Philip Freeman's "Celtic Mythology": Book Review

 
This professor of Classics and Celtic Studies, Harvard-trained, brings a compendium of interwoven tales, from sources translated from a wide variety of his predecessors. The contents cover the earliest deities, the Book of Invasions, the Wooing of Etain, tales from the Tain and the Ulster Cycle, and stories from the Irish otherworld. Then, a few on Finn the outlaw, before the Mabinogi are related in four stories, followed by three more Welsh stories and sagas. Finally, Christian saints Patrick, Brigid, and Brendan gain attention in this slim, but accessible collection.

A quick sample of the tone. Cu Chullain asks his charioteer: "Where on earth are we?" He replies: "'I have no idea, my lord.' He continues, "But I don't think we're in Ulster anymore." (125) Not Kansas either, but the everyday register of these stories makes them meaningful for us. Too often either scholarly versions are antiquated (if in public domain) or New Age-tinged florid reckonings divorced from academic rigor and narrative control. Professor Freeman stays grounded.

It's lightly annotated with introductions and endnotes, clarifying where the texts originated and variants in meaning here and there. But the learning's worn lightly, for this volume is aimed at the general reader. While Irish-published resources remain, and predecessors such as Oxford's translation by Sioned Davies of the Mabinogi and Penguin's anthology of Irish themes by Jeffrey Gantz, the updated version of Philip Freeman's colloquial versions is welcome. I'd have liked Breton, Scots, Manx, and Cornish topics to widen the Celtic scope, however. (Amazon US 2/16/17)

"The freedom to be left alone"

Reminded by my friend who found a typically endless rant by this addled pantheist during research at the Huntington, I pulled my copy of Porius: A Novel of the Dark Ages off my shelf and picked up somewhere near the two-hundred page mark I'd left off a while back. For this meandering narrative takes eight days in late October, the year 499, and stretches it into a reading experience demanding weeks, at least. John Cowper Powys remains as Morine Krissdottir's Descents of Memory (2008, reviewed by me) attests a difficult, elusive figure to grasp and not always an appealing one to like.

I suppose I was one of the few who checked that bio out of the library never having read the subject. I'd see at the old Bodhi Tree used bookstore on Melrose a big paperback of his earlier A Glastonbury Romance but the silly names within (a deal-breaker for me with Dickens as well as nearly all fantasy save that of the one linguist who knew of what he invented, J.R.R. Tolkien) discouraged me from it. (I have since learned that JCP changed names to protect himself against lawsuits by real Glastonburians.) The Grail and the Arthurian corpus never excited me in grad school, although I did like Excalibur. John Boorman considered filming this novel, fittingly. And, come to think of it, I did not mind Malory's realms at all. But I atavistically favor the Celt and the pagan, the resisters to Saxon rule and Catholic imposition, more than I do magic-kal conjuring, dodgy cant, fiery horses or swords.

At least in my fiction. But finding two years ago David Goodway's Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (2006; reviewed by me) revealed what Krissdottir's study had not: the promise of Portius as a hold-all for a lot of my own pet pursuits. Anti-statist/ anti-capitalist libertarianism, Celtic lore, British origins, Welsh resistance, and Joycean immersion. Goodway had I think found some key connections. He compared what Kevin Birmingham has more recently credited as Joyce's "philosophical anarchism" to Powys' retreat from any political fray (which caused differences with his friend Emma Goldman). He assumed that inevitably that freer outlook would prevail--but not for a very long time.

And as for liberation, so far in my return to the 1951 tome, the restoration of a new Golden Age surfaced. The freedom to be left alone, Myrddin Wyllt surmises, is to be desired. No priests, no emperors, no governors, no druids even. This "pagan" yearning, as with Powys and so now, may be quixotic. Where would I be without a dentist (even if my plan fails to cover my teeth; don't get me started on my "vision plan;" Cal Grants and scholarships to cover college, or the ability to stay afloat post-"recession" if not for some nanny state)? Few of us grew up in the comfort afforded the gentrified class of Powys, a vicar's son and a Cantabrigian. Most of us coddled in this world, 1616 years after Merlin, need help to live, not in the glade, but in a toxic megapolis that consumes our soul.

Still, this odd fictional volume, standing by the voluminous epics of Glastonbury and its less-heralded successor Owen Glendower which I've ordered and half keep asking myself why, poses a nagging question that left-libertarians, cranks such as JCP, and misfits like me keep pursuing. Why are some of us born discontented by the system we labor for and live under? Given many of this contingent are soft intellectuals like me rather than hardy folk of the soil like I presume my drizzly Connacht kin, what realistic chance do we have of proclaiming any self-sufficiency when surrounded as JCP was not, of his privileged choosing, once he claimed to inherit his Welsh corner and make himself its returned ruler? I suppose this "lordship" was not entirely in jest. We all bear our own inconsistencies.

Therefore, I will press on. After all, Powys' notion however unverifiable of an "ichthyosaurus-brain" recoverable by concentration as a proto-Jungian mind-memory, a collective guide and individual vision, appeals to me in a VR-sort of literary way (not sure about a real one). Lawrence Millman in The Atlantic admits: "One doesn't read Powys so much as enlist in him." Of Porius (and he wrote in 2000): "it is, I think, Powys's masterpiece. It calls to mind novels as diverse as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Finnegans Wake, and Alice in Wonderland. At times it reads like an extended study of what Powys called 'the three incomprehensibles': sex, religion, and nature. At other times it reads like a magical mystery extravaganza." That promise will keep me plodding along, as Millman in his Arctic.

P.S. Amber Paulen blogged back in '08 about this novel: "It gives me great pleasure not to be finished yet." I wonder how long it took her? Andrea Thompson, in for her a mercifully allotted "briefly noted" slot in The New Yorker, reminds us that over five hundred pages were cut from the original, restored in this 2007 edition. (He preferred little editing, and less as he aged, which can bedevil the most patient of his cult following.) Margaret Drabble (whose surname JCP could have used) begins her review in The Guardian: "The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air." In an undated online entry of what I assume is the original text, Kirkus Reviews sums it up: "Among those who enjoyed the author's previous novels in this historical sequence, there may be some who will find themselves at home in the midst of the tangled beliefs and superstitions of the Persians, the Romans, the Greeks, and the Druids with which these early Welshmen spiced their Christianity. But others will find the obscurities of both diction and dogma almost impenetrable." For the willing bold few, seek ye here .

"Wales Is Our Concern": 2 books on Welsh Nationalism

I examine two titles about 20th century efforts, one by a prominent novelist, the other by a shadowy faction, to rouse English-speaking Welsh citizens to fight, by mostly peaceful but sometimes violent means in the latter case, for their cultural, linguistic, and territorial survival. Originally, this was composed in 2009 for the journal Epona: A Journal of Ancient and Modern Celtic Studies, but as that publication appears in hiatus, I preserve my critique here in the meantime.

(Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist?

Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.

290 pp. 978-0-7083-2217-8. £19/€20/$25.

John Humphries, Freedom Fighters?: Wales's Forgotten “War”, 1963-1993.

Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008.

228 pp. 978-0-7083-2177-5. £20/€21/$25)

 

Can one "speak Welsh in English?" Embattled cultural and linguistic identities from Wales conveyed through our dominant language capture this novelist's struggle for articulation. Diane Green, basing this on her doctoral thesis on "narrative patterning," stops in 1998, but five decades out of the six that still see him writing provide plenty, given his steady output for a man born in 1919, for her study.

Its postcolonial contexts comprise the theoretical foundations for Green's explanations of how myth-- not only Celtic but Etruscan, set in Wales but also in Tuscany and Benin-- combines with history, often filtered via discontented intellectual males caught between a secularized homeland and relentless anglicization. How can one live in Wales as Welsh? His breakthrough novel, A Toy Epic, (1958) contrasts the rural, impoverished religious pacifist Iorwerth with Albie the ambitious, assimilating, Marxist emigrant, and Michael as uprooted intellectual.

Humphreys given his own status as a teacher and BBC producer may represent a combination of Michael's social mobility with Iorwerth's organic and linguistic allegiances. Learning Welsh as a young man, inspired as a teenager by the Penyberth burning of the bombing station by three Welsh activists in 1936, Humphreys chose to write in English to educate and appropriate the best of what Welsh identity could transmit to a wider audience. Green emphasizes the difficulty of using the "language of the oppressor" (15) to proclaim the "language of the tribe" (12). Fiction offers, citing Humphreys, a "supranatural language which is detached from the cultural problem" as "one of the escape routes" (27). The tension between "his political ideals and his creative talents" energized his long series of novels in which he delved into the same conflicts within his Welsh characters.

This entry in the Writing Wales in English series expects close familiarity with a body of work not well known even within Britain. His books from 1946 to 1991 were printed in London. However, as the 1990s progress his new novels get published only in Wales, and his older ones depend on reissues by the University of Wales Press. Humphreys may have sensed this fall-off in broader support when in 1987 he wrote an essay "The third difficulty."

He explains how he chose the role of "People's Remembrancer." He gives his readers the feeling of Welsh through English. He uses the novel, already feared as giving way to other mass media, as his method of proclamation. He figures that Welsh culture within British society for him can best be transmitted by fiction. Still, confronted with a formidable series of interlinked novels demanding considerable grounding in mythic archetypes, the result of a small-press minimal audience for his works may not be surprising.

Bonds of Attachment (1991) includes episodes from the controversy over the investiture of Charles Windsor in 1969. This novel offers rich material for investigation, but Green prefers to pursue the mythic and historiographic aspects. She largely limits her study to postcolonial theory. Given this book presumably represents a revision of her dissertation and not a reproduction of it, this narrowed focus may not satisfy a reader seeking cultural relevance as well as critical theory.

Green elides a more pressing and less academic application. This analysis lacks attention to the political contexts in Wales at this time when the Penyberth impact, however long delayed, threatened to burst into renewed protests. These continued what Saunders Lewis, at Penyberth in 1936, called upon his countrymen to continue, and they broke his heart when none rose up. This episode was fictionalized in Humphreys' début The Little Kingdom (1946).

The complexities of a peaceful Christian ethos that may have led to the relative marginalization of Welsh republicanism as opposed to its physical-force Irish variety surely must have factored into Humphreys' fiction more than Green's work establishes in a few asides, mostly very early on. While the slow disintegration of non-conformist religious conventions surrounds Outside the House of Baal (1965), the pacifism and Christian idealism Humphreys shared with Lewis and other nationalists appears very muted in Green's critique. For study in literary criticism, her book fills a need. But it may leave an inquirer still wondering about Humphreys' semi-imaginary plots in relationship to the real-life Welsh predicaments faced by his neighbors and colleagues and readers since Penyberth. Three decades of frustration erupted into protests in 1969.

Bombings, jailings, censorship, arson against holiday and second-homes, marches demanding rebellion, calls against terrorism: these rocked Wales if on a small scale the past few decades. This is where the force of myth, after all, lands heaviest. History as lived and not only dramatized must run through Humphreys' work, determined as it is to convey Welsh implicated in postcolonial society. The subject of Green's work deserved more attention as a chronicler of these decades.  The Taliesin Tradition (1989) delves into the place of Welsh nationality within culture and language; Green understandably concentrates on the novels rather than this elegant study, but if she had expanded its role as a summation of Humphreys' ideological evolution, it would have enriched her theoretical and literary bases.

How did Humphreys invest his energy-- not only as mythologized, historically framed, or channeled overseas-- within his fictional inquiries about his native land under such pressures? Did Humphreys weary of protest and step aside into fiction as an escape? Did this "supranational language" succeed or fail him over half a century's output? How did his Welsh colleagues and English critics react to his efforts over these changing decades? What growth or retraction did his readership show? Her book elides such questions; it leaves one wondering the worth of some installments in a long series of demanding novels for an apparently small audience. 

Perhaps more immediacy comes not in novels, but what the news reports, or does not report, as John Humphries' Freedom Fighters?: Wales's Forgotten “War”, 1963-1993 narrates, starting with his walk-on role as a Cardiff Western Mail night-desk editor who took a call one night in 1966 that explosives were set at Clywedog reservoir. These detonations signalled that the spirit of Saunders Lewis would lead to the practical action and symbolic resistance begun at Penyberth. Thirty years on, protests against the British presence would reignite.

Nationalism revived in the early 1960s; postcolonialism proved more than theory. Underdeveloped, made redundant by mine closures, exploited, ignored, Welsh natives resented the English thirst for water. So close to Liverpool, the reservoir at Tryweryn inundated the village of Capel Celyn near Bala. In 1963, three men gathered to detonate the transformers. They represented Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, the Movement for the Defence of Wales (MAC).

MAC2, for Clywedog slightly reformed after its original members went to ground, continued what the Free Wales Army (FWA) then propagandized as a counterpart to Breton and especially Irish republicans. One of the bombers, Welsh-speaking farmer Owen Williams, had to flee during the mid-1960s to Ireland, to evade police capture. There, the FWA made contacts with Irish republicans. 

This episode has given rise to legendary tales that the Marxist-directed IRA sold off its arms to the Welsh, leaving the Irish ill-prepared to fight back when “the Troubles” returned three years later. Yet, Humphries downplays the actual exchanges of weaponry or explosives. Denis Coslett attracted too much attention to the FWA. He boasted of killer Alsatians ready for suicide missions, and he courted John Summers, a journalist inveigled in the fight for funds for the victims of the Aberfan coal-tip disaster in 1966. Summers appears to have finagled himself on behalf of the FWA to demand redress for the Aberfan claimants. Curiously, Humphries—who reveals Summers informed the authorities about his Welsh activist contacts-- ignores Summers’ 1970 paperback, The Disaster -- slightly revising his 1969 potboiler The Edge of Violence -- which dramatizes Summers’ involvement in Aberfan and sensationalizes the potential of FWA rebellion. 

The media, quick to leap on connections claimed (if satirized by such as Summers) between Fenians and Welsh hotheads, brought the Special Branch, founded to fight against Irish republicans a century earlier, to arrest and jail many innocent nationalists. Both the activists and the authorities stoked the fires that threatened, as the investiture of Charles Windsor as “prince of Wales” loomed in 1969, to kindle militarism in Wales similar to the Irish resurgence.

Humphries cites John Jenkins that Seán MacStiofáin, in 1968 soon to be “the founder of the breakaway Provisionals,” took from Jenkins the concept of a cellular structure for the PIRA. The conversion of the Provos to this non-hierarchical organisation took place nearly ten years later, after MacStiofáin had stepped down from his leadership role. Whatever impact Jenkins’ model had on the Irish campaign appears indirect and at considerable remove. 

This episode of Irish-Welsh contacts remains little investigated in Humphries’ book, perhaps due to reticence from those involved, perhaps out of a legend inflated out of a few casual contacts. This topic merited more attention. The pan-Celtic and Welsh countercultural milieus in which pop and folk musicians along with language activists revived political radicalism likewise gain scant coverage here. 

Any pan-Celtic contentions in Humphries' account stint on the details of what such alliances sought. He barely quotes from Roy Clews' To Dream of Freedom (1980 ed. cited; but rev. 2001). Humphries  glosses over Keith Griffiths (Gethin ap [ab?]Iestyn)  in his roles as propagandist for the Patriotic Front and Cofiwn. (Not to mention his role, recalling Emyr Humphries’ commemorative stance, via Gethin’s spirited website and republican-related archives at Welsh Remembrancer.) 

Such scarcity of firsthand testimony may also reflect a largely more self-effacing Welsh movement determined to avoid infiltration and informers, which had repeatedly weakened their Irish counterparts. The Welsh campaign’s two spokesmen tended towards grandiosity, while its operatives kept hidden. Griffiths, Jenkins, and a few others, perhaps no more than twenty-five identified members of the FWA, fronted a silent majority of grassroots sympathisers. Detectives were clueless about many who fought back. The authorities fumbled and followed many false trails. 

The FWA was “living on a legend of newspaper cuttings,” Griffiths admitted to its “commandant” Cayo Evans. (qtd. 98) Humphries compares their outbursts to a flailing by “a drowning man.” He lashes out in desperation to alert those long assimilated, too long complacent to danger from constant English in-migration and Welsh abandonment of its heritage. (65) 

This small band of Welshmen, some far more anglicized than Welsh-speaking, also split along political vs. linguistic necessities for their strategy to revive their embattled land’s culture. Luckily, a visit from “Red” Rudi Dutschke with MAC2 was aborted; British surveillance expelled him before links between German revolutionaries could be forged. Coslett and Evans, the self-proclaimed leaders, by their love of the limelight brought Griffiths to warn them of their antics. “There is nothing substantial behind us at all,” he warned in a letter found in a police raid at Evans’ farmhouse. (qtd. 98) 

Did these “freedom fighters” valiantly sustain the example of Penyberth’s fire-setting trio against the British bomber station on venerated Welsh land? Or, did they perpetuate the futile gestures of desperate cultural nationalists driven to protest the only way they could for attention, faced with an indifferent audience of those who had surrendered to the English incursion and the Welsh erosion? 

Early on Humphries pins blame. “But while the campaign of violent direct action had its genesis in nationalist virtues and goals, it was the failure of the patriotic foot soldiers to articulate their cause that allowed government to marginalize Welsh extremism as the action of crazed fanatics.” (15-16)

Two activists blew themselves up the night before the investiture ceremony; the bomb went off near the tracks that would carry the royal train to Caernarfon Castle, icon of imperial domination over the Crown’s first colony.  Charles was crowned; as crowds of his countrymen cheered, “MAC2’s chief bomb-maker, Sgt. John Jenkins, providing dental care for the troops on ceremonial duty, “ was the perfect mole, “at other times wandering around Caernarfon and being abused by locals on account of his uniform.” (127)

The next day, July 2, 1969, nine of Jenkins’ FWA comrades were sentenced. Griffiths alone refused what Evans and Coslett promised the court: to distance themselves from militant activity. They kept their word. A year later, Jenkins was captured and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. He refused to name his accomplices. 

Faced with these men’s actions, Humphries examines if they were terrorists. He admits that “for all its eccentricities and blurred message,” their restrained response constituted the “only authentic Welsh uprising since Owain Glyndŵr.” (146) However, the caricaturing of Welsh republicans as “mad dogs,” Alsatians aside, contributed to the media’s defeat of nationalist-fueled radicalism. The language issue was left to Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, and many who fought for Welsh freedom lacked fluency in a language foreign to their upbringing. The political base, furthermore, never was allowed to emerge, unlike Sinn Féin’s role for the IRA. Republican traditions emerged more from the southern valleys as opposed to Y Fro Gymraeg, the Welsh-speaking northern and western heartlands under cultural assault. 

Welsh saboteurs lacked the popular if again reticent support afforded those a decade later. After the momentous defeat of devolution in 1979, shadowy guerrillas, as Meibion Glyndŵr, rallied under cover of darkness. For a third time this century, a few Welsh asserted themselves. Their linguistic heartland faded. Wealthier English bought its quaint dwellings, “Sons of” this leader (who resisted Westminster for fifteen years after declaring himself in 1400 Prince of Wales), decided to fight back with fire.  

Contrasted with those who took the fall for the pipeline bombings and attacks on buildings in the 1960s, why were any arsonists undetected for another ten years? They had clandestine backing, Humphries reasons, from the people. Folk heroes rather than incendiaries, they were not feared-- as were the 1960s bombers-- for importing leftist revolution.  Invented for Northern Ireland, the Prevention of Terrorism Act brought down its force upon Welsh suspects; again many were taken in without cause. The perpetrators eluded the law. Over two hundred holiday and second homes (often turned permanent residences, thus undermining Welsh culture even more) were burned over twelve years. 

Dignity despite destruction permeates this story. Imagine protests during the 1960s elsewhere with such polite signs as Capel Cefyn’s residents carried to Liverpool in vain: “Your homes are safe. Save ours. Do not drown our homes.” Or, “Please Liverpool, be a great city not a big bully.” (17) After the first attacks on homes in 1979, a note written in ballpoint pen was found:

“The houses were burnt with great sadness. We are not ferocious men. It was an act of despair. The rural areas are being destroyed all over these islands. Wales is our concern. These homes are out of reach of local people because of the economic situation. We call upon individuals of goodwill to take action before these sorry steps take place.” (qtd. 163) 

Emyr Humphreys sought to escape by fiction his homeland’s strife but his mythic models revived within his novels’ depictions of his neighbors and colleagues, caught in an anglicizing land that meant the author himself had to use “the language of the oppressor” to speak on behalf of his Celtic tribe. For a second author with nearly the same surname, also raised in an assimilated Welsh home and working for London’s mouthpiece, the “paper of record” in the Welsh capital, a similar journey back to the heartland occurs. Humphries does wander, during the 1980s, into his own entertaining but digressive stints abroad as a foreign correspondent, but he comes back to his homeland in 1988 aware that swerves away from the anglicized complacency of the Anglo-Welsh establishment may represent renewal. Under Margaret Thatcher’s closing of the mines and privatization of steel, the Welsh workers capitulated, as despair fueled reaction vs. resignation. One-third of North Walians are English-born.  Cohesive communities-- to where Lewis and Humphreys as young men had left their cities to learn Welsh-- have dispersed. 

Humphries closes his study integrating his own reflections. His own transformation from editor for a pro-British, anti-Walian Cardiff newspaper into a critic of Westminster demonstrates a telling shift. He supports Welsh autonomy and welcomes his grandson, raised speaking Cymraeg. He critiques the pacifism of Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans as “fundamentally incompatible with Welsh freedom.” (191) Whereas Emyr Humphries shared with Evans and Lewis the traditional non-conformist avowal of a Christian socialism (an aspect deserving here as with Green more than a cursory nod) refusing to countenance rebellion by armed means, Humphreys allies himself with those tired of Plaid’s careful retreat into quietism. He backs (if for awhile) Cymru Annibynnol/ Independent Wales Party and its refusal to support the 2001 census which denied Welsh their ability to tick a box for their identity. 

This editor, now retired from the fray, ends with a recapitulation of flashpoints for Welsh resistance. In-migration from England, the concomitant reduction of the Welsh-speaking heartlands, and the recurring water demands from its larger, thirstier neighbor add up. They summarize grim assurances that the seven million sterling spent to crush a few dozen rebels in the 1960s may pale before the costs accrued by those complicit in cultural, linguistic, political, and ecological destruction of a long-exploited nation.

Slightly revised and altered for Amazon US 8-14-12:Freedom Fighters and  Emyr Humphries

Paddy Figgis' "On the Bright Road": Book Review

Certainly a challenging, difficult, and ambiguous novel. As the blurb for the book [on Amazon or the Wiki for Lunch.com] summarizes, this combines two stories, one from the Arthurian, post-Roman era and one from today, set in 1993. Figgis reminds me of Charles Williams' own difficult fiction (she cites him in a quote), which likewise sought to merge the supernatural plane with our own mundane. Her knowledge of archeology and the "dark ages" of Britain makes for the most involving aspect of this tangled tale. She delays, like a crafty storyteller, clarifying details of the story until much later than a reader might expect, and even at its close, this novel leaves spaces still unfilled.

Its unforgiving erudition makes this at all times a daunting rather than diverting read, and it's a very serious story, with not much humor or wit to lighten its considerably relentless gloom. It deserves a more educated reader than I am to excavate and label all of its layered artifacts. Figgis labors to re-create not only the decay of post-Roman Wales but the decline of one modern man's life, and the parallels, although never obviously juxtaposed, make for instructive insights, which she does not--to her credit but relying upon the reader's consistent and not entirely rewarded effort--simplify or reduce to truisms.

While I expected an easier novel, this does show that Figgis takes her audience as seriously as she does her fiction, and this is probably a step above the usual Arthurian fantasy. My one criticism is that I sensed that secondary characters remained too willfully mysterious throughout, and the lack of explanation for many of the more mundane events--as well as those more symbolic--irritated me. Figgis does not provide enough clues to unlock all of the puzzles she places within the way of Kerr's quest, for him or for us. More disturbing, unsettled in its characterization, and opaque in what would have been in other novels clues that would have been eventually made transparent, her novel may frustrate more likely than entertain. She knows a great deal about the time she restores here, Arthur is by the way off-stage rather than the protagonist, and both The Tracker and Cathal Kerr remain enigmatic central characters beyond the last pages of what does not reach simple closure as a conventional "time-travel" tale.

(Generally I don't post older reviews pre-blog from Amazon, but this title was bugging me and I couldn't recall the details. So, thanks to Lunch.com I now have my reviews transferred and more easily retrievable at the latter site. Not easy, but still easier than sifting through over eleven hundred reviews the past dozen-odd years at Amazon US, where this appeared 9-15-05.)

Aneurin Gareth Thomas' "Luggage from Elsewhere": Book Review

This coming-of-age story spans 1966-82, narrated by a Welsh lad embittered by poverty, colonialism, nuclear threats, sex, drugs, overdoses, murder, and rain. While familiar ingredients in a standard recipe, Thomas does add sobering, poetic observations that enrich the tale. For readers interested in Wales in the "nuclear age", the hippie and punk movements, Thatcherism, and activism, this may prove a worthwhile selection.

In a society where females have only two choices: girl or mother, the narrator's maudlin Mam takes until menopause to become a woman. Her husband, a militantly and comically atheistic womanizer, with his mates down the pub "talked about the future as if there wasn't going to be one." (41) Welsh men later will earn pithy definition: machines converting beer into sperm.

The chapters of the tale told by the nameless narrator unfold out of order. Throughout, it's nearly always dreary. "Greyness wasn't only a colour in those days but a transparent substance that wafted day and night around our streets, a Passover curse that came calling through the keyhole, wandered about the house looking for grey matter, and on entering the brain, turned thoughts and feelings grey." (231)

Nature offers scant escape. One must conjure up one's dreams out of the daily grind. "Below an oil tanker stationed in the distance looked like a castle on a flat blue horizon. Seaweed washed up and dried under the sun as snakeskins. Foam met the grey-green of the sea. I walked along the shore among the sea's bones, passing boys my age playing at being younger with a plastic beach ball carried over the heads of a young family. A woman alone hoping for a lifeguard to stroke oil over her back, whisk her glasses and scarf away and take her back to when she was twenty. Men playing cards and holding in their stomachs, thinking if only the scarf would ask." (138)

The narrator thunders against complacency, the resignation of his people. As a teenager, he's threatened by English gentry for poaching trout in the river of a nation where he thought he could walk freely. As a young adult, he wanders to a hippie camp, but there he finds lassitude as the campers wait for mushrooms to grow under the torrential clouds. Idealism inspires him, desperately. "Our first act was to write on a wall next to the bank on High Street Gorseinon the slogan 'Nid Yw Cymru Ar Werth'. Wales Is Not For Sale." (189) However, they "only got as far as writing NID YW CYMRU before being interrupted and we ran off." The partial slogan stands a few months as testimony to their bravery: it's rendered in English as "WALES IS NOT."

Wales under Thatcher drives the narrator and three friends to lash out. As Bore Coch ("Red Morning"), they issue a manifesto written in English, laboriously translated into Welsh, and back to English. "The last thing we wanted was to sound like an amateurish group that represented nobody and faked the Welsh, which was precisely what we were." (202-3) Nobody prints it.

Later, he will try another slogan which will wind him up in jail. He reflects there on his town, and the Welsh promise of his youth: "Where the children played, the next generation numbed the brain with pinpricks before the comedown of bus shelters covered in porn." (286) While the narrative for my tastes closed far too suddenly, perhaps the new novel by Thomas, titled "Excess Baggage," will continue the story.
(Posted to Amazon U.S. and Britain 9-25-09)

Niall Griffiths interview at AmeriCymru

Celebrating daffodils on St. David's Day, national holiday for Wales, here's a discussion with one of my favorite authors, a Liverpudlian novelist of half-Welsh, half-Irish parentage. Known more for the former than the latter genetic inheritance, at least as concentrated in his nervy, funny, and harrowing fiction that often explores the tension between incomer and native, his often hapless, yet still rather heroic, children of the rave and lager, disco and drugs scenes instigate a new series of incursions. These disaffected youths wander in rattling sub-compacts, hitching rides or waiting by dismal petrol stations. Loaded on cans of beer and packets of crisps, fingers greasy with chips, hands stained by nicotine, fumbling across not the Marches so much as down the road past Wrexham that separates Cymry Cymraeg, Welsh-speaking heartlands, from English-dominant everywhere else.

I've enjoyed his début, the massive and as I guessed vaguely (as all first novels seem to be) semi-autobiographical "Grits." This 2000 text delved into the human detritus left by hedonism in the backwash, geologically and morally, of the Thatcher era. The strip-mall, mercury-lit, beach resort grime sinks into this narrative, and the squalor of squatters on the dole contrasted with the ecstasy on E energizes and dissipates. It's probably one of the best recent attempts I've read (not that I've found many) to explore the highs and lows of the psychedelic experience, at least as I imagine in my innocence how such could be!

He followed with a novel that earned him a comparison that's dogged him, however well intended, with Scots contemporary Irvine Welsh, with "Sheepshagger" (2001). Without spoiling the plot, the inclusion of molestation, which to me seems too often an easy plot contrivance, only slightly lessens the power of this work, perhaps his most renowned. It's a savage and poetic tale, fitting the mountains where its battles unfold. Allegorical without losing touch with the everyday, it's a work I recommend. Griffiths began as a poet, and like Gerard Donovan, the Irish novelist from a similar start, his craft benefits from this apprenticeship.

"Kelly + Victor" (2002) shifts to a gentrifying Liverpool and the S&M relationship of a young pair of lovers who try to make a living amidst the yuppie boom, marginalized from the prosperity of the millennium's turn. While intriguing, it's quite relentlessly clinical. Told in the first half from one side and then the other, the fictional diptych fits together as snugly as the couple, at least on a good night. Technically a bit more daring, it may satisfy those wanting more psychological tension; while I prefer his other works, "K + V" marks his mature determination to apply the panoramic eye to Liverpool as he already has for Wales.

His hometown's half-criminal element also features in the next pair of novels, "Stump" (2003) & "Wreckage" (2005), which make a wonderful tag-team, as they track a couple of clueless amateurs in the aftermath of a roadside heist that leads them into the chemical underground, so to say, of big-city cartels. The conclusion of "Stump" reminds me of a comedy about crooks that ends perfectly. The fact that it doesn't for those involved spawns the rare sequel that equals its predecessor. There's marvelously related fights, conversations that rival Beckett, and the balance between humor and pathos Griffiths handles with increasing ease.

In the interview, Griffiths tells about "Runt" (2006), not seen yet by me. His novels don't get widely published abroad, and invariably I hear about them long after they're out! It's told from a young girl's perspective in her words, so this marks a departure from the voice that often relies on a indirect free and omniscient p-o-v. Griffiths deserves acclaim, and I've championed all of his previous works on Amazon US. He's also prepared books on "Real Aberystwyth"--where he lives now-- and "Real Liverpool." Another book (I reckon a novel?), "Ten Pound Pom," from its title sounds promising, being slated for print this year.

He seems, so far from my five lengthy encounters, to be improving and streamlining his style. It's his intelligent, inquiring analysis that seeks to burrow into the mind and consciousness of those less intelligent, less inquiring who manage to blurt out their stories to you: a difficult feat to pull off convincingly. His enthusiasm for writing-- as you glimpse in this interview-- should inspire you to seek out his enlightening yet entertaining books.

Link: "Interview with Niall Griffiths". Photo: Instead of the one publicity shot that's ubiquitous and that I already used when reviewing "Wreckage" here earlier, I found this of a Finnish translation. Can't tell what, but 2008's mentioned in the blurb. It best captures his typical character's louche (second time that adjective came in handy this week) aplomb. P.S. Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus! Happy St. David's Day.

Emyr Humphreys' "The Taliesin Tradition": Book Review

My wife asked me if this was about Frank Lloyd Wright. Well, it is and isn't. Humphreys, a long-time (b. 1919) novelist and director, certainly brings the Welsh American experience provocatively if briefly into this chronological survey of "the secret of creative survival" inherited from the early medieval bard, that combines durability with flexibility, mythological resonance with iconoclastic resistance. It's a bracing study, one that does for long stretches wander into scenic if sometimes faraway byways, before in its last dozen pages it comes roaring back with impassioned, thoughtful, and moving reminders of why Welsh identity remains defiant.

I use the third edition, 2000. I recommend this for its afterword (1989) and postscript (2000): these short additions bring the context closer to Wales today, moving towards a small degree of autonomy after Thatcherite abuse and Labour arrogance. The continuity of Celtic tradition may be a slim line upon which to thread so many displays of Welsh literary defiance and definition, but Humphreys' prose energizes and for its short length it's a densely argued, erudite study.

He intrigues by comparing Iolo Morgannwg to John Dee, Unitarians to Marxists, chapel dissenters needing constant revival to Lloyd George's shape-shifting. He links the demythologizing of Madoc to the desperation of Welsh-language speakers within the context of Darwin and scientific revolution. He contrasts the appeal of Chartists in England to their demand that Welsh surrender their identity for entry into the middle-class worlds of education and assimilation.

He compares Matthew Arnold's Celticism to a concoction from Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll: "Take a victim or a patient and extract from him the vital juices that would cost him his life but which could be used to revive the spirit of an ailing giant with an elixir of life which Arnold labelled 'Celtic Magic'." (179) Such verve surfaces here and there in this narrative, and captures the flavor of Humphries' best prose. Transformation, for preservation or destruction, persists for the 1500 years of this tale.

The language itself earlier on, faced with Westminster's power and cultural doom, "was tucked into a corner of the Tudor baggage train, like a cooking pot, along with the crumbling effigies of Arthur, Merlin, Taliesin and Madoc. They could be cast aside when they had outlived their usefulness; the language was not so easily disposed of. A well-made cooking pot, if preserved for a sufficient length of time, could become a cauldron of rebirth." (46) Humphreys traces the fortunes of the cauldron, Cymraeg, the Welsh speakers who rallied against political and theological change with their own territorial and spiritual autonomy. The poets, and the preachers and politicians whose guises bards later assumed, sustained the battle against conformity, and the voices of dissent.

Dispossessed of land and relegated to marginality, some Welsh refuse to turn into caretakers of a theme park. Humphries in 1983 enters the disorientation felt by many in Wales. Lacking their own language, losing their way of life, they lose their history and tradition. "At the most simple level it is they alone who offer the clues and keys to the meaning and the magic of a landscape in which a man must live and work."
The Taliesin Tradition's generated and perpetuated "so large a body of myth," but for Humphreys this translates into "a living poetic tradition." (227) Not only consolation for the defeated, myth-making carries potency as a "weapon in the struggle for survival." (228) It offers a young person a way out of the labyrinth by "clutching more tightly to the thread which connects him to a an honourable past"; it revives dignity and prepares one to embrace, as with heroes of old, one's destiny.

Heady stuff, but Saunders Lewis, in his protests and eloquence (Humphreys wrote equally well of his mentor in an essay for "Presenting Saunders Lewis"; he learned Welsh after Lewis' fiery protest at Penyberth in 1936) models one solution against those superstructures which coddle us within the uncreative slumber of indifference. Instead of being roused only for profit or by manipulation, Welsh myth and history remind its people of sacrifice and demand survival. "They both exist primarily in order to convince a beleaguered remnant that they are a fragment of humanity scheduled, in spite of everything, for ultimate preservation." (229) The tradition offers "a whole range of alternative heroes who have not lost the gift of shape-shifting inside the confines of the tribal language." (230) Cut off from international acclaim, within marches and protests, artists and activists-- such as Lewis-- devote themselves to making the creative also confrontational.

By 1989, Humphreys' afterword warns of annihilation from nukes or assimilation by England. Emancipation politically must also take form spiritually. "For a naked people in the acid rain they offer a coat of many colours and a cleaner air," he says of protesters who suffered prison for their opposition to anglicisation. (236) It is difficult to imagine such an image, of ecology joining economics, language merging with the land, being made even in Ireland, for instance, at this time by a radical populist. Wales carries an advantage of a language preserved within a faith; although that faith may now be as vitiated as in much of the capitalist realm; the Crown's compromise that linked their reformer's bible to an ancient vernacular managed to meld Welsh cultural advocacy into a blend of belief and non-violence that distinguishes it from many other activist movements in the secular West.

Humphreys opens his account: "It is always the past rather than the present that offers the best hope for the future." (4) He concludes the 2000 edition with an prescient image. "Separate societies cease to exist and individuals take on the characteristics of tiny light bulbs respoding gratefully to an omnipotent planetary electric circuit." (237) Against technological imposition, who cares about Welsh concerns? Again, the answer comes via Lewis' example. "A tradition remains of enduring value when it preserves the ability of words to possess the power of meaning more than they say." (238) Humphreys and Lewis take seriously their legacy or Welsh verbal power. They employ language as a weapon as they deploy the spells of earlier bards.

Dafydd ap Gwilym: Poems (ed./tr. Rachel Bromwich): Book Review

Alexander Theroux in a recent L.A. Times critique of Burton Raffel's unnecessary rendering of Chaucer into contemporary English reminded me about the nearly exact contemporary across the island, Dafydd ap Gwilym. He's considered the equal of Chaucer's own versifying best, but far less accessible due to the intricacies of medieval Welsh metrics, the exceedingly alliterative and rhythmic demands of that musical language, and the inability to carry these heard harmonies into English. Still, I instantly ordered, mid-November from a seller in the book-laden Hay-on-Wye, an affordable copy of his work. I wanted a bilingual edition, so I could, as with Dante or Ovid, at least pretend I could gain an insight fleetingly into the original. Six weeks later, it arrived yesterday.

I had enjoyed Rolfe Humphries' 1969 "Nine Thorny Thickets" as a sample of Dafydd's love lyrics, and that American poet did attempt as the title shows to replicate the effects of the source. Gwyn Thomas, last month, had his own translations published, and I reckon these will be admirable. However, the sight of the Welsh facing the English in Bromwich's selections does have its own merits. The organization into topics departs from the standard 1952 edition by Thomas Parry (he gives a brief preface); Bromwich explains in her introduction how "I have arranged the poems according to subject matter, to bring out certain comparisons and resemblances;" these comprise about a third of the poet's accepted canon. (Richard M. Loomis & Dafydd Johnston translated all the originals without the Welsh text in 1982.)

Her introduction briskly surveys the little we know of his life, the metrics, the poetic craft, and the challenges of translation itself. Bromwich brought Dafydd to the attention of scholars earlier last century, and her familiarity with the author shows. She follows the example pioneered by Kuno Meyer with Irish medieval verse, in giving prose equivalents; she cites as one forerunner for her own project the versions from various languages given in Kenneth Jackson's "A Celtic Miscellany."

The fifty-six entries (cross-referenced with Williams' differently numbered originals) cover in turn love's seasons; various lovers the poet addressed; birds and animals; nature's messengers of love; love's frustrations; addresses to his friends; and meditations, a recantation, and a concluding prayer. The element of precision and incision characterizes his tightly wound, firmly grasped style.

Since I lack facility with the Welsh, I cannot give an complete estimate of Bromwich's success or failure to convey Dafydd ap Gwilym's intricacies. From what I can gather, nonetheless, this appears a valuable answer to the problem that other editions have: they lack both languages. The book's well-designed, with a readable typeface, handy size, and line references are keyed to endnotes. Leafing through the selections, the degree of compression into couplets of the Welsh does find an accessible echo in her line readings into serviceable English. She strives more for equivalents than eloquence, and her edition's geared both to somebody like myself with little knowledge of Welsh, and to the reader needing to learn more about this rarely noted (even in passing as with Theroux's review) writer who evades the attention of many of those who claim wider knowledge of medieval texts.

(All but paragraph one posted to Amazon US today.)

Oliver Davies + Fiona Bowie's: "Celtic Christian Spirituality": Book Review.

Separating fact from fable when it comes to the Celtic Church's independence or submission to Catholicism has long been a British fascination. Welsh, English and Scots reformers popularized their revisions as reversions to earlier, supposedly autonomous, manifestations of an insular church that did not bow the knee to Rome. Davies & Bowie seek to correct antiquarian, New Age, or theological exaggerations which also have followed suit. They show in their introduction how the Celtic spiritual teachings differed-- and where they matched dominant Catholicism. They carefully, if briefly, remind readers too of the historical and social difficulties in defining a distinct Celtic identity. This concept "based on a mythologized reading of the past" would not have been understood by the ancients, although as the editors also note, "it has its own exigencies, and should not be dismissed too lightly" for those who chose this interpretation in centuries nearer our own. (4)

They also, as this combines medieval prose and poetry with contemporary verse, illustrate how poets express the physicality, nature-based connections, imaginative creativity, communal roots, and Trinitarian fluidity of Celtic-centered qualities that many Christians, or perhaps post-Christians, now seek to renew and revive. Many of the medieval entries can be found, in expanded form, in Davies' 1999 "Celtic Spirituality" anthology published in 1999 by Paulist Press. These two collections by Davies may be confused (not to mention a 1996 compendium from medieval Welsh). The difference lies in the 1995 edition's subtitle of "modern sources"-- adding oral traditions gathered in from Scots Gaelic as "Carmina Gadelica" by Alexander Carmichael and from Irish as "Religious Songs of Connacht" by Douglas Hyde. Then, contemporary poetry from Celtic writers this past century brings the collection closer to the present.

It's an accessible anthology addressed more than the Paulist Press successor to the common reader, and I recommend it as an entry point. Bibliographies and sources used are both helpful, and I particularly value the translations of Welsh-language poet Euros Bowen.

His "Changing Government" stands out. "The government of the skies/ we have sent to hell,/ and so the throne of the sun is empty,/ there is a death mask on its face/ in a museum." (184) The whole poem's worthy of transcription. He ends "Tap Root": "There is no resurrection where there is no earth." (187) You might expect to have found instead the better-known vicar R.S. Thomas, but Davies & Bowen wisely try to welcome writers less-anthologized, and as deserving of attention.

As Irish-language representative (in translation), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's certainly expected, and her feminism's necessary. As Davies & Bowie in their introduction caution, the tendency by moderns to amplify the matriarchal Celtic presence does clash with the patriarchal norm practiced even by the Celts, one that deepened under the penitential and apocalyptic emphases instituted by the Church that harbor less appeal for seekers from our own time. Today's poets do tend to favor the feminine and the natural, regardless of the author's male or female identification. Medieval entries, by contrast, feature the need for renunciation, repentance, and asceticism.

Speaking of nature, Seán Ó Riordáin might have been entered as a second Gaelic counterpart to Bowen, equally meriting exposure. His existential attitude might, however, unsettle many. Mary O'Malley or Caitlín Maude may also be sought out by readers looking into spirituality expressed by Irish poets. A mismatch between the flesh and the spirit, and a longing to reconnect what's been sundered, enters many inclusions. Brendan Kennelly's "Sculpted from Darkness" watches worshippers returning from midnight Mass over a bridge; "House" considers the fragile body and the aging dwelling elegantly juxtaposed.

Ruth Bidwell observes in "Standing Stone" a Welsh parallel to Kennelly's mass-goers: "A mindless ritual is not empty. When the dark mind fails, faith lives in the supplication of hands, on prayer-wheel, rosary, stone." (198) For another rural poet, the simple lines of Anjela Duval translated from Breton recall a 20c Emily Dickinson, if she'd had four years of grade school and worked her life alone on a remote farm. In their diction, capitalization, and imagery, there are eloquent comparisons to the Belle of Amherst. In a poem that could stand alongside R.S. Thomas', Duval laments "The Song of the Foreigner," one that ravishes the trees, despoils the land, and erases the language. It ends:

"And soon...if we don't pay attention/ On the great organ/ Of their dark and sad forests/ --Fertilised with the ashes of our trees--/ The Atlantic Wind/ Will play while singing/ ...The Requiem of our Country." (228)

(Posted 12-22-08 to Amazon US.)

Blodewedd, Bean Bláthannái & Ulchabáin.

Is Blodewedd, nó Blodeuwedd/ Blodeuedd, bean finscéalach í. D'inis seanscéal Breatnaise ina 'Mabinogi' fúithi. Tá scéal aici seo ag scríofa ina ceathrú roinnt, 'Math'.

Rinne Math agus Gwydion Blodewedd. Bhain siad sísean de bláthannaí doire, giolcachaí sleibhte, agus airgid luachra. Is ciall mar 'aghaidh bláth' as Breatnais. Is bri é a ainm.

Blodeuwedd a tugadh uirthi seo níos deanaí, mar sin féin! Cén fáth? Ar dtús, bhí sí bean Lhleu mac Arianrhod. Bhí sí is áille aice féin, ár ndóigh, ban uile ar fud an domhan.

Ní raibh Lleu ábalta beann bhásmhar a phósadh. Thóg sé bean chéile ag déanta bláthannaí. Ach, tharraing sísean féin ar fear eile. Fuair Gronw Pebr sí. Rugadh sí é ar ais go raibh ag dul san fiach fia fireann air.

Thugadar grá da chéile oíche céann sin. Iarr beirt a dúnmharú Lleu. Ní bheadh go furasta. Bhí cumhachta draíochta air.

Scéal mór fada eachtrúil áta ann. Ní dhearna an lánúin dana ag fáil saoirse. D'fhoglaim sí rún mortlaíochta do fír chéile aice. Mhairaigh Gronw Lleu.

Bhuail Lleu Gronw. Fuair Gronw bás. D'athraigh Gwydion mar ulchabáin sí. Chaill an h-ainm 'Blodeuedd', mar sin 'bláthannaí'. Anois, faigheann ainm 'Blodeuwedd', no 'aghaidh blátha' amháin. Is cosuil ulchabáin í go deo.

Chonaic mé le deanaí léaráid seo. Chuir Gethin ab Iestyn sí ar a bhlog. Tá 'Ríochtaí Ceiltigh' anseo. Déanann sí íomhá di leis gréas stílithe mar críochnochta. Níl fhios agam an cúis. Cad chuige? Is cuimhne liom seo faoi an dealbh bhansagairt (nó bhandia?) Mhinoa ag coinnaigh suas dhá nathair.

Blodewedd, Lady of Flowers & Owls.

Blodewedd, or Blodeuwedd/ Blodeuedd, is a legendary lady. The Welsh legend in "The Mabinogi" tells about her. There's her story written in the fourth section, "Math."

Math and Gwydion made Blodewedd. They brought her out of the flowers of oak, broom of the mountain, and silvery rushes (=meadowsweet). The derivation of "face of flowers" is from the Welsh. It's her name's meaning.

Blodeuwedd was named this later, however! What happened? In the beginning, she was the wife of Lleu son of Arianrhod. She herself was the loveliest, of course, of all women over all the world.

Lleu was unable to marry a mortal woman. He took a wife made of flowers. But, she herself drew towards another man. Gronw Pebr found her. She caught him after he was going hunting for a stag.

They were lovers that same night. The couple wished to murder Lleu. This would not be easy. He had powers of magic.

It's a long, adventurous, story. She learns the secret of her husband's mortality. Gronw kills Lleu. The bold lovers don't find freedom.

Lleu beats Gronw. Death finds Gronw. Gwydion changed her into an owl. She loses the name "Blodeuedd," that is "flowers." Now, she gets a name "Blodeuwedd," or "flower-face" only. She resembles an owl, forever.

I saw this illustration recently. Gethin ab Iestyn put it up on his blog. It's "Celtic Realms" here. She's depicted by conventional style as bare-breasted. I don't know the cause. What's the reason? This brings into my mind the figurine of a Minoan priestess (or goddess?) holding up two snakes.

St Beuno & the Saxon's Charge.

Speaking of bibliomancy (see my "Book Meme" entry yesterday), I picked up off the shelf next to my desk where I type this one of my rather randomly (thanks to a remodelling done when I was off in the Celtic Fringe meself) arranged Irish-related books. I chose one I'd been meaning to root around in. Oliver Davies' anthology for the Paulist Press series, "Celtic Spirituality," opened to this (for me) haunting passage when I parted the pages by chance:

"One day, when Beuno was walking around his corn, near the river Severn, he heard from the other side of the river the cry of an Englishman, who was encouraging his dog in pursuit of a hare. At the top of his voice the Englishman shouted: 'Charge, charge.' These were words of encouragement to his dog in his own language. When Beuno heard the shout of the Englishman, he immediately turned and went straight back to his disciples, saying to them: 'Put on your clothes, my sons, and your shoes, and let us leave this place. The people of the man of foreign speech whom I heard calling to his dogs across the river shall invade this place. It shall be theirs, and they shall keep it in their possession.'" (214-15)

Davies tells us that this hagiography exists only in one Middle Welsh version circa the fourteenth century, but it may come from an earlier Latin source. It seemed as I transcribed the abbot's quoted warning very Latinate in its cadence and balance; I am sure Cymraeg possesses too this elegance, to be sure, but neither my fingers nor my wit cannot coax out such magic hiding there in these ironic, yes, anglicisms, given my woeful lack of Welsh. While Davies emphasizes in his brief comments on this short text its primitive and to him structural qualities (hail Levi-Strauss at his centenary!) which repeat decapitations and threaten deflorations, I wondered about this text as an historical marker of the coming of the Saesnag.

Darrell Wolcott helps out slightly here. Composite Lives of St Beuno at Ancient Wales Studies explains the typical medieval conflation, or confusion, of two Beunos. The saint at Holywell may have lived between 515/520-590 at the latest. The other, an abbot at Clynnog Fawr, flourished the following century. The healing of Beuno's niece, Winifred, accounts apparently for the fame of both saints; he raised her from the dead after one of those Celtically symbolic decapitations after lustily attempted deflorations.

At Early British Kingdoms, David Nash Ford, incorporating Baring-Gould's 1907 entry, informs us that the site of St Beuno Gasulsych's (545-640) preaching's known as Maen Beuno; the standing stone's at Berriew near Welshpool. Around here, therefore, the sight of the Saxon and his sounds first appeared.

But, if we know where, what about when? I spent a quarter-hour leafing through indices of Welsh histories on my shelf, after an on-line search turned up nothing. Thanks for old-fashioned scholarship! In the best place rather than the last I should have looked, John Davies, on pg. 62 of his revised Penguin "History of Wales," answers my query. He estimates "about 610" for when Beuno heard "the language of paganism" across the banks that caused him to flee for Gwynedd. There, today, Welsh still survives.

Photo: Formerly Jesuit seminary, now retreat center, St Beuno's in North Wales carries on the Christian apostolate of over 1600 years in that nation. It seems so long ago that the Welsh tamed the Saxon, leading those who hailed hounds into Christian mores and Catholic customs. Even though beheadings and ravishings may have continued if less abated. The site near St Asaph's known to the literati today, perhaps, as Gerard Manley Hopkins studied theology there in the mid-1870s while "writing a third of his mature poetry," according to the website. I thought this image of two men from the center making the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises at Snowdon Lake captured well the power of the water, the human, and the natural that the saint(s) heard in various languages, sixteen centuries ago. No dogs "charge," at least in visual range. I wonder, peering: is there a third man on the far side of the lake?

Glyn Jones' "Selected Stories": Book Review

I read Glyn Jones' gripping "The Pit" in a later collection of stories by various Welsh writers, "The Green Bridge," (reviewed by me on Amazon US and here recently); the novella "The Green Island" here rivals it in length, plot and premise. Two uneasy lovers find that nature conspires against them and wonder if it's more than the elements that have it in for their adulterous actions. Jones combines the quasi-biblical cadences of many of his fellow Welsh writers who move between their native language's rich imagery and eloquent rhetoric into an English perhaps marginally more spare, and perhaps more blunt. The result can make for a stylistic register that may at first sound out of sync with contemporary English. It's stranger and more detached, even as its intimacy draws you in to a faintly archaic mode, despite the modern settings of many of these stories.

Like the Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty, who also went back and forth between his native Irish and English for powerful stories that often entered into animal as well as human souls, imagining their brutal and yearning lives on the edge of civilization, many of the stories here set up parallels. Characters appear often rather archetypal, and this heavier burden means that some stories remain clunkier by comparison. I liked the selections best in which, as Jones explains in an excellent brief introduction to this 1972 anthology, as a writer he gets to play God. The clash of conformity with instinct, the pairing of beast with human, sparks confrontations and tensions that impel the best stories.

Some, as he notes, are based on anecdotes he heard; one appears taken from a Welsh legend, and the rest, even though they take place in the middle of the last century, more or less, evoke often a distant time freer of distractions from passion, revenge, lust, and loyalty. Surprisingly, the mines so well described in "The Pit" do not appear here; the pastoral settings of the south-west Welsh coast contend against the Welsh city as the places for these stories, but, as with O'Flatherty, I reckon Jones favors the rural redoubt over the urban bustle. The peace may not come in either place for his protagonists, but there's less to draw his characters away from their silent, nagging, or insistent voices in their head as they face nature and enter themselves to wrestle with the big questions that, inevitably, they must answer.

(Posted to Amazon US today; I note a collected stories came out in 1999 from U of Wales Press. Too expensive, but worth seeking in a library!)

Painting: Sir William Nicholson, Tate Gallery caption: "The Nicholsons lived at Harlech in North Wales towards the end of the First World War and later. This view is from high above Harlech Castle, which is itself on the edge of a hill, and looks across Tremadoc Bay to the mountains on the Lleyn Peninsula. It is seems [sic] to be by moonlight, after rain, with a reflection from a slate roof and a pattern of shadows cast by the walls around the fields." "The Hill Above Harlech" 1917

"The Green Bridge: Stories from Wales": Book Review

John Davies edited-- if sparingly given but a five-paragraph introduction, a few sentences appended about each contributor, and a few sentences of acknowledgments-- this collection of twenty-five short stories written in English by Welsh authors over the 20th c. Appearing in 1988, it spans the century. I'll briefly comment on the ten I found most worthwhile.

Ifan Pughe, a pseudonymous author, gives a biblically-infused dreamlike "The Wild Horses and Fair Maidens of Llanganoch." As with the better-known Caradoc Evans here in his "Three Men from Horeb," this type of tale conveys what Davies characterizes as "mythopoetic, lighting our dream life, its longings, fears. Our mythology is our lasting consensus, an alternative and often buoyant reality. And a means perhaps of reconciling the irreconciliable." (7) Evans, however, remains much grimmer, the darker side of Pughe's more Lawrentian consciousness. This aura infuses also one of the two longer stories that I especially liked: "The Chosen One" by Rhys Davies. The tension between an atavistic throwback and a powdered dowager unfolds dramatically, and the denouement provides an appropriate, if not predictable, conclusion to the climactic, psychosexual tension.

Such tension, as seen from the view of a little boy, enters Dylan Thomas' "Patricia, Edith and Arnold." The boy witnesses two-timing Arnold get his comeuppance, and the clash of a youthful innocence with adult sin makes for a satisfying, and less schematic than I'd feared, entry. Thomas, by contrast with many of his bilingual peers, controls his language markedly. Many of the writers who also wrote in Welsh tend to charge their stories selected by Davies in English with an undercurrent of less controlled prose. This is not to their detriment in the better stories, but some that I have left unmentioned do mope, prance, or fumble along.

The best of these, the other long story: Gwyn Jones' "The Pit." Like Thomas, a love triangle sets up the plot, but the drama of a protagonist trapped in a mine, fearing his rival's out to destroy him from afar and above, makes for a truly exciting narrative. It's old-fashioned in the best sense of a gripping read. Same with Glyn Jones' "Jordan." This recalls Arthur Machen in its uncanny juxtaposition of the supernatural with the mundane, a half-mythical tale of wrongs righted wrongly if evenly for the sake of righteousness, done by an evildoer to another of his kind.

Emyr Humphreys' "The Arrest" brings the selections closer to present-day concerns, or at least those of modern Wales. It's a simple tale of a preacher preparing for incarceration for his symbolic stand not to pay the television licence until a Welsh-language service was implemented. Many did go to jail for such a decision, and Humphreys carefully shows the idealism and the folly of such a violation of the law. While Alun Lewis' "The Raid" takes place in India immediately pre-Partition, and while Wales never enters into the story, the parallel with another fanatic defying the Empire for his patriotism makes for both a stirring adventure and a thoughtful take on dying for one's country. And, how the imperial forces judge such a stance.

A skewed slant on this issue, in an unnamed African nation under apartheid, pushes another story with no overt Welsh content, Duncan Bush's "Boss," into a symbolic, politically charged interpretation. It's a sign of Bush's skill that he gives a tale full of latent colonial critique as well as potent power without falling into didacticism. Dannie Abse takes this same sense of warped identity into "My Father's Red Indian," which again from an oblique angle appears to become a meditation on the need to assimilate a foreign consciousness within one's domestic predictability.

(Posted today to Amazon US)

Richard Llewellyn's "Green, Green My Valley Now": Book Review

In high school, three decades ago, I read the Welsh and Patagonian saga of Huw Morgan that began with, of course, "How Green is My Valley." Although the other day I came across a reference to the 1941 film version -- recall it won Best Picture Oscar in that remarkable year of "Citizen Kane"-- as "Hollywood schmaltz," the novels did have their moments of energy and conviction. Certainly I learned much about not only coal but cabinetry, life in the Argentinian frontier and the culture that Welsh speakers sought to preserve in their dramatically sparse new land.
What stayed with me past the admittedly heavy-handed emotional scenes was Llewellyn's conviction in the distinctive identity of his people.

His novels played for a mass-market audience, akin in retrospect to the epics of a Leon Uris as mid-20th century sagas, and so never earned the respect given critically to, say, Dylan Thomas, yet they remain for many a while back probably the average Anglo-American reader's introduction to a Welsh milieu. This belated end to Huw's Patagonian stint brings him back from the military corruption that strangles 1970s Argentina. Huw keeps his wealth, more or less, and in this novel appears limitlessly wealthy. I suppose the British economy was indeed at a low ebb then; he's able to buy up land and homes and fund a deserving student for three years at Heidelberg while he pays for or pays off conniving relatives from the Argentine who learn of his newly acquired bank account.

The novel, when I read it way back, had not stuck in my memory. Now I know why. It's surprisingly dull. Llewellyn's strongest gift was his narrative voice-- it rings true here as in his earlier installments of Huw's life. But, despite the women willing to throw themselves at this aging scion, and the intricate derring do of Breton and Irish and Welsh nationalists who all conspire to foment pan-Celtic havoc, the whole question of what will happen to a Wales so down on its luck, and a Huw who manages to parlay his luck into one investment after another, human or financial, gives this effort a detached, airless quality. You do not care as much as the author intends about Huw and his relations and acquaintances.

Without the details of how to make a cabinet or mine coal that invigorated earlier storylines, the characters remain often inert. And, there's very little payoff in any return to the valley of his childhood, or any connections with his earlier novels that matter much. While this may stand as a small marker to a post-Investiture Welsh society still threatened by dams that obliterate villages, and convulsed by idealistic rebels, the blundering mayhem blamed on the Welsh who dare to act foolishly for the self-government that others remain only dreaming about turns the novel into not so much farce as indifference. Llewellyn castigates his countrymen for blunders and doubts they could ever rule themselves, and the whole Panglossian theme of cultivating one's estate and letting the rest run down appears to have escaped the eye of what once would have been a sharper observer of Welsh complacency.

(Posted to Amazon today, British and US!)
Image: poster for the movie that beat out Orson Welles: http://ikritic.blogspot.com