Living with R.S. Thomas
Surprisingly, the church door was open. Surprisingly? These days I am accustomed to encountering padlocks, metal grilles and all the best technology that Yale and Chubb can muster, when attempting to gain entrance to Welsh churches. Of course, there is always someone 'up the street' who keeps the key, and will allow you a few brisk minutes of speculation or devotion. But it's not the same. So that feeling of gingerly leaning your weight on the usually rusty-studded, dark- varnished, comforting solidity of a church door, and finding it budge a few scary millimetres, is increasingly rare. In fact, it's a bit of a thrill.
This was the ancient, sea-strand church in Aberdaron, a village of a few hundred souls set in a dramatic notch of Llyn. Strange, isn't it, that settlements of this size seem so well-known, so refulgent with their own identity, so comparatively well-chronicled in Wales, when other much more populous places, usually the huge, better-unnamed council estates of Glamorgan and north-east Clwyd, remain anonymous, almost as alien as siege towns in Bosnia.
Aberdaron in summer is apparently caravan country. But on my visit it was deserted. I was the single passenger on Bws Gwynedd, a lonely walker on the street, the first or last beachcomber on the sands. Rather guiltily, I was also the only customer in one of its hotels, sitting clenched and out-of-place in the lounge, listening to the English staff ordering frozen microwave dinners from a catalogue.
In fact, speaking out loud in Aberdaron is to advance and retreat continually over an invisible frontier. It doesn't take long to realise that it is not, linguistically, the most Welsh place in the world. Yet all I had to do was open my mouth to show the stamp on my passport. My Welsh is useful as long as I am the only person speaking. It consists of one thousand words used in three tenses, the vocabulary a hybrid of the hateful, idiomatically-vapirised Cymraeg Byw, Merthyr tavern bilingualism, circa 1920, and literary and colloquial phrases gleaned from inconsequential scholarship, which have not been heard in conversation in several generations. (Anyone heard sbrocsyn -'sparrow' - used recently?) Put more accurately, my Welsh was about as helpful on the jaunt as Old Lithuanian.
That's the trouble with places like Aberdaron. It puts Welsh people like myself on guard, desperately rummaging through the memory for our national qualifications. We are continually on the look-out for sleights, sneers, and derision. And our paranoia is only matched by our aggression, the 'I'm as good as you, brawd', attitude we carry into places like Llyn. (When it really comes down to it, we are, after all, products of an unpleasantly macho culture). Not, I hasten to add, that we often venture willingly into such terrifying areas of the country. I've never yet managed to return from my expeditions into the Welsh language heartlands without feeling strangely angry, somehow diminished, and yes, out-of-sorts. Almost unwell.
No wonder the church door was open. There was nothing but stone and wood and a polygon of afternoon light on the floor. Its austerity was confounding, even to someone like myself, familiar with the functionalism of Welsh chapels. Of course, in its severity lay its wealth, but only for those with the time and the willingness to understand. Personally, I was intimidated and felt the intimidation as an oddly cleansing experience. Poking about for the usual ecclesiastical iconography, I realised that the only icon in the church was its priest, and he, typically, dominated by his absence.
It is this idea of R.S. Thomas as a cultural icon that had impelled my bus-trip into Pen-llyn. For me, Thomas as a poet is not important. I have never really understood the literary climacteric created by his collections. Worse, perhaps, I have been continually perplexed as critic after critic has nominated him as heir to the tradition of Vaughan and Herbert, and hailed him as a 'great' religious poet. The idea, also, that he is a 'Welsh Yeats' has been allowed, by lack of critical rigor and a fear of voicing academic heresy, to gather credence.
If R.S. Thomas is a great religious poet, then his work is a fitting testament to the debilitated, apologetic and politically-cowed system of 'belief' that is liberal, Western European religion at this millennium’s end. Religious poet? For me, Dylan Thomas, pondering the estuarine splendours of his adopted home, gets tantalisingly closer to faith. And certainly to love. Glyn Jones, agonisingly loading, atom by atom, the scales of beauty , seeking to match the weight of horror that confronts him, is also, for this reader, far more deserving of the (anyway, dubious) labelling of 'religious poet'.
It is not with pleasure that I suggest that R.S. Thomas has been consistently overrated as a writer. His books, for me, are a banquet of crumbs. In terms of music, they are stillborn. Rhythmically they are conservative, almost minimalist. In matters of imagery , they mine beyond exhaustion into the realms of tiresome predictability , a slight, glittering seam.
What chafes my ignorance most about his work is that R.S. Thomas's Wales is largely unlocatable. Ned Thomas, in his introduction to the Selected Prose (1986), which is not for any perverse reason, my favourite collection of the poet's, points immediately and delightedly to how there are passages in the essays about real places, real people, that are redrawn and developed in certain of the poems.
Yet for me, Prytherch, the Puws, Cynddylan, etc. are mere ciphers created to make a point. Even the portraits of Ann Griffiths, Richard Hughes and Saunders Lewis seem not compelled by a personal love or admiration of the poet's, but because he can use the examples of these people as weapons in his own, increasingly bitter feud with the twentieth century.
Returning briefly to Selected Prose, it is fascinating to find Ned Thomas quote so approvingly in his introduction from a radio-talk by the poet about one of his parishes. The quoted section runs:
And then after a long, hot summer, the leaves would start to change colour, and for two months the valley would be like a fairyland: the cherry-trees dark red and the ash-trees yellow. There was a large ash-tree at the end of the Rectory lane which would be completely yellow by November. The leaves remained on it one autumn longer than usual...
I don't want to make too much of this, but for me the use of the word "fairyland" here is extraordinary. No term could be more alien to R.S. Thomas the poet. It is an exhausted, 'mean anything' cliche that is a major intrusion in the text. Yet it also gives a possible insight into the poet's relationship with the natural world, which, throughout much of his work, seems ambiguous. For example, as he is celebrated for his ornithological interests, I am always surprised by the lack of avian imagery in R.S. Thomas's poetry. This bird-watcher refuses to share his rarities. But then the species for which he continually looks dominates more by the power of its absence than any unexpected arrival.
As to physical Wales, the verse maps it mentally, so that for me it is a remote, politicised landscape, populated mainly by demons, sometimes by angels. Depicted as a desert, the original inhabitants he shows as cretins, and their usurpers as oafs. Of course, there is nothing new in this. The literary Welsh have often written in appalled terms about the lack of qualities in their fellow countrymen. However, it would be wise once again to remember the example of Glyn Jones, who has looked harder and longer than most at his compatriots. When it is almost fashionable to berate the spiritual and cultural bankruptcy of Wales, what Glyn Jones discovers in people is almost subversive in its sublimity.
What I miss that might help me develop a more enthusiastic attitude to R.S. Thomas's poetry is a post-1970 major work, a substantial, autobiographical piece of generous length. At obvious risk of unfairly criticising a writer for poetry he has not produced, I have not been able to find it. Instead, I possess, literally, hundreds of short poems, a packed quiver of curare-tipped darts, many of which are perfect of their type. But whilst appreciating collections such as H'm and Laboratories of the Spirit, it is still possible simultaneously to mourn a lack of prosodic intelligence and development of subject in R.S. Thomas.
True, there is The Echoes Return Slow, with its untitled fragments that, as usual, add up to something significantly more than the poetic components might initially suggest. This is experimentation, right enough, and we should be thankful for it. Let us also note the influence of the Ezra Pound of, say, Mauberley here, if not, disappointingly, of Cathay and the more lucid Cantos. I have never discovered anything in literary criticism that ties Thomas with Pound. Perhaps I should blame my own tin ear and unvoluminous reading. I Neither have I encountered an article entitled 'Welsh Larkin' that would draw out what are to this reader the obvious similarities between the minister and the librarian, in the sense of very different cultures, or issues, finding their quintessential spokesmen.
The blame for this lack of a significant poem might lie in the poet's very fertility. He is an unquenchable writer and has now published more individual poems than almost anyone of any literary stature in the U.K. Yet these seem cuttings from an invisible main work, sketches for a masterpiece that has disappeared. There is no Omeros, no Sweeney, and certainly no The Second Coming upon which to concentrate. This is, perhaps, less true of the poems about Wales. We have, after all, The Minister and 'Border Blues' and a fine choice from the early collections. But forget What is a Welshman, which is less of an albatross and more of a turkey, a bizarre and utterly misjudged publication, which, thankfully, is not now easy to come by.
An explanation might also be found in the fact that gradually R.S. Thomas the cultural icon has eclipsed R.S. Thomas the poet, despite the fact that the verse continues to flow as prolifically as ever. Today this writer's pronouncements on English migration into Wales, house-burning, the 'status' of the Welsh who don't speak their own language, and, to a lesser extent, unilateral disarmament and oil and gas exploration off the Llyn coast, can, and do, make front-page news.
It is difficult to over-estimate the influence in Wales of this role. For it is R.S. Thomas who broadcasts previously unvoiced opinions, who speaks publicly of matters that not long ago were treated with ceremonial; secrecy. Thomas's importance is that he has mapped and named the cultural divide between various groupings of the Welsh people. Certainly, he has not been alone in this, but it is the chilling lack of sentiment, of excuses, of prevarication and compromise, with which he has carried out this work, that makes R.S. Thomas unique.
It is a sobering, indeed lacerating, experience to listen in person whilst the poet lectures, for example, the non-Welsh-speaking Welsh on their linguistic treachery and gutlessness. Yet it is difficult to convey this to the many English-born or bred writers who now live and publish in Wales, because, for them, it is a less culturally- and environmentally-compromised country than England or America.
Raymond Garlick, Jon Dressel, J.P. Ward, Jeremy Hooker, Joseph Clancy, and, I imagine, the present editor of Poetry Wales, whether they have learned Welsh or not, would applaud many of the poet's cultural stipulations. And all honour to them for doing so. But they would not understand, as say, Mike Jenkins or Nigel Jenkins or Steve Griffiths would understand, the nuances and the personal implications of the lecture. I doubt if they would reel, as I have done, out of a public room after listening to the poet, feeling that I was a cancer in my own society.
Usually, R.S. Thomas's poetry cannot maintain the pressure of incorporating such matters without degenerating into a bitterness which all but destroys the writing's effect. Alternately, a poem can be the ultimate medium for communicating hatred, and there are undoubtedly poems by R.S. Thomas which are white-hot with such feeling. Hatred has its own purity, and demands respect.
However, it is unnerving to come upon a collection such as Welsh Airs which Seren published in 1987, an attempt to collect in one volume some famous 'Welsh' or 'Nationalist' (as the editor would have it) poems of earlier publication, with new or previously unobtainable work.
Despite the presence of highlights such as ‘Border Blues', the overall impact is of the writer's purse-lipped condemnation of what time or the Welsh themselves have, almost by default, allowed. Wales, emerging through the poems, is a concept betrayed, an image besmirched. In creating such effect, any possible redemption for the particular is sacrificed in the painstakingly-conjured sense of the corruption of the whole. This is dangerous territory for poets, who usually work from the opposite direction.
But as I say, it is not now for literary reasons that this man is important to Wales. Like it or not, the challenges laid down by R.S. Thomas are impossible to ignore. Ultimately concerned with language, they yet address the quality of the lives we seek to live. In a monoculture, he preaches diversity. In a consumer-state, he describes how we might practise the art of citizenship. In the empire of mammon, he evokes values.
The trouble is, he speaks so frankly that his words wound as often as they heal. Yet personally, I am grateful for his angry quest, whilst understanding that he has no chance of discovering what he purports to seek. For instance, it is easy to imagine R.S. Thomas feeling as apocalyptic about the obscene, English-infiltrated Welsh heard every day on the streets of Caernarfon as about the language of occupation and domination itself. Wales isn't Bosnia, but we have our own archipelagoes of authenticity. Personally, I hope that the poet's lasting legacy will be 'Abercuawg' or 'The White Tiger'. Yet I suspect that his breathtaking cartography of the differences between us will be the more influential.
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