A470 Articles and Debates

 

Professor Dai Smith introduces The Library of Wales

 

 

I spent most of the spring and summer of 1968 perched like a Victorian shipping clerk on a leather–covered high stool in front of a sloping reading desk upstairs in Cardiff’s splendidly ornate Central Library.  In those days, before the advent of micro-fiche even, if you wanted to do newspaper research you read the originals, opened, spread and bound.  My research was on the epic history of inter-war South Wales and day after day, as the sun peeked through vaulted windows and guitar music drifted up from the Hayes, I was immersed in stay-down strikes and stand-up riots and political eloquence that was as principled as it was serious.  It was absorbing and, in the chaos of its detail, exhausting.  I longed for something, anything really, that could help knit it together in the mind.  Since I had spent the previous year or so studying political fiction – notably Joseph Conrad – in New York City I yearned for a novel to tell me the meaning of my South Wales story.  Or at least to try.  And what I knew and had read, including the incomparable Gwyn Thomas who had once taught me, did not tap into this central seam directly.

Back amongst the yellowing newsprint I kept coming across the name of a Communist leader of the unemployed, Lewis Jones from mid-Rhondda, my very own patch.  I had never heard of him and there were, then, no histories of Wales in which you could read about him.  I read on.  And one afternoon I reached 1937 and read a short, inconsequential notice of the novel he had just written and published.  I rushed to the card catalogue and there, handwritten, it was.  Only, the only copy of Cwmardy they had was missing.  That same week I bought, from Lear’s, the just published The Dragon Has Two Tongues, Glyn Jones’ entrancing memoir and critique of his life and times amongst Anglo-Welsh writing.  I flipped the pages and sipped the day’s end pint of Brains.  The combination clicked.  There, on page 145, was a Footnote in the essay on Huw Menai Williams – another writer from the Rhondda about whom I knew nothing – and it read: ‘An Anglo-Welsh writer who really was a checkweigher was Lewis Jones (1897-1939) the Communist author of Cwmardy (Laurence and Wishart 1937) and We Live (Laurence and Wishart 1939).’

There was another novel?  The card catalogue was my first port of call in the morning.  This time it was there.  I also fast-forwarded my chronological research to read the end of Lewis Jones’ own story in The Western Mail’s obituary notice of 1939.  Later I discovered a copy of the earlier book; later still wrote the Introduction to both of them for the re-prints made by Yr Academi Gymreig in 1978; and finally wrote the volume on Lewis in the Writers of Wales series in 1982.  But nothing was more gratifying than, over the years that followed, the interest in this forgotten, yet key figure, across the world: studies in Danish and German and Spanish and Swedish. And in Wales and England critics as insightful as John Pikoulis, Valentine Cunningham, Frank Kermode and, of course, Raymond Williams gave him his due.
 
The purpose of this reminiscence is not warmed-over nostalgia but cold analysis of why the Welsh Assembly Government’s Library of Wales initiative is such a vital part in the sustaining and projection of Welsh culture.  My experience would have been typical, at the time, of any young historian or literary scholar in Wales.  I had been lucky to have stumbled across Lewis Jones and, in no small measure, been helped forward by that vademecum of my generation, The Dragon Has Two Tongues. But no-one in the English Departments of the University of Wales was then teaching this literature about industrial Wales in English and where Anglo-Welsh was mentioned in the universities at all it was of the marginal Powys brothers, John Cowper and T.F., or Dylan or R.S. Thomas.  Slowly, and with great determination, by scholars like M Wynn Thomas, Jim Davies, Tony Brown, Jane Aaron, John Pikoulis, Dafydd Johnston and Katie Gramich, the study of Welsh writing in English became more and more widely understood to be unjustly neglected.  It has taken a long time but its validity and respectability have become assured.  And yet with all this gain there remains a mingled sense of something-less-than-the-whole.  Of something less than the reason for this literature’s existence in the first place: To reach out and speak to the people about whom, in all their complexity, it was written.

If a popular memory and a cultural heritage was present and available in the Welsh language literature of Wales, it was palpably not so in English.  If you wanted to read in or teach that body of literature in, say, in the classroom and in syllabi, since the 1980s, then you did so haphazardly and by happenstance.  If you happened to be able to find texts and teaching materials, it might so happen that you could bring literature to the attention of students who lived in those places. More importantly still, if it was possible to provide, and keep constantly in print, this literature of Wales, then we would be preserving the memory of collective and individual passages through time without which no community or country or nation or identity can be taken forward. The Culture Committee of the National Assembly for Wales questioned the lack of prominence for some superlative writing within the secondary school system. So,in the early summer of 2004 the Minister Alun Pugh asked me to prepare a series of recommendations about a possible Library of Wales.  My role as Series Editor, largely centres on the overall choosing and format of the books, on reading proofs and on the commission and discussion of all the forewords for a series definitely intended to have as wide an appeal as possible. Parthian will undertake the tasks of publication and marketing, in partnership with Academi. The Welsh Books Council will be the accounting body to the Minister.  But ultimately, the public, now and in the future, will be the judge of its success, both as a commercial and as a civic project.

For there is the rub with which, back in 1968, I at least, began.  I read We Live and then Cwmardy because I was driven to do so intellectually and for my research work as an historian.  I read them, though, with the fascinated delight, and sometimes disdain, that you feel when you see your own features in the photographs of your forbears.  And that was, and is, far and away the most important reason for a Library of Wales in the 21st Century.