 287 Shop, The (Humphreys) 312 Sims, Charles 43 ‘Sin’ (Gwenallt) 217–18; see also ‘Pechod’ Slotkin, Richard 93 Small Country, A (Siân James) 332 Small Mine, The (Gallie) 333 Smith, Anthony D. 8–9, 337 Smollett, Tobias 51 ‘Smotyn Du, Y’ (‘the Black Spot’) 29, 74, 237 Smyrna Congregational Chapel (Llansteffan) 229 Soar chapel (Merthyr) 270 Soar y Mynydd chapel 334 Social Gospel 34, 36, 73, 108, 149, 171, 178 socialism 34, 60, 97, 107, 108, 109, 111–13, 141, 142, 169, 170–1, 172–3, 175, 176, 202, 246, 251, 279, 301, 308, 331 Socialist League 170 ‘Society, The’ (William Parry) 94 Socinians 238 Sorrow for Thy Sons (Gwyn Thomas) 140, 163, 165, 166 Southwell, Robert 249 Spain 165–6 ‘Spoiled preachers’ (T. Harri Jones) 157 Spurgeon, C. H. 108, 174, 176, 178–9 Stalinism 315 ‘Stare from the mountain, A’ (Mathias) 320 Stars of the Revival, The (Margam Jones) 98–101 Stephens, Meic 270 Stevens, Wallace 148 Stones of the Field, The (R. S. Thomas) 160 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 12

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Strike for a Kingdom (Gallie) 333 Sullivan, Louis 242 Sunday schools 27, 38–9, 84, 88, 91, 106, 120, 165, 166, 176, 202, 257, 258 Swansea 4, 7, 57, 234, 237, 277 Swansea and West Wales Guardian 246, 247 Swansea Valley 171, 333 ‘Sweet singer of Valle Crucis Abbey’ (Trevelyan) 54 Syndicalism 107, 108 Tabernacle chapel (Aberdyfi) 77 Tabernacle chapel (Ferndale) 13 Taffy (Caradoc Evans) 178–9 ‘Talent thou gavest, The’ (Caradoc Evans) 134 Taliesin 53, 293 Tares in the Wheat (Francis) 192–4 Tavern across the Street, The (Morgan) 73 Teifi Valley 29 Teilo, St 93 temperance 63, 73, 97, 105, 106, 298, 307 Tennessee 41 ‘Testament’ (Mathias) 2, 319, 320, 322 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 47 Tirebuck, W. Edwards 70–2 ‘Their bonds are loosed from above’ (Gwyn Jones) 216–17 Theomemphus (Williams Pantycelyn) 302 ‘There Was a Saviour’ (Dylan Thomas) 247 ‘Thirty-one dolls’ (Glyn Jones) 268–70 ‘This bread I break’ (Dylan Thomas) 245–6 Thomas, Alfred P. 88–90, 93 Thomas, Bertha 63–6 Thomas, Dylan 13, 29, 74, 121–2, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 158, 160, 161, 186, 206, 226–55, 262–3, 264, 266, 270, 271, 274, 276, 277, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292, 293

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INDEX

Thomas, Emma, see Trevelyan, Marie Thomas, Gwyn 13, 115, 119, 123–4, 125–6, 137–40, 142, 150–1, 156, 162–70, 183, 184, 188, 218–21, 261, 284, 337 Thomas, H. Elwyn 78–80 Thomas, John 4 Thomas, M. Wynn 7, 13–14 Thomas, R. M. 97 Thomas, R. S. 160, 210, 334–6 Thomas, William, see Gwilym Marles Three Crosses (Swansea) 56 Times Literary Supplement 9 Tithe Act (1888) 61 Tithe Wars 106 tithes 58, 61, 97, 106 Tolkien, J. R. R. 132 Toy Epic, A (Humphreys) 301, 303–4 Traits and Stories of the Welsh Peasantry (Beale) 55–6 Transcendentalism 240, 242, 337 Trawsfynydd 44 Tredegar 188 ‘Tree, The’ (Dylan Thomas) 232–4 Tregaron 191 Trevelyan, Marie (Emma Thomas) 54–5 Trewern (R. M. Thomas) 97 Trick, Bert 227, 229, 236, 246, 255 Trinitarianism 237, 238 Troed yr Aur 116 Twenty-Five Poems (Dylan Thomas) 235 ‘Twenty-four pairs of socks’ (Humphreys) 314 Twm o’r Nant (Thomas Edwards) 87 Twm Siôn Catti (Thomas Jones) 50–3, 54, 190–1, 192 Tylorstown 4 Tywyn 1 Ulysses (Joyce) 2827 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 12 Unconditional Surrender (Humphreys) 314

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Under Milk Wood (Dylan Thomas) 230, 231, 254, 288, 290 Unitarianism 28–9, 62, 69, 73, 74, 108, 226, 236, 237–40, 241–2, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255 United States of America (US) 3, 9, 10, 21, 27, 34, 41, 86, 164, 208, 239, 240, 261 University of Wales 42, 81 Upper Killay (Swansea) 56 Utica (New York) 86 Valentine, Lewis 298 Valentino, Rudolf 163 Valley, The City, The Village, The (Glyn Jones) 281–90. 292 Valleys, the 126, 149, 163, 164, 167, 169, 177, 193, 259, 262, 265, 267, 279, 280, 284, 290 Vie de Jésus, La (Renan) 83 Voice of a Stranger (Humphreys) 303 ‘Waking in the blue’ (Lowell) 329 Wales (Keidrych Rhys) 122, 186, 187, 244, 271, 276 Wales (Owen M. Edwards) 102 Walk Home,The (Gwyn Jones) 188–9 Walsingham (Robinson) 49–50 Walters, Evan 131 ‘Wanderer, The’ (Glyn Jones) 275–7 War on the Saints (Penn-Lewis, Evan Roberts) 4–5, 185 ‘Way he went, The’ (Bertha Thomas) 65 Way Lies West, The (Wyn Griffith) 212–13 Wells, H. G. 173 Welsh Eye, A (Gwyn Thomas) 115, 119, 142, 165–6, 184 Welsh Hillside Saints (William Parry) 93 Welsh language 10, 12, 23, 41, 46, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 85, 91, 99, 103, 118, 124, 148, 149, 150, 151, 171, 174, 219, 220–1,

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229, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263–4, 271, 288, 297, 299, 311, 335 Welsh Legends and Folk Tales (Gwyn Jones) 203 Welsh Outlook, The 43 ‘Welsh People, The’ (Caradoc Evans) 128 ‘Welsh poet finds a proper story, A’ (T. Harri Jones) 146–7 Welsh Singer, A (Raine) 67–9 Wesley, John 35 Weston-super-Mare 91 Wheldon, Huw 296 Where Eden’s Tongue is Spoken Still (H. Elwyn Thomas) 78–80 Whitefield, George 46, 47, 86 Whitman, Walt 173, 231, 241, 243, 274 Wilde, Jimmy 4 William, Thomas (Bethesda’r Fro) 290 Williams, David 29, 239 Williams, Edward, see Iolo Morganwg Williams, John (Brynsiencyn) 43 Williams, Mallt 101–2 Williams, Raymond 78, 155, 156, 157, 334 Williams, T. Marchant 105–6, 107 Williams, Taliesin 55 Williams, Thomas, see Nefyn, Tom Williams, William (o’r Wern) 35, 86, 93, 94, 288 Williams, William (Pantycelyn) 27, 74, 94, 239, 253, 297, 302 Williams, William Emrys 13 Williams Parry, R. 149, 150 Wilson, Richard 286 Withered Root, The (Rhys Davies) 142, 202–3 Wittenberg 20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 124 ‘Wolf in sheep’s clothing, A’ (Saunders) 104 women 3, 14, 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 40–1, 59, 62, 73, 89, 92, 101, 102–4, 112, 131, 198, 199, 304, 313, 331, 332–4

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Wonders of the Invisible World, The (Mather) 148 Wooden Spoon, The (Wyn Griffith) 209–12 Worboise, Emma Jane 91–3 ‘Word, The’ (Caradoc Evans) 130 Wordsworth, William 265 Wrexham 26 Wright, Frank Lloyd 29, 242 Wyclif, John 20

INDEX

Yale 285 Yeats, W. B. 147, 161, 311 ‘Ymadawiad Arthur’ (T. Gwyn Jones) 149 Ymofynydd, Yr 239, 240, 254 Young Wales 104 Young Wales movement 45, 102; see also Cymru Fydd Ysbyty Ifan 41 Zwingli, Huldrych 22

Y Ffor chapel (Abererch) 153

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