Lectures

The Gwyn Jones Lecture 2002

Written by Tony Conran, presented by M Wynn Thomas as part of the Academi Bay Lit festival, May 2002

Castles and All Hallows: The First Two Symphonies of the Welsh Commoedia – Tony Conran

I suppose I’d better say how Welsh I am, first of all. As in the case of other English poets from Wales in the nineteen-sixties, the so-called Second Flowering, there was an element of willed choice in my Anglo-Welshness. I was brought up in Colwyn Bay by a Welsh grandfather (a miner from Chirk who became an Inspector for the Prudential) and an English grandmother. Grandpa was personally Welsh all his life, but he took good care that very little of it rubbed off on his family. I’d always assumed he was not Welsh-speaking, though I knew his parents were; but the circumstantial evidence is mounting that he could speak it. He denied all knowledge of it, however. My cousin says she overheard his friend from Chirk ask him if he still used Welsh at all. He just grunted non-committally. He mocked her if she used the bits of Welsh she learnt in the school playground in Colwyn Bay. I owe my grandfather more than I can say; but equally, what I now see as a betrayal of Wales has dogged me all my life. However, it was not until much later that I realised I was not properly English either.

I found myself as a poet through a combination of reading Spenser and Shakespeare, and moderns like Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Lorca and Edith Sitwell, with Latin poets like Catullus, Virgil and Ovid; and I was beginning to translate Welsh poetry. I met with very little success publishing my poetry in England. I realise that as a disabled person, it took me years longer to mature than normal - you get the same problem in celibate priests. But the situation never improved. I gradually came to realise a fundamental divergence between modern English poets and myself.

They were empiricists, writing about experience. They approximated their art to up-market journalism, either reporting as eye-witnesses or reflecting on what they found. In such writing, consciousness was at a premium, though obviously subconscious motifs and even dream imagery sometimes emerged through the fabric. In artist’s jargon, their art was representational not abstract. Their poetry was based on the dichotomy of ego and what the ego perceived, I and it, and rarely on the relationship of people talking to one another.

The poetry I wrote, on the other hand, was not a poetry of experience but an attempt to create metaphorical paradigms of the recovery of innocence: that is, something like allegories of rebirth. This subject matter excluded representational modes, since rebirth is not experienced empirically - or at least, if it is (feelings of joy, gratitude, love) these are trivial concomitants of an existential change. My poetry, like all metaphor, tended towards abstraction - in the painterly sense - not representation; and here two things made this tendency more insistent than it usually is. One was my friendship with a modernist composer of music, and the other was that the first art I had even a minimum competence in was pure mathematics which I did in the sixth form.

A lot of my energy was spent trying to disrupt conscious thinking. Dreams, Zen riddles, nonsense doodles, nursery rhymes were my stock in trade. Sometimes my poems were deliberately self-destructive, in that at the end the experience they gave evaporated in the mind, like this one called

CHRISTMAS IS COMING

If I could give away desire
as cheaply as a ten bob note
and leave Time happy at my tip, and leave
time happy just to stroll the roads,
the lanes where vetches tangle, utterly absorbed
in my happiness in you -

if I could only
take even my happiness in you, and throw it
like a sixpence in a fountain, and not bother
even to wish -

or keep it
in a breast pocket like a farthing, not for use
but as a charm or talisman for nothing -
nothing or God bless you - both -
for keeps -

And here’s a lonely one where innocence is becoming asymptotic, almost like a tangent to life but never quite meeting it - `She is, and is not, Cressida’:

OTHER THAN WE

My loneliness is other than I
And all around me that strange land
Humps like a weasel through my dreams
Where robbers come.

And if, my dear, you try to pilfer
I’d give you twice the hour’s worth
For my hunched time is other than I
Where tinkers tap.

And if you hammer me kettle and pan
All my doors will latch for your asking,
You can snaffle and market my chicken my rose
Where hucksters bitch.

And if your price is a deal too high
My summit of fancy is other than I
And you may afterwards thistledown down
Where the swart mole tilts.

And if you undermine my plot
Our warring wits are other than we,
And the strange land humped like a weasel’s back
Where bedouin ride

In the sandstorm dreams to pillage and thieve
Like buccaneers on hillocky seas
Is only a loneliness stolen from two,
Quite other than we.

Most of my best poetry at that time was written in a sort of trance, but it was radically inter-personal, I and thou, not I and it, because innocence and rebirth were not solitary things (though they could be lonely) but a state of union, a world in a baby’s eyes, a couple in love, a field full of folk.

I hardly seemed to dream at all during those years - I wrote poems instead. Dreaming has always been important to my poetry, because it offers an abstraction, a life that is not experience. Our modern secular civilization, historically, is peculiar in denying any social relevance to dreams, regarding them as purely private, a kind of mental excreta that are necessary to get rid of the day’s surplus images. But they hold a lot of power still, and not all of it purely private. I actually became a Christian because of a dream.

During the middle sixties I was largely pre-occupied by the great labour of translating Welsh poetry for the Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, which was another kind of paradigm of the recovery of innocence and the ever-present potential of tragedy if it failed. I found in Welsh poetry an inter-personal poetic; a vision of society centred on the abiding possibility of innocence; and a world-view geared to rationalism, not empiricism. By rationalism I mean a philosophy that believes that the rational mind has access to knowledge of the world other than through the senses: for instance it can reason about God’s purpose in creating us.

Welsh poetry did not meld, though, with my sense of the importance of dreaming - strangely, in view of the high place other mediaeval cultures gave to dreams - but perhaps what Saunders Lewis called the `platonism’ of the bards, their praise of their patrons, the uchelwyr, as `platonic types’ of lordship, was itself a kind of dream.

So my paradigms grew wider: socialism, nationalism, on the political side, and Buddhist and Hindu shock-tactics on the spiritual. I cannot go into all that. But as early as 1953 I had felt an affinity with Dylan Thomas, and now I began to explore critically the very difficult work of his Anglo-Welsh contemporaries. I felt very strongly that neither Wales nor I could afford to dump the great body of that explosion of talent as merely English and nothing to do with Wales.

I have come to realise two things, both a bit odd. The first was that though English poetry, since 1900 at least, has been overwhelmingly lyrical, Welsh sensibility is dominated by the apprehension of epic: the epic subject matter of Wales, its survival or failure to survive, and the adventures of the epic hero, the Welsh poet or his imaginary surrogate, in his attempts to ratify this survival or failure. If you write poetry in Wales this is what Welsh people look for in your work.

And secondly, even odder, the centrality of Idris Davies in all this. Idris, from an English point of view, is an almost non-existent and very minor `local’ poet who never succeeded in forging an authentic personal style and whose lyrics are over-simplified, often rhetorical and sentimental; mainly interesting as social and historical documents, though sometimes expressive and occasionally complex enough to rate as poetry. At any rate that was the judgement I made when I first came across his work in the fifties.

The trouble was, the man wouldn’t go away. The Angry Summer is a poem or `sequence’ he wrote about the catastrophic miners’ strike of 1926. Putting it on as a performance in the seventies made me feel that the whole was much greater than the sum of its parts. What I’d taken to be lyrics weren’t real lyrics at all but tesserae in a dramatic mosaic. And then later, when Dafydd Johnston’s monumental edition of Idris Davies came out, I saw the problem: the seemingly mindless production of such `tesserae’ without a shape, a mosaic to build towards. Idris Davies had himself only half-realised the novelty of what he was doing. He knew the Angry Summer was one poem, of course, not a collection or even a sequence of lyrics. But I don’t think he wholly realised that what he was writing was epic, the epic of the miners’ strike of 1926 and the subsequent breakdown of the coal-mining communities of the South. He took from Eliot, maybe Joyce, the idea of a major poem as a mosaic of fragments; but instead of impressionistic bits and pieces like The Waste Land he used what I call these pseudo-lyrics as his epic medium, his tesserae. But this brilliant formal invention he had then wasted for want of a new subject, or perhaps from a growing alienation from his own people. Epic is not something you can write in a social vacuum. He saw that what he had done wasn’t taken seriously, either by the Valleys or by the poetry-reading public, even in Wales. He was accused of `journalism’, of not being interested in the beauty of words, of lacking form.

The epic subject and the fact that Idris Davies had not just composed exotic lyrics for the Anglo-American poetry market, but had written for and out of the Valleys’ consciousness of itself, made him central to the Second Flowering, the poets who came to the fore in the nineteen-sixties, and particularly to those writers - Harri Webb, John Tripp, Bryn Griffiths (plant Idris as I call them, children of Idris) - who had not had their Welshness corrupted by English departments at college. The English-trained pedagogocrats, the powers-that-be in the teaching profession, tended towards Edward Thomas, Alun Lewis and, later on, R.S.

What has not happened is any great extension of Idris Davies’s form, the symphonic epic mosaic, where the tesserae are almost independent pseudo-lyrics. I have tried to use something like it in my four `symphonies’ - the three that make up The Welsh Commoedia (Castles, All Hallows and A Gwynedd Symphony) which try to combine the epic `matter of Wales’ with the elegiac material of my friends and myself; and the so far unpublished What brings you here so late, which is a mosaic Prelude, an autobiography rooted in dreams.

I retired from my college job in 1981, and the next ten years were very eventful, dominated by two baby daughters growing up and a tragic sequence of deaths of those near to me. Thatcher was selling British socialism (such as it was) down the river. The Falklands War and the Welsh soldiers that were killed there made me realise the responsibility that I had as a poet to my people. Feminism and the impending collapse of international communism loomed large in my consciousness.

Apart from the Falklands elegy, my work in the middle eighties started with the Jonathan stories which I told my daughters at bedtime - some of you may know them, because we’ve been using them as Christmas cards ever since; and if you don’t, I’ve copies of two or three which you can pick up afterwards. Otherwise my poetry was dominated by two dance tragedies, Blodeuwedd and Branwen, with plots taken from the Mabinogion. But without the narrative and dramatic freedom and the sense of an audience I’d found in telling stories, these plays would have been impossible.

Both dramas, I like to think, are about the nakedness of women. Blodeuwedd is a girl actually created out of flowers - sugar and spice and all things nice - to be suitable as someone’s wife. Her desperate attempts to realise herself, to be human, lead her into adultery and murder, and finally into dehumanised nightmare - she becomes an owl, a predatory witchlike creature, `without scruple or remorse’. Branwen, on the other hand, with her brothers, is a Third World leader of a populist revolution against dictatorship. Her brothers, to save the revolution and despite her protests, force her to accept a dynastic marriage with another local dictator. He treats her very badly, and in order to save her, her brothers go to war and in the struggle the revolution collapses, Branwen’s heart is broken and her baby is killed. Branwen, besides being a feminist play, is a prophecy of the kind of muddle of revolutionary idealism and the mass of unresolved personal relationships that was to destroy Stalin’s `Socialism in One Country’ and Soviet-style communism throughout the world.

These two dance-dramas ask the audience to participate in many levels of reality: for example, in Blodeuwedd, Gwydion, the man who makes her out of flowers, besides being a mediaeval magician, is both a naked Stone-Age shaman and a police-inspector in a modern detective story. In Branwen the fantasy and anachronism is even more extreme. In both plays the convention is broken that each character is played by one actor at a time. Blodeuwedd herself is played by two actresses, who speak from opposite sides of the stage; and on occasion she is also danced by one or other of the dancers as well. The dramatist’s job is to establish these new conventions quickly and easily in the audience’s mind, so that they understand more or less perfectly what is going on.

On the whole I think I succeeded - certainly with Branwen. But it does mean that the plays are like epics: each one is its own world, its own box of tricks if you like, and cannot be repeated. In spite of Milton’s Welsh eisteddfodic imitators, you cannot have two Paradise Losts. Traditionally, epic poets like Virgil and Milton wait till they’ve got their act together and then bend every sinew, sometimes over many years, to produce the one masterpiece on which they are going to be judged.

But then, what other art-form famously creates its own universe, one for each work? Well, you might say the novel, of course, but I’ve never had any inclination to go in that direction. In music I’m reminded above all of Mahler’s ideal of the symphony; and it is there that I turned my attention next.

You see, I didn’t think that a verse narrative of epic length was possible in modern English; and in any case I couldn’t imagine an epic fable, a story which would reflect the `Matter of Wales’ in anything like its real richness. But beside the epic format there was also the Visionary Journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Ezra Pound had used the pattern in his Cantos. Dante was always somewhere at the back of my mind. Instead of the continuous spiralling downward through hell and then upward to Heaven, I used a format derived from the symphony, with my building blocks symphonic movements, each one made up of pseudo-lyrics like Idris Davies’s, in which various themes and chronologies interweave and give significance to each other - as they do in Dante of course, and as I’d found so effective in my plays.

One problem with producing a poem to read instead of a play to participate in, is that readers have time to ask awkward questions. The `voices of their accursed human education’ as Lawrence called them, continually get in their way. `Heigh up,’ they say, `this Gwydion’s a mediaeval wizard: what’s he doing as a naked Stone Age savage? What the hell’s a modern police inspector got to do with it?’ A reader from Bloodaxe Books actually gave this as a reason for not publishing Blodeuwedd.In the theatre, you’re too busy following the story to bother with silly questions like these. Could I get my readership interested enough in a symphonic framework for them not to put obstacles in the way of their real appreciation of what was going on? Could I, in fact, distract them from distraction?

Was it possible, anyway, to give epic weight and significance to a long poem created on symphonic lines? A symphony, as you know, is a dramatic piece for orchestra, built out of the opposition, development, conflict and resolution of different musical motifs, harmonies, tunes, moods or rhythmic undercurrents, classically in four moverments but these days often in less or more. I have spoken of the sequence of deaths that haunted me at this period: when I began Castles, my first symphony, six people dear to me had died. Castles has six movements, each one dedicated - `haunted’ would be a better word - to one of these dead friends.

Each movement begins, more or less, with Wales and the forces that have thwarted her self-development. That’s the first or main subject of the whole work. Secondly, the dead friends begin to infiltrate the texture about halfway through each movement: this is the second subject. And third, in some movements at least, my own shambling journey towards some sort of meaning is sketched in.

Let me give you some examples of how it works. The first movement is dedicated to Paul Nicholson, a television boom operator who killed himself by jumping off Menai Bridge. It was a very violent and aggressive suicide, committed by a man who obsessively played and designed war-games. The movement begins with the Norman castle-builder, the archetypal Earl, making a fortresss to control and lay claim to the land. Castles are both weapon and refuge, prisons and centres of authority; but the Earl’s assertion of his will collapses, his castle is ruined. Paul does not personally appear in this movement, but his memories of being a baby in the London blitz fuse with the tumult of the siege as the castle is destroyed:

O castle my mother, womb
Of the aspiration in me,
To what springtime do you bear me?

Out of the belly of war
Protect me, mother. Pussy-willows
Fleck the rock with gold.

I can hear the mewing hawks
Climb on the air. Then the din
Of siegecraft, wood on rock,

Stone on rock, clang of iron
Wrenching, blundering.
Men scream in broad daylight.

The baby was born in the blitz.
Leering incendiaries
Scrawled on the walls. They had no shelter.

His mother lay on the kitchen floor
Cradling him underneath her body.
Will you die for me like that?

That’s what love’s like, isn’t it?
Till I can hear your heart
Thud, thud against death -

Out of the belly of war
Protect me, mother. Ecstasy
Flecks the grey rock like sunshine.

The second movement is about the wedge that castles and foreign domination drive into the soul. It begins by contrasting castles with hillforts, the iron-age fortified towns whose ruins are dotted round the foothills of Gwynedd. Whereas castles are a device to enable a small number of invaders to impose their will on a countryside, hillforts are places for communities to make home. In their ruins we feel we belong, we can grow. I cannot imagine anyone belonging in a castle. Castle-building brings anger, oppression, alienation and waste. Somehow, with castles, we feel we’re not there any more. Mike Donahue, the dedicatee of the movement, was a folksinger, short-story writer and bird-watcher, who was killed in a car-crash. We do in fact glimpse him, actually in a photograph, with his back to us. We try and talk to him, ask him where he is now; but all that come back are dissociated sentences in the past tense, from one of his short stories. The alienation of his absence seems complete and unending.

Castles are weapons, then, of class or foreign domination. But so is a lot of art. Artists are rune-makers, spell-binders,magicians. The next movement fast-forwards to eighteenth-century Llanberis, near Caernarfon, a period of intense class-struggle, with the enclosure of common land reaching its climax and the industrial revolution just beginning to tear the landscape apart for roofing slates. Two great artists, Wilson and Turner, two ideologues of the new age, came here to paint the ancient castle of Dolbadarn on the shorthe lake: one painted a picture of classical stability under the great landlords, the other an image of constant chemical change, the vision that gave rise to Britain’s industrial might, but also to the Romantic movement and democratic reform. But now the slate industry is as much a ruin as the castle they commemorated. The dedicatee of this part of my poem is Victor Neep, an artist who came here after the Second World War - like so many incomers a fugitive from urban nightmare - to paint his moonlit abstracts of broken industrial waste.

The fourth and fifth movement, while they do have relevance to Wales, the Welsh language and the Welsh complicity in empire, are mainly taken up with the second and third subjects of the symphony, the dead friends - in this case Linda Noyau and my father - and my own shambling progress towards meaning. They concern my renewed confrontation with the crucified Christ as a result of Linda’s death, after seventeen years away from the Church; and the belated and partial healing of my relationship with my father from the wound that war-time separation inflicted on us. Throughout Castles the dedicatees move further and further into the limelight. Paul in the first movement is just a memory of a cry, part of the violence and excitement of war; but Linda and my father are rounded presences, almost like characters in a novel.

The sixth movement is the only one where the dead dedicatee was actually Welsh, Eirlys Roberts, an actress from Carmarthen. The two main themes - Wales and the death of my friends - move into focus together. The longest section of the entire work is a narrative about two sisters, Eirlys and Non, daughters of the manse, and the pressures on them, either to leave Wales for wider horizons elsewhere, which was what Non tried to do, or, like Eirlys, make a home here, a refuge for Welshness and the Welsh language, after the terrible wasting of the Depression and two World Wars. This tension, though it reached crisis point in our time - my time anyway! - is no new thing, being almost as old as Wales herself: to quote my Welsh poem, `Ar y Maes’:

Mae’r ddwy linell yn torri
Fel briw trwy Gymru, trwy’n byd.
’Rydym yn byw ar draws ffawt:
Mae toriad yn y ddaear

Dan ein sylfaen, dan y bryniau,
A gyfyd ac a egyr fel blodyn gwael
I’r wybren. Mae ffawt enfawr
Yn ein tynnu ar wahân.

(The two lines cut
Like a wound through Wales, through our world.
We live across a geological fault:
There’s a break in the earth

Under our bedrock, under the hills,
Which rises up and opens like a vile flower
To the sky. An enormous fault
Is pulling us apart.)

One good thing about our new Welsh Assembly is that this fault-line is at last reaching real political consciousness. The opposition between the pan-British Labour Party and Plaid Cymru is as near to conscious reality as Wales as a whole has ever achieved.

Castles is a poem circumscribed by death. Each movement ends with a highly formal structure called a sestina, which forms its climax and concerns the core of our response to the death of the friend: bitter guilt in the case of the suicide Paul, the alienation of absence with Mike, Vic Neep’s sheer terror, the inadequacy I felt with my father … In only one case does the death involve anything like joy: Linda in the fourth movement leads me back to the Cross on Calvary, so her death is felt in the sestina as a kind of wedding, a union with Christ. But on the whole Castles is a deeply pessimistic and claustrophobic poem about our failure to keep faith. It moves round and round the circles of death like a vortex.

Castles is not a history of Wales, of course; but it does more or less take that story up to the Depression and the aftermath of the Second World War. My second symphony, All Hallows, deals with the two attempts since then to restore our birthright and self-respect.

The first attempt was two-pronged: to save the Welsh language and to achieve some measure of home rule. The perceived contradiction in practice between these two aims certainly contributed to the fiasco and self-inflicted wound of the 1979 Referendum: English speakers suspected that the proposed devolution was a ploy by Welsh speakers to get jobs for the boys, while Welsh speakers hesitated to support an assembly mainly representing an English-speaking majority.

The second attempt to restore a Welsh dimension, post-1979, was one of resistance to Thatcher’s destruction of decency in economic life and her attack on any kind of hindrance to the juggernaut of international capital. One such resistance centred round the continued existence of Wales as a separate national community.

All Hallows adopts a traditional epic strategy to deal with its political and social subject-matter. That is, it sees it as refracted in the hopes and experience of two men, whom we can call epic heroes, at least for the purpose of the poem: Raymond Garlick, the Anglo-Welsh poet, and Paul Davies, a visual artist whose main icon was the shape of Wales as a map, which he created in every conceivable medium. Garlick’s magazine, Dock Leaves (later The Anglo-Welsh Review) almost single-handedly kept Anglo-Welsh literary hopes alive in the dark post-war years; while Paul Davies and his `Becca’ group fought a bitter and prolonged battle against an artistic establishment which marginalised Welsh creativity and its political message.

The first movement is like a parody of the Book of Job in the Bible. You remember how God boasts of how he is pleased with the way Job lives the good life: Satan then bets God that he can tempt Job into despair, blasphemy and sin. God accepts the wager and hands Job over to be tempted. In my poem, the complacency of the Anglo-Welsh Imagination is similarly challenged by the Shadow, a Jungian archetype who represents everything we suppress from consciousness:

`Ho, Shadow,’ said
Imagination,
`Have you observed my creature Raymond?
How he bears himself - ’

(It was a shining glass, it was adversity)

`He is coming to my festival
He carries the sponge of vinegar
To give me. He lays his goat foot
Gingerly among the privates.
He will play me aboard
Like a bosun.
He fingers his flute.
He will judge like a poet.’

`Want to bet?’ said
The Shadow?

And the Indignations
Crowded into the forecourt to hear him.
He dragged out a sack.

`Not I,’ said Imagination.

But nevertheless
Like Efnisien at the feast
The Shadow squeezed it, played
Badger in the bag,
Until skulls broke,
Eyeballs were bursting
Tongues torn out.

`Play your pipe now,’ he smiled,
`Pipe me aboard.’

And in the single red darkness of the time
The Shadow climbed upon the Cross
Like a lantern.

Garlick had invoked the trial of Christ before Pilate in his `anti-poem’ about the trials of Welsh-language activists. He gave the Welsh cause an ideology of martyrdom. So the Shadow sardonically usurps Christ’s position on the Cross as he begins his trial-by-ordeal of Garlick himself.

Young people were breaking the law and committing civil disobedience to further the aims of the Welsh language society. Garlick compared these patriots to the expedition, celebrated by the poet Aneirin, of the sixth-century Gododdin tribe to re-take Catraeth from the invading English. He took Aneirin’s line, `Poets of the world judge men of valour,’ as his slogan, though he was himself a pacifist and a follower of Gandhi:

But indeed, the young men
Were walking into battle,
Into no man’s land

Walking in the grey
Morning, brave
For us to judge
The white of Gandhi’s dhoti,
The loins of peace.

In the trial he says, like a witness to martyrdom, ` My hope is on what is to come.’ He looks forward to a bilingual Welsh state as one of the United Nations:

Specification. Country l33.
WALES / CYMRU. Oaks
On the quickening hillside
Sprouting.

Stag, owl and salmon
Reservists. Daffodil
Through the woodland
Sounding.

The two crisp languages
Pulling like sails
Our barge
Into open sea.

We had a future. Bilingual
Wales, a destination
And a tide
Turning.

But then the Shadow, representing perhaps the `Never had it so good’ majority that Garlick tended to ignore, makes his devastating retort to this complacent vision:

Lightly, like a conjuror,
With the flip concentration
Of a fairground,
The shadow unpinned itself
From the cross.

It winked at us -
`Ho, boyos,’ it said,
`What’s in it for me?’

(And the doves giggled like schoolgirls) …

`Oo, there’s lovely,’ said the doves.

`Oh, yes,’ said the Shadow,
`It’s been a good party.
But what’s it to me?’

Continued in Part Two - Click here to read on