Waving the Leek
THE stage Welshman—feckless, emotional, equivocating, poetic, gifted with the gab—is an endearing enough personage, and those of his compatriots who act it up a little in real life make good enough drinking companions. When he becomes the persona or the guiding hand of the Anglo-Welsh writer of prose, there is less to be said for him. In this incarnation his favourite modes are solemn, adjectival poeticality unrelieved by humour, and a pawky humour occasionally relieved by solemn, adjectival poeticality. He gleefully breaks the bounds of what Mr. Graves calls 'prose decency,' being quite prepared to say of someone waiting outside a room that they 'stood like spoon-food outside the busy mouth,' or to lurch all unwitting into magazine-serial flummery and write that 'a slash of poppies burnt a red wound across the field.' His dialogue tends towards the ponderously gnomic or saga-like. He is weak in narrative, preferring to load a single incident with verbal festoons.
I do not know whether the eighteen names in Professor Gwyn Jones's anthology include the best Anglo-Welsh short-story writers; in his introduction he claims high distinction for eight of them, including himself. But however this may be, the hand of the stage Welshman is heavy on nearly all the contributors. Too many of them are what Professor Jones calls (in admiring terms) 'word-bibbers . . . the loving elaborators of verbal effects.' And many—I should guess the majority—of them come from industrial South Wales, but choose for their settings an Arcadia that may have affinities with what rural Wales once was, or even with what it still is in some of the remoter places, though I doubt it on the evidence given here. Anyway, these authors often avoid the backgrounds they would be expected to know best. Does South Wales seem too much like England? It isn't really. Is it only in North Wales, in thinly populated areas, that the Welsh character flourishes? I think the Anglo-Welsh writer sometimes begins to believe his own propaganda about the Welsh character, and of course a big thing in the Welsh character is making a big thing of the Welsh character. This would explain the continual clangour of stylistic oddity in these stories, the frequent air of literal translation from Welsh, although only four of the twenty- eight were first written in Welsh. Constantly trying to be Welsh will make nobody a good Welsh or Anglo-Welsh writer.
Several of these stories are exempted from the above denuncia- tion, which was partly the result of disappointment and also, perhaps, of mild rage at finding Mr. Emyr Humphreys, the best of the younger Anglo-Welsh authors, unrepresented. There is good stuff from Mr. Rhys Davies, Alun Lewis, Mr. Gwyn Thomas, Mr. Aled Vaughan, and especially Caradoc Evans, the daddy of them all—if this volume does no more than find him
new readers, it will have been worth while. KINGSLEY AMIS
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