R.S. THOMAS: A Vivid Stubbornness
Some years ago - appropriately enough, in a dentist's waiting room - I read an account of an interview with R.S. Thomas. He was alleged to have complained about the presence in Wales of English holiday-makers, and, specifically, about a girl who asked him the way somewhere, not surprisingly using what is, after all, Thomas's native language - English. He pretended not to understand her, and replied in Welsh. Apparently he referred to her, in the interview, as "a thing in a bikini", her attire being an additional cause for indignation. All this floated back into my mind, in an untimely way, when the editor invited me to write something for this 80th birthday number. I can only add that when we met for the first time, in Dublin in 1991, Thomas did not strike me as a man who would be rude to a young lady, however dressed.
Born in 1914, I inevitably did not become aware of Thomas's work till I was well past the age at which one succumbs to contemporary influences, but when I did encounter the poems I was impressed by the vivid stubbornness of the country people they delineated, and by the sober conviction, which the poet seems to have made his own, that
Between better
And worse is no bad place.
More surprisingly, he seems to find in himself, as in God, a "long war with himself", - surely too dangerously akin to
that
metallic warfare in which
the one casualty is love.
Even beneath the more light-hearted
Of all the women of the fields --
full skirt, small waist --
the scarecrow is the best dressed
"the earth's fathoms" are waiting. Thomas's world is not the Christian world known to Henry Vaughan. He thinks in a chamber:
too low to stand up in
where the breath condenses
to the cold and locationless
cloud we call truth.
Hardly for me to say so, but it sounds less like a place for the Church in Wales than for philosophy, of which Thomas has left us a 'Synopsis' in the Frequencies volume:
Plato offered us little
the Aristotelians did not
take back. Later Spinoza
rationalised our approach;
we were taught that love
is an intellectual mode
of our being. Yet Hume questioned
the very existence of lover
or loved. The self he left us
with was what Kant
failed to transcend or Hegel
to dissolve: that grey subject
of dread that Sorren Kierkegaard
depicted crossing its thousands
of fathoms; the beast that rages
through history; that presides smiling
at the councils of the positivists.
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