Forming the Subject: The Genesis of Welsh Writing in English as an Academic Discipline
Professor Jane Aaron
In December 1938, the Welsh-language dramatist and critic Saunders Lewis gave a lecture entitled ‘Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?’ to the Guild of Graduates of the University of Wales. According to Raymond Garlick, that event ‘marks the beginning of serious Anglo-Welsh studies’.[1] It sowed the seed of a critical debate that waged throughout the 1940s and 50s. Thirty-three years later, in 1971, forty students at Trinity College, Carmarthen, enrolled to read ‘Anglo-Welsh Literature’ as a ‘three-year core component’ of a new ‘Main’ Certificate of Education course in Welsh Studies.[2] Subsequently, in 1978, at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, BA Hons English students first sat a degree examination paper in Welsh writing in English. A new academic subject was born: why its gestation period was so protracted, and what characterised the study of Welsh writing in English before the establishment in 1984 of what became AWWE, are the main questions to be discussed in this contribution to the history pages of the AWWE website.[3]
In 1969 when Garlick, speaking at the first English-language conference to be held under the auspices of the Welsh Academi, named Saunders Lewis the progenitor of ‘Anglo-Welsh studies’, that dramatist was already well-known as a potent catalyst of new political and cultural formations in twentieth-century Wales. In 1925 he had established the political party Plaid Cymru; in 1962 his radio broadcast Tynged yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language) led to the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, the Welsh-language Society. If Welsh Writing in English studies were to be appended to the list of new developments brought about through his interventions, however, it would in this case be a matter of his having provoked a strongly-felt reaction against, rather than in support of, his arguments. In ‘Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?’, Lewis had argued that Anglophone literature produced in Wales could have nothing specifically Welsh about it. Unlike in Ireland, the English language in Wales had developed no roots in the country’s soil, he claimed: it had never ‘been the speech of an organic community’, but rather the language of alien governments and educational systems enforced on Wales. ‘It is the sensibility of the English literary body that it advances,’ he says of Welsh writing in English, ‘and its idiom and vocabulary have their virtues from English poets and letters.’ Hence he came to the conclusion ‘that there is not a separate literature that is Anglo-Welsh, and that it is improbable that there ever can be’.[4] The study of Welsh writing in English began in earnest with the aim of proving the erroneousness of those conclusions, according to Garlick.
In fact, however, Saunders Lewis was not the first eminent commentator to make use of the term ‘Anglo-Welsh’ in a literary context only to deny its existence as a literature separate from the English mainstream. Others before him, with the same intention of trying to protect a beleaguered Welsh-language culture against further encroachments, had also sought to dismiss the possibility that anglophone writing could speak with the voice of Wales. Harold Idris Bell, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum and translator of Welsh poetry, in a letter to The Welsh Outlook in August 1922 refuted all attempts to establish ‘what I may call an Anglo-Welsh movement’ on the grounds that ‘literary Welshmen have usually either written, like [Henry] Vaughan and W. H. Davies, practically as Englishmen, along the lines of the English literary tradition, or used the Welsh language as their medium’.[5] Bell still held those views in 1936, when he published a monograph on The Development of Welsh Poetry, and Iorwerth C. Peate, Welsh-language poet and founder of Sain Ffagan folk museum, endorsed them in his review of the book in that year’s Cymmrodorion transactions. ‘It is idle to talk of an Anglo-Welsh literature’, claims Peate: ‘There is none: we have Welsh literature – and English literature by writers…[whose] work is not Anglo-Welsh in the sense that Yeats and Synge are Anglo-Irish. On the contrary, theirs is a substantial contribution to the tradition of English literature.’[6]
Why then should Saunders Lewis’s lecture, delivered but two years later, have aroused so strong an opposition that it could be hailed as unintentionally generating a discipline? One answer to that question may lie in the fact that those few years 1936-8 constituted an extraordinarily rich period in the production of anglophone Welsh literature. They witnessed the publication not only of Dylan Thomas’s second poetry collection Twenty-five Poems (1936) and David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), but also of Gwyn Jones’s Times Like These (1936), Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937), Rhys Davies’s A Time to Laugh (1937) and Jubilee Blues (1938), Glyn Jones’s The Blue Bed (1937) and Jack Jones’s Bidden to the Feast (1938). In other words, those were the years in which the Welsh industrial novelists began as a group to make their distinctive mark. Saunders Lewis in his lecture does not ignore this immediate context; he acknowledges that ‘the especial world of the Anglo-Welsh novelists…is the industrial life of South Wales’. But industrialism, he argues, as a global phenomenon means ‘the depression of local characteristics’ and distinctive local culture: ‘[w]hatever culture there has been in the mining valleys of South Wales has been the remnant of the social life of the countryside, and has been Welsh in speech’.[7] The industrial novelists could only offer a translation at one remove from the authentic voice of Wales.
In 1939 one of those novelists, Gwyn Jones, in his capacity as editor of the Welsh Review (the third journal of that name) entered the lists in defence of the anglophone culture of Welsh industrialism, claiming in his editorial to the Review’s first number, that in south Wales ‘the last few years have seen the emergence of a group of young writers…who for the first time are interpreting Wales to the outside world’.[8] Keidrich Rhys, the editor of Wales from 1937-40 and 1943-9, would also appear to be responding to Saunders Lewis’s lecture when from 1939 he started sending out to the journal’s contributors a questionnaire, asking such questions as ‘Do you consider yourself an Anglo-Welsh writer?’[9] In 1938 Saunders had claimed that Anglo-Welsh writers wrote predominantly for an English audience: Rhys asked his authors, ‘For whom are you writing?’ John Cowper Powys, for one, makes it clear that he recognised a connection between the questionnaire and Saunders’ lecture, commenting in his answers that ‘this whole question of “Is there such a thing as Anglo-Welsh Literature?”’ is complex.[10] In general, authors from industrial south Wales, like Glyn Jones, in their responses to Rhys’ questionnaire unproblematically accepted the title ‘Anglo-Welsh writer’, but as the 1940s advanced, a new generation of writers, which included Emyr Humphreys and R. S. Thomas, refused the appellation ‘Anglo-Welsh’, preferring, rather, to identify as ‘Welsh’ only.[11] Both Thomas and Humphreys make it evident in their replies that, for all their use of English, they considered themselves to be as supportive of the Welsh language and its culture as the most patriotic Welsh-language writers of the period, and were writing, like them, ‘for my own race/ And the reality’, as Thomas puts it, quoting Yeats.[12] B. L. Coombes, however, makes it equally apparent in his replies that he sees himself primarily as writing for the international working class.[13]
The question of the status of Welsh writing in English as a new voice for Wales was thus increasingly becoming a political, as well as cultural issue, caught up as it was in a rift between not only Wales’s two linguistic cultures, but also its international socialist versus Welsh nationalist political orientations. In 1951, Iorrie Thomas, Labour MP for Rhondda West, referred to ‘the Anglo-Welsh school of poets and authors’, in whose work, he claimed, ‘the soul of Wales is finding expression’, as evidence in support of his vehement arguments against the 1950s Parliament for Wales movement.[14] Why strive for Welsh devolution if international socialism characterised ‘the soul of Wales’ and English was its language? With his 1957 lecture ‘The First Forty Years’, Gwyn Jones brought this political and cultural clash to a head by naming Caradoc Evans ‘the father of the Anglo-Welsh’ not although but because the publication of My People in 1915 had aroused such strong opposition amongst Welsh-speaking patriots. ‘[W]ith Caradoc Evans, the war-horn was blown, the gauntlet thrown down, the gates of the temple shattered’, he announced: ‘The only Welsh readers who didn’t think My People the most noisome visitation since the Brad y Llyfrau Gleision of 1847 were those to whom it appeared our worst national disaster since the fall of the last Llywelyn in 1284. The Anglo-Welsh had arrived’ – in highly combative mode.[15] To adopt such a position was however to decrease the likelihood of Anglo-Welsh studies becoming an academic subject, for during the 1950s those fighting for greater recognition of Welsh issues within the University of Wales tended to be Welsh-speaking and nationalist. In 1951 a Joint Committee appointed to consider pleas that the University should establish a new College using Welsh as the medium of instruction entered upon a prolonged debate which ended with the defeat of the pro Welsh College party, led by Plaid Cymru candidate Gwynfor Evans, on the grounds that such a development ‘would involve a real danger of academic isolation for the University’.[16] Alienating the nationalist group left Anglo-Welsh studies with few friends amongst a University otherwise so defensively concerned to maintain its position within the status quo.
Gwyn Jones himself, at any rate, did not propose or initiate the teaching of Welsh writing in English as an academic discipline although, as Professor of English at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1940, he was well-positioned to do so. It may be that, himself a specialist in Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, his view of the Anglo-Welsh school as very recent in origin made it for him an inappropriate subject for scholarly study, characterised as English literary studies were in the mid-twentieth century by an emphasis on historical research and the Leavisite ‘Great Tradition’. It was left to a young Pembrokeshire schoolteacher in his twenties, and an Englishman to boot, first to put serious and persistent pressure on the educational establishments of Wales to include anglophone Welsh texts in their English literature syllabuses. If Saunders Lewis paradoxically provoked the discipline into being through repudiating it, it was Raymond Garlick who, in a more positive sense, laid its fountain stones through his ‘pertinacious proselytizing for Wales and Anglo-Welsh literature’ throughout the 1950s, as his biographer Don Dale-Jones puts it.[17] From first to last, the editorials Garlick penned for Dock Leaves, the journal he founded with Roland Mathias in 1949 and edited until 1960, fulminate against the Welsh universities’ neglect of their heritage. The University of Wales, he maintains in a 1952 editorial, provides but ‘a provincial English education’; it ‘has almost completely neglected even those Welsh poets and novelists who write in that English tongue which it has selected as its medium of teaching, administration and corporate life.’[18] In 1958, when Dock Leaves was re-titled The Anglo-Welsh Review, he is glad to report the growing acceptance of the term ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’, but adds that one thing yet remains: ‘its recognition by the University whose four colleges have bred so many of the writers to whom the term is properly applicable, but to whose achievement the University has been so indifferent a mother.’ Continental and American universities encourage scholarship in the subject, he states, listing various doctoral theses in evidence, but not the Welsh University, and this of course impoverishes not only the students’ sense of their heritage but also that of the Welsh schoolchildren who may later be taught by them:
In 1969 when Garlick, speaking at the first English-language conference to be held under the auspices of the Welsh Academi, named Saunders Lewis the progenitor of ‘Anglo-Welsh studies’, that dramatist was already well-known as a potent catalyst of new political and cultural formations in twentieth-century Wales. In 1925 he had established the political party Plaid Cymru; in 1962 his radio broadcast Tynged yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language) led to the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, the Welsh-language Society. If Welsh Writing in English studies were to be appended to the list of new developments brought about through his interventions, however, it would in this case be a matter of his having provoked a strongly-felt reaction against, rather than in support of, his arguments. In ‘Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?’, Lewis had argued that Anglophone literature produced in Wales could have nothing specifically Welsh about it. Unlike in Ireland, the English language in Wales had developed no roots in the country’s soil, he claimed: it had never ‘been the speech of an organic community’, but rather the language of alien governments and educational systems enforced on Wales. ‘It is the sensibility of the English literary body that it advances,’ he says of Welsh writing in English, ‘and its idiom and vocabulary have their virtues from English poets and letters.’ Hence he came to the conclusion ‘that there is not a separate literature that is Anglo-Welsh, and that it is improbable that there ever can be’.[4] The study of Welsh writing in English began in earnest with the aim of proving the erroneousness of those conclusions, according to Garlick.
In fact, however, Saunders Lewis was not the first eminent commentator to make use of the term ‘Anglo-Welsh’ in a literary context only to deny its existence as a literature separate from the English mainstream. Others before him, with the same intention of trying to protect a beleaguered Welsh-language culture against further encroachments, had also sought to dismiss the possibility that anglophone writing could speak with the voice of Wales. Harold Idris Bell, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum and translator of Welsh poetry, in a letter to The Welsh Outlook in August 1922 refuted all attempts to establish ‘what I may call an Anglo-Welsh movement’ on the grounds that ‘literary Welshmen have usually either written, like [Henry] Vaughan and W. H. Davies, practically as Englishmen, along the lines of the English literary tradition, or used the Welsh language as their medium’.[5] Bell still held those views in 1936, when he published a monograph on The Development of Welsh Poetry, and Iorwerth C. Peate, Welsh-language poet and founder of Sain Ffagan folk museum, endorsed them in his review of the book in that year’s Cymmrodorion transactions. ‘It is idle to talk of an Anglo-Welsh literature’, claims Peate: ‘There is none: we have Welsh literature – and English literature by writers…[whose] work is not Anglo-Welsh in the sense that Yeats and Synge are Anglo-Irish. On the contrary, theirs is a substantial contribution to the tradition of English literature.’[6]
Why then should Saunders Lewis’s lecture, delivered but two years later, have aroused so strong an opposition that it could be hailed as unintentionally generating a discipline? One answer to that question may lie in the fact that those few years 1936-8 constituted an extraordinarily rich period in the production of anglophone Welsh literature. They witnessed the publication not only of Dylan Thomas’s second poetry collection Twenty-five Poems (1936) and David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), but also of Gwyn Jones’s Times Like These (1936), Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937), Rhys Davies’s A Time to Laugh (1937) and Jubilee Blues (1938), Glyn Jones’s The Blue Bed (1937) and Jack Jones’s Bidden to the Feast (1938). In other words, those were the years in which the Welsh industrial novelists began as a group to make their distinctive mark. Saunders Lewis in his lecture does not ignore this immediate context; he acknowledges that ‘the especial world of the Anglo-Welsh novelists…is the industrial life of South Wales’. But industrialism, he argues, as a global phenomenon means ‘the depression of local characteristics’ and distinctive local culture: ‘[w]hatever culture there has been in the mining valleys of South Wales has been the remnant of the social life of the countryside, and has been Welsh in speech’.[7] The industrial novelists could only offer a translation at one remove from the authentic voice of Wales.
In 1939 one of those novelists, Gwyn Jones, in his capacity as editor of the Welsh Review (the third journal of that name) entered the lists in defence of the anglophone culture of Welsh industrialism, claiming in his editorial to the Review’s first number, that in south Wales ‘the last few years have seen the emergence of a group of young writers…who for the first time are interpreting Wales to the outside world’.[8] Keidrich Rhys, the editor of Wales from 1937-40 and 1943-9, would also appear to be responding to Saunders Lewis’s lecture when from 1939 he started sending out to the journal’s contributors a questionnaire, asking such questions as ‘Do you consider yourself an Anglo-Welsh writer?’[9] In 1938 Saunders had claimed that Anglo-Welsh writers wrote predominantly for an English audience: Rhys asked his authors, ‘For whom are you writing?’ John Cowper Powys, for one, makes it clear that he recognised a connection between the questionnaire and Saunders’ lecture, commenting in his answers that ‘this whole question of “Is there such a thing as Anglo-Welsh Literature?”’ is complex.[10] In general, authors from industrial south Wales, like Glyn Jones, in their responses to Rhys’ questionnaire unproblematically accepted the title ‘Anglo-Welsh writer’, but as the 1940s advanced, a new generation of writers, which included Emyr Humphreys and R. S. Thomas, refused the appellation ‘Anglo-Welsh’, preferring, rather, to identify as ‘Welsh’ only.[11] Both Thomas and Humphreys make it evident in their replies that, for all their use of English, they considered themselves to be as supportive of the Welsh language and its culture as the most patriotic Welsh-language writers of the period, and were writing, like them, ‘for my own race/ And the reality’, as Thomas puts it, quoting Yeats.[12] B. L. Coombes, however, makes it equally apparent in his replies that he sees himself primarily as writing for the international working class.[13]
The question of the status of Welsh writing in English as a new voice for Wales was thus increasingly becoming a political, as well as cultural issue, caught up as it was in a rift between not only Wales’s two linguistic cultures, but also its international socialist versus Welsh nationalist political orientations. In 1951, Iorrie Thomas, Labour MP for Rhondda West, referred to ‘the Anglo-Welsh school of poets and authors’, in whose work, he claimed, ‘the soul of Wales is finding expression’, as evidence in support of his vehement arguments against the 1950s Parliament for Wales movement.[14] Why strive for Welsh devolution if international socialism characterised ‘the soul of Wales’ and English was its language? With his 1957 lecture ‘The First Forty Years’, Gwyn Jones brought this political and cultural clash to a head by naming Caradoc Evans ‘the father of the Anglo-Welsh’ not although but because the publication of My People in 1915 had aroused such strong opposition amongst Welsh-speaking patriots. ‘[W]ith Caradoc Evans, the war-horn was blown, the gauntlet thrown down, the gates of the temple shattered’, he announced: ‘The only Welsh readers who didn’t think My People the most noisome visitation since the Brad y Llyfrau Gleision of 1847 were those to whom it appeared our worst national disaster since the fall of the last Llywelyn in 1284. The Anglo-Welsh had arrived’ – in highly combative mode.[15] To adopt such a position was however to decrease the likelihood of Anglo-Welsh studies becoming an academic subject, for during the 1950s those fighting for greater recognition of Welsh issues within the University of Wales tended to be Welsh-speaking and nationalist. In 1951 a Joint Committee appointed to consider pleas that the University should establish a new College using Welsh as the medium of instruction entered upon a prolonged debate which ended with the defeat of the pro Welsh College party, led by Plaid Cymru candidate Gwynfor Evans, on the grounds that such a development ‘would involve a real danger of academic isolation for the University’.[16] Alienating the nationalist group left Anglo-Welsh studies with few friends amongst a University otherwise so defensively concerned to maintain its position within the status quo.
Gwyn Jones himself, at any rate, did not propose or initiate the teaching of Welsh writing in English as an academic discipline although, as Professor of English at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1940, he was well-positioned to do so. It may be that, himself a specialist in Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, his view of the Anglo-Welsh school as very recent in origin made it for him an inappropriate subject for scholarly study, characterised as English literary studies were in the mid-twentieth century by an emphasis on historical research and the Leavisite ‘Great Tradition’. It was left to a young Pembrokeshire schoolteacher in his twenties, and an Englishman to boot, first to put serious and persistent pressure on the educational establishments of Wales to include anglophone Welsh texts in their English literature syllabuses. If Saunders Lewis paradoxically provoked the discipline into being through repudiating it, it was Raymond Garlick who, in a more positive sense, laid its fountain stones through his ‘pertinacious proselytizing for Wales and Anglo-Welsh literature’ throughout the 1950s, as his biographer Don Dale-Jones puts it.[17] From first to last, the editorials Garlick penned for Dock Leaves, the journal he founded with Roland Mathias in 1949 and edited until 1960, fulminate against the Welsh universities’ neglect of their heritage. The University of Wales, he maintains in a 1952 editorial, provides but ‘a provincial English education’; it ‘has almost completely neglected even those Welsh poets and novelists who write in that English tongue which it has selected as its medium of teaching, administration and corporate life.’[18] In 1958, when Dock Leaves was re-titled The Anglo-Welsh Review, he is glad to report the growing acceptance of the term ‘Anglo-Welsh literature’, but adds that one thing yet remains: ‘its recognition by the University whose four colleges have bred so many of the writers to whom the term is properly applicable, but to whose achievement the University has been so indifferent a mother.’ Continental and American universities encourage scholarship in the subject, he states, listing various doctoral theses in evidence, but not the Welsh University, and this of course impoverishes not only the students’ sense of their heritage but also that of the Welsh schoolchildren who may later be taught by them:
from the University and Training Colleges of Wales, where most of our teachers complete their studies in English literature – using syllabuses which may very properly contain texts by Irish, American, even Polish, writers in English, how many go down to the schools with even the most cursory historical and critical introduction to Anglo-Welsh literature? Yet it is to this tradition that they and their pupils are peculiarly the heirs, and it is this tradition which both – if they have creative abilities – will extend. So long as the Anglo-Welsh tradition is ignored, so long will the teaching of English in the schools – whether as a first or a second language – lack integrity.[19]
‘What we in Wales call education/ Marx defined as alienation’, wrote Garlick in his poem ‘Notes for an Autobiography’,[20] and he accuses the University of Wales of collusion with an alienating UK system bent on depriving the anglophone Welsh of their national heritage.
Garlick is all the more urgent in this matter because from the first he had envisaged for Welsh writers in English a significant ameliorative, not combative, role, in relation to the two linguistic groups in Wales. In 1950, in his first Dock Leaves editorial, he asserted that if the Welsh are to find ‘any firm and full expression of nationality’ they must first ‘acquire a united will to be Welsh’.[21] Within this process of necessary unification, Anglo-Welsh writers ‘who speak in one language the life of another’, ‘must become a voice for the inarticulate, drawing them back to the tradition from which they have become separated’.[22] It was in part the development of Welsh writing in English during the 1940s, with the emergence of such writers as R. S. Thomas and Emyr Humphreys, which enabled Garlick to raise such hopes. His arguments had some effect: by 1954 even Saunders Lewis had modified his earlier view of the anglophone Welsh writer considerably. In his 1938 lecture he had asserted that ‘Mr Dylan Thomas is obviously an equipped writer, but there is nothing hyphenated about him. He belongs to the English.’ But in a Welsh-language radio broadcast after Dylan’s death, later published in translation in Dock Leaves, he withdrew his earlier rejection, saying of Dylan, ‘He brought honour to Wales, and in his latter years he became increasingly Welsh in his sympathies, and found his themes in Welsh society.’[23] Gaining such support from Welsh-language cultural leaders was, of course, of vital importance to Garlick in his quest to break down the resistant bulwarks of the University of Wales and establish Welsh writing in English as a subject within its portals.
To do so, however, within the conservative ‘Great Traditions’ context of mid-twentieth-century English studies, he also had to challenge the notion that anglophone Welsh literature was a newly-born phenomenon. When in 1952 Ioan Bowen Rees, in the Welsh Anvil, disparaged the notion that there was such a thing as an Anglo-Welsh literary heritage,[24] Garlick responded by publishing in the next issue of that journal an article in which he lists, with biographical and bibliographical data, 12 poets from the sixteenth century, 10 from the seventeenth, 25 from the eighteenth, 21 from the nineteenth, and 3 from the twentieth, all of whom he claims as Anglo-Welsh writers. Moreover, many of them, he argues, were primarily concerned with Welsh issues: ‘the past and present of their country, its topography and traditions, its distinctive problems – the linguistic situation, the political relationship with England – these are their themes.’[25] Later, in 1957, when Gwyn Jones flung down his challenge and proclaimed Caradoc Evans the sole generator of Welsh writing in English, Garlick again responded quickly, pointing out in the Anglo-Welsh Review editorial in which he first refers to Gwyn Jones’s lecture that a number of articles had by then appeared which detailed much earlier beginnings to Welsh writing in English and publishing extracts from the work of anglophone Welsh poets in the Review. Stanzas from ‘The Hymn to the Virgin’ by Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal (fl. 1430-1480) made an appearance in the twenty-third number of the Review in 1958, along with extracts from Evan Evans (Ieuan Brydydd Hir), ‘The Love of Our Country’ (1772) and Morris Kyffin’s ‘The Blessedness of Brytaine’ (1567), to be followed in the next number by an extract from John Davies of Hereford’s ‘Cambria’ (1603). These extracts were obviously selected to demonstrate that not only were these fifteenth- to eighteenth-century poets Welshmen writing in English, but they were also all writing in support of their country and its indigenous language and culture. In 1959 Tony Conran, then a young research fellow at Bangor University College, also contributed to this debate, with the idiosyncratic suggestion that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ ‘may be said to have begun the modern Anglo-Welsh movement’; as a praise poem in the tradition of the Welsh medieval bards, Conran argues, its ‘ceaseless play of alliteration and rhyme’ indicates Hopkins’ veneration of cynghanedd as poetic craft.[26]
Such suggestions had the double-edged effect not only of underlining the argument that the historical originators of Welsh writing in English were appreciative of Welsh cultural difference, rather than abusive towards it in – arguably – the manner of Caradoc, but also that their antiquity necessitated scholarly research. ‘Only one who has the freedom of libraries and the time and facilities at the disposal of a research scholar can attempt the task’ of reclaiming these lost voices, argues Garlick: ‘It will be unfortunate, to say the least, if the American Universities…which have already shown themselves to be so alert and sympathetic in these matters, should quite overcast the University of Wales in the recognition of such writers.’[27] At first, few responded to his appeal: Bobi Jones contributing to Dock Leaves in 1953 complained that not only the universities but critics in general ignored Welsh writing in English: ‘The Anglo-Welsh have had no major literary critic,’ he claims, ‘nor even a responsible second-rate critic of talent.’[28] However when finally a notable monograph on Welsh writing in English emerged, it but further emphasized the modernity of the school, accepting Caradoc Evans as its originator. For Glyn Jones in his The Dragon Has Two Tongues (1968) the term ‘Anglo-Welsh’ meant ‘only writers of this century, more particularly the post-Caradoc Evans writers of the first half of this century’, Caradoc being ‘the man who Professor Gwyn Jones has taught us to regard as the first of the modern Anglo-Welsh.’[29] Garlick responded by publishing An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (1970), most of the pages of which analyse the poetry of pre-twentieth century Welsh writers: 61 out of the 69 authors listed in its bibliography published their main work before 1915.
When this book appeared, Garlick had just returned to Wales after having spent most of the 1960s teaching in the Netherlands, to where he had withdrawn ‘despairing of the cause – which at that time appeared to have made no impact upon the entrenched attitude of…academics in the University of Wales.’[30] Or so wrote his successor as editor of The Anglo-Welsh Review, Roland Mathias, who himself continued the fight for further academic recognition for Welsh writing in English throughout the 1960s, finding but ‘deserts of ignorance of Anglo-Welsh writing in the population at large, the ignorance even of graduates of English departments about their natural heritage’.[31] In 1973, in his editorial to the fiftieth number of The Anglo-Welsh Review, Mathias, however, is able to strike a more hopeful note regarding Welsh writing in English as a subject of study: ‘slowly, very slowly – despite the deprivations involved in the absence from the system of education of any sufficient provision for an interest in Wales amongst non-Welsh-speakers – it is coming into existence.’[32] Hopeful signs included the establishment of the Welsh Arts Council in 1968 and the appearance in 1970 of the first monographs in the Writers of Wales series, published under the general editorship of Meic Stephens by a University of Wales Press finally ready to accept its responsibilities with regard to the new discipline. Meic Stephens had also initiated in 1968 the setting up of the English-language section of Yr Academi Gymreig, in whose annual conferences many of those who were later to become critics and teachers of Welsh writing in English gave papers on the subject. In June 1972, for example, Belinda Humfrey, recently appointed to a post in the English Department of the University of Wales’ St David’s college, Lampeter, gave a paper to the conference on ‘the landscape of Anglo-Welsh poets’;[33] she was soon to start teaching Welsh writing in English at Lampeter. The chief agent of change in Wales’s higher education institutions was, however, Raymond Garlick himself, who took up a post as lecturer at Trinity College, Carmarthen, in 1968. In 1971 he was appointed Director of its newly created Welsh Studies programme, for which he constructed and taught the three-year core course on ‘Anglo-Welsh Literature’.
It was to Garlick at Trinity that M. Wynn Thomas and James Davies went in 1984 to gather advice on the setting up of Welsh Writing in English courses at Swansea.[34] Before then, however, another significant development in Welsh writing in English studies had taken place at Aberystwyth. Ned Thomas was appointed to a lectureship in the English Department at Aberystwyth in 1970 after an international career in which he had taught at universities in Russia and Spain and developed an interest in what would now be termed postcolonial literature. At the time of his appointment the Department was unaware of the fact that his book The Welsh Extremist (1971) was about to appear.[35] That study sought to present the Cymdeithas yr Iaith language protests which had taken place in Wales throughout the 1960s as but the latest chapter in a long history of opposition to colonial suppression, a history which Wales shared with many other communities across the globe. In that story Welsh writers in English also featured, their anglicization an aspect of their national history:
Garlick is all the more urgent in this matter because from the first he had envisaged for Welsh writers in English a significant ameliorative, not combative, role, in relation to the two linguistic groups in Wales. In 1950, in his first Dock Leaves editorial, he asserted that if the Welsh are to find ‘any firm and full expression of nationality’ they must first ‘acquire a united will to be Welsh’.[21] Within this process of necessary unification, Anglo-Welsh writers ‘who speak in one language the life of another’, ‘must become a voice for the inarticulate, drawing them back to the tradition from which they have become separated’.[22] It was in part the development of Welsh writing in English during the 1940s, with the emergence of such writers as R. S. Thomas and Emyr Humphreys, which enabled Garlick to raise such hopes. His arguments had some effect: by 1954 even Saunders Lewis had modified his earlier view of the anglophone Welsh writer considerably. In his 1938 lecture he had asserted that ‘Mr Dylan Thomas is obviously an equipped writer, but there is nothing hyphenated about him. He belongs to the English.’ But in a Welsh-language radio broadcast after Dylan’s death, later published in translation in Dock Leaves, he withdrew his earlier rejection, saying of Dylan, ‘He brought honour to Wales, and in his latter years he became increasingly Welsh in his sympathies, and found his themes in Welsh society.’[23] Gaining such support from Welsh-language cultural leaders was, of course, of vital importance to Garlick in his quest to break down the resistant bulwarks of the University of Wales and establish Welsh writing in English as a subject within its portals.
To do so, however, within the conservative ‘Great Traditions’ context of mid-twentieth-century English studies, he also had to challenge the notion that anglophone Welsh literature was a newly-born phenomenon. When in 1952 Ioan Bowen Rees, in the Welsh Anvil, disparaged the notion that there was such a thing as an Anglo-Welsh literary heritage,[24] Garlick responded by publishing in the next issue of that journal an article in which he lists, with biographical and bibliographical data, 12 poets from the sixteenth century, 10 from the seventeenth, 25 from the eighteenth, 21 from the nineteenth, and 3 from the twentieth, all of whom he claims as Anglo-Welsh writers. Moreover, many of them, he argues, were primarily concerned with Welsh issues: ‘the past and present of their country, its topography and traditions, its distinctive problems – the linguistic situation, the political relationship with England – these are their themes.’[25] Later, in 1957, when Gwyn Jones flung down his challenge and proclaimed Caradoc Evans the sole generator of Welsh writing in English, Garlick again responded quickly, pointing out in the Anglo-Welsh Review editorial in which he first refers to Gwyn Jones’s lecture that a number of articles had by then appeared which detailed much earlier beginnings to Welsh writing in English and publishing extracts from the work of anglophone Welsh poets in the Review. Stanzas from ‘The Hymn to the Virgin’ by Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal (fl. 1430-1480) made an appearance in the twenty-third number of the Review in 1958, along with extracts from Evan Evans (Ieuan Brydydd Hir), ‘The Love of Our Country’ (1772) and Morris Kyffin’s ‘The Blessedness of Brytaine’ (1567), to be followed in the next number by an extract from John Davies of Hereford’s ‘Cambria’ (1603). These extracts were obviously selected to demonstrate that not only were these fifteenth- to eighteenth-century poets Welshmen writing in English, but they were also all writing in support of their country and its indigenous language and culture. In 1959 Tony Conran, then a young research fellow at Bangor University College, also contributed to this debate, with the idiosyncratic suggestion that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ ‘may be said to have begun the modern Anglo-Welsh movement’; as a praise poem in the tradition of the Welsh medieval bards, Conran argues, its ‘ceaseless play of alliteration and rhyme’ indicates Hopkins’ veneration of cynghanedd as poetic craft.[26]
Such suggestions had the double-edged effect not only of underlining the argument that the historical originators of Welsh writing in English were appreciative of Welsh cultural difference, rather than abusive towards it in – arguably – the manner of Caradoc, but also that their antiquity necessitated scholarly research. ‘Only one who has the freedom of libraries and the time and facilities at the disposal of a research scholar can attempt the task’ of reclaiming these lost voices, argues Garlick: ‘It will be unfortunate, to say the least, if the American Universities…which have already shown themselves to be so alert and sympathetic in these matters, should quite overcast the University of Wales in the recognition of such writers.’[27] At first, few responded to his appeal: Bobi Jones contributing to Dock Leaves in 1953 complained that not only the universities but critics in general ignored Welsh writing in English: ‘The Anglo-Welsh have had no major literary critic,’ he claims, ‘nor even a responsible second-rate critic of talent.’[28] However when finally a notable monograph on Welsh writing in English emerged, it but further emphasized the modernity of the school, accepting Caradoc Evans as its originator. For Glyn Jones in his The Dragon Has Two Tongues (1968) the term ‘Anglo-Welsh’ meant ‘only writers of this century, more particularly the post-Caradoc Evans writers of the first half of this century’, Caradoc being ‘the man who Professor Gwyn Jones has taught us to regard as the first of the modern Anglo-Welsh.’[29] Garlick responded by publishing An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (1970), most of the pages of which analyse the poetry of pre-twentieth century Welsh writers: 61 out of the 69 authors listed in its bibliography published their main work before 1915.
When this book appeared, Garlick had just returned to Wales after having spent most of the 1960s teaching in the Netherlands, to where he had withdrawn ‘despairing of the cause – which at that time appeared to have made no impact upon the entrenched attitude of…academics in the University of Wales.’[30] Or so wrote his successor as editor of The Anglo-Welsh Review, Roland Mathias, who himself continued the fight for further academic recognition for Welsh writing in English throughout the 1960s, finding but ‘deserts of ignorance of Anglo-Welsh writing in the population at large, the ignorance even of graduates of English departments about their natural heritage’.[31] In 1973, in his editorial to the fiftieth number of The Anglo-Welsh Review, Mathias, however, is able to strike a more hopeful note regarding Welsh writing in English as a subject of study: ‘slowly, very slowly – despite the deprivations involved in the absence from the system of education of any sufficient provision for an interest in Wales amongst non-Welsh-speakers – it is coming into existence.’[32] Hopeful signs included the establishment of the Welsh Arts Council in 1968 and the appearance in 1970 of the first monographs in the Writers of Wales series, published under the general editorship of Meic Stephens by a University of Wales Press finally ready to accept its responsibilities with regard to the new discipline. Meic Stephens had also initiated in 1968 the setting up of the English-language section of Yr Academi Gymreig, in whose annual conferences many of those who were later to become critics and teachers of Welsh writing in English gave papers on the subject. In June 1972, for example, Belinda Humfrey, recently appointed to a post in the English Department of the University of Wales’ St David’s college, Lampeter, gave a paper to the conference on ‘the landscape of Anglo-Welsh poets’;[33] she was soon to start teaching Welsh writing in English at Lampeter. The chief agent of change in Wales’s higher education institutions was, however, Raymond Garlick himself, who took up a post as lecturer at Trinity College, Carmarthen, in 1968. In 1971 he was appointed Director of its newly created Welsh Studies programme, for which he constructed and taught the three-year core course on ‘Anglo-Welsh Literature’.
It was to Garlick at Trinity that M. Wynn Thomas and James Davies went in 1984 to gather advice on the setting up of Welsh Writing in English courses at Swansea.[34] Before then, however, another significant development in Welsh writing in English studies had taken place at Aberystwyth. Ned Thomas was appointed to a lectureship in the English Department at Aberystwyth in 1970 after an international career in which he had taught at universities in Russia and Spain and developed an interest in what would now be termed postcolonial literature. At the time of his appointment the Department was unaware of the fact that his book The Welsh Extremist (1971) was about to appear.[35] That study sought to present the Cymdeithas yr Iaith language protests which had taken place in Wales throughout the 1960s as but the latest chapter in a long history of opposition to colonial suppression, a history which Wales shared with many other communities across the globe. In that story Welsh writers in English also featured, their anglicization an aspect of their national history:
The English-speaking and Welsh-speaking Welsh are not two quite separate language groups who happen to be rubbing shoulders like English and French speakers in Quebec province; they are one group which has suffered a split in its consciousness and this produces a curious emotional ambivalence which can be exploited for conflict but which is also the hope for cultural and political solidarity.[36]
To further such hopes, Ned Thomas attempted to establish a Welsh writing in English course at Aberystwyth, but initially his proposals were opposed by his department. From 1972-6, however, he succeeded in teaching a ‘subsidiary’ course on African and Caribbean literatures, thanks to the Welsh Department’s policy of permitting their students to take a course in another department as long as it was taught through the medium of Welsh.[37] From 1973-7 he also managed to introduce at least one question on Welsh writing in English into the third-year ‘English Literature in the Twentieth Century’ paper, questions which indicate the political tenor of his approach to the subject, e.g., ‘“Anglo-Welsh writing is the expression of a fundamentally un-English culture”. Discuss in relation to one or more writers.’[38]
Finally, in 1977, Ned Thomas succeeded in introducing a year-long course on ‘Literature in Twentieth-century Wales’ into Aberystwyth’s degree syllabus, and three colleagues – Jeremy Hooker, Robin Young and a young Post-Doctoral Fellow, Tony Bianchi – joined him in the teaching of it. Among the authors taught on the course were Caradoc Evans, Idris Davies, Alun Lewis, David Jones, Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Emyr Humphreys, and the Welsh-language authors, Saunders Lewis, Kate Roberts, Gwenallt and Waldo Williams, taught in translation.[39] A distinctly postcolonial ethos is evinced in the module’s examination papers, an approach now supported by the 1975 publication of Michael Hechter’s Internal Colonialism, which represented Wales as colonised,[40] and Raymond Williams’ radio broadcast on ‘Welsh Culture’ in the same year, in which Williams argues that ‘to the extent that we are a people we have been defeated, colonized, penetrated, incorporated.’[41] The ‘Literature in Twentieth-century Wales’ paper required its students to tackle such questions as ‘“Anglo-Welsh writing…is a perversion of normality, it is a grunt or a cry or an odour rising from a cultural wound of a special kind.” Is this fair?’, or ‘“An Anglo-Welsh poem is, almost by definition, an elegy”. Discuss.’[42]
This postcolonial perspective was vital in healing the clash between the two linguistic groups in their attitude towards certain key authors. In 1971 J. E. Caerwyn Williams had dismissed Caradoc Evans as ‘a native writing pseudo-colonial literature’ who depicted his compatriots in the manner of an English imperialist, representing them ‘with such a mixture of mockery and contempt that one can only conclude that he set out with the express purpose of exploiting his fellow-countrymen in order to make a name for himself’.[43] By 1982 in The Cost of Strangeness, Tony Conran, on the other hand, could portray Caradoc as a writer who wrote as he did because he never overcame the trauma of cultural dispossession. ‘His use of a made-up language which mocks Welshness with a grotesque distortion of itself is as much a re-enactment of the trauma as his subject-matter is’, Conran argues: ‘it arises from the violent necessity of having to change culture and language in one’s teens, a casualty of the Welsh colonial inferiority to England and her ways.’[44] The ‘pseudo-colonialists’ which Saunders Lewis had dismissed as having nothing Welsh about them are thus presented as but another dimension of the Welsh experience, non-heroic, certainly, but as representative of their country’s history as any freedom fighter or Welsh-language activist. And the trauma and struggle within which they too had their being are not isolated experiences, locked inside the borders of small country, but issues of central concern to large tracts of the world’s population, as it emerges from the imperialist past.
‘“The question should be not ‘Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?’ but ‘Is there any purpose in trying to define it?’” Discuss’, asks one question in Aberystwyth’s 1980 ‘Literature in Twentieth-century Wales’ paper.[45] At least four different definitions of Welsh writing in English studies were presented with some passion from 1939 to 1980. Firstly, according to Saunders Lewis, such studies were null and void, their subject a non-entity. That view gradually eroded under the sheer weight, in numbers and quality, of anglophone Welsh texts published from the mid-1930s on. Secondly, for Gwyn Jones and his followers, Welsh writers in English spoke with a new, predominantly industrial but authentically Welsh voice, born in 1915 and of vital importance in itself, but not appropriate for academic study because of the subject’s lack of a ‘Great Tradition’. That view changed along with changes in English literary studies generally from the mid century, after which the study of contemporary culture, and of Irish and American literature, gained greater credence. Thirdly, according to Raymond Garlick, it was the study of a specifically Welsh literature, ‘un-English’ despite its language, which did indeed have an extensive tradition, reaching back to the Tudor period, and stood in desperate need of scholarly attention for which it was eminently suitable. Fourthly, it was in Ned Thomas’s view the study of a postcolonial literature, comparable to other such studies across the globe, and one which should certainly feature within higher education English literature syllabuses in Wales, if not elsewhere. It is that fourth definition, broadly interpreted, which on current critical evidence has gained prominence in post-devolution Welsh writing in English studies. Within it, moreover, it is of course possible to include both the concept of the subject’s antiquity, co-current as its beginnings were with the colonising Tudor Acts of Union, and its industrial and post-industrial history, seen as the outcome of capitalist colonisation and Welsh resistance to it. With that latest evolution in the story of Welsh writing in English studies, many of the followers of Saunders Lewis, if not their leader, would probably have been well content.
Finally, in 1977, Ned Thomas succeeded in introducing a year-long course on ‘Literature in Twentieth-century Wales’ into Aberystwyth’s degree syllabus, and three colleagues – Jeremy Hooker, Robin Young and a young Post-Doctoral Fellow, Tony Bianchi – joined him in the teaching of it. Among the authors taught on the course were Caradoc Evans, Idris Davies, Alun Lewis, David Jones, Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Emyr Humphreys, and the Welsh-language authors, Saunders Lewis, Kate Roberts, Gwenallt and Waldo Williams, taught in translation.[39] A distinctly postcolonial ethos is evinced in the module’s examination papers, an approach now supported by the 1975 publication of Michael Hechter’s Internal Colonialism, which represented Wales as colonised,[40] and Raymond Williams’ radio broadcast on ‘Welsh Culture’ in the same year, in which Williams argues that ‘to the extent that we are a people we have been defeated, colonized, penetrated, incorporated.’[41] The ‘Literature in Twentieth-century Wales’ paper required its students to tackle such questions as ‘“Anglo-Welsh writing…is a perversion of normality, it is a grunt or a cry or an odour rising from a cultural wound of a special kind.” Is this fair?’, or ‘“An Anglo-Welsh poem is, almost by definition, an elegy”. Discuss.’[42]
This postcolonial perspective was vital in healing the clash between the two linguistic groups in their attitude towards certain key authors. In 1971 J. E. Caerwyn Williams had dismissed Caradoc Evans as ‘a native writing pseudo-colonial literature’ who depicted his compatriots in the manner of an English imperialist, representing them ‘with such a mixture of mockery and contempt that one can only conclude that he set out with the express purpose of exploiting his fellow-countrymen in order to make a name for himself’.[43] By 1982 in The Cost of Strangeness, Tony Conran, on the other hand, could portray Caradoc as a writer who wrote as he did because he never overcame the trauma of cultural dispossession. ‘His use of a made-up language which mocks Welshness with a grotesque distortion of itself is as much a re-enactment of the trauma as his subject-matter is’, Conran argues: ‘it arises from the violent necessity of having to change culture and language in one’s teens, a casualty of the Welsh colonial inferiority to England and her ways.’[44] The ‘pseudo-colonialists’ which Saunders Lewis had dismissed as having nothing Welsh about them are thus presented as but another dimension of the Welsh experience, non-heroic, certainly, but as representative of their country’s history as any freedom fighter or Welsh-language activist. And the trauma and struggle within which they too had their being are not isolated experiences, locked inside the borders of small country, but issues of central concern to large tracts of the world’s population, as it emerges from the imperialist past.
‘“The question should be not ‘Is there an Anglo-Welsh Literature?’ but ‘Is there any purpose in trying to define it?’” Discuss’, asks one question in Aberystwyth’s 1980 ‘Literature in Twentieth-century Wales’ paper.[45] At least four different definitions of Welsh writing in English studies were presented with some passion from 1939 to 1980. Firstly, according to Saunders Lewis, such studies were null and void, their subject a non-entity. That view gradually eroded under the sheer weight, in numbers and quality, of anglophone Welsh texts published from the mid-1930s on. Secondly, for Gwyn Jones and his followers, Welsh writers in English spoke with a new, predominantly industrial but authentically Welsh voice, born in 1915 and of vital importance in itself, but not appropriate for academic study because of the subject’s lack of a ‘Great Tradition’. That view changed along with changes in English literary studies generally from the mid century, after which the study of contemporary culture, and of Irish and American literature, gained greater credence. Thirdly, according to Raymond Garlick, it was the study of a specifically Welsh literature, ‘un-English’ despite its language, which did indeed have an extensive tradition, reaching back to the Tudor period, and stood in desperate need of scholarly attention for which it was eminently suitable. Fourthly, it was in Ned Thomas’s view the study of a postcolonial literature, comparable to other such studies across the globe, and one which should certainly feature within higher education English literature syllabuses in Wales, if not elsewhere. It is that fourth definition, broadly interpreted, which on current critical evidence has gained prominence in post-devolution Welsh writing in English studies. Within it, moreover, it is of course possible to include both the concept of the subject’s antiquity, co-current as its beginnings were with the colonising Tudor Acts of Union, and its industrial and post-industrial history, seen as the outcome of capitalist colonisation and Welsh resistance to it. With that latest evolution in the story of Welsh writing in English studies, many of the followers of Saunders Lewis, if not their leader, would probably have been well content.
Notes
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[3] For the development of Welsh writing in English studies post 1984, see Tony Brown, ‘The Association of Welsh Writing in English: A Short History’ (2016), and M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Introduction: Microcosmopolitan Wales’ in All That Is Wales: The Collected Essays of M. Wynn Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017), 1-29.
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[39] See Ned Thomas, ‘Parallels and Paradigms’, in M. Wynn Thomas ed., A Guide to Welsh Literature, vol. VII: Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 310-326, for a full discussion of the parallels between anglophone Welsh literature and that of other colonised cultures, and for the argument that Welsh writing in English should be taught comparatively alongside Welsh-language texts as one national literature (p. 326).
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© Jane Aaron, May 2017
The image at the top of this page (taken from an original photograph © Aidan Byrne) shows Gregynog Hall in May 2017.
