Fight and Flight , livre ebook

FIGHT AND FLIGHT

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)
F IGHT AND F LIGHT
E SSAYS ON R ON B ERRY
edited by Georgia Burdett and Sarah Morse
WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2020
© The Contributors, 2020
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, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78683-528-4
eISBN 978-1-78683-530-7
The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover design:.© Living Levels Photography / Alamy Stock Photo.
For Ron 1920–1997 ‘Boy, inseparable from man in his time, his place’
Ron Berry Photograph by John Pikoulis
C ONTENTS
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
1 Ways Out: Ways In: Ways Back: An introduction Dai Smith
2 History Is What You Live: Ron Berry’s Rumination on His Conflicted Life and Times Barbara Prys-Williams
3 A Man’s World: The Short Fiction of Ron Berry Tony Brown
4 Reading Hector Bebb: Masculinity and Mythic Paradigms in So Long, Hector Bebb (1970) John Perrott Jenkins
5 The Full-Time Amateur: Sport in Ron Berry’s South Walian Imagination Daryl Leeworthy
6 ‘The Inadequates’: Ron Berry and Disability Georgia Burdett
7 ‘Green always comes back’: Ron Berry’s Ecocentric Writing Sarah Morse
8 Land of My Feathers: Ron Berry and Niall Griffiths on the Wing Tomos Owen
9 ‘Word-of-mouth cultures cease in cemeteries’ John Pikoulis
Afterword, by Ron Berry’s children
Bibliography
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
This book is the result of our mutual discovery of Ron Berry during the course of our doctoral research at CREW (the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales), Swansea University (2006–15). We are indebted to Professor M. Wynn Thomas for initially introducing us to this much critically-neglected writer, who, it must be said, had much to say in regards to the themes of our respective research fields (disability and landscape), piquing our interest from the outset.
During our time working as executive officers at the Learned Society of Wales (2014–16), the topic of many of our conversations in our broom-cupboard office was ‘Ron’ – as we (and many others in our field) always, with a curious level of intimacy, refer to him. His name was dropped time and time again at AWWE (the Association for Welsh Writing in English) annual conferences as a figure ahead of his time, a painfully-astute cultural observer. But where was the criticism on Berry? It certainly did not exist collectively, in any way that would pay due credence to the myriad perspectives that people had on the man, his writing, and indeed his legacy. Something needed to be done, and in the summer of 2018 we took it upon ourselves (somewhat hurriedly) to ‘rally the troops’ and remedy the situation just in time for his centenary in 2020. We take full responsibility for any errors made in haste, but it really was a case of now or never.
We are beyond grateful to all of our contributors, some of whom have been ungraciously disturbed in their retirement and asked (begged) to revise material from the 1970s onwards, in our quest to give the fullest account of Berry possible by those who knew him personally. Professor Dai Smith responded with great enthusiasm in support of the volume, and in the process of writing his brilliant introduction unearthed some undiscovered letters to him from Berry, so that, true to form, Berry defies any easy containment. Dr John Pikoulis very kindly offered us incredible personal photographs of Berry, one of which has made it into the final volume. We are also delighted to be able to present unseen material from new and emerging scholars.
Our gratitude also to Professor Kirsti Bohata and Professor Daniel G. Williams for accepting our proposal for this volume, and to the staff at the University of Wales Press for their support and guidance. We very much value CREW’s continuing support for our work as independent scholars.
For granting permissions to use quotations in this collection, we are grateful to the Berry family; to Gomer Press for the use of quotations from The Collected Short Stories , History is What You Live , Peregrine Watching , and This Bygone; and to the Library of Wales and Parthian Books for the use of quotations from So Long Hector Bebb . We would also like to thank Gwen Davies at New Welsh Review for allowing us to reprint in full ‘Word-of-Mouth Cultures Cease in Cemeteries’.
We greatly appreciate the full support of Ron’s family, Lesley, Simone, Rod, Maggie and Conrad, through all stages of the compilation and editorial process, and are delighted to be able to offer an ‘afterword’ composed by them as a tribute to Ron, his insight and influence.
Thank you to our families and friends who have had to endure us while we put this volume together. Special thanks to our colleagues in the real and virtual CREW community: Kieron Smith, Clare Davies, Anthony Howell, Gareth Evans, Cath Beard and Daryl Leeworthy, for the heated debates and the beers.
Finally, this volume is dedicated to Ron. We like to imagine that you would be very vocally dismissive, but secretly pleased about it. We hope that this is just the start of Berry scholarship.
Georgia Burdett and Sarah Morse January 2020
A BBREVIATIONS
CS Simon Baker (ed.), Ron Berry: Collected Stori