All That Is Wales , livre ebook

A LL THAT IS W ALES
WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH
CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies
General Editors: Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams ( CREW , Swansea University)
This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales . Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.
Other titles in the series
Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1)
Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1)
Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8)
Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)
Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)
Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (978-0-7083-2053-2)
Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (978-0-7083-2153-9)
Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2)
Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)
Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist (978-0-7083-2217-8)
M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (978-0-7083-2225-3)
Linden Peach, The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (978-0-7083-2216-1)
Daniel Westover, R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (978-0-7083-2413-4)
Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (978-0-7083-2483-7)
Judy Kendall, Edward Thomas: The Origins of His Poetry (978-0-7083-2403-5)
Damian Walford Davies, Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English (978-0-7083-2476-9)
Daniel G. Williams, Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845–1945 (978-0-7083-1987-1)
Andrew Webb, Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies: Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature (978-0-7083-2622-0)
Alyce von Rothkirch, J. O. Francis, realist drama and ethics: Culture, place and nation (978-1-7831-6070-9)
Rhian Barfoot, Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-Sexual Servitude (978-1-7831-6184-3)
Daniel G. Williams, Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (978-1-7831-6212-3)
M. Wynn Thomas, The Nations of Wales 1890–1914 (978-1-78316-837-8)
Richard McLauchlan, Saturday’s Silence: R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading (978-1-7831-6920-7)
Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century (978-1-7868-3029-6)
A LL THAT IS W ALES
T HE C OLLECTED E SSAYS OF M. W YNN T HOMAS
WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH
© M. Wynn Thomas, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78683-088-3
eISBN 978-1-78683-091-3
The right of M. Wynn Thomas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Iwan Bala, Am dy Galon / For your Heart (2003), mixed media.
Er cof am fy mam
C ONTENTS
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Microcosmopolitan Wales
1 The Scarlet Woman: Lynette Roberts
2 Margiad Evans and Eudora Welty: A Confluence of Imaginations
3 ‘A Grand Harlequinade’: The Border Writing of Nigel Heseltine
4 ‘There’s words’: Dylan Thomas, Swansea and Language
5 ‘A huge assembling of unease’: Readings in A Man’s Estate
6 Outside the House of Baal : The Evolution of a Major Novel
7 ‘Yr Hen Fam’: R. S. Thomas and the Church in Wales
8 R. S. Thomas: ‘A Retired Christian’
9 Vernon Watkins: Taliesin in Gower
10 ‘Dubious affinities’: Leslie Norris’s Welsh–English Translations
11 ‘Staying to mind things’: Gillian Clarke’s Early Poetry
S ERIES E DITORS ’ P REFACE
The aim of this series, since its founding in 2004 by Professor M. Wynn Thomas, is to publish scholarly and critical work by established specialists and younger scholars that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. The studies published so far have amply demonstrated that concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies can illuminate aspects of Welsh culture, and have also foregrounded the potential of the Welsh example to draw attention to themes that are often neglected or marginalised in anglophone cultural studies. The series defines and explores that which distinguishes Wales’s anglophone literature, challenges critics to develop methods and approaches adequate to the task of interpreting Welsh culture, and invites its readers to locate the process of writing Wales in English within comparative and transnational contexts.
Professor Kirsti Bohata and Professor Daniel G. Williams
Founding Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (2004–15)
CREW ( Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales ) Swansea University
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Most of the essays in All that is Wales have been previously published over the last two decades in a range of publications, the details of which have been carefully recorded at the conclusion of each piece. I am very grateful indeed to all concerned for permission to reprint here, as I am to the many authors and publishers the particulars of whose works have been duly cited throughout in my textual notes.
Yet again, thanks beyond measure go to the wholly indispensable University of Wales Press, and most particularly to the following members of staff with whom I have liaised so profitably closely: Sarah Lewis, Helgard Krause, Siân Chapman, Dafydd Jones, Elin Williams, Elisabeth Edwards and Eira Fenn Gaunt. And, of course, friends and colleagues such as Helen Vendler, Tony Brown, Neil Reeve, Glyn Pursglove, Kirsti Bohata and Daniel Williams, who share my interests and have provided me with invaluable companionship and intellectual sustenance:
As always, the present volume is, in its way, as much the product of my close family – Karen, Elin, Bob and, yes, little Joseph and littler Elliott too – as it is my ‘own’ work.
But in the end this book – probably one of my last – is – indeed had to be – dedicated to the memory of my mother, who sadly died (as did my beloved father so very much earlier) before any publications of mine had seen the light of day. In my end is my beginning. But for my mother’s unstinting devotion, long outlasting my childhood and adolescence, I am acutely conscious I would have come to nothing: in her beginning, therefore, was this my end.

 
The University of Wales Press gratefully acknowledges permissions granted for use of the following materials:
New Directions Publishing Corp., for the following works by Dylan Thomas:

‘The Peaches’, ‘Old Garbo’ and ‘Return Journey’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas , copyright © 1940 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
‘After the Funeral’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas , copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
‘The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ and ‘Especially When the October Wind’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas , copyright © 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
‘The Hunchback in the Park’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas , copyright © 1943 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas , copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
David Higham, for the writings and poetry of Dylan Thomas in the following works:

Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings (London: Dent, 1971).
Paul Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (London: Dent, 1985).
Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (eds), Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934–1953 (London: Dent, 1988).
Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning: Poems, Stories, Essays (London: Dent, 1974).
Leslie Norris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Stories (London: Dent, 1983).
Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins (London: Dent, 1957).
The Dylan Thomas Omnibus, Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories and Broadcasts (London: Phoenix, 2000).
Carcanet Press Limited, for material in:

Lynette Roberts, Collected Poems , ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005).
Lynette Roberts, Diaries, Letters and Recollections , ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008).
Gillian Clarke, Letter from a Far Country (Manchester: Carcanet, 1982).
Meic Stephens (ed.), The Bright Field: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Wales (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991).
Meic Stephens, as literary estate, for copyright permission to use the work of Leslie Norris in the following publications:

Leslie Norris, Albert and the Angels (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
Leslie Norris, Recollections (Provo: Tryst Press, 2006).
Leslie Norris, Collected Poems (Bridgend: Seren, 1996).
Leslie Norris, Translations (Provo: Tryst Press, 2006).
Leslie Norris, Glyn Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973