Alun Lewis
In the Green Tree. By Alun Lewis. (Allen and Unwin. 8s. 6d.) ALUM Law's was killed in an accident, in India during the war, at the age of twenty-eight. This book gives us his letters from India, some of his short stories, a sonnet " On the Death of Alun Lewis," by Vernon Watkins, a postscript by Gwyn Jones and a preface by A. L. Rowse. Mr. Rowse, whether deliberately or not one does not know, gives a very clear impression of the strange mixture of feelings a writer is almost bound to have who recognises achievement in a young poet and mourns his death. That is to say, in the notes of praise there are undertones of grief, guilt and anxiety. The grief is for a general loss ; the guilt, that one writer should die young and another, older and non-combatant perhaps, survive ; the anxiety, that to the survivor time may bring no justifying fulfilment of the spared talent. These feelings are not the less human, understandable and painful for snapping their fingers at cold reason. We should not be better poets if we had died young ; nor can we say how a poet would have developed had he lived when in fact he died.
The picture we get of Alun Lewis from his writings, and especially from his letters, is of a courageous, modest, perceptive and gay person ; a person of good will, clear-sighted, impatient of humbug ; a good soldier and a good officer. There are many young men like Lewis who have fallen in the wars, poets among them, too, as great as, and greater than he, and some have died viler deaths by far. But grief and loss are not matters for competition, or subject to weights and balances and the laws of the multiplication table. Do poets at war grudge the sacrifice of their talent and guard their lives more closely for the sake of unwritten poems ? Sophists might say they should, gibing that art is the first of war's casualties. But it is not the poets who say this. " Death is a great mystery, who can ignore him ? " Lewis writes to his wife. " But I don't seek him, only I should like to ' place ' him. So much is strange in all things. The essential virtue in such strangeness is courage—to test and endure and abide by what slowly and surely emerges."
There is no self-pity in this poet, and very little in his letters that calls for pity. But he is writing to his wife and to his parents, and of course he does not wish them to be anxious for him. In the stories and poems the comment is sharper, but it is not personal. And yet sometimes an admission creeps into the letters : " And now it is bedtime, all on my own I go. Hockey finished, censoring finished, darkness waiting to fold me away. Tomorrow is always a little itch in my head as I turn in at night. I don't want it very much, I prefer it to become yesterday."
He has a very strong, unworrying, almost severe attitude to his poems. He is not certain they are good, but the strength comes out in the way he thinks they may become better. He wants to draw upon the widest and, conventional poet-fanciers might think, the most unlikely sources. " I must get to grips with the details of life as I haven't yet done: the law, the police, the insurance, the hospitals, the employment exchanges." There is something extra- ordinarily lion-hearted about this—even if he is saying it chiefly to silence a younger self who preferred Welsh mountains and soli- tudes. And again these sentences, that are now so sad, " I don't think I'll stop writing as long as I live " and " But I've got a persistent feeling that I'm still waiting for my big moment, my big word. It's still in seed and won't flower till it has a mind to. I can't hurry that up."
It appears that Alun Lewis had a considerable correspondence with Robert Graves. It would be extremely interesting to see this correspondence in full. For Graves is an outstanding example of the good poet, soldier and officer who survives, and goes on writing and getting better. Harking back to Mr. Rowse—he makes some rather bold remarks about " Celtic " art (Mr. Rowse being Cornish and Mr. Lewis Welsh)—" that loving observation of detail, the sense of line and pattern and phrase, the attachment to the particular, yet clothed with an imagination sensuous in itself, the brightness of vision with which the object is seen. Those qualities appear in all Celtic art : they are in the instinct of the Celt." Without raising the vexed and unprofitable question, what is a Celt ? and leaving out Shakespeare who, I am sure, Mr. Rowse would be the first to inform us, is above the pettiness of mere nationality, one might just mention Spenser, in whom these qualities are rather marked. Again, praising Alun Lewis for his " abstract " poetry, he. says: " There are few English poets to whose cast of mind it is natural: Donne certainly, Milton, Wordsworth and a few others." Notable exceptions, one must admit. And it would not be difficult to supply among the " few others " some powerful names.
It is a pity to put forward these " Celtic " claims for Alun Lewis ; he was so entirely free from this sort of thing himself. He was a Welshman who loved Wales, but he does not make a protest out of that love. " We three boys," he writes to his parents, " are in a very big movement, and the security of centuries of British Government is being put to the test in our case and everybody else's." One likes the sturdy common sense of this, the absence of egotism, the everyday nobility. There are some gruesome clichés to be found among the thoughts which turn upon the subject of " young poets." It needs the common sense of a poet to show them
up for what they are and blow them away. STEVIE SMITH.
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