Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare

Rhys Davies

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Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare Critical essays to mark the centenary of the writer’s birth

Edited by MEIC STEPHENS

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2001

© The Contributors, 2001

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–7083–1694–8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 6 Gwennyth Street, Cardiff, CF24 4YD. Website: www.wales.ac.uk/press

Published with the financial support of the Arts Council of Wales and the Rhys Davies Trust

Typeset at University of Wales Press Printed in Great Britain by Dinefwr Press, Llandybïe

Contents

List of Contributors

vii

Introduction MEIC STEPHENS

1

Rhys Davies and his ‘Turbulent Valley’ DAI SMITH

29

The Epic Rhondda: Romanticism and Realism in the Rhondda Trilogy MICHAEL J. DIXON

40

‘Not a Place for Me’: Rhys Davies’s Fiction and the Coal Industry STEPHEN KNIGHT

54

‘The Memory of Lost Countries’: Rhys Davies’s Wales TONY BROWN

71

Withered Roots: Ideas of Race in the Writings of Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence DANIEL WILLIAMS

87

Rhys Davies as Autobiographer: Hare or Houdini? BARBARA PRYS-WILLIAMS

104

‘One Rainy Sunday Afternoon’ D. A. CALLARD

138

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‘I Wish I Had a Trumpet’: Rhys Davies and the Creative Impulse J. LAWRENCE MITCHELL

147

Eccentricity and Lawlessness in Rhys Davies’s Short Fiction LINDEN PEACH

Lawrentianisms: Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence JEFF WALLACE

162

175

‘Love . . . and the Need of it’: Three Novels by Rhys Davies JAMES A. DAVIES

191

The Masquerade of Gender in the Stories of Rhys Davies KATIE GRAMICH

205

Daughters of Darkness: Rhys Davies’s Revenge Tragedies JANE AARON

216

The Black Venus: Atavistic Sexualities KIRSTI BOHATA

231

‘Unspeakable Rites’: Writing the Unspeakable in Rhys Davies SIMON BAKER and JOANNA FURBER

244

‘Never Seek to Tell thy Love’: Rhys Davies’s Fiction M. WYNN THOMAS

260

Rhys Davies: A Bibliography MEIC STEPHENS

Index

283 287

Contributors

Jane Aaron is Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan. Simon Baker was formerly a Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Swansea. Kirsti Bohata is a doctoral research student at the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, University of Wales, Swansea, and teaches part-time at the University of Glamorgan. Tony Brown is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Bangor. D. A. Callard is the biographer of Evelyn Scott, Anna Kavan and Rhys Davies. James A. Davies was formerly Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Swansea. Michael J. Dixon is a doctoral research student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Joanna Furber is a doctoral research student at the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, University of Wales, Swansea. Katie Gramich is Staff Tutor in Literature with the Open University in the south-west of England. Stephen Knight is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University.

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J. Lawrence Mitchell is Professor of English at the College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University, USA. Linden Peach is Professor of Modern Literature at Loughborough University. Barbara Prys-Williams is a doctoral research student at the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, University of Wales, Swansea. Dai Smith is Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glamorgan and Chairman of the Rhys Davies Trust. Meic Stephens is Professor of Welsh Writing in English at the University of Glamorgan and Secretary of the Rhys Davies Trust. M. Wynn Thomas is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, University of Wales, Swansea. Jeff Wallace is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Glamorgan. Daniel Williams is a Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Introduction MEIC STEPHENS

Rhys Davies was among the most dedicated, prolific, and accomplished of Welsh prose-writers. He practised his craft with unswerving devotion for some fifty years, publishing nineteen novels, three novellas, about a hundred short stories, an autobiography, and two books about Wales. Apart from a stint as a draper’s assistant on first arriving in London and some compulsory war-work as a civilian at the Ministry of Information, he lived almost entirely by his pen, his income unsupplemented by teaching, journalism, broadcasting or any of the other activities to which writers usually have recourse. If he has for long been considered a master of the short-story form, his novels, though out of print, are also now regarded as among the best ever written by a Welsh writer in English and are due for critical reassessment. This collection of essays, published to mark the centenary of his birth, places Rhys Davies in his social and literary context and examines some of the main themes in his writing. Most of Rhys Davies’s stories and novels are set in his native Wales, whether in an unspecified but easily recognizable Rhondda, grimly proletarian, or else in fondly idealized rural parts further west, and despite the fact that he left home for London as a very young man, it was to those landscapes that he most often returned in his imagination. Some of his later works have characters and social milieux which are unmistakably English and middle-class, and some are set in France and Germany. Nevertheless, ‘There is only one abiding classic,’ he wrote in the magazine Wales in October 1943: ‘Wales.’ On the other hand, his long residence in England, and his refusal to be associated with any literary school or movement, even to consider himself an ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writer, was to set him apart from that first generation of Welsh writers in English who came to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s. He was, for a start, unconcerned in his writing with political or social questions, though he claimed to have had a

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Introduction

lifelong allegiance to the Labour Party and published a few short pieces in Tribune, a Socialist weekly run by George Strauss and Stafford Cripps. He may have been fairly typical in his antipathy towards the narrowness of Welsh Nonconformity, though less so in his ambivalence towards the Welsh language, which he did not speak, but there was something wilfully wholesale about his rejection of so much that belonged to the Wales of his youth. Like Stephen Dedalus, he decided early on to fly by the nets of nationality, language, and religion. His revulsion against what he considered to be ‘the tyranny of the chapels’ was keenly felt and bordering on the obsessive; only Caradoc Evans (1878–1945) was more hostile. One of the characters in Davies’s first novel, The Withered Root (1927), is made to say, You Welsh! A race of mystical poets who have gone awry . . . To me there seems to be a darkness over your land and futility in your struggles to assert your ancient nationality. Your brilliant children leave you because of the hopeless stagnation of your miserable Nonconformist towns; the religion of your chapels is a blight on the flowering souls of your young. When I think of Wales I see an old woman become lean and sour through worrying over trivialities, though there are the remnants of a tragic beauty about her nevertheless.

This may not have the animus of Joyce’s comment on Ireland as ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’, but it is certainly uncommonly plain speaking. On the subject of the Welsh language he had this to say in his book My Wales (1937): ‘To me it is a lovely tongue to be cultivated in the same way as some people cultivate orchids, or keep Persian cats: a hobby yielding much private delight and sometimes a prize at an exhibition.’ Not even Caradoc Evans administered a dose of salts of that pungency. The price Rhys Davies had to pay for thus distancing himself from his countrymen was that readers in Wales never really took him to their hearts: many thought he was out to caricature them for the amusement of an English audience. Davies was unrepentant: ‘Wales can be a beautiful mother, but she can be a dangerously possessive wife,’ he wrote in My Wales; and again in the magazine Wales, ‘A man is greater than his country. Therefore, I do not exist for Wales, but Wales exists for me.’ As a consequence, it is only since his death in 1978 that Davies has attracted any serious critical attention in the land of his birth. In England, too, he was always something of an outsider, a role he assiduously cultivated in defiance of all the prevailing fashions and

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ideologies of the day. His life, which he shared with no other person, was given up entirely to his writing. He maintained a rigorous workschedule – eating, writing and sleeping in one small room – and seldom sought the company or opinion of other writers. This professional single-mindedness, reinforced by his equanimity, love of solitude and modest material needs, enabled him to pursue a literary career uninterrupted by any of the emotional or domestic upheavals that are so often to be found in his writing. The virtues he extolled were those he had learned in his youth – thrift, a horror of debt, and minding one’s own business – which he also took, somewhat surprisingly, to be specifically Welsh characteristics; that is why he disliked the profligate Dylan Thomas (1914–53). He also kept his distance from London Welsh society, though he was not averse to meeting other expatriate Welsh writers such as Idris Davies (1905–53) at Griff’s Bookshop in Cecil Court. He preferred the company of London’s artistic community, taking delight in some of its more outrageous members like the boozy Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) and the notorious Count Potocki, pretender to the Polish throne, who used to parade through the streets of Soho in a red cloak and with his blond hair falling over his shoulders. In his entry in Who’s Who, Rhys Davies gave his recreations as ‘theatre, living in London, and cultivating ruined characters’; it seems he had a patient way of dealing with difficult people. Although sometimes to be seen at the Wheatsheaf, one of Fitzrovia’s most famous pubs, he never took to excessive drinking and remained an urbane, mild-mannered, parsimonious man whose only extravagance was sartorial: he had a taste for fine, expensive clothes, particularly tweeds and silk ties, almost to the point of dandyism. His sexual orientation was homosexual but he maintained complete discretion, never writing about it in personal terms, except obliquely in letters to friends. It took the form of platonic friendships with younger men or else was satisfied by fleeting encounters with Guardsmen, usually strangers, about whom he is said to have had a homoerotic fixation. The title of his autobiography, Print of a Hare’s Foot (1969), is in fact a coded reference to its author’s own androgynous nature. The image of the hare, a richly secretive, shapeshifting creature in Welsh and English folklore, as George Ewart Evans and David Thomson have demonstrated in their book, The Leaping Hare (1972), was central to both his writing and his life. It also explains to some extent the detached, almost clinical way in which he observed

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other people and the evasiveness with which he habitually responded to enquiries about himself. Most of the essays in this book attempt to throw light on the complexities of his sexuality: to decode the hare. The important facts of Rhys Davies’s life are few and, at first sight, plain, but highly relevant to his work because he often drew upon his own experiences in his writing. He was born in industrial Glamorgan on 9 November 1901 (not in 1903, as he claimed) in Blaenclydach (not Clydach Vale, the next village), a mining community in a sidevalley of the Rhondda Fawr which rises steeply from the town of Tonypandy. The valley was dominated by the presence of two major collieries, the Cambrian and a drift-mine, known as the Gorki, in Blaenclydach itself, quite close to the house where the writer was born; both were the focus of bitter and violent industrial strife, most famously during the Tonypandy Riots of 1910, about which Rhys Davies wrote in his autobiography and in some of his novels. Rees Vivian Davies, as he was christened, was the fourth of the six children of the village grocer, Thomas Davies, and his wife, Sarah. His father, who voted Liberal, was the son of an illiterate Merthyr collier and his mother an uncertificated schoolteacher from Ynysybwl. On both his father’s and his mother’s side his people had their remote origins in north-west Carmarthenshire, always for him a lost Arcady, ‘everlastingly green and sweet-smelling’, despite his tenuous connection with it. The household was strongly matriarchal. Rhys Davies was to create many a female character who was as capable, shrewd, forthright and dignified as his mother, while his men tend to be much weaker characters, and are often bemused, hapless victims of misfortune. The Davieses’ small shop, known rather grandly as Royal Stores, was at 6 Clydach Road, now a private house distinguished from the others in the row only by a commemorative plaque put up by the Rhys Davies Trust in 1995; across the road stands the Central Hotel, which appears in the stories and novels as the Jubilee. The family later moved to live at Penllwyn, 70 Jones Street, near by. One of the Davieses’ sons, Jack, was killed during the closing weeks of the First World War; they also had three daughters, namely Gertrude, Gladys and Peggy, the first and third of whom became teachers in Treorci, and the second a nurse in London. The Davieses’ younger son, Lewis, who read History at Aberystwyth before becoming a librarian with Odham’s Press in London, is still alive; only one of these siblings, Peggy, married and none had children.

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Both sides of the family were Welsh-speaking, as were Rhys Davies’s parents, but they did not pass the language on to their children, and he grew up with only a few phrases at his command. As a boy he attended services at Gosen Chapel, where Welsh was in regular use, but was soon attracted to the High Anglican rite at nearby St Thomas’s Church, soon to be followed by the rest of his family, his father believing that this was a step up the social ladder. In later life Rhys Davies was to turn against all forms of religious practice and declare himself an atheist. At the age of twelve he became a pupil at Porth County School, which had a reputation as the best school in the Rhondda, but he was not happy there and did not distinguish himself academically. He left two years later, much to the chagrin of his parents for whom education seemed to be the surest way of avoiding the pits, and began helping behind the counter at Royal Stores. His parents’ status as shopkeepers set them apart from a community that worked in the coal industry, to the extent that some of Rhys Davies’s attitudes were distinctly petit-bourgeois, but in the shop’s daily routine the boy came into contact with local people, especially the womenfolk, whose gossip and idiosyncrasies he relished. One of the recurring references in his writing is to ‘the ledger of old accounts’ in which his mother kept a record of the villagers’ debts and around which more than one drama unfolds. ‘I always think of this period as a burial, with myself lying somnolent in a coffin, but visually aware of the life going on around me, and content to wait until the time came for me to rise and be myself,’ he told R. L. Mégroz, one of his earliest critics, in 1932. For the next five years, having resisted parental ambition for him to work in a bank, he read avidly, mainly the French and Russian classics, and made his first adolescent attempts at writing poems and stories. A growing awareness of his own homosexuality, however, eventually made life in the Rhondda unbearable and, daunted by its endemic grime and coarseness, by the banausic character of its built environment, and by what he saw as the narrowness of its chapel culture, he left ‘this mangy hole’ to live for a while in Cardiff, where he found work in a corn-merchant’s warehouse. Soon afterwards, drawn to London, where he was determined ‘to starve and suffer’ for his art, he embarked on his literary career. He was never to live permanently in Wales again, but its ethos had marked him indelibly and was to provide him with an inexhaustible source of material for his writing. ‘I wished for no possessions and, since taking my leap over the

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mountains, I had learned in my initial year or two how to be alone,’ he recalled in his autobiography. Then, ‘one wet Sunday afternoon’ in 1924, he sat down in his dingy lodgings in Manor Park, near Ilford, and wrote three short stories ‘as clear of fat as winter sparrows’. Set in a Welsh mining valley, these ‘carnal little stories’ owed more to Caradoc Evans than to Maupassant or Chekhov, except that they dealt with a brutish proletariat rather than a venal peasantry. They were first published in a small, left-wing, short-lived, avantgarde magazine, The New Coterie, which was distributed by Charles Lahr (1885–1971); among other contributors to the journal were T. F. Powys (1875–1953), Liam O’Flaherty (1896–1984) and H. E. Bates (1905–74). It was Lahr, a German-born bibliophile and owner of the Progressive Bookshop at 68 Red Lion Street in Holborn, who introduced the young writer to the literary and artistic world of London and who published, as a Blue Moon pamphlet, his poem entitled ‘The Woman among Women’, in 1931. He also served as Davies’s amanuensis, typing up the manuscript of The Withered Root and publishing his first collection of short stories, The Song of Songs, both of which appeared in 1927. It was an auspicious start: the public response was favourable, the books received good reviews and the novel was published in an American edition. The author now found himself taken up as an original new talent, especially among those who admired the work of D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), at the time a cult-figure for the young and people of ‘progressive’ views. With an advance on a second novel, Rhys Davies was able to give up the menial jobs on which he had subsisted hitherto and become a full-time writer. The rest of his life was without great incident. During a visit to Nice in the south of France in the winter of 1928 he was invited to spend some time with D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda at the Hôtel Beau Rivage in Bandol, a small port between Marseilles and Toulon, and he saw them again in Paris the following Spring. It was Davies who smuggled a manuscript copy of Lawrence’s poems Pansies into England and helped to have them published by Charles Lahr in 1929. According to Lawrence’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, in The Married Man (1994), Davies got on better with Mrs Lawrence than with her husband. He came to the view that Lawrence was not homosexual but that his upbringing in a mining community had forced him to mask the deeply feminine side of his nature with a false masculinity. Be that as it may, the two writers had much in common: they had both grown up in mining villages and their mothers had been

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teachers. They took to each other immediately, the English writer clearly warming to the impressionable young Welshman: ‘What the Celts have to learn and cherish in themselves,’ he told him, ‘is that sense of mysterious magic that is born with them, the sense of mystery, the dark magic that comes with the night . . . They want to keep that sense of the magic mystery of the world, a moony magic. That will shove all their chapel Nonconformity out of them.’ Years later, he was to recall Lawrence’s advice on discovering the primeval figure of Dr William Price (1800–93) of Llantrisant – quack, neo-druid and moonworshipper, Chartist rebel and pioneer of cremation – to whom he devoted a whole chapter in Print of a Hare’s Foot. Although Rhys Davies’s literary output throughout the 1930s was regular and substantial – he published seven collections of short stories, six novels (one under the pseudonym Owen Pitman) and three novellas – financial success eluded him. Unable to settle at any one address (as his letters clearly show), he lived a peripatetic life until he was offered accommodation at a thatched cottage owned by Vincent Wells, a wealthy homosexual who was company director of a brewing firm, near the leafy village of Henley-on-Thames. This arrangement lasted until 1945, when the house, known as Bush Wood, caught fire and many of the writer’s papers were destroyed, including the first chapter of his novel Tomorrow to Fresh Woods. He then went to live at 131 Randolph Avenue in Maida Vale. Davies was undaunted by misfortune: whenever he needed a roof over his head or money in his pocket, he would go home to Blaenclydach where he knew he was always welcome, and immerse himself in his writing, turning out stories and novels with a view to selling them to magazines and publishers in London; there were, of course, no such opportunities in economically depressed Wales. Thereafter he lived for a while with Louis Quinain, a literary-minded policeman, and his wife Greta, at Shamley Green near Guildford, where he finished Tomorrow to Fresh Woods. The finest of his stories written at this time appeared in the collection The Things Men Do (1936). Much of his energy during the 1930s, by which time the making of the young writer was virtually complete, went into the writing of a trilogy of novels chronicling life in Blaenclydach from the days of ‘sylvan Rhondda’, before the discovery of coal, through the years of economic boom and industrial strife, down to the onset of decline and widespread social deprivation after the General Strike of 1926. The best of ‘the Rhondda Trilogy’ is undoubtedly Jubilee Blues (1938).

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The outbreak of war in 1939 filled Rhys Davies with despondency, and yet the war-years – despite rationing and the blitz – were to be one of his most productive periods. Although paper was in short supply, there was great public demand for reading material, and the short story, in particular, flourished in a variety of magazines, which were exempt from rationing. Davies contributed to many of them and, with the publication of A Finger in Every Pie (1942), The Trip to London (1946) and Boy with a Trumpet (1949), his style as a practitioner of the form reached maturity. At about the same time he achieved his only commercial success with a novel, The Black Venus (1944), when it was reissued as a paperback; in the same year, however, a stage-musical adapted from his stories, Jenny Jones, after a short run in the West End, turned out to be a flop. For the rest of the 1940s, and certainly after the demise of so many of the magazines where he had found a market for his stories, he concentrated on the writing of novels. By this time he seems to have abandoned the writing of poetry, although Keidrych Rhys (1915–87) included two of his poems, ‘Seine’ and ‘Louvre’, in his anthology Modern Welsh Poetry in 1944. Davies lived for some years with the Scottish writer Fred Urquhart (1912–95) in a cottage known as Wood House in Wiggington, near Tring in the Chilterns, the setting for some of his country stories, and later with other male friends at 6 Belgrave Place in Brighton; in homosexual circles he was known as Rhoda. Soon drawn back to London, he took accommodation at 29 Castellain Road in Maida Vale (where his landlord was a Mr Gay). Towards the end of the 1950s he published a novel, The Perishable Quality (1957), and a collection of stories, The Darling of her Heart (1958), the last of his books to take the Rhondda and west Wales as its main setting. From now on he would deal with more lurid themes: incest, lesbianism, drug addiction and murder. The 1960s and 1970s were not productive years for Rhys Davies, but they were not unlucrative. Looking to America for a new market, he had several stories published in such prestigious magazines as New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post, including ‘The Chosen One’ which won the Edgar Award for Crime Fiction in 1966. Honours came his way, too. In 1968 he was admitted to the Order of the British Empire and, two years later, the Welsh Arts Council made him a financial award in recognition of his lifelong contribution to the literature of Wales, though he felt unable to attend the ceremony in a Cardiff hotel. Two more novels appeared – Nobody Answered the Bell (1971) and Honeysuckle Girl (1975) – but they were not particularly

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well received, perhaps because their subject-matter had moved beyond the taste of many of his older readers. When I first met him, on 16 June 1968, Rhys Davies was living at 15 Russell Court, near Woburn Place in the heart of Bloomsbury, in a small bedsit which he was to occupy for the rest of his life. I found him to be a friendly, courteous but reserved man, and in appearance slim, fine-boned, and with a distinctively Iberian head and complexion. He had been able to afford the flat, I remember his telling me, with the help of money he had inherited from his parents, who had left him a little more than their other four children because, he said with a wry grin, he had saved them the expense of higher education. Fortunately, he was by now no longer dependent on his books for his income, having been left two more substantial legacies. The first came from half the estate of the writer Anna Kavan (1901–68), with whom he had shared a curious bond that ended only with her death. Kavan had been addicted to heroin for more than forty years and had tried several times to commit suicide. Rhys Davies rescued her after two overdoses and arranged for her to receive medical treatment. The precise nature of the friendship between these two solitaries remains undocumented, since hardly any of their correspondence has survived. Other women had been attracted to Davies and he took pleasure in female company, but it was perhaps only with the asexual Kavan that he was able to enjoy anything like a close relationship. Yet neither admired the work of the other and Davies turned down a suggestion from Kavan’s agent that he should write a biography of her, excusing himself on the grounds that, although they had seen a good deal of each other over many years, he did not know enough about her; he nevertheless carried out his duties as her literary heir and executor by editing two posthumous volumes of her work. The second legacy, of some £60,000, came a few years later from another woman friend, Louise Taylor, an American who had been the adopted daughter and heiress of Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967), the companion of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). She and her husband, a painter known as Red Taylor, had kept a literary and artistic salon in Chelsea; they had been kind to Davies and he often stayed with them for weeks at a time at their homes in London and Taunton, as the affectionately laconic inscriptions on the fly leaves of the books he gave to the Taylors, and many of his letters, testify; on my copy of Jubilee Blues, for example, he wrote: ‘Red and Louise Taylor – Where

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will you find room for yet another of my books? I turn pale at the sight of so many.’ He now found himself with money in the bank for the first time in his life and contemplated a trip to America to see his old friend Philip Burton (1904–95), the radio producer with whom he had collaborated in the 1950s, another recipient of many signed copies. But his deteriorating health would not allow it. A lifelong smoker who suffered from severe bronchial attacks, he was diagnosed as having lung cancer. He died on 21 August 1978 at University College Hospital, London. After a brief secular service at Golders Green Crematorium, his ashes were scattered in the rose garden there in the presence of two of his sisters, his brother Lewis and two of his friends, Raymond Marriott and Keidrych Rhys, editor of the magazine Wales.

Among the first of his compatriots to recognize the mature talent of Rhys Davies was the writer Glyn Jones (1905–95). In the inaugural issue of Keidrych Rhys’s Wales, which appeared in the summer of 1937, he reviewed Davies’s new novel, A Time to Laugh. ‘As Welsh writers go,’ he commented, Rhys Davies is undoubtedly a bigshot, a good bit of a pioneer, one of the first to get the valleys across on the English in the face of indifference, prejudice and a good deal of press-engendered hostility. He has written some of the best short stories ever published about the valleys; and his virtues, well-known by this time (fancy, salty dialogue, grotesque humour, a robust masculinity of style) are all present in this his latest novel . . . Only philosophy is missing.

He went on to regret the lack of a unifying principle, or tension, which held the characters together in an imaginative world where their coexistence might be more credible. Although this stricture is much less true of Rhys Davies’s short stories than it is of his novels, it does contain some perceptive criticism of his work as a whole. Rhys Davies was the first Welshman of the twentieth century to live as a full-time writer in London and to draw upon his background in his writing. He knew, too, what it was like to feel ‘the ancient recoil’ of many English readers from Welsh life and letters, especially those more used to the sugary confections of the romantic novelist Allen Raine (1836–1908) or the never-never land of How Green Was My Valley

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(1939). In an article in The Literary Digest published in 1947, one of the rare occasions on which he wrote about his craft, he revealed how conscious he was of the pitfalls lying in wait for the writer who would write about Wales in English. ‘There is no decadence in Wales,’ he commented. ‘Life there is lived with the bright and hard colouring, and the definite simple principles of conduct, which one sees in a child’s picture-book. There are rogues and ogres, true, there is scandalous behaviour. But the Celtic simplicity and wonder lies over all.’ Of his fellow-countrymen he added, But let a writer go beyond the border and shape them into English print and they begin to scowl . . . The life of this fairyland must not be told outside or to foreigners like the English. Alas, that there should be traitors like myself! But I cannot help myself – my passion for Wales, her beauty, her individuality, her quality of perpetual youth . . . must be expressed in the only way I know, in words, and as truthfully as I am able.

One of Rhys Davies’s difficulties was that he had few literary models on which to base his treatment of Welsh characters and locations, and that may be why so much of his dialogue and some of his plots bring to mind the work of Caradoc Evans, the Welsh writer to whom he was psychologically closest. He may not have had the latter’s vitriolic turn of phrase but he certainly strove for his economy of style and emulated his attempts at rendering the peculiarities of Welsh speech in English, at least in his early work. However picturesque or outlandish his style may have seemed to his first English readers, with its inverted syntax, literally translated idioms, singsong rhythms and so forth, this local colour can seem tedious and dated now, especially to readers in Wales who remain hyper-sensitive to it, but it should not be allowed to spoil the enjoyment of the narrative. More serious, perhaps, is that after long years of residence in England, with only occasional trips back to Wales, by the 1950s Rhys Davies found that his memories of the Rhondda had begun to fade, with the consequence that Welsh readers had some difficulty in recognizing the veracity of the people and places he was endeavouring to depict. This sense of not belonging any more is most poignantly treated in The Perishable Quality (1957). Be that as it may, a story’s location was never as important for Davies as characterization and plot, for as a writer he was more interested in the play of human personality than in anything else. Only

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rarely does he point the moral to his tale and he never condemns his characters, not even the villains among them. He was particularly good at tracing the subtleties of the female psyche and among his most striking portraits are those women who suffer and triumph in their social and sexual relationships. His own sexual proclivities were undoubtedly an advantage in this respect. Certainly, he is one of the few Welsh writers to have written about south Wales mainly from the point of view of its womenfolk. A typical plot of his stories and novels revolves around three sisters, or a young headstrong woman, or a middle-aged spinster, or else a wife fretting against the restrictions of an unhappy marriage, who eventually rise above their circumstances and achieve a kind of liberation. Emma Bovary was ever the heroine whom Rhys Davies most admired. The women in his work usually achieve their victories by dint of personal revolt against convention, a favourite theme of his, and by embracing the Lawrentian values inherent in a passionate response to life. This leitmotiv is linked in his work to an abhorrence of the more extreme forms of puritanism and industrialism, and to his belief that one of the specifically Welsh virtues is a joy in the natural world untrammelled by a sense of original sin. ‘There is still a primitive shine on Wales,’ he wrote in his travelogue My Wales (1937). ‘One can smell the old world there still, and it is not a dead aroma.’ He detected the embodiment of these virtues in the person of his great hero, Dr William Price, whom he described as ‘the seer who sought to bring back to his people the spirit of an ancient, half-forgotten poetry’. Part of this joy, for Rhys Davies, had its corollary in a fascination with death: there are more fatal accidents, bereavements, widows, murders, corpses, coffins, wreaths, legacies, funerals, cold ham and mournful hymns in his books than in the work of any other modern Welsh writer. ‘Myself, I favour a dark, funereal tale’, he wrote in the preface to his Collected Stories (1955), ‘but not always.’ Fortunately for his readers, Davies’s treatment of this theme is not at all morbid: indeed, some of the funniest scenes in his work – he had a delicious sense of black humour – take place during the rituals of death and burial. Who can forget the opening line of his short story ‘Resurrection’?: ‘Half a day before the lid was to be screwed down on her, Meg rose in her coffin and faintly asked for a glass of water,’ and her two sisters’ frantic attempts to persuade her to lie back and die so that they might enjoy the fuss of the funeral and get their hands on the insurance. At such moments he found his compatriots at their most

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primeval, their greed and hypocrisy the very stuff of satire. ‘Another virtue of the short story’, he wrote, ‘is that it can be allowed to laugh.’ As for his lack of ‘philosophy’, Rhys Davies defended himself thus in an interview with Denys Val Baker in John O’London’s Weekly in 1952: ‘I become uneasy when a novelist begins to expound, preach or underline, state a case, even briefly, or when he douses his characters with over-personal wealth of vision. This sort of philosophising must be kept, with me, incidental.’ He was against the waving of flags in public, of all kinds whatsoever, and never joined any party or group which would have required him to do so. He was, however, prepared to allow a glimpse of his political colours in private: writing to Charles Lahr in 1929, he confided, ‘Every night in my devotions I pray for a Labour Government’, and in the magazine Wales he once expressed support for the idea of self-government for Wales; but those are his only recorded utterances on the subject. In the stories and novels there is hardly a hint that he had any party-political opinions and the reader is left to draw whatever inference is preferred. It may be that, like many another satirist, including Caradoc Evans, Rhys Davies was more conservative than his radically minded friends and contemporaries ever had reason to suspect. His primary aim was objectivity in the delineation of character in which there was no room for anything beyond the strictly individual, and in this he nearly always succeeded. It follows that he set his face against deliberately striving to express a specifically Welsh attitude to life and the world. ‘If a writer thinks of his work along these lines’, he replied to a questionnaire from Keidrych Rhys, ‘it tends to become too parochial, narrow. But if he is Welsh by birth, upbringing, and selects a Welsh background and characters for his work, an essence of Wales should be in the work, giving it a national slant or flavour.’ It is an irony of Rhys Davies’s career that, in his determination to rebut the charge of parochialism, while at the same time giving much of his work Welsh settings, he was sometimes considered too English in Wales and too Welsh in metropolitan England. There is nevertheless a remarkable consistency of quality in Davies’s mature work which puts him in the front rank of Welsh writers in English, especially as a writer of short stories. In his prodigious output he is comparable only with Liam O’Flaherty and A. E. Coppard (1878–1957). As David Callard has pointed out, whereas most writers, towards the end of a long writing career, experience a diminution in their creative powers and tend to lapse into self-parody, often bringing

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out work that has long been consigned to the drawer, Rhys Davies – with the help of his legacies – was saved from the necessity of having to publish what he knew to be third-rate work. He continued writing during the very last years of his life, finishing another novel which was published posthumously as Ram with Red Horns in 1996. As for his stories, he left us enough in print on which to base our judgement of him as a master of the form. Even in his reliance, in the early work, on melodrama and some pretty unlikely coincidences, he manages to beguile and entertain us. At his best he has an eye for significant detail, an instinct for moments of high drama, an ear for dialogue and the telling turn of phrase, and a delight in human nature in all its lovely and unlovely variety, which make his books compelling reading. In practising the ancient art of the story-teller to such excellent effect, Rhys Davies wrote books that have a timeless and universal quality which will ensure their lasting appeal.

The present volume is the first substantial study of Rhys Davies to appear, though there have been three previous books touching on his life and work. The Swiss critic R. L. Mégroz published Rhys Davies: A Critical Sketch in 1932, G. F. Adam included him, with Jack Jones (1884–1970) and Hilda Vaughan (1892–1985), in his Three Contemporary Anglo-Welsh Novelists in 1948, and David Rees wrote a useful monograph in the ‘Writers of Wales’ series in 1975. Since then, interest in Rhys Davies has grown steadily and the first fruits of research by a new generation of critics have appeared in such Welsh literary magazines as Planet and The New Welsh Review and in the Yearbook of the Universities’ Association for the Study of Welsh Writing in English. This book reprints four essays that have already been published – those by Barbara Prys-Williams, D. A. Callard, J. Lawrence Mitchell and M. Wynn Thomas – and brings together another twelve, specially commissioned, by some of our most distinguished literary critics. It is now time to introduce each in turn. Dai Smith places Rhys Davies in the context of Rhondda society in the first decade of the twentieth century. The valley’s population had swollen rapidly during the previous thirty years: from some 17,000 in 1871 to nearly 114,000 in 1901, the year of Davies’s birth, and was to increase to 167,000 by the time he was twenty. Three-quarters of the male population, mostly in-migrants from other parts of Wales and many from much further afield, were employed in the mining

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industry, and about a half of all recorded deaths took place underground. When the boy was nine he witnessed the disturbances now known as the Tonypandy Riots, but when he came to write My Wales (1937), he was to look back at the turbulent years of his boyhood and youth with a mixture of moralizing and disapproval; it was left to Lewis Jones (1897–1939), another Blaenclydach man, to present the riots in a more political light in his novel Cwmardy, published in the same year as My Wales. Davies’s response to the decline of the Rhondda in the inter-war years, when unemployment soared to more than 40 per cent and many thousands left in search of work, is to be found in the three novels that make up ‘the Rhondda Trilogy’, particularly Jubilee Blues (1938). It was not the economic conditions or their political implications that interested Davies, but the drama of human lives under severe stress. He understood the quick pace of Rhondda society as no other writer has done: its closeness and local rivalries, its social life revolving around pub, chapel and cinema, its back-lanes and terraces, the smoky panoramas and the wild hillsides, and more than all, the character of its people. One of the best cameos of Rhondda life is to be found in the short story ‘The Pits are on the Top’, which is almost a documentary account of a bus journey from Tonypandy up to Blaenclydach: some of the women passengers discuss, knowledgeably and passionately, whether the body of a miner, dead from ‘the dust’, should be dissected so that it can be established whether he has died from silicosis and whether his wife is therefore eligible for compensation, and all the while a younger woman sits quietly with her collier fiancé, listening to his persistent cough. In less than five pages Rhys Davies sketches a scene that is precisely local and yet universal in its sympathy for human suffering. Michael J. Dixon goes into more detail about Rhys Davies’s depiction of south Wales, focusing on ‘the Rhondda Trilogy’ – the three novels, Honey and Bread (1935), A Time to Laugh (1937) and Jubilee Blues (1938). In these books Davies traces the growth and decline of the Rhondda from before the discovery of coal through the years of industrial conflict to the economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s. In typically romantic fashion, the gentrified Llewellyn family of Glan Ystrad in Honey and Bread are cast in heroic mould, only to see their wealth squandered by an effete and irresponsible son who is no match for the new era of capital and steam. Davies’s fondness for a pastoral, mythic Rhondda is clearly stated in the first novel of the

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trilogy. In the second, A Time to Laugh, set two generations later, he grapples with the nascent urban world which replaced it so rapidly, and in a distinct move towards historical realism, opens with a strike and riot which draw, though not altogether accurately, on the Hauliers’ Strike of 1893 and the Cambrian Combine Strike which led to the Tonypandy Riots of 1910 (here set in December 1899). Although expressly radical in its sympathy for the proletariat, this novel also finds a place for local tradespeople, the small shopocracy to whom Davies belonged, who remained neutral, non-political, with their livelihoods threatened but mere bystanders in the social conflicts of the day. The background of Jubilee Blues is the General Strike of 1926, although the novel focuses more on Prosser Jones, the pub’s owner, who – petit bourgeois by virtue of his victualler’s trade – is not yet comfortably established among the valley’s middle class. The truly noble figure in this novel is his wife Cassie, whose common sense, thrift and generous heart are in stark contrast to her husband’s profligacy; it is she who represents a final synthesis between Rhondda’s rural past and the harsh reality of its present, though in the novel’s final paragraph she leaves the valley for her home in west Wales. Stephen Knight reminds us that Rhys Davies has not hitherto been thought of as belonging to the canon of Welsh writers who have dealt specifically with the industrial experience in their work. Yet he wrote the first novel to be entirely focused on industry and its impact on people, namely The Withered Root (1927), and had published two more before Jack Jones made his début as an author in 1934: Count Your Blessings and The Red Hills, both of which appeared in 1932; his Rhondda Trilogy constitutes the most substantial depiction of the industrial world by any Welsh writer in English. This material is not always treated with the political realism that has become a stereotype of Welsh industrial fiction, as in the work of Lewis Jones, Gwyn Thomas (1913–81), Glyn Jones and Alexander Cordell (1914–97), for it has a wider focus and the viewpoint can often be that of a woman or child, but strikes, disasters and the impact of industrial work are recurrent themes. Occasionally Davies expresses a sense of revulsion against the ugliness of industrial society as he had known it in the Rhondda, and he does not shrink from disapproval of the mindless violence of some sections of the workforce, but he is consistent in his representation and analysis of the life and spirit of those who lived in and were shaped by

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the south Wales coalfield. Essentially he tends to see the resistant spirit of the mining communities, both men and women, as continuous with an older Welsh tradition of coping with a harsh environment and facing a range of external pressures. This idealization meshes with Davies’s personal attachment to a Lawrentian form of modernist romanticism, but is considerably strengthened by his use of Dr William Price of Llantrisant as a focal figure of cross-temporal resistance. Under-politicized as this position might seem, it amounts to a powerful and perhaps persuasive overview of how the industrial experience can be understood in terms of Wales’s history. Rhys Davies’s achievement in writing about the coal industry and the people whose livelihood depended on it was substantial, subtle and deserves to be taken seriously by historians and literary critics alike. Tony Brown, quoting the critic Clare Hanson, sees the short story as a form which lends itself to the experience of losers and loners, exiles, women, black writers, who for one reason or another have not been part of the ruling ‘narrative’ or epistemological framework of their society . . . [It is] the chosen form of the exile – not the self-willed émigré, but the writer who longs for a return to a home culture that is denied him.

This comment seems particularly apposite in the case of Rhys Davies, who was certainly detached from the working-class community of Blaenclydach by virtue of his lower-middle-class background, from the older cultural traditions of Wales by his inability to speak Welsh and, above all, from the mores of the Rhondda by his sexual orientation. How he then portrayed, from London, the Wales from which he felt excluded is examined with reference to his idiosyncratic books, My Wales (1937) and The Story of Wales (1943), as well as to some of his short stories, such as ‘The Bard’ and ‘Blodwen’. Special attention is paid to the way the physical environment of the Rhondda is portrayed: Davies saw it as enclosing and stifling, ‘not unlike a coffin’, an image as common in his writing as in the painting of the Rhondda artist Ernest Zobole (1927–99). The essay also examines the antipathetic view Davies took of chapel religion and Welsh nationalism, and the myth, to which he subscribed in both his fiction and nonfiction, of an autochthonous Wales, a ‘Silurian’ Wales that existed before industrialism and Nonconformity, where life could be lived more fully and authentically, that is to say, more frankly. The same

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preoccupations can be seen not only in his depiction of his personal heroes, men like ‘Twm Shon Catti’, Dr William Price and D. H. Lawrence, but also in how he saw the religious and political aspirations of the people of south Wales: ‘They are not satisfied to be born as they are,’ he wrote in My Wales. ‘They ask for a new world.’ In an interview with Glyn Jones (published in the Winter 1996/7 number of The New Welsh Review) Davies said, ‘Every writer creates his own Wales’; what he did not say was that he creates it in his own image. Daniel Williams argues that one of the most striking and disturbing characteristics of Rhys Davies’s work is the way in which he understands and describes the world in racial terms and that his ideas were derived from a nineteenth-century tradition of describing Wales and the Welsh. By comparing a range of books from The Withered Root (1927) to Print of a Hare’s Foot (1969) with the work of D. H. Lawrence, primarily his novella St Mawr, he also suggests that their views were part of a literary discourse which took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This argument is developed by comparing and contrasting the desire of Matthew Arnold (1822–88), in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), to see the Celtic peoples merge with the Saxons in the construction of a common (English) culture, with the commitment to a plurality of cultures based on ‘unassimilable racial differences’ that we witness in the writings of Davies and Lawrence. The essay suggests that the ideas of race in both writers pose a challenge to the commonly held belief that a commitment to racial difference is inevitably linked to the ideology of cultural nationalism. Their racialism derives from their fundamental belief in artistic freedom and individualism. For while the autonomous individual may be enticed from his or her individuality by the idea of a society based on a participatory common culture, the idea of a society based on race is not dependent on any social relations with others, for membership is already predetermined. Herein, the essay concludes, lies the advantage of race in the constitution of a community for both Davies and Lawrence. Barbara Prys-Williams, who is researching autobiographical writing by Welsh writers in English, looks more closely at the personality of Rhys Davies, focusing on Print of a Hare’s Foot (1969). Having read five earlier drafts now at the National Library of Wales, she traces the process of the construction of this book which, she concludes, is the creation of a very guarded and manipulative autobiographer. She looks first at the published text, showing how, for the son of a village grocer,

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social status was one of Davies’s preoccupations from the beginning. The writer’s depiction of his formative years had all the hallmarks of latent homosexuality, not least because heterosexual sex seemed linked in his mind with theft, trespass, entrapment and punishment. When he writes about his own sexual initiation, he seems knowingly to offer coded Freudian interpretations of the sort which had had a liberating influence in the London of the 1930s. By regularly tracking changes between draft and published text, this essay demonstrates how Davies liked to tease and confuse the reader, the hare putting out misleading signals and covering its tracks at every turn: he is the very epitome of ‘the unreliable narrator’ in matters concerning his own experience. Rather more severely, Davies is charged with having very little interest in other people and the quiddities of their lives: he remained an observer, aloof and untouched by the feelings of others, ‘remote inside his private lighthouse’. The essay ends by considering whether Davies was clinically a narcissist and to what extent his writing was essential to his mental well-being. D. A. Callard, who has written extensively about Rhys Davies, traces his early career as a short-story-writer, examining what he owed to Caradoc Evans and Maupassant before noting how, in the story ‘Daisy Matthews’ (1932), he began to find his own voice. In the preface to his Collected Stories (1955) Davies wrote: ‘That instinct to dive, swift and agile, into the opening of a story holds, for me, half the technical art; one must not on any account loiter or brood in the first paragraph: be deep in the story’s elements in a few seconds.’ His story about Daisy, a woman who ‘looked as harmless and neat as a pet white mouse’, set the direction in which he was to develop as a writer of short stories. Davies’s first mature collection was The Things Men Do (1936) which, despite its title, is almost exclusively concerned with women trying to maintain their dignity in the face of poverty and neglect by their husbands. It was also his first book to allow the reader to smile. A more sombre note is struck by the story ‘Cherry Blossom on the Rhine’, written after a visit to Germany in the company of Charles Lahr and H. E. Bates in 1927. Despite the revulsion he felt for the Nazis and the depression which affected him deeply at the outbreak of hostilities, the war had little effect on the content of Davies’s writing: ‘The physical destruction of war is antipathetic to that creative instinct which is the artist’s reason for existence,’ he wrote in Wales. Even so, he found wartime London congenial to his writing: he produced A

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Finger in Every Pie (1942), The Trip to London (1946) and Boy with a Trumpet (1949), and these stories are among his best. They include ‘Fear’ and ‘Boy with a Trumpet’, both small masterpieces and both based on real experiences. J. Lawrence Mitchell has a long-standing interest in the work of Rhys Davies. His essay explores the creative impulse in the writer, linking it to his early fascination with religious zeal and his subsequent loss of faith, as delineated in The Withered Root (1927), and in the stories in The Song of Songs (1927). He also argues that Davies’s reading of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857) shortly before he left Wales for London (he had found a copy in the library of the Miners’ Federation in Tonypandy) taught him a thing or two about the complexities of writing about women and bore fruit when he came to write his own novel, Rings on her Fingers (1930). What attracted Davies to Emma Bovary was the power of her imagination to outstrip reality, her early religious enthusiasm which turned so easily into sensuality, her constrained existence in the provincial backwater of Normandy and her yearning to escape the tedium of her daily life with a husband whom she found boring. It is no coincidence that Edith Roberts has some of the French woman’s physical traits, including her ugly hands, but it is in their oppressed spirit that they are most alike. Before her marriage she had been proud and fiercely independent and only gradually, after taking a series of lovers, does she succumb to the exigencies of domestic life. One of the intriguing points Lawrence Mitchell makes about some of Davies’s more unsympathetic characters, such as the self-satisfied draper Edgar Roberts, is that they are meant to be caricatures of himself, for there was an element of self-disgust in his understanding of his own androgynous psyche. The eventual reunion of Edith and Edgar corresponds not only to his French models but also to Davies’s psychic need to reconcile two very different aspects of his own nature. The essay ends by considering the reasons why Rhys Davies chose to leave Wales: like James Joyce in his attitude towards Ireland, he needed to live outside his native land in order to see it more clearly, at least in the ways which suited his own psychological needs, but could not leave it altogether, for it remained the main source of his inspiration. Linden Peach reminds us that, in his interview with Glyn Jones in 1950, Rhys Davies said: ‘It seems to me that Welsh writers have been fascinated too much by eccentrics . . . the trouble is perhaps to find the

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commonplace people in Wales.’ (A transcript of this interview is to be found in The New Welsh Review, 35, 1996/7.) Yet few of his contemporaries wrote about eccentricity in as much depth as Davies did, nor did they make such extensive use of the eccentric as a narrative strategy; indeed, he relished it in all its forms, finding in its subversive power a way of overturning cultural norms and social conventions: there was no greater rebel in nineteenth-century Wales than Dr William Price or any more flamboyant exhibitionist in pre-war London than Count Potocki, and he had nothing but admiration for them both. The eccentrics in his stories are seized by a subversive idea, as in ‘Conflict in Morfa’ and ‘The Farm’, or possessed by an obsession, as in ‘A Woman’ and ‘The Bard’, or bent on mischief, as in ‘The Chosen One’. Eccentricity, for Davies, was associated with impropriety, lawlessness and crime, and he made it the cornerstone of his fiction, even going so far as to question the notion of eccentricity itself; his depiction of it is invariably based on resistance to externally imposed labels and to an authority which denies the provisionality of all ‘meaning’. We are left wondering who the real eccentrics are and what exactly is meant by ‘unacceptable behaviour’ and why it is deemed to be so; the world, Davies suggests, is capable of a multiplicity of interpretations. This essay considers such questions in the context of a south Wales which, in the nineteenth century, was rapidly developed after the discovery of coal, giving rise to communities which were ‘eccentric’, that is different from the metropolitan ‘standard’, in both their language and social structure. Jeff Wallace makes a pioneering attempt at substantiating the oftennoted points of comparison between the fictions of Rhys Davies and those of D. H. Lawrence. Certainly, Davies admired Lawrence’s work: ‘To me, he seemed to be the only writer who was crystallizing the needs and fumblings of my generation – and in vehement language. He talked to, and among, my generation; though older and matured he was not detached.’ The two had some things in their backgrounds in common – early life in a mining village, flight through art and intellect and physical displacement – and both wrote fictions about the life of industrial communities and, in particular, about women defying social conventions. In Davies’s early novels and stories there are traces of a certain narrative language of the Lawrentian kind, principally in the depiction of class and the emancipating potential of the passional impulses. In his novella, ‘A Bed of Feathers’, for example, there are at

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least three recognizably Lawrentian plot scenarios: close sexual rivalry between three people, one of whom is an Other or interloper, and a pit death and the subsequent lodging of the body in the home before burial. But this essay, quoting Michel Foucault (1926–84) in his scepticism about the sovereignty of the human subject, warns us of the pitfalls of charting literary ‘influence’ and draws attention to the ‘semimythical’ status of the concept of ‘Lawrentianism’ itself. ‘How Lawrentian was Davies?’ it asks, but also, ‘How Lawrentian was Lawrence?’ With The Black Venus (1944), it detects an ironic distancing from Lawrentianism, and this, the essay argues, signals a shift in Davies away from the purely sexual relation and towards the envisioning of unconventional and alternative forms of social relations. James A. Davies discusses three of Rhys Davies’s novels which are based on the lives of famous Welshmen: The Withered Root (1927) is a fictional account of the religious revival of 1904/5 in which the central character, Reuben Daniels, is modelled on Evan Roberts (1878–1951); The Painted King (1954) deals with the brilliant theatrical career of Ivor Novello (1893–51), here named Guy Aspen; and in The Perishable Quality (1957), a novel concerned mainly with the fictional life of Eva Pritchard, a Welsh prostitute, the young Dylan Thomas appears as Iolo Hancock, poet and member of London’s literary bohemia. Reuben Daniels sublimates his unrequited love for his mother and disgust at female sexuality in misanthropic but charismatic preaching. The incessant demands of his huge congregations and his basic disillusionment exacerbate his existential loneliness. Guy Aspen is seen through the eyes of Judith Cottar, who becomes his personal assistant and has a strictly asexual relationship with the obviously gay matinée idol. She witnesses a personal tragedy as Guy becomes the helpless and isolated prisoner of illusion, fame and the expectations of others. The ‘perishable quality’ of the third novel’s title refers to lust and youth, but particularly the former. The book is a study of female sexual power and desire, of which, ultimately, Eva Pritchard becomes the lonely victim. Iolo Hancock, however, is presented as a free spirit; his is the world of the creative imagination unshackled by social obligations. Fame, it seems, offers lasting consolation only to the supremely gifted. Yet, even here, Iolo’s devotion to his writing separates him from satisfying human relationships and, because the informed reader is aware of the connection with Dylan Thomas, the narrative hints at a dark ending. All three novels reveal Rhys Davies’s gay sensibility; all explore the problems of fame or notoriety and all are

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concerned with the treatment of women and sexuality. Above all, they reflect Davies’s abiding concern with exile, longing and loneliness, this last linked to the need for love – themes central to his increasingly bleak vision as a writer. Katie Gramich’s essay explores another of the chief concerns of Rhys Davies’s short stories, namely that of gender roles and relations, particularly the notion of gender as a public performance, a masquerade. She points to the almost obsessive attention given to clothing in his stories; what people wear is endowed not only with symbolic significance but amounts to a complex system of ‘vestimentary codes’. Much of Davies’s writing can be interpreted as an encoded expression of the author’s own uneasy gender position as a ‘discreet’ homosexual coming from a traditional south Wales society of entrenched machismo. It is not surprising to find that his stories often feature liminal or uncertain gender positions and transgressive gender performances, as manifested in such acts as cross-dressing. A reading of a number of Davies’s short stories, including ‘Nightgown’, ‘The Fashion Plate’ and ‘Betty Leyshon’s Marathon’, points to their dominant sartorial imagery, their focus on performative gender and their depiction of repressed or neglected female desire. Drawing on Marjorie Garber’s theories about cross-dressing, this essay suggests that the stories challenge easy notions of binarity and may also be destabilizing other binary categories enshrined in the ideology of the society depicted. Davies is a writer whose work resembles a palimpsest of multiple codes; it may be said to express the experiences of a number of ‘submerged population groups’, including homosexuals and women, as well as the working class and perhaps even the Welsh. Attention is given to the frequent use of a boy protagonist who is a go-between figure, neutral in terms of the gender polarity of adult heterosexual lovers. Katie Gramich suggests that the boy may even be taken to represent that third gender possibility which has continually fascinated writers. Davies’s stories signal clearly that the masquerade of gender is not merely an aberration which is characteristic of individuals of ambiguous sexuality but that it is central to all ‘femininity’. He underlines the constructed nature of gender identity, which has little to do with physical ‘reality’ and everything to do with states of mind, imagination and desire. Nor is the notion of performative gender confined to characters within the stories. We, as readers, are constructed as gendered subjects by the text, which tries to enforce on

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us a particular reading. The interpellated reader is frequently invited to take up a feminine gender position which might be regarded in itself as a masquerade. Davies succeeds in destabilizing our own gender positions as readers. He does not seek to put a feminist case, nor, primarily, to attack a narrow patriarchy, but rather to blur the rigid gender divisions which must have made his own life, as a firmly closeted homosexual, such a tediously repeated performance of repression. Jane Aaron writes about three of Rhys Davies’s novels dealing with the war between the sexes. They are dominated by strong female characters who have put aside stereotypically feminine traits in order to avenge their sex and seem primarily concerned with teaching the heterosexual male a sharp lesson. Olwen Powell in The Black Venus (1944) uses the old Welsh custom of ‘courtship in bed’ to force her lovers to change their misogynistic ways. In The Dark Daughters (1947) three sisters wreak slow vengeance on their adulterous father for his crimes against their mother and, assisted by his Nonconformist conscience, drive him to madness. Marianne (1951) is the chilling record of how a middle-class woman destroys the steelworker whom she erroneously believes to have brought about, through desertion, the heartbreak and death in childbirth of her twin sister. Each novel is progressively darker than its predecesssor: The Black Venus is predominantly a comedy, The Dark Daughters a Gothic version of King Lear told from a female point of view, while Marianne, quicker in pace and with an unrelieved intensity, shares some of the characteristics of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. Like the Rhondda Trilogy, they cover an extended period of Welsh history, but focus not so much on community as on the changing nature of gender identity in a Welsh setting. The second and third novels probe what they present as a specifically Welsh gendered psyche, in which Nonconformity and class issues play key roles in the construction of masculinity and femininity. The ultimate message of these novels is that the enemy is the oppressive and divisive structure of society, such as the class and gender systems, not the individuals entangled in the prejudices and misunderstandings they induce. As one of the characters in The Dark Daughters says, ‘There’s no victory in wars between human beings. That old-fashioned organ the heart won’t allow it.’ Kirsti Bohata explores the way in which discourses of female sexuality and racial and sexual difference pervade Rhys Davies’s novel, The Black Venus (1944). One of the earliest and most important icons

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of such imperial discourses was Sarah Bartmann, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who was exhibited in London and Paris in the second decade of the nineteenth century on account of her protuberant buttocks and pendulous breasts. After her death in 1815, when the body of ‘The Hottentot Venus’ was dissected, it was discovered that her genitalia were malformed in such a way as to suggest sexual excesses, including lesbianism, and this was assumed to be a racial trait. This essay detects echoes of Sarah in Davies’s novel: the ‘buxom young negress’ portrayed on the canopy of Olwen Powell’s bed and the ebony statue in the cottage of the sexually ambivalent Lizzie Pugh are the emblems of ‘dark’ passions. The novel considers sexual desire in atavistic terms, using the vocabulary of racial purity, breeding and miscegenation, savagery and civilization, and linking sexuality to primitive impulses that are relics of humankind’s barbarous and even bestial origins. The significance of the black Venus as a sexually potent symbol is underlined at every stage of the narrative: ‘On Sundays, and in deference to possible visitors, Lizzie always tied a muslin apron about its smooth thighs.’ Sarah Bartmann had worn an apron round her loins and it had become, for the gentlemen who gazed at her, a highly charged erotic garment. Although The Black Venus is for the most part the light-hearted story of how Olwen searches for a suitable husband, much to the disapproval of the community of Ayron, its portrayal of female sexuality is subtle, complex – and ultimately subversive. Simon Baker and Joanna Furber continue that process of decoding Rhys Davies’s homosexuality which several contributors have undertaken, but in more theoretical terms. In a companion piece to the more phenomenological approach taken by M. Wynn Thomas, and expanding on Simon Baker’s introduction to his edition of Print of a Hare’s Foot (1998), they trace the covert metaphors which Davies used to convey homoerotic desire at a time when acts of homosexuality were hardly ever written about or spoken of in public. There is only one explicit reference to homosexuality in Print of a Hare’s Foot, and the stories and the novels take it as one of their principal themes without ever mentioning it by name: illum crimen horribile quod non nominandum est. The necessity for closetness, in life as in art, produced in Davies a range of subterfuges which enabled him to conceal or admit, to articulate and yet to contain, just as much or as little as he wished about his own sexuality. It is only with the growth of the

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literary discipline now known as Queer Theory that critics have attempted to decipher and interpret them. Queer Theory is concerned with disavowing the search for a single or singular identity and seeks instead something less and something more: the vertigo of substitution and repetition, of ‘same’ and ‘different’. Recent discussion has centred on challenging traditional concepts of masculinity, replacing its emphasis on phallic genitality (aggressive, penetrating) with a different metaphoricity emerging from its testicular/ testerical characteristics (passive, witnessing/morose, petulant). Rhys Davies’s stories and novels are fertile ground for such readings. He is the paramount example among Welsh writers in English of a man who, despite the urbanity of his literary style, has an acute sense of his own marginality, an awareness of being constantly on the outside, looking in on a world of which he can never be a part. The essay ends thus: Fiction, particularly short stories, offered Rhys Davies the opportunity to articulate a complete ‘being’, a perfect blend of truth and falsehood, depicted in its entirety: both who he was under the camouflage, and who he would like to be. In this it seems to us that he perfected every creative writer’s challenge: to know someone for a lifetime, and yet ultimately to keep him a secret.

The essays in this collection employ a range of contemporary critical discourses in discussing the work of Rhys Davies, but one constant is the assumption that concerns about sexual orientation and gender identity are deeply inscribed in his fiction. One of the earliest critics to read Davies’s work in this way was M. Wynn Thomas, who – in the Rhys Davies Lecture for 1997, delivered at the University of Glamorgan – turned to Queer Theory and other products of Masculine Studies to uncover previously unexamined levels of implication in Davies’s writing. His lecture is reproduced here, as the final essay in our book, in the belief that it continues to be a comprehensive and authoritative statement about the homosexuality of Rhys Davies and its significance for his writing. In it, M. Wynn Thomas traces how the writer came to an understanding of his sexual identity and how his writing played a crucial role by keeping him in touch with his inner self. At first, as a boy growing up in Blaenclydach, he had no word for it and no one with whom he could discuss it, and so he set out to explain it to himself by means of cryptography, or code. Even in the sexually tolerant ambience of Fitzrovia, he could

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never bring himself to make a public disclosure of it: at most, he would speak (as in the BBC interview with Delyth Davies recorded shortly before his death in 1978) of ‘the feminine element in my nature which is fulfilled by writing about women’. As for sex between men and women, he displayed a cool neutrality in his description of it, so that heterosexual desire finds only oblique, usually agonized, emotionally ambiguous expression in his fiction. To be homosexual in his day was to be condemned to secrecy and so, for Davies, concealment was all. He nevertheless sought revenge on the society that oppressed him by revealing its own concealments. In his autobiography he describes how, as a boy, sharing a bed with the maid, Esther, he feels under her nightdress and gropes his way to her ‘bush’; later, he is lured into a ‘secret marriage’ with Vanna, a village girl of Italian family, who whips up her frock to reveal ‘the forbidden mystery’. These, and similar incidents, suggest how Davies tried to defy society’s prohibition of sexual frankness and to uncover the secret sexual acts of others; with more openness, he seems to be saying, even he could reveal his sexual identity without fear of persecution. In the mean while, with pen in hand, he will continue to play the hare, a member of an endangered species, a quintessential misfit, living by his wits, vulnerable, giving out misleading signals, changing shape but always resolutely himself, lying low and leaving only the lightest of prints before disappearing into his form in his own mysterious way.

The publication of this book by the University of Wales Press in the centenary year of the writer’s birth may be regarded not only as the first substantial attempt to assess the work of Rhys Davies, now recognized as one of our major prose-writers, but also a landmark in the field of Welsh writing in English. The contributors are among a new wave of critics who have devoted their energies to the Englishlanguage literature of Wales by focusing on individual writers in discourses which are consonant with contemporary critical theory, with important consequences for how we view this hitherto neglected body of work. If they sometimes gainsay one other in their readings of Davies’s work, so much the better: their disagreement will make for lively discussion of a writer who seems to suggest that the world, and his writing, are capable of various interpretations and defy a final analysis. The hare may be decoded but ultimately he cannot be snared.

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Introduction

As editor, I am grateful to those who have accompanied me in the coursing since we first caught sight of our quarry. On their behalf, I thank the Rhys Davies Trust and the Arts Council of Wales for their financial support. On a more personal note, I should like to express my appreciation of the warm friendship and encouragement of Lewis Davies, the writer’s brother and only surviving relative, now in his eighty-ninth year, whose extraordinary generosity enabled me to set up the Rhys Davies Trust in 1990 and whose genial personality is our last direct link with that enigmatic man and fine writer who was Rhys Davies. Whitchurch, Cardiff August 2001 The first two parts of this Introduction were originally written for the edition of Rhys Davies: Collected Stories which was compiled and edited by Meic Stephens and published by Gomer Press in three volumes in 1996 and 1998.

Rhys Davies and his ‘Turbulent Valley’ DAI SMITH

On Census night 1901 the (probably under-estimated) population of the Rhondda Valleys was 113,735 and one of the latest additions was Rees Vivian Davies, born on 9 November in mid-Rhondda, the very epicentre of this spectacularly booming coal society whose population, amongst the fastest growing in the British Isles, had, since 1871, soared from 16,914 in the parish of Ystradyfodwg to its city-like proportions as the new century began. Nor would it stop there. By the time Viv was twenty, and already Rhys in his own mind at least, the Rhondda Urban District Council was the second largest conurbation in Wales, set to peak at over 167,000 in the few years of boom that remained to it. This was the essential Rhondda experience ingested by the adolescent and young adult before he shook its confines off in every sense but one: and that was the way its private, individuated meanderings beneath or within its more public framework of events haunted and informed his mind and imagination. Most of that swelling population were, unlike Rhys, in-migrants and increasingly coming from further and further afield as this carboniferous Eldorado beckoned them down to the First World War. This was even true of Rhys’s own forebears, for although his parents, the Tonypandy grocer Thomas Davies and his stern schoolmistress wife, Sarah, from Ynysybwl, were as local to mid-Rhondda as you could be in this overnight building frenzy, their origins lay in west Wales, in that Carmarthenshire which gave his writings a glimpse of lost bosky Celtica to counterpoint the mongrelized streets of his own Wales. In his lean fiction and in his elaborated autobiography, both places and people are tinged with lost worlds and current compromises. Sometimes the falsity of the juxtaposition rings its own warning of grotesquerie and caricature and, at other times, is weighted with a sentimentality too sweet to be other than sickly. Yet even these emotive representations speak of the insufferable burden of being born

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a writer in this particular Rhondda: too big, too bewildering, too panoramic to comprehend fully. It is in the interstices of this confusion, amongst his ambivalences and evasions, that the twenty-firstcentury reader can really observe how closely Rhondda marked Rhys and how intensely Rhys documented Rhondda in his imagination since, as he wrote at the end of the chapter entitled ‘Clydach Vale’ in Print of a Hare’s Foot (1969): ‘Hailing from a less raw and dangerous place than the Rhondda, it took my mother some time to subdue her puritanic irritation with the turbulent valley. But I was born into it.’ ‘Born into it’ he certainly was. No better vantage point could he have had than the small terraced home as Blaenclydach rises steeply through Clydach Vale from the main settlement of Tonypandy on the valley bottom of the Rhondda Fawr. Again, the numbers overwhelm before we can put faces to them. Almost 70 per cent of the male population aged twelve and over were employed in the mining industry. The population was young and notoriously fecund, in and out of the marriage bed, as both rates of birth and of illegitimacy left averages way behind. In mid-Rhondda alone, north and south of Tonypandy, there were 12,000 miners at work by 1910, producing half of the total coal spewing out of the Rhondda to Cardiff and the world. And at the top of Rhys’s tributary valley lay the Cambrian Colliery, itself the heart of D. A. Thomas’s overwhelming Cambrian Combine, an amalgamation of pits that fuelled Thomas’s global interests in shipping, patent fuels and newspapers. ‘Raw and dangerous’ it was, too, but a backwater it was decidedly not. Just before Rhys Davies celebrated his ninth birthday, the 1910 industrial conflict at the Cambrian Combine exploded onto the streets as the Tonypandy Riots and brought imported Metropolitan Police, Lancashire Fusiliers and 18th Hussars into the valley. He writes vividly, especially in his 1969 memoir, of the autocratic D. A. Thomas, the future Viscount Rhondda, and of the technicolour clashes, lasting over a year, which gave Tonypandy an ever-reverberating fame in the annals of labour history. Yet his several accounts are essentially a diorama rather than an analysis. This sense of the relationship of these visceral moments to the longer time sequence which connected them to the successful national strike of 1912 for a minimum wage is as attenuated as his grasp of the progressive movements being incubated, then and there in the Rhondda, for both pragmatic Labourism and quasi-revolutionary forms of syndicalism.

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Thus his sense of the crowd’s frenzied action in destroying the commercial property of the township on 8 November is a compound of moralizing – a lament that Welsh spiritualism and perhaps Welsh ethnicity had left them – and contemporary annoyance – at the ‘slavering and barbaric eyed’ colliers who, ‘repelled’ by the police in their attack on the Glamorgan Colliery at nearby Llwynypia, had ‘vented their rage’ on the innocent shopocracy. His writing in this vein (in My Wales, 1937) exhibits little of the empathy or the political insight his Blaenclydach contemporary, Lewis Jones, showed in Cwmardy (1937). But, then, Rhys’s politics, conditioned perhaps by his Liberal father or just withering on the vine of a greater indifference, were never typical of his native ground. This was, in another sense, the lack of a unifying principle or philosophy which another nearcontemporary, Glyn Jones, remarked on in a review of Rhys Davies’s novel A Time to Laugh in the magazine Wales in that same year, 1937. By then, apart from some short stays and increasingly infrequent visits, Rhys had been, via London and Europe, long gone. And in his absence, the workforce was cut in half, unemployment amongst those that remained, whilst thousands migrated, soared to over 40 per cent and was stuck there by the mid-1930s. ‘Red’ Rhondda now existed but its labours were expended in marching and talking. So his account of the ‘turbulent valley’ in My Wales (1937) is particularly intriguing since it oscillates so dramatically between the raucous world which had cradled him but not held him, and the despairing society whose quiescence in the downtrodden 1930s he deplored. It is as if, at one and the same time, he is driven to acknowledge the (vanished) power to fascinate which the Rhondda of his first two decades so abundantly possessed and the (evanescent) pity which its humanity could invoke in him. In one tone we can hear the cold-comfort hand-wringing simplicities of a back-to-the-soil naïveté present in Saunders Lewis and Richard Llewellyn: It is merely one of the disagreeable and ruthless activities of modern life that hundreds of thousands of workers have to be left abandoned when, because of breakdowns in the world’s commercial system, the accumulation of quick fortunes is no longer possible in the region. These workers are merely unlucky to be caught in the fag-end of an era. The only cheerful thought one can offer them is that they still have

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Wales. Surely they can forget their woes in applying their undying energy, now that most of the great coalowners and ironmasters have departed, to giving their land once again to its former cleanliness. It is doubtful whether salmon ever again will consent to leap the cascade of Berw Rhondda, but surely those huge offensive heaps of colliery rubbish called tips can be used in sweeping up those derelict works rusting in the Welsh rain which, as ever, falls to fructify green produce as well as to enter the decrepit shoes of the unemployed. After the ugly hundred and fifty years’ interruption from the outside world, perhaps Wales can now return to its former pastoral unison – if it can afford to. And, if the million or so abandoned people who cannot be absorbed elsewhere, return to that elementary condition of wresting the simplest of livings out of the soil, they surely will not be bitter. Why should they be! Generations of their ancestors, and themselves, have obtained shares of the industrial spoil, measured out carefully according to the economic laws of the times. No fury, no bitterness, no lamentations, should be felt. They have had the interesting opportunity of helping to build an historic era which placed their country in a wealthy and respected position among the nations which do great business over the seas of this faulty world. This should be a comforting memory to them in their solitude.

Taken at face value, this has the breathtaking candour of a Madison Avenue copywriter in search of a Development Agency commission, only that is to cross-pollinate decades in which shared values confuse historical context. For Rhys Davies that context was the 1930s and there is enough elsewhere in his work to allow us to drop a tincture of irony into his Olympian dismissal of these toiling souls apparently without mind or matter to hinder them. Instead over a third of his socalled ‘travelogue’, My Wales, is devoted to chapter 3 and ‘The South Wales Workers’. They sit uneasily amid chapters on the ‘Eisteddfod’, ‘Welsh Players’, ‘Welsh Characters’, and thoughts on ‘Words’ and a ‘Holiday Trip’, but it is as if the social currents of his ‘turbulent valley’ will not free him from their tug. He postures, he tut-tuts, he exoticizes and he caricatures but, steadily, he is, in small things more than large, faithful to what he has seen and known, and so necessarily punctures the inflated generalities of outside accusers even as he himself rises on their clichéd afflatus. To strike at such a time [in the 1914–18 war] with every piece of coal valuable and with a dangerous shortage of men to work the basic

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industries [because of the high volunteering rate of miners!] was criminal and not to be borne. The miners were taking advantage of the country’s helpless plight. This was the time when people wrote to the newspapers and said the miners ought all to be poisoned, imprisoned, starved, put between the opposed rows of machine guns in Flanders etc; never mind, Nemesis would come to them. They were bloated profiteers (who were not?); they bought pianos which they couldn’t play (sometimes two); fur coats bedecked their wives; they washed themselves in whisky; they bought farms and kept other women; they wore evening ‘tails’ when they set out in the morning for a few days by the sea, and the ears of their daughters (who were baggages of sin) dripped diamonds; they went into Cardiff for evening trips and made that respectable city redden with shame. Further notoriety fell on the area. I saw little evidence of this shocking gaiety. Pianos were certainly bought, by musical minded colliers who for long barren years had craved these instruments, suitable furniture in a land of song. I saw women I had known as gaunt and shabby grey shapes come out of their little dark dwellings amazingly gay with a few ribbons and a feather or two. They went excitedly to the Welsh seaside towns for a holiday (many of the swank English resorts used to turn down applicants for accommodation from such places as the Rhondda). New, wonderful comforts were suddenly and pathetically in their grasp. Some did not know how to use these comforts, having been without them for so long. Life had become a bit of a fairground – though, because of sons and relations in the trenches, a threatening fairground. This little period of fake prosperity, a few years out of the hundred and fifty, was really the last flourish of the old vigorous life peculiar to South Wales. The district became, as the war finished, less of a place enclosed by its own mountains, by its special problems, as an Eldorado flushed with wealth over which there had been terrible local battles and a period of Welsh civil war.

He was quite right, of course, to spotlight the force of the divide that had occurred to this people and within his country over these years. The First World War really was a cultural as well as a political watershed for Wales. He summed it up, again sharply in focus, as a change in outlook beyond mere economic shifts or ideological winds; it was an education in and out of the classroom which had affected the kind of Wales that would now exist for the long remainder of the twentieth century: ‘Schools had done their work, the Miners’ Federation was an

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organisation of portentous influence, the Great War had given the final jolt to a consciousness that had never been very aware of the world beyond the mountain.’ He was not the only one of his generation to name the post-war years – especially after 1926 – as ones of summation or even closure. His own major response – in the trilogy of novels he then wrote – Honey and Bread (1935), A Time to Laugh (1937) and Jubilee Blues (1938) – was to impose a fabular pattern on the chaos of detailed life that had rushed in and out of the mining valleys since the 1840s. For him it was a mistaken if understandable venture – most successful when he lets the chaos back in to swamp the pattern as in Jubilee Blues – one at odds with his abiding talent for the miniature. In that form – notably in the short story or in slight vignettes – he etched over and over the profiles of individual men and women trapped, released, crushed, saved or just discarded by the weight of human indifference and the insistence on filling in the blank page of human existence with our own distinctive markings. He was, fortuitously and happily, ‘born into it’ to let us feel, intimately, the sights, sounds, smells – the synaesthesia of the private – that lay within this apparently grim human habitation. To the contemporary outside eye, such as this London reporter sent down in the wake of the 1910–11 disturbances, the picture was of a tottering mayhem not so much landscaped as vomited into shape: [Tonypandy lies] . . . in a narrow winding valley confined by squat denuded hills upon whose blank sides tower huge mounds of rock and rubbish excavated from the numerous coal tips. The river, sometimes almost dry, sometimes rushing down in tempestuous flood, but always pestilential with all manner of garbage and offal, is crossed and recrossed by the railway over which, all day and all night, roll the neverending coal trains on their way to the distant sea-port. The high road, where it may, runs its course alongside the odorous river, but for the greater part of its length it has to hug the steep slopes of the cheerless hills . . . long rows of steep gardens rise sheer from the roadside to a line of small stone-built four-roomed cottages. A paved alleyway at the rear, the length of the terrace, gives access to the houses, and from this narrow alleyway, another series of gardens continue the ascent to a similar row of cots, and so the terraces rear themselves until the topmost is reached from which the roadway, the pits, the railway and the river are seen in panoramic array. Each alley has one waterspout, common to all the homes in that row. The two tiny back rooms are darkened by

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the overhanging gardens of the higher terrace, and the houses are so low that a man must stoop before entering.

That is why Rhys Davies was so absorbed in the life that went on before one stooped to enter. You do not, either in the end or in the beginning, go to Rhys Davies for the fact-of-the-matter, you go to him for the matter-ofthe-thing: and in this his growing consciousness of his own sexuality as different from the public aspect of Rhondda life became his insightful window onto that world. You can tell immediately, especially if you too were a native of a mid-Rhondda still caught in its coalfield heyday, how intuitively he understands how those rear alleyways – our gulleys – were a network of passageways in which, in the open, so to speak, communication, gossip and sexual congress could and did proceed apace. His Rhondda was, after all and in a literal sense, a world of strangers. They needed to find out about each other as did all immigrant societies. There were established enclaves in particular chapels, or in particular underground districts of the pits themselves, where natives of one far village or another or those who clung to Welsh in a Rhondda where well over half the population still spoke it habitually down to the 1920s, could congregate and comfort each other. Inter-marriage was a mode of reinforcing such identities and quite common. In both public houses and in shops men and women, usually separately, could exchange the coin of fresh recognition and old renewal. But it was in those back lanes that quiet conversation, gambling, fighting and the exploration of physical love – when the mountain tops grew too cold and the seaside was too remote – actually happened. He is, in all this, an incomparable guide. Yet it is never as some kind of superannuated Baedeker that he takes us by the hand. This is the Rough Guide to the Rhondda – its packed spaces of noise, its sudden spilling of light onto darkness when cinemas or variety theatres disgorge their audiences, or the sour mash smell of smokefugged saloon bars and the sticky sweetness beneath eiderdown covers as pink face-powder is washed off by the ravenous kisses of the young. ‘The pits were working full time now,’ he wrote in Print of a Hare’s Foot about the immediate pre-1914 years, and Saturday nights burst with the vigour of a big explosive cabbage . . . Shops, open until midnight in good times, gained lost ground. The pubs rang and shouted with language. Enmities were settled on the

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road outside . . . and I liked the forgiveness of all things and people that followed.

His is a more relaxed, almost always engaged, account of this people’s swirling life than the one his mentor D. H. Lawrence contrived for the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Rhys Davies’s fictional colliers, though they can be depicted as subhuman, are never quite as frightening in their distance, earned and unshareable, as are Lawrence’s when we glimpse them, sexually charged carnivores squatting on their haunches and leering, with Gudrun and Ursula in Women in Love. Whatever Lawrence wanted, and raged because he could not find it, for himself in his relationship with those colliers, with his father and their damned acceptance of whatever life brought, it was not the lack Rhys Davies felt. The only other south Welsh writer who even comes close to the missing dimension of those too easily hastened lives is Alun Richards who, like Rhys, is able to make us see through the eyes of the women who, far from being the marginalized sector social and economic truisms would have us swallow, were the marginalizing psychological factor which continuously kept the issue of humanity itself at the forefront of Rhondda’s history. It all comes together in a marvellous late work which is more an enamelled piece of anecdotage until the terrible clang of its ending than one of his delicately crafted short stories. The story – ‘The Pits are on the Top’ – is set in the Rhondda of the Second World War. This is not the rip-roaring place of another wartime’s prosperity. Too much of the pall of the inter-war years and the miserable knowledge those decades brought hangs over it for that scenario to have any credibility. Nor will any startling discovery or revelation or brutality be uncovered. The tone is almost that of a quiet documentary, and all the more effective for it. What makes it sing is the setting – a bus journey from the valley’s bottom to the top of the adjacent cwm, from Tonypandy to Blaenclydach, in a ‘bright noon light’ that is prismatic through the winter snowflakes – and the interaction between the passengers who add nothing to what they hear – of the death of a young woman’s brother-in-law from bronchitis (or is it silicosis?) – to pass the gathered information between themselves like the natural dreadful thing it is whilst they observe the young collier and his girl who sit, uneasily, amongst them. It is an inverse journey, away from the escape route of the larger settlement and back to its originating pits. It is grimly about endings

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and the way a man-made world causes that to occur too soon. The bereaved sister-in-law bemoans the cost of the wreath she has had to buy. It was composed of red tulips, white chrysanthemums and two longtongued orchids which were the colour of speckled toads. She eyed the wreath with uncertainty and went on with her complaint: Fifteen shillings, and in the summer a bigger wreath than this you can get for seven-an-six. The price of flowers! And soon as I’ve taken this up I’ve got to come down again and be fitted for my black. Potching about!

Whether it was folk memory or actual recollection that caused Rhys Davies to find that seemingly innocuous phrase – ‘The price of flowers!’ – is neither here nor there. The echo of it is pregnant with the memories of an earlier Rhondda when, in the summer of 1910, colliers and their wives greeted the appearance of the conciliatory miners’ agent and future Rhondda MP, Dai Watts Morgan, with the bitter cry of ‘What price are flowers, Mr Morgan?’ just months before they wrecked, in the November riot, the shop on Tonypandy Square which boasted two hand-painted signs – ‘Studleys, Fruit Merchant’ and ‘Wreaths to Order’. In those years, apart from the fact that about a half of all recorded Rhondda deaths came about from accidents underground, colliers were dying of ‘pulmonary consumption’ at eleven times the rate of any other occupation. By the 1940s, at least, the medical arguments about ‘pulmonary consumption’ had been extended beyond ‘pthisis’ and ‘bronchitis’ to acknowledge the workinduced diseases of pneumoconiosis and silicosis. The women on Rhys Davies’s bus discuss, with passion and knowledge and despair, whether the dead man should be dissected: ‘It’s a wonder,’ said the fat woman, ‘that they didn’t open him up.’ ‘But the plates,’ said the district nurse, who had her black maternity bag on her knee. ‘He had the X-ray plates took not long ago and they didn’t show anything.’ The fat woman did not like to dispute with the district nurse, but, pushing the load more firmly into the basket, she said judiciously: ‘Oh aye, the plates! Funny though for him to go so sudden; a young chap too – I wonder,’ she turned again to the woman with the wreath, ‘your sister didn’t ask for him to be opened up, like Joe Evans and Dai

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Richards in my street was, when they went. It’s worth it for the compensation. The pit’s got to pay for silicosis, haven’t they!’ Indignation had begun to seep into her voice, before it subsided into doubt: ‘Of course, there is a lot of bronchitis about.’ Another woman who was nursing a baby voluminously wrapped in a thick stained shawl, said: ‘There’s two men got it in our street. You can hear them coughing across the road. Jinny James’s ’usband one of them, and she do say it’s the silicosis.’ ‘What d’you expect,’ said another, ‘with their lungs getting full of the coal dust and rotting with it.’ ‘They can always have plates taken,’ said the district nurse officially, and looking down her nose. She leaned across to the woman with the baby. ‘How’s Henry shaping?’ she asked, peering at the pink blob of face visible in the shawl’s folds – she had brought Henry into the world.

All this time the slender, still young Dilys Morgan sits beside her powerfully built collier boyfriend, stocky Bryn Jones, and listens to their words and his persistent cough. She senses they are waiting for her to become ‘one of them’ and her resentment is tinged with an almost inexpressible fear. The engaged couple, Bryn without a muffler and hatless against the cold, leave the bus: His shoulders were broad, his limbs and hands thick and hard. The snowflakes turned into a grey liquor in the warm grease on his brisk black hair. The faint bluish pallor of his face was a little more evident. This week he was working on the night shift. They went down a side turning. They lived in the same street. But before they reached it he put his hand in hers and stopped her against an old building where there was shelter from the whirling flakes and wind. It was a bakehouse, and the oven was inside the wall; they could feel the heat coming out. He would not be seeing her again until Sunday.

In less than five pages, Rhys Davies brushes in a cycle of Rhondda life, one universal in its sketch of births and sex and death generation on generation and delicately precise in the quiddity of this valley’s pavane. Dilys, to be married in three months’ time, cheers up and leaves the Bryn whose child she will surely bear and whose wreath she will certainly carry on another bus – ‘she felt . . . that she was lucky really. He was in a reserved occupation and he was a good miner, with

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a place of his own down under . . . he would be by her side for her to look after him.’ This is a near-perfect cameo, so good for its passing moment that it could be wished Rhys Davies had never left his ‘turbulent valley’ at all so that, for its long time, he might have stayed to capture its complete rhythm. Too much to ask, maybe, and perhaps the wrong request for, with the real end of that long time, we may finally now appreciate how vital those moments were and how exceptionally gifted was the wondrous writing talent that caught them, as they fell, one by one, into his imagination.

The Epic Rhondda: Romanticism and Realism in the Rhondda Trilogy MICHAEL J. DIXON

Rhys Davies dealt with the industrialization and decline of the Rhondda in a trilogy of novels: Honey and Bread (1935), A Time to Laugh (1937) and Jubilee Blues (1938). He brought to bear on his subject-matter first-hand experience of life in Blaenclydach. Indeed, the autobiographical Print of a Hare’s Foot (1969) has Davies enthusing that his native township, in tandem with the Rhondda as a whole, ‘trumpeted an affirmation of the constructive urge in man’ (PHF 8). For him, were it not for such areas as these, ‘modern Wales [would] have scarcely existed’ (PHF 7).1 Nonetheless, for all his avowed commitment to his roots in midRhondda, Davies’s relationship with the area was less straightforward than that of his near-contemporary Lewis Jones (1897–1939). Unlike that of the Communist Jones, Rhys Davies’s background was petitbourgeois, and although in many ways sympathetic to his overwhelmingly working-class community, he was, at times, at odds with its proletarian drives. Arguably, such a distance was due to Davies’s class and sexual difference from a deeply working-class and heterosexually oriented community: the degree to which he was at odds with Rhondda norms is reflected in his writing perspective. This tends to mirror a lower-middle-class viewpoint; in his Rhondda-based works, his central figures are either intrinsically of such a social standing, or else arrive there through upward or downward mobility. Rhys Davies was noticeably inclined towards romanticism, and was strongly influenced by D. H. Lawrence. Yet the prosaic Rhondda continued to provide a context for many of his fictions, though it could be argued that in writing these ‘industrial’ novels Davies was opportunistically adapting to the fashion for proletarian literature prevalent amongst the English ‘liberal’ middle classes of the 1930s, who made up much of his readership.

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He thus centres his fiction on historical events such as the early industrialization of the Rhondda, the bitter struggles of the 1890s, the Cambrian Dispute, and the General Strike of 1926, and in order further to provide it with an identifiably ‘realistic’ focus, includes portrayals based upon men like D. A. Thomas and Dr William Price. Needless to say, such larger-than-life figures also served Davies’s romantic inclination in these somewhat Promethean portrayals. Davies’s developing maturity as a writer of proletarian fiction can be traced through the trilogy which constitutes his most developed portrayal of the valleys. This is signalled in the shift from a rather hostile perspective towards his subject-matter in Honey and Bread to a position encompassing a seemingly more empathic scope in A Time to Laugh and Jubilee Blues. Honey and Bread (1935) is based upon the development of Blaenclydach and portrays the displacement of a stagnating rural society by a dynamic industrial one. Here Davies is concerned with describing the terminal stage of a once great family, the landowning Llewellyns. With their fall is signalled the demise of the valleys’ rural squirearchy and its rigid social practices in the face of unstoppable mechanization. In typically romantic fashion, the Llewellyn family is shown, initially, in a largely heroic light. Their tenure has survived the ravages of Norman and Plantagenet conquest and dispossession as a consequence of their support for the Glynd{r rebellion. The Tudor ascendancy restores legitimacy to them; they are of a gentrified class, prospering in an economy where ‘substantial profits began to be made on the pastoral products of the valley’ (HB 55). Davies reveals that this Edenic era produces a flourishing of the arts among the local populace, with perhaps a deliberate irony in his clichéd statement ‘bards and musicians appeared in every family, and there were meetings on hilltops where they competed with great trumpetings of vocal expression’ (HB 54). The life of Tudor Llewellyn, the current patriarch of Glan Ystrad, is governed by a pursuit of aesthetic pleasure. Throughout his trilogy, Davies holds to a Nietzschean view of the native character, where intellect and passion interact, with uncertain and often fatal results. Certainly this trait is evident in the Llewellyn menfolk, of whom it was commonly held that ‘a hard-working squire was certain to be followed by two spendthrift semi-rascals enamoured of anything but work’ (HB 55). Tudor Llewellyn falls into the latter category. Although well-educated and widely travelled, he finds his ‘fortune steadily diminishing’ (HB 13) as he indulges himself in pursuit

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of a futile muse at extreme financial cost, funding eisteddfodau and classical concerts at his family seat. His fecklessness in estate management means that he is forced, inevitably, to accept the easy promise of ‘industrial money’, and he sells off ‘the ancient heritage’ (HB 118) in biblical fashion like a latter-day Esau.2 His dispossessed sons now face the future differently. The more pragmatic David Llewellyn makes for the Cyfarthfa ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil, dreaming of ‘becoming a Prince of Commerce’ (HB 73), but is only able to make ‘a steady slow ascension, simply by virtue of honest plodding’ (HB 252), whilst his older brother, Owen, faces the abyss. Owen is a Byronic figure, consumptive and melancholy. The loss of Glan Ystrad seals his fate, and his death at a tragically young age is attuned to the text’s Romantic drive. For him, the land signifies the essence of the Llewellyn clan. As he observes, rightly: ‘Without it they’re nothing. My family has lived with it for hundreds of years, fought for it, some of them dying for it. It’s our life-pulse and our meaning’ (HB 203). It is his refusal to worship at the temple of Mammon that confirms Owen as a man unable to function in a modernizing society. His inflated claim, ‘I know myself a prince when I see people selling themselves for miserable money’ (HB 203), strikes a typically romantic chord, but also confirms the unreality of his stance in a world where the new masters are, as Davies has it in an accurate historical reference, men like ‘the Crawshays of Merthyr, the Homfrays of Penydarren, Guest of Dowlais . . . men of foresight and energy who had broken into the new era with a loud industrial clamour’ (HB 231). There now seems to take place a shift in the novel’s tenor, as the energy of industrial capital and its proponents stands in stark contrast to the comparatively effete gentry, whose ailing ethos is symbolized in the failure of the Llewellyns. In contrast, Honey and Bread makes reference to the historical figure of Richard Trevithick. The Cornishman was responsible for running the world’s first steam-powered locomotive from Penydarren to Abercynon, thus signalling the railway age, and with it enormous socio-economic consequences for south Wales. Although at pains to lament the passing of the agrarian era, and to depict the vicissitudes of industrialization with its attendant ‘squalour, fighting, jealousy’ (HB 234), and all too frequent workplace casualties, the novel now also reveals an undeniable attractiveness about the dynamism of the industrial enterprise. Rhys Davies, as narrator, captures its spirit as follows:

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New and surprising wonders were arriving as the century entered into a manhood that looked like being a lusty and prosperous one . . . the strange exciting revolution marched through the valleys and was hailed and welcomed amiably. Life was making a move at last. (HB 233)

Here there is a vitality lacking in the mundane pastoral world which has been so rudely displaced, and an urgency of movement is conveyed in the complementary images of ‘farm labourers [who] flocked to the grey little villages’ (HB 234), and the springing up of ‘rows of dwellings [that] could not be raised swiftly enough’ (HB 234). The essence of this new south Wales is summed up by Davies, ironically but effectively, in the comment ‘here was Eldorado’ (HB 234). In Glan Ystrad, the new world arrives with the appearance of a Swansea-based mining company headed by the austere figure of Jeremiah Clark. Rhys Davies’s geographical setting and historical timescale are not altogether accurate, but nor are events at Glan Ystrad distorted beyond recognition in respect of Blaenclydach specifically, and the Rhondda more generally. The earliest coal extraction in the Rhondda was undertaken by Walter Coffin of Bridgend, whose Dinas Levels in Lower Rhondda Fawr started production in 1809. The first such enterprise in the Blaenclydach area was the Perch Levels, opened in 1847, by William Perch and Co. The first ‘deep mine’ in the general Clydach area was also sunk at Blaenclydach, and was opened by Bush and Co. in 1863. These workings were followed by the founding of the Clydach Vale Colliery by Samuel Thomas, John Osborne Riches and Co., in 1872.3 Yet in spite of the novel’s shift in sympathy towards the new industrialists, Jeremiah’s initial enterprise is depicted as clearly brutal in comparison to the pastoral productive mode that it banished to the social and economic margins of valley life. Nonetheless, his Cimmerian workers, who resemble ‘a tribe lost in the inner mountains’ (HB 271), engage in an epic undertaking. The dynamism of their labour quickly forges the semblance of a permanent civic community, headed by Jeremiah who imposes upon it a strict Victorian paternalism. In keeping with the Romantic tendencies of the text, and despite the harsh reality of his industrializing project and his dogged pursuit of money, Jeremiah Clark is portrayed as one of Davies’s archetypal Prometheans, a figure who is prone to ‘visionary bouts’ (HB 330) concerning his ‘great and glorious task’ (HB 330). So concerned is he with his project that it is akin to a ‘white fire [that] burned in his mind’

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(HB 326).4 Indeed, the only serious opposition to his driven purpose comes from ‘the local prophet’ (HB 326), Robert ap Gruffydd. An incarnation of Dr William Price, he is an eighty-year-old hermit who lives a withdrawn and meditative life on the mountainside and preaches a Chartist ideology. He succeeds, briefly, in slowing Jeremiah’s progress, but his main function in the text is to symbolize the original ethos of the valley, and the spirit of resistance, rather than to lead a full-blown revolt. Finally, he takes on the mythic role of an exile, a latter-day Glynd{r figure who poses an unseen, and threateningly permanent, challenge to Jeremiah Clark and his kind. If the figure of ap Gruffydd represents the permanence and rebellious potential of the old gwerin, then a residual trace of the old gentry, in its more spirited aspect, also remains. For although Owen dies young, and the rest of the Llewellyns finally decamp, with Tudor and Nest heading for London and David settling for a life in Merthyr Tydfil, they leave behind them, as a reminder of their lineage, the illegitimate child of Owen and a peasant girl, Bronwen Evans, his intended marriage partner. Bronwen is a natural ‘survivor’; she survives an exile imposed on her by a disapproving Nest, the death of her intended husband and the problems imposed by the illegitimacy of her child. In a final twist to the novel, she marries a young and vigorous railway foreman, an ‘incomer’ called Ben Morris who is destined for success in this new industrial world. Their match could be read as symbolizing the conciliation of the old native order with the new status quo, and the final image in Honey and Bread is suitably affirmative, with ‘the clamour of new, changing life surging everywhere all throughout the valley’ (HB 365). The sense of decay and loss that has tended to inform the narrative throughout is now dissipated, and at the novel’s close the author appears to be reconciled to industrialization, seemingly favouring it over the lost cause of an agrarian way of life. Nevertheless, in opening his trilogy thus, with a novel set so far back in Rhondda history, Rhys Davies is signalling a very different relationship with the area from that of Lewis Jones. The Rhondda he wishes to remember, and whose life he wants to record, is a rural as well as an urban Rhondda, and one whose Welshness is evident in folk tradition and culture, and in a persistent feudal attitude as much as in its strongly socialist ethos. This, perhaps, indicates Davies’s own particular ‘isolation’ from the industrial Rhondda of his experience. Having dispensed with the pastoral Rhondda and a nascent industrializing process which displaces it, Rhys Davies, in his next

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novel, engages with the more fully developed urban world forged in its wake. A Time to Laugh is set two generations further on, in the year 1899, and the text’s historical detail, though not altogether precise, sets it apart from Davies’s other Rhondda-focused works, for it is a vital element in his producing a work of identifiable ‘realism’. That the lower-middle-class Davies seeks a proletarian focus on mid-Rhondda’s radicalism is also an interesting development. He employs the figure of Dr Tudor Morris, grandson of Bronwen Evans and Owen Llewellyn, as a means of maintaining continuity in his trilogy, but, more importantly, Tudor is also Davies’s main vehicle for examining the implication of radical politics in the valley. The novel opens during a mining strike and its initial chapter centres on a riot. In a distinct move towards historical realism, Davies’s account appears to draw upon the 1893 Hauliers’ Strike, and more specifically the 1898 Six Months’ Strike, for its ‘authenticating’ detail, with a hint of the Cambrian Combine Strike, and the Tonypandy Riots of 1910, thrown in for added effect. Each of these struggles was bitter and violent, and ended in defeat for the strikers. The opening paragraphs in A Time to Laugh describe vividly a vicious encounter between police and striking miners: Suddenly there was a huge sound of smashed glass and the window of the shop at the corner dropped in fragments to the road . . . The gang of rioters was already at the far end of the lane, a mass of crouched figures ragged in the early evening light. But the policemen were young athletic chaps whose stomachs had been receiving proper nourishment: they pursued like eagles. In two minutes they were among the scuffled rioters and distributing cracks successfully. Yells, oaths and groans filled the bleak January air. Policemen roared, kicked on their fed bellies and swiped vengefully across jaws; rioters yelled with the scratched hysteria of men fed for days on rage – but they were laid low, red-flecked foam on their lips. They tumbled like dummies to the ground. (TL 1)

This naturalistic prose signals a departure from Davies’s more ‘mythic’ writing style. What is represented is a clear ideological division between the forces of ‘law and order’ and coal capital and the proletarian rioters, who eventually win the day, and who conclude the business with a ransacking of local shops. The introduction of a third social grouping here, that of the local traders, is important. Of the

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author’s own particular class, in their supposedly unaligned political status, they serve an important function. These ‘tradespeople and their families, neutral but threatened, owning goods for empty insides and shivering bodies’ (TL 2), are portrayed as the most helpless group at this stage of the proceedings – mere bystanders overtaken by the grievances of others. The shopkeepers react with a shared stoicism; they ‘bemoaned, and swore a little, but accepted the calamity with strange perverse indifference’ (TL 6), and a quiet heroism can be read into such fortitude. At this juncture it is evident that the local petitebourgeoisie are the most sympathetically portrayed grouping. One of the event’s ringleaders, Tudor Morris, is of a social class more akin to these than to the strikers whose cause he embraces. A direct, albeit illegitimate, descendant of the Llewellyn family, and a recently qualified medical practitioner, he becomes deeply involved in the locality’s ‘sacred revolutionary circle’ (TL 16). Davies employs him in order to develop Marxist ideas, and to provide identifiable historical data. For instance, Morris’s bold declaration that ‘the Sliding Scale ought to go and the scheme of Regulation of Output adopted’ (TL 74) places him in the syndicalist camp occupied in reality by men like the miners’ leader Noah Ablett, whilst his view that ‘the new century is going to hear the last gasp of capital’ (HB 79) centres the narrative in the late 1890s. Even so, ideologically distanced from his own social class, becoming proletarianized but not essentially proletarian, Tudor Morris is marginalized in a way that marks him out as a potential tragic hero, suggesting that his creator is keen to maintain a Romantic perspective on him. Certainly, his early attachment to his comrades is sentimentally driven: ‘He only knew that their “cause” was like a religion to him, the rhythm of their lives, the beat of a sombre piece of music, a symphony to whose forceful if noisy power he was compelled to listen’ (TL 57). In fact Morris is propelled into the heart of revolutionary politics in the fictional valley, as he rises to become chairman of an unofficial committee of Federation men, closely supported by an old and respected collier and long-standing Socialist called Beriah Thomas. (A third important militant, Tudor’s friend and brother-in-law Melville Walters, is languishing in prison at this point in the narrative, jailed for his political activism.) Mirroring the rise of the Unofficial Reform Committee at Clydach Vale’s Cambrian Combine, Davies’s radicals exist as ‘perhaps the real blood of the Federation’ (TL 232), who prepare for an inevitable resumption of hostilities with the colliery owners.

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This is reached as the text moves towards its climax, with its reworking of the Tonypandy Riots, here set in December 1899. Noticeably, Davies chooses to square his fictional account with a misreading of events. Whereas the actual assault on the Cambrian Colliery in 1910 was enacted as an orchestrated attempt to shut down its power-house, and was successful from the strikers’ point of view in that they closed the pit, the corresponding action in A Time to Laugh is deliberately haphazard, and achieves nothing but a series of retaliatory arrests. Davies follows this misrepresentation of historical fact at Blaenclydach by rewriting the Tonypandy Riots, a random event which occurred later that same day. For him it becomes a co-ordinated insurrectionary act. What actually took place on 8 November 1910 is described by Davies as ‘the beginning of the Christmas riots; a taste of blood . . . [which] was well-planned, hundreds taking part’ (TL 383). In A Time to Laugh this systematic blood-letting takes place over several successive nights, running unconfined across the length and breadth of the valley, and deliberately contravening the Christmas ethos in its Bolshevik-inspired fury. Furthermore, there is here no representation either of a coherent ideological purpose driving events, or of any sense of control being exercised by the strike’s leaders. Davies presents a farcical interpretation of the Riots, with the looting presented in terms reminiscent of Jack Jones’s fiction. The account includes grotesque descriptions of attacks on foodshops, with grocers and butchers being the major targets, as a starving Christmas faces all but the valley’s ‘middle-class and certain austere mining families who had savings’ (TL 383). From this point onwards the strikers are consistently portrayed in diminished terms, as the strike runs ‘finally out of control’ (TL 391), erupting into naked violence, where ‘the satisfaction of the fight became like a wallowing in religious orgasm’ (TL 387). Beriah laments the decline into continuous violence, and Tudor is minded to consider himself as an ‘outsider’, suspected of treachery because of his middleclass origins and unable to fit in with the masses around him. In A Time to Laugh the strike fails after two months of conflict. It is left to Beriah and Tudor to announce its capitulation, and they envisage a massed return to work on the ‘bastard terms’ proffered by the owners (TL 422), and which will ensure a continuance of the Sliding Scale rate of payment. The Cambrian Dispute ended similarly, and Rhys Davies is faithful to his historical source in this respect,

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although not in terms of duration, for the actual struggle lasted eleven months. However, although a failure in the short term, the historical event proved to be a catalyst for longer-term gains. As Ness Edwards concludes: From the time of this Cambrian strike there arose a new enthusiasm for working-class education, and a recognition of the fact that peace with the employers would not be possible. Out of this struggle arose the Unofficial Reform Movement – which thrashed out, and propagated new trade-union tactics, and breathed a new spirit into the SWMF.5

But A Time to Laugh proffers no such conclusions: at its close Tudor is left to ponder his future among ‘an aboriginal race dispossessed of any dignity it may have held’ (TL 431). His commitment to ‘stay, struggle, [and] go among them with an intent watching’ (TL 431) is not presented, finally, as issuing from an identifiably Socialist drive. Rather, it is expressed in terms of the vaguely humanistic notion that such a people ‘had the full tarnished brilliance of life in them’ (TL 431), in spite of their mean existence. Thus, although A Time to Laugh is the most absorbing of Davies’s Rhondda novels, detailing as it does identifiable geographic and historical factors, and exploring important ideological drives, it is not a ‘proletarian novel’ in the true generic sense of the term. Essentially, it is a novel written from a petit-bourgeois perspective, and one which promotes a hero figure of that social class. David Gilbert identifies the fact that, at the time of the Cambrian Dispute, although ‘community consciousness in Tonypandy retained real force’,6 it was also true that the area’s middle class possessed the ‘ability to separate itself ideologically from the majority of the population’.7 In A Time to Laugh, Rhys Davies manages to insist upon the idea of ‘community consciousness’ as a useful ideological focal point, whilst simultaneously distancing himself from it through a sympathetic account of the experiences of his ‘outsider’ hero, Tudor Morris. Davies’s final novel in his Rhondda Trilogy moves events on to the mid-1920s, with the General Strike as a political focus, and economic decline beckoning. The Morris family again appear, in order to provide a sense of continuity within the trilogy, thus maintaining Rhys Davies’s preoccupation with genealogy and ‘authenticity’. Now, on the eve of the strike, Dr Tudor Morris’s ‘idealism had almost gone’ (JB 55), though his self-respect remains intact inasmuch as ‘he knew

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himself no failure . . . in spite of the storms of poverty, ostracism and persecution that had assailed him’ (JB 63). Tudor’s main function is to provide an entry point into the text for the Morris family. The effects of conflict and decline are not, however, to be played out through him, but through the figure of his son, David Morris, a radical schoolteacher with a fascination with Karl Marx. Unsurprisingly, 1926 sees David Morris firmly on the side of the mineworkers and their allies. Although the General Strike is a central element in this novel, Rhys Davies chooses not to foreground it. In fact, little space is given to it, or to the ensuing action that followed in the mining districts. Instead, although each of the main characters is affected by the conflicts of 1926, these events are employed as a backdrop against which they live out their existence. This is most obviously the case in the relationship between David Morris and Annie Vaughan. It is through her eyes that the Morrises’ decline is observed. ‘[T]he only daughter of a pit manager, rich and rigid’ (JB 71), Annie is fearful of the Morris tendency to wilful underachievement, and their identification with the proletariat politically and socially. Annie concludes that, despite an obvious social decline, Dr Morris himself ‘was still middle-class’ (JB 114), and that David’s sympathy with the proletariat is an aberration due to his mother’s background. As she concludes, ‘He did not belong to them, in spite of his mother; he was the son of a doctor and he possessed brains’ (JB 114). But the ideological incompatibility of David and Annie proves fatal for their relationship; he refuses, steadfastly, ‘to turn into a bourgeois’ (JB 124) for the sake of her arriviste family, thus ensuring the eventual breakdown of their fragile partnership. David’s life is dictated by the social mores of the valley, and by socio-economic theories learned from textbooks ‘of formidable revolutionary tendency’ (JB 124). Unable to square his sexual desire for Annie with his political commitment, David becomes an alienated figure. What is suggested here is that David is the product of a modern, mechanized world, the failure of which is signalled in a triumphant scientific rationalism. Ironically, its ultimate logic is reflected in industrial decline, which leaves humanity completely at the mercy of overbearing and impersonal natural forces. Although David Morris is allowed to maintain the stance of a dedicated class-warrior, he is driven at base by an existential force

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which disengages him from any meaningful social enterprise. His detachment is a major factor in his foolhardy decision to embrace social downward mobility to the extent that he has little more status than an educated proletarian; thus he ‘betrays’ his own class to no useful effect. The final demise of the Morrises is, then, swiftly charted through the socially downward progress of David. As a family they may remain wedded intrinsically to the valley, but their gentrified lineage is now more mythical than apparent, and Rhys Davies, significantly, shifts his focus onto the equally incompatible pairing of Prosser and Cassie Jones, licensees of the Jubilee. Of uncertain background and morality, Prosser Jones is one of life’s survivors. Described by his creator as having ‘something within him over which he has no control’ (JB 12), he is another arriviste, whose perspective is enacted from a position of ‘trade’ similar to that of Rhys Davies. But although proud of his relatively elevated status as ‘a middle class, owning a pub’ (JB 94), Prosser, perhaps surprisingly given his selfish nature, supports the General Strike. In fact, he views it ‘mystically’ (JB 94), considering the conflict between capital and labour to be of an epic order, involving ‘the bitter struggles of thousands of men asking for the means to live in this world’ (JB 93). Nonetheless, there is a certain ambiguity in his portrayal, for although Rhys Davies allows Prosser to suggest himself as potentially heroic in the Romantic sense, his general boastfulness and wily ways also suggest a miles gloriosus (‘a boastful soldier’). It is difficult, then, to view his ideological commitment with any real seriousness at this point. It may be the case that Rhys Davies employs him here in order to foreground the paradox in the position of the local petite-bourgeoisie in a time of overt class conflict. No longer working-class, but not yet established comfortably amongst the middle classes, their position is compromised. Certainly, the fact that he slyly helps himself behind Cassie’s back to ‘a couple of bob out of the bar till’ (JB 81) for gambling purposes reflects more accurately on Prosser’s character than does his avowed solidarity with the working classes who provide the bulk of his trade. This, together with a steady series of thefts from his wife’s carefully hoarded savings, leads inevitably to bankruptcy, and an acrimonious parting of the ways. And if there is a truly noble figure in this novel, it is the unlikely person of Cassie Jones, whose solid good sense and thrift stand in

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marked contrast to the profligacy of her husband. For despite her abhorrence of extending credit to her customers, and her ‘agricultural conservatism’ (JB 139) that is at odds with the revolutionary politics associated with the General Strike and its aftermath, she expresses generosity in times of hardship by contributing to the strikers’ cause in a discreet manner; she ‘privately helped one or two miners’ families known to her through the chapel’ (JB 99). It is noticeable that, as she holds onto spiritual and communal values that are increasingly under threat, the ‘rural’ Cassie begins to accommodate the troubled industrial society of the valley in humanitarian terms that bring both worlds together. Although at first wary of their ‘brisk fierce spirit’ (JB 48), and in spite of continually feeling a desire to return to her agrarian roots, on the whole she engages constructively with the local proletariat. In an ironic reversal of attitude, the erstwhile Socialist Prosser dismisses the local hunger-marchers leaving en masse for London with the comment ‘fraid they won’t do much good’, and Cassie’s riposte ‘they’re doing something’ (JB 275) is both a barbed attack on his thoroughly ‘modern’ inertia, and a statement of support for the impoverished marchers. Although despairing of their general shabbiness, Cassie admires the fact that at least they were ‘making an effort to bring their state to public notice’ (JB 273); Rhys Davies adds a familiar romantic touch by describing the strikers, through her perception of them, as quasi-heroic figures ‘all looking [like] warriors battered by bad feeding and thwarted living’ (JB 273). Yet for all his apparent empathy with a Socialist ideology in Jubilee Blues, Rhys Davies remains fundamentally as wary of its drives in this novel as he had been in its predecessors. The local Communists are seen to be merely angry propagandists and empty rhetoricians, rather than the socially vital force they actually were in areas like Blaenclydach. Here, they are, for the most part, faceless creatures, promoting a futile and destructive dogma amongst a fickle and volatile people. For Davies, then, the Marxist ethos, ultimately, lacks humanity, and it is left to Cassie, his ‘reliable narrator’, to observe of the Communists that ‘they discussed facts and figures . . . there were no men and women, only actions, numbers and protests’ (JB 140). Davies’s portrayal of the Rhondda populace generally in Jubilee Blues sees them marked by a distinct trait of nihilism and anarchic irresponsibility. It is this streak in Prosser Jones that undermines the solid petit-bourgeois, but humane, values aspired to by Cassie, whilst an atavistic attraction to it in David Morris upsets the coherent, bourgeois

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designs of Annie Vaughan. As a result both women eventually take flight. But despite his ostensible defeat there remains a perverted sense of triumphalism in Prosser; he can still maintain stubbornly that, come what may, ‘Prosser Jones has never starved yet’ (JB 277). What is inferred is that in troubled times, and in a troubled environment like the valley, only the hardened can prosper; this maxim is demonstrated by the histories of both Prosser Jones and David Morris. Whereas their paths barely cross in the narrative, and the ‘duality’ of the structure itself is rather unsatisfactory in that it fails to develop any real textual depth, the essential selfishness of these individuals confirms their world as a dismal place in which all but self-signification has become wellnigh impossible. In Annie’s case her departure leads her back into the middle-class cocoon of her upbringing, and her exile is embarked upon in a physical, and highly symbolic, departure from the Morris household after her one and only act of love-making with David. In leaving him she feels ‘as though she had just been released from some terrible temptation’ (JB 127), and perceives the terrain she flees from as ‘desolate and arid to her, a wilderness, a valley of dry bones’ (JB 127). In a parallel departure, in the novel’s final paragraph, Cassie deserts the valley for the safety of rural west Wales. Her leaving, too, is enacted on both a physical and metaphysical plane, and is a distinctly epiphanistic experience: She struggled with the sense of death within her, she struggled to break out. The people she passed were strange and mysterious, unconnected with her. She had died and was rising again. She was raw and exposed. Drops of sweat fell down her face; warmth was pounding through her. At the back of her mind she had a train to catch . . . (JB 315)

Both departures allude to Rhys Davies’s own, equally biblical, ‘escape’ from the declining, and increasingly unromantic, world of the Rhondda; Cassie’s final words to Prosser Jones perhaps summing up Davies’s seemingly ambivalent attitude to his native environment. As his heroine puts it, ‘Some of it was fun’ (JB 315).

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Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

Rhys Davies, Honey and Bread (London: Putnam, 1935); A Time to Laugh (London: Heinemann, 1937); Jubilee Blues (London: Heinemann, 1938); Print of a Hare’s Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning (London: Heinemann, 1969). All references to Davies’s writings following in this essay are to these editions, as HB, TL, JB and PHF respectively. See Genesis 25–8, 32, 35, 36; Hebrews 12. Early Rhondda enterprises were of a privately owned or joint-stock nature. These were subsumed, eventually, into large-scale mining operations, such as the Cambrian Combine Ltd Co., founded in 1885 under the auspices of Samuel Thomas, father of D. A. Thomas. It is conceivable that the industrialist is named, jointly, after the Old Testament prophet whose name evokes despair, and the Marquis of Bute’s chief mineral agent William Southern Clark, who was responsible for opening up vast, untapped, coal reserves in the Upper Rhondda Fawr in the 1850s. Ness Edwards, History of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, vol. I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1938), 40. David Gilbert, Class, Community, and Collective Action: Social Change in Two British Coalfields, 1850–1926 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 88. Ibid.

‘Not a Place for Me’: Rhys Davies’s Fiction and the Coal Industry STEPHEN KNIGHT

I One Sunday, when he was about to have an interview for a job in a bank but thought that a surface job in a colliery might be more appropriate, Rhys Davies went down the pit at his home in Blaenclydach. His reaction was divided: ‘No shift worked that day. But the great throbbing power-house was a breathing entity of shining force, unceasing as the mills of God, a heart of impervious machinery that yet generated a malevolence in its rhythm.’1 For the young man, the grandeur was overlaid with malignity: There was nothing but the gigantic silence of unshifting death. It was not a hostile silence. Only the forgetfulness of death lay in this silverored beyond. It was not a place for me. The colliery was another trap. (99)

Anxious to evade traps, keen to discover an aesthetic vitality not available in the noisy, dirty coalfield, the young Davies moved on to a busy literary life in London. His overall reputation became that of an intuitive, wry, above all sensitive writer, one of the romantic modernists, best of all at the short story that suggests human aspirations and constraints. He is not usually placed in the honour-roll of Welsh industrial writers. When Rhys Davies has been noted in the context of coal, comments can be firmly negative. Dai Smith refers to his representation of the Tonypandy rioters:2 in the opening of A Time to Laugh they are seen in distinctly unfavourable terms: ‘ “Kill the bastards!” screamed the powerful voice, now scarcely human.’3 Later in the same scene: ‘shopkeeping wives saw the rioters infest the wares in opposite gaping windows like swarms of rats’ (3).

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It would be easy enough to associate these judgements with Rhys Davies’s family’s grocery business – it might be his own mother’s viewpoint. Other evidence of an anti-coal Davies could be found in My Wales, where early on he says: ‘Glamorgan, her jewels and fine raiment now in pawn, sits huddled in sackcloth; but the other counties lie placid beside their trout and salmon streams and about their mountains, not much obliged to the great world beyond for anything.’4 Apparently related is his later advice to a visitor to Wales: ‘After partaking of a fish tea, which is a Cardiff habit, it is best, I suppose, to go west to Swansea, ignoring the uncomfortable and sinister mining valleys which lie behind the city’ (231). These comments would seem to support David Rees’s account of Rhys Davies as a rural fantasist for whom, with his family coming from Carmarthen, ‘one of the Welsh Arcadies’,5 ‘pastoral West Wales remains an anchor and an enduring symbol of stability and the past’ (3). But, this essay will argue, an account of Rhys Davies as an antiindustrial writer would oversimplify the responses made in his fiction to the industrial world in which he grew up. He wrote earlier about the world of coal than any other major Welsh writer (Joseph Keating’s treatment of the theme is both secondary and intermittent) and he wrote more books and stories about the industrial context than any other Welsh writer. Davies does not have a single or simple response, whether political leftism as in Lewis Jones or (in more nuanced form) Gwyn Jones, or the sentimentality to be found in Jack Jones, Richard Llewellyn and Alexander Cordell. Rhys Davies’s response, combining irony, despair and aspects of native value, has more in common with the complex positions of Gwyn Thomas, Menna Gallie and Ron Berry, both celebrating and ironizing the people and their context. This essay will attempt to establish Davies as someone who did, in sometimes contradictory ways, try to think about the origins, nature and proper response to the south Welsh industrial context and deserves to be taken seriously – if sometimes negatively – as someone who was in the first half of his writing career substantially committed to considering the condition and plight of the people among whom he grew up. Not all commentators have been negative on this matter. M. Wynn Thomas, in an essay focusing on the issue of gender and devoted to making Davies seem a more complex writer than has previously been acknowledged, notes in passing that he has received ‘short shrift’ from what Thomas challengingly calls ‘the acolytes of the collective’.6 Glyn

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Jones, in The Dragon has Two Tongues, while spending little time on Rhys Davies, sees him as someone who ‘gives us a vivid and highly individual picture of his native country, both the valleys and the agricultural west’7 and later has no qualms about listing Jack Jones, Rhys Davies, Gwyn Thomas and others as writers who deal with the life of ‘a working-class home in the mining valleys’ (156). More recently M. Wynn Thomas, writing about the context of Dylan Thomas’s early work, refers to an essay by Cathrin Huws published in Welsh in Tir Newydd (1935) where ‘Rhys Davies and Jack Jones were commended for being alive to the transformative energies in urbanindustrial culture that were busily fashioning the future’.8 Davies’s approach has even been seen as giving a lead to other industrial writers: Philippa Davies, writing an introduction to Ram with Red Horns, a novel left in manuscript by Davies, says ‘within the AngloWelsh tradition, he is the first realist writer’.9 Anti-industrial Lawrentian modernist romantic, realist transcriber of the valleys experience: these are very different accounts of Rhys Davies. It seems appropriate to look at his work to see which he is, or to what extent he might be both.

II Philippa Davies’s point about priority is important. Rhys Davies’s first novel The Withered Root appeared in 1927. It deals with the life of a young man in a mining village who, like his father, becomes a miner. Davies provides an early example of that compulsive motif in Welsh industrial fiction, a boy’s alarming first day in the pit. (Joseph Keating gives an earlier example, possibly a source, in Maurice, 1905.) The hero does not remain a miner: the novel works out tensions in the domain of religion, family and sexuality, but there can be no doubt that it is firmly set in the industrial context. This is not true of Rings on her Fingers, Davies’s second novel, published in 1930, but Count Your Blessings (1932) tells of a girl from a mining village who moves to Cardiff, and returns, while the next book, The Red Hills, also from 1932, deals with a man who mines an old level in a rural context, but is still involved – almost disastrously – with women and with the people from the neighbouring mining village. Then in 1935 Davies began the trilogy dealing with Glan Ystrad, apparently his version of Blaenclydach where he grew up, telling first in Honey and Bread the

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story of how a rural valley was industrialized, then in A Time to Laugh (1937) dealing with the industrial battle at the end of the nineteenth century, and finally in Jubilee Blues (1938), giving the story of the Depression, General Strike and the subsequent conflict in the coalfield. So Davies had produced three industrial novels before Jack Jones had published one, and had produced six before Lewis Jones published his second. Many of Davies’s short stories from the 1930s also had a Welsh industrial setting, though unlike the novels something like an equal number are set in England and continental Europe. It could be argued that in the 1930s Davies’s biggest efforts, in his novels, were devoted to Welsh industrial material. That did not remain true for the rest of his career: Under the Rose (1940) is not set in Wales, and while Tomorrow to Fresh Woods (1941) and The Black Venus (1944) are, they have a different relationship with the country. Tomorrow to Fresh Woods relates how the hero, Penry, closely modelled on Davies himself, is able to leave the mining village, while The Black Venus is an ironic rural romance. After that Marianne (1951) and The Perishable Quality (1954) both deal with women returning to Wales, and both have some industrial material, but could not be said to treat it in a central way. Unlike the later novels, the short stories from the post-1940 period do at times deal primarily with the coalfield: these are not a majority by any means, but they include major stories such as ‘Nightgown’ (1942),10 ‘The Pits are on the Top’ (1942), ‘The Benefit Concert’ (1949), ‘Canute’ (1949) and the powerful ‘Period Piece’ (1958). In terms of sheer numbers of novels and stories, then, Rhys Davies might lay a claim to being, next to Cordell, the most productive of the industrial writers from Wales, a claim which might come as a surprise to many people. But the matter of evaluating Davies as an industrial writer does, of course, primarily concern what is being said, not how much there is of it.

III The industrial world is treated by Davies in a range of ways and some of them are less than positive. The Withered Root opens in the voice of the young writer desperate to escape his cramping environment ‘in one of those naked rows, chiefly occupied by colliers, that rise, shrouded in grey coal-dust, on the Valley hills’.11 The atmosphere is deeply negative:

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. . . about half-a-mile from the Row, the pit sprawled, an amorphous collection of dim sheds and structures coated thickly with black dust, the tall chimney stacks rising up barrenly, smoke issuing from them slowly like black thin banners of submission. (6)

Reuben Daniels, born in these surroundings, not coming from the green and religious country of his parents, becomes obsessed with the fiery Revival, becomes burnt out by it, and at his father’s death, in the pit, can see nothing positive in valley society and culture. He only . . . saw as in a projected vision this sordid mining region in all its distorted nakedness, the imprisoned community dwelling in sullen acceptance of their existence, gathered about the black sprawling filth of the mines, so that the very souls of the people seemed to blacken and life was an arid wilderness where toil and the animal processes fulfilled the years . . . (241–2)

It was not until 1928 that Davies was to meet D. H. Lawrence, who would be interested in his writing, accept his friendship and orate to him about the true nature and value of the Celt. But Davies had surely already read Sons and Lovers and had been persuaded by its account of the degradation of the Nottinghamshire mines, with the trapped parents and the sensitive young man who tries to move out. Indeed the figure of Philip, the English, incisive, sensitive, dying young man, seems in The Withered Root an uncanny, or perhaps already deliberate, prevision of Lawrence, and Reuben Daniels appears to respond with some violence of spirit to the alienation Davies felt – it may be no accident their initials are the same. There are a number of early stories along the same lines, where the cramping context of mining-village culture is ruptured by a different vision, such as the naked body of the chief engineer’s wife in ‘Revelation’ (1931), or the sexual arousal of the heroine in ‘Blodwen’ (1931). If in these early fictions the pit is seen as oppressive, needing to be surpassed by some dynamic internalized force, there are other early stories where the industrial context appears merely to provide a mechanism. In Count your Blessings, Blodwen, herself the daughter of passion, loves a sturdy miner, in spite of the attentions paid her by the upwardly mobile preacher Caleb Morris. But the pit claims the life of her love; and so she moves out to Cardiff, ostensibly to service but actually to a high-class brothel where she gathers money, falls in love with an English rotter and grows in

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confidence, wealth and general self-control. Yet the story is reluctant to leave the coalfield: after the Englishman’s betrayal, Blodwen returns to the valley, marries the still eager Caleb, grows to despise him and only finds self-realization in a physical affair with a young miner. There is, the story tells us, a basis of human and even ethical value among some at least of the valley people. A more complex version of the same response is found in The Red Hills. Iorwerth – a name redolent of the princely Welsh past – works his private mine, an old level, long abandoned by the capitalist mineowners of the nearby village. He also attracts to his simple hut the choicest local beauties, Ceinwen, the village girl, and Virginia, from a higher and more English class: both lust after him in the style of true Lawrentian ladies. In a strange displacement of the standard industrial plot, the village people, outraged by his morals, or lack of them, cause a cave-in that traps him and Virginia. But the village has contradictory forces: it is Ceinwen, his devoted but rejected earth-lover, who has him rescued. The story ends in what might come from a prize-winning parody of Lawrence – ‘the gift of life . . . quivered in the nipples of her breast and along the wild grace of her thigh’12 – but the plot also shows the stubborn presence in Davies’s imagination of the coalfield and its people, playing a much more substantial role than is allotted to the mining context in Sons and Lovers. Rhys Davies’s commitment to his childhood context appears in many of the early short stories. A number of them merely use the mining context as the basis for whimsies, stereotypes and folkloric exercises: stories about death are common, as in all Celtic conversation. ‘Death in the Family’ (1931) has the unmarried Dilys inherit all from her father, in spite of her hostile and squabbling married siblings; in ‘Resurrection’ (1936) a sister is not really dead, and so is exposed to the meanness of her family; by reverse, in ‘The Last Struggle’ (1946) a miner is thought killed in the pit, but emerges safe after his wife has enjoyed spending the insurance money; in ‘The Dark World’ (1942) two boys prankishly visit the dead (as in Print of a Hare’s Foot, 73, Davies says he did himself), while in ‘Mourning for Ianto’ (1942) we have the hoary tale of the drunken mourners who left the coffin in a pub. While those instances seem at times like Dylan Thomas’s regional entertainments, others have a politically, or at least ethically, conscious edge. ‘The Two Friends’ (1936) deals with two colliers’ wives who, in

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the depths of the Depression, pick for usable coal on the tips. Singing in Welsh as they fill their heavy bags, they bespeak a natural community that can, in spite of all difficulties, be at one with their environment. They are arrested, their bags confiscated, they are jailed – and Gwyneth can only wonder ‘who did the coal in the mountain belong to?’ Her answer might not have pleased Lewis Jones, but it has an ethical depth, and also perhaps simplicity, characteristic of Rhys Davies – ‘Why, God of course’ (115). Here Davies’s token of value is God; elsewhere he opposes to the constraints of modern valley life equally under-focused Celtic ideals. The much-anthologized story ‘Blodwen’ (1931) provides the heroine with a very proper fiancé, Oswald Vaughan, a tight-suited solicitor, all that a Welshman can be in pretending to be English. But lurching into her affianced ambience is the hirsute purveyor of vegetables and deeply sensual stares, Pugh Jibbons, named for the strong onions which like him are very close to the soil. Pugh, who lurks up on the mountains, lusts grotesquely after Blodwen. She usually sends him on his way in a properly tidy fashion – but is, at the end of the story, found to have abandoned poor Oswald to her mother’s apologies while she herself lies naked with Pugh in his mountain lair.

IV This story points to Rhys Davies’s central idea about industrial life in Wales, and his personal rationale for the resistance made to its difficulties by the people of the valleys. He has an argument found in none of the other writers. He feels a clear sense that the best of the modern Welsh political resistance – from which he seems to exclude riots, looting and such unpleasantness, but not courage, community spirit and collective passion – in some way goes back to a native Welsh tradition that has been expressed in poetry and music, but has also, crucially, been resistant to the invaders of this anciently self-conscious region. The idea that present discontents are somehow being handled in a thoroughly traditional manner is Davies’s recurring way of both praising and rationalizing passionate and principled resistance to oppression – within certain limits. At times this can be a fairly underdeveloped matter: in Tomorrow to Fresh Woods, the hero’s thoughtful father, faced with rioters and looters in the streets, does not see them as rats or killers, but says ‘I s’pose

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they’re obeying some old law of their blood . . . While there’s people who have, and people who have not, there’ll always be this.’13 Earlier, in Honey and Bread, describing the history of Glan Ystrad, the narrator speaks of the people who ‘never ceased to fight with a strange tenacity, obeying the wild instinct in their blood, when other peoples would have settled comfortably under the yoke of conquerors obviously superior in numbers and civilized accomplishments’.14 Davies’s sense of an unfolding Welsh history, where modern strikers are linked back to the Welsh who resisted English military invasions, rather than connecting their attitudes with those of other workers of the modern world, is developed more fully in his non-fiction The Story of Wales (1943). Speaking of the period when ‘Miners and their families starved in the long amazingly determined strikes’15 he sees the troubled present in a historical and continuous perspective: The native rebellious spirit became occupied in a new kind of combat – that of industrial reform. Perhaps it is elementary to call this a war between masters and men or capital and labour. The rebellion was more than that. Fundamentally it was a people determined to preserve their old self-respect. (34)

The idea is not restricted to the industrial context; in The Black Venus, speaking of the use of ‘local social law’ rather than imposed English legalisms, Davies asserts that Wales is ‘truthfully democratic in the blood’.16 His idea, or collection of ideas, is at once historical, rural, industrial and inherently radical, and he, as befits a fiction-writer, has a character to focus the whole concept. Dr William Price is Davies’s central figure of Welsh tradition – spectacular, learned, fearless, far-sighted and somehow conveying the sense of difference and excitement that Davies associates with Welshness. As M. Wynn Thomas has astutely remarked, in Print of a Hare’s Foot Dr Price is given full coverage early on, just where ‘one might have expected an extended portrait of Rhys Davies’s father and mother’.17 Davies recounts there how Dr Price stalked with attendant womenfolk through the valley, clad in his famous fox-skin cap and bound on a national political mission to explore and deplore ‘the monotony of the packed rows stretching from belching pits and ripe fields of iron ore’ (16). He judges these as if he were a past projection of Rhys Davies himself:

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Dr Price closely watched these developments. It seemed to him that the race of workers occupying the valleys, arrived mostly from pastoral areas of Wales, was in danger of developing wrongly. Their illorganized but furious strikes for better pay and conditions kept a rough idealism glowing in their hearts, but there was a threat of complete demoralization by the new industrial age. These workers might rapidly lose their old racial integrity and their heritage of myth, legend, poetic gaiety and personal liberty. (16)

Price offers Davies so much as a focus for value: he was a nineteenth-century man of medicine and reason, insisting on the right to cremate his son and himself; he was also a nineteenth-century romantic, a fantasist for newly invented tradition, wearing his fox-cap, studying druidic lore and carrying a crescent-headed staff while he chanted on Pontypridd Common his ‘Song of the primitive bard to the moon’. But he was also a man for modern freedoms, whether it was being the Pontypridd leader of the Chartists on the great march to Newport in 1839, or a standard-bearer of sexual liberty, fathering his last child on his last partner in his eighties. As godparent to Rhys Davies’s local consciousness, Dr Price symbolizes both modern boldness and traditional respect, both sympathy for the dispossessed and a sense of a higher scale of things into which they all fit. Davies sums Price’s biography up in his own autobiography: He was a descendant of the warrior-bards who were always at the side of those Welsh kings and leaders incensed by the attempts of invaders to obliterate the ancient heritage of their race. Instead of foreign soldiers he had coal-owners and iron-masters to grapple with – more subtle invaders. His task was to ensure that they should not utterly possess the spirit of his people. (27)

Davies locates Price at the evaluative heart of his own story and personal struggles: the chapter ends suggestively, even Oedipally, with Davies’s mother excitedly dismissing Price as a show-off who gave his children silly names and was out of tune with the times (27–8). With his intellectual and emotive paternality to Davies, Dr Price occupies a large role in the semi-autobiographical novel Tomorrow to Fresh Woods, where he appears in the valley with his daughter Penelope and his son Jesus Christ (the one he cremated). He speaks out against the mine-

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owners – ‘the Welsh Pharaohs who think they can suck the life blood of the collier for ever’ (42). He gives free medical help, and appears ‘as a bit of old Wales, staunchly enduring’, but one whose ‘eagle eyes pierced to the future too’ (44). A longer treatment of Price is given in My Wales (1937) where, with a fine portrait (provided by The Cremation Society), he appears in fox-cap with flaming torch in hand. He is first seen in a chapter called ‘Three Welsh characters’: the others are the romantic Maid of Cefn Ydfa and the outlaw Twm Shon Catti – all three were resisters in some way against imposed social order, though the representation of Price here is the least political version that Rhys Davies gives, emphasizing quaintness and colour as befits what is essentially a touristattracting book. Dr Price is the figure in which so many of Davies’s interests in the valleys come together. Sympathetic to the cause of the miners, he also transcends such quotidian concerns; revolutionary, he is also romantic. This is the vanishing-point of Rhys Davies’s treatment of the industrial context: it is notable that in his autobiography he tells us how D. H. Lawrence, who reminded Davies of Price, ‘kindled to my accounts of the social and economic struggles in the Rhondda’ (141) and that Lawrence insisted the Welsh should ‘learn and cherish in themselves’ their sense of ‘a magic mystery of the world’ (141). Lawrence as usual was highly emphatic – the words magic and mystery chime like a mantra through his reported assertions about Wales. Davies accepted the idea, or rather had already thought of it, judging from his quest for such passionate attachment in The Withered Root, but also was less exclusive. Where both Lawrence and his hero gladly leave behind the mines in Sons and Lovers, and treat them as little more than a metonymic, even metronomic, symbol of sexual activity in Women in Love, for Rhys Davies the quest to link contemporary industrial life into a Welsh tradition of both sense and sensitivity was a three-book project to be undertaken in the mid-1930s as an established novelist.

V The first edition of Honey and Bread carries on the front jacket a fullpage drawing in woodcut style of Rhys Davies, set against a green mountain in the medium distance. Testifying as it does to Putnam’s

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sense of the marketability of the thoughtful, sensitive, modern-dressed young man (scarf, trilby, soft shirt and woollen tie), the cover illustration does not represent the book accurately. Davies in no way seeks to dominate the material by authorial presence; in fact Honey and Bread is one of his least authorially assertive books, telling with Hardyesque semi-objectivity how Glan Ystrad developed from an idyllic farming area dominated from medieval times by the Llewellyn family and their mansion to a mining area using the same mansion as offices. The book obviously shares a main idea with the later How Green Was My Valley and may well also be a source for Richard Llewellyn’s unusually, and in Cymric terms inaccurately, spelt surname. Change is the essence of the story: The old reposeful life was forgotten as though it had never been. Within a few weeks a district would change its whole aspect; a tornado passed over it, chucking out in its journey a commotion of fractious men, engines, pieces of grinding machinery, clouds of dust. Everywhere ungainly dumps of hasty barbaric dwellings sprang up on the earth like goitres. (235–6)

Ugliness, noise, machinery and illness – they all disrupt a rural Eden; the sweetly natural life of honey and bread is to be no more. But while Davies both realizes and deplores the insurgence of inorganic modernity, he also constructs a plot that insists on human continuance. The older son of the Llewellyn family, Owen, suffers from tuberculosis, both realistic of Welsh rural life and symbolic of his class’s debilitation, but he also, from the viewpoint of the rest of the family, suffers from his sympathies with working people. This liberalism combines with love in his relationship with Bronwen, a beautiful villager: Owen dies before they can marry but his posthumous son will transmit to the following novels a sense of social combination and gentry sympathy with the workers’ concerns, and permit Davies to suggest that there is some antique Celticity about modern dissent on the coalfield. This theme is developed most fully in A Time to Laugh, Davies’s longest novel, which deals fully with conflict on the coalfields at the end of the nineteenth century. Against the threats of wage cuts and the Sliding Scale the characters are involved in battles to organize resistance in single pits, as well as trying to combine with miners working for other owners: there are heroic and difficult marches over the

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mountains to other valleys and bitter battles with intransigent scabs. A leading figure is Dr Tudor Morris, grandson of Owen and Bronwen in Honey and Bread: his father is also a doctor and sympathetic to the miners, but also a little nervous of the result of Tudor’s involvement – which goes as far as being arrested as a suspected trouble-maker and, as the miners’ resistance rises to a climax, being a major speaker at the mountainside rallies. But Davies’s recurrent idea of modern resistance being in some kind of Welsh tradition is not only represented through the figure of Tudor, his rejection of a moneyed bourgeois woman as his wife and his move to a practice in the poorest part of the area, the Terraces (a term also used widely by Gwyn Thomas, and perhaps drawn from here). Melville Walters, the leading agitator, is a reading man and tells his colleagues about the Scotch Cattle in terms that both emphasize the Celticity of their activities but also assert their modernity: ‘they hid in the mountains like the marauding tribes of old; but they were fighting for recognition of the first Union of the workers’.18 As Tudor makes his first speech, Davies brings together, however improbably, ancient and modern Wales: The valley night always tasted of ancient things, the mountains seemed to remember unruly tribes, long-ago battles, a druidical circle of brooding men waiting for the moon. Still, Tudor, standing between the carriage lamps, went on throwing fiery seed into the dim air where the grey faces hovered ghostlily. Until the warning nine o’clock shifthooter of the Cefn pits hissed forcefully to the sky. (242)

There are limits to Tudor’s sympathy: he is against violence and looting, and it would be arguable that he is a more socially and professionally dignified version of Rhys Davies the grocer’s son who watched shops being looted – but not his father’s, to the family’s relief, as is recounted both in Tomorrow to Fresh Woods (134–44) and also Print of a Hare’s Foot (49–54). The doctor’s social distance – a matter of suspicion for quite a few of the miners – is also a means, for all Tudor’s sympathy and activity on behalf of the strikers, of disengaging the text from the dramatic action, offering the simplifying notion of Welsh resistance to oppression across the ages, and so finding a distinctly Lawrentian vital value that seems to elide the genuine understanding of hardship and the need for resistance that the text has also outlined. In the final scene, as the people of the valley celebrate the last Nos

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Galan of the century they are watched by Tudor, his grandmother Bronwen, and his wife Daisy, sister to Melville the strike-leader: what they see, according to Davies, is an image of trans-temporal Celticity: ‘They were dancing on the green heights, abandoned to the ancient magic of the night, obeying some wild liberated impulse of their ancient blood, up there under the clear untarnished stars’ (429). Down here, though, Tudor realizes, matters are not so untarnished: Tumult and disorder, frustration, wages, strikes, riots, debts – were these to be his world? The architecture of his earth was a muddle of low squat evil dwellings in which lived an aboriginal race dispossessed of any original dignity it may have held. (431)

Tudor speaks for Rhys Davies in his sense of the cramping, humiliating ugliness of the mining environment – something that Gwyn Thomas would also insistently stress. The Davies who writes the story has left that environment, but he permits his hero to stay: And yet, and yet . . . He would stay, struggle, go among them with an intent watching. They were the world with its beauty, mystery and pain; they fought and yielded, they were garlanded and they were battered. They had the full tarnished brilliance of life in them . . . and he began to laugh, with a soft low sound, half caught in his throat. (431)

The title of Davies’s major engagement with the life and the politics of industrial Wales finally emerges as a result of this sympathetic, involved but also disengaged character’s ‘intent watching’: Dr Morris judges that in spite of all it is a time to laugh. This may seem a dubious and self-gratifying position, finding in Lawrentian vitalism and a spurious Celticity a way of both accounting for and depoliticizing the struggles on the coalfield. Certainly it seems the more unconvincing because of the weight of much of the novel. Tudor Morris’s direct engagement in resistance to the mine-owners, and the author’s consistent focus on the industrial context makes A Time to Laugh Davies’s fullest and most forceful account of the industrial context, with a strong sympathy for those who opposed the owners on responsible and ethical grounds, suffered for their beliefs and passed on an inheritance of the value of resistance. Davies did not engage so fully again with the politics of the coalfield. In the third of the Glan Ystrad trilogy, Jubilee Blues, Davies

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tells the story of the Depression up to the 1930s through the eyes of a woman who moves from west Wales when her new husband buys a valleys pub with her inheritance. Their relationship is as important to the novel as the industrial context and in any case Cassie’s position as focal figure itself distances the politics – it as if Germinal were retold from the viewpoint of the wife of Rasseneur, the café-owner. Politics is here focused on the relatively minor figure of David Morris, Tudor’s son, who is a Communist and represents the new type of organized militancy: ‘Vast fortunes had been made. But the conflict between master and man had ever been present; the coming of the new industrial day had also brought with it a fresh consciousness of the rights of workers as compared with those of owners.’19 There is a historical blurring about even this reference to modern combativeness, and the novel does not represent in much detail the dramatic confrontations of the 1920s. The strikes, the lock-outs and the impact of capitalism at its starkest are represented symbolically, as with the one-page account of a man whose leg is torn off by new machinery (210). The sharpest effect of the book is to recreate through Cassie’s eyes and distressed feelings the human cost of industrialization in Wales. A starving miner arrives at the pub and Cassie invites him to have some food: ‘Thank you, Missus,’ he said in that hollow voice, looking at her from his far-away eyes, water-grey. And told her that he had walked over the mountains since six o’clock that morning from the Aberdare valley. She understood that he had come to beg in a valley where he wasn’t known. He had a wife and five children, he said, and had been out of work for six years. The last child had arrived a week ago. Cassie’s heart moved like a flame. (200)

Cassie gives him a meat pie, but her generosity is overdone; she is suddenly called back by Hilda, her assistant: ‘She hurried into the living-room, and there was the man falling to the floor, while vomit spurted out over him and the rug. The meat and gravy of the pie. He was groaning; his face was greyish yellow’ (201). Through figures like Cassie or Tudor Morris, Davies is able to give an account of the situation in south Wales and also, because of their marginality, ultimately find a positive closure – Cassie returns to the country, Morris can from his comfortable distance find laughter in the situation. This is a use of marginalization in much more positive form

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than in the early short story ‘Arfon’ (1931), about alienation. Possibly a dark projection of the author’s own sense of separation from his context, it tells how a feeble boy, unable to join village society, steals for the favours of a lusty village girl – and eventually kills her out of his sense of alienation. But by the trilogy, Davies’s own absence seems to help him use a marginal figure to understand the value of the mining community and also to condemn conveniently what he sees as its excesses, moral or political. But marginal and rose-tinted as Davies’s politics can be, it is also very striking that he, who was by virtue both of his father’s occupation and his own artistic temperament not directly involved in the traumas of the Welsh working-class, nevertheless chose, from the distance and the entanglements of literary London, both its Bloomsbury and its Lawrentian versions, as he established himself with major publishing houses in the 1930s, to return consistently to the themes, events and evaluative puzzles of his home environment. It might be suggested, a little negatively, that there was an interest in publishers in the period in Welsh material, both on regional and political grounds, and so Davies might have been tailoring his novels to taste. But in fact, in so far as there was such a taste, it appears to have been largely constructed by Davies himself, by his own success and by his remarkably determined insistence, at this stage of his career, not to forget the people and the context he had left. The surprising thing is that Rhys Davies wrote so much about industrial south Wales, and that so many of the themes, political, personal, aesthetic and social, that other writers were to emphasize, are already explored in his work. Jack Jones’s vibrant families, Lewis Jones’s combination of gender and politics, Gwyn Jones’s meticulous reportage, Menna Gallie’s focus on women, even Gwyn Thomas’s sense of historicity and ironic collectivity, these can all be identified in Rhys Davies’s work – as of course can much that made Richard Llewellyn rich. Rhys Davies was quite confident, when he saw it close-up, that the pit was no place for him; but his fiction tells us that through the 1930s at least he remained equally clear that Wales was his place, and in spite of his affection for the countryside, and his occasional dismissive remarks, in the bulk of his early work he demonstrated a deep commitment to the industrial context. Through his own fictional displacements, which included gender as well as class, and inspired by the improbable but irresistibly real model of Dr William Price, he

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wrote strongly, sharply, sympathetically – and sometimes sentimentally and conservatively – about the people of the industrial world in which he grew up. He saw in the mining world a vitality and a set of attitudes that he believed were authentically, and even traditionally Welsh; in that he saw, or foresaw, a reading of the industrial world that is still too daring for historians and sociologists, however much a familiarity with valleys culture, its values, strengths and indeed weaknesses, may make that view seem credible. Rhys Davies resisted national tags on writers with the fine phrase ‘Down with passports to Art’,20 but in the context of industrial fiction there seems good reason to think of him as one of the most determined, inventive and memorable of the Welsh writers who have analysed, lamented and celebrated the turbulent, tragic and, as Davies and others who must chronologically be called his followers, have recorded, dynamic society and culture that the coal industry stimulated in Wales.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot (London: Heinemann, 1969), 99. Further references will be inserted in the text. Dai Smith, ‘Wales through the looking-glass’, ch. 2 of Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), 45–66, see 62. Rhys Davies, A Time to Laugh (London: Heinemann, 1937), 2. Further references will be inserted in the text. Rhys Davies, My Wales (London: Jarrolds, 1937), 15. Further references will be inserted in the text. David Rees, Rhys Davies, Writers of Wales series (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), 3. Further references will be inserted in the text. M. Wynn Thomas, Review of Fire Green as Grass, New Welsh Review, 29 (1995), 92–4, see 93; the remark is quoted in M. Wynn Thomas’s essay ‘ “Never seek to tell thy love”: Rhys Davies’s fiction’, reprinted in the present volume. Glyn Jones, The Dragon has Two Tongues (London: Dent, 1958), 60. Further references will be inserted in the text. This book has been reissued by the University of Wales Press (2001). M. Wynn Thomas, Corresponding Cultures: The Two Literatures of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), 88; the essay he refers to is ‘Y Bywyd Dinesig a’r Gymraeg’, Tir Newydd, 3 (1935), 12–16. Philippa Davies, ‘Introduction’, to Rhys Davies, Ram with Red Horns (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), 8.

70 10

11

12

13

14

15

16 17 18

19

20

Rhys Davies’s Fiction and the Coal Industry The dates given for short stories refer to the volumes in which the stories first appeared. The stories referred to here all appear in Rhys Davies: Collected Stories, ed. Meic Stephens, 3 vols. (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996–8). Further references will be inserted in the text. Rhys Davies, The Withered Root (London: Holden, 1927), 3. Further references will be inserted in the text, Rhys Davies, The Red Hills (London: Putnam, 1932), 307. Further references will be inserted in the text. Rhys Davies, Tomorrow to Fresh Woods (London: Heinemann, 1941), 60. Further references will be inserted in the text. Rhys Davies, Honey and Bread (London: Putnam, 1935), 52. Further references will be inserted in the text. Rhys Davies, The Story of Wales (London: Collins, 1943), 34. Further references will be inserted in the text. Rhys Davies, The Black Venus (London: Heinemann, 1944), 11. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘ “Never seek to tell thy love” ’, 17. Rhys Davies, A Time to Laugh (London: Heinemann, 1937), 21. Further references will be inserted in the text. Rhys Davies, Jubilee Blues (London: Heinemann, 1938), 65. Further references will be inserted in the text. In a response to a questionnaire from the editor of Wales, as reported in David Rees, Rhys Davies, 49.

‘The Memory of Lost Countries’: Rhys Davies’s Wales TONY BROWN

In a study of the short story, Ian Reid suggests that, in the early years of the century, ‘The short story seemed especially suitable for the portrayal of regional life, or of individuals who, though situated in a city, lived there as aliens’.1 Reid seems, in fact, to be echoing the highly influential view of the short story expressed by the Irish shortstory-writer Frank O’Connor in his pioneering book The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, in which he argues that the short story as a genre has tended to articulate the experience of outsiders, marginal people, what O’Connor calls ‘submerged population groups . . . whatever these may be at any given time – tramps, artists, lonely dreamers, and spoiled priests . . . [I]n the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society’.2 Somewhat later, Clare Hanson has extended O’Connor’s perspective to take in developments in the form on both sides of the Atlantic; she too sees the short story as a form which frequently deals with those whom she characterizes as ‘ex-centric’, the lives of those individuals and groups who are outside the main centres of cultural and political power: losers and loners, exiles, women, black writers, who for one reason or another have not been part of the ruling ‘narrative’ or epistemological framework of their society. . . . [It is] the chosen form of the exile – not the self-willed émigré, but the writer who longs for a return to a home culture which is denied him.3

All of this, of course, sets up strong resonances when one considers the situation of the English-language short-story-writer in Wales; not only has Wales been for centuries distant from the centres of political and cultural power, but the Welsh writer in English is of course

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doubly marginalized in that s/he, though not English, is at the same time, if not Welsh-speaking, shut out from the rich cultural heritage in the Welsh language. It may be that this sense of displacement from a ‘home culture which is denied him’ not only contributes to the sense of alienation and isolation which haunts so many English-language short stories in Wales but may, indeed, in part account for the way in which the short story has been such a potent means of literary expression for Welsh writers in English. Rhys Davies was ‘ex-centric’ in many respects. Born and brought up in a working-class community, like several other Welsh writers in English in his generation, he was, as the son of a shopkeeper, not entirely of it.4 To be gay was, more than anything, to be an outsider; in the Rhondda it presumably did not even make you a member of a ‘submerged population’, in the sense of a community that knew each other; that came when Davies sought the relative freedom of exile in London. Here one recalls Ian Reid’s comment about the short story as being ‘especially suitable for the portrayal of regional life, or of individuals who, though situated in a city, lived there as aliens’. But I want to return to Clare Hanson’s reference to the short story as ‘the chosen form of the writer who longs for a return to a home culture which is denied him’ and to suggest that Hanson’s phrase has particular resonance when we consider the writing of Rhys Davies, for one might argue that what we see in Davies is not the expression of displacement from his actual ‘home culture’, from south Wales in the early years of the century, but from an older ‘Wales’, constructed by Davies out of his own emotional and imaginative circumstances. It is a ‘Wales’, a ‘home culture’, which supposedly existed before the coming of industrialization and Nonconformity, a Wales from which Davies feels not only himself but contemporary Wales to have been displaced. It is a ‘Wales’ which, from the isolation of his various London lodgings, Rhys Davies constructs not only in his short fiction but in his two non-fictional studies of Wales, My Wales (1937) and The Story of Wales (1943).5 The actuality of south Wales is repeatedly seen, not unsurprisingly given Davies’s orientation, in terms of constraint and imprisonment and of the stifling of the impulses of natural life. Thus even in the opening pages of My Wales, while the life of Wales is seen, unusually, as ‘rounded and complete’, it is ‘bound by its little confines’ (MW 13). Again, the descendants of those who flooded into the south Wales coalfield in the nineteenth century are seen as ‘still there, wedged

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bleakly in tight corners’ (MW 45). Crammed into the valleys, the whole vital life of the people is seen as being constrained to the point of death by the forces that then were brought to bear upon them: A man called Walter Coffin . . . sunk a shallow pit at Dinas . . . Beginning with a Coffin, and not unlike a coffin in its geographical formation, the Rhondda can be said to be associated with the word to-day . . . [V]ital life . . . [has] been cultivated with a peculiar intensity which may be due to a combination of a strong Welsh element and imprisonment in a black mountainous region of repellent aspect. The hundreds of chapels which line the twelve miles with their lugubrious shapes have been as packed with aching humanity as the public houses with thirsty. Life has been lived there with an obstreperous nervous and physical passion in direct contradiction to the puritanical ethics of restraint superficially prevailing. And death, disease, and destruction have been constant elements of life, stalking close behind the inhabitants. (MW 66–7)6

The tensions here, between natural energy and restraint, are a constant theme in the book. In fact, Davies asserts that, outside the bleak, ravaged landscape of the south Wales valleys, ‘There is still a primitive shine on Wales; one can smell the old world there still, and it is not a dead aroma’ (MW 15). Even in south Wales, elements of that older atavistic world are detectable; occasionally, says Davies, the visitor will come across: a distinct species of short and sturdy people with long, dark, curly haired heads and black eyes. These are probably descendants of those Silures of Iberian aspect whom Tacitus describes as being in possession of South-West Britain . . . Vivacity and briskness are characteristics found in these descendants; they can also sit very still, while their black eyes seem to gleam with unconscious memories, behind their living sheen depth after depth of that mysterious possession the ages leave with such races as this. (MW 20–1)

Continuing this rather odd racial essentialism, Davies tells of meeting one of these ‘Silurians’ recently on a train journey in Wales; next to him sat a young American. The American, ‘bright as the morning, sharp as an arrow’, is at the same time ‘living outside himself; I could see now that he was scarcely ever a part of his body; he jumped and careered about and jerked out questions about the land, brightly using

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his mind and storing information away in it, like a card index’ (MW 21–2). The American seems controlled by nerves damaged in a civilization that has not been able to touch the Silurian’s core: ‘The Silurian’s vitality was warm, deep and shrewd; the mobility of his expression had a soothing beauty, he was perceptive of the earth and the things around him, from a source deep within him’ (MW 21). The ‘Silurian’ is a stray remnant of an older Wales, still capable of living an authentic life in touch with his body and instincts, aware of his links with the natural impulses of the earth, unlike the modern, neurotic, mind-driven, non-rooted American. We meet another member of this ‘very old race of people’ late in the book when Davies visits a mountain farm in north Wales: ‘Here again was the pre-Celtic Iberian, long-skulled, with dark rich eyes. When he moved it was as if a lean, swarthy flame wavered. His conversation was shorn, unwasteful . . . But he was vitally, naturally alive’ (MW 256). If the shade of D. H. Lawrence is clearly visible in the imagery here, when Davies returns to his theme in The Story of Wales (1943), other sources perhaps contribute to his account of the ‘Mediterranean stock . . . non-Aryan and pre-Celtic’ who settled in Wales two thousand years before Christ, whose descendants, ‘long-skulled, dark-eyed and volatile of temperament’, can still be seen ‘culling a black mineral in Rhondda mines’ (SW 8). The detail of the waves of Iberians and then Celts which Davies introduces in this later account, and especially the reference to the ‘long-skulled’ descendants, indicates Davies’s awareness of the work of H. J. Fleure, Professor of Geography at Aberystwyth, who had for some years been undertaking an anthropological study of racial types in Wales. His findings, based on his belief that there is a direct correlation between racial types and size and shape of skull, had been published in 1939, not in an obscure scientific journal but in Keidrych Rhys’s Wales.7 But the sources of Davies’s construction of his Silurian and pre-Celtic figures is less significant than what they denote in his work: a Wales in which the life of the body and the senses, including presumably the sexual instincts, were not suppressed but seen as related to the rhythms and impulses of the natural world, a life from which Wales had been exiled by the coming of the mechanical world of industrialism and the moral restraints of Nonconformity, a modern world in which stray figures such as those detected in My Wales wander like revenants. My Wales is as idiosyncratic as its title suggests, lacking the documentary impulse of two other books also published in 1937, James

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Hanley’s study of the social disaster taking place in the south Wales valleys, Grey Children, and, further afield, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier.8 Part history, part personal survey, Davies’s book also contains a chapter on ‘Three Welsh characters’: Dr William Price, the Maid of Cefn Ydfa and Twm Shon Catti. Davies’s account of the last of these explicitly rejects the Dictionary of National Biography’s sober dismissal of the tales attaching to ‘Thomas Jones’ and from the stories and legends relating to Twm Shon Catti, Davies constructs a figure from ‘remote pre-Nonconformist days’ (MW 188), a figure who ‘has gathered unto himself the gay, swashbuckling, raiding, pot-loving instincts of a people very much aware of their earth’ (MW 193). So, while Catti is not an atavistic Silurian, Davies does portray him as an embodiment of ‘man’s natural impulses’ which are normally constrained by ‘the shackles of that powerful form of debased puritanism which reside in [the Welsh] yet’, impulses which are only occasionally released, perhaps at some communal get-together with a certain amount of alcohol; on such occasions, Davies says, the Welsh ‘begin to beam and bustle, they flower like very dark, rich red roses, they become amorous and witty, they want to ride horses and gallop up mountains, they want to plunder he who’s got too much, they turn out their pockets to the poor’ (MW 190–1). In the case of Ann Maddocks, the Maid of Cefn Ydfa, Davies has an even flimsier foundation of actual fact, but from the various versions of the tale he constructs a story of class prejudice and thwarted love which would not be out of place in one of his own collections of stories. He even creates a brutal childhood – ‘bread and water for days, confinement to her room, beatings’ (MW 179) – for the repressive mother whose resultant ‘savage puritan spirit’ (MW 183) forces Ann into marriage with Maddocks the solicitor, a ‘polished . . . townsman’ (MW 181) rather than allow her to marry the working-class Welsh poet, Wil Hopkin. Before her marriage and in love with Wil, Ann is, again, associated with the sensuality of the natural world: Magically he could call into her flesh delicious sensations. It was as though a white rose became flushed with red in a night. She would hurry back to the sombre house . . . her scarlet shoes wet with the dew, and brushing past the great upraised trumpets of the garden lilies, her heart would swoon with the knowledge of the perfume. (MW 183)

Married to Maddocks, this Lawrentian ecstasy is replaced by a neurotic sense of repressed instincts – ‘a jangled irritable maturity, all raw edges

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and sick moodiness’ (MW 185) – and a decline into death inevitably follows. ‘I have told the story . . . in my own way,’ says Davies; what he has constructed from the ‘scraps gathered here and there’ (MW 188) is another echo from a more natural Wales, although this time, the story being set in the eighteenth century, more material and more puritanical forces are already abroad. Once more, however, Davies suggests that the story, like that of Catti, has become a focus for the longings of a later, even more repressive age: Generations afterwards the nearby valleys were opened by the industrialist and workers’ cottages were built line by line, grey and dreary, the roads nude of tree or flower. Sometimes the thoughts of some of the new race of workers would turn to times that were past, to the unbroken fields, the pure woods, the Llynfi vale with its sad Ydfa house. (MW 187)

It is the third of these three Welsh characters, however, that is clearly the most potent for Rhys Davies: Dr William Price, who lived until just a few years before Davies’s own birth rather than in the mists of the legendary past, is not only portrayed in My Wales but also in The Story of Wales and in Print of a Hare’s Foot, where Davies devotes a whole chapter, ‘A Drop of Dew’, to Price’s extraordinary life, itself an unusual thing to do in one’s own autobiography. Dr Price, the qualified doctor who became fascinated by the pagan rites of the ancient druids, carried out his own rituals on Pontypridd Common and frequently walked through the town dressed in a ‘druidic’ regalia which included animal skins, is best known for attempting to cremate the body of his young son, whom he had christened Jesus Christ. In the ensuing court case Price was acquitted, the landmark judgment being that cremation was not illegal in Britain. Price, Davies emphasizes, ‘tried to stand outside his period’ and attempted to ‘escape the herd’ (MW 175). One can see how such a figure would appeal in general to Davies, but it was the actual nature of Price’s resistance, the values by which he lived, in a social environment so similar to that with which Rhys Davies was so painfully familiar, which made Price such a personal, iconic hero for Davies: He was not ashamed to own a body, which he endeavoured to serve honestly. He was a pagan, he delighted in, and was brazen about his immoralities. He never groaned and wept under the whip-lashes of

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unlawful desires, he turned them into wholesome behaviour. (MW 167)

The significance of this for the homosexual Davies is clear; no wonder that he writes directly after this passage, ‘one’s heart warms to him’. Here was a man who not only saw the body and its impulses as wholly natural – he sunbathed in the nude – but ‘treated physical passion as something which was not objectionable and was not to be deplored’ (MW 171); Price fathered many children out of wedlock, the last when he was eighty-seven. Moreover, and importantly for Davies’s construction of his ‘Wales’, Price saw his lifestyle as rooted in ‘that mysterious druidic life whose savour remained in his ancient Welsh blood’ (MW 175). In Print of a Hare’s Foot, Davies not only portrays Price as wanting ‘the old race back’ but, in the way the narrative distance from Price’s ideas is elided, Davies seems essentially to take him at his word: He was a member of a race that is moonstruck, that has never quite forgotten the primitive magic of natural forces, that loves unbridled songs and rhythms and drama. Before the Reformation members of the true race had danced and told their flower-tinted tales in an imaginative awareness of the sensuous world. Later there was the Nonconformist blight . . .9

Echoes of this passage, and the thinking behind it, are to be heard later in the autobiography, when Davies recalls his friendship with D. H. Lawrence in Bandol in the late 1920s; the imagery of constraint and imprisonment which Davies associates with Lawrence is by now familiar: ‘ “I know I’m in a cage,” he rapped. “I know I’m like a monkey in a cage. But if someone puts a finger in my cage, I bite – and I bite hard”, and Davies comments, ‘Sometimes he reminded me of all I had learned of Dr William Price’ (PHF 131). Almost inevitably Davies and Lawrence compare their backgrounds in a mining community dominated by, in Davies’s words, ‘the constrictions and religious bigotry of a Nonconformist up-bringing’. ‘Although he did not know Wales’, Lawrence expresses a vision which in some ways parallels those images of a mythic Wales we have been tracing in Davies’s writing and, given the date of Davies’s contact with Lawrence, may have been one contributory element in their formation; Lawrence’s vision is certainly a long way, and not just

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geographically, from the realities of a south Wales which Davies did know, a south Wales already feeling, after the events of 1926, the harsh grip of economic disaster closing upon it: What the Celts have to learn and cherish in themselves is that sense of mysterious magic that is born with them, the sense of mystery, the dark magic that comes with the night, especially when the moon is due, so that they start and quiver, seeing her rise over their hills, and get their magic into their blood. They want to keep that sense of the magic mystery of the world, a moony magic. That will shove all their chapel Nonconformity out of them. (PHF 133)

In fact, despite the recurring references to the constrictions which Nonconformity placed on the natural and, especially, sexual impulses of the Welsh people, Rhys Davies’s actual treatment of the life of the chapel and its role in the life of the Welsh in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is less simple and indeed less negative than we might expect. In The Story of Wales, for instance, Davies emphasizes the view that the first phase of Nonconformity in the eighteenth century was one way in which the instinctive emotional and imaginative life of the Welsh found expression: ‘Like blossom on the young tree of this sturdy faith there was a new flowering of the Welshman’s lyric impulse . . . The bleak-sounding Nonconformist movement was full of intense spiritual drama, as it was abundant in the wild poetry of eager young blood’ (SW 24). Even as he condemns the grim effects which Nonconformity had through the nineteenth century, and on into his own boyhood, on the daily life of the people, the cramping of the natural senses by the internalization of the chapel’s prohibitions (‘Even a slice of cake must not be too rich’, SW 25), Davies continues to see the life of the chapel itself as a place of profound emotional drama, a drama intensified because the activities there, not just the weekly service but the prayer meeting and the cymanfa ganu (singing festival), were the only legitimate outlets for such emotions. The various religious revivals are peaks of such canalized emotion, outbursts of displaced instincts in a people constrained not only by the moral imperatives of their religion but by the grim impoverishment of their physical environment; Davies is at times explicit: ‘in the excesses of the religious revivals psychologists discern the erotic impulse wearing one of its agonised masks’ (SW 25).10 Davies celebrates the powerful drama generated by the hwyl of the preacher in the Nonconformist pulpit – ‘a

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paean of gladness, a croak of despair, a howl of fury’ (MW 150) – and mourns its passing in the more intellectual sermon styles of the twentieth century (‘But one sighs, one sighs. One longs for the old theatre’). Indeed – and again unexpectedly given Davies’s antipathy for the social impact of Nonconformity – when on a return visit to Wales he finds the chapels all but deserted – ‘Twenty people sat huddled in the centre pews. The high wooden pens of the big gallery were completely empty’ (MW 126) – he expresses his sadness at the decline of a place which had been ‘the heart of the land, where beat its most fruitful emotions’ (MW 126). The chapels, then, are portrayed by Rhys Davies as places of emotional longing, longing for a fuller life, for a place where the individual could be whole, could live fully and authentically; it might be imaged in paradisal terms (Evan Roberts, the central figure of the great revival of 1904, had ‘the dews of that other place . . . on his brow’, MW 96), but Davies’s own inclination is never to the otherworldly but consistently to a more earthly place, closer to home: ‘To attend a Cymanfa Ganu was an experience feeding to souls almost dispossessed of the old kind of Welsh life’ (MW 82). There were those, of course, who struggled for the establishment of a better place in the here and now. Davies’s chapter in My Wales – the longest in the book – on ‘The South Wales Workers’ repeatedly refers to the interconnectedness of the emotional longings which underlay both Nonconformity and industrial protest: Outside the chapels another section of the industrialized race grizzled and let loose moans and complaints. These noises were intrinsically of the same nature as the groans inside the chapels – sighs of longing, panting and yearning for a blessed and perhaps impossible land where idealistic justice was maintained with a nice regard for one and all. (MW 70)

Davies traces the political struggle from the ironworkers’ protests in Dowlais and Merthyr in 1816 to the bleak situation of the mid-1930s. But the long years of struggle are seen less in terms of conflict over wages or working hours than, again, as aimed at achieving a fuller life, not materially but emotionally and imaginatively. A white angel sent by an ‘objective God’, says Davies, would have flapped back hurriedly to report to Him that ‘They want something strange and unknown and perverse to come to pass. They are not satisfied to be born as they

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are. They ask for a new world’ (MW 92). Indeed, Davies is depressed at the ‘more intellectual approach’ to the crushing economic crisis being taken by the ‘College-trained chaps’ who now represent the workers, replacing the ‘old characters who spoke mainly with their bruised fists and out of their indignant bowels’ (MW 102). The essential romanticism of this is clear, but again it is born of Davies’s insistence that the political struggle is another manifestation of those older instincts of the Welsh, the ‘old Welsh Adam’ that has refused to die despite the ‘clanking grind of soulless machinery’ (SW 34). Perhaps the oddest – and most revealing – moment in Davies’s account of the struggle of the workers of south Wales comes as he recounts the disputes of the 1890s over the reductions in the Sliding Scale rate: In London, Oscar Wilde was elegantly sauntering down the Haymarket dropping jewels of wit about Art for Art’s sake, though by this time there was only the ghost of a carnation in his hand. He, too, was preaching revolt and was of similar texture to the coal-miners, intrinsically. (MW 85)

One can only speculate as to what Wilde or the miners of south Wales would have made of the comparison; Davies is aware of the incongruity, of course, but the fact that he makes the link at all reveals the terms in which he is viewing the Welsh industrial struggle: it is a struggle for personal freedom and fulfilment, for the right of the individual, miner and homosexual, to live a fulfilled life. If the workers’ resistance to the constraints of capitalism is, for Davies, rooted in the life of the instincts, that resistance has unsurprisingly found expression amongst other figures of natural and imaginative energy down the ages: ‘most of the old bards were feared by hard-fisted landlords, barons and gentry for their satirical talent. It is a talent that has never lost its continuity’ (SW 25). We see one descendant of the ‘old bards’ in the figure of Gwyn, the prize-winning poet in ‘The Bard’.11 But not for Gwyn the vigorous life of the countryside in preNonconformist Wales but the mundane, domestic life of the valleys in the 1930s, pressed by his wife, Bronwen, to deal with the practicalities of bringing home a regular wage rather than yet another eisteddfod chair: He had always been a little queer. Never able to master a job properly. In the old, old days he would have been a minstrel and a teller of tales,

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wandering from village to village over the countryside . . . These men are no more, but the spring of song still flows in their modern descendants. (CS 103)

Gwyn’s Welsh poems tend to be of epic length and ‘enormous with mystic exaltations’ but, ‘since the age did not favour volumes of poetry in the Welsh language’, much of his work remains shut in a large trunk. Gwyn meanwhile has tried a variety of jobs, including a spell as Council gas-meter reader, but even such mundanities as these cannot wholly stifle his poetic imagination – the accuracy of his readings is disrupted by his meditation on a Welsh saga based on Tristan and Isolde and once again he is sacked. Now he runs a ‘talley-trade’ business from his home, selling household goods on credit to local housewives, though, to his wife’s despair, ‘lines for poems played hide and seek with the business entries’ in his account-books: ‘Mrs A. P. Adams: Her countenance is like a desert, but where her mouth is, there also is an oasis’ (CS 106). Gwyn’s absurdity is clear; the tone of the story is for the most part comic. But when Bronwen, in despair and in anger at Gwyn’s taking tea with a local middle-class lady of the arts, chops up and burns one of the eisteddfod chairs that fill their little house, the tone shifts somewhat; as Bronwen tells him what she has done, he looks at her in horror: ‘It was as if he was being forced to listen to harsh iron bells ringing in a place of grey desolation, a prison with high, blank walls’ (CS 108). The chopping up of the chair is a displaced assault on Gwyn himself, almost a symbolic gelding, although the dominant tone of the story makes such a reading seem overdramatic. But Davies does not leave the story there, his poet imprisoned in the poky house and marital strife; the tone shifts again. Struck by Gwyn’s reaction to what she has done, by his utter belief in himself and his calling, Bronwen begins to laugh: ‘Her laughter bubbled and rippled, with now and again deeper and darker notes running in her throat’ (CS 109). It seems likely that she will never fully understand Gwyn but also that theirs will be an unusual and not unrewarding relationship. ‘Blodwen’ is another story with its roots in earth of an older Wales. The young woman in the title is engaged to Oswald Vaughan, a young solicitor in the valley town, of respectable chapel-going family and, in the eyes of Blodwen’s mother, an admirable husband for her daughter. However, in emotional terms it is clear that the pale, dull Oswald is no match for Blodwen. While she has a glow of natural energy, Oswald’s idea of an evening’s courting is to sit with her in the

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parlour reading aloud from Wordsworth and Tennyson, especially In Memoriam. After which, while he goes home ‘refreshed and . . . in an ecstasy’, Blodwen, we are told without comment, ‘would go to the kitchen . . . and, oddly enough, something would be sure to irritate her’ (CS 83). Blodwen loves to walk on the mountains – ‘She loved the swift open spaces of the mountain-tops’ (CS 85) – while Oswald, we are not surprised to hear, does not enjoy such strenuous outdoor activity. The only other young man with whom Blodwen comes into contact, Pugh Jibbons who comes around the valley houses selling vegetables and flowers, in fact lives ‘a semi-wild life’ in an old house up on the mountainside: He was a funny-looking fellow . . . Perhaps there was a gipsy strain in him. He was of the Welsh who have not submitted to industrialism, Nonconformity or imitation of the English. He looked as though he had issued from a cave in the mountains. He was swarthy and thickset, with rounded, powerful limbs and strong dark tufts of hair everywhere. Winter and summer he bathed in the river. (CS 81)12

Here again, clearly, is a version of Davies’s ‘Silurian’, close to the earth, at ease with his body. Pugh is scathing about Oswald; he tells Blodwen: ‘he’s not a bloke for you . . . There’s no guts to any of his lot . . . no seed and no marrow’ (CS 82). We are told in fact that Oswald’s mother ‘had been put away in an asylum at one time. Even now there was a strange dead look about her’ (CS 83); we are told nothing more but the suggestion is of a woman whose neurosis is the result of her being emotionally frozen up by the respectable inhibited life of the Vaughans and presumably a similar fate will overwhelm Blodwen if she marries the prim Oswald. In fact, despite her conscious distaste for Pugh, the swarthy and disrespectful outsider, at some deeper level she is increasingly drawn to him: ‘His swarthy face, with its dark gipsy strains, was full of knowledge that she sensed rather than saw’ (CS 88). ‘Your mind is stupid’, he tells her in one confrontation, ‘because you won’t be what you want to be’ (CS 89). As Blodwen walks the hills with Oswald on one occasion, he sees her as ultimately beyond him, mysterious, disturbingly other: ‘And her eyes were strange to him, as though she did not know him. They were blue and deep as the sea, and old and heavy, as though with the memory of lost countries’ (CS 86). At the climactic close of the story, while Oswald sits in her parents’ parlour with her

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mother apologising for her daughter’s being late, Blodwen is up in Pugh Jibbons’s old house on the mountain; Pugh is ‘laying a flower on the white hillock of her belly, with tender exquisite touch, a wide flat, white marguerite flower . . . his mouth pressing it into her rose-white belly, laughing’ (CS 93). Blodwen has apparently made her choice, a life with Pugh which is unrespectable in the eyes of the village, but she can ‘be what [she] wants to be’, regain that lost country. Perhaps predictably, when Rhys Davies speculates on the future of industrial south Wales it is to consider the possibility of a return to the rural: It is doubtful whether salmon ever again will consent to leap the cascade of Berw Rhondda, but surely those huge tips can be transformed into orchards, surely time can be used in sweeping up those derelict works rusting in the Welsh rain which, as ever, falls to fructify green produce as well as to enter the decrepit shoes of the unemployed. After the ugly hundred and fifty years’ interruption from the outside world, perhaps Wales can now return to its former pastoral unison – if it can afford to. (MW 81)

Interestingly, of course, one strand of political thinking in Wales was advocating something rather similar. Plaid Cymru’s ‘Ten points of policy’, published in Y Ddraig Goch in 1933, not only includes a rejection of laissez-faire capitalism but advocates, as the eighth point, the ‘de-industrialization of South Wales’, replacing it with an economy based on light industry and, above all, farming: ‘Agriculture should be the main industry of Wales and the basis of its civilisation.’13 But in fact, when Davies does refer to ‘the Nationalists’ in My Wales, his comments are at best neutral and at times hostile. He senses little response in the valleys to the Nationalists’ message and is generally negative towards their advocacy of the Welsh language: ‘I do not believe that the Welsh language has a future’ (MW 227). Davies gives quite a full account of the burning of the bombing school at Penyberth – his book was, after all, published within months of the jailing of Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams – concluding that ‘The country as a whole has not made up its mind about the movement’ (MW 278). But he himself, writing in the late 1930s, is aware of the ‘terrifying menaces to peace that too much insistence on nationalism breeds’ and seems nervous of the direction which Welsh Nationalism might take: ‘Isolation in the haughtiness of a tribal

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consciousness is the danger of such a Party as this which is endeavouring to entice the confused Welsh people into its ranks’ (MW 283). It is little wonder that when Pennar Davies criticizes the attitudes of some Anglo-Welsh writers towards the notion of Welsh nationhood in an article in 1948, it is Rhys Davies whom he singles out for particular criticism (he refers directly to The Story of Wales, published a few years earlier, but he is clearly aware of Davies’s other writing). He sees Rhys Davies as symptomatic of the Anglo-Welsh tendency ‘to define essential Welshness as a species of racial character rather than as a developing national life which must be given fair play in the spheres of economics and politics’.14 It is a shrewd comment on Rhys Davies’s notion of Welshness. But then Davies, in his non-fiction, has limited interest, as we have seen, in the economic and political actualities of Wales. What he constructs is essentially a personal myth, a myth of a place whose age-old natural life has been stifled and constrained by an alien way of life, of a people who have for generations, in their chapels and in political struggles, yearned for a fuller, freer life. In other words Davies, as a man who inhabits a world which forbids him from expressing his deepest feelings and impulses, creates a ‘Wales’ which echoes his own situation. To go back to Clare Hanson’s phrase, Davies is a writer who ‘longs for a return to a home culture’ – or a state of authentic being which he would like to imagine once existed – ‘which is denied him’. Asked by Glyn Jones in a radio broadcast in 1950 to what extent he thought his work represented the real Wales, Davies replied, ‘What is the real Wales? Whose is it? . . . Surely every genuine writer creates his own Wales?’15

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

Ian Reid, The Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1977), 24. Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1963), 20, 19. Clare Hanson (ed.), Re-reading the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1989), 2–3; my italics. On this point see my introduction to Glyn Jones, The Dragon has Two Tongues (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), xxv. Rhys Davies, My Wales (London: Jarrolds, 1937) and Rhys Davies, The Story of Wales, Britain in Pictures (London: Collins, 1943). Further references to these texts will be included in the text, abbreviated as MW and SW.

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7

8

9

10

11

12

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In his discussion of this passage, Aidan Byrne points out the detachment which Rhys Davies sets up between such descriptions and his narrative voice in My Wales. See Aidan Byrne, ‘Urban literature of south Wales: an exploration of urban themes in works by Gwyn Thomas, Rhys Davies and Christopher Meredith’, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Wales (Bangor), 2000, 35. H. J. Fleure, ‘The Welsh people’, Wales, 10 (October 1939), reprinted in Wales I–II (London: Frank Cass, 1969), 265–9. The response of R. S. Thomas to this material in his early poetry has been discussed in M. Wynn Thomas, ‘R. S. Thomas, war poet’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 2 (1996), 82–97. Linda Adams has drawn attention to the connection between Fleure’s work and contemporary Neo-Romantic constructions of Wales in art and writing: ‘Fieldwork: the Caseg broadsheets and the Welsh anthropologist’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 5 (1999), 51–85. James Hanley, Grey Children: A Study in Humbug and Misery (London: Methuen, 1937); George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Gollancz, 1937). Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning (1969; Bridgend: Seren, 1998), 32, 36. Further references to this book will be included in the text, abbreviated as PHF. Rhys Davies shows his awareness of the erotic energies released by such religious revivals in The Withered Root (1927), his fictionalized account of the Evan Roberts revival of 1904–5, not just in the ambiguous emotional ecstasies experienced by the young evangelist preacher, Reuben Daniels, but also in the way Catherine Pritchards, one of his converts and a fellow worker, is sexually drawn to him. In his portrayal of Reuben Daniels’s yearning for some sort of emotional fulfilment and his unexplained incapacity through much of the book to respond sexually to a woman, Rhys Davies would seem, in his first novel, to be expressing deeply personal impulses. Rhys Davies, Collected Stories, ed. Meic Stephens, vol. 1 (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996), 101–9. Further references to this volume will be included in the text, abbreviated as CS. Pugh’s bathing in the river is echoed by the river bathing of Rufus in Davies’s powerful 1960s story ‘The Chosen One’; as he bathes, he is watched by Mrs Vines, the English owner of the estate who is about to eject him from the cottage in which the young Welshman’s family have lived for generations. She has ‘lived among African savages, studying their ways’ (Collected Stories, ed. Meic Stephens, vol. 2, 255) and as she watches Rufus through her binoculars she notes the ‘prognathus jaw, broad nose, and gypsy-black hair of this heavy-bodied but personable young man [which] bore distinct atavistic elements. He [is a ] . . . throwback descendant of an ancient race’ (257), potent (‘. . . your organs are exceptionally pronounced’, 270) but about to be dispossessed.

86 13

14

15

‘The Memory of Lost Countries’: Rhys Davies’s Wales For a discussion of the ‘Ten Points’, see Dafydd Glyn Jones’s chapter on Saunders Lewis’s politics in Alun R. Jones and Gwyn Thomas (eds.), Presenting Saunders Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1983) 23–78, especially 35–9. Davies Aberpennar, ‘Anti-Nationalism among the Anglo-Welsh’, The Welsh Nationalist (February 1948), 8. The writer excepts some Anglo-Welsh writers from his criticism, since they ‘recognise the living nationhood of the Welsh people’ and he praises ‘. . . the restless energy of Keidrych Rhys, and the poetic conscience of R. S. Thomas, and the imaginative force of Emyr Humphreys’. He also suggests that ‘one of the most interesting of the Welsh racialists is Mr John Cowper Powys, a distinguished writer of far greater significance than Mr Rhys Davies’. I am grateful to the editor of the present volume, Meic Stephens, for drawing this article to my attention. The interview is reprinted as ‘Every genuine writer finds his own Wales’, New Welsh Review, 35 (Winter 1996–7), 11–15.

Withered Roots: Ideas of Race in the Writings of Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence DANIEL WILLIAMS

George Ewart Evans, in reviewing Rhys Davies’s ‘new style guidebook’ My Wales in 1937 was struck by the fact that the author’s analysis of industrial unrest was based on ideas of race: Rhys Davies attempts to take a detached view of the conflict between miners and owners since the beginning of the last century. He sees the struggle isolated in South Wales, not a world-wide phenomenon. As a result he has startling theories of its cause. The strife in South Wales is a natural outcome of the presence of mixed breeds in the coalfield. What a notion! Comic of Bill Bristol, Mike and Dai working together in the same seam [sic]. But is fascist-fodder comic?1

By 1937 a view of society based upon racial differences was increasingly being connected with the rise of fascism but, as several critics have argued, the values that informed fascist ideas of society and culture played a significant part within European intellectual life throughout the first half of the twentieth century.2 Indeed, one of the most striking, and disturbing, characteristics of Rhys Davies’s writings is the way in which, throughout his career, he understood and described the world in racial terms. Individual characteristics, especially abnormalities, are given racial explanations throughout Davies’s writings. In the early short story ‘Arfon’ (1931), for instance, Mrs Edwards blames her husband’s racial background for their son’s ‘idiotic tendencies’: ‘Gipsy blood is in you’.3 Davies was still depicting the world in racial terms in his autobiography of 1969, Print of a Hare’s Foot, where the Rhondda Valley is depicted as a ‘mongrel place’ that nevertheless managed to nurture the ‘perfection of dark Iberian features’ that Davies perceives in his friend Caerphilly whom he

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decides must be ‘a throwback to some more splendid ancestry, a reminder of an old racial sumptuousness’.4 Whilst this racial view of the world could, with some justification, be dismissed as ‘fascist-fodder’, this chapter is written in the belief that an account of Davies’s ideas of race is necessary if we are to achieve a full understanding of the social and political values informing his fictions. The question of race also throws a new light on the Welshman’s, by now well-known, relationship with D. H. Lawrence. Society in the fictions of Davies and Lawrence is made up of distinctive racial groups and I believe that their writings are indicative of a significant shift that occurred in the discourse on race between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is no space to develop this argument at length in this chapter, but I nevertheless hope to begin to identify and characterize this shift in ideas of race by comparing the commitment to plural racial cultures that we encounter in the writings of Davies and Lawrence, with the desire to forge a single homogeneous common culture that we encounter in the writings of the leading Victorian social critic, Matthew Arnold. My argument is informed by the writings of the contemporary critic Werner Sollors, who bases his analyses of ethnicity on a distinction between consent (the bonds of culture) and descent (the bonds of heredity and blood).5 Consent and descent are not mutually incompatible terms, but adopting these terms will allow me to isolate, within a varied and complex field, two divergent strains that are characteristic of racial thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My goal in what follows is to trace some of the roots of Davies’s and Lawrence’s racial ideas, and to explore the impact that their ideas of race had on their writings. I do so by focusing primarily on their depictions of Wales and the Welsh.

I The Welsh in Rhys Davies’s writings are represented in racial, primitivist, terms. Welshness is not defined by a consensual engagement in a historically developing culture, but rather is preprogrammed ‘into the blood’ of characters.6 The Welsh are thus defined according to a set of eternal, immutable and primitivist characteristics that are passed down through the generations; they ‘at heart are still bucolic and simple,’ notes Davies in My Wales; ‘they still

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have their priceless Celtic sense of wonder, they are still beautifully child-like’.7 The ‘individual Welsh spirit’ is ‘poetic’ and ‘imaginative’, and the Welsh ‘seldom worry themselves with the weighty problems of modern civilisation’.8 ‘There is still a primitive shine on Wales,’ he notes later; ‘one can smell the old world there still.’9 In Davies’s first novel The Withered Root (1927) the Welsh are described as ‘a race of mystical poets who have gone awry in some way’, and it is the fact that Reuben Daniels’s mother is of ‘the old pure Welsh blood’ that gives the preacher his poetic imagination, for ‘he of her descent would in other days have sung poems and carried his harp from village to village, a bard bred of the rough hills and wild people’.10 Reuben and his mother inhabit a valley described in the novel’s opening as ‘a community to itself ’ in which ‘its rock-crowned hills imprisoned hardly any but the native Welsh, and in their bleak isolation the people lived with all the primitive force of the Welsh’.11 Davies’s conceptualization of the Welsh as primitivist, anti-materialist and poetic was encouraged by his major literary influence and friend D. H. Lawrence. In Print of a Hare’s Foot Davies recalls that he ‘listened carefully’ to Lawrence’s argument that What the Celts have to learn and cherish in themselves is that sense of mysterious magic that is born with them, the sense of mystery, the dark magic that comes with the night, especially when the moon is due, so that they start and quiver, seeing her rise over their hills, and get their magic into their blood. They want to keep that sense of the magic mystery of the world, a moony magic. That will shove all their chapel Nonconformity out of them.12

This ‘mysterious . . . moony magic’ that Lawrence associates with the Celts is embodied fictionally in the character of Morgan Lewis in his novella of 1924, St Mawr. Lewis, the groom from Merioneth, occupies a position in the novel ‘half-way’ between the coldly rational world of humans and the warm, instinctive world of animals.13 Lou notes that, when she speaks to Lewis, ‘I’m not sure whether I’m speaking to a man or to a horse’ and this animalistic primitivism is reflected in the fact that Lewis is made the spokesman for a mystical and magical view of life:14 If you didn’t go near the fire all day, and if you didn’t eat any cooked food nor anything that had been in the sun, but only things like turnips

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or radishes or pig-nuts, and then went without any clothes on, in the full moon, then you could see the people in the moon, and go with them.15

The emphasis on the moon and on primitive beliefs reinforces the image of the Celts that informed Lawrence’s advice to Rhys Davies. For both Davies and Lawrence the Welsh are perceived in racial terms as embodying a number of unchanging and eternal characteristics – imagination, a belief in the supernatural, a poetic temperament – and both authors thus continue a tradition of thought that extends back to the late eighteenth century. Walter Scott was to popularize such ideas in the contrast between the Gaelic culture of a feudal Highland society and the hard-headed commercial ethos of Lowland life in his novel Waverley (1814), a contrast which itself derived from the visions and fabrications of early romantics such as Thomas Gray and James Macpherson. However, the idea of the Celt received its most influential formulation, especially with regard to Wales, in Matthew Arnold’s lectures of 1866, On the Study of Celtic Literature. Arnold begins his study with a somewhat melancholy description of attending an eisteddfod in Llandudno, where, on an ‘unfortunate’ day of ‘storms of wind, clouds of dust and an angry, dirty sea’, he listens to the last representatives of a once proud tradition reciting verse in a language which Arnold admits he does not understand.16 Upon leaving the festival pavilion he meets an acquaintance fresh from London and the parliamentary session. In a moment, the spell of the Celtic genius was forgotten, the Philistinism of our Anglo-Saxon nature made itself felt, and my friend and I walked up and down by the roaring waves, talking not of ovates and bards, and triads and englyns, but of the sewage question, and the glories of our local self government, and the mysterious perfections of the Metropolitan Board of Works.17

The English philistine’s world of material affairs, of instrumental activity, of the ‘machinery’ of industrial society, is juxtaposed to the creative, imaginative, poetic world of the Celt. As the contrast between English philistinism and Celtic creativity suggests, Arnold’s lectures were not primarily directed at the Celts themselves, but were concerned with exposing certain deficiencies within the emerging culture of England. Wales is thus presented, in contrast to England, as a place

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where the past still lives, where every place has its traditions, every name its poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still knows this past, this tradition, this poetry and lives with it, and clings to it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the other side, the invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead, has long ago forgotten his.18

Arnold’s lectures were based on the belief that the withering, poetical and magical cultures of the Celtic race should now feed into and revitalize the emergent, progressive, yet rather drab and philistine, culture of the English nation. The distinction between the English nation and the Celtic race is significant, for whereas the English in Arnold’s analysis are an emergent people, a product of history and subject to further development, the Welsh and the Irish are conceived of in visualized terms, demonstrating certain eternal racial characteristics, atemporal, static and destined for both cultural and racial absorption. Arnold thus produces a Celt characterized by certain enduring visible traits which inevitably, and crucially, make the Celts ‘ineffectual in politics’.19 ‘The Celtic genius’, he notes, has ‘sentiment as its main basis, with love of beauty, charm, spirituality for its excellence, . . . ineffectualness and self-will for its deficit’.20 The Celt is ‘always ready to react against despotism of fact’, is ‘sensual’ and is ‘particularly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret’.21 These are the Celtic characteristics that we also encounter in the writings of Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence, and whilst this does not necessarily suggest a direct influence, it testifies to the fact that the Arnoldian criteria had become part of the very language in which the Welsh conceived of themselves, and in which they were conceived of by others. Arnold’s conceptualization of the Celt also relates to the writings of Davies and Lawrence in that all three authors invoke primitive Celtic characteristics as the basis for mounting a critique of the materialism and philistinism of contemporary, industrial society. Matthew Arnold was one of the pivotal figures in Raymond Williams’s analysis of Culture and Society (1958) which influentially explored the ways in which nineteenth-century critics of industrialism adopted the term ‘culture’ to denote a sense of how the spiritual life of the mind could be set in opposition to a declining social order. The more the actual social reality of industrial capitalism was seen to be debased and exploitative, the more the idea of ‘culture’ developed as a term of critique. ‘Culture’ in the new industrial landscape came to mean

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first, the recognition of the practical separation of certain moral and intellectual activities from the driven impetus of a new kind of society; second, the emphasis of these activities as a court of human appeal, to be set over the process of practical social judgement and yet to offer itself as a mitigating and rallying alternative.22

In later life Williams came to regret the fact that issues of racial and national identities were missing from his discussion of Culture and Society, and what is striking in Arnold’s Celtic essays is the fact that the critique of English industrial and materialist society is developed in terms of the alleged cultural traits and characteristics of nations.23 The division between a narrow philistine society and a humanizing culture that Arnold famously developed in Culture and Anarchy (1869) finds its precursor in the distinction between the instrumental materialism of the English and the poetic sensibility of the Celts in the essays on Celtic literature. The structure of Arnold’s argument, where Celtic traits are invoked as a means of critiquing the values and aspirations of contemporary society, is mirrored in the writings of both Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence. If Arnold begins his Celtic essays standing in Llandudno, where he looks eastwards towards the ‘Saxon hive’ in Liverpool, and westwards towards Anglesey ‘where the past still lives’, the characters in Lawrence’s St Mawr also encounter a landscape that is divided along lines of nationhood:24 The Needle’s Eye was a hole in the ancient grey rock, like a window, looking to England; England at the moment in shadow. A stream wound and glinted in the flat shadow, and beyond that the flat, insignificant hills heaped in mounds of shade. Cloud was coming – the English side was in shadow. Wales was still in the sun, but the shadow was spreading.25

The spreading shadow is symbolic, for this is a tale in which an antimaterialist primitivism – embodied in the Welsh horse St Mawr, its groom Lewis and the Native American Phoenix – is juxtaposed against the materialism of an exhausted western civilization embodied in the figure of Mrs Witt and her daughter Lou. Lawrence follows Arnold in utilizing a primitive Celticism, embodied in both animal and man in the following passage, as a means of highlighting the deficiencies of his own culture.

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But now where is the flame of dangerous, forward-pressing nobility in men? Dead, dead, guttering out in a stink of self-sacrifice whose feeble light is a light of exhaustion and laissez-faire. And the horse, is he to go on carrying man forward into this? – this gutter? No! Man wisely invents motor-cars and other machines, automobile and locomotive. The horse is superannuated, for man. But alas, man is even more superannuated, for the horse.26

If the Welsh groom and his horse stand as the last bastions of nobility in Britain, the laissez-faire values of contemporary society will soon drive them to extinction; the shadow that lies over England in St Mawr ‘is spreading’ and will soon encroach upon Wales. Rhys Davies also invokes a primitive Celticism as a means of critiquing the dominant values of a materialist society. Pugh Jibbons in the short story ‘Blodwen’ (1931), for instance, is represented as one ‘of the Welsh who have never submitted to industrialism’, and it is he who ends the tale in the arms of Blodwen whose eyes hold ‘the memory of lost countries’.27 Both characters represent a set of values that stand in opposition to those of the industrial society which they inhabit. In The Withered Root Reuben Daniels, whose ‘soul’ is ‘sick’, seeks solace in religion from the ‘rows and rows of dirty-grey dwellings’ which are ‘like galleries sunk in some murky, deserted inferno’.28 Reuben seeks transcendence by turning to God, and becomes a revivalist preacher. He ultimately comes to regard his religion as a symptom of, rather than an answer to, the forces of industrialism, however, and Davies powerfully conveys this moment of realization as the preacher begins to think of himself and his social role in the mechanized terms of an industrial society: He would see himself as a mechanical doll, lifting one arm in suitable gesture, then the other, while, forcing himself to go on, his voice sang out brokenly until the glittering machine in him ran down. And all the time the rapt, staring faces before him would exude a sweat of gratified pleasure and their bodies would pant and their breasts heave as that pleasure sank into their very bowels.29

Reuben, who is ‘of the old pure Welsh blood’ and would ‘in other days have sung poems and carried his harp from village to village’, ultimately turns his back on religion and finds transcendence from the

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industrial world only in death.30 It can therefore be seen that Lawrence and Davies are to a considerable extent continuing a Victorian tradition of social criticism in their use of Celticism as a vehicle for critiquing those aspects of their contemporary society that they disliked.

II If Davies and Lawrence follow Arnold in invoking a Celtic primitivism as a means of exposing the narrow materialism of their contemporary societies, the twentieth-century writers’ social vision is ultimately considerably more pessimistic than that of their Victorian predecessors. Arnold’s social criticism is directed not so much at the ‘industrial community’ itself, as at the ‘common tide of men’s thoughts’ within such a community. He states explicitly in Culture and Anarchy that culture ‘admits the necessity of the movement towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism’ and ‘readily allows that the future may derive benefit from it’.31 His views on the Welsh language are particularly illuminating with regard to this dimension of his thought. Arnold calls for the eradication of Welsh as a living language in his essays On the Study of Celtic Literature, and presents his argument in the following terms: I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother Saxons as to the practical inconvenience of perpetuating the speaking of Welsh . . . Cornwall is the better for adopting English, for becoming more thoroughly one with the rest of the country. The fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogenous, English-speaking whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation to which the natural course of things irresistibly tends; it is a necessity of what is called modern civilisation, and modern civilisation is a real, legitimate force.32

If Arnold often invokes culture as an alternative source of values to industrial society, here he deems ‘modern civilisation’ to be a ‘real, legitimate force’ and the source of welcome changes in society. Culture is not opposed to modern civilization, for the latter creates the context for the dissemination of the former. Arnold’s vision is

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democratic in the sense that his goal is to construct a shareable, accessible, common culture in Britain that makes the ‘best knowledge and thought of the time’ relevant to all. That common culture is ultimately based, however, on the belief that society’s ‘best knowledge’ can only be disseminated through the medium of English. The Welsh language is thus seen to represent a hindrance to the man of culture’s project of diffusing ‘the best knowledge . . . from one end of society to the other’.33 The deepest desire in Arnold’s writings is towards reconciliation; the reconciliation of classes, races and religious sects in the formation of a common participatory culture. That culture is not defined along lines of racial descent. Arnold does not advocate that the Welsh be excluded from the national culture because of their race, but argues that their current linguistic practices must change if they are to participate fully in that common English culture. If, at times, Arnold emphasizes the pervasive influence of race and heredity, this strain in his thought is always tempered by his belief that a ‘community of practice is more telling than a community of origin’.34 If race, for Arnold, is ultimately determined by culture not blood, culture for Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence is ultimately determined by race. What we witness in the shift from Arnold to Davies and Lawrence is a shift from the idea of a single common culture, to the idea of plural cultures. Whereas Arnold desired ‘the fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogenous . . . whole’, Lawrence’s plea to society was to ‘give me differences’.35 This shift from a commitment to the idea of a common culture of consent to an emphasis on a plurality of ultimately irreconcilable cultures of descent can be traced in Lawrence’s St Mawr where Mrs Witt observes that ‘Europe was organic, like the helpless particles of one sprawling body. And the great body in a state of incipient decay’.36 Her daughter Lou is described as ‘one of these nervous white women with lots of money’ who wants to ‘escape from the friction which is the whole stimulus in modern social life’.37 She complains to her mother that ‘she can’t live’, and would be ‘dead if there weren’t St Mawr and Phoenix and Lewis in the world’.38 This primitivist threesome stand in opposition to the dominant values of society, but have no future role to play within it. We are told, for instance, that the horse St Mawr was ‘raised for stud purposes – but he didn’t answer’, and this inability or unwillingness to procreate is mirrored in its groom Lewis who, when asked why St Mawr ‘doesn’t get any foals’, answers, ‘Doesn’t want to I should think. Same as me.’39 Far from representing an Arnoldian source of

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primitivist revitalization for a materialist European culture, the horse and its groom are represented as a dying breed, the last of their kind. Whereas Arnold felt that the philistinism of the English could be alleviated by an infusion of Celticism, Lawrence’s Welsh groom Morgan Lewis argues that ‘There’s too many people in the world for me to help anything’.40 Similarly Reuben Daniels in Davies’s The Withered Root wastes his poetic sensibility in the cause of a Nonconformist revival, is sexually frigid, never marries and finds his only solace at the hands of a prostitute before dying with ‘the face of one for whom life had not yet begun’.41 Whilst there is a sense that civilization is in a state of decay, the primitive races offer no source of revitalization, for their roots are withering in an industrializing world. In contrast then to Arnold’s desire to see an infusion of poetic Celticism transform the philistinism of English life, the primitive characters in Lawrence’s and Davies’s fictions offer no such hope for regeneration for they are essentially impotent. The fact that the representatives of primitive cultures – St Mawr, Morgan Lewis, Reuben Daniels – do not procreate underlines that these are the last representatives of their kind, and also preserves their symbolic racial purity. Thus rather than advocating a fruitful amalgamation of races, the characters in the fictions of Lawrence and Davies inhabit societies where racial differences are preserved. One result of this shift from the Arnoldian belief in a common culture to the commitment in Davies and Lawrence to the preservation of racial differences is that primitivism ceases to be a stage in a historical development, but rather becomes a criterion for racial and cultural authenticity. Thus, as the individual ‘Celt’ or ‘Negro’ becomes less primitive, he or she is also regarded as being less racially authentic. An example of this racial belief at work occurs in Davies’s Print of a Hare’s Foot where he recalls Lawrence’s ‘deep dislike’ for a ‘young Negro waiter’.42 To see Lawrence’s eyes gleam with watchful revulsion as the waiter laid a dish on the table seemed grotesque to me – why be so stirred over the young man? It was his hands Lawrence watched: thin, dusky, nervous hands laying very, very carefully a plate of vol au vent on the table. I watched too, as I had been bade. ‘You saw his hands, how uncertain they were, no feeling in them! No Feeling. It’s quite sickening, he can’t even place a plate down properly, he fumbles, hesitates, it’s like a dead hand moving, every moment I

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expect to see the plate go to the floor’. And the denunciation came: ‘All his movements are so mental, he doesn’t trust to his blood, he’s afraid. Look at him walking down the room, look at his legs, look how they hang together and cower, pushed forward only by his mind! Ugh!’ And he ended with a hiss of absolute revulsion. It was true, as I looked at the waiter’s legs, that they were rather soft and dejected-looking, clinging together as if for company as he took his short, gliding kind of steps down the room. Yes, his gait was vaguely unpleasant – that hesitating glide, as if practised, and the subjected look of the legs. There was little that was spontaneous about the youth, certainly. But this fierce antipathy! (139)

Although Davies is surprised at Lawrence’s revulsion, his own primitivist values are also exposed as he expects the Negro waiter to be ‘spontaneous’ and admits, in sympathy with Lawrence, that the waiter’s ‘hesitating glide’ looked ‘practised’. Lawrence’s wrath results from his perception that the ‘Negro’ is not behaving according to a set of racial expectations. In the racial thought of Lawrence and Davies modernization is understood to be a racial betrayal. This primitivist view of the individual and of the community results in the separation of ideas of the primitive and the modern from the actual social history that produced them. I have already discussed the range of eternal primitivist attributes that Davies ascribed to the Celts, and the more closely that primitivism is equated with Welshness in Davies’s writings the less these primitive characteristics are seen to represent a stage in the development of society, and the more they are seen to be the inevitable expressions of a racial identity. Thus any modern transformations in the cultural practices of Welshmen are deemed to be fundamentally un-Welsh. In My Wales, for example, we witness the rise of working-class militancy being dismissed in racial terms: Outside the chapels another section of the industrialized race grizzled and let loose moans and complaints. These noises were intrinsically of the same nature as the groans inside the chapels – sighs of longing, panting and yearnings for a blessed and perhaps impossible land where idealistic justice was maintained with a nice regard for one and all. The outside section, some said and still say, was composed of rootless ruffians and barbarous aliens, particularly Irishmen, who were merely stirring up trouble for its own sake, loving a fight, bored with the

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monotony of work. Any excuse served to call a strike, which might develop into rioting, arson, plundering.43

The reasons for industrial strife are thus placed at the feet of those who are deemed to be ‘aliens’ in a Welsh culture that Davies has already defined in largely primitivist, Arnoldian, terms. Ultimately, industrialism is itself a profoundly un-Welsh development for Davies. The industrialized valley is described as ‘a slatternly woman abandoned to wretchedness’ in The Withered Root and Davies hopes in My Wales that ‘After the ugly hundred and fifty years’ interruption from the outside world, perhaps Wales can now return to its former pastoral unison’.44 The ideas of race that inform the writings of Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence carry significant consequences for their approach to history and their understanding of human communities. In the October 1943 edition of the journal Wales that included articles advocating the rise of ‘An emergent national literature’ by George Ewart Evans, the reconstruction of Welsh politics ‘From the foundations’ by Gwynfor Evans, and an editorial in which Keidrych Rhys ‘sincerely’ hoped that Anglo-Welsh literature was simply ‘a stage on the way back to the use of Welsh for literature’, Rhys Davies’s excerpts ‘From my notebook’ struck a somewhat discordant note. If asked (in the offensive suspicious way!), I always say I am not Welsh to the Welsh, just as I say that I am not English to the English. The scorn of my Welsh interrogator is my delight, and when he begins to insult me I know that here is an impure Welshman and an inferior man who needs a prop of nationality. As soon as I am asked or am expected to show my ‘Welshness’ I know that Satan is tempting me to make a pretty fool of myself.45

There seems to be a contradiction here, for whilst rejecting the idea of national identity, the above passage relies on a distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ Welshmen. In the same article Davies also recommends that the artist should ‘Live out of Wales for a time’ but then goes on to suggest that ‘you will be a purer Welshman for it’, and while he urges the artist to ‘Never carry a flag’ he goes on to note that ‘self-conscious nationalists, earnest students and “protectors” of the culture’ will always fail to ‘bring the essence of Wales before one’.46 Davies seems to be taking away with one hand what he then reintroduces with the other. The idea of a distinctive Welsh culture is

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rejected while the ideas of a ‘pure’ and ‘unselfconscious’ Welshness are maintained. The emphasis in Davies’s ‘From my notebook’ is on the individual consciousness. ‘A man is greater than his country,’ he argues; ‘as a human being you have no need of a flag.’47 This emphasis on the individual is complicated, however, by the references to a Welshness that is inevitably a collective identity. This tension between a simultaneous commitment to ‘individualism’ and to the sense of a national community is reflected in D. H. Lawrence’s meditations on national identity in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). Lawrence insists on the ‘isolate’ character of the ‘essential American soul’, but complicates this insistence with respect to national identity by generalizing it: ‘The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself.’48 This tension is replicated in Lawrence’s discussion of Herman Melville where he considers Moby Dick to be ‘isolate’ whilst also being ‘the deepest blood-being of the white race’.49 It is a tension that also manifests itself in the opening pages of Lawrence’s study where he argues, on the one hand, that ‘men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes’, but claims, on the other, that men are only ‘free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community’.50 Whilst clearly believing in some kind of national distinctiveness, both Davies and Lawrence perceive that there is a danger for the autonomy of the individual artist if he subscribes to any collective manifestations of identity. Davies dismisses all culturally institutionalized embodiments of Welshness – be they the ‘Eisteddfod, the Nationalist Party, Welsh MPs, all Welsh writers’ – as ‘fundamentally useless’.51 Similarly Lawrence, while encouraging American artists to foster their distinctiveness, perceives a danger for the individual consciousness in what he calls ‘the social’ for it leads to a ‘merge’ that results in a failure to ‘listen in isolation to the isolate Holy Ghost’ who ‘speaks as individually inside each individual’ and never to ‘the general world’.52 Both Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence meet the danger posed by collective identities by conceiving of the national community as a ‘race’ rather than as a ‘culture’. They conceive of the group in terms of descent rather than consent. It seems that, for both Davies and Lawrence, the individual may be forced away from his or her individuality by a consensual idea of a communal identity which calls for an active participation within the culture of a civil society. The individual’s autonomy is not seen to be threatened in the same way, or

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to the same extent, if one bases one’s sense of community in race, for although the idea of race does inevitably refer to people outside the individual it is not dependent on any social relation to them; membership of the group is predetermined by blood. Thus Lawrence can read James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer as an ‘isolate’ who is nevertheless a representative of the ‘pure white’.53 In St Mawr, Morgan Lewis represents a noble primitivism and is identified as an ‘aristocrat . . . in his own way’, but ‘it was an aristocracy of the invisible powers, the greater influences, nothing to do with human society’.54 Similarly, for Rhys Davies, the ‘purer’ Welshmen are those who live in isolation: There are several Welsh people in Wales, on remote farms, in dreamy chapels, tending sheep on hill-tops. But they have never heard of Wales. If you ask them ‘Welsh you are?’ they will look at you in a puzzled way. These are the only Welsh; they will always exist if left alone.55

Welshness does not derive from participation in a Welsh culture and society for Davies, for the real Welsh are unconscious of their identity; it is already predetermined. The notion of racially distinct communities has generally been regarded as the preserve of nationalists. Davies’s racial view of the world, however, derives from his commitment to individualism, whereas the dominant strain within Welsh cultural nationalism in the twentieth century was based on the idea of a linguistic, as opposed to a racial, continuity. Indeed, Davies dismissed the Welsh language as ‘an unnecessary though charming accomplishment for petty use’ and ridiculed the idea that ‘Welsh nationality – or any other – is a matter of knowledge of the language, place of residence, accent, absorption in the culture’.56 He thus rejects a consensual conception of identity based in culture, and subscribes to a view of identity based in race. The idea of race in the writings of Davies and Lawrence embodies a collective entity that does not jeopardize the integrity of the individual, for membership of the group is predetermined. This, ultimately, is the advantage of race in the constitution of a community for both Davies and Lawrence.

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III If Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence follow an Arnoldian tradition of Victorian social criticism in utilizing a primitivistic conception of the poetic and anti-materialist Celt as a means of mounting a critique on the rationalism and materialism of contemporary society, they diverge fundamentally from that tradition in their conception of the relationship between race and society. Racial differences, for Matthew Arnold, can ultimately be transcended through common cultural practices. Cultural practices, for Davies and Lawrence, are determined by race. This results in a commitment in their writings to unassimilable racial differences, and in an ahistorical view of racial identity in which primitivist behaviour becomes a criterion for racial and cultural authenticity. Whilst there is much that is disturbing in D. H. Lawrence’s and Rhys Davies’s reliance on an idea of race in their writings, their replacement of the cultural by the racial is an attempt at making it possible for the individual to be part of a predetermined community of descent, without that posing a threat to his or her autonomy.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

George Ewart Evans, ‘The Valleys’, Wales, 3 (Autumn 1937), 128. See, for example, John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber, 1992), and the more nuanced Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Rhys Davies, ‘Arfon’ in Collected Stories, vol. 1, ed. Meic Stephens (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996), 17. Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot (London: Heinemann, 1969), 198, 184, 197 (PHF in following references). Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Davies, PHF 140. Davies, My Wales (London: Jarrolds, 1937), 12–13. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Davies, The Withered Root (London: Robert Holden and Co., 1927), 100. Ibid., 3. Davies, PHF 141. D. H. Lawrence, St Mawr, in The Complete Short Novels (London: Penguin, 1982), 291.

102 Ideas of Race in the Writings of Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

Ibid., 296. Ibid., 374. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in Collected Prose Works, vol. 3, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 1962), 294–5. This will be abbreviated from now on as CPW 3. CPW 3, 295–6. CPW 3, 291. CPW 3, 346. CPW 3, 311. CPW 3, 344, 345, 347. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958; London: Hogarth Press, 1990), p. xviii. See, for instance, Williams’s Politics and Letters (London: Verso, 1979), 118, 119. CPW 3, 291. Lawrence, St Mawr, 337. Ibid., 346–7. Davies, ‘Blodwen’, in Collected Stories, vol. 1, 81, 86. Davies, Withered Root, 43, 53. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 27. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), in CPW 5, 105. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in CPW 3, 296–7. CPW 5, 113. Arnold, ‘A French Critic on Goethe’ (1878) in CPW 8, 256. Arnold, CPW 3, 296–7. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 3, October 1916–June 1921, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 719. Lawrence, St Mawr, 365. Ibid., 404, 406. Ibid., 322. Ibid., 285. Ibid., 360. Davies, Withered Root, 280. Davies, PHF, 139. Davies, My Wales, 70. Davies, Withered Root, 111; My Wales, 81. Davies, ‘From my notebook’, Wales, 2 (October 1943), 11. Ibid., 10, 11, 12. Ibid., 10. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1924; New York, 1964), 62, 66. Ibid., 160.

Ideas of Race in the Writings of Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence 103 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Ibid., 6. Davies, ‘From my notebook’, 10. Lawrence, Studies, 79. Ibid., 63. Lawrence, St Mawr, 389. Davies, ‘From my notebook’, 10. Davies, My Wales, 220; ‘From my notebook’, 12.

Rhys Davies as Autobiographer: Hare or Houdini? BARBARA PRYS-WILLIAMS

While many of the best autobiographers succeed both in holding a mirror up to themselves for their own enlightenment and in moving on from this to paint a bold and revealing self-portrait for the world’s inspection, for others there may be a crucial failure of nerve in moving from private understanding to public recording. In Rhys Davies’s complex personality, what seems to have been a fear of being too deeply known results, at times, in very coded autobiographical utterance, at times in outright censorship, as he constructs the sort of textual self that he is prepared to allow others to see. It is perhaps of significance that he put off until old age his attempt explicitly to image himself to himself and to the world in Print of a Hare’s Foot, subtitled ‘An Autobiographical Beginning’, published in 1969 when he was sixty-eight.1 The published version of Print of a Hare’s Foot reads as a remarkably urbane work with little sense of the interiority of Davies’s experience, lacking what Frank Kermode would call the feel of ‘the climate of a life’.2 Fortunately, the earlier drafts of the work are available for study and these help the reader construct a much fuller picture of the man. As one notes what Davies found it necessary to delete for reasons that do not seem to be aesthetic and as one discovers how regularly he repositions material so that its original, revealing emphasis is lost, one builds up a much clearer sense of the vulnerability of the man lurking behind formidable defences. This essay will consider both the finished, public work, containing what Davies chose to make known about himself in published form, and the process of the evolution of that work. The first section will focus, in the main, on the published version of Print of a Hare’s Foot, providing some preliminary interpretation against which the draft versions will emerge more tellingly. The second section will analyse the new information one gains about Davies’s personality from the drafts. The concluding

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section attempts to construct a model of personality which takes into account and interprets what has been noted, in a way which, it is hoped, will increase understanding of Print of a Hare’s Foot and, indeed, Rhys Davies’s fiction.

I In Print of a Hare’s Foot, Davies most successfully places his individual life within the nexus of the powerful historical forces which impinged upon him and his community. He vividly traces the social history of a part of the Rhondda from pre-industrial (as seen through the eyes of Davies’s hero, Dr William Price) to post-industrial times. Ostensibly, the time span covered in detail is from the turn of the century to the middle of the Depression in the 1930s, yet, as the actual vantage point of writing is the late 1960s, the experiences of that decade would appear to contribute to the defeated mood of the final chapter of the published work. The 1960s had seen the closure of seventy-four pits in south Wales, including the Cambrian in Clydach Vale after an explosion in 1965 which had killed thirty-one miners. Thus Davies records his memories of his own mining community at a time when the focal point and raison d’être of his village had already ceased to be. We experience, too, through particular characters represented in detail, the human reality of the social movement in south Wales in the first forty years of this century: the Welsh-speaking maid Esther, driven by grim poverty in west Wales into service in the Rhondda; Jim Reilly, son of an Irish immigrant, adjusting with difficulty to some Welsh norms; Aldo and Vanna, part of the Italian influx which established purveyors of delectable ice cream throughout the valleys; Caerphilly Jones, part of the diaspora of the 1930s, escaping hunger in the valleys by taking the King’s shilling in the Horseguards. Yet, for the most part, the mood is of record not of commemoration. It is not surprising to read in the final draft chapter, deleted just before publication, this comment as Davies views the beauty of the Carmarthenshire countryside: ‘I thought that, after all, the hideous coal mines were merely a brief stain on the nation’s long history: time’s sponge would dab it off.’3 There is no sense of nostalgic regret over the passing of the mining experience. As Davies records historical movements which shaped his community, he describes, too, how he learnt to position himself

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within that society. In the early chapters of Print of a Hare’s Foot, we see Davies smugly aware of his niche above that of the ordinary working man, in the petit-bourgeois position of a shopkeeper’s family. Although he simulates surprise at the ‘dread thing in life, class consciousness’ (104) which he asserts that he discovers on moving to London, his family make the appropriate signals of their higher-thanaverage rank in the world through the semiotics of dress and possessions. Davies was clothed appropriately for chapel in an Eton collar – ‘as a member of the lower middle class I never wore the celluloid kind, which required no laundering’ (17) – and sat in the socially superior position of his family’s ‘rented pew’ (17). Their ‘glossy trap’, horse-drawn, made Davies’s family seem ‘stylishly well off’ (23) in relation to other valley-dwellers. The employment of a maid was another social marker. Davies quickly ‘sensed Esther’s inferior position’ (47) and is full of ‘Little Master’ arrogance. His sense of who he is is intricately enmeshed with his social position. In Print of a Hare’s Foot, Davies gives a lively sense of the attractions of being socially accepted, while making clear his admiration for free spirits such as William Price and D. H. Lawrence who seemed able to dispense with social acceptability altogether. He seems particularly aware of how the granting of primacy to one’s sexual needs in entering a relationship might affect one’s social placing and he explores the way different cultures and traditions come to different accommodations in this matter in his delineations of Vanna, Esther and Madame S. Italian Vanna has a ‘gleam in [her] dancing eye’ as she reveals her ‘forbidden mystery’ (39) to Davies after their childhood mock marriage in the coke oven. A few months later, ‘she put her hair up much earlier in life than was the practice with Welsh girls’ (40) and shortly after that, was whisked back to Turin to finish her growing up under the fiercer Italian sexual codes for nubile girls and the strict supervision of her grandmother. Davies clearly sees the binding force of sexual convention in limiting life possibilities here. In his portrayal of the family maid, Esther, he depicts a woman who fears where the power of her sexuality might lead her when, after an impoverished upbringing, her greatest need is for security. As a boy, Davies agrees to ‘a profitable chaperonage’ (60) with Esther and the young miner, Gwilym, Davies sitting between them at the cinema, performing much the same function as her ‘carbolic soap which she believed had a safeguarding property against nasty things’ (59). When another strike is threatened, she sees clearly what marriage to a miner might involve

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and returns to west Wales. Some four years later, she comes back to the Rhondda triumphantly on a visit, ‘dressily well-off’ (63), married to a much older man who has provided her with ‘a bay windowed house’ well away from ‘the unbridled sea’ (63). The adolescent Davies retains a lively memory of the electric charge he experienced when he explored her intimate person on the one night he shared a bed with her as a child. Now she is totally hemmed in and contained. ‘Under a wide hat containing a sharp-eyed bird with outspread wings, she sat with an erectness conveying . . . the discipline of a lengthy corset’ (63). The fixed bird with outstretched wings surely suggests the freezing of any aspiration for a fuller emotional life. Social exigencies had stifled sexual potential. Moving into a wider world, Davies, in his portrayal of Madame S., his landlady in the South of France, shows how other, warm-blooded cultures can reconcile the needs of good sexual adjustment with the desired niche of social placing that the marriage contract can bring. Madame S. entertains a lover in the room adjacent to Davies’s for exactly one hour every Friday afternoon. He is amazed and instructed by the ‘choral ritual’ (121) of their unbridled lovemaking, clearly heard through the communicating door, and ‘the Gallic thoroughness which, like the native talent for forcing all usages out of a vegetable, extracts full value from the provisions of nature in men and women’ (121). Only once does he catch sight of the lover, dressed in bleu de travail unmistakably denoting his peasant or workingclass status. Madame S.’s husband, a clerk in a municipal office, assures her lower-middle-class status, her lover an outlet for her highly sensual nature. Davies is amused when, after Madame S. has done him real service, he invites her for a morning aperitif at a café. There was ‘a perceptible drawing-up of her frontage’ and an ‘expression of deprecating rebuke’ (142). Davies felt that her refusal implied that ‘a respectable married Frenchwoman did not sit in a public place drinking with a young man acquaintance’ (142). This is a culture where public and private codes are allowably quite different. Davies captures beautifully the French bourgeois preoccupation with having everything exactly comme il faut in the public domain. As Davies observes and conceptualizes from a late adult perspective what sexual need and social placing have done to limit others, there is a distinct, if guarded tracing of his own sexual development. Overtly, Davies attributes his huge sense of guilt to his chapel formation and in his adolescence achieved relief when he ‘found a less guilt-ridden religious creed’ and ‘insisted on transferring my worship from

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Nonconformist Welsh-speaking Gosen to the Anglican church of St Thomas’ (81). Nonconformity has not the reputation of having people live happily with their sexuality and Davies had perhaps reason to be less happy than many. David Callard reproaches him for being, on the evidence of his friend Urquhart, ‘100% homosexual’, yet in Print of a Hare’s Foot ‘writing much to hint otherwise’.4 Certainly, he never declares his homosexuality overtly in Print of a Hare’s Foot and in comparison with homosexual autobiographers such as Ackerley, Gide and Genet, he would seem most secretive. Yet what he does write of his early sexual experiences seems to show a shaping where homosexuality might be a likely outcome. As we shall see later, Davies makes explicit that he found Freud’s theories, as expounded in the London of the 1920s, personally very liberating. Clearly the text we are studying is the product of an elderly author writing in London in the period up to 1969, whose conceptual apparatus seems to date from the 1920s and for whom the relatively novel Freudian world-view of that time was a liberating instrumentality. While the Freudian model, especially in the formulation of that period, would now, to put it mildly, be far from universally accepted, in discussing Print of a Hare’s Foot and its drafts a largely Freudian model of homosexuality seems illuminating.5 At many points in Print of a Hare’s Foot Davies seems to explain himself to himself – and to readers alert to this coded communication – in Freudian terms. Freud writes of his conviction that the choice of sexual orientation is made in adolescence.6 The models of heterosexual identity that Davies offers us as he moves towards adolescence often depict the female in a relationship as threatening and often emasculating. Though not the first such episode described in the book, chronologically, his first overt heterosexual experience is that with Esther with whom he has, on his assertion, just once, to share a bed and receives an ‘eerie shock’ as he explores her ‘electrically tingling bush’ (47) while she is asleep. At this early stage, very much the young master, his guilt at his action – which was a sort of theft – is containable, although when Esther decides to leave the Rhondda rather than marry a miner, Davies records ‘Somewhere far away in me I felt an oddly welcome acceptance of her going’ (62). However, years later, coruscating guilt is felt when Esther returns to visit, very much the fine lady. ‘Had she known?’ (63) he asks himself in torment. When he returns from a short walk, Esther has left, leaving as a gift a plucked and eviscerated duck (64). Davies shapes this observation to form a climactic end to the chapter.

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Davies’s next heterosexual adventure is the mock marriage to Vanna in the coke oven, arranged by the manipulative Idwal, robed in his choirboy surplice. After the ceremony, Idwal retires, ostensibly to keep guard, but when Vanna whips up her skirt to reveal all, there is an almighty clatter from outside and a convincing voice declares that he is Sergeant Richards ready to make an arrest. Heterosexual interest is again consciously linked with the idea of punishable wrongdoing. Vanna – a tease – runs away and when, soon after, she returns to Italy, Davies feels a sense of ‘bondage and deprivation’ (40). Perhaps the most interesting and powerful indication of his sexual shaping is given in the incident of Mrs Blow’s pear tree. Idwal involves Davies in a scrumping adventure. As Davies swings up the big pear tree, he sees ‘golden flasks hung plump among the arms of leaves’ (42), perceiving the pears first sensually as breasts; ‘Then my hand closed round a cool little belly and the fleshy shape, free-of-charge for its plucking, excited me’ (42). In this moment of heightened sexual awareness, Mrs Blow appears bellowing ‘Thief! Police!’ and so great is Davies’s terror he urinates there and then in the tree. Surely part of the excitement of a scrumping raid is the possibility of being caught. This level of terror seems indicative of a particular psychic vulnerability. He has been caught in what he would see as a lascivious act by a female authority figure. From the examples cited, heterosexual sex is closely linked in Davies’s mind as he writes with acts of theft or trespass. An aspect of a child’s nurture that is often offered as a precipitator of the homosexual state is that, within the family situation, the mother is dominant and the father weak. The child fails to resolve the Oedipal stage, as most males do, by moving on, from intense love of the mother, to fear of the castrating power of the father-as-rival, to use the Freudian model, and then to identify with the father as role model. Heterosexuality then becomes unthinkable because, at an unconscious level, it involves a kind of theft, a sort of violation of the mother. Mrs Blow’s appearance as he is on the point of sensually capturing a ‘fleshy shape’, envisioned as a female body, arouses enormous guilt and fear. Inwardly, then, Davies is consolidating a view of the female as domineering, controlling and, as we shall see later, predatory, while outwardly he seems to be making a ‘normal’ progress through adolescence, following models of a particular sort of adult identity based on externals: he takes to cigarettes and buys his own shirts. In acquiring a silver-topped malacca cane and spats, he takes on the accoutrements of

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a male gender role but also further develops the sense of superior social position begun in his Eton-collared childhood. An important rite of passage remains to be negotiated. His friend John, a pharmaceutical apprentice, fills him in on the cold practicalities of sex, is much preoccupied with contraception and prophylaxis against venereal disease, but finally wearies Davies with his ‘everlasting cut-and-dried lasciviousness’ (90). Davies finally loses his virginity to a woman on the sand dunes at Porthcawl. It seems to be in ignominious retreat from a sighting of this woman in Cardiff that Davies discovers in an intuitive way what his sexual orientation might be, although he does not yet have the vocabulary for it. At this point, the tale virtually becomes a conversion narrative. He has that day bought a copy of Wilde’s Salome with the Beardsley drawings: ‘Random little bombs go off inside one with secret detonations . . . Delight restored my nerves’ as he looks at ‘these sinuous drawings of perverse yet truthful human beings’(95).7 Evidently Davies felt an imaginative awakening and a strong sense of affinity with these brilliant – yet perverse and nasty – drawings illustrating a text in which Wilde has depicted Salome using her enormous sexual power over her stepfather, Herod. Salome’s name is linked from the beginning with the idea of woman as an instrument of death. She performs the dance of the seven veils, and through her wiles, achieves the death of John the Baptist who has spurned her. On his death, she lavishes a horrifying, necrophilic love on his severed head. The drawings are overtly erotic, showing the considerable sexual power of Salome and Herodias, her mother, and through them Beardsley creates a series of images of potent women producing arousal in men – Herod, servants, slaves – without any hope of consummation. Simon Wilson draws attention to the multitude of phallic symbols expressing Herod’s fatal lust: the candelabrum with its candles, the peacock’s head, the trees.8 Davies makes his own idiosyncratic leap in interpreting the drawings: ‘even I could tell that its illustrator . . . made peculiar fun of [Wilde’s text] . . . The alarming majesty of our Jehovah and other powerful biblical characters went awry and melted like wax’ (95). That Herodias and Salome were contemptible figures of corruption seems to have passed him by. To the extent that Jehovah and his servants appear in the Salome story, they remain potent and not to be mocked. Because Davies seems to have been prone to experiencing women as authority figures, he delights in seeing Beardsley ‘sending up’ the evil matriarch Herodias and her wileful daughter. When that authority crumbles, for

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Davies, the whole religious structure with its guilt-arousing tendencies collapses too. One can only speculate from the vigour and delight of Davies’s response to Beardsley that the drawings and Wilde’s text reinforced a growing sense of alienation from the trap that women represented and, at the end of Part One, Davies sees traps all around him. Art and literature had started to transform Davies’s view of what sort of identity might be possible, giving a sense of emancipation at the crucial transition to manhood. Earlier, Davies had told us that The Odyssey had been one of the first works of literature to quicken his pulse and fire his imagination. However, it is not the nobility of Penelope, steadfast and loyal to her husband through endless trials which excites Davies but the wiles of the enchantress Circe who turns all Odysseus’s companions to swine. Davies later refers to the one woman recorded as granting him complete sexual intimacy as ‘my Circe of Porthcawl’ (94). If, in leaving the Rhondda in 1920, Davies is in search of selffulfilment, he gives no stronger sense in Part Two than he did in Part One that that fulfilment will be achieved through heterosexual love. He writes with incredulity of Franz who achieves congress with a known-by-sight journalist at the Café Royal in ‘an old-style [telephone] booth of stolid wood with two small glass panels in the door (107)’ and is trapped into marriage by the woman who ‘ferreted his identity’ (107) and unleashes ‘a bombardment of phone-calls and telegrams’ (108) until he capitulates. Davies visits a brothel in Germany ‘in the spirit in which one visits a zoo’9 to inspect but not to participate. Although, on the evidence of the pubic-hair lice he mentions and ‘the lyrical night’ (125) which produced them, Davies is evidently sexually active, he tells us nothing of the identity nor sex of the partner in this presumably rather sleazy liaison. He has a wide range of homosexual acquaintances, ranging from ‘unknowns’ like German Ernst in Nice to Norman Douglas and Hart Crane. Brenda Maddox interestingly observes that D. H. Lawrence’s interest in Davies was possibly to do with his fascination with homosexuals and she quotes Aldington and Orioli’s belief that Lawrence’s legendary rage stemmed from his inability to acknowledge his own bisexuality:10 his refusal to believe that he had tuberculosis even when terminally ill shows his prodigious capacity for denial. Although Davies at no time explicitly acknowledges his homosexuality, his developing orientation can be traced in the ways

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indicated and in a further humorous clue where the reader is required to match two pieces of information rather like cards in a game of Pelmanism. Early in Part Two, Davies lauds Freud as ‘a newly canonised redeemer’ (101) in the London of the 1920s and he would doubtless be aware of the significance Freud imputes to particular symbolic forms. At times Davies seems to be testing the alertness and discernment of the reader. He confesses an obsessive attachment to a cash box ‘I used to carry about everywhere when I was much younger . . . It went with me in the streets, to bed, and, once, to chapel’. It was ‘a black-and-gold tin box’ with ‘beautifully-fitting trays’. He explains: ‘Early anxiety, rooted in guilt, had manifested itself in fear of loss of my beloved box’ (87). Freudians would see in this attachment to the box with its beautifully fitting trays a strong identification with female genitalia. That Davies is aware of what he is suggesting seems likely as, some forty pages later, he seems euphemistically to imagine the vagina as a money box. The child Rosamund in Nice is said to steal from tips left for lavatory attendants and concealed the coins in ‘that very private money box’ (123). That the box Davies so treasures is a cash box provides a further, teasing conundrum. Freud argues that miserliness is a later manifestation of an anally retentive personality. Davies was known to be frugal, even parsimonious. He leaves the interpreting reader floundering between these two possibilities: which orifice is he alluding to? One feels that Davies enjoys the power of manipulating and discomfiting the reader: draft material will provide further insights. So guarded a depiction of his sexual orientation gives interesting insight into Davies’s very private personality. He would seem to offer a further, cultural explanation for reticence. A recurrent theme in Print of a Hare’s Foot is how Davies’s Welsh valleys conditioning tended to stifle any strong instinctual life and how moving to a strong sense of fulfilled identity involved leaving behind the narrow, claustrophobic models on offer in his ‘cul de sac’ valley. In the introductory chapter, we see how as a boy Davies felt ‘manacl[ed]’ (17) in the itchy Welsh flannel shirt he was forced to wear to chapel. In a neat and (surely) exuberantly fictive balancing episode in the final chapter, an elderly collier’s wife speaks of the days when men, her husband included, ‘used to wear those Welsh flannel underpants with tapes to tie below the knee . . . Striped, they were, bright stripes’ (174). Flannel, for Davies, represents all that depresses the instinctual in Welsh life and from this concluding episode we surmise he is alluding to the forces he sees in Welsh life that stifle joyous sexual fulfilment. His

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autobiographical journey has involved a progressive moving outwards from this base. If the content of Print of a Hare’s Foot is guarded, coded, the polished elegance of its style seems a further controlling device, leaving minimal risk of unintended self-disclosure. Although, from time to time, we experience Davies’s involuntary eruption of memory from the texture of the flannel cloth in the market, the smell of sweet peas which invariably recall Porthcawl, there is little sense of the frustration usually attendant on attempts to recapture evanescent memory, nor discernible grappling with inadequacies and imprecisions of language to embody particular experiences, nor any hint of fear that memory may be betrayed once it is set in the immutable fixative of words. Certainly, there is little sense that Print of a Hare’s Foot offers an unmediated access into an extra-textual world of events. Each of the sixteen chapters, most of which can be regarded as free-standing short stories, show Davies exercising the acquired skills of a lifetime as a short-story-writer imposing coherence, closure, form on the amorphousness of life as it was lived and inevitably introducing a fictive dimension. The first part of ‘Spats and malacca cane’ seems pure short story with its fully created background, extended conversations and rounded sense of character without any attempt on the author’s part to say ‘This is approximately how it might have been’. The remarkable concreteness of detail of the telling and the firmness of the narrative line as it shapes towards the closure of each chapter gives a distinct sense that this is ‘life as short story’.

II My study of Print of a Hare’s Foot was almost complete, when, during a visit to the National Library of Wales, I found my perspective radically altered and my understanding deepened when I unearthed earlier drafts of the work. There are five drafts to which I refer in what follows, all holograph in pencil: the first, loose-leaf, a fragment of fiftyone pages, henceforth referred to as D1 Frag.; the second, complete, apart from occasional missing pages, henceforth referred to as D2; a thirty-five-page fragment of a third draft written in the second volume of Draft 2 and henceforth referred to as D3 Frag.; and complete fourth and fifth drafts (apart from some missing pages) referred to henceforth as D4 and D5 respectively. Each of the three complete drafts contains a

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final chapter, ‘Country’, which was dropped just before publication.11 In the discussion which follows, PHF is used to represent the published form of the book. Before evaluating the drafts, it seems essential to try to formulate what justifiable expectations can be brought to one’s reading of autobiography, a genre which has attracted a great deal of critical interest and comment over the last thirty years. In his essay ‘The autobiographical pact’, Philippe Lejeune posits a contract or pact, whether explicit or implicit, ‘proposed by the author to the reader, a contract which determines the mode of reading the text’.12 The author invites the reader to read with particular expectations. In the rules Elizabeth Bruss formulates in her attempt at a generic definition she includes: Under existing conventions, a claim is made for the truth value of what the autobiographer reports – no matter how difficult that truth value might be to ascertain, whether the report treats of private experiences or publicly observable occasions. . . . The autobiographer purports to believe in what he asserts.13

Barrett Mandel arrives at a particularly helpful judgement: An honest autobiography puts its illusion of the past forward in good faith, not suspecting that it is but one angle of perception. The good faith is the ratification that the particular creation speaks as well as could any creation for the author’s present sense of where he or she has been and the meaning of it all.14

To what extent does Rhys Davies enter into such an autobiographical pact? The title-page declares: Print of a Hare’s Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning and delivers an account of the earlier part of the author’s life. Further, the name inscribed on the title-page as author is the name inscribed in the text as protagonist: included in the text is a letter from D. H. Lawrence to the narrator which begins ‘Dear Rhys Davies’ (PHF 127). The dust jacket of the first edition describes the work as ‘informal autobiography’. In the opening page of PHF, Davies describes the incidents which trigger ‘an unsealing of the past’ and the uncovering of ‘buried memory’. The way Davies attempts to market the work is surely an indication of how he intends it to be read. Just before publication of PHF, he attempted to sell the

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‘Esther’ chapter to The Southern Review. The response thanks him ‘for giving me the opportunity of reading this excerpt from your autobiography’.15 At no point does Davies repudiate an autobiographical pact, as Dannie Abse does in emphasizing that Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve is an autobiographical fiction or Maxine Hong Kington when she includes fantasy sequences in The Woman Warrior.16 Although Davies’s papers give evidence of his care in checking up on historical facts in his preparation of PHF, a study of the drafts brings the reader to the unavoidable conclusion that Davies is a very unreliable narrator in matters which concern his private experience. Any critical analysis has to be formulated on the probability, not the certainty, of where the truth might lie. It is hard to escape the conclusion that some of Davies’s characters may well be fictitious. Section III will explore in more detail the significance of the personality traits that the drafts reveal. As one scrutinizes the drafts, one becomes aware how little concern Davies had, on occasion, for matters of fact or in recording consistent emotional responses to people or situations as the text evolves. In D1 Frag., both he and Idwal climb the pear tree. They are caught by the owner (at this point referred to as Mrs Cook), Davies believes that he has been recognized and ‘badly wanted to water’ but manages to contain himself and drops down into the garden to be told off by the irate woman who later complains to his mother. Davies states that, after this, ‘the unreasonably malevolent dislike of Mrs Cook endured for long’. He records ‘making fun of her’, ‘jeering at her dropsical behind’ and playing practical jokes on her (D1 Frag. 11). There is no mention of Mrs Cook’s death or funeral. By D2, his initial action becomes more culpable – he urinates into the tree – and his emotional response more commendable – after the incident he now accords Mrs Cook ‘an embarrassed respect’ and declares ‘she was no longer a target for derisive humour’. He ends the D2 account of her with a description of her ‘moderate funeral’ (21) when ‘night shift colliers’ (that is, those free to come without inconvenience or loss of pay) turned out to pay tribute ‘to the widow of a collier killed down under’ (D2 20). Davies concludes the section with some general comments about miners’ funerals which can be very impressive when club guilds turn out with their banners. By D4, Mrs Cook’s funeral itself becomes large-scale, resplendent ‘with a panoply of great banners’ (31). In this draft, Davies asserts he feels guilt over the pear-tree theft and urination and is glad to see this impressive recognition of Mrs Cook in a

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large-scale funeral (31). By PHF (44–5) the lady in question, by now referred to as Mrs Blow, has a grand funeral in place of her husband who, on this occasion, is recorded as having died of silicosis in a home over the mountain. Many of the funeral details were originally positioned for quite another funeral, now deleted. Davies himself is penitently centre stage as the funeral moves off: ‘My small presence among the pack of onlookers, most of them grown-ups, was all I could offer’ (PHF 45). Thus between D1 Frag. and PHF there has been a complete turnabout on personal feeling about the owner of the pear tree, very different versions of what happened in it and a magnificent upscaling of a possibly imaginary funeral. Different outcomes in different drafts can suggest that Davies has very little interest in people and how they experience their lives. Although the feeling tone is more consistent in this case, Rhys’s good friend Jim, who is reported as having died of silicosis in his thirties in D2 (91), by D4 (105) meets his end ‘by a fall of roof a few years later [that is, in his teens] and his was the second funeral I went to’. By PHF (75), the focus is again the boy Davies, centre stage, trying to take in the news of the death of his friend and running to the funeral at the last moment. This handling of the material suggests a striking shallowness of emotional response in Davies, in view of the fact that Jim is presented as the person to whom he is closest in his growing up. It could, of course, be possible that Jim is entirely fictional but such a conclusion would have interesting implications as Jim is the character with whom Davies is described as having the closest emotional bond in PHF and its drafts. The lability on matters of fact is pervasive. In descriptive detail, Davies may alter a word to its opposite. In D2 (21), the cemetery at Trealaw is ‘crammed’, by PHF (45) it has become ‘capacious’. After the escapade in the pear tree, Davies declares, in D2 (19), that he has a fortnight’s pocket money docked. By D4 (30), he avers that no punishment was meted out. Through the drafts, one at times seems to see Davies adjusting details on the principle of what he thinks he can get the reader to believe. In D2 (8E), a dressy Gentleman Collier is described as having nineteen pairs of shoes. By D3 Frag. (21) this is reduced to fourteen and is further whittled down to eleven by D4 (15), where even that number is struck out and ‘nine’ substituted. Davies can shift from a position where he can only be reporting what he has been told by a third party to one where he personally endorses the authenticity of a story by having himself been a witness to at least

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part of the proceedings. In D2 (138), Eastern European Franz and a woman journalist achieve sexual congress in the otherwise empty lounge of the 1917 club. By PHF (107), Davies is personally vouching for the happening, as Franz is described as leaving the table where Davies is sitting to follow a journalist from a nearby table upstairs, where the act now takes place in a two-paned telephone box. Further, guilt is a persistent theme in PHF but it may well be one that Davies has made a conscious decision to develop in a literary sense. In D2 this sentence is interpolated: ‘I was not conscious of guilt for a long while, although its strong underswell lay in our religion’ (D2 8A). Yet by PHF (17, 37), we have a very early evocation of how early and deeply his chapel experiences imbued Davies with guilt. As one engages with PHF, one is aware that every syllable is considered, weighed and mostly evaluated in terms of its intended effect on an exactly positioned reader. Draft evidence reveals how Davies is entirely aware of the response he intends to elicit on occasion as he deploys particular tests for the reader. That he means us to read his escapade in the pear tree and his discomfiture in front of Mrs Blow in Freudian terms is made absolutely clear when one discovers that Davies abandons a neutral description of the pears in D4 and inserts a deliberately eroticized evocation of breasts and ‘cool little bellies’ in D5 (53). The episode is invention, on the factual level, as we have shown, but is, perhaps, an attempt to encode a psychic truth of how terrifying – to the point of involuntary urination – Davies found any possibility of heterosexual engagement in a world dominated by authoritarian women. Similarly, although Rosamund’s vaginal ‘money box’ appears in D4 (171), the balancing cash box, very codedly suggestive of Davies’s anality and identification with female sexual equipment is quite deliberately inserted as late as D5 (134–5). One can almost feel the presence of the ironic writer manipulating and then evaluating the reader. It is in the area of sexuality that the drafts seem most revealing. Although Davies seems exuberantly relaxed in discussing sexuality in general terms, he lets no explicit reference to his own homosexuality into the public domain nor anything that could be construed as such by the casual reader. In D2, Davies describes the Gentleman Collier very early in great detail and is clearly something of a homosexual role model for Davies. He is no longer really young but still unmarried . . . He was alleged to possess nineteen pairs of shoes which he polished to resplendency every

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Sunday and treading our streets trimly in a pair of these, wore a slimwaisted mauve velvet smoking jacket, fanciful neckwear and kid gloves long after our evil winter winds became balmy with spring.17 . . . Whatever people said about the dressy Gentleman Collier – one of them ran ‘He’s got his father’s fixtures and his mother’s tastes’ – he paid his bills and kept himself in clean and tidy order.18

By PHF, he is assigned a minimal walk-on part in a scene illustrative of the sort of brawls that take place in the Davies family shop. He is no longer remarkable in his unmarried state but is fully incorporated into ‘the tribe of unmarried young lodgers who, since Victorian days, had come seeking fortunes in that deceptive valley’ (PHF 73). Davies has removed any traces of his boyhood fascination with someone who resembled what he might have felt himself to be. Similarly, he deletes the entire episode of Count Potocki’s trial at the Old Bailey in which he describes the defendant in a sexually appreciative way: ‘from the public gallery, [I] admired him nonchalantly combing and arranging his resplendent hair over his slender shoulders’ (D2 186). He deletes the phrase ‘frustrated queer’ (D2 191) in the description of a strange, kimono-clad landlord he once had, and removes the banal explanation of how he acquired his pubic crabs (D2 250). Further, he suppresses a sentence in a passage where he describes landladies ‘of an advanced degree in bitchiness, keyhole spies gifted with second sight and the eyes of cats. . . . This is a profession lending itself to blackmail’ (my italics). So cautious is he to delete explicit homosexual references that he even changes expletives. He meets by chance a former lodger of his own landlady, now a prostitute, and the surprised woman greets him with ‘Well I’m buggered!’ (D4 225) By PHF (116) this has become ‘Well, bless my tits, it’s you!’ While Davies is eager to extirpate any too obvious traces of homosexual signalling, his interest in sexual matters in a general way is allowed through to PHF. As we have seen, he found the broad sweep of Freudian ideas, particularly on sexuality, which he experienced in the London of the 1920s, personally very liberating. He lauds Freud as ‘the newly canonised redeemer’ of that post-war society which ‘coruscated with intimations of complete personal liberty’ (PHF 101). Freud’s belief in the force of the sexual drive, which he saw as the strongest human motivational force, and his analysis of the neurotic illnesses which can follow a too ferocious repression of it must have seemed to offer carte blanche to promiscuous sex to those early,

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delighted receivers of his findings. In D4 (218), a sentence which occurs in a description of Bloomsbury in the 1920s, and which Davies deletes, reads ‘Another virtue was its discriminating awareness of puritanism, derived from the still-fresh breezes of psychoanalysis’. Freud’s Vienna was the very model of seeming propriety and respectability, yet he found it to be seething with sexual energy beneath the surface. Suddenly Davies sees his chapel-instilled puritanism as no sort of moral or God-given absolute but merely a repressive construct set up against wholly natural sexual drives. He sees Wales as repressed as turn-of-the-century Vienna: In Wales, sex as a subject of conversation was strictly taboo. It was a thing lying under a great weight of flannel blankets and it belonged to the deepest dark. Even among the Saturday night colliers in the pubs, it was not a popular subject for jests. (D2 168)

Retrospectively Davies is able to trace or construct a realistic illustration of a Freudian normative figure in a grandfather whose sexual drive appears both in public repression and impetuous action. A particular section in D2 highlights Davies’s sense of adolescent troubled sexuality within this very repressive society. He has described having his nose broken by stone-throwing boys and being gently ministered to by a young woman (who later goes mad from unrequited love) (D2 79–80). He becomes tormented by nightmares. He experiences ‘a huge red wardrobe of blood-red wood’ whose mirror ‘held evil’ as a ‘tomb’ and ‘woke to a sound of my own bellowing’. In a generally frail state he is sent to convalesce at his grandparents’ house at Ynysybwl. There, the ‘clean religious quiet’ was dominated by ‘the portentous tick tock’ of the grandfather clock (clearly seen by Davies as an objective correlative to his stern grandfather), ‘its rhythm at night less a threat than a solemn warning not to neglect discipline’ (D2 83). The specific area in which he saw that discipline as being required is clear as he describes the ‘genital pendulum and dim weights’ of that clock. The mood is as near distress as we ever get from Davies, and an awareness that Freud closely identified the nose with the penis helps us interpret the wretchedness he is feeling over his nascent sexual identity as he nursed his damaged nose in this oppressive household. The passage continues: My grandfather frightened me. I thought of him and her weighed down under their enormously heavy patchwork quilt night after night

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while the religious ticktocking of the clock went on and on for eternity but such a grey, deacon loving bed was beyond any crystallisation of my imagination. Yet some years after my visit when my grandmother died untimely, he would not wait the customary twelve months of decent mourning and within a few weeks anarchically married a buxom widow on the sly/quiet.19 My mother wept into a Turkish towel when news of the furtive act reached her – a full-sized weeping of all the shocked daughters in the world. (D2 86–7)

From his late adult perspective, Davies knows that those who live by the tenets of puritanism are not exempt from the anarchic forces of their own sexuality. Here, the social control of the chapel cannot constrain the lustful urges of one of its leading deacons. In D2 the connections can be clearly traced between Davies’s memory of his adolescent dismayed but growing awareness of the power of sex, his consciousness of the ferocious discipline that his grandfather exerts over his household, to the extent, the adolescent believed, of the banishing of any carnal contact, and the universal amazement when carnality rampant is finally revealed in this pillar of the chapel. Although the relating of the actual events is carried through to PHF, deletions ensure that these clear points are not made. What is symbolically resonant in a draft largely becomes mere plot or local colour in PHF. But Davies’s strongest interest in Freudian theory seems to be to do with neurosis. In D5 (308) he observes, ‘But pleasure for me was varied people, especially if they were problematical – and who isn’t – or dire with failings or, best of all, ruined’ and indeed he seems to relish the collection of neurotics he depicts, using this term explicitly for several of the characters he presents. It will be remembered that Freud saw sex as an anarchic power of tremendous strength which civilization, as it evolved, attempted to keep in check by imposing repressive defences. Individuals, in trying to accept the strong, inhibitory demands of society, may reject at the conscious level desires that society considers wrong and immoral. These repressed desires still have power, however, and if frustration levels are increased, can break through and result in anti-social behaviour. Alternatively, when instinctual energy is denied outlet, a person’s defence mechanisms can become more and more extreme, resulting in neurotic behaviour. The most striking example presented by Davies is Erasmus, in the final chapter of the drafts, who is rescued by his sister Rhoda after ‘the

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serious adultery’ (D4 281) of his wife and becomes a chronic, chairbound invalid, presumably as a defence against the unbridled nature of sex.20 However, from his chair he researches Welsh folk customs, including the unbelievable ‘Hir Wen Gwd’, allegedly an old Pembrokeshire custom which involved removing a corpse from its coffin just before the funeral and hauling it right to the top of its own chimney on ropes as a sort of farewell to life.21 Davies seems to delight in the imaginative displacement of the phallic and ejaculatory in neurotic Erasmus. We also meet deeply neurotic Eastern European Franz who achieves sexual congress without any social preliminary with a journalist in the 1917 club lounge (D2 139), which, in the next full draft, metamorphoses into a two-paned telephone box (D4 155). Further, Davies sees Esther’s arm’s-length treatment of her devoted Rhondda boyfriend as deeply neurotic. In fact Davies seems fascinated by what becomes of the sexual urge if it is not allowed its proper channels. Rather more darkly, an incident which is recorded only in two drafts,22 when read in conjunction with the story ‘The Public House’,23 suggests that Davies suffered something remarkably like sexual abuse when a child at the hands of a local publican’s spinster sister. The story (which will be read as fiction) communicates something of the boy narrator’s scarcely formulated disquiet and troubled reaction and a sense that trust has been betrayed. In the autobiography rendition, however, this feeling tone is suppressed. ‘Aged eight, how was I to know that Miss J’s insult to dignity would bear decent fruit when I took up a pen to earn a living. She became a short story . . .’ (D3 Frag. 14), he quips. Indeed, in spite of considerable preoccupation with sex in PHF and its drafts, the works are remarkable for the lack of feeling displayed by the main protagonist. Occasionally Davies is an appalled spectator of what feeling can do to others: for example, at a funeral seeing ‘a woman’s exposed face streaming with unashamed tears’ (D2 98); of Esther after she has intervened on her brother’s behalf in a riot ‘[it] petrified, my first glimpse of a woman demolished by emotional excess’ (D2 60). He remembers that his boy self was scornful of Gwilym who allowed himself to be in thrall to their maid, Esther, and, depending on the content of a message that he, Davies, delivers the young man, ‘his swarthy, strong-boned face would either close into blankness or brim into a smile. My wondering contempt grew’ (D2 68). Davies’s version of events in PHF often seems to reveal dissociation from pain. As Davies describes the undoubted torment he

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suffered as a boy in his itchy flannel shirt in chapel being bombarded with terrifying hwyl, it is in a detached, distant way which does not allow himself the reality of the pain. It is as though he is not there in the experience. ‘Adult saints of the past endured a comparable martyrdom’ (PHF 16), he jokes of his childhood Sunday mornings. However, the same period is recorded in stronger language in D2 where a recurrent motif of horror of anything imprisoning is apparent. In Chapter 1, Davies traces the beginning of his whole autobiographical project to a visit to Carmarthen, where, on a visit to the market, he notes with alarm a roll of the flannel which had so tormented him as a child. He also notes in (a none too subtle symbol, immediately deleted) ‘a crumbling old gaol placed warningly in [Carmarthen’s] centre’ (D2 2). He goes back in memory to ‘the dreadful Sundays’ agonies of a manacled boy’, remembering ‘the robust shirt, slipped on by my mother’s capable hands’, before ‘something almost as ruthless (deleted) manacling followed’ (5). He writes of his Eton collar as though it were a neck fetter and declares in a deleted sentence that ‘exposition of the Gospel required such manacled tribute’ (6). He evokes the whole experience of being a child in coldly appalled language: But there is a period of growth when man is a miserably ignorant nobody almost totally unable to free himself of ignoble/ancient fetters, when he is moribund, lost in a dread no-man’s land, incarcerated in a jail of submission to authority of which he has no rational understanding. This happens in early boyhood roughly between the ages of five and twelve [ten]. (D2 7–8)

The horrified images of constraint are remarkably revealing, and although he later refers to the Wordsworthian ‘shades of the prison house’ there is no sense of a time when the world was ‘apparelled in celestial light’ for Davies. In a later passage he writes with admiration of Dr William Price who tried to emancipate people from what Price saw as the blighting power of Welsh chapels and ‘the groaning sounds of guilt coming from within those shackling, imprisoning walls’ (D2 43). Finally, at the point of making life decisions about what work he shall do, Davies sees the colliery as ‘a final jail’ (D2 144). Although in D2 (145) the sentence ‘I was my own interior master now’ appears with coded emphasis, embedded in a paragraph where Davies describes his purchase and treasuring of a rhyme sheet of Blake’s poem

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‘Never Seek to Tell thy Love’, by D4 the words are given unmistakable prominence, becoming the opening sentence of Part Two and a ringing declaration of his sense of emancipation on leaving the Rhondda. A strongly charged recounting of an incident appearing only in D1 Frag. (15), where he was held down and anaesthetized on the kitchen table for an operation on his nose finds him, at times, almost inarticulate with a remembered terror that he cannot bear to formulate: I was laid flat on the kitchen table . . . I can still see the hovering of the mask of wadding, smell the chloroform . . . It was the sudden assault that branded me indelibly, this proof of the illusion of freedom and the will. This death . . . this prison. I struggled against obliteration; was mercilessly held down by the legs and arms.

The idea of being tied down, having to submit to someone else’s authority brings out the strongest language we experience in PHF and its drafts. Many of the early references to jail and manacling disappear by PHF. Interestingly, too, Davies vividly communicates a sense of horror of entrapment in relationships in the way he juxtaposes two situations in D2. He describes himself fleeing from his lady of Porthcawl who had relieved him of his virginity, seeing his ‘fear or self-preservation or whatever’ (D2 138) as being like that of the Eastern European refugee, already considered several times, who, having achieved sexual congress with an almost unknown woman, finds himself bombarded by her attentions until he capitulates into marriage. It is probable that Davies finds the parallel too revealing, and, by D4, the anecdote has been shifted to Part Two, removing all the emphasis it originally delivered about his own fear of being trapped by a relationship. Further, some family ties are perceived as frighteningly constricting. When visiting Carmarthenshire relations, Davies is dismayed by Erasmus and Rhoda’s sibling relationship: ‘His sister’s submissive harkening to him is oppressive to me. They are imprisoned in a tight cramp of family bondage’ (D4 289). Most interestingly, in describing the excitement of the freedom of London, he writes ‘Homosexuality, a term I did not know until I went to London, was not a thing to be shut away [in Wormwood Scrubs – deleted]’ (D4 154). In view of Davies’s obvious horror of any sense of being imprisoned, trapped, not his own person, this gives telling insight into what active homosexuality might have

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felt like for Davies during the period it was illegal. Although some of his changes will have been made for aesthetic reasons, Davies seems aware from his deletions and removal of emphases that such a dread of entrapment could be pathological and he is not prepared to allow something so revealing to stand. As a defensive protection, Davies habitually adopts ‘Now you see me, now you don’t’ stances. As we have already seen, there is a drive to fragment so that the clear message of the drafts may be lost and he is not trapped by what he seems to have said. His title Print of a Hare’s Foot is something of an enigma, never properly explained in PHF or the drafts. M. Wynn Thomas has written that ‘Davies would have us believe that his title refers harmlessly and lightly to the young man who mounted the train at Tonypandy station, already joyously savouring his escape to London. But I don’t believe him.’ Thomas goes on to demonstrate how in his stories Davies uses the hare image in a personally significant way to suggest a creature ‘that knows its life is precarious among the colossal dangers of the open world’.24 But the reader has to accomplish an Isislike search through the stories to work out exactly what Davies intends by the image. Closely connected with the hare trope is the way Davies uses his trunk as a sort of motif symbolic of his compulsion to pack up and move on at regular intervals. In D4 (220) he writes, ‘For years all my worldly possessions lay in the trunk with which I had left Wales. There was a handy firm of van owners, Carter Paterson, who removed it to any London address for a shilling or two – you left a message at the local newsagent.’ By PHF, the trunk is only mentioned as a useful storage receptacle while in London and as the means whereby he smuggles D. H. Lawrence’s poems back into Britain. Any sense of it symbolizing Davies’s need to live his life on the move, his inability to root, has been deleted. Similarly, too, he dismantles what had seemed a very evocative ending to Part One, replacing it with a much weaker and less climactic PHF version. In this D2 version, he sees the mysterious pedlar figure, known as the Wandering Jew, silhouetted against the darkening sky and seems to identify strongly with him: Why didn’t the immortal glazier burdened with that heavy load on his back, take the trams which slanted the habitated winding valleys off the main mountain valley? . . . In the green twilight I saw his square load outlined against the sky as he slowly disappeared/faded away over the mountain crest/brow. Away, away. I had a load on my back too and did not know clearly what lay inside it. I only knew I wanted all the

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pleasures the five senses can provide, especially those of the eye, and that the nourishment around me had come to an end. My box, an oblong metal-bound receptacle of indestructible strength into which several customs officers were to poke, peer and alarm me on one particular occasion, was bought. Passive resistance to my plans of rooting there had won. (D2 147)25

Davies’s nerve seems to fail at associating himself, at this point of departure, with the Wandering Jew, a figure who is accursed and condemned to wander the world until the Second Coming. The parallel may be exact in describing how Davies feels but would not seem to accord with the self-image he wishes to present. The physical load the climbing figure carries corresponds to Davies’s sense of psychological burden; the image allows him to make explicit his awareness that life away from the valley will involve exploration of the nature of his disease. He decides against making any such symbolic ending to his Rhondda experience, dismantles the paragraph and has the Wandering Jew appear at a much earlier point simply as a colourful character. Although traces of Davies’s sense of burden carry through into Part Two in PHF, without this passage, the later references are much less explicit. A further striking motif, fully preserved in PHF, is the Ledger of Old Accounts in his parents’ shop, a six-inch-thick tome in which were recorded the debts of the miners during strike periods, a tracing that went back many years and was even preserved beyond death. Although Davies’s tone is always equable as he describes her, it seems that Davies’s mother was an unrelenting debt collector: ‘Untainted by the romantic gullibility of my father, she swooped drastically now and again’ (PHF 23). In other contexts, he twice uses the word ‘ruthless’ of her (D3 Frag. 20 and D2 5). In PHF (155), Davies shows that he himself cannot allow himself to be in anyone’s debt: I became ashamed of being poor. I would not borrow money even from my parents, and when D. H. Lawrence heard of my plight from a friend and sent a cheque for ten pounds, I stupidly refused it. Yet I did not get into debt. When the lurid red light appeared, I went nimbly to ground, saw nobody, and could spend a month equably without speaking to a soul.

Perhaps the most interesting passage in any of the drafts is one which seems powerfully to encapsulate the characteristics in Davies we

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have been observing in the last few pages. The episode seems to provide a paradigm for the way in which Davies configures his feelings and, as it is deeply revealing, it comes as no surprise that the passage disappears after the second draft: Half the people remained for ever in bad debt because of the long Cambrian strike. But the father of another boy in my class [schoolfriend half deleted] cut his throat with a razor in a shed down their back garden. In aspect, they were the best turned-out family in the place and did not mix with the others: two aloof twin girls with a calm diplomatic poise and their hair put up early, their tall graceful brother with his considered air of not really being present in our noisy/scruffy class, their slender mother always taking trips to Cardiff and wearing something new – her feather boas, esp. a pink one, were especially flaunted and she wore them like an actress (people said it was her mania for costly clothes for herself and three children that brought the disaster) and the quiet father, a clerk in the colliery office who slit his throat from ear to ear in an ivy-smothered shed. I watched the meagre ‘private’ funeral passing below our upstairs window. There was no singing. A few men walked before the hearse, behind it, my fourteen year-old fellow pupil, stepping with a strange, elegant dignity, perfectly dressed. He was the man of his family now. To my astonishment and admiration, he carried a smart, rolled umbrella, planting it on the road with easy resolution. (D2 88–9)

The passage is striking on many points. A man has responded to huge debts incurred by his dependants by killing himself in a horrific manner in an ivy-covered shed, the creeping plant symbolizing the parasitic nature of human relationships, as we see from Davies’s use of it elsewhere.26 As suicide was illegal at this time, the funeral was small and shamefaced. Yet what remains with Davies is not the sense of squalor and pain but the stylish way the son distances himself from it all with ‘his smart rolled umbrella, planting it on the road with easy resolution’. It seems to be the sort of urbane detachment Davies himself seeks to achieve in life and certainly adopts effortlessly in his stories. The horror of being trapped, manacled, imprisoned, the need to be constantly on the move to avoid dependent relationships, the awareness that being in debt is a way of being bound hand and foot in someone’s power, all coalesce into a life solution that Davies seems to see as a luminous positive: detachment. Again and again Davies

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describes himself as remote inside his private lighthouse. What could be more securely aloof, less subject to ‘parasitic’ demands of relationships, and yet more able to give warning of danger?

III How we respond to a particular autobiography may depend on what we have felt about self-disclosure in other, similar works we have read, particularly those of the same period. J. R. Ackerley, literary editor of The Listener and a deeply respected figure in the London world of letters, published his autobiography My Father and Myself 27 in 1968, and although there is congruence with Davies in age, time-scale covered, London literary milieu and promiscuous homosexuality,28 the contrast with Print of a Hare’s Foot could not be more striking. Ackerley’s response to his deep-rooted sense of being an enigma to himself is to excavate as strenuously as he knows how and then to display the results frankly, feeling that in this way either he or others may achieve understanding of his complexities, and increase the general sum of knowledge of the human condition. He writes openly of his sexual relationships, revealing that the Horseguards, who were very poorly paid, were a regular source of homosexual prostitutes. Comparing his frank analysis with Davies’s bland chapter on the guardsman, Caerphilly Jones, almost certainly the nearest he comes to describing a homosexual partner – when he marries, Caerphilly presents Davies with a single-bed mattress – one is very struck by the difference between Davies and Ackerley. Ackerley includes an appendix for the interest of psychologists, in particular, where he outlines two problems of intimate sexual functioning. He strives most earnestly and movingly to penetrate what is inscrutable in himself and to help the reader to do so too. In comparison, Print of a Hare’s Foot comes across as ferociously defended. However, when one compares Print of a Hare’s Foot with the earlier drafts and notes the deletions and revisions, a much stronger sense of the pulse of personality – and, it has to be said, the areas of pathology of that personality – emerges. There are questions which surface insistently. Why did Davies have so little regard for literal truth? Why did he find it necessary to cover his tracks by fragmenting, omitting and editing what had been clear in the drafts? Why does he need to be quite so manipulative and controlling? Why is there dissociation from

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feeling and such shallow depiction of feeling? (For example, what sort of person can describe himself as ‘going nimbly to ground, saw nobody and could spend a month equably without speaking to a soul’ (PHF 155) when he has been driven to this course through the exigencies of poverty?) Why, in his autobiography, as so often in his stories, does he turn descriptions of passion into farce as in his tale of Madame S. and her ‘coq au vin’ lover (PHF 126) or his account of the ardent transvestite couple which culminates in a funeral in drag (D4 240)? Why does he seem to relish voyeuristic imaginings as when he transfers the passionate encounter between Eastern European Franz and his ‘known-by-sight’ journalist from the lounge of the 1917 club in D2 (138) to a telephone booth with two glass panes in D4 (155)? Whence the horror of entrapment? Why is he so obsessed with funerals and why, as in so many of his stories, does he end his own draft autobiography with an utterly macabre tale – in this case of the Hir Wen Gwd custom where corpses are dragged up chimneys (D5 315–18)? Why does he find it so necessary to subvert death? Why is there virtually never a charge of real feeling passing from writer to reader? In Print of a Hare’s Foot the author strongly suggests to the reader a particular authorial persona – an accomplished writer, a dandified bohemian of valleys origin and a discreet homosexual. My contention for the remainder of this essay will be that it assists and clarifies the reading of his work to consider whether Davies was, in the technical sense of the term, a narcissist. My aim here is to illuminate the man and his work while avoiding the sort of reductiveness that implies that Davies has been completely described when particular pathological characteristics have been identified. As technical descriptions of the condition are sometimes expressed coldly and even, seemingly, judgementally, it is important to emphasize at this stage that narcissism is a very painful state, often fixing the sufferer on a point between the Scylla of perceived entrapment in relationships and the Charybdis of loneliness.29 There seems to be general agreement that the state is caused by a particular traumatic event or cumulative trauma brought about by the emotional character of a parent, and causes the sufferer to turn inwards to self-love at the very time he would normally be beginning to develop object relations in the world beyond himself.30 Kernberg finds that: Chronically cold parental figures, with covert but intense aggression are very frequent features of the background of these patients. A composite

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picture of a number of cases . . . shows consistently a parental figure who functions well on the surface in a superficially well-organized home, but with a degree of callousness, indifference and non verbalised spiteful aggression. . . . [We remember how Davies’s ‘ruthless’ mother ‘swooped drastically’ on defaulters from the Ledger of Old Accounts and what an imaginative charge this carried for Davies.] Their histories reveal that each patient possessed some inherent quality which could have objectively aroused the envy or admiration of others . . . Sometimes it was the cold, hostile mother’s narcissistic use of the child which made him ‘special’ and set him off on the road in a search of a compensatory admiration and greatness . . . For example, two patients were used by their mothers as a kind of ‘object of art’ being dressed up and exposed to public admiration in an almost grotesque way. [We remember Davies’s middle-class Eton collar and his Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, mentioned at the beginning of PHF and at the beginning and end of all the complete drafts, an outfit which must have made him remarkable, even grotesque, amongst miners’ children. Davies’s narcissistic grandiosity shows itself clearly in his presenting himself throughout the autobiography as an only child whereas in fact he was the fifth of six. Resplendent in a middle-class Eton collar, he saw himself as ‘seated alone in my mother’s rented pew in a Congregational chapel’, PHF 17.] . . . The greatest fear of these patients is to be dependent on anyone else . . . and the development of a situation in which they do feel dependent immediately brings back the basic threatening situation of early childhood. [We note with what hostility Davies remembered the period between five and ten when ‘in a jail of submission to authority’.]31

Christopher Lasch32 summarizes succinctly the characteristics of pathological narcissism from a comprehensive overview of the clinical literature. He records that sufferers lack a capacity to mourn, particularly their parents, ‘because of their rage against lost objects [people]’ (37). Their terror of emotional dependence and what can be an exploitative approach to other people result in superficial and deeply unsatisfying relationships (40). They tend to be sexually promiscuous rather than repressed, looking for ‘instantaneous intimacy’ and seeking ‘emotional titillation rather than involvement’ (40). They depend on a ‘vicarious warmth provided by others’ while fearfully avoiding dependence (33). As traumatic damage has started in the Pre-Oedipal stage of psychic development, narcissists often have a huge sense of oral deprivation which results in unsatisfied oral cravings

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(33, 37). They have a profound sense of inner emptiness and ‘a boundless repressed rage’ (33). They are terrified of ageing and death (38). How good a fit does the narcissist model seem for what we can discern of Davies? This study has already drawn frequent attention to Davies’s need to be totally independent, avoiding the entrapment he saw in close relationships by being constantly on the move. An inability to mourn combined with a strong sense of repressed anger would explain why he deals so sketchily with his parents in Print of a Hare’s Foot, a chapter on his hero, Dr William Price, taking both the chronological position and the sort of detailed coverage that would normally be given to parents in a conventional autobiography.33 An inability to mourn would also explain the exploitative literary use he made of his friend Jim’s death in the draft material: without the deepening of the emotional process that grief brings, Davies would not have felt constrained from disposing of his friend in a way that made, by his lights, for the best story, spotlighting Davies himself narcissistically centre stage at that funeral. We remember that the climax of ‘A Human Condition’34 involves a bereft husband, after a morning of obsessive drinking to numb his sorrow, gazing into the grave into which his wife’s body has just been lowered before tumbling in on top of the coffin and in so doing parting company with his false teeth. Davies could hardly be argued to be showing much empathy with grief. In considering whether Davies’s sexual relations revealed a similar sort of shallowness, or even the outright promiscuity Lasch includes as a narcissistic characteristic, we have the evidence of David Callard that these took the form ‘of casual, often mercenary, contacts with Guardsmen’.35 While all the time remembering we are gathering evidence for a deeper understanding of Rhys Davies not for a salacious frisson, we need to consider whether ‘vicarious warmth provided by others’ would be delivered by the sort of voyeuristic imaginings already alluded to and more fully worked out in the such characters as Mrs Vine in ‘The Chosen One’ as she spies on Rufus bathing naked through field glasses.36 ‘Unsatisfied oral cravings’ might explain Davies’s interest in a lascivious engagement with food, particularly in his predatory female characters37 and the sort of oral dependence that can be assuaged by cigarettes. Davies was a lifelong smoker and died of lung cancer. ‘Boundless repressed rage’ erupts regularly and unappeasably in his stories where the delivery of savage revenge brings climactic

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satisfaction for a character. Particularly significant in this regard is ‘The Last Struggle’,38 the horrific tale of a miner who is entombed and, although left for dead, fights his way out with amazing pertinacity only to learn his wife has gone on holiday with the insurance money to find herself a new man. He brutally brings her to submission through the power of his will. ‘The Wages of Love’39 shows the merciless revenge her family is prepared to exact of Olga for being a lady of easy virtue while all the while feathering their nests with the proceeds of her life of sin. There is no doubt at all that Rhys Davies understood most deeply what a ‘profound sense of inner emptiness’ felt like and I rate ‘Boy with a Trumpet’,40 in which he engages with that feeling, amongst his very best stories. It seems to me that in the young boy protagonist Davies paints a most compassionate picture of narcissistic pain which, as we have already explored, derives originally from developmental failure in infancy as a result of traumatic experience. A young boy brought up in an orphanage is discharged from the army after a suicide attempt. He is unable to love and he knows his lack: ‘he had no instinctive love to give out in return for attempts of affection: it had never been born in him’ (95). In his inner desolation ‘like a young hungry wolf sniffing the edge of the dark, he howled desolately inside himself’ (97). He declares to a prostitute with whom he shares a house, ‘I have no faith, no belief and I can’t accept the world – I can’t feel it’ (102). He likes being with prostitutes because ‘their calm acceptance of the world as disintegration eased him’. In a moving interchange the prostitute observes: ‘You’re too lonely, that’s what it is.’ ‘Will you let me –’ ‘What?’ she asked, more alert. The light was finishing, her face was dim. ‘Put my mouth to your breast?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be any use, anyhow.’(104)

The boy is not making sexual advances but is asking for succour of his infant needs, never properly nurtured. Turning away in despair from her refusal, he takes the narcissistic option, as did the boy narrator in ‘The Dark World’41 and projects his own inner desolation on the world. ‘He saw himself the inhabitant of a wilderness where withered hands could lift in guidance no more. There were no more voices and all the paps of the earth were dry’ (104).

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But perhaps the most interesting of the characteristics in relation to Davies is that narcissists are terrified at the thought of ageing and death. As a writer shapes his autobiography, imposing coherence and closure, thoughts of that final, unavoidable closure to his life-story can hardly be dodged. Davies manages to side-step engaging with the process of ageing or thoughts of his own death by limiting the time span of his autobiography to the first thirty-five years of his life, although the man who held the pen was himself sixty-eight. Funerals, however, abound in Print of a Hare’s Foot and there are further ones in the drafts; Death, played by a knockabout comedian, is one of the main characters in his stories. An analysis of death and funerals in the stories quickly reveals how little a real sense of the finality of death Davies allows himself. A sister sits up in her coffin and so is not dead; a body is buried with great pomp, ceremony and expense by a guilty widow and then it is discovered her real husband is alive and well; a man’s drinking mates propose to carry his coffin the four uphill miles to the cemetery, but after many refreshment stops en route, arrive without it so there can be no burial; a woman’s fiancé dies away from home and the coffin goes missing so that she never has a body to grieve over; a woman dies and her companion leaves her body sitting in the chair for months while claiming her pension; a man is entombed for a week but fights his way out, by which time his wife has spent the insurance money.42 Again and again there is no body to bury or the wrong body. In this Houdini universe, death and grief can be thoroughly disconnected from each other. Surely, too, there is a denial of death as we see people escape that ultimate entrapment. Psychoanalytic insights do, indeed, offer illumination on puzzling features in Davies the writer. The narcissism hypothesis, moreover, helps to explain another interesting idiosyncrasy observed in Davies – his ability to receive intense and erotic pleasure from what he sees. His description of his early response to ballet is particularly interesting. He describes ‘the barbarically primary colours’ which ‘gave much more than visual impact; colour shot down the throat, attacked the spine, poked up an erotic tumult’ (PHF 109). He further describes ballet as ‘a sweet depravity of the eyes’ and ‘a permissible cultural aphrodisiac’ (D2 157). He makes quite clear the complete primacy the sense of sight has for him when he describes his pleasure in sitting in the Café Royal thus: ‘Although I had long left corporeal adolescence, I listened less at those loquacious tables than received/absorbed visually. I received much less through my ears (deafened) by bullying sermons

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(and exalted oratorios) than through my ever-famished (starved) eyes. (Voyeur?)’ (D2 165). It is worth emphasizing that the bracketed ‘voyeur’ is in Davies’s very own hand. We have already noted voyeuristic imaginings and how Davies transformed an open act of sexual congress into one that could provide a voyeuristic frisson by transporting it from a lounge to a two-paned telephone box. It is possible to surmise that sight stood in for other senses in Davies’s make-up. In his analysis of narcissism, Heinz Kohut43 explains that a child deprived in his early physical needs, both oral and tactile, by a cold or rejecting mother can seek to compensate through the visual sense: By looking at the mother and being looked at by her, the child attempts not only to obtain the narcissistic gratifications that are in tune with the visual sensory modality but also strives to substitute for failures that had occurred in the realm of physical (oral and tactile) contact or closeness.44

Kohut describes a young man who had been grossly deprived of tactile stimulation in infancy but who had been able, ‘early in his life, to shift his need for tactile stimulation to the visual area. . . . the visual stimulation seems to have been sufficient to support the nucleus of a self which in general maintained its cohesiveness’.45 When Davies describes his eyes as ‘ever-famished’ he seems to suggest that he recognizes visual stimulus is as necessary to him as food. That Davies’s fiction writing was necessary to his general mental well-being seems probable. It seems likely that, through writing, painful but amorphous mental states could become more concrete and containable. Anyone knowing Davies’s vulnerabilities would find ‘Fear’ an outright exercise in sadomasochism: it describes a boy cowering in terror in a corridor-less train as a snake charmer soothes an angry rearing cobra.46 Yet one can imagine that by giving diffuse, free-floating anxiety and fear concrete expression their power might diminish. In Print of a Hare’s Foot, Davies describes an awareness that comes his way as the result of an experience of near mystical interfusion in the South of France: ‘My grimy load of undeserved guilt seemed to have gone from my back. Its substitute of self-expression in writing, some of it impure, might always be as weighty, but this was of my own choosing, and it was a full wineskin on my back’ (124–5). Davies seems to be recognizing here a direct equation: the burden of

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untethered guilt has disappeared through a cathartic process of ‘selfexpression in writing’. A study of Rhys Davies’s autobiographical process has, it is hoped, illuminated how much unconscious process and personal vulnerability work upon the picture a writer paints of himself and his society. Crafted by a writer of undoubted ability, Rhys Davies’s central image of a repressed valleys culture is a powerful creation but, as we have shown, it is perceived from the stance of a detached narcissist not through truly objective eyes. Davies makes his repression pervasive and external, symbolized by the shackles of the chapel and the constraints of Welsh flannel, and experiences its shattering in a way he cannot or will not make explicit when he experiences the Beardsley drawings of Salome and the Wilde text. It is probable that these externals were in fact objective correlatives to inner states brought about by the potent combination of Davies’s narcissism and, at the time of his first seeing the Beardsley drawings, his unacknowledged homosexuality. A reader working with a sympathetic model of Davies’s psychology in mind is likely to find her reading of his autobiographical text much enhanced.

Notes This essay was first published in Welsh Writing in English, 4 (ed. Tony Brown, New Welsh Review, 1998). 1

2 3 4

5

6

7

Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning (Bridgend: Seren, 1997). References are to this edition, abbreviated as PHF. Frank Kermode, Not Entitled (London: Harper Collins, 1996), 3. Draft 5 of PHF. National Library of Wales MS 21534C, 307. D. A. Callard, ‘Rhys Davies and the Welsh expatriate novel’, Planet, 89 (1991), 84. This reading, in effect, takes Davies’s sexuality as being a part only of a generally dissident social stance. It might be enlightening to pursue his largely shrouded sexual persona from the point of view of contemporary political/social constructions, cf. Joseph Bristow, ‘Irresolution, anxieties, and contradictions: ambivalent trends in the study of masculinity’, Journal of the Study of British Culture, 3/2 (1996), 165–80. Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, Penguin Freud Library, 14 (London: Penguin, 1990), 214. The drawings were originally commissioned for an edition of Oscar Wilde’s

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8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17 18 19

20

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Salome (Paris and London: John Lane, 1893). It is not clear which edition Davies purchased. Simon Wilson, Beardsley (Oxford: Phaidon, 1983), s. 12. Roy Thomas, review of Print of a Hare’s Foot in Anglo-Welsh Review, 18 (Feb. 1970), 42, 245–6. Brenda Maddox, The Married Man: A Life of D. H. Lawrence (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 471. D1 Frag. is to be found amongst uncatalogued papers in the Rhys Davies archive in the National Library of Wales, 1–51. D2 is to be found in NLW MS 21532B 1, 1–174, and MS 21532B ii, 175–359 (labelled Draft One on the spine). D3 Frag. is to be found at the end of NLW MS 21532B ii, 1–27. D4 is to be found in NLW MS 21533C, 2–292 (labelled Draft Two on the spine). D5 is to be found in NLW MS 21534C, 1–321 (labelled Draft Three on the spine). I am grateful to Dr Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan for her help in locating specific items. Her goodwill and her encyclopaedic knowledge of the NLW archives have proved invaluable. Philippe Lejeune, ‘The autobiographical pact’, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 29. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 11. Barret J. Mandel, ‘Full of life now’, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 66. Letter written on the paper of The Southern Review, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, dated 16 March 1969 and signed by Donald E. Stanford. In uncatalogued private papers in the Rhys Davies archive, NLW. Dannie Abse, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (London: Corgi Books, 1972). Maxine Hong Kington, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (London: Picador, 1981). Dannie Abse prefaces his There was a Young Man from Cardiff (London: Hutchinson, 1991) with an author’s note in which he emphasizes that this work is a companion volume to Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve and both works are to be regarded as autobiographical fiction, not autobiography. D2 8E. D2 8 ff. In early drafts, Davies frequently lists two or three possible words as he tentatively formulates an idea. He often records them, one above the other, without any prioritizing. I have indicated this practice with / in my transcription. Where an alternative word appears in a bracket, I have transcribed the bracket. Erasmus and Rhoda had an earlier incarnation in ‘Time and the Welsh mountains’, a contribution by Davies to Countryside Character, ed. Richard Harman (London: Blandford Press, 1946), 209–19. In this earlier version, Erasmus is described as unmarried with no money and no mention is made of research into Hir Wen Gwd.

136 21

22 23

24

25

26

27 28

29

30

31 32

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Jonathan Ceredig Davies describes this alleged tradition in his Folklore of West and Mid-Wales (Aberystwyth: Welsh Gazette Office, Bridge Street, 1911), 41–2. I am grateful to Emma Lyall of St. Fagan’s Museum of Welsh Life for making further searches and for indicating that this is the only sighting she has been able to trace. D2 Frag. (13–14) and D4 (17). Rhys Davies, Collected Stories, vol. 2 (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996), 62–6. Hereafter CS 2 and similarly CS 1 for Collected Stories, vol. 1. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Never seek to tell thy love’, reprinted in the present volume. Sometimes Davies’s phrasing in early drafts is less than polished. Clearly ‘there’ in the final sentence refers to the Rhondda. Cf. D5 318. ‘Neurosis, often bestowing a compensatory physical toughness, can be the encroaching ivy that brings a tree down. Erasmus might succeed in demolishing Rhoda.’ J. R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself (London: Bodley Head, 1968). Evidence of Davies’s promiscuity is documented in an interview David Callard had with Fred Urquhart where Urquhart speaks of being aware of Davies ‘having a number of “one-night stands”, almost invariably with Guardsmen’. D. A. Callard, ‘Rhys Davies (1901–1978)’, in Dean Baldwin (ed.), British Short Fiction Writers 1945– 1980 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), 68. I am deeply grateful to Jonathan Pope, a psychoanalytical psychotherapist, for indicating, in response to my analysis of the draft material, that Rhys Davies showed many of the signs of narcissism in the psychoanalytical sense. Jonathan Pope’s humane and knowledgeable exposition of narcissism in a personal interview has very much extended my understanding of the state and has encouraged a rounded rather than a reductionist view of Davies. I am further grateful to Jonathan Pope for reading the typescript of this essay, though any errors that remain are, of course, my responsibility. See Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London: Karnac Books, 1993), 51–9, 73–5. Otto F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975), 234. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, 234–6. C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1991) 37–41. In a field in which lapidary statement is rare, I have found ch. 2 of this work, ‘The narcissistic personality of our time’, which contains a careful restatement of mainstream clinical opinion on narcissism, a useful encapsulation. The TLS reviewer finds the chapter ‘careful and subtle in places’. Galen Strawson, ‘Success without and the void within’, TLS (4 July 1980), 759. The reader should perhaps be warned that Lasch’s personal theories elsewhere in this work are more controversial. M. Wynn Thomas makes this point in ‘Never seek to tell thy love’.

Rhys Davies as Autobiographer: Hare or Houdini? 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42

43

44 45 46

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CS 2, 122. D. A. Callard, ‘Rhys Davies (1901–1978)’, 71. CS 2, 258. See, particularly, ‘The Trip to London’, CS 2, 46–53, and ‘The Chosen One’, CS 2, 271. CS 2, 32–41. CS 1, 202–8. CS 2, 93–104. D. A. Callard in ‘One rainy Saturday afternoon’, New Welsh Review, 38 (Autumn 1997), 67–8, shows that the protagonist in ‘Boy with a Trumpet’ is closely based on Colyn Davies, a friend of Davies’s in the postwar years. The fact that there was a life model for this character does not detract from my argument that, in this story, Davies shows a compelling sense of understanding and resonating to the pain of inner emptiness. Callard’s essay is reprinted in the present volume. CS 1, 253. ‘Resurrection’, CS 1, 166; ‘A Man up a Tree’, CS 2, 219–32; ‘Mourning for Ianto’, CS 1, 218–23; ‘Tomorrow’, CS 2, 146–54; ‘Pleasures of the Table’, CS 1, 277–86; ‘The Last Struggle’, CS 2, 32–41. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (New York: International University Press, 1971). Ibid., 117. Ibid., 15. CS 2, 124–7.

‘One Rainy Sunday Afternoon’ D. A. CALLARD

Rhys Davies’s career as a short-story-writer began with publication of ‘A Gift of Death’ in the Spring 1926 edition of New Coterie. Davies was then twenty-five, and had worked, mostly in gentleman’s outfitting, in London for five years, living in lodgings in the far-flung suburb of Manor Park and trying his hand, without much success, at various literary forms. According to his own account, he wrote his first three stories on one rainy Sunday afternoon, a fairly impressive output given their length. All three were accepted and published in subsequent issues of the magazine. Davies’s only precursor in the Welsh short story was Caradoc Evans, whose My People had been published in 1915. In later years, Davies was to make light of any possible influence Evans may have had upon him. In an interview recorded for the BBC1 just before his death in 1978, he said that Evans had been much less of an influence than D. H. Lawrence had been, and that he found Evans’s characters ‘nonhuman’. This echoed the judgement he had made in My Wales (1937): His chief limitation is that he takes the short local view of Wales; he has never really escaped the chapel and is much a deacon in the Big Seat as any of those faithful, grim wardens of the country’s village life and mannerisms. He sees the chapel characters accurately enough, but they do not become recognisable as human forces in that struggle with life which is the basis of the finest fictional art.

Despite this, examination of Davies’s earlier work, much of which he would later disown, reveals some close similarities with Caradoc Evans’s stories. Evans was writing about a rural Welsh-speaking peasantry and Davies about a newly urbanized and industrialized English-speaking proletariat, but at the time the two men were writing, the gap between the two was often a matter of one

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generation. Take, for example, this from the opening page of ‘A Gift of Death’: ‘A strict man was my father, Aunt Ann. Stricter than a preacher was he, and every day was a Sunday for him. Like a Sunday-school too he made life in this house. There’s hated him I have sometimes. Mam was as bad also. A horrible life have I had between both of them.’ And as Aunt Ann made sucking noises of distress in her teeth, she continued, ‘The truth it is. Now that they are dead, judge them I can. An old maid they have made me, and no pleasures have I had. The Bible for breakfast, dinner and supper it’s been. There’s awful religion makes some people.’

In short, religion, preponderant in Evans’s work, was also a major preoccupation of the young Rhys Davies. So much so that, for his part, Evans dismissed Davies as an imitator when interviewed by Davies’s friend, Raymond Marriott, in the mid-1930s.2 But stylistically and thematically, Davies was soon to escape from this particular influence. His main influences were Chekhov and Maupassant, the former being his great master: ‘my god’, as he called him. Through New Coterie he came into contact with many of the short-story-writers who flourished in that heyday of the form – H. E. Bates, A. E. Coppard, Liam O’Flaherty and Sean O’Faolain – though he never expressed much enthusiasm for the work of his contemporaries, with the exception of Joyce’s masterpiece, ‘The Dead’. His earlier stories were experiments in various modes, ranging from an exercise in the style of Maupassant at his most Rabelaisian, ‘Tale’ (1930), to a story like ‘Daisy Matthews’ (1933) in which his own distinctive voice begins to be heard. ‘That instinct to dive, swift and agile, into the opening of a story holds, for me, half the technical art; one must not on any account loiter or brood in the first paragraph; be deep in the story’s elements in a few seconds’, he was to remark in his preface to Collected Stories (1955). The comment is amply illustrated in his opening to ‘Daisy Matthews’: She was a small woman of thirty-three or thereabouts who looked as harmless and neat as a pet white mouse. Her little round eyes, bright and alert, and her swift pattering movements, as though she were always engaged on some nervous quest were mouselike too. But she was not negligible. She had a certain amount of natural prettiness, she read poetry and played her piano intelligently, and she had a passion for

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wearing expensive black furs. Living alone with a housekeeper in her villa on the hill, she had been courted by some of the most respected men in the place, men of position. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to marriage.

This story is typical of the direction which Davies’s mature work was to take. His subjects were usually Welsh women, often in some marital or financial predicament, drawn from the years in his teens when he worked in his father’s grocery shop. Sometimes the subject is an adolescent valleys boy: Davies himself. Occasionally he would choose non-Welsh themes which often, on close examination, prove to be semi-autobiographical. Davies’s first mature collection was his third, The Things Men Do, published in 1936. Despite the title, the book is almost exclusively concerned with the world of women locked in a dignified respectability which, in the face of poverty, drunken ne’er-do-well husbands and general backbiting, they are trying to maintain. The flaws of the early work – the melodrama and a reliance on extreme effect – had been expunged. Extreme situations are sometimes used, but for comic effect, as in ‘Resurrection’, in which a corpse which has been laid out for burial in the parlour inconveniently comes to life: Half a day before the lid was to be screwed down on her, Meg rose in her coffin and faintly asked for a glass of water. Her two sisters were bustling about the room, tidying and dusting and admiring the flowers, and both, after a few moments of terrified shock, looked at the recently deceased with a bitter anger. Once again she was doing something improper. ‘Water!’ stuttered Bertha. ‘Go on with you now. What do you want with water?’ Gathering strength at the sound of her own voice, she went on sternly, as if speaking to a nuisance: ‘Lie back thee, lie back. Dead you are.’

As in this story, the dynamic often revolves around three sisters (Davies himself had three sisters) and, though the Rhondda of his youth was a male-dominated society based on heavy industry and the masculine camaraderie of the pit, it is not really so surprising that he should have chosen to portray this society from a woman’s viewpoint. Leaving aside the female-dominated nature of his family circumstances, as a general assistant in his father’s shop between the

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ages of fourteen and nineteen, his contacts with the inhabitants of the valley would have been principally with women. Men worked, but did not shop. The corner shop was also a meeting place where gossip was recounted, and Davies certainly absorbed a great deal of this. The Things Men Do is also the first volume in which Davies’s wry humour comes to the fore. If he had set out to add fleshly tints to the bleakness of Caradoc Evans’s stories, he also succeeded in adding humour, a quality often absent from Evans’s work. Yet he was not oblivious to the ravages of the Depression, as a story like ‘On the Tip’, about a group of unemployed miners searching a slagheap for coal, reveals. The book also contained a story, ‘Cherry Blossom on the Rhine’, inspired by a visit to Germany made with Charles Lahr, H. E. Bates and a few others in 1927, in which he observed the rise of the Brownshirts. A story drawn from Davies’s travel experiences was to become a constant feature of his succeeding volumes. Davies was thirty-eight when the Second World War broke out in 1939. The war’s onset depressed him deeply. His brother Jack had been killed in the closing months of the First World War, and his death had had a profound effect on him. Categorized 4F (the lowest medical category), he was deemed unfit for the military but not exempt from civilian duties, and received call-up papers in 1941. He was sent to work at the Ministry of Information, somehow engineering a discharge on medical grounds after four months. He returned once more to writing, and the war years, during which there was a huge demand for stories, were to be among his most productive. By a quirk of paper rationing, magazine production was far less stringently regulated than that of books, which led to a plethora of magazines and books which masqueraded as magazines. Yet the war itself had little direct effect on his writing. In 1944, he was to write in the magazine Wales: It is curious (but is it?) what a small amount of writing there is with warfare as a subject. The common rose has evoked a myriad more poems than the most heroic war. Physically, writers are gentle creatures. In the military line, they are akin to Salvation Army soldiers. Guards of the eternal verities of the soul. They have their battlefields, but bloodless ones. Faust is the writer’s Wellington, Hamlet his sergeant-major. The physical destruction of war is antipathetic to that creative instinct which is the artist’s reason for existence. Recently a newspaper leader-writer looked around him asking, ‘Where are our

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war novelists?’, saw none, and pointed out that grand and exciting material was at hand, ready-made for these mutes. Apart from the fact that destruction, while it is proceeding, inhibits the imaginative processes out of which design and pattern are formed, this leader-writer forgot that novelists need perspective to make their work whole and complete. Already various literary documents of value have come out of this war, but they are fragmentary, without finish; inevitably they lack that vision of seeing around, beyond, under and above the gigantic catastrophe. As aesthetic material, the meaning of the war has yet to be revealed. I surmise that it will be at least ten years before some novelist of genius (assuming one exists) will be able to deal with it completely.3

Except for his story ‘Spectre de la Rose’, a gentle satire of the bohemian effusion which oddly flourished in the pubs of Fitzrovia during the austere conditions of the blitz, Davies hardly dealt with the war at all. However, within seven years, he produced three books of short stories, A Finger in Every Pie (1942), The Trip to London (1946) and Boy with a Trumpet (1949), which mark the high point of his storytelling. One tragi-comic figure whom Davies met during these years was a namesake, Colyn Davies. He was an orphan who had been conscripted, then discharged from the army after a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt. At a loose end, he had drifted into Soho and had encountered Davies, who evidently found him attractive, at the Wheatsheaf pub. After boarding him for a while, Davies found him a room in a half-boarding house, half-brothel on the same street as his own. Colyn Davies’s tale was eventually told in one of Davies’s most celebrated stories, ‘Boy with a Trumpet’, the title story of his 1949 collection. When Colyn Davies was interviewed in 1991, just prior to his death, he confirmed that the story was substantially true, with very little fictionalization.4 A similar basis of true life can be detected in many of Davies’s stories: he was essentially a naturalistic writer. The story ‘Fear’, about a young man’s encounter with a strange Indian on a train, actually happened to Philip Burton, best-known as adoptive father of the actor Richard Burton, who collaborated with Davies on several radio projects.5 He recounted the incident to Davies, who turned it into a story. Even so apparently fanciful an exercise as ‘Resurrection’ grew from a conversation which Davies overheard in which two women recounted the apparently miraculous recovery of

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the victim from what appeared to be an irreversible coma. One day, one of the women had come home to find her up and cooking in the kitchen, as if nothing had happened. However, the years immediately following the Second World War saw a decline in the number of magazines which had sustained Davies’s output. The great age of the little magazine had gone in Britain by 1950, never to return. Davies was a fully professional writer, in that he had no income other than that generated by his pen, and no particular skill or qualification to fall back upon. In the circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that he resorted so rarely to journalism and reviewing, but his few ventures into these fields were for personal satisfaction or favours rather than for money. He began to look elsewhere for markets, and one story from Boy with a Trumpet, ‘The Dilemma of Catherine Fuschias’, was published in the New Yorker. In his BBC interview, he cited the opening paragraph as an example of the incisive opening which he believed was essential to a successful short story: Puffed up by his success as a ship-chandler in the port forty miles away, where he had gone from the village of Banog when the new town was rising to its heyday as the commercial capital of Wales, Lewis had retired to the old place heavy with gold and fat. With him was the bitter English wife he had married for her money, and he built the pink-washed villa overlooking Banog’s pretty trout stream. And later he had set up a secret association with an unmarried woman of forty who was usually called Catherine Fuschias, this affair – she receiving him most Sunday evenings after chapel in her outlying cottage – eluding public notice for two years. Until on one of those evenings, Lewis, who for some weeks had been complaining of a ‘feeling of fullness’, expired in her arms on the bed.

All the elements of the story are succinctly conveyed, and terseness and economy of style were to be hallmarks of Davies’s later work. His short-story output was to become more intermittent over the coming decades, though its quality did not deteriorate. The immutable nature of Davies’s talent – having once discovered his genius for the short story he almost simultaneously discovered a style and a set of themes to which he would adhere for the rest of his career – is demonstrated by his inclusion in the 1949 collection of ‘One of Norah’s Early Days’, a story which had been privately published as early as 1935. It does not seem out of place.

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Taxed by his BBC interviewer as to whether he had lost touch with Wales by so long a residence in London, Davies replied that he did not think so. Human nature, he thought, was unchangeable, even though the external circumstances might be different, and it was not external circumstance which interested him. He also remarked that he thought the short story a form principally for young writers, another factor which might explain his small output during the last three decades of his life. In 1955, Heinemann published his Collected Stories, something of a misnomer since it contained just less than half of his vast output. It was well-received, and refocused attention on Davies as a master of the form. In 1958 he published his first collection for nearly a decade, The Darling of her Heart and Other Stories. Previous volumes had credited numerous magazine and anthology appearances of stories: this time there were none. The magazines had nearly all folded. After so long an absence, the quality of the stories was, if anything, higher. Seven of the nine stories had Welsh settings but, unlike the earlier stories, there was a marked move to west Wales rusticity and petit-bourgeois characters. The Rhondda was becoming a fading memory. He did return to it in one of his most cleverly plotted stories, ‘A Spot of Bother’, in which Ormond, a young miner with marital problems, is photographed in a compromising position with a prostitute whom he has picked up on a night out in Cardiff. When a blackmailer comes to his house with the photographs, he relies on the fact that his wife is extremely shortsighted to show her the photographs, passing them off as portrait shots. The blackmailer flees, but is captured by Ormond and his friends. The photographs are retrieved. It is only when Ormond returns to the house that he discovers that his wife was not quite so shortsighted, and had played along with his deception. After she strikes him with a stocking full of dried beans, they quarrel, then an amicable truce is made: The dew was finally off the garden. They recognised it. Ormond crossed to her, took her shoulders, turned her round from the table. She had to be rediscovered. He gave her a shake. A bean fell out of the tightknit curls and dropped into her bodice of flowered voile. Two pairs of tears also fell from behind her glasses. ‘Let me find my bean,’ he begged. Later, tidying with hand-brush and pan, he swept up all the beans from the floor. This was exceptional. In Bylau men are not much addicted to domestic jobs, and Ormond in particular, always out with

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the boys, was not partial to them. There was a vague aspect of compliant reformation about his figure as he stooped to the task.

Davies, so adept at beginning a short story, had a similar talent in closing them adroitly. With the collapse of the British market, Davies began to look toward America as a market and, during the 1960s, he published four stories in the New Yorker, one, ‘The Chosen One’, receiving the 1966 Edgar Award for crime-writing. This was the title story of his 1967 collection, his last book of short stories and one of his best. Whereas most writers experience a ‘falling off’ or diminution of intensity in later life, degenerate into whimsy and cosiness as H. E. Bates did, or fall into repetition and self-parody, the quality of Davies’s work improved as he was released, by literary earnings and legacy, from the necessity of having to publish what he considered to be second-rate work to earn money. In ‘The Chosen One’, a middle-aged spinster, that recurring figure in Davies’s fiction, deliberately goads a young man into killing her, knowing, as an act of revenge, that he will live to suffer the consequences while she achieves release. Odd, somewhat perverse relationships run through nearly all the stories in the book: instead of opting for cosiness, Davies, in his old age, struck out to explore the more arcane human passions which had always fascinated him. In the remaining decade of his life he wrote only two stories, both of high quality. The war, as an event in history, scarcely touched Davies. He was, however, affected by the curious shift of sensibility in the literary world marked by the 1939–45 period. Pre-war, his work was in demand from magazines and he wrote copiously to meet that demand. During the war, the demand was even greater, and his volumetric output increased. When the dust of war had settled, the short story was out of fashion, at least in England, which had never developed an outlet of the stature of the New Yorker to which any up-and-coming young writer in the form might aspire. It was to an American audience that Davies targeted his work in the post-war years, and the exercise was not unlucrative. For his New Yorker stories he received, on average, about $2,000 (£800) each: then about the mean annual wage for a manual worker and sufficient to keep Davies, with his fairly modest lifestyle, in comfort for a year. His style became increasingly terse, in the novel as well as the short story. ‘Cut, cut, cut’ was the advice he gave to writers in his BBC

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broadcast. He was able to move with ease with the shifting currents of literary fashion without being in any sense a camp-follower, simply because he was a consummate professional who recognized that a story must be told in different ways to different audiences. The root of those stories lay in the Hebrew myths of the Old Testament and the Greek myths, both of which he had absorbed at an early age. Human nature might not change very much, but Davies was capable of adapting his method of depicting it to reflect the changing tastes of the time.

Notes This article first appeared in The New Welsh Review, 38 (Autumn 1997). 1

2 3

4 5

Interview with Delyth Davies, broadcast by the BBC in 1978; the transcript is kept in the BBC Archive at the National Library of Wales. R. B. Marriott, ‘Caradoc Evans’, in Wales, 7 (Summer 1945). ‘From my notebook’, in Wales, 2nd series (1943), continued in 4/5 (1944) and 6/2 (1946). Author’s interview with Colyn Davies, August 1991 (unpublished). See Philip Burton, Early Doors (New York: Dial Press, 1969).

‘I Wish I Had a Trumpet’: Rhys Davies and the Creative Impulse J. LAWRENCE MITCHELL

The deep things of Wales belong to the past. (David Jones, The Dying Gaul) In the life of the mind there is no such thing as an unwilling victim. (Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, on Ibsen’s influence on Joyce)

Perhaps no writer in English ever wrote more obsessively about the homeland he had abandoned than Joyce. From his father he had inherited a fascination with the esoterica of Dublin life and lore ‘which distance and the lapse of time served only to increase’, his brother noted.1 He never really tried to escape his past, though he knew instinctively that he had to distance himself from it. As Ellmann put it, ‘Joyce needed exile as a reproach to others and a justification of himself.’2 Davies’s exile was far less an act of reproach – though that element was not entirely absent – and far more an act of selfjustification, of self-empowerment. His first symbolic steps towards voluntary exile were taken while still in school: he chose to study French rather than Welsh and left his parents’ chapel for the established Church (the Church of England by any other name). From an early age, then, it seems clear that he shared the ‘fructive unrest’ of Joyce (Kenner’s felicitous phrase),3 if not the Irishman’s reluctance to return home in later years. A fear of being stifled by what they saw as manifestations of sectarian bigotry – whether in Irish Catholicism or in Welsh Nonconformism – seems to have been a catalyst common to both men. Oddly enough, religion was, in fact, Davies’s first love, perhaps because it offered just those feelings of heightened perception that would later come to be associated with writing. In a letter (undated) to Charles Lahr, Davies refers to his youthful religious experience thus:

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‘At fifteen, a fervent evangelist spent weeks on trying to seduce me to his God.’4 He was clearly fascinated – at least for a time – by such preachers and, as he concedes in Print of a Hare’s Foot (1968), ‘it must have been some hunger deeper than ordinary curiosity’ (PHF 62) that prompted such interest. It is hard to reconcile such a grudgingly given admission of spiritual ‘hunger’ with the subsequent claim that nothing more than ‘base curiosity’ (63) drew him to a ‘little revival’ in Tonypandy in the hopes of seeing the sins beaten out of a penitent. The expedition was, on the face of it, a failure, for there was no great drama, no beating that night. But the image of the solitary observer – the boy ‘alone on a back bench’ – is a striking one that encodes the initiation of Davies, the writer. Here he shatters the boundaries of the familiar – Sunday morning in Gosen Congregational Chapel – for another kind of religious experience in which he figures as witness rather than participant. His spiritual yearning would never find a satisfactory outlet within the confines of the chapel: the burden of guilt engendered by Mr Walters’s fiery sermons, the torture of a Welsh flannel shirt and his inability to sing all contributed to his ultimate alienation. Of course, Davies’s move from chapel to church may – uncharitably – be read as a social ploy somewhat akin to the dandyism manifest in his later adoption of spats and a silver-topped malacca stick; on the other hand, it is plausibly interpretable as a desperate, last-ditch effort to find a spiritual home within conventional religion. The overlap between religious fervour and the creative impulse is precisely rehearsed in the powerful story, ‘Boy with a Trumpet’ where the neurotic and vulnerable protagonist ‘ached to submerge himself in belief and to enter into mystic identification with a creative force’. But, as Theodore Powys – a writer admired by Davies and sometimes even compared to him5 – once wistfully observed, ‘Belief is too easy a road to God’. Religion, especially as practised in the more radical of the Welsh Nonconformist sects, proved to be a disappointment and certainly not the road to spiritual fulfilment. The fictionalized history of that disappointment is inscribed within the pages of The Withered Root (1927), Davies’s powerfully imagined first novel. For Charles Lahr, he characterizes this work as the story of ‘the disintegration of a young man . . . one of those elemental poets . . . whose naturally pagan mind is swayed and ravaged by the fiery worship of these Welsh people who turn Christianity into orgies of abuse’.6 Reuben Daniels – who shares his initials with Rhys Davies – is the hero of the piece, a collier-turned-preacher whose lyrical eloquence inflames religious

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passions throughout Wales. Fanatically intent upon his religious mission, he can find no time for the human love which might have been his redemption. Yet from the novel – as well as from Davies’s autobiographical accounts – it becomes clear that elevated religious feelings all too easily merge with or are transmuted into far more corporeal desires. Caritas – inevitably it seems – gives way to cupiditas. Catherine Pritchards, the devoted worker for Reuben Daniels’s ‘revival’, exemplifies all too well the fragility of the boundary between the two types of love. So aroused is she by Reuben’s preaching that she attempts to seduce him in the back bedroom of the Carmarthen Congregationalist minister with whom they were staying; and her words, if not her gestures, are lifted directly from the biblical Song of Songs: ‘His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh.’7 Reuben’s worldly friend, Philip, had long ago warned him that ‘In some natures the impulse of religious worship is mingled inextricably with the sexual impulse’ (WR 213). Davies is equally explicit on the subject in The Story of Wales (1943): ‘And in the excesses of the religious revivals psychologists discern the erotic impulse wearing one of its agonised masks’ (SW 25). Although Philip had women like Catherine in mind, the events of the novel show the statement to be just as true for men like Reuben. In any case, in the richly cadenced language of the Song of Songs, Davies found inspiration and a linguistic bridge from divine to human love. Once that fact is recognized, it is not hard to see why his first collection of stories came to be entitled The Song of Songs and Other Stories (1927). The biblical canticle provides both an exemplar and a path of escape from a religious into a secular aesthetic. In musical terms, the religious element extends from ‘the old Welsh lullabies and hymns’ (WR 13) Reuben’s mother used to sing to ‘the arias and hymns from the sacred cantatas’ that provided ‘the aesthetic relief’ (WR 212) in Reuben’s evangelistic programme. Eirwen Vaughan, Philip’s sister, is equally constrained by her environment, confined to singing ‘in the little eisteddfod of this and that chapel’ (WR 61), rather than escaping, as was her dream, to sing opera in London, Paris and Rome. Any individual of refined sensibility, Davies seems to suggest, harbours a similar secret longing to escape. His determination to purge himself of the stifling effect of his religious heritage could only have been reinforced by his awareness of ‘the ominous heavy tread of Caradoc Evans’ (MW 216), the black bitterness of whose work Davies attributes to the fact that ‘he has never really escaped the chapel’ (MW

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217). Some critics have assumed that Evans was an influence upon Davies simply because he was, more or less, his immediate predecessor; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Let us return for a moment to the nameless boy with a trumpet. He is an important, if easily overlooked, point of reference – portrait of the artist as a young musician. Why the trumpet? At one level, it symbolizes the boy’s yearning for fame and glory.8 Alas, he is a failure who makes more noise than music; even long hours of practice deny him the facility so casually demonstrated by Harry, the ebullient Guards sergeant, who could, at a moment’s notice, play the ‘Londonderry Air’ ‘unfalteringly, from harmonious lungs’ (BWT 44). More ominously, a trumpet of a different kind – one of those that herald the end of the world – is never far from the thoughts of the unstable boy. He envisages himself blowing his trumpet ‘over the fallen night, [to] waken these dead, surprise them with a new anarchial fanfare’ (BWT 43). For his failure is not limited to music – it extends to human relationships, to life as a soldier and even to his abortive suicide attempt. No wonder, then, that he is at ease among those ‘daughters of the night’ who share his ‘calm acceptance of the world as a disintegration’ (BWT 40) and pleased only by things that ‘belonged to the chaos, the burnt-out world reduced to charcoal’ (BWT 43). The rejection of his advances by a friendly prostitute precipitates his final apocalyptic vision: ‘He saw grey dead light falling over smashed cities, over broken precipices and jagged torn chasms of the world. Acrid smoke from abandoned ruins mingled with the smell of blood’ (BWT 49). While this story brings into focus in a unique way the failed protagonist and the trumpet image, neither is unprecedented in Davies’s work. Indeed, in his BBC interview with Glyn Jones, Davies confirms his recurring interest in ‘a design of human figures battling to rid themselves of blemishes, and, on the whole, failing’.9 The first formulation of this pattern can be found in The Withered Root wherein Reuben Daniels’s life disintegrates around him and death offers a welcome release. The image of the trumpet also occurs here for the first time. Tempted by the secular music of Eirwen, Reuben becomes aware of ‘some other call in his soul, that rang swift and clear as a trumpet-call’ (WR 93). Later, preaching as if possessed, Reuben ‘was but the trumpet that received and issued the Word’ (WR 126). In Tomorrow to Fresh Woods, Penry obscurely exclaims ‘I wish I had a trumpet’ (TFW 201) – in this context, best read as an oblique statement of his otherwise unarticulable desire for creative fulfilment.

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In one way or another, most of Davies’s early works foreground the existential struggle, the individual’s solitary and passionately contested struggle with the self and the world. Paradoxically, Davies saw that he must embrace this topic of human failure in order to succeed artistically. If he is to survive, Reuben Daniels must overcome the temptations of the flesh which threaten his evangelical calling. In Reuben the preacher, we also discern something of the creative artist, the shaper of words who can move a crowd with his ‘glowing but simple language’ (WR 183). His inspiration is necessarily of a special kind, because it has its source in religious belief. From his youth he – like Davies – had studied the Bible and could recite much of it by heart. His poetry is in his preaching and he acts, we are told, ‘like a young John coming from the desert with wild and beautiful words in his hungry mouth’ (WR 182). Yet there remains a tiny corner of his heart responsive to the kind of ‘old Welsh poetry’ for which a Catherine Pritchards had no time (WR 221). Thus the hwyl of the preacher is transformed into ‘the chant of a bard’ who reminds his listeners ‘of the heritage that was their richest possession’ and patriotically enjoins them ‘to keep the poetry of their souls intact from the jeers of foreign lands’ (BWT 184). But in the alien isolation of London, the pathetic ‘Boy with a Trumpet’ re-enacts, on a smaller scale, the failures of Reuben Daniels and many more besides. Just before he left Wales for London, Davies read Madame Bovary for the first time – a novel that would become ‘another scripture’ for him – in the nearby South Wales Miners’ Federation Library. There are three allusions to Flaubert’s masterpiece in Print of a Hare’s Foot; and in the BBC interview with Glyn Jones, Davies recounts Flaubert’s response to being asked whether Madame Bovary was based on anyone he knew. ‘I am Madame Bovary,’ the author allegedly responded. The fact that the story is apocryphal matters less than that Davies so clearly endorses the technique of identification implicit in Flaubert’s response as a solution to the difficult problem of writing about women. Rings on her Fingers (1930) is his own first acknowledged contribution to the genre. In the autumn of 1928, Davies found a pension in Nice where he settled down to write what would become his second novel. I sat occupied with a kind of Welsh Emma Bovary. She was married to a self-satisfied draper and, in romantic misconception of a man, conceived a passion for a high-principled Socialist agitator who indignantly spurned her bourgeois advances. (PHF 134)

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Given the work in progress, it is singularly ironic that his landlady, Madame S., entertained her lover every Friday afternoon in the adjoining room. Despite his penchant at the time for seeing almost everybody as a potential subject, Davies used ‘only a smack or two’ (PHF 129) of this lady for his novel. What sympathetic chord could Madame Bovary have struck in the heart of a teenage Welshman from the Rhondda Valley that would prompt him to naturalize her a decade or so later in a fiction of his own? There were, in fact, many small details in the life-story of the young woman from Les Bertaux with which Davies could have identified – the power of her imagination to outstrip reality, her early religious enthusiasm which turned so easily to sensuality, her desperately constrained life in a provincial fastness and her inexpressible yearning to escape the tedium of daily life for something better. Leon, Emma’s first lover, poses the question that both she and Davies answer affirmatively: ‘Has it ever happened to you to discover some vague idea of one’s own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the fullest expression of your own slightest sentiment?’ (MB 59). When it came time to give the world Edith Roberts, Davies’s Welsh Emma, he did not forget to incorporate little touches that remind us of the French original, such as the ugly hands they have in common. But there is inevitably more of Davies in Edith than of Emma. At twenty-four, Edith is yet ‘an alien bird’ in the family nest for whom the Valley has become a terrible place where she can only endure ‘the monotony, the fearful monotony of the unending weeks’ (ROHF 20). The daughter of a schoolmaster who has himself found refuge from the world in his study of Chinese art, Edith finds intellectual companionship, but nothing more, with Raglan, a would-be-artist and writer who shares at least her ennui. Of course, Edith Roberts was never intended to be the alter ego of Rhys Davies; her transparent identification with Madame Bovary satisfies us on that count. Moreover, Davies’s autobiography yields evidence that points to Edgar Roberts, Edith’s husband-to-be, as something akin to a cruel self-caricature of Davies. This touch is not surprising – in many of his characters Davies betrays a certain degree of self-hatred. Edgar is the only child of a well-to-do draper, long a widower. Initially he is cast as a ‘model boy’ with a febrile body and a sallow, anaemic face of ‘owlish solemnity’ on account of his spectacles. But three years at an English grammar school transform him and at eighteen he returns ‘refined to the point of effeminacy’ (ROHF 51),

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with a lisp, a taste for poetry and silk pyjamas, sporting spats and a pince-nez. Mildly melancholic, he takes long lonely walks in the countryside, swinging his expensive silver-topped walking stick. He also turns to the chapel for ‘aesthetic sustenance’ (ROHF 55), plays Chopin études, reads Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, and eventually joins the local amateur dramatic society (ROHF 50–72). Except for the Somerset school and the pince-nez (which seems to have been borrowed from Mr Samuels, the headmaster of the school Davies actually attended, Porth County School), equivalents for most of these details can be found somewhere in Print of a Hare’s Foot. Chapter 8 is actually entitled ‘Spats and a malacca stick’. In the marriage of the proud and fiercely independent Edith Stevens (whose greatest wish was to escape the confines of her home) to the artistic and sensitive Edgar Roberts, Davies found a way to reconcile two very different aspects of his own complex androgynous psyche. Katherine Mansfield has done something very similar with Mouse and Raoul Duquette in ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’. Is it mere coincidence that, on his first visit to D. H. Lawrence in Bandol, Davies, then deep into Rings on her Fingers, was assigned the very room in the Hôtel Beau Rivage that Mansfield had occupied while writing her story just ten years earlier? Or could it be that he specifically asked to occupy that corner room?10 The evident sympathy shown by Davies towards Mansfield and her work evoked little positive response from Lawrence, who ‘dismissed her stories as trivial’ (PHF 137) and granted only ‘a half-willing salutation to her as a person’ (PHF 142). The reconciliation of Edith and Edgar Roberts follows to some extent the pattern of Madame Bovary, Davies’s fictional model; for Emma, however recklessly driven to a Leon or a Rodolphe, invariably returns to her husband. But until one recognizes that Edith and Edgar are also complementary aspects of their creator, bound together by more than name,11 it is difficult to comprehend fully Davies’s psychic need for a reunion which so happily corresponds to the exigencies of his French model. There seems also to have been an ulterior motive for Davies’s questioning of Lawrence about Mansfield – he was quietly collecting material for his novel-in-progress. Thus the penultimate chapter of Rings on her Fingers, takes Edith to St Ives, Cornwall, where she can reflect upon her future in solitude. However, in the nearby village of Zennor, she bumps into Raglan, her working-class writer-artist friend from the valley, whose fierce rhetoric now sounds uncannily like that

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of D. H. Lawrence: ‘I want to rise again in the new world, I want to rise again clean of this horror that’s creeping on me’ (ROHF 231). Edith soon accepts Raglan’s invitation to join him and his unconventional group of friends in the two cottages they are sharing; and there, in a brief affair with exotic André, she loses her ‘romantic yearnings for imagined passion’ (ROHF 244) and determines to return home to her husband. Clearly, Davies is drawing upon knowledge of the disastrous attempt by the Lawrences and the Murrys to share two cottages in Zennor during May 1916. Since Mansfield’s Journal (1927), which Davies had read and found ‘moving’, makes no reference to Zennor or the events thereof and since the few relevant published letters12 had been severely edited by Middleton Murry, the source of Davies’s information must have been Lawrence or Frieda. It is also worth noting that Rings on her Fingers includes Davies’s first real efforts to stray beyond the boundaries of Wales.13 Given Edith’s eagerness to escape the valley, it is little wonder that she insists on London and Paris for her honeymoon rather than ‘some beautiful and romantic village in North Wales or Cornwall’ (ROHF 97), Edgar’s preference. Davies thus gets to draw upon his recent experience of both cities in some evocative descriptions which confirm the warmth of his own response to the two glittering capitals: [London]: The cold January streets saturated with the warmth of endless people, the opulent soft glow of the shops, the austere stateliness of Westminster. (ROHF 97) [Paris]: That evening they walked out into the splashed lilac and green of the streets, and then the light died entirely from the sky and the city manifested its own sway, and they meandered along the Seine, up to the Ile de la Cité, Edith wanting to remain there forever, as she stood on the Pont Neuf, watching the ripples, the yellow, the crimson ripples, repeated, and blue and lilac, upon the vague river. (ROHF 109)

Davies’s response to colour – particularly evident in the Paris description – reminds us how much of ‘a rainbow wash of the mind’ (PHF 113) these two glittering capitals afforded a writer whose senses had been starved – for all the stark beauty of the mountain slopes – in the industrial greyness of the Rhondda Valley. The sensitivity had always been there, if we accept the fictional evidence of Penry’s willingness to criticize his mother’s clothes because he ‘knew when

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one colour quarrelled with another’ (TFW 203). So while Davies’s claim that ‘in my early work I depended on my memories of realistic life in such places as the Rhondda’ (BBC interview, 1950) can be documented readily enough, it offers an incomplete account of the complex way in which other sources, far more recent, contributed to his fiction. There is always a danger in relying too much upon what a writer says in an interview, even when the responses have been carefully crafted in advance, as were Davies’s in the BBC interview with Glyn Jones. At the same time, such primary data may prove invaluable in providing clues about a writer’s modus operandi which can be verified or refuted on the evidence of the works themselves. Autobiographies are, we now know, not the transparent documents we once assumed them to be. Yet, apart from unpublished materials not always generally accessible, they are often almost the only source of information about a writer’s life and work, as seen from his perspective (an important qualification). We are necessarily at the mercy of the very subject we wish to study, who may be as selective (at best) or misleading (at worst) as he/she wishes. Davies’s contribution is Print of a Hare’s Foot (1969), with the subtitle ‘An Autobiographical Beginning’. The enigmatic title taunts us with the suggestion that, track him as we may, we will never flush the hare from his form, but will have to settle for indirect evidence of his former presence – much as the signature legally registers the man. Predictably, Davies is as evasive as the hare with whom he associates himself, for in this book there is far more about other people and places, famous and humble, than about himself: Roy Campbell (poet), Esther (servant), Caerphilly Jones (soldier), Nina Hamnett (artist), Charles Lahr (bookdealer), D. H. Lawrence (phoenix), Dr William Price (iconoclast), Jim Reilly (boyhood friend) and many more. Nonetheless, Print of a Hare’s Foot yields a wealth of useful information, particularly when read in conjunction with its fictional antecedent, Tomorrow to Fresh Woods (1941), as well as with other less manifestly autobiographical stories and novels. A couple of examples will suffice. Davies recalls how the purchase of an edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome with drawings by Beardsley convinced him that he could not draw and impelled the transition from art to literature: ‘I gave up my dream of becoming a painter and stopped chalking heads on the coloured sheets of thick paper in which our raisins, currants and sultanas were packaged on Mondays. Poems were my compensation’ (PHF 98). Were it not for this single reference to his artistic aspirations, we would be quite

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unaware of them, and might miss the significance of key passages in Tomorrow to Fresh Woods, as well as in ‘Aaron’ and its expanded version, ‘Arfon’. The third of four sections in Tomorrow to Fresh Woods, ‘Penry’ focuses on the youngest son of Roderick Bowen, the grocer. He is a restless young man of sixteen to seventeen who has dropped out of the County School, talks vaguely of becoming a preacher, is reading the European novelists (Balzac, Zola, Flaubert and Tolstoy), and has ‘lately become dressy’ (TFW 193). In short, Penry Bowen presents essentially the same cluster of characteristics later associated with Rhys Davies in Print of a Hare’s Foot. The name, Penry, is a suggestive one, too. Alma Jones, the Western Mail reviewer, ingeniously suggests that it is a play upon Rhys the Pen (i.e. writer). But it is far more likely that Davies had in mind John Penry (< ap Henry, that is, son of Henry), an Elizabethan martyr who is emblematic of the spirit of Wales herself – or rather the spirit of Wales past, from which Davies so obviously draws sustenance in his work. In The Story of Wales (1943), Davies describes this Penry as ‘another of those native leaders born to material defeat and spiritual triumph’ whom the condition of Wales ‘roused to vehement protest’ and who ‘left behind him the beginnings of a tremendous awakening of religious zeal’ (SW 24). Here the martyr is made to sound like one of Davies’s own heroes doomed to failure (such as Reuben Daniels in The Withered Root) – the very reason he was selected for inclusion in The Story of Wales, no doubt! The contrast between Penry and his friend, John Mathias, is not unlike that between the boy with the trumpet and Harry the guardsman – Penry and the boy are sensitive and cerebral where John Mathias and Harry radiate a kind of carefree physicality. And just as Harry plays the trumpet far better than the boy, so John draws far better than Penry. But the subject of their drawing contest is of prime importance: ‘a naked woman lying on a purple-draped couch and gazing ardently at herself in a mirror held by cupid’ (TFW 188). While she ‘yielded her secret’ to John, Penry’s sketch prompts him to exclaim in frustration, ‘I’ll never make a painter’ (TFW 190) and to toss his work on the fire. Implicit in Penry’s failure is, we are to understand, an inability to apprehend natural woman in aesthetic terms as in real life. The point is emphasized in a subsequent scene in which Penry responds far more powerfully to a mysterious unknowable woman in a window than to Shan Mathias, John’s sister, who ‘with her dark clumsy grace, was actual’ (TFW 195). Penry calls the mystery woman ‘Sabrina’, after the

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nymph of the Severn; and this ‘Sabrina’ is, in truth, a fictive construct, a creature of Penry’s imagination whose insubstantiality is emphasized by his description: ‘she sat there in the room like a reflection in waters’ (TFW 195) and ‘she was his Beatrice’ (TFW 225). In effect, she becomes his muse, and soon we find him in the hills, writing poetry to the illusory Sabrina while awaiting the real Shan! At this point it becomes clear that there can be no future for Penry and Shan. He will not marry her nor will he become a preacher, as once planned; instead he will leave the valley for London in order ‘to trace the stream of being to its source’ (TFW 249). Before leaving, however, Penry reads Shan his latest poem, ‘Leda’. Within the narrative, this short piece provides evidence that he has found an appropriate outlet for his creative impulse, in literature rather than in art, if not yet the right genre. There is, however, more to be discovered here, a link between the fictive and the real world: for ‘Leda’ is at once a composition by Penry Bowen and by Rhys Davies, which, together with three other poems, was published in Soma, 2 (September 1931) over the name Rhys Davies. None of the few published poems by Davies can actually claim much distinction; but they serve to remind us of the lyrical element in his early fiction. His own description acknowledges this feature, referring to a style ‘half-lyrical, half-realist’ in ‘Writers of Today’, John O’London’s Weekly (24 October 1952). In many writers there develops an early awareness of somehow ‘being different’ or of ‘not fitting in’ to the community. This sense of difference is to be found in writers of markedly diverse backgrounds such as D. H. Lawrence (an English miner’s son), Katherine Mansfield (a New Zealand banker’s daughter) and Gertrude Stein (an American merchant’s daughter). Out of such difference emerges some strategy for survival in an otherwise hostile world: Lawrence dreamed of Rananim, a heaven-on-earth where he and like-minded friends could ‘live apart, away from the world’; Mansfield escaped to London and Europe ‘where people had roots’14 and Stein to Paris which she saw as ‘the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth century art and literature’. She interpreted her own decision in quasiuniversal terms, asserting that ‘the creative individual had a fundamental need of the experience of another civilization’.15 Davies makes essentially the same point in his BBC interview with Glyn Jones, arguing that ‘Alien people and surroundings seem to sharpen and contract, to crystallise one’s memories and emotions’ and that ‘this flight is not selfishness or frivolity, but comes from a sense of . . . well,

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primary dedication’. Thus his decision to leave Wales must be understood as a step necessary to his creative fulfilment – not as an act of wilful and unpatriotic perversity. Moreover, unlike some of his contemporaries, he had no qualms about returning home from time to time, as is clear from his letters to Charles Lahr, in which negative are offset by positive remarks: ‘Wales blacker than ever. Rain hissing down at the moment, & the hills shaking. However, a big red Welsh fire in the grate & a pot of leek broth on the hob.’16 The homely image of the leek broth recurs in the non-fiction My Wales (1938) where Davies claims, rather extravagantly, that ‘all the Welsh rugby players and boxers are what they are because of this broth’ (MW 261). (Would Tommy Farr of Tonypandy have agreed?) Davies was obviously alert to this pattern of exile and return in his life as in his work, and he has Penry reflect in Tomorrow to Fresh Woods that ‘he did not feel like a prodigal son’ (TFW 275). One of the characteristics of the exile is a kind of melancholy as he looks back on the past. In English literature, we can trace the expression of this melancholy all the way back to Old English, as in ‘The Wanderer’, where it is manifest as the ubi sunt topos; in Welsh it takes the form of hiraeth, which Davies himself defines as ‘the mourning for the loss of the past, the longing of the exile’ (TFW 11). The past was of vital importance to Davies, and there is considerable evidence of his fascination with what he calls ‘its hypnotic, dark spell’ (MW 286). One might point, for example, to his ambitious historical trilogy (Honey and Bread, 1935; A Time to Laugh, 1937; Jubilee Blues, 1938) which moves from the idyllic, pastoral world of the past to the harsh industrial reality of the 1930s. But perhaps the most persistent emblem of the past in Davies’s work is the strange figure of Dr William Price of Llantrisant (1800–93). Doctor, druid, nudist, scholar and vegetarian, Price was a free-thinking activist who scorned society, yet earned a kind of immortality in the valleys for his independent ways, the most bizarre of which was cremating his son. For Davies, he acquired a shaman-like status, regarded both as the embodiment of Wales’s past and as a cipher for the freedom that the future might hold. We first find reference to him in My Wales (1938); then there is a long section about him in the opening section of Tomorrow to Fresh Woods which culminates in the spectacle of his public cremation. Here his symbolic status is made quite clear: ‘Rodney [Bowen; that is, Penry’s father] was dimly aware in his blood how the texture of Dr Price’s being had been knitted with old racial memories – memories which

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had mingled and fermented with the life of today’ (87). Finally, Davies devotes a whole chapter to Price in Print of a Hare’s Foot, detailing his own first encounter with the legendary doctor in the pages of Morien’s History of Pontypridd and Rhondda Valleys (1903) and subsequent ‘ferreting’ for material about ‘the troublesome pagan and rebel’ (PHF 15) in Cardiff, the British Museum and ‘the Welsh bookshop of my friend Will Griffiths in London’ (PHF 15).17 For an individual such as Davies who had opted out of Welsh-language classes at school and who had chosen to live in England, such obsessive interest in a long-dead Welsh eccentric might seem paradoxical, but cannot be without significance. We can only resolve the paradox if we recognize that, for Davies, the combined effects of industrialism and narrow Nonconformism had all but destroyed the Wales he loved – an idyllic pastoral world for which Honey and Bread (1935) was an elegy of sorts. By excavating this past, Davies sought to rediscover ‘the mind’s lost kingdom’. Similarly, Cassie Jones in Jubilee Blues (1938) learns that only by returning to the country of her youth (Plynlimmon) could she escape the trauma of the present in a mining valley where society itself seemed on the verge of collapse. In a variety of ways, then, invocation of the past – whether in the person of Dr Price or other agents – can be seen as a strategy; it allowed Davies to overcome his disillusionment with the turbulent industrial valleys and to draw creatively upon his own memories and deeply felt love of Wales. Penry, his alter ego in Tomorrow to Fresh Woods, speaks for both of them when he declares that ‘I can feel the historic past in my blood’ (TFW 279). The truth is that, despite the criticism of contemporary Wales evident in his early work and the reproaches of fellow-writers like Glyn Jones for leaving his homeland, Davies was never unsympathetic to the patriotism of Reuben Daniels’s hyperbolic claim that ‘the country of Wales had been the country that was nearest Paradise’ (WR 184). Behind the sympathetic vignettes of Dr Price and similarly marginalized fictional characters lies what John Cowper Powys – borrowing a term from Ibsen – called a ‘life-illusion’. In A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), Powys defines it as ‘that secret dramatic way of regarding [one]self which makes [someone] feel to himself a remarkable, singular, unusual, exciting individual . . . It is the shadow of your subjective self’ (PS 82–3). Where Powys identifies strongly with Taliesin, the sixth-century magician, Davies found his life-illusion in Dr Price, a man singularly unafraid to live by his own rules. And Davies peopled his novels with other fearless ‘outsiders’ by whom he

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and his young protagonists might measure themselves – driven men such as Morgans the Bakehouse, who cursed ordained ministers but was diligently copying out the Bible in red ink (The Withered Root), or Aristotle Jones, the herbalist, unbowed by a spell in prison for practising his craft (Tomorrow to Fresh Woods) and still clinging to a plaster-cast of the Venus de Milo, his talisman of beauty in an ugly world. Such men Davies numbers among what he calls ‘The Undefeated’. In his own way, Davies too was one of them. For, though he had long since abandoned the Bible, in exile he had learned, like Penry, that ‘words are my herbs’ and how to ‘sing the Lord’s song in a strange land’.18

Notes This essay was first published in Fire Green as Grass, ed. Belinda Humfrey (Llandysul: Gomer, 1985). Key to Abbreviations BWT = ‘Boy with a Trumpet’; MB = Madame Bovary; MW = My Wales; PHF = Print of a Hare’s Foot; PS = A Philosophy of Solitude; ROHF = ‘Rings on her Fingers’; SW = The Story of Wales; TFW = Tomorrow to Fresh Woods; WR = The Withered Root. 1 2 3 4

5

6

7 8

9

Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber & Faber, 1958), 81. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 109. Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 73. Rhys Davies to Charles Lahr, undated [c.late 1920s] (Sterling Library, University of London). In T. F. Powys, The Soliloquy of a Hermit (New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916). Neville Braybrooke makes the comparison in a 1967 review in The Spectator of The Chosen One, calling Davies ‘a rather similar writer’ on the basis of his deceptively simple short stories. Rhys Davies to Charles Lahr, November 1929 (Sterling Library, University of London). Song of Songs, 5: 13. ‘The trumpet symbolizes the yearning for fame and glory’ (333). J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, translated from the Spanish by Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962). Glyn Jones interview with Rhys Davies, ‘How I Write’ (Welsh Home Service, 17 January 1950). Original transcript in Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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11

12

13

14

15

16

17 18

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Anthony Alpers, The Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1984), 559. He dates the composition of ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’ between 30 January and 10 February 1918. Edith and Edgar share the same initial name-theme which derives from OE ead- = ‘happy, prosperous’. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable & Co., 1927), 67–71. ‘A Pig in a Poke’ and ‘Evelyn and Ivor’ begin in London but quickly move back to Wales. Anthony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking, 1980), 58–9. John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1959), 47. Rhys Davies to Charles Lahr, 4 January 1934 (Sterling Library, University of London). Griffs Ltd, 4 Cecil Court, London. Psalm 137.

Eccentricity and Lawlessness in Rhys Davies’s Short Fiction LINDEN PEACH

In an interview with Glyn Jones in 1950, Rhys Davies observed ‘it seems to me that Welsh writers have been fascinated too much by eccentrics’.1 But few of his contemporaries examined eccentricity in as much depth as Davies or made such extensive use of the eccentric as a narrative trope. The eccentrics in his work are grasped by a subversive idea, as in ‘Conflict in Morfa’ (1931) or ‘The Farm’ (1936); possessed by an obsession, as in ‘A Woman’ (1931), ‘The Bard’ (1931) or ‘The Fashion Plate’ (1949); frustrated in their desires, for example in ‘Arfon’ (1931) or ‘Boy with a Trumpet’ (1949); or associated with mischief, for example in ‘The Chosen One’ (1967). Through obsession or mischief especially, eccentricity is often linked with, or leads to, violence, and even crime. I want to suggest in this essay that, for Davies, eccentricity, invariably challenging cultural norms and destabilizing social conventions, raised questions about how definitions are arrived at. My argument is that his stories are as much concerned with perceptions of eccentricity as with eccentrics themselves, exploring the extent to which dominant cultural discourses determine patterns of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, how far individuals are complicit in definitions of themselves, and issues of exclusion and inclusion. The emphasis upon eccentricity in Davies’s fiction signifies the importance of the concept of difference to his work. For this reason, the role of the eccentric in his stories can be understood best in terms of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogic subject’. The so-called ‘dialogic imagination’, which Bakhtin developed through readings of Dostoevsky, emphasizes the subject’s relation to social, historical and linguistic forces; individuals struggle with persuasive discourses competing for their attention. This is the social situatedness in which Davies’s eccentrics find themselves. The difference between self and

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other in Bakhtin’s work, as in Davies’s short fiction, is maintained through perpetual dialogue between them. In this respect, Bakhtin and Davies’s concept of difference differs from that of the French linguistic philosopher Jacques Derrida, for which he coined the term différance, in which self and other are perpetually alienated from each other. However, any meaning attached to eccentricity in Davies’s fiction, as to subjectivity generally in Bakhtin’s theory of the individual, is provisional. There are important distinctions, though, to be made between the Welsh writer’s eccentric and the Bakhtinian subject. In Davies’s work, some characters, including the eccentrics, are more dialogic, in the sense of being open to interlocutory discourse, than others, and not all dialogues in his stories are productive or have positive consequences. An obsessively religious parent beats his pregnant daughter in ‘A Woman’; an ‘eccentric’ child grows up to strangle a girlfriend for whom he steals from his father’s business; a young man in ‘The Chosen One’ is goaded by his landlady who intends to evict him into killing her; and in ‘The Fashion Plate’ a wealthy woman is suspected of having obtained her wealth by suspicious means. Moreover, the extent to which the eccentric in Davies’s work is also a desiring subject signifies how his characters are invariably embroiled in assessing their social, gendered and sexual relation to others. Thus, a useful starting-point for a discussion of eccentricity in Davies’s work is the way in which eccentricity implies ex-centricity. Although the label ‘eccentric’ is generally applied to individuals and behaviours that seem odd, whimsical or irregular, the word also denotes not being centrally placed. This meaning has particular resonance for a Welsh writer. ‘The Farm’ reminds us that the discovery of coal transformed many of the south Wales valleys into a frontier, goldrush area, which may be at least partly responsible for the violence with which eccentricity in many of Davies’s stories is directly or indirectly associated. Even though he recognizes that ‘the world turns round and customs change’,2 Powell, the male protagonist, is turned by technological and urban development into an eccentric for holding on to the old farming ways: ‘Declaring that only in Him was security, Powell took exclusively to God for some months, walking to chapel on week-days and, if there was no worship, dusting the pews’ (1, 183). Here, as in other stories such as ‘Conflict in Morfa’ where Priscilla pressures the local minister into allowing her favourite cow to accompany her to Sunday-evening service, eccentricity is freed to

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some extent from its association with stigma. It becomes the experience of an intensified subjectivity, in opposition to the limited, fixed meanings and unequivocal purposes of the public realm. This point is well made of Powell himself: ‘Around him the green-and-lilac mountain disposed themselves grandly as of old; he could forget that the far sides of them were whipped raw by the coal industry. Life was still sweet-smelling to him, in spite of cold-stomach worries’ (1, 186). Yet for all its insistence upon separateness, Powell’s linguistic consciousness, opposing the soft description of his side of the mountain to a violent evocation of the mining industry, reflects the internalization of social upheaval. It exhibits what Bakhtin calls ‘multilanguagedness’, drawing its energy not only from the social turmoil of south Wales but the region’s socio-linguistic diversity.3 The Welsh-inflected English of south Wales at this time was ‘multivoiced’ in several respects. Apart from the fact that the influx of English and Irish immigrants did not eradicate the Welsh language, which even for non-Welsh-language speakers continued to influence the way English was spoken, the adaptation of language to meet the new social contexts simultaneously involved mythologizing pre-industrial Wales. Linguistically, industrial south Wales was far more diverse than more popular representations have suggested. Its pronounced sense of ‘multilanguagedness’ is important to Davies’s configuration of the eccentric and of eccentricity since it is in this context that the very notion of difference is rendered provisional and complex. Indeed, the unstable nature of eccentricity as a signifier is the basis of the plot of many of his stories. For example, in ‘The Bard’, Bronwen, through whose shifting perspective the eccentric poet Gwyn is categorized, is initially attracted by his oddness: ‘He had always been a little queer. Never able to master a job properly. In the old, old days he would have been a minstrel and a teller of tales’ (1, 103). Her provisional assessment of him is poetic, and it is appropriate to this view of him that he is a poet. Bakhtin observes that in the poetic symbol the ‘voice is completely alone within its own discourse’.4 This is certainly true of how she sees him during their courtship, his eccentricity constituting the basis of her romantic attachment. She warms to his ‘visionary mobile face’ and the way he ‘made love to her in a style founded on some of the luscious episodes of the Mabinogion’ (1, 104). But, in discussing the difference between what he sees as the unity of poetry and the double-voicedness of prose, Bakhtin describes a process that actually occurs in Bronwen’s view of Gwyn: ‘in the space between the

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word and its object another’s word, another’s accent intrudes, a mantle of materiality is cast over the symbol’.5 Frustrated by his failure to provide adequately for them as a family, she comes to regard him as ‘a good-for-nothing fool’ (1, 105) and a ‘natural clown’ (1, 108), eventually turning on him in an act of violence. The linchpin of each of these stories is speculation as to the nature of eccentricity, and concomitantly ex-centricity, rather than the documentation of socio-economic change. Thus, the focus of ‘The Farm’ shifts from Powell himself to his daughter Ruth who, at times redolent of the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, incurs the wrath and violence of her sisters, partly because she does not pull her weight around the farm, but mainly because they are unable to accept her difference from them: ‘Yet each knew that there was a set-apart quality in their sister that made her like a painted china ornament on the mantelpiece, while they remained usable earthenware jugs on the table’ (1, 181).The social situatedness of Ruth’s difference, like that of Bakhtin’s dialogic subject, is multivalent. It is not entirely clear whether Ruth’s ‘set-apart’ quality is the product of nature – ‘there was on occasion a languid roll to her russet eye, a sensuous drop in her glance, which her direct, unsubtle sisters did not possess’ – or of her own making: ‘She was the only one who liked to be abed of a morning and leave the cows go hang’ (1, 181). Nor is it entirely possible to free our perceptions of Ruth from her sisters’ stigmatizing of her difference; Bella denounces her as an ‘actress’ (1, 181) and they ‘venomously accused her of mischief with the two farm-hands’ (1, 186). Her difference, or ex-centricity, becomes not simply an expression but a sign of multilanguagedness, as well as a reminder that dialogism, as I suggested earlier, does not always have positive consequences: ‘At first she led the two young men an evil dance . . . abusing their home district, where people couldn’t speak much English . . . using words they had never heard before’ (1, 184). The location of eccentricity within a multilanguaged context is an important dimension also of ‘The Chosen One’ which, at one level, might be taken as analogous, albeit somewhat crudely, of Wales–England relations. Although Rufus’s family have lived in the cottage for generations, the land is owned by the eccentric, and possibly anglicized, Audrey Vines who is rumoured to have ‘lived among African savages, studying their ways’ (2, 255) and whose home, containing a copy of The Geographical Magazine and a Tunisian birdcage, suggests a global traveller. Now, she lives alone, and her

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‘funny ways’ (2, 252) include spying on her neighbour and trespassers through binoculars. However, the allusions to nineteenth-century colonialism are part of a wider concern in the story with the nature of definitions, compounded if not confused by its multivalence. One of the words which Rufus pauses over in reading Audrey Vines’s letter to him at the outset of the story is significantly ‘category’ (2, 250). The most overt references to the colonial project are actually to the way Victorian ethnography classified races in terms of physical features. The description of Rufus echoes the way in which black peoples were seen as more primitive and closer to the apes than white Europeans. Like nineteenth-century Negroid stereotypes, he has ‘full-fleshed lips’ (2, 250) and ‘to her eye, the prognathous jaw, broad nose, and gypsyblack hair of this heavy-bodied but personable young man bore distinct atavistic elements’ (2, 257). But the unreliability of labels is underscored by the fact that this is only her view of him. Definitions are frequently the product of rumour, for example, we do not know for certain that Audrey Vines lived among African tribes; or of cryptic innuendo, we suspect that Audrey Vines is English because she is associated with a bulldog. Moreover, definitions are frequently contradicted. Although Rufus thinks of Gloria as his ‘young lady’ (1, 253), Audrey, jealous of her relation with Rufus, denounces her as one of the ‘loud-voiced factory girls’ (1, 253), and a ‘prostitute’ (1, 275). The incorporation of eccentricity as a label within a wider field of categorization of difference that includes nineteenth-century ethnographic practices recalls the earlier story ‘Arfon’ which also concludes with the principal male protagonist committing murder. Arfon recalls Hardy’s child Old Father Time in Jude the Obscure: ‘Odd he was to look at, too. He never grew beyond the stature of a small boy of ten, but his head was ridiculously large, and the expression on his heavy grey face was of such gravity that no one felt at ease in his presence’ (1, 17). And the story is concerned with the extent to which his eccentricity is the result of biology or of the attitudes of others towards him, including his own mother: ‘So silly he looked, her only child, with his paltry thin body and massive head, she shut herself away from him in resentment and became angry at the continual ache in her heart when she looked at him’ (1, 17). Thus, the focus of this particular story is the various narratives into which Arfon’s physical and behavioural eccentricity is placed by members of the community. ‘Arfon’ initially suggests that nineteenth-century physiological theories of race and criminality have determined the way those who

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are physically or mentally different from the norm are perceived. The basis for defining Arfon as an eccentric, as for categorizing particular racial and criminal types in the nineteenth century, is primarily visual; as the teacher remarks, ‘anyone can tell only by looking at him what a big dunce he is’ (1, 19). His mother blames Arfon’s birth on his father’s ‘mad and bad’ blood: ‘Ha, found out I have that your aunt was put away in an asylum and your grandfather in jail for whatnot. Gipsy blood is in you’ (1, 17). But in exposing his mother’s anxieties about her husband’s family line, Arfon reveals her conviction, held even more strongly by the headteacher and the minister, that eccentricity is akin to criminality and that the criminal classes are born and not made. The teacher insists that Arfon ‘ought to be put away in a reformatory or something’ (1, 19), recommending that he ‘didn’t ought to be about where there were women’ (1, 20), while the minister is equally convinced: ‘Dangerous he will become. Murder and violent and dirty work he will do unless the fear of God is put in what he is possessed by’ (1, 20). The trouble with these views, as Bakhtin observes of all ‘authoritative discourse’, is that they do not permit an interrogation of the contexts, cultural, ideological or religious, which give rise to them.6 The story itself, however, engages in more ‘play’ with the teacher’s Darwin-inspired belief that sex murder is the product of a primitive bestiality lurking beneath the veneer of civilization than the teacher does himself. When Arfon’s father beats him, he ‘roar[s] at him, protruding his thick lips and rolling his violent eyes’ (1, 17). These are physiological features Victorian ethnographers associated with criminal and Negroid types, each of which was perceived as being closer to the ape in the chain of evolution than the white European. The ‘primitive’ blood connection between Arfon and his father, first suggested by his mother, is recalled by Dilys’s boyfriend when he attacks Arfon, calling him a ‘bloody little ape-face’ (1, 38). In Hardyesque fashion, the juxtaposition of the primitive and violence with a kind of fatalistic determinism is suggested by the ‘granite boulders . . . scattered like prehistoric monsters asleep’ (1, 41). Because the subject of this story, like ‘The Chosen One’, is the unreliability of signifiers of difference, no one explanation is offered for what Arfon eventually does, and none of them, including Dilys’s own manipulative behaviour which first turns him into a criminal, is entirely satisfactory. Authoritative discourses around labels such as ‘eccentric’ and ‘not normal’ like those of the teacher, as Bakhtin argues, restrict the extent of our interaction with their subject.7

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Structurally and stylistically, the story resists formulating and framing internally persuasive discourse in ways that resist ‘semantic openness’. Thus, there is an obsession with sexuality that is supple, dynamic and difficult to resolve. It is evident in Arfon’s paintings of his imagined people which he perceives in one way and his mother, and later Dilys, in another: ‘He made pictures of them: walking, sitting, lying, naked or draped idly’ (1, 22). At one level, the story suggests that the murder is connected to Dilys’s association in Arfon’s mind with the angels he imagined as a young child: ‘dressed in frilly puce and golden skirts and bodices of shining silks. They were dainty and elegant in their frolics, leaping with fragile grace from branch to branch’ (1, 18). At their first meeting, she certainly brings them to mind: ‘she half-waltzed down the path, with beautiful young movements, her heavy gold hair dripping in the shine of the sun’ (1, 24–5). The murder is overtly sexual; before strangling her, he rolls his face in the fur as if it were pubic hair, and the act itself is redolent of intercourse: Her choking cries were strange and awful. He had never heard their like. His own voice uttered quick, deep sighs, that were like groans, while his chest heaved and sank. Tighter and tighter he pulled the fur. And she went silent, though her body continued to throb beneath his legs. (1, 41–2).

But the trope of sexuality remains unresolved because, as Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky’s work, we are always made aware of other possible connections.8 Before he kills Dilys, Arfon sees her ‘as a symbol he could desecrate in a last triumphant act of power and contempt’ (1, 41), recalling how he felt after the minister’s caning: ‘He would like to do something to have his own back. He would like to see people crying and full of rage at something he had done’ (1, 21). The beating is also recalled as he waits for Dilys before the murder in the description of his veins like ‘knotted whips’ (1, 40). Also typical of Davies’s work, the anxieties expressed about Arfon as a child become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, although Davies alludes to Hardy’s fiction, Dilys’s murder cannot be attributed in Hardyesque fashion to a fatalistic determinism. The story invites us to consider the extent to which Arfon is responsible for his own actions, and how much blame his parents, the minister, his teacher and even Dilys must assume for turning him into the dangerous eccentric it was predicted he would become.

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The elusive nature of eccentricity as a signifier of difference is often based on confusion between eccentricity as a set of attitudes or behaviours one can choose in opposition to dominant discourses, evident for example in Arfon’s withdrawal into his imaginative world peopled by angels, and eccentricity as an attempt by the dominant culture to stigmatize and contain what is different from it. This is especially true of ‘The Fashion Plate’. Our first impression of Mrs Mitchell is that her perceived eccentricity is the result of a number of strategic choices on her part: ‘Her hats! The fancy high-heeled shoes, the brilliantly elegant dresses in summer, the tweeds and the swirl of furs for the bitter days of that mountainous district’ (2, 128). There are clear negative inferences here; the body is reduced to an obscene form of commodification; the reader can almost see the price-tags. But we must remind ourselves that the focalization is the community’s. Davies is surely suggesting, as Bakhtin observes, how persuasive words, such as ‘fashion plate’, become objects of representation.9 But it is possible to have a more sympathetic opinion of Mrs Mitchell; to argue that, faced with the constraints of the community, she refuses to adapt to it, choosing instead to make her external body a display of her inner, less restricted consciousness. However, typical of Davies’s work, we never really discover definitively whether Mrs Mitchell’s extravagance is geared to her innermost sense of self or merely the effects that she hopes to create. Certainly, there is a tension between the illusory world of pleasure that her opulence signifies and the disillusioned reality of life with her seemingly unambitious husband. In this story, as Bakhtin recognized of Dostoevsky, there is unresolved conflict between a subject and another’s judgement, or misrecognition, or even non-recognition.10 In this respect, it is linked to the ostensibly different story ‘Boy with a Trumpet’. The locations of ‘Boy with a Trumpet’, a bleak room on the outer rim of the West End and a partitioned basement space in a street that ‘was not of good repute’, reflect the atomized and discontinuous experience of city life. The story’s major protagonist is the product, to appropriate Davies’s own language, of an ‘unanchored’ past; he is an orphan and an isolate whose personal history includes a failed suicide attempt and an army discharge. But when the boy talks about his ex-centric background to his landlady and the prostitutes with whom he lives in London, he also absorbs it further into himself. Thus, at one level, the boy seems to be responsible for his disconnected sense of being, an impression reinforced by the advice of those around him, which he rejects, that he

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should seek work or study. But, ultimately, as in Mrs Mitchell’s case, it is difficult to know how much of his ex-centricity or eccentricity – sitting at home by himself day after day trying to learn the trumpet, or earnestly struggling with religious treatises – he has chosen for himself, and how much has been imposed upon him. The boy’s inability to master the trumpet, ‘harshly and without melodic calm, he blew it over a world of chaos’ (2, 95), is analogous of his failure to master his chaotic past which, like his ‘music’, he can only conceive as ‘a hideous pattern of noise’ (2, 95). Noise, as an image of a failure to make the notes cohere and as a symbol of interference – noise confounds reception – highlights the concern in this story with eccentricity as signifying a failure to make connections. Eccentricity/ex-centricity, in the landlady, Irish Lil, the brothel and the boy himself, signifies an unhealthy solipsism suggested, for example, by the violet circles painted around the landlady’s eyes. In the boy’s case, this leads to pessimistic visions of the future, based partly on his experience of living with prostitutes and their flirtation with other forms of crime, but also betraying the impact that the Second World War had on Davies himself: ‘I believe’, [the boy] said, ‘there’ll be big waves of crime after the war . . . The old kinds of crime, and new crimes against the holiness in the heart. There’ll be fear, and shame, and guilt, guilt. People will be mad’ (2, 103). The only prostitute with whom the boy is able to make contact is the one ‘who still appeared to observe things beyond this private world of the brothel’ (2, 101). Yet even they are set apart from each other: ‘They had disconnected conversations in her room; she accepted him amicably as a virginal presence that did not want to touch her’ (2, 100). Although she frequently lets him talk to her, as with her clients, she only pretends to listen. Mary Russo observes that, despite the differences between them, ‘the designated “freaks” of history meet up nonetheless in those “transfer” or “relay” points of the knowledge/power network’.11 These freaks, for Russo, include ‘the pervert, the hysteric, the deformed, the “precociously” sexual child, the criminal, and the mad’. Most, if not all, of these categories appear in Davies’s short fiction. However, it is not her categorization of ‘freaks’ but the way in which she associates them, in a Foucauldian sense, with the distribution of social, sexual and political power that has most relevance to Davies’s work. At one level, Mrs Mitchell in ‘The Fashion Plate’ is an example of an eccentric located on the kind of ‘relay’ point Russo has in mind. In provoking

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questions, Mrs Mitchell appears to destabilize the power network within the community, for she ‘was only the wife of the man in charge of the slaughter-house. She was not the pit manager’s wife’ (2, 128). To see culture in terms of discriminatory practices, as Homi Bhabha has argued, involves recognizing the authority which the signs of difference acquire.12 In encouraging us to recognize the discriminatory practices of the community, Mrs Mitchell exposes how much the self-assumed authority of the women who stigmatize her depends upon them. ‘Strange murmurs could be heard; she almost created a sense of fear, this vision of delicate indolence, wealth and taste assembled with exquisite tact in one person. How could she do it? Their eyes admired but their comments did not?’ (2, 128). In challenging the rules of recognition, she disrupts the shared mode of thinking that binds the women together around accepted definitions of the ‘Other’: Yet the work-driven women of this place, that had known long strikes, bitter poverty and a terrible pit disaster, could not entirely malign Mrs Mitchell. Something made them pause. Perhaps it was the absolute serenity of those twice-weekly afternoon walks that nothing except torrential rains or snow-bound roads could prevent. Or perhaps they saw a vicarious triumph of themselves, a dream become outrageously real. (2, 128)

Here, Mrs Mitchell, as a perceived eccentric/ex-centric, mirrors the object of colonial discourse which, as Homi Bhabha maintains, is ‘at once an object of desire and derision’.13 Individual items of her clothing, such as her high-heeled shoes, her ‘lacy gloves’ and her ‘sumptuous’ handbags (2, 128), are not only signs of her femininity but signifiers of female desire and aspiration. As in many texts from the inter-war period written in Wales and England, female sexuality and assertiveness are elided with ruthlessness, and even criminal tendencies. Mrs Mitchell’s attitude towards her husband’s death, their incongruity as a couple, and the gossip concerning herself and Mr Burgess, especially regarding the photograph she had taken, would seem to justify ‘the puritanic dread that such lavishness and extravagance could not be obtained but at some dire cost greater even than money’ (2, 129). The image of the lobster is a reflection of Mrs Mitchell’s perceived ruthlessness: She fetched from the kitchen an oval dish in which lay a fabulous scarlet beast. Cruel claws and quiveringly-fine feelers sprang from it. At

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first Nicholas thought that Mr Mitchell must have brought it from the slaughter-house, but when his excitement abated he remembered they came from the sea. ‘How did you get it?’ he asked, astonished. (2, 132)

Ordered specially because no one else wants them, the lobster both confirms and redefines Mrs Mitchell’s ‘otherness’. Cruel and unusual, it is simultaneously the product and the eccentric of the sea, mirroring the ‘outrageously real’ that one might imagine emerging from one’s subconscious. The lobster, like the community’s view of Mrs Mitchell, reflects the wider anxiety of the time about sexually assertive and independent women. This in turn led to some eccentric definitions of women, not least that of the ‘amateur prostitute’ which first emerged in the 1930s. In Prostitution (1931) Gladys Mary Hall maintained that sexually promiscuous women may be thought of as ‘amateur prostitutes’ because the men with whom they become involved usually pay for their satisfaction: ‘the payment takes the form of a gift, or a dinner, or a motor run; the episode appears less commercial and suggests more of passion and spontaneity than a similar episode with a professional prostitute, and for this reason is usually infinitely more attractive’.14 This concept is complicated in many of Davies’s stories by the perceived impact of Nonconformity on the communities which are described. The emphasis in ‘A Woman’, for example, is not so much upon the titular protagonist Jane’s behaviour as on that of her parents, who deliberately define her as a ‘slut’, and her boyfriend Samuel Evans who, more unwittingly, treats her as an ‘amateur prostitute’. The first part of the story, redolent of Caradoc Evans’s stories about rural Cardiganshire, establishes the eccentricity of Jane’s parents, who ‘see the impulse of evil in every action of the flesh’ (1, 44), and of her upbringing. In their obsession with the sins of the flesh, ‘it seemed to her that her father and mother had had a mischief done to their minds, it seemed to her that they had not entered into realisation of the marvellous things that were under the sun’ (1, 52). But the eccentric in Davies’s stories, as signs of multilanguagedness, frequently assume a role comparable to that which Bakhtin assigned to the fool or the rogue.15 Thus, the eccentric, in interacting dialogically with others, frequently unveils them. The dangerous eccentricity of Jane’s parents, evident when her father beats her while she is pregnant, defamiliarizes not just their behaviour but Samuel’s too. The fair to which he takes Jane is a symbol of the ex-centric, the illegitimate and the

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carnivalesque. But instead of inverting the norms of society, it amplifies them, as the tent displaying ‘Secrets of Paris. Adults only’ (1, 49) demonstrates. Samuel’s courtship of her is revealed as a project of manipulation. Intending to have sex with her, he obviously believes that he must pay in advance, and that she will oblige him when she has been paid. Hence, he insists on taking her to a fish and chip restaurant where he implicitly reminds her what this is a payment for: ‘all through the meal Samuel held her legs between his knees and grinned, so that she was ashamed and afraid that people would see what was going on under the table’ (1, 48). At the fair he takes her on the roundabouts, inadvertently reinforcing the trope of payment in trying to win her a purse at the hoopla stall, and, for their journey to a quiet bay, he hails a barouche. The use of eccentricity, as in ‘A Woman’, to defamiliarize a range of behaviours and render them eccentric/ex-centric returns us to a question posed in many of Davies’s stories, who are the real eccentrics? But the eccentric as a narrative device only functions in this way because of the dialogic nature of Davies’s short fiction, especially the way in which the difference between self and other is maintained in a perpetual dialogue between them. This, together with the sociolinguistic complexity of the Welsh valleys, means that eccentricity for Davies is itself a fluid concept. It is impossible to disentangle it from a wider concern in his work with the way definitions, discriminatory practices, and authoritative discourses frequently deny the innate provisionality of all meaning. Thus, the examination of eccentricity in his stories is invariably based on resistance to externally imposed labels. His interest in the conflict between ‘othered’ subjects and labels, such as ‘eccentric’, ‘Not normal’, ‘actress’, and ‘fashion plate’, that turn them into representative objects is illustrative of this. No doubt his status as a Welsh person, and his homosexuality, determined the level of his engagement with language and definitions. But it is not too farfetched to assume that they also helped forge his interest in the ‘secret otherness’ within ourselves as well as others. As vehicles for the expression of this interest, the eccentrics in his stories are not always perceived positively. In some stories, such as ‘Conflict in Morfa’, this secret otherness within is entertained as delightfully subversive, rendering fixed meanings and customary practices suddenly uncertain and provisional. But in other stories, it is overtly dark and destructive, finding expression in violent, even criminal, behaviour, or, for whatever reason, stimulating this kind of behaviour in others.

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Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14

15

‘Rhys Davies: Interview with Glyn Jones’, New Welsh Review, 35 (1996/7), 11–15, 15. Rhys Davies, Collected Stories, 3 vols., ed. Meic Stephens (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1996), vol. 1, 180. All subsequent references are to this edition and volume and page numbers are incorporated in parentheses in the text. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (1981; rpt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 325–6. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 329. Ibid., 343. Ibid., 346. Ibid., 347. Ibid. Ibid., 349. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 94. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 114. Ibid., 67. Gladys Mary Hall, Prostitution: A Survey and a Challenge (London: Williams & Northgate Ltd., 1933), 30. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 403.

Lawrentianisms: Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence JEFF WALLACE

The friendship between Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence in the late 1920s is by now well documented. Late in 1928 Charles Lahr, owner of the Progressive Bookshop in Holborn and publisher of the avantgarde magazine New Coterie, wrote to Lawrence in France informing him of the proximity, in Nice, of the young Welsh writer. An invitation to the Lawrences’ hotel in Bandol resulted, and this became the first of three visits. Davies, it seems, experienced certain staple features of an encounter with the renowned yet now ailing novelist. He was lectured on how Lawrence alone had paved the way for novelists of the younger generation, particularly in respect of the breaking of sexual taboos; and he was reminded of the ‘dark magic’ which Welsh or Celtic cultures needed to acknowledge and develop in themselves, as an antidote to Nonconformity. He witnessed the passionate quarrels between Lawrence and Frieda, including one in which he himself figured as the object of sexual jealousy, after a morning aperitif with Frieda had taken rather longer than it should have done.1 A form of intimacy was, one senses, quickly established; Davies managed to distinguish himself by falling asleep during a reading of Lawrence’s poems Pansies. David Ellis, the biographer of this later period of Lawrence’s life, claims that Lawrence ‘had a special feeling for Davies because he came from a mining village in the Rhondda and had never had much money’ (at Christmas 1928 Davies presented Lawrence with a silk dressing gown, for which he received another lecture on the importance of sound economy).2 He accompanied Lawrence on a trip to Paris in March 1929, an abortive attempt to publish and distribute a new cheap edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and later, on his return to London, smuggled into the country a complete typescript of the officially blacklisted Pansies.

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These accounts, taken largely from Davies’s intriguing memoir Print of a Hare’s Foot, tend to lead to the assumption that the friendship with Lawrence left an indelible mark on his writing. Lawrence became, argues David Rees, ‘not only a friend but an important living literary influence on the younger writer’.3 Certainly, Davies’s recollections seem to provide evidence for this, even if they also hint at the fact that the influence lay as much in Davies’s textual encounter with Lawrence before the meeting as in the reverberations of the friendship itself. Davies writes of his excitement at the prospect of meeting ‘the great man’, whom he imagined as a ‘remote, inaccessible figure, brooding and isolated in his later esoteric rages and fumings’ (PHF 127). As he informed Frieda, ‘we’ younger writers in London looked ‘eagerly’ to Lawrence for direction. Davies expresses admiration for the early short stories of mining life, such as ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ or ‘Daughters of the Vicar’, but reserves special comment for the first Lawrence novel he read, Women in Love. This novel had ‘gone to my head and – the author’s preferred objective – bowels’; in its affirmation that ‘men and women must be reborn’, the novel had ‘struggled through from an old, slack, dying world’ (PHF 127). Also, just prior to their first meeting, Davies had apparently read The Rainbow and confessed to feeling ‘overpowered’ by it.4 Significantly, however, Davies could not work up the same enthusiasm for Lawrence’s ‘beloved . . . bible, banner and trumpet’, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, finding it ‘too evangelically uxorious and humourless for me’. Nevertheless, the general debt is recorded elsewhere, thus: ‘to me, he seemed to be the only writer who was crystallizing the needs and fumblings of my generation – and in vehement language. He talked direct to, and among, my generation; though older and matured he was not detached.’5 Added to these gleanings, the broad lines of comparison between Davies and Lawrence – early life in a mining village; flight, through art and intellect as well as physical displacement, into an émigré condition; fictions, both about the life of industrial communities and about women confronting and defying social conventions – make the search for Davies’s Lawrentianism almost irresistible. At the same time, however, the tracing of literary influence is a precarious if not also in some senses a discredited process. Michel Foucault’s analysis of discursive formations has left us wary of the dependency of our histories of thought and ideas on various forms of continuity, such as tradition, development, evolution and ‘spirit’, as

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well as influence itself. The latter, Foucault argued, ‘provides a support – of too magical a kind to be very amenable to analysis – for the facts of transmission and communication’; it ‘refers to an apparently causal process (but with neither rigorous delimitation nor theoretical definition) the phenomena of resemblance and repetition’; it ‘links, at a distance and through time – as if through the mediation of a medium of propagation – such defined identities as individuals, oeuvres, notions, or theories’.6 This, it is true, is one of those moments at which Foucault performs a more-than-passable imitation of an unreconstructed empiricist, denying us the reassurances of continuity in the name of an unfeasibly precise description of discursive ‘events’. His emphasis, however, is not on the total ‘rejection’ of forms of continuity, but on disturbing the ‘tranquility’ with which they are accepted, and this in turn because they invariably act as ‘privileged shelter(s) for the sovereignty of consciousness’.7 Here, in Foucault’s scepticism about the sovereignty of the human subject, lies my starting-point for a comparison between Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence. The question of how Lawrentian was Rhys Davies is compelling enough in its injunction to search Davies’s fiction for the appropriate echoes and parallels, and in this short essay I can hope only to sketch out some possibilities for further development. But a prior question asserts itself. How Lawrentian was Lawrence? How secure is our conception of the Lawrentian? It has been a commonplace of the Lawrence critical tradition to assert a peculiar proximity between the man and the work, the life and the writing – peculiar, that is, within the context of a poetics of modernist impersonality. An important and original strain in recent gender criticism has, however, begun to question how far D. H. Lawrence coincides with the Lawrentian we think we know. In 1982, Angela Carter’s essay ‘Lorenzo as Closet-queen’ reflected on the ‘strange case of D. H. Lawrence’, focusing in particular on the lingering gaze of his narratives (The Rainbow, Women in Love) on women and their clothing.8 Lawrence, Carter concluded, not only ‘enjoys being a girl’, but develops the more complex position of a textual transvestism, holding in tension both a love of female impersonation and a fundamentally masculine, idealizing and objectifying gaze. Linda Ruth Williams’s Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence (1993) uses Carter’s essay as a springboard for a more radical and searching analysis of Lawrence’s fear of the scopic, whether expressed in his notorious distaste for cinema or in the wider

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philosophical framework of a critique of the overbearing dominance of the visual sense in modern western culture. Williams emerges with a Lawrence ‘against-himself’, one whose texts play so transgressively with the boundaries of sexual identity that the ‘metaphysical bedrock’ of those female/male differences we associate with ‘Lawrence’ begins to crumble. Lawrence’s work turns itself ‘inside out’, and Lawrence becomes ‘less consistent, less wholesomely sexually-integrated, rather more perverse and therefore rather less straightforwardly sexist, than both he and traditional criticism of him would have us believe’.9 It is not my intention in this essay to reflect upon the sexual orientations of either Rhys Davies or Lawrence. I am simply content at this point to have unsettled any readily available interpretative frameworks from which a definition of the ‘Lawrentian’ might be deduced. If Lawrence is viewed as the ‘priest’ of a phallic, heterosexual love, of a kind which is particularly threatening to female autonomy and subjectivity, then Rhys Davies’s ‘Lawrentianism’ can look like the poetic mask behind which shelters Davies’s discreet homosexuality. But if Lawrentianism does not coincide with Lawrence, still less might it have any direct bearing on our understanding of Davies himself. ‘Influence’, in other words, is a complex textual affair, and even when my own conclusion points to differences in the treatment of sexuality between these two writers, this should not imply a distinction between two discrete or ‘sovereign’ forms of sexual subjectivity. What, then, do we understand about or assume by the ‘Lawrentian’? I want to begin by looking at two of Davies’s works which have had this label attached to them: the novella ‘A Bed of Feathers’ (1929) and the novel The Red Hills (1932).10 In the latter case David Rees observes that ‘in its contrast between nature and “civilised” life, and its message of liberation through sex, this is perhaps the most “Lawrentian” of Davies’s novels’.11 ‘A Bed of Feathers’ contains at least three recognizably Lawrentian plot scenarios: close sexual rivalry between three people, notably in conditions of domestic cohabitation; one of the three protagonists who figures as an Other or interloper, disrupting the previous dynamic; and a pit death and subsequent lodging of the body in the home before burial. Sixty-year-old Jacob Jenkins, church deacon and collier, brings his new, ‘rose-red blooming’ twenty-five-year-old wife Rebecca back to the valley after a long holiday in Cardiganshire, to the scandal of his sister Ann and half-brother Emlyn, with whom he shares his home. Ann leaves, but Emlyn remains, soon to enter into a relationship of intense physical

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attraction with Rebecca, as the strained barrenness of her marriage with Jacob makes itself felt. Eventually, Emlyn and Rebecca consummate their relationship, and an atmosphere of claustrophobic suspicion develops as Rebecca, made bold by passion, becomes less guarded in her behaviour in the presence of Jacob. Then Emlyn is killed in a pit roof fall which is engineered by Jacob. The body is brought home, and Rebecca cannot hide her distress. In the story’s final scene, Jacob sternly summons Rebecca to the bed of the dead man, where he tortures Rebecca, first by uncovering the wounded head of the corpse, then by insinuating, through Bible readings and a prayer for God to ‘visit her with more punishment if thou wilt’, that Emlyn had confessed his relationship with Rebecca as he lay dying. However, Jacob had only discovered this by finding a belonging of Emlyn’s in his bedroom. Jacob embraces his wife, her face uplifted ‘like a shining hot flower’, and the story ends: ‘She was his now.’ This brutal revenge tragedy seems more explictly naturalistic in its treatment than anything comparable in Lawrence. We might recall the murder of Banford in The Fox, through the uncannily deft tree-felling of Henry Grenfell, or the convenient textual disposal of Mrs Hepburn in The Captain’s Doll. These deaths have an unlikely quality which wrenches them out of the everyday and into the mythical, where some supra-rational logic appears to holds sway. Similarly, while Rebecca’s keening as the body is brought back home recalls the vivid realistic intensity of the parallel scene in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, the significance of the death begins and ends as the desperate vengeful act of a single impotent man. In Lawrence’s story, by contrast, the redrafting of the final section describing Elizabeth Bates’s response to her husband’s body has been seen to constitute a crucial Lawrentian moment, signifying a shift from the earlier realistic mode to the later, more abstract and experimental ‘vision’.12 Unable to produce the conventional death-scene drama – ‘she strove to weep and behave as her mother-in-law expected’ – Elizabeth instead experiences profound existential apprehension of the unrelatedness in life of her husband and herself: ‘Elizabeth felt countermanded. She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him.’13 This failure of touch or human connection thus fulfils the logic of the earlier sections of the story, which subtly detail the human realm poised in abeyance between industrial technology and the natural environment, like the woman who stands back to let the train pass, ‘insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge’.

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Davies’s story is perhaps most ‘Lawrentian’ in the strength and symbolic intensity of the passional impulses, whether sexual or murderous. As so often in Lawrence, Rebecca’s sexual frustration is the sign for a wider stifling of human potential and creativity – ‘life’, in the Lawrentian–Leavisite lexicon: Yet she craved for something else, she knew, gazing at her handsome face in the mirror, that some other wonderful thing was escaping her. And as she realised that, a strained and baffled look would come into her searching eyes and she would cross her pressing arms over her body, a half-strangled moan escaping her distended lips.14

In Lawrence, too, the entwining of the murderous and the sexual impulses occurs in suffocating domestic circumstances presided over by the old and/or pious – Jacob Jenkins being, of course, both. Rebecca becomes accustomed to finding Jacob sitting in his armchair, ‘his face fixed into a contented leer’, or asleep with his mouth open and ‘a thin line of saliva . . . descending from it’: ‘Her husband’s back suddenly roused a fury of hate in her – she could have clawed in venom the coarse thick neck above the cotton muffler’ (BF 61, 65, 67). This physical repugnance in association with the deadly routine of the home and conventional family life is similarly borne in upon the Cockney Flo in ‘A Pig in a Poke’ (1931), when in a desperate attempt to attract Ianto out of his evening routine of careful and laborious reading she lays her head in his lap, to find him looking down at her ‘in horror, his round lipless mouth wide open’.15 In Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy, reinventing the earlier Daughters of the Vicar, such repugnance reaches its apogee in the household of the rector, himself an ‘utter unbeliever’ at heart, and the central figure of the grandmother or ‘Mater’, slobbering her food and engaging the family in evening crossword puzzles ‘invented by Satan himself’. Yvette’s dismay centres on the house which must inevitably be washed away – ‘the whole, stagnant, sewerage sort of life’ – in the final mythical scene presided over by the gypsy she has halfencountered, half-dreamt. So too Rebecca in ‘A Bed of Feathers’ passes each day in an ‘ecstasy of dreaming’, characterized by scenes of dreamlike physicality with Emlyn – the washing of his back, or Emlyn’s caressing of the whippet, ‘soft and glossy as the back of a swan’ (BF 63) – as well as her own troubled, sensual dreams. In these realms of the passional and subliminal, Davies seems to confirm Philippa Davies’s view that, ‘like Lawrence before him’, he

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emphasizes ‘the power of the unconscious to affect human behaviour’. The critic places this concern with the unconscious in the framework of an emphasis on individualism over social realism: ‘the essential dynamic of society for Davies is not the struggle between classes but the struggle of the individual for self-determination’.16 However, that this might be a partial view both of Davies and of the Lawrentian is dramatized in the novel The Red Hills. Iorwerth has left the valley to live as a recluse in his hut in the hills, mining his own seam of coal. He meets Virginia, a singer who has travelled widely and has had a variety of affairs and marriages (‘ “Good Christ”, observes Iorwerth, “Why, you’re a bit of a Moll Flanders!” ’17). The Communist, utopian Iorwerth is deeply attracted to this woman of sexual candour and worldly experience, and she in turn to ‘this strange young collier, who was so unlike anyone she had met in the place before’ (RH 65). Their intense relationship disrupts the long-standing affair between Iorwerth and Ceinwen, the young working-class woman from the valley, and scenes of conflict are again played out in close domestic spaces, including Iorwerth’s hut, in which the women are clearly competing for the favours of Iorwerth (and not without some narrative irony: ‘Meet each other!’ he announces). Equally, the relationship scandalizes the valley community, and prime amongst them Virginia’s father and her stepmother Naomi. Naomi eventually confronts Virginia, the latter spellbound by the repressed violence which surfaces in the older woman’s physical attack – ‘She knew that all the complicated and tangled emotions of Naomi’s barren life, rigidly subdued until now, were straining savagely at their leashes’: The woman crouching over her was translated into another consciousness. She breathed of the powers of death. In her eyes was the sightless rigidity of an approaching dissolution. Virginia, glaring on her face still stretched menacingly above her, was horrified to see a thick dribble of saliva emerge from Naomi’s mouth and drop slimily over her chin. (RH 135–6)

Dissolution comes literally in the form of a stroke. Virginia flees to live with Iorwerth in the hills, and they are the victims of an attack led by Mack, Ceinwen’s brother, with whom Iorwerth has a history of conflict. The level is blown up while Virginia and Iorwerth are in the tunnel; they are trapped and apparently entombed, until rescued by a group led by Virginia’s father after a tip-off from Ceinwen. In a final

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scene, after a highly charged parting from Ceinwen, Iorwerth and Virginia emerge out of death into ‘a beautiful sunrise’, a world of grandeur which, Iorwerth claims, will give them ‘a new quantity of life’, though he adds, in response to Virginia’s desire to ‘crush the world to her breast’, ‘also “A bouquet of stinging-nettles” ’ (RH 250). There is again here a fascinating recycling and distribution of Lawrentian motifs. In its conclusion it is a resurrection narrative, of the order of those later Lawrentian models which culminate in The Man who Died or, indeed, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There must be a lapsing-out from life, and a rebirth through warmth and touch, sun and sexuality. It is perhaps with a weary familiarity that contemporary readers find that it is only Iorwerth who can truly touch Virginia: She knew herself alive. Their physical marriage was exquisitely adjusted . . . (H)e belonged to the massive loins and barbaric breasts of these mountains: he was a god come out of legend to take her where she lay dreaming of gigantic embraces . . . Between the great quiet hands of the mountains she came to new life. (RH 113, 177)

This is a reminder, perhaps, of the all-too-programmatic transfiguration of women by potent, godlike men in Lawrentian narratives from The Plumed Serpent onwards. However, in its handling of the Ceinwen–Iorwerth–Virginia ménage, the novel also harks back to earlier Lawrentian narratives in the sense that issues of sexual choice are inevitably entwined with class as well as with individual self-fulfilment. Iorwerth’s rejection of Ceinwen for Virginia has overtones of Paul Morel’s break with Miriam and his affair with the worldly and progressive Clara Dawes in Sons and Lovers. Miriam must be rejected because her pious, spiritualized sexuality embodies order and the familiar, conventionalized scenario of marriage, home and farm; although Paul’s love for her is so acute as to be painful, there is more at stake for Paul than the physical relationship alone. Thus, as in Ursula Brangwen’s rejection of Skrebensky in The Rainbow, the decision transcends any sense of ‘liberation through sex’. Clara, like Lydia Lensky, or Paula in the story ‘Love among the Haystacks’ (which again features a murderous rivalry between two brothers), represents the woman from outside, the foreigner who will expand the horizons of her lover’s world; Virginia, Rebecca and Flo, in the aforementioned works of Davies, are similarly migrant figures. Bodies here are inseparable from the cultures in which they are encountered.

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‘But I wasn’t fine enough for you.’ Ceinwen’s concession of an affair which is also a class struggle lost is then developed revealingly in Iorwerth’s reflections: He saw now that she understood something of her failure, instinctively. She was raw and submerged: she was the victim of a racial decadence she could not overcome. Her physical splendour, ironically, had been spared. But he was shocked when he thought of the squalid possessiveness she had revealed at times and that made her physical beauty a dangerous snare. (RH 243)

Davies’s first readers – or those who, like him, had read The Rainbow and Women in Love with attention – would undoubtedly recognize the terms in which this analysis of an industrial working-class culture is conducted. It is not only in the word ‘instinctively’, attributing to Ceinwen an unconscious awareness of her condition whose metaphysics are dictated by the narrative voice. It is also in the seamless transition from a social and economic to a ‘racial’ condition in which the working class is figured as degenerate, ‘decadent’. Descriptions of the valley community in The Withered Root and The Red Hills are vivid in their Lawrentianism: the ‘raw’, ‘grey’ and ‘ugly’ pit buildings, the colliers ‘squatting’ on their heels on street corners, ‘joyless and grave’ (WR 111), the dismal reminders of a popular culture of distraction – cinemas, fish and chip shops, pubs. Thus Iorwerth notes ‘the squalor attendant on the labour of making the Valley a place of civilized industry’ and speculates idly on ‘a new life in an undevitalized country’ (or, ‘was that romantic nonsense?’). Impelled by a Communist idealism, Iorwerth however begins to ‘lose faith’ after the General Strike of 1926, and is led to a recognition of ‘the mistake of trying to love humanity’, and a repulsion from the ‘masses’ of modern class society which is even more precisely and unmistakably Lawrentian: But the great mass of enchained humanity moves on its stony road to death like a procession of lumbering beasts to slaughter, trudging on together acquiescently. Such were these colliers, Iorwerth brooded in his rage, such too, on their different roads, were all the other classes of people in the land. Massed humanity – how hateful and repulsive it was! He had made the mistake of trying to love humanity, of trying to idealize a raw mass of protoplasmic stuff moving blindly over the deserts of Time. (RH 56)

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The political defeatism of these representations is secured by their eugenicist generalizations of racial pattern; it is difficult to expect conscious, revolutionary activity from ‘a raw mass of protoplasmic stuff moving blindly over the deserts of Time’. From the differing perspectives of Reuben’s evangelicalism and Iorwerth’s political secularism, Davies offers a simple spatial pattern of attempted resolution: each periodically ‘descends’ into the despoiled valley, and then retreats back into the hills where – if only one can get high enough – purity and transcendence can be found: He ascended one of the hills with quick breathless energy, his limbs bathed in a glow that gave him an acute sensation of eternal power. Arrived at the top, he sat down and stared below into the Valley. Jesus Christ! The world was grey and lost, sunk in apathy. (WR 111–12)

Individual self-fulfilment and a romantic, revitalizing landscape are closely entwined, yet the prominence of issues of class in Davies’s fiction cannot be brushed aside by appeals to those powers of nature and individualism which are figured as forms of escape and resolution. ‘The English countryside is so lovely; the man-made England is so vile.’ Lawrence’s formula seems to resonate through his social and industrial critique, and it seems equally appropriate to apply a Welsh version to Davies’s early work. It is, however, through this concept of ‘nature’ and its apparent centrality to the Lawrentian that I want to offer, in the final section of this essay, some disentanglings of Davies and Lawrence, moving out into some wider reflections on some of Davies’s later fictions. In Lawrence, the truth is that the nature–culture dichotomy is never as clear as the above suggests. From The White Peacock onwards, and certainly in the animated discussions about knowledge which characterize Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, nature is a problematic, contested concept, consisting of ways of knowing rather than a single domain of object knowledge. Thus, the brightly coloured idealism of Davies’s hills is not to be found in Lawrence, who of course hated ‘uplift’. In contrast to Reuben and Iorwerth therapeutically imbibing the beauty and purity of the hills as an antidote to the degradation of the valleys, we might place Alexander Hepburn in The Captain’s Doll, dragging Hannelle up the glacier as an exercise in the idealization of nature. With a ‘dark flame’ over his face, Hepburn announces that he ‘hates’ the mountains, for

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‘their snow and their affectations’, the latter phrase prompting Hannelle to seek further explanation: ‘Yes’, he said. ‘Their loftiness and their uplift. I hate their uplift. I hate people prancing on mountain-tops and feeling exalted. I’d like to make them all stop up there, on their mountain-tops, and chew ice to fill their stomachs. I wouldn’t let them down again, I wouldn’t. I hate it all, I tell you, I hate it.’18

Thus, in a sense, Lawrence’s Hepburn condemns Davies’s Reuben and Iorwerth to a lifetime of icy wandering. To take the function of the hills in The Withered Root and The Red Hills as an instance of Lawrentian ‘nature’ would be, perhaps, to replace a popular conception of the ‘Lawrentian’ for the true article. As I have tried to suggest, Davies had in his early novels proved adept at reproducing a discourse of the Lawrentian, notably in the form of a metaphysics which could explain individual character through racial pattern. But to whom, and in what way, do we attribute such discourse? Returning to Foucault’s scepticism about the nature of ‘influence’, especially where it might concern questions of essential subjectivity, what exactly is it in Davies that we are seeing as Lawrentian? My proposal here is that in the late 1920s ‘Lawrence’ existed for Davies as a language, whose currency was high and whose metaphysic of liberation through nature and the passional impulses seemed a particularly appropriate model for the young novelist whose formation was in some respects so similar. As Davies matured, however, these Lawrentianisms became, palimpsest-like, reworked, written over, displaced. In an important act of distancing, Davies in his memoir confesses that Lawrence probably thought him ‘prosaic and too rational’. In a related manner, Meic Stephens records the view of Davies’s contemporary, Glyn Jones, to the effect that Davies’s fiction lacked only ‘philosophy’, or a unifying principle which would hold the characters together in a credible imaginative world.19 We recall Davies’s unease at the ‘evangelically uxorious’ and ‘humourless’ Lady Chatterley’s Lover, chiming with his own recorded view that philosophizing in fiction must be kept ‘incidental’.20 However we now evaluate Lawrence’s fiction, it seems undeniable that the power of invective, of a diagnosis unfolding, helps provide its compelling narrative momentum. Given his reluctance to philosophize, it is perhaps unsurprising that Davies’s strength lay in short fiction, and that his novels are characterized by longueurs, an

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abiding sense that they, and their readers, are waiting for something to happen. Yet, on the other hand, to be released from Lawrentianisms of a certain kind is to be liberated into other possibilities. My final example from Davies’s fiction is the popular novel of 1944, The Black Venus. This novel is generally regarded as something of a departure for Davies, turning to a satirical and even whimsical treatment of a historical theme after the engaged contemporaneity of the ‘industrial’ trilogy. The novel returns to the issue of sexual choice, though in a highly conventionalized setting. Olwen Powell, the scandalous and progressive heiress of T} Rhosyn and ‘loveliest daughter in Ayron’, sets the dubious sexual morality of her community against itself by reviving the old rural tradition of courting in bed. Condemned by the vicar, Padrig Pryce, as an instance of how Ayron people were ‘still labouring under the shadow of the dark ages’, Olwen in fact reinvents the tradition as a radical way of ensuring that the modern woman marries the right man.21 We think back here to the experiences of Rebecca and Flo, thrust unceremoniously into the harsh life of a collier’s wife and soon bitterly disillusioned. Following the short and dramatic Part One, in which Olwen undergoes a Christian ‘trial’ to interrogate her virtue, the substantial Part Two, in typical Davies manner, settles into a repetitive pattern of Olwen’s encounters with suitors. Olwen yearns for her angel figure, ‘a young man with a starry glisten not of this world’ (BV 88), but these are in short supply in Ayron. Nevertheless, the novel’s intriguing resolution manages to incorporate two of the suitors, each with distinctly Lawrentian overtones. Although she has not met the young Rhisiart Hughes, Olwen falls in love with his ‘image’, preparing us for what is in effect a pastiche Lawrentian, whether of Lawrence’s own making or of an earlier Davies Lawrentian such as Iorwerth: He was an outlaw from social habits, he refused, not from pride but from natural decorum, to enter into association with people. He poached. He did not gabble. He bathed in the stream. His natural good-looks were not hampered or blemished by inside meannesses. He was a love-child. He did not care if he earned no money . . . No wonder he had the reputation of being dotty. But oh, how she longed for a lover who was beautifully dotty. (BV 127)

The suspicion that Davies is here playing with Lawrentian frames of reference is further reinforced (as far as one can ever be sure of

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Davies’s comic tone) when, on Olwen’s first meeting with Rhisiart, he produces a ferret from his rough tweed jacket (‘not with love or petting but with perfect understanding of the small pale beast’, BV 136) and proceeds, Pan-like, to play his flute for Olwen – ‘The little music flicked her senses delicately and as quickly vanished; it came nearer, fled down her blood and left it quivering’ (BV 138). Olwen sleeps deeply, without positioning the crucial bolster in the bed, and in the morning Rhisiart is gone. Soon after, Olwen discovers she is pregnant. By contrast, Olwen’s other Lawrentian suitor, Noah Watts, arrives to do his courting with overcoat, bowler hat and umbrella. He is a creature from the stable of Lawrence’s Mr Massy in ‘Daughters of the Vicar’, round-bodied and with a habit of ‘quacking’, but, unlike Massy, with the most progressive ideas for the Church and for his own ministry once his ordination is complete. He writes poems about women in history, and pronounces that the Church is ‘wrong’ and holds ‘foreign views’ (BV 120). Olwen’s analysis of her dilemma has, at least, the virtue of clarity: ‘Why did not Rhisiart have Noah’s agreeable mind? Why did not Noah come through the window in Rhisiart’s body?’ (BV 143). In the final Part Three, some thirteen years later, Noah announces his arrival at T} Rhosyn on a powerful motorbike which ‘ripped its way through the winter dusk’ (BV 168). Having refused to marry Rhisiart, Olwen had married Noah principally for her father’s sake. They live in separate homes, but an atmosphere of enlightened communication and good humour prevails, he the ‘modernistic preacher’ of great renown, she Ayron’s ‘most important inhabitant’, a councillor devoted to improving public health through the installation of a new sewerage system for the area. Like Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, Olwen has in effect retained her spinsterhood (‘since women sometimes achieve the feat of eating their cake and having it’). T} Rhosyn is a commune of four women: Olwen; Miss Eurgain, the old music teacher who once met Liszt; Lizzie Pugh, the hunchback and black sheep of the village; and the servant Catrin. There is also Olwen’s son Owain, who with Noah forms an ‘ideal’ son and father partnership. The ‘ideal’, however, is not the convention, for in Noah there is no ‘father’s domination of possession, the clank of an owner’s chain’, while the boy treats him with ‘direct, unretreating’ respect (BV 173–4). In that the implicit subject of The Black Venus is the nature and impact of modernity in Ayron, a key feature of this modernity is a

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distancing from the sexual relation, and the biological essentialisms it might carry, as the source of liberation and personal fulfilment, and a move towards the envisioning of new forms of community or social grouping, including alternatives to marriage and the family unit. Davies’s ironic distancing from Lawrentianism is crucial to this. Reflecting back on her liaison with Rhisiart, Olwen notes that ‘her mind had been taken away from her. A sorcery had been worked in her’ (BV 180), reminding us of Kate Millett’s observation on the tendency of Lawrentian men such as Henry Grenfell to ‘anaesthetise’ their women.22 By contrast, Olwen has befriended Lizzie Pugh who, despite her ‘warped maliginity’, was trustworthy, ‘because, though in a twisted way, she looked truth in the face and did not crumple up before the terror. She had burned away from her mind all sentimental fats and gross humbugs’ (BV 127). The Black Venus is illustrative of a move, in Davies’s later fictions, towards an exploration of these unconventional groupings, usually involving women. They are not idealized: Lizzie Pugh’s hectoring, underdog presence causes as much conflict as it has always done, while in the distinctly Gothic novel The Dark Daughters (1947) the rebellion of the three sisters against their father’s patriarchy involves a secluded, brooding cohabitation which threatens to tear them all apart. But, as Olwen Hughes implies, these new social formations are ways of questioning the ideological stranglehold of the sexual relation alone: ‘the angel partner never comes down to earth’ (BV 199). Even in Davies’s posthumous novel Ram With Red Horns, the very Lawrentian opening scenario in which Rhonwen murders her unfaithful husband with a deft flick of a walking-stick is followed by a probing if inconclusive exploration of the kind of relationship that is possible between Rhonwen and her husband’s mistress. In this essay the ‘Lawrentian’ has figured as a semi-mythical concept, produced as much by critical discourses around Lawrence (and Davies) as by the evidence of Lawrence’s texts themselves. The fragility of this concept may serve, I hope, to justify the use, in conclusion, of an anecdote which has a somewhat apocryphal and uncertain status, but which for me highlights the key features of what has been a tentative first attempt at developing a comparison of Davies and Lawrence. In 1985 a biography of Dorothy Brett, a member of Lawrence’s circle in the 1920s, included her recollections of two nights, in a cottage in Ravello, on which Lawrence visited Brett’s bed, and on each occasion apparently left without anything of consequence having occurred. Of the second occasion, she observed:

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I tried to be warm and loving and female, he was I think struggling to be successfully male; it was a horrible failure. Nothing happened until he got up and stalked out of the room turning on me and saying, ‘Your pubes are wrong,’ which left me ashamed, bewildered, miserable. After hours of self-torment, misery, I slept.23

Here is an emblem of a sexual fundamentalism and essentialism combined. In Lawrence’s alleged, cruel remark, the interested critic might trace those tendencies in the later fictions, not simply to underline the transfiguring power of sexuality, but to encourage speculation upon which kinds of sexuality were right and which were wrong, culminating, of course, in the triumphal Lady Chatterley’s Lover. While Lawrence’s fictions took it upon themselves to construct distinctions, for example, between the still and the frictional, the vaginal and the clitoral, in female sexuality, Davies’s work took an ever more discrete turn. His concerns became, not just with the ‘strong women’ so often noted by his critics, but with new kinds of social relation, within which new forms of identity might take place. To legislate upon the forms of sexuality itself had better be left, as he might have put it, to the evangelists.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8

9

Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning (1969; Bridgend: Seren, 1998), 136. Hereafter cited as PHF in the text. David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 461. David Rees, Rhys Davies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), 7; the phrase is echoed by Philippa Davies in her edition of Davies’s last, posthumously published novel Ram with Red Horns (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), 8. See J. Lawrence Mitchell, ‘Home and abroad: the dilemma of Rhys Davies’, Planet, 70 (August/September 1988), 87. Quoted in Rees, Rhys Davies, 8. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1972; London: Tavistock, 1974), 21. Ibid., 25–6, 12. Angela Carter, ‘Lorenzo as Closet-queen’, in Nothing Sacred (London: Virago, 1982). Linda Ruth Williams, Sex in the Head: Visions of Film and Femininity in D. H. Lawrence (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 149, 15.

190 10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17

18

19

20 21

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M. Wynn Thomas refers to ‘A Bed of Feathers’ as ‘Lawrentian’ in his ‘Never seek to tell thy love’: Rhys Davies’s fiction’, reprinted in this volume. Rees, Rhys Davies, 16. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Introduction’ to D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow (1915; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xxx. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 224, 221. Rhys Davies, ‘A Bed of Feathers’, in Rhys Davies: Collected Stories, vol. 3, ed. Meic Stephens (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1998), 61. All references to this story cited hereafter in the text as ‘BF’. Rhys Davies, ‘A Pig in a Poke’, in Collected Stories, vol. 3, 113. Davies, Ram with Red Horns, 8. Rhys Davies, The Red Hills (1932; Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1970), 64. All references to this novel hereafter cited in the text as RH. D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Captain’s Doll’, in The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 137. Meic Stephens, ‘Introduction’ to Rhys Davies: Collected Stories, 13, reprinted in this volume. Ibid., 15, from an interview with Denys Val Baker in 1952. Rhys Davies, The Black Venus (London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1944), 8. References to the text hereafter cited as BV. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1971; London: Abacus, 1972), 264–5. Sean Hignett, Brett: From Bloomsbury to New Mexico: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984), 191–2. See also David Ellis, Dying Game, 292–4.

‘Love . . . and the Need of it’: Three Novels by Rhys Davies JAMES A. DAVIES

The past is another country and so is fame. In three of Rhys Davies’s novels – The Withered Root (1927), The Painted King (1954) and The Perishable Quality (1957) – it is the same country.1 Each novel features a character based on a famous Welshman from what might be called the recently distant past. Each novel explores forms of lonely exile, though not of the geographical variety: in the earliest novel Davies’s famous Welsh celebrity longs for an idea of home, in the later two his seemingly or actually Welsh characters at large in London rarely long either for home or homeland. We keep in mind his own sardonic comments on the Blaenclydach of his youth, his upbringing as a ‘burial’, his escape as a kind of resurrection.2 The Withered Root was Davies’s first novel, published when he was twenty-four, The Painted King was his twentieth volume of fiction. The former’s central character, Reuben Daniels, is based on Evan Roberts (1878–1951), the evangelist from Loughor who inspired the religious revival of 1904–5. Guy Aspen, the ‘painted king’, is modelled on Ivor Novello who as a matinée idol and, particularly, as a composer, dominated the London musical stage during the 1930s and 1940s. By 1927 Evan Roberts and his revival had faded from the popular consciousness. The Great War had accentuated the modern crisis in religious faith; the flood of writing about the war was beginning. The General Strike of 1926 was still fresh in the memory, the disastrous Welsh miners’ strike that followed it hardly over. Davies’s choice of subject for a first novel can thus seem strange defiance of the Zeitgeist, except in so far as the rise of Mussolini and Hitler during the 1920s drew attention to oratory, the source of Reuben Daniels’s power. Further, during high modernism’s rich endgame – Pound’s Personae had appeared the previous year and 1927 saw the publication of To the

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Lighthouse – the emotional and melodramatic style of Davies’s novel, the persistence of florid romanticism, is unexpected. J. Lawrence Mitchell suggests that in this novel Davies is exploring two of his youthful preoccupations. One was his concern, ultimately disappointed, to find an acceptable religious faith. This began while he was still at school: during his teens, for example, he left his parents’ Nonconformist chapel for what was then the established Church of England.3 The other was the concern with words that was to make him a writer: the preacher as creative wordsmith was an obvious interest. Mitchell is persuasive but limited in that nowhere in his article is there any awareness that Rhys Davies was gay.4 To the possible significance of this last fact this essay will return. Although in his heyday a brief but great sensation – up like a rocket down like the stick, as one early reviewer predicted of Dickens5 – Evan Roberts is now generally forgotten, despite the fascination of his lifehistory. He was one of fourteen children of a devout mining family in Loughor, west of Swansea. At the age of eleven he was working as a door-boy in the local pit; in his early twenties he became a blacksmith. His leisure time he gave to Loughor’s Moriah Chapel. In 1903 he began training for the Welsh Calvinistic ministry at their Newcastle Emlyn academy. He became dissatisfied with its system and left, possibly expelled, during the following year. On his return to Loughor he began preaching at Moriah. It was said that he was not an especially gifted preacher but he certainly had charisma and soon drew vast crowds attracted by the emotionalism of the meetings and the stress on personal conversion. His fame spread and hugely successful preaching tours of Wales followed, during which he was accompanied by a group of disciples and a choir of young ladies. Despite the presence of the latter there was, a devoted biographer tells us, no hint of scandal,6 nor was there any concern with fame or fortune. The revival brought in large numbers of new or born-again Christians and resulted in a rise in chapel membership. Yet, almost as quickly as it began, it all ended. Evan Roberts suffered a mental breakdown and in 1906 he retired to a friend’s home in Leicester. He became a recluse and during the last forty-five years of his life little more was heard of him. Many of the converts fell away; by 1909 chapel membership was again in decline. Rhys Davies’s evangelist, Reuben Daniels, is the only child of a sottish mother and a father whose life swings between drunkenness and chapel-going piety. He becomes a strange young man devoted only to worship. His parents lack the means to satisfy his ambition to

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become a preacher; in any case, his mother is hostile to his piety. Reuben works for some years in the local pit before an older friend persuades him to attend services held by a sect called the Corinthians. Untrained but with much biblical knowledge and a formidable gift for spontaneous utterance, he becomes their full-time preacher. A revival begins. Reuben preaches throughout Wales to vast acclaim until a kind of weary disillusionment sets in. Apart from his preaching, his life is dominated by a series of confrontations with sexually predatory women whom he resists until his father’s death calls him home. After the funeral he sleeps with Eirwen Vaughan, a local girl who had always tried to seduce him and is now married but separated. Repelled by his own weakness and mortified by Eirwen’s decision to return to her husband, he leaves everything and in dreadful weather walks to Cardiff, twenty miles away. There he collapses only to be found and nursed back to health by Ann Roberts, a former fallen valley girl become golden-hearted prostitute. Though not fully recovered physically, his conscience forces him to return to his valley home. He struggles back through mid-winter snow but, on arrival, collapses and dies.7 Rhys Davies has retained the main thrust of Evan Roberts’s career: the self-educated young man seemingly plucked from the pits by God to lead a religious crusade that ends abruptly. The significant differences are in the details: Reuben’s difficult parents and their strained relationship, the direct shift from coalface to non-denominational pulpit, the unrequited sexual manœuvrings of Catherine Pritchards, Reuben’s disciple and singer who travels as part of the evangelizing team, the brief affair with Eirwen Vaughan, the return home from Cardiff for a final meeting with his mother and his early death. The facts about Evan Roberts were readily available to the young Rhys Davies.8 Doubtless some of the changes were designed to increase the drama, or melodrama, of his tale, but others are more revealing. Essentially, this is an anti-religious book, expressing the anger of the disappointed supplicant. One theme is the damaging unworldliness of the religious leader: having given himself to Christ at an early age Reuben lacks direct experience of crucial areas of life. He distances himself from the often drunken, sometimes blasphemous, lives of his parents, in particular from his mother’s hostility to his pious life and her urgings that he find himself a girl, and from ordinary life in general. Even his greatest supporter, old Morgans the religious baker who introduces Reuben to the Corinthians and plays an important

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part in the revival that follows, is concerned. Conventional ministers, he tells Reuben, ‘have no knowledge of life’ (68). He advises Reuben that because all is God-given he should not ‘scorn the flesh, or misery will come upon you like a whip’ (67). In other words, first get a (sexual) life – within marriage, the old man cautiously adds. Reuben’s dying friend, Philip, makes the same kind of point in more generally social terms: ‘ “You do not know enough of people yet,” Philip answered gently. “You ought to go away and bury yourself in the miseries of great cities, starve and battle in the economic struggle of existence. You might find a splendid light then”’(100). The narrator is cynical about the faithful, constantly casting doubt on their motives: the minister of Pisgah Chapel seems more concerned with his lucrative sideline in umbrella-repairing than with his vocation; the Corinthians are relieved when their expenses are recouped (147), converted sinners beam ‘in the satisfaction of knowing themselves respectable once more’ (183). The leading revivalists are often motivated by self-display (Catherine), a desire for ‘religious notoriety’ (Morgans) (219), or by self-importance (the choir-master Bangor Davies). During the religious tours they live comfortably in the houses of others, at one point becoming tipsy on elderberry wine in a hospitable manse. The narrator is at his most sardonic regarding healing: varied complaints ‘all miraculously vanished in ratio to the fervour of the convert. Even a floating kidney was fixed in its rightful place again’ (196). Reuben, however, is ‘sickened’ (34) by a world ‘reeling in an embrace of sin’ (105), by narrow lives seemingly dominated by anger, lust and Mammon. Religion is an escape from this and, in time, from himself: ‘He was glad when it was time to go to the meeting. He knew that in the big Congregational chapel he would forget his own woes for a time’ (223). Central to these woes are the aforementioned sexual temptations of Ann Roberts, Catherine Pritchards and, above all, beautiful Eirwen Vaughan, who demonstrates unflagging and eventually prevailing seductive resources. In itself the clash between spirit and flesh is something of a cliché; here, however, there is nothing hackneyed about the relationship between Reuben and his designing women. For example, when Eirwen attempts to seduce him: He kissed her with a gentle, chaste desire, a virginal kiss. But suddenly she clasped his mouth with a mature dexterity that held it fast. Her arms tightened like snakes about his body; he was held in

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the tentacles of her physical vigour as a drowning man in the supple arms of an octopus . . . The perfume of her breasts crept into his veins, but there was within him, also, a stony horror that was as an arrow from God . . . His eyes flared; and as her mouth in its sucking grimace came near his again, he thrust her away shudderingly. (79–80)

Reuben also dreams of her: ‘He saw abhorrent curved-back lips that were pale with slime, eyes that under snake-like brows held evil as hellish laughter, dark flesh that shone’ (119). As the first sentence of the first passage shows, Reuben – and, we might add, the narrator whose viewpoint is difficult to disentangle from Reuben’s own – is comfortable only with the chaste, non-sexual being. Female sexuality disgusts him, even though he acknowledges its power. Thus, when eventually he takes Eirwen to bed the experience begins with ‘brutal’ (254) possessiveness, continues as ‘madness’ (255) and ends as high romantic escapism; Reuben has little sense of Eirwen as a real woman. The extreme nature of such reactions is of course derived in part from Reuben’s Bible reading: the idea of woman as serpent is applied to Catherine and Ann as well as to persistent Eirwen. This is not so much misogyny, one suspects, as the author’s gay sensibility: ultimately a woman is valued as chaste or, in Ann’s case, as a sexually undemanding companion to be left when she has other ideas, or as a mother. This last is a main theme. Reuben’s fame sets him apart. It condemns him to a rigid code of conduct and the constant satisfaction of expectations so that he is as much controlled by as controller of his huge congregations. As the narrator comments, these last ‘had come for fire to warm their stale souls and they must not be denied it’ (125). His life becomes a treadmill and so generates negative reactions. One such is revulsion: But he was always conscious of those faces beneath him. And sometimes a black wave of nausea surged up through that consciousness, and the faces seemed to congeal into one solid mass of greasy white flesh, flesh animated by a thousand watchful eyes: and then a violent disgust would pass through him. (202)

Another is doubt as he wonders if he has any effect on what he more and more comes to see as the ‘evil heritage in man’ (216). Reuben is exiled from normal social relations. His is an existential loneliness which generates a desperate need for love, particularly of a

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non-sexual kind. Hence his desperate desire for his mother’s love, evident from the beginning. His boyhood violence, as when he bites his mother’s wrist as she punishes him for rudeness, is, we see, attention- and ultimately affection-seeking. His father thrashes him. Later, when he apologises, his mother strokes his head. The caress is so ‘rare and unexpected’ that he is overcome and embraces her. She thrusts him away mockingly: His suffering eyes looked at her beseechingly. He wanted her love so much. But, singing briskly, she went into the kitchen with some dishes and he knew she would ignore him as before. But as he walked to school he carried preciously in his soul the memory of her caress. (22–3)

The key word here is ‘soul’. For the rest of his life Reuben sublimates his unrequited love for his mother in the desperate love of God that also sublimates the sexual feelings that disgust him and of which he is afraid. His return from Cardiff to his old home after the journey that is to kill him is, he discovers in his vision, to see his mother again. She enters, tipsy from the pub; he ‘lurched forward’, eager for love, falls, hits his head and dies within two days. Too late, she is, it seems, conscience-stricken. As for the dead Reuben: in death his ‘brows were chaste and untroubled as the brow of a sleeping child. It was the face of one for whom life had not yet begun’ (280). We are reminded of the ‘oddly tranquil’ (13) moments of his earliest life when benevolent motherly attentions were assured. Such peaceful happiness, this ending implies, is soon destroyed as maternal rejection, sex and religion conspire to deny love and foster a loneliness exacerbated by fame. Ivor Novello is still well-known if no longer a name to conjure with; the best of his sugary songs linger on. He was born David Ivor Davies (1893–1951) in Cardiff, the only son of Clara Novello Davies (1861–1943). His mother, named after a well-known Italian singer, was a famous, flamboyant and immensely popular choir-mistress whose Welsh Ladies’ Choir won the International Competition at the Chicago World Fair in 1893 and sang at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Her son found early fame and fortune as the composer of ‘Keep the home fires burning’, the patriotic hit-song of the Great War. After West End success with a number of plays, from 1935 to 1949 a string of smash-hit musicals – from Glamorous Night to King’s Rhapsody – in which he also acted, made him a household name. His mother, to whom he was

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devoted, wished him to compose operas. However, apart from playing the lead in Henry V in 1938 (the play closed in three weeks, mainly but not wholly because of the crises that led to the Second World War), Ivor Novello remained a creature of the popular stage. As a result he became rich, with a West End flat above the Strand Theatre and a luxurious country house near Maidenhead, where he offered lavish entertainment to his gang of close friends and, occasionally, to the whole cast of his current musical. Novello’s matinée-idol looks made him a target for women admirers but to no avail: he was homosexual and at a time when to be actively such was illegal. A prolific career, in films as well as in the theatre, meant constant hard work which, together with heavy smoking, contributed to his comparatively early death, at the age of fifty-eight, from coronary thrombosis. The Painted King was published within two years of Ivor Novello’s death in 1951, by which time the first biography had appeared.9 The character of Guy Aspen is based very closely on him. Ethereally handsome, with a ‘perfect nose’ (7), he lives in the world of his theatrical imagination, hardly drinks and is so obsessively hardworking that he is often oblivious to all else. He has his London apartment and a country house where much of the action takes place and to which he invites the cast of one of his musicals for a weekend party. His mother, Madame Annie Aspen, is a famous choir-mistress whose ladies’ choir tours America and elsewhere to great acclaim. He is devoted to her even though she expresses strong reservations about his achievements and urges him to write serious operas.10 His ambitions as a Shakespearean actor end with an unsuccessful Romeo; otherwise he remains steadfastly populist. As befits the spirit of the age (1958) his homosexuality is only suggested, though at times more than vaguely, as when Judith, his personal assistant long attracted to him, is irritated by his ‘young men taken up for brief periods’ and wishes ‘Guy had been as other men’ (220). He dies suddenly in his dressing room, seemingly from a brain haemorrhage, after the opening night of another hit show. Rhys Davies’s use of Novello’s life is very different from that of Evan Roberts: apart from virtually ignoring Novello’s Welsh upbringing there are no significant departures from the known facts. The narrative stance, however, departs from that in The Withered Root. In that first novel Reuben Daniels is always the focalizer. The Painted King is far more assured and sophisticated.

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It is essentially the story of Judith Cottar, an orphan from Dorset who comes to London hoping for a career in journalism, and it is mostly told from her point of view. Following an abortive relationship with a political activist, through a chance meeting with Jorgen Brokholm, a Danish photographer, she meets Guy Aspen, a struggling composer living cheaply in bedsitter land. She becomes his lyric writer and personal assistant, staying close to him until his sudden death. Apart from one unsuccessful attempt to go to bed together, their relationship, though more than strictly professional, is firmly asexual, Judith remaining a virgin. This last worries her but pleases Guy; when she attempts to leave him he always persuades her to stay. Judith poses frequently for Jorgen’s nude photos but otherwise keeps him at arm’s length. Following Guy’s death, the book ends with her and Jorgen’s sense of freedom and the suggestion that their relationship will become closer. They feel released from Guy’s world, the nature of that world linking this novel to The Withered Root. As has been noted, in the earlier novel Reuben is repeatedly criticised for having little or no direct experience of life. In The Painted King the three people closest to Guy Aspen insist constantly on the unreality of his musical comedies. Jorgen tells him: ‘You do not collect the pictures and music of the open street. Buses and fire-engines! . . . The public-houses!’ He continues, ‘Always too much of dreams and pretending in your music’ (7–8). Guy’s musicals, Jorgen says later, are ‘giving lies about life’ (58). The narrator comments that, though Guy achieves great financial success, his productions are watched ‘almost exclusively [by] suburban matrons accompanied by dragged-in-looking husbands and young courting couples undergoing a night out in the West End’ (55). His mother offers frank reservations and continues to urge her son to write serious opera. Through virginal Judith, the third of Guy’s intimates, we are offered a more profound understanding of his deficiencies. When she worries that life is passing her by and too often takes refuge in heavy drinking, part of her concern is that she is increasingly drawn into a world of surface and illusion. It is a world that Guy often prefers, as when he insists that ‘There is more purity in imaginative truth than in the factual, which is so often cluttered with unimportant and interfering details; imaginative truth can show the stripped essentials’ (140). Judith, on the other hand, and the narrator, come to see that ‘On the stage illusion became fact, imagination solidified into the concrete, and

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more and more for her this sorcery overflowed into the street and the home’ (154). Such undemanding escapism is seen as essentially worthless, leading to a kind of decadence where appearance is all and moral corruption a characteristic, as evidenced, for example, in the behaviour of Bolton, the depraved boy actor. Judith concludes that Guy is isolated from the world, ‘like a cripple from a high window or a poet from a tower’ (192), unwilling, perhaps unable, to separate his stage worlds from day-to-day reality. Hence Guy as Louis XIV, the painted king, acting the part even off-stage. The ‘real’ Guy becomes increasingly hard to find as he escapes from the world behind layers of romantically tuneful tosh and, as he grows older, ever-thicker stage make-up. As he admits, ‘he himself came alive and was happy only in a role, the grease-paint on thick’ (238). Guy is thus not without self-knowledge. On occasion, like Reuben Daniels, he faces facts: alone and depressed at the riverside during a day-long party at his country house, he longs, he tells Judith, ‘to step out of the mirror and find someone there!’ (214). Though for years sustained by his audiences’ adoration, also like Reuben he comes to feel ‘distaste’ (239) for them. He is the helpless prisoner of illusion, fame and expectations, eventually killing himself to keep his public satisfied. As he lies dying in his dressing room, young Bolton places Guy’s stage-crown under his hand. In the musical that crown stands for ‘servitude’ (242), the final comment on Guy’s hollow and loveless life. Iolo Hancock in The Perishable Quality (1957) is clearly based on Dylan Thomas (1914–53), more precisely almost wholly on the younger Dylan Thomas, the literary golden boy of the 1930s. Iolo has a superb speaking voice that is often heard on the radio, he holds court in various London pubs and clubs, is often helplessly drunk, lives in squalor, sponges off people, has a cavalier attitude towards government departments (in this case ignoring the need to pay national insurance stamps), has a volatile relationship with a woman (here named Ann) and, of course, writes poetry. Even his fundamental puritanism, plus a recourse at times to a kind of childishness and occasional violence, link him to the recently dead poet. The Perishable Quality (1957), like The Painted King, uses a female character as focalizer. To an even greater extent than the earlier book, that focalizer dominates. The Perishable Quality is the story of Eva Pritchard and her three lovers. She is from Bylau in a Welsh valley. There she has a brief affair with a young miner named Elwyn, who

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dies of tuberculosis. While still a young girl she becomes, openly, the mistress of Mr Dai, the rich and all-powerful coal boss. When he dies he leaves her financially well-off. She moves to London and embarks on a lucrative career as a call-girl, mainly servicing older men, and moves in the bohemian world of artists, writers and tarts centred on The Goat in Boots pub, where Iolo Hancock holds sway.11 Through her friendship with Iolo she meets Val, a young man with whom she has a passionate affair. When he becomes too possessive and occasionally violent she returns to Bylau and her sister’s home in a house that she, Eva, owns. Though Val follows her and continues the relationship, eventually they separate. The novel ends with suggestions that Eva might marry Noah Edwards, a prosperous Bylau hotelier. The ‘perishable quality’ is at once lust and youth, but principally the former. Young, virile Val pleasures Eva marvellously in bed. But She wanted more than these pleasures, a deeper identification than these transports. When his head lay sleeping under her shoulder the submerged sadness would flow unrestrained. A perishable quality lay in that relaxed body; and in hers. To find here the peace she wanted was impossible. (175)

Eva, like Reuben and Guy, is a study in power, in this case over men. Like the two men she, seemingly powerful, dwindles into a victim. She discovers, like Reuben and like Guy occasionally, in their different ways, that her life of controlled depravity has a hollow core, a dreadful limitation. The controller becomes the controlled, an ‘absurd creature’ (193) suicidally aware of ‘the terrible isolation of the human soul’ (194). Enter Iolo Hancock, whose characterization demonstrates Rhys Davies’s changed attitude towards the celebrity-figure. Iolo is a minor character who plays a direct part in Eva’s life only in chapter 6 and this in flashback as Eva recalls her earlier days in London. For, unlike the two earlier novels, The Perishable Quality abandons linear narrative for alternating present/past sequences, the present being Eva’s flight from Val to Bylau, his pursuit and the final stages of the relationship. Iolo belongs to Eva’s past. Yet, after chapter 6, though he enters the text only when mentioned briefly, to the end he remains an important presence. Eva remembers first meeting Iolo when he is in his mid-twenties and holding court in The Goat in Boots. In an echo of the Judith

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Cottar/Guy Aspen relationship in The Painted King, he spends a night with her that is sexually unexciting because of his drunkenness and thereafter they enjoy an asexual friendship. Eva grows to like and admire him: ‘In him fame and public exhibitionism were for once in congress with sterling talent’ (135). He is famous for his poetry, his broadcast readings and convivial pubbing. Eva helps him out with money and food. When she and Val help drunken Iolo back to his squalid Covent Garden bedsitter the couple stay the night. In a novel stylistically restrained and concerned to avoid stereotypical Anglo-Welsh grotesquerie, the sequence from pub to Eva’s departure the following morning is a startling contrast. Iolo vomits in detail before insisting on carrying home a damaged tailor’s dummy found in an alleyway. In his room he has a nude wooden carving of his girlfriend Ann which has ‘the aspect of a Minoan snake goddess’ (141); Ann has gone off with a friend of his that very evening. Iolo, far gone in drink, imagines rats, sleeps in a house-painter’s cradle hauled up to the ceiling to keep ‘safe from those rats’ (141), and eats seafood to help him with a poem about the sea. The characterization is established by this neo-surrealistic journey from pub to room: Iolo’s life is offered as different in kind from those of the other characters. He is no victim but a gifted and successful writer who ignores convention and, as it were, floats as freely and optimistically above humdrum living, as when he ‘rock[s] pleasurably’ (141) in the house-painter’s cradle. Eva’s life is also unconventional but she maintains a veneer of respectability in her ‘discreet flat’ (234). Even so, Iolo and Eva are similar in their essential puritanism: both embrace (Eva, it could be said, literally) the work-ethic consequences of a ‘puritan upbringing asserting itself ’ (165). For at the heart of Iolo’s chaotic life is his poetry, the serious writing with which he struggles. Eva notes that ‘even more in drink than in sobriety he retained access to that child’s kingdom of wonder where menace can stalk suddenly under the trees’ (139). This is not so much escaping from the world as stepping outside to gain a more penetrating perspective. Iolo’s is the creative imagination in action, working on and away from basic worldliness to produce fine poetry and thus very different in kind and quality from Reuben and Guy’s evasions. What all three share is loneliness, for all three, in their various ways, are driven men. When Eva learns that Iolo has gone to Paris with girlfriend Ann ‘under his arm like a redeemed mermaid’, her response is a question: ‘They’re together again?’ Val’s answer reaches the heart

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of Rhys Davies’s lonely vision: ‘No one is ever together with Iolo except his pure muse’ (199). In 1957, when Rhys Davies wrote The Perishable Quality, the main sad facts of Dylan Thomas’s later life were known to many. Here they are only occasionally hinted at, as when Eva remembers Iolo ‘in the middle twenties, reasonably fresh of face, his feet loitering uncertainly near the primrose path’ (133–4). After chapter 6 he hovers on the fringes of the story as a carefree yet focused talent, freed, it seems, not only from the social prison but also from the exigencies of the sexual drive. Like Reuben and Guy, Iolo seems rootless; unlike Reuben and Guy – respectively longing for motherly love and lasting companionship – Iolo seems not to care. He is at home where he finds himself. The unsuccessful search for roots is linked to the preoccupation with sex on the part of all the main characters, Iolo again excepted. The sexual lives of Rhys Davies’s characters are invariably problematic: Reuben’s temptations, Guy’s other life (when his mother considers his bedroom ‘unsuitable for a bachelor’, Judith thinks ‘of the guests who had used it unknown to Madame’, 142), Judith’s worrying virginity, Eva’s activities as lover, mistress and whore, unable to help herself when Val comes to call. The persistent linking of women with serpent imagery, the early disgust at and fear of heterosexual intercourse, the insistent coupling of sex and unhappiness, all demonstrate the chasm between the physical life and contentment. Hence the bleak titles of these three novels, two dominant negatives plus a symbol of decadence. And as has been seen, even isolating and victimizing fame, that strange other country, offers lasting consolation only to the supremely gifted. In his own life Rhys Davies found little fame or fortune but continued to write obsessively. His move away from what Roland Mathias describes as the ‘florid romanticism’12 of his early writing to increasingly indirect and restrained, not to say distanced and colder, novels, shows an increasingly disillusioned view of fame and power. The conclusions to all three novels embody this view as the main protagonists either die or desert their former lives. Reuben finds, it seems, peace in death; certainly he dies believing he is about to be reunited with his mother. The two later novels offer open and unexpectedly romantic endings strongly suggesting future happiness for Judith with Jorgen, Eva with Noah. We recall Judith’s comment on Guy’s extravagant musicals: ‘Love . . . and the need of it, is the basic theme’ (65). The same can be said of these three novels; their

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endings endorse essentially conventional relationships that satisfy that need, a sudden surprising affirmation of bourgeois values. This last, however, despite these endings, is not a wholly dominant insistence. For we also, of course, have the example of Iolo Hancock. In these three novels his is offered as the only worthwhile journey into the world of the creative imagination unshackled by social concern. His is that other country where fame is put in its place. The characterization offers a sudden romantic glimpse of artistic freedom, a glowing alternative to troubled lives and limited horizons. Yet, even here, the informed reader may well feel not only that Iolo’s other country is placed firmly in the novel’s past but also that the association with Dylan Thomas makes him a singing man whose chains will tighten to fatal effect. In these novels, at least, present happiness is the most we can expect from Rhys Davies’s dark vision.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6 7

8

9

Details are as follows: The Withered Root (London: Robert Holden, 1927); The Painted King (London: Heinemann, 1954); The Perishable Quality (London: Heinemann, 1957). Quotations are from these editions; page numbers are included in the text. See My Wales (London: Jarrolds, 1937), 3. See p. 5. Rhys Davies was always discreet about his sexual orientation. The late radio interview that offered clues was not generally available to Mitchell in 1995. For the same reason he could not, of course, take advantage of two key essays on this topic: see pp. 104–37. The essay by M. Wynn Thomas includes details of the radio interview. Abraham Hayward, in his review of Sketches by Boz and Pickwick Papers in the Quarterly Review, 59 (1837), 484–518: ‘he has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick’. J. Edwin Orr, The Flaming Tongue (Chicago: Moody Press, 1973), 22. Reuben’s struggle through the snow owes much to the closing pages of D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920). See pp. 175–89 and 260–82 for an assessment of the Davies/Lawrence literary relationship. For instance, in D. M. Phillips, Evan Roberts: The Great Welsh Revivalist and his Work, 8th edition (1906; London: Marshall Brothers, 1923). Peter Noble, Ivor Novello: Man of the Theatre (London: Falcon Press, 1951). This appeared shortly before Novello’s sudden death and was frequently reprinted. The approach is hagiographical but it does provide basic facts. The book is, for obvious reasons, silent about Novello’s sexual orientation.

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11

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This frankness, and her determination to further her own career as a choirmistress, make her an interesting departure from the stereotypical ‘Welsh Mam’. Almost certainly Rhys Davies is referring to The Goat in Boots pub at the Junction of Fulham Road and Park Walk. This was Dylan Thomas’s local when he first went to London and lived there during 1934–5 in nearby Redcliffe Street and Coleherne Street. Roland Mathias, Anglo-Welsh Literature: An Illustrated History (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), 83. Mathias detects the influence of such florid romantics as the poets A. G. Prys-Jones, Ernest Rhys and Huw Menai. Certainly, in 1927, there were few if any Welsh novelists who could serve as Davies’s models.

The Masquerade of Gender in the Stories of Rhys Davies KATIE GRAMICH

One of the OED’s definitions of ‘masquerade’ seems to be a perfect description of the dramatis personae of Rhys Davies’s fiction: ‘A gathering or procession of fantastic or ill-assorted characters’. His copious output teems with the kind of vigorous and grotesque characters which can truly be labelled Dickensian, except that the majority are also distinctively Welsh. Moreover, Davies combines a relish for the bleakly macabre with a talent for burlesque comedy which, again, aligns him with the Victorian novelist. And yet, as he averred, Chekhov was ‘his God’, and his more immediately recognizable influences are those of his friend, D. H. Lawrence and, in his early work, Caradoc Evans. Despite the superficial and often grotesque comedy which we see in a good deal of Rhys Davies’s writing (there is certainly a comic-postcard feel to stories like ‘The Contraption’, ‘Caleb’s Ark’, ‘A Pearl of Great Price’ and even ‘Canute’), his work is fundamentally bleak. All the above-mentioned writers, different as they are, share a central concern with gender roles and gender relations, often in the sense of gender as a public performance, perhaps even a ‘masquerade’ in one of the other OED definitions of the word: ‘an outward show, a pretence’. Rhys Davies’s fiction, particularly, reveals how the individual continually acts out a gender role, constructing a public performance out of a gender position. Clothing is often of central importance in Davies’s stories; he endows clothes with enormous symbolic significance. As Marjorie Garber points out in her seminal study, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, ‘Vestimentary codes, clothing as a system of signification, speak in a number of different registers: class, gender, sexuality, erotic style.’1 Women’s clothing, particularly, assumes almost fetishistic significance in Rhys Davies’s work, perhaps understandably, since many of his stories

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feature women as central characters, while events are often seen from a female point of view, indicating perhaps that Davies concurred with the opinion of Balzac who states (in Daughter of Eve, 1839) that for a woman dress is ‘a continual manifestation of intimate thoughts, a language, a symbol’.2 As M. Wynn Thomas has observed,3 much of Davies’s writing can be interpreted as an encoded expression of the author’s own uneasy gender position as a ‘discreet’ homosexual coming from a traditional south Wales society of entrenched machismo. It is not surprising to find, then, that his stories often feature liminal or uncertain gender positions and transgressive gender performances, as manifested in such acts as cross-dressing. Davies’s autobiography, Print of a Hare’s Foot, though in many ways a camouflage, does reveal not only the author’s acute observation of others’ clothing and public performances, but also his own selfconstruction as a dandy and sexually ambiguous artist figure. While still living in his native Blaenclydach, he ensured that he stood out from the crowd by ‘b[uying] a pair of spats and a silver-topped Malacca stick’,4 and later on, living in France, he transformed himself into a Gallic bohemian: ‘By that time I wore a beret and espadrilles and took a Pernod every morning on the Place Masséna.’5 He even characterizes his own fiction by using a sartorial image: ‘My carnal little stories were long-trousered productions.’6 One of Rhys Davies’s most acclaimed short stories, ‘Nightgown’,7 has a central female character who has lived a life of economic hardship, struggling to make regular payments to a local shopkeeper. This is a story about money, poverty, the raw economic facts of life. But it is also a story which focuses readers’ attention on sartorial imagery, gender roles and on the repressed or neglected desires of the female. Male characters are depicted negatively, as unimaginative, insensitive, incommunicative; for Rhys Davies here, desire and imagination are the prerogative of the female. However, it is emphatically not celebratory in tone. Indeed, one might argue that it is fundamentally a narrative about death and the inevitability of defeat and disappointment in women’s lives. Davies is concerned with the determining and constricting pressure of gender in close and traditional Welsh communities. He indicates unmistakably that it is gender rather than sex which acts in this way, that is, he is interested in the socially constructed, external manifestations of gender, the public show. This distinction between the categories of sex (biological) and gender (socially produced) is a

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conventional one, yet it is a commonplace which has far-reaching implications. For, as Judith Butler states, if we accept this distinction, ‘there is nothing that guarantees that the “one” who becomes a woman [in Simone de Beauvoir’s famous formulation] is necessarily a female’. Butler goes on to argue that ‘there is no core gender identity behind the expressions of gender . . . identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’.8 Femininity and masculinity as performance are foregrounded in ‘Nightgown’. The men’s oppressive physical bulk in the story is a metaphor for the mountainous patriarchy which they represent; inside the men-mountains cower paltry little souls. The menfolk take their masculinity brutally seriously, cultivating a bestial demeanour which is the denial of anything remotely feminine. They are constantly aware of their gender role, continually vigilant in ensuring that nothing slips. They eat like hogs, they swill their beer, they work, they wallow, and they grunt only to other properly gendered hogs bred at the same trough. The unnamed woman, under the onslaught of this lumbering performance, is dwarfed by it and gradually begins to imitate it. She begins to cross-dress and to adopt the aggressively masculine traits of her menfolk: ‘the house became so obstreperously male that she began to lose nearly all feminine attributes and was apt to wear a man’s cap and her sons’ shoes, socks and mufflers to run out to the shop’.9 She forgets how to ‘perform’ femininity. It is the silken nightgown in the shop window which is the sudden revelation of the woman’s amnesia. The nightgown represents her lost femininity. It also connotes sensuality, luxury, self-indulgence, beauty, intimacy, rest. Her desire is resurrected and becomes focused on the possession of this object, with which she can reinvent a feminine subjectivity. With the inevitability of tragedy, the garment also begins to connote death. In the story the stereotyped masculinity of the valleys is condemned for its totalitarian exclusiveness – there is no room for ambiguity here, no hope of change in its rigid, ever-repeated performance. Sadly, the performance of femininity is only possible in death. It is a savage parable of the death of the feminine, which is associated with human feeling, desire, love of beauty, tenderness, and a rejection of the merely pragmatic. Yet it is the pragmatic patriarch who has the last word: after his wife’s death, he wastes no time in seeking a competent replacement. The ending is as chilling as Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and infinitely closer to home. This woman in a man’s clothing seems to have been based on actual childhood memories, noted in Davies’s autobiography, where he

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mentions observing ‘a collier’s wife, wearing her husband’s cap (usually a sign of a truculent nature, whereas shawl-headed wives seemed gentler)’ and a ‘hard-drinking woman [who] hailed from Bristol slums. She had eight tremendously eating sons, six of them already in the pits, and, as if logically, she lived in 8 Pleasant Terrace. Everybody called her Mrs Hughes Number 8.’10 It is interesting how Davies observes here the difference that a change in headgear alone seems to effect in gender performance: a man’s cap produces tough masculinity, while a woman’s shawl confers feminine gentleness. Typically, Davies himself appears to favour neither of these binary opposites but rather, like his mother, is drawn to extravagant hats (which bob up enticingly all over Davies’s writings). In ‘Nightgown’ the lost possibilities of the unnamed woman are figured in millinery terms: ‘Peering out surly from under the poke of her man’s cap, she never went beyond the main street of the vale, though as a child she had been once to the seaside, in a buff straw hat ringed with daisies.’11 This instance of cross-dressing in ‘Nightgown’ may be taken to exemplify Marjorie Garber’s contention that ‘one of the most important aspects of cross-dressing is the way in which it offers a challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of “female” and “male”, whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural’.12 Garber’s thesis goes much further than this, however, claiming that one of the most consistent and effective functions of the transvestite in culture is to indicate the place of . . . ‘category crisis’, disrupting and calling attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances . . . the notion of ‘category crisis’ is not the exception but rather the ground of culture itself. By ‘category crisis’ I mean a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another: black/ white, Jew/Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave.13

Thus, in addition to the challenge posed to gender stereotyping in ‘Nightgown’, one might also argue that Rhys Davies is destabilizing other binary categories enshrined in the ideology of the society he is depicting. The fictional representation of Blaenclydach is of a place which is governed by the equivalent of ancient ‘sumptuary laws’ which dictated who had a right to wear what garments and ornaments. The female protagonist of ‘Nightgown’ is breaking these unspoken

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laws by coveting a garment which is beyond her economic means and social rank. Although Davies himself was avowedly apolitical, and was also sceptical about the Labour hegemony in his native land, nevertheless his stories are packed with acute observations of class tensions and divisions. He is a writer whose work focuses overwhelmingly on the lives of working-class characters and, as such, can be said to illustrate the contention made by Frank O’Connor in his classic study of the short story as a literary genre, The Lonely Voice, that the short story does not really have a hero but rather gives expression to the feelings and experiences of a ‘submerged population group’.14 Indeed, a materialist reading of Davies’s stories might suggest that the constant tensions and dissonances perceptible in the depiction of gender may actually be taken as an encoded representation of class issues. And yet such a reading would perhaps be too reductive: Davies is a writer whose work resembles a palimpsest of multiple codes; it may be said to express the experiences of a number of ‘submerged populations’, including homosexuals and women, as well as the working class. Indeed, in the context of his time (and ours?) the Welsh themselves might be regarded as such a population group. A number of Davies’s stories have young boys as their central protagonists. Although this technique can be regarded as part of a developing Anglo-Welsh tradition (as practised, for example, by both Dylan Thomas and Glyn Jones in some of their short stories), Rhys Davies’s usage of the device is distinctive. M. Wynn Thomas has suggested that Davies uses the boy protagonist as a go-between figure, neutral in terms of the gender polarity of adult heterosexual lovers, and indicative of the ‘interstitial, intersexual position’15 from which his fiction is written. I would further suggest that ‘the boy’ may represent that third gender possibility which has continually fascinated writers as diverse as Théophile Gautier and Jeanette Winterson.16 Stephen Greenblatt has indicated that the boy player on the Renaissance stage occupies this third position, while Marjorie Garber posits that Joan of Arc’s ‘maid’ is another example.17 The boys in Davies’s fiction tend to be non-participant voyeurs; as the narrator states in the chapter entitled ‘Boys’ in Print of a Hare’s Foot, ‘I only wanted to look.’18 Nevertheless, this cool observational stance, so like Rhys Davies’s own, is sometimes severely compromised or destroyed by strong emotions, as in the unbearably poignant story ‘The Dark World’. Nicholas in ‘The Fashion Plate’, the nameless boy in ‘Weep Not, My Wanton’, and the unnamed ‘Boy with a Trumpet’ are all examples

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of characters whose gender remains inchoate or ambivalent. They have a privileged position from which to observe and question the often brutal sexual relations between heterosexual adults. The latter have a very rigid, oppositional idea of gender which Davies clearly wants us, as readers, to recognize as reductive. In ‘Weep Not, My Wanton’, for instance, the young boy’s jealousy of his sister’s breasts is mocked and repressed by his family: Auntie Becca made tittering wet sounds through her teeth, then suddenly sang out jeeringly: ‘A petticoat he’d like to wear too, p’raps, and have a plait down his back . . .’ His father was concluding like a policeman: ‘Don’t let me find you up to those tricks again, my lord. They put blackguards of little boys in reformatories.’19

Similarly, Mrs Mitchell in ‘The Fashion Plate’ embarrassingly tries to treat Nicholas as a ‘little man’ as part of her cruel ostracization of her husband, little realizing that Nicholas is arguably more attracted to her beautiful clothes (perhaps because he might like to wear them himself) than to her as a woman. These are instances of what Marjorie Garber identifies as the function of the ‘third position’: ‘The third deconstructs the binary of self and other that was itself a comfortable, because commutable and thus controllable, fiction of complementarity.’20 Clothing as part of a gender performance is central to ‘The Fashion Plate’. Mrs Mitchell, the ‘fashion plate’ of the title, is an extravagant Valleys Cleopatra, whose exotic clothing is a source of wonder and envy to the colliers’ wives. Her femininity is overt and opulent; she is ‘a dream become courageously real’.21 She defiantly breaks the unspoken ‘sumptuary laws’ of her valleys community, like the female protagonist of ‘Nightgown’. In a sense, though, this story reverses the gender roles of ‘Nightgown’, for whereas in the earlier story, the female had been the victim of her menfolk’s brutal masculinity, in this story, the solidly masculine Mr Mitchell, as ox-like as the animals he slaughters for a living, becomes the victim of his wife’s narcissistic femininity. Rhys Davies’s skill in characterization comes across quite remarkably here, for we as readers are made to sympathize with the crass, inarticulate and unimaginative Mr Mitchell, while at the same time retaining our admiration and understanding of his wife’s loneliness and frustration. She is a femme fatale: like the lobster she insists upon eating (turning up her nose at the meat which she

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presumably could get for nothing from her husband’s slaughterhouse), she is exotic, incongruous, fascinating and cruel. The most masterly touch in this story is its focalization upon the young boy, Nicholas, as the central consciousness. His as yet ill-defined sexuality is our touchstone. He is drawn towards Mrs Mitchell’s pampering and feline femininity, perhaps covetous of her finery, but he is also dimly aware of her callousness. The focus upon clothing remains to the end, where Nicholas is treated to a vision of the fashion plate’s important new hat, trimmed with the glossy wings of a blackbird spread in flight, while the dead man lies in his coffin, his cut throat concealed under a linen muffler, giving him ‘an air of being at the mercy of apparel he himself would not have chosen’.22 Adept as Rhys Davies is at capturing the sensibility of a young boy, he does not confine himself in his stories to portraying the lives and aspirations of youth. He excels also in depicting old age, in memorable stories such as ‘I Will Keep Her Company’ and ‘Betty Leyshon’s Marathon’, both of which date from the 1960s. The latter story again demonstrates Davies’s continuing fascination with dress and the performative aspects of dressing. Betty Leyshon is an eighty-five-yearold whose mind is wandering and who has long been bedridden; in the story, she embarks on her ‘marathon’, a forbidden journey to visit her estranged daughter, Megan, who turns out to have died six years previously. The journey is one which both takes us into Betty’s past and leads her and us inexorably towards her death. Significantly, Betty dons all her ‘finery’ for this, her final journey: She . . . chose her best voile dress, blue as the day’s sky, and rummaged among several hats in the cupboard. She pondered over a black toque. Had she bought it for her husband’s funeral – was it as old as that? She rejected it – not black for that day – and found a lilac straw bonnet that had a bunch of cherries fixed to its poke . . . she wore her beads of real amber, a large gold-rimmed cameo brooch, dangling garnet earrings, and a bracelet of gold medallions. Gloves of mauve silk covered the three jeweled rings she had taken from the heart-shaped plush casket, now empty.23

It is as if Betty is making a last, dramatic assertion of her femininity in her valedictory performance. Significantly, she encounters on her travels a handsome young man with whom she flirts, and towards the very end she meets a darkly good-looking farm-worker walking

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home, whom she mistakes for Bran, her dead husband. Escaping from the daughter who cares for her/keeps her in check, she revels in this long-missed male company: ‘she was sick of women’.24 Buoyed up by her ‘undefeated will’ her self-confidence is fuelled by her ‘finery . . . the rhythmic swing of her two-inch earrings, that she hadn’t worn for many years, especially assured her’.25 When Betty finally lies down to die in a little bower under a hedge, she loses the crowning image of her reclaimed femininity: ‘her hat, with its cherries, [which] dangled above the gap until the farmhand passed that way again, the next morning’.26 Clearly, Betty is performing a masquerade as false in its way as the men’s clothing worn by the woman in ‘Nightgown’ and the ‘black frock, necklet of pearls, and bobbed auburn wig’27 worn by the Cornish transvestite with whom Rhys Davies danced in a Berlin night-club. Davies’s story signals clearly that masquerade is not merely an aberration characteristic of individuals of ambiguous sexuality but that it is central to all ‘femininity’ or, as Stephen Heath puts it, ‘authentic womanliness is . . . mimicry, is the masquerade’.28 Rhys Davies is underlining for us once again the constructed nature of gender identity, which has little to do with physical ‘reality’ and everything to do with states of mind, imagination, and desire. The notion of performative gender is not confined to characters within the stories. We, as readers, are ‘interpellated’ by the texts, to use Louis Althusser’s term; that is, we are constructed as subjects by the text, which tries to enforce on us a particular reading. Though Althusser does not seem particularly interested in the gender of the subject constructed in this way, I believe that the interpellation extends to our gender positioning as readers too. In Rhys Davies’s work, the interpellated reader is frequently invited to take up a feminine gender position. In ‘Nightgown’ it is virtually impossible for a male reader, let alone a female, to empathize with the male characters. The male reader is forced by the strong interpellation of the story to perform a feminine gender role, to read like (if not as) a woman. This kind of reading might be regarded in itself as a masquerade. Nor is this unusual in Rhys Davies’s fiction. As a homosexual writer, he often seems to take up a feminine subject position in his texts, viewing the male body, for example, in an erotic and sensuous way in the disguise of a heterosexual female. (A striking instance of this is found in the later story, ‘The Chosen One’.) Rhys Davies succeeds in destabilizing our own gender positions as readers. He requires us to perform other gender roles, to move from one

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gender performance to another, manipulating us as he does his own characters to take part in a phantasmagoric masquerade. In some stories, such as ‘Arfon’,29 the interpellation of the reader is, however, highly problematic. Here, we are presented with a deformed and despised male who, like Frankenstein’s monster, eventually turns murderer in the trauma of his sexual and psychological frustration. The question of the gender positioning of the reader in a story such as this is an interesting one. Clearly, we are invited to empathize with the illtreated, sensitive Arfon, for the female character is both frivolous and calculating. Yet Arfon’s masculinity is questionable. He feels sexual desire for the female but, in his drawings of her, her eroticism is translated into something ugly and threatening. It is tempting to interpret Arfon’s marginal and ambiguous status as a coded representation of male homosexuality (as M. Wynn Thomas has suggested) but, if so, the demands made upon the reader are problematic ones. Discretion and self-protection meant that Davies was forced to conceal or encrypt his references to homosexuality, so that he cannot make a straightforward demand for a ‘gay’ reading from his readers. We are left in an uncertain position, and this uncertainty regarding the gender positioning of the interpellated reader is one of the many reasons why this story is so disturbing and open-ended. I believe that Rhys Davies sets out to destabilize gender positions for the sake of it. He does not seek to put a feminist case nor, primarily, to attack a narrow patriarchy but rather to blur the rigid gender divisions which must have made his own life, as a firmly closeted homosexual, such a tediously repeated performance of repression. No wonder that we see gender role reversal and cross-dressing often displayed in Davies’s texts, sometimes comically, at other times with the full force of tragedy. As Judith Butler states in her feminist re-evaluation of cross-dressing, ‘in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency’.30 Though there is undoubtedly a tendency to privilege female characters and female points of view in Rhys Davies’s fiction, it is also true that his work does not suggest that there is one, single female voice. His work indicates that there can be no universal definition of ‘woman’; similarly, ‘reading as a woman’ is not so straightforward as it might sound. As many feminist critics have observed, the female reader is herself a complex and protean entity, since the woman who is reading has to be differentiated both from an abstract, historically defined concept of the ‘female reader’, and from the ‘female reader’

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who is constructed or interpellated by the narrative of any individual text. Although it would be foolhardy to suggest that Rhys Davies anticipates post-structuralist feminist theory in his work, he certainly does alert the reader to the almost infinite permutations of gender, the myriad masks a man or woman may, indeed must, wear.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 161. Quoted in Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 3. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘ “Never seek to tell thy love”: Rhys Davies’s fiction’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 4 (1998), 1–21, reprinted in the present volume. Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning (London: Heinemann, 1969), 90. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 116. Rhys Davies, ‘Nightgown’, in Collected Stories, vol. 1, ed. Meic Stephens (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1996), 237–44. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 25. Rhys Davies, ‘Nightgown’, 237. Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot, 47 and 70. Rhys Davies, ‘Nightgown’, 238. Garber, Vested Interests, 10. Ibid., 16–17. Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1963), 14. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Never seek to tell thy love’, 3. See, for example, the former’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and the latter’s Written on the Body (1992), both featuring sexually ambiguous protagonists. Garber, Vested Interests, 11. Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot, 63. Rhys Davies, ‘Weep Not, My Wanton’, in Collected Stories, 1, 270–1. Garber, Vested Interests, 12. Rhys Davies, ‘The Fashion Plate’, in Collected Stories, vol. 2, 128. Ibid., 139. Rhys Davies, ‘Betty Leyshon’s Marathon’, in Collected Stories, 2, 316. Ibid., 322. Ibid., 317.

The Masquerade of Gender in the Stories of Rhys Davies 26 27 28

29 30

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Ibid., 331. Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot, 174. Stephen Heath, ‘Joan Rivière and the masquerade’, in V. Burgin, J. Donald, and C. Kaplan (eds.), Formations of Fantasy (London: Methuen, 1986), 48. Rhys Davies, ‘Arfon’, in Collected Stories, 1, 17–43. Butler, Gender Trouble, 137.

Daughters of Darkness: Rhys Davies’s Revenge Tragedies JANE AARON

In the 1940s and early 1950s, at the peak of his career as a novelist, Rhys Davies produced three novels focusing with an increasing degree of intensity and violence on the war between the sexes. Dominated by strong female characters, who have put aside stereotypically feminine traits in order to avenge their sex, these novels seem primarily concerned with teaching the Welsh heterosexual male a lesson. Olwen in The Black Venus (1944) uses what power she has in a rural community, still practising ‘courtship in bed’, to force the Welshman to change his ways towards women. In The Dark Daughters (1947) three daughters wreak a slow vengeance on their adulterous father for his crimes against their mother; aided by his Welsh Nonconformist conscience, they drive him close to madness. Located in a Welsh coastal industrial town, Marianne (1951) chillingly records a middleclass woman’s destruction of the steelworker whom she erroneously believes brought about through his desertion the heartbreak and death in childbirth of her twin sister. Each novel is progressively darker than its predecessor: The Black Venus is predominantly a comedy; The Dark Daughters a Gothic feminized version of King Lear; Marianne, with its quicker pace and unrelieved intensity, shares some of the characteristics of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. Together, like Davies’s earlier Rhondda trilogy, they cover an extended epoch of Welsh history, focusing this time not on a specific community but on the changing nature of Welsh gender identity. My interest in writing this chapter is primarily in the last two darker novels and their probing of what they present as a specifically Welsh gendered psyche, in which Nonconformity and class issues play key roles in the construction of masculinity and femininity. But The Black Venus too, for all its relative light-heartedness, is concerned to explore what may be considered as Rhys Davies’s most characteristic theme

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throughout his work, namely, the essential loneliness of the human soul and its struggles to shore up defences against that loneliness. Within different communities these defensive practices will take different forms; in The Black Venus Davies is particularly interested in the traditions of Welsh rural communities, and in one tradition in particular, ‘courtship on beds’ or ‘bundling’ as it was also called. ‘Courtship on beds’ refers to the socially accepted practice of acknowledged lovers getting to know one another better while lying, supposedly fully clothed, in the woman’s bed: as an additional protection, the girl’s mother might also lay a bolster between the two, or stitch the girl up in a bolster case or sack, hence the appellation ‘bundling’. For lack of any other private space for lovers during the cold winter months, this practice was widespread in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury rural Europe,1 but in Wales it apparently persisted into the 1920s, albeit in the face of much opposition.2 Rhys Davies stoutly defends ‘bundling’ as ‘wise and prudent’,3 and, moreover, specifically Welsh. The events of The Black Venus take place in the first decades of the twentieth century: in its opening scene, Olwen Powell, its central character, refers to the fact a new century has just begun. But in the remote rural village of Ayron, courtship on beds is still being practised, with such open zeal that it can yet be used by the local Church of England faction to vilify the Nonconformist sects to which the majority of the village’s indigenous inhabitants belong. Caroline Drizzle, a wealthy English incomer into the village, is appalled by the continuation of the custom, and manages to arouse the local Anglican clergyman into open condemnation of its Nonconformist practitioners. The labelling of ‘courtship on beds’ as a peculiarly Welsh custom, and one which was abhorrent to more refined English susceptibilities, dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, to an 1847 English governmental report on the state of Welsh education. When the Report, which in Wales became notorious as the ‘Betrayal of the Blue Books’, went beyond its brief and listed in detail the sins of the Welsh, ‘bundling’ figured largely. The Victorian morality of middle-class England laid stress upon the sanctity of the marriage bed and pronounced itself shocked by the barbarities of Welsh sexual mores, which the Report ascribed to Welsh people’s lack of access to the civilizing effects of English-language culture. ‘Want of chastity’ was ‘the giant sin of Wales’,4 and one which was positively encouraged by the religion of the Welsh, Calvinistic Nonconformity, with its

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weekday evening prayer-meetings or seiadau, attended, of course, by both men and women. According to the Report: The want of chastity results frequently from the practice of ‘bundling’ or courtship on beds, during the night – a practice still widely prevailing. It is also said to be much increased by night prayer-meetings, and the intercourse which ensues in returning home.5

Historically, in nineteenth-century Wales, few dared to raise their voices in defence of courtship on beds, although many and vociferous were those who protested the purity of Welsh women, and in particular Welsh Nonconformist women. But in The Black Venus ‘bundling’ is itself defended as a practical and sensible way of choosing a life partner, and English interference in ancient Welsh customs is robustly dismissed. Moesen Rowlands, the ageing local squire, pronounces that no effect is there made on me by the statement that in go-ahead nations like England our custom of courting in bed rouses surprise and more. A new and foreign race the English are and have not yet had time to settle successfully in Britain . . . we will abide in our British customs, without reference to the opinions of our guests the English.6

For Olwen Powell, the village’s ruling beauty and heiress of the richest farm in the district, there is, however, one substantial defect in the way in which ‘courtship on beds’ has traditionally been practised; hitherto its benefits have been felt mainly by the male sex who use it to choose their partners, rather than by women relegated to the passive role of being merely the object of their choice. The novel opens with a trial scene in Ayron’s Methodist chapel in which Olwen successfully defends against a jury of elders, most of whom have practised ‘courtship on beds’ in their youth, her enlightened and overtly feminist mode of conducting the old ritual. ‘A new century we are in’, she says, but still are women locked up . . . the cramp of their chains is still in their limbs . . . I am trying to make courting in bed a fairer business than it has been. A woman’s testing of a man I am wanting to make it and not always a man’s testing of a woman. An example to women I am trying to make myself.7

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Accordingly, she has taken to her bed a string of seven eligible locals (selecting each in turn during chapel services with a significant look and nod), with the altruistic aim of teaching them how to conduct themselves with women, as well as of finding for herself the ideal mate. ‘A mission I have,’ she proclaims, and good I have done already to the seven mentioned. Not the same men they are now. Less clumsy and better-mannered they are. The women of Ayron will live to thank me . . . And going on with the education of men I am. A low state they are in. They do not see that women are throwing away their chains . . . For I tell you that running up the mountains women are, and their feet will reach the top.8

In the event, her quest for the ideal partner is not fulfilled; she laments at the close of the novel that ‘Lonely everybody is. The angel partner never comes down to earth. But second-best most persons take. Except me . . . so far’ – to which the unorthodox Nonconformist minister whom she finally agrees to marry (but with preconditions) responds, ‘True, true. But very poor the person that can’t jump out of second-best now and again, and be first-best for an hour very glorious.’9 Nevertheless she has succeeded, as even the envious Ayron women eventually have to admit, in raising to a higher level of sensitivity and civility a number of the village’s bachelors and has done so through her use of the vilified custom of ‘courting on beds’. In this comedy, then, peculiarly Welsh ways of bringing the two genders together, and attempting to ease as far as possible the anguish of the isolated human condition, are upheld as praiseworthy; marred though it is by centuries of patriarchal practice, ‘bundling’ is yet redeemable by a determined woman, and can function to the benefit of both sexes. Welsh men may need a lesson but it is one which twentieth-century Welsh women are fully capable of teaching them, without diverging from specifically Welsh customs. Moreover, that other peculiarly Welsh institution, Calvinist Methodism, proves ultimately no barrier to women’s liberation and development in The Black Venus. Her chapel elders do not condemn Olwen, and her eventual husband Noah Watts, who fully approves her campaign and accepts uncritically the fact that she is pregnant by another suitor, is himself a Nonconformist preacher. The same degree of optimism about the basic sanity of Welsh ways of life can hardly be said to be maintained in Rhys Davies’s next novel, however. Mansell Roberts,

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the central male figure in The Dark Daughters, gains little but blight from his Welsh heritage. The only child of a Welsh farmer and his downtrodden wife, Mansell arrives in London as a young man in 1895, determined to wrest from the city a fortune which will redeem in retrospect the tragedy of his father’s life. In the 1870s, the father had invested his hard-won savings in a pioneering mining venture ‘operated in the new El Dorado of Glamorgan’.10 But the venture failed and left Roberts senior a bitterly disappointed man, who ‘rarely allowed conversation, was totally lacking in affectionate demonstration and, after the financial catastrophe, remained isolated in Biblical studies’.11 Mansell has brought with him out of Wales an apparently submissive wife, Arabella, who gives him three daughters, but the attractions of London prove a lure too great for his Nonconformist conscience. He allows himself to be led into making money from renting rooms to prostitutes, and takes as a mistress May Potter, a music-hall artiste. After Arabella’s early death, however, he makes an attempt to revert to respectability, marries May, and brings her and Laura, the daughter she has borne him, back to his chemist shop in North London. But his wife had discovered his secret, and on her death-bed had passed the knowledge on to her own eldest daughter, Marion, who now involves her two sisters in a conspiracy of vengeance against their father and his second bride. This purpose they retain with inviolable implacability until the father’s eventual death some twenty years later. The family has returned to Wales, where May, whose married life has been rendered miserable by her step-daughters, succeeds in drinking herself to death. But when Mansell seeks to assuage ‘the consciousness, profound and certain, of the soul’s unutterable loneliness’12 by marrying once more, Arabella’s daughters wreck his plans by blandly informing his proposed bride of his former peccadilloes. ‘I could disgrace you wherever you were,’ Marion tells her father ‘tranquilly’: ‘The past is not easily disposed of.’13 She and her two sisters see themselves as taking vengeance upon the patriarch not only for crimes committed against their mother but also for the sake of their grandmother, the farmer’s wife, who, as they have discovered, wasn’t allowed to sit with her husband and son in the local chapel and used to eat a raw swede out in the fields . . . She wasn’t buried in the same grave as her husband either . . . even though it was through her exertions the farm didn’t go bankrupt. Our father wouldn’t have it . . .

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one would imagine women in these parts hadn’t come out of the dark ages; it makes one boil.14

As the sisters atrophy in bitter celibacy alongside their trapped father, Laura, May’s daughter, flees this serpents’ nest of a household to become an actress in London. Ten years later, after an abortive attempt at marriage, she returns, having realized that she too can enjoy no internal freedom while the family sex war still wages unassuaged. By this time, the division between father and daughters has gained Gothic dimensions. Mansell spends his days isolated in a bleak tower chamber and his nights, secretly, in the mansion’s cellar, which he has furnished with a coffin for his bed. His daughters, living in poverty on the meagre allowance he begrudges them, are convinced of his madness, but have not yet succeeded in their attempts to persuade the local doctors to certify him. In his deterioration, the father perceives his ‘vampire’ daughters as goads in the hand of God, intended through what he experiences as their perpetual assaults upon him to bring about the purgation of his sins. At the same time, he is still intent upon blaming his first wife for what he is determined to see as his lifetime of crime. Of Arabella he says, ‘She sowed guilt in me. Always meek and not a word against me! Tearing me down! She asked to be destroyed . . . But the poison remains for ever.’15 In particular, it remains for him in the abiding presence at his side of Arabella’s daughters, intent upon his destruction. Into this endgame of desolation Laura tries to bring a redeeming love, but at first she can hardly be said to succeed. Her presence exacerbates each member of the household to an increased awareness of their condition, to such an extent that Mansell sets up for himself the means to make a suicide bid, but is saved from that end by a fall down the cellar steps. Alerted by his cry, Laura finds him as she descends the stair in the dark: A scream rang round the buried walls. She had stepped on his face. She felt the burning print of his mouth, nose and eyes against the sole of her foot. She fell on to his body. She did not hear her own scream. But in that moment when she thudded against his body a cord seemed to snap within her mind. She uttered another cry: low, vibrant, like triumph. And easing herself, she lay flat across his body and took his head within her hands . . . She lifted the face to her own. In a passion of sorrow she embraced him . . . Her crushed breasts flooded him with her warmth.

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She breathed into his nostrils. And in a passion of regret, the hopeless sorrow of the living, she wept. ‘Father, father . . .’ And slowly, slowly an arm fell across her shoulders and pressed with a light, broken weight. She heard . . . the whisper: ‘Laura . . . my daughter, Laura . . . stay with me.’16

This scene constitutes an interesting reversal of the final tableaux of King Lear, a play whose motifs haunt The Dark Daughters throughout. The story of Lear was itself, of course, originally a Welsh or rather ancient British tale, taken by Shakespeare from Holinshed’s version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of Leir, king of pre-Saxon Britain, in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1120–9). But whereas in Shakespeare’s version the play ends with the old king breaking his heart as he bends over the corpse of his one loyal daughter, Cordelia, in Rhys Davies’s version the loyal daughter’s heart is made whole, and her life released and renewed, as she flattens what is to prove virtually the corpse of her father. It is of course the long-awaited expression of fatherly affection and need which he finally utters that actually releases her emotionally; nevertheless the image of the daughter’s foot on the patriarch’s face is vividly and memorably represented here. And the novel does not close before Rhys Davies’s Cordelia also makes an attempt to help her sisters rid themselves of the poison left behind by their long vigil of hate, a move not contemplated by Shakespeare’s heroine when she finally faces her father’s tormentors, Goneril and Regan. Unforgiving to the end to the offspring of his first marriage, Mansell leaves his money unequally divided. A small sum, which the will explicitly states comes only from the honest profits of the chemist’s shop, goes to Laura; two-thirds of the much vaster wealth derived from the prostitutes’ houses goes to Marion; while the remaining third must be shared between Kate and the second sister Gwen. Arabella’s three daughters start to bicker instantly and intensely over this inheritance, but Laura tells them, can’t you see that father made that will to punish the three of you? . . . Not only did he believe that money would corrupt you, but by dividing it unfairly he wanted to make you tear each other to pieces . . . He particularly wanted to punish Marion.17

As if in unspoken recognition of her half-sister’s good intentions, Marion presses into Laura’s hand as she leaves the dark household a

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box containing May Potter’s jewellery, including her wedding ring. The gift would appear to signify the closure of at least Marion’s, if not also her sisters’, enmity against Mansell’s second bride and his illegitimate daughter. The sins of the father, it would appear, are not for ever to be held against the daughter; the destructive cycle of hatred wrought by male heterosexual infidelity need not endlessly pit woman against woman. Arabella’s children are not ‘unnatural daughters’ to her, as they wage war for her sake against their father; and Laura’s greater identification with her father does not in the end prevent her from recognizing the grim justice of her sisters’ vendetta, and trying to help them to assuage its after-effects on their lives. Although the historical period in which The Dark Daughters is set differs little from that of The Black Venus, the two worlds of Wales they describe are so different as to appear like straightforward contradictions of each other. In particular, Welsh Nonconformity in the one is actively instrumental in bringing about the tragedy, whereas in the other it does nothing to prevent, and even, in the shape of the progressively minded preacher Noah Watts, helps to bring about, the happy conclusion of the comedy. But from the outset Mansell Roberts’s life is darkened by his father’s religion, which appears to encourage the father to sequester himself in dark brooding, away from the family life of his wife and child, a pattern which the child was later to follow with disastrous results. However, his Calvinism does nothing to prevent Roberts senior from experiencing loss of money as a major humiliation, nor does it deflect Mansell from aspiring above all else to make a fortune. The accusation against nineteenth-century Welsh Calvinism that, in allowing a pattern to develop in which wealth as much as spirituality became a criterion for the choosing of chapel elders, it created an association in its members’ minds between successful material acquisition and divine approval, appears to be endorsed by this novel.18 However, when Mansell in London gains financially through exploiting prostitution, his Calvinist conscience is awakened with a vengeance. Though successfully to make money is an indication of God’s support, to make it through the sins of the flesh is a crime of everlasting proportions. Mansell’s religion is also a profoundly patriarchal affair; in the many prayers to his ‘Father’ that feature in the second part of the text the earthly father who dominates his consciousness seems conflated with the godhead. The position of women within this religion is decidedly subordinated; vehicles of fleshly temptation as they are, their role is to accept a secondary position and subdue their very being in an attempt

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to keep sexuality at bay. However, they are caught in a double bind, because they can also be blamed, as Arabella is by Mansell, for not asserting themselves to control and discipline their masters should the males start to slip from the straight and narrow path. It is in part because he accords to women this moral chastizing role that Mansell is impotent to check the development of the destructive war between himself and Arabella’s daughters. The stalemate between them is presented in the text as a specifically Welsh state of affairs; Laura’s greater freedom from it comes about in part because she is only halfWelsh, and because of the ten years she spends outside its influence in England. Her redeeming angel role in the second half of the text is not apparently motivated by any Christian faith, Calvinist or otherwise, but by a conflation of her personal recognition of the need for greater love between the sexes and the liberal humanitarian principles she acquires from her current suitor, the urbane Englishman Alex Gregory, who makes an appearance in the text and pontificates in Freudian mode upon the twisted emotions of the Welsh family. From this text alone, therefore, it would appear that participation in the Welsh way of life dooms the sexes to a primitive emotional warfare, in which a greater intensity of passion may be generated than in the affairs of the less contorted English, but only to destructive effect. However, when the world of The Dark Daughters is compared to that of The Black Venus, it becomes clear, paradoxically enough, that the most significant difference between them resides in the latter world’s greater freedom from English influences. The Welsh rural community in The Black Venus refuses to accept any English interference in the ruling of its affairs, and this refusal promotes rather than limits the ease of exchange between the sexes and the acceptance of the needs of the body. Historically, the Ayron community represents a throw-back to a pre-1847 Welsh world in which such rural practices as courtship on beds was more or less openly tolerated by an already Nonconformist Wales. After 1847, in historical fact, Welsh Nonconformity, in an attempt to redeem itself in English eyes, imposed heavy punitive controls upon the sexual behaviour of its congregations, particularly the women, excommunicating from its numbers any unmarried female members of its flock who became pregnant. It is this harsher environment which constitutes the world of The Dark Daughters, and the obviously greater likelihood of hypocritical and deceitful sexual behaviour to which it gives rise is exacerbated in this novel by the characters’ move to London.

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As part of Welsh objections to the accusations of the 1847 Report, the point was made that the higher ratio of illegitimate births in Wales, compared with England, could largely be accounted for by the fact that there was comparatively little prostitution in Wales – prostitutes being considered to be particularly skilled in such rudimentary methods of contraception as were available at that time.19 England’s lower levels of illegitimate births should, therefore, these protesters suggested, be ascribed to an institutionalized hypocrisy, in which surface respectability covered a brisk trade in hidden prostitution, particularly rife in the larger English cities. It is into this world of secret vice that Mansell Roberts slides in the 1890s, via his weakness for London’s music-halls, only subsequently to see his dereliction as the work of the devil. By the date of the closing scenes of The Dark Daughters, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, while the upper echelons of English society (represented in this text by Alex Gregory) may have repudiated as overly restrictive the sexual mores of the Victorian period, those mores are still sufficiently alive within the Welsh Nonconformist conscience to condemn Mansell in his own eyes and that of his daughters. Yet The Black Venus demonstrates that a fear of sexuality need not be seen as an indigenous Welsh trait, but more as one induced into the mind-set of Welsh Nonconformity by the history of its nineteenth-century collisions with imperial England and its established church. Partly perhaps because the virulence of Welsh Nonconformity’s sexual puritanism detracted from its popular appeal, by the middle years of the twentieth century its members were rapidly decreasing in number, particularly in the industrial areas. Certainly it seems to have very little influence, for good or ill, over the behaviour of the characters in Rhys Davies’s next novel, Marianne, which is set in the industrial towns of Port Talbot and Morriston, here thinly disguised as Port Trolon and Mariston. Social class, and the different patterns of self-presentation expected of the sexes within each class, bear more influence upon the tragic development of this novel’s plot than Welsh Nonconformity. The novel opens in the garden of the middle-class home of twin sisters Marianne and Barbara Treharne. The garden’s ‘long flower-filled’ seclusions look out across the river to Nun’s Well, an ‘escarpment of densely-packed dwellings’ on the opposite hillside, inhabited by the local steelworkers and their families. Periodically, throughout the day and night, both these middle- and working-class residences are illuminated by ‘a huge, fiercely growing conflagration’ which resembles ‘the unexpected eruption of an invisible volcano’,20

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though it is in fact but the glow produced by the local steel foundry’s tapping of its furnaces. The blaze serves, however, as a symbol of the emotional conflagration which is even now, at the tale’s commencement, threatening the peace of the Treharne family. For Marianne is already pregnant as a result of an infatuation with a man from Nun’s Well; she refuses to divulge the name of her lover, thus confounding her parents’ wishes to force marriage upon him, though it is clear from her demeanour that it is not through any wish of her own that no marriage is to take place. In the event, Marianne dies in child-birth, but not before, at the last moment, throwing out her lover’s name to her sister ‘between clenched teeth’.21 Barbara, whose bonds with her twin are of such intensity that, at the death, ‘she saw every convulsion, to the last, and knew them as her own’,22 vows vengeance on the man whom she sees as the double murderer of her sister, inasmuch as he not only impregnated her but through his desertion threw her into a state of such desolation that her health was impaired, and she lacked the physical strength and emotional will-power necessary to combat the after-effects of a complicated birth. Accordingly, Barbara quits the secluded world of her upbringing, starts attending Nun’s Well boxing matches and dances, finds her man, Geoffrey Roberts, a young moulder in the local steelworks, and duly marries him, helped, she thinks, to preserve the secret of her vengeful purpose by the fact that she and her sister were not identical and that Marianne adopted an assumed name during her own earlier forays into the working-class area. After a brief, but from the sexual point of view highly successful honeymoon in France the couple return to Port Trolon, where Geoffrey is blandly informed on his first night in his new, expensively furnished home, the payments for which will continually harass him during the rest of his short life, that his bride is not going to sleep with him any more. Baffled and deeply wounded, he takes to drink and rapidly deteriorates, to such an extent that, when he falls in the street on one frosty night in the following winter, he does not have the strength to withstand the pneumonia which develops, and dies in hospital, unvisited by his remorseless, but inwardly deeply troubled, wife. Barbara returns to her parental home, where Marianne’s child is still being cared for, only to be told, quite casually, by a neighbour who had been in her sister’s confidence, that the child strongly resembles its father, Jeffrey Roberts, a married sailor, whose home-base is in Nun’s Well. In the intense agony of her remorse and her by now openly acknowledged passion for the man she

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married, Barbara decides as an act of atonement to give her muchbeloved nephew to his father, should Jeffrey Roberts and his wife want him. Having successfully negotiated this dénouement, the book ends with Barbara’s decision to seek political and social work, and do what she can for the rest of her days to aid the people to whose class her late husband belonged. Such a brief synopsis can give little sense of the mesmerizing power of this tale as Rhys Davies tells it; it is intensely gripping and psychologically entirely convincing in the rapid and remorseless sequence of its events. Indeed, why this novel and so many of Rhys Davies’s other, in their way equally successful, fictions have remained for so long out of print is a mystery; certainly, the reading public, and Welsh readers in particular, have been deprived through this neglect of a body of work which could do much to aid understanding of the divisions in contemporary Welsh society, and help to heal them. Class divides, and the polarized type of gender identities to which they give rise, constitute the chief cause of the characters’ difficulties in recognizing the true nature of one another in Marianne. The text makes it clear that these divisions are historically constructed and entirely arbitrary in so far as they relate to actual individual identities; they constitute a drama which the characters feel bound by their class and gender loyalties to play out to the bitter end, though there is little relation between those dramatic roles and their real propensities. Throughout the period of their courtship and marriage, Barbara, in order to gain reassurance as to the rightness of her choice of victim, makes frequent attempts to get her husband to confess to what she assumes must be his actively sexual past. In ignorance of what hangs on it, Geoffrey revels in her representation of him as ‘the Don Juan of the foundry’,23 and has too much pride in this roisteringly macho image of himself as idealized working-class stud to reveal to her that, in fact, before her advent, he had always been uncertain in his relations with women. It is only on his death-bed that he is sufficiently broken down to give to a nurse his final pathetic message to his absent wife – that ‘there was no one else’.24 Equivalently, Barbara during her honeymoon steels herself against the recognition of her actual passionate responsiveness to her husband’s love-making through identifying with another guest at the hotel, a handsome English spinster who sat alone at a window-table . . . and desired no one’s intimacy. The way she put on a pair of gloves on the

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terrace, looking at no one, was full of the might of the British Empire, which, if it fell, would still exist for her.25

She too, Barbara persuades herself, is of this ‘proper lady’ breed. But in fact the Treharne family’s middle-class status is only one generation deep, in a manner which accords with the historical reality of the late growth of the Welsh middle class. Barbara’s father was himself working-class, but he married into money, and the educated sensibilities he had developed during his time as a trade-union activist in the Welsh labour movement of the first decades of the twentieth century made him a fitting intellectual partner for his cultivated wife. By 1950, however, after the years of the Great Depression and the stultifying of Welsh industrial growth, the working class from which he rose is rigorously ghettoized into the terraces of Nun’s Well, a world away in terms of culture and educational opportunities from the middle-class mansions on the opposing side of the valley. Geoffrey’s increasingly agonized pleas that his wife should reach across the breach she has created between them – ‘What are you doing to me?’26 he says, ‘Come to me, Barbara . . . come . . . touch me . . . touch me’27 – can be read as voicing the bafflement of a Wales destructively divided into richer and poorer by what are in fact comparatively recent class segregations, not of its own indigenous making. Yet this novel, too, does not close in complete darkness. By the end of the educative process she has undergone, after her husband’s death and the ‘interior crash after crash’28 of her misapprehensions, Barbara has become ‘aware of the interfusion of the eternal being of people, the correspondence in their touch and voices’, for all the artificial barriers of class and gender. The awareness awakens in her ‘the dim stirring of a liberated inner life and of the distant but radiant fringe of a new happiness’.29 Geoffrey also, during his brief honeymoon happiness, shows a sensitivity and openness of mind sufficient to liberate him from the rigours of his acquired class and gender role; on one occasion he jokingly paints his lips with his wife’s lipstick, telling her in the mean time in all seriousness, ‘I want to get more feminine for your sake.’30 The need for both sexes to become aware of the qualities they share is stressed too in The Black Venus; the admirable Noah Watts realizes that Olwen Powell’s difficulties in finding a suitable mate were caused by male refusals to admit such a recognition. ‘Two things you have been looking for in a man,’ he tells Olwen, ‘the comforts of the flesh and the treasures of the soul. But bad luck for

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you, only a lot of bulls have come courting you . . . Best type of man is he who owns a bit of the cow in him, but very rare these are.’ Noah attributes the propensity of males to bullishness in part, however, to the encouragement they receive from their womenfolk to take up such macho roles: ‘Why is it that so bullish they are? Because women, from the habit of their low state, whimper “be a bull and protect me. A poor weak woman I am.” Garlands on the bull they hang. A false image of strength they worship.’31 But it cannot be said that any of the chief female characters in the three novels discussed in this chapter show any such ‘low’ feminine traits; they are more likely to charge a ‘bull’ head on at first sight than to hang garlands around his neck. Through convincingly portraying such women’s capacity to control and fight, Rhys Davies demonstrates that the will to power, as much as the need for tenderness and intimacy, is in fact equally shared by both sexes. No doubt it was in part his homosexuality, revealed as it has been of late by his recent biographers and critics,32 that freed him to see through the artificial nature of gender divisions and to recognize that so-called masculine and feminine traits are all ultimately but human characteristics, shared by both sexes. Be that as it may, the ultimate message of his revenge tragedies is that it is the oppressive and divisive structures of society, such as the class and the gender systems, that constitute the enemy and must be fought, and not the individuals entangled in the prejudices and misapprehensions they induce. For, as one of the characters in The Dark Daughters says, ‘There’s no victory in wars between human beings. That old-fashioned organ the heart won’t allow it.’33

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6 7 8

See Martine Segal, Love and Power in the Peasant Family, trans. Sarah Matthews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). See Catrin Stevens, Arferion Caru (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1977), 67. See Rhys Davies’s MS notes on The Black Venus, now held in the National Library of Wales. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of Education in Wales (London, 1847), 2, 60. Ibid., 56. Rhys Davies, The Black Venus (London: Heinemann, 1944), 31. Ibid., 21 and 22. Ibid., 26.

230 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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Ibid., 199. Rhys Davies, The Dark Daughters (London: Heinemann, 1947), 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 248. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 258–9. Ibid., 293–4. See Caradoc Evans, My People (1915; repr. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1987), for repeated instances of this accusation. In his autobiography Print of a Hare’s Foot (London: Heinemann, 1969), 119, Rhys Davies acknowledges the influence of Caradoc Evans’s fiction on his work, and certainly the depiction of the lives of Mansell Roberts’s parents in The Dark Daughters would appear to owe much to similar portrayals in My People. See Ieuan Gwynedd [Evan Jones], ‘A vindication of the educational and moral condition of Wales’ (1848), reprinted in Brinley Rees (ed.), Ieuan Gwynedd: Detholiad o’i Ryddiaith (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1957), 87–91. Rhys Davies, Marianne (London: Heinemann, 1951), 1. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 242. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 171. Davies, Black Venus, 187. See, for example, M. Wynn Thomas, ‘ “Never seek to tell thy love”: Rhys Davies’s fiction’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 4 (1998), 1–21, and Meic Stephens, ‘Introduction’, in Rhys Davies, Collected Stories, vol. 1 (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1996), 8–9; both are reprinted in the present volume. Davies, Dark Daughters, 252.

The Black Venus: Atavistic Sexualities KIRSTI BOHATA

Sarah Bartmann,1 a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa, arrived in England in 1810. Until her death, in Paris, in December 1815, she was exhibited in England (including an appearance in the Court of Chancery in 1811) and France as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. She appeared naked but for a small apron covering her genitalia, allowing the spectators a full view of the protuberant buttocks for which she was famous. Bartmann was the subject of street ballads and cartoons in England, while in Paris a vaudeville entitled La Vénus Hottentote ou haine aux Françaises was staged just streets away from where she was being exhibited. Sarah Bartmann, as a representative of her ‘race’, not only came to represent the lowest form of human (perhaps forming a link between man and the highest ape, the orang-utan), her body also became the epitome of sexual excess.2 However, perhaps her most enduring fame came after her death and dissection when Georges Cuvier discovered an over-development of the labia minora which he named the Hottentot Apron. Thus, Bartmann’s body, or rather her sexual parts – her large pendulous breasts, her buttocks and now her genitalia – were pathologized by European scientists, while they simultaneously came to represent female sexuality itself. The ‘malformations’ of her genitalia were explicitly linked with sexual behaviour that was perceived to be pathological, including lesbianism. Sander Gilman, in Difference and Pathology, describes how in 1877: ‘The author H. Hildebrant links [the Hottentot Apron] with the overdevelopment of the clitoris, which he sees as leading to these “excesses” which “are called ‘lesbian love’.” The concupiscence of the black is thus associated with the sexuality of the lesbian.’3 Whether or not Rhys Davies was aware of the original ‘Black Venus’, or had come across later versions of what T. Denean SharpleyWhiting describes as ‘the narrative of the Black Venus’4 – that is, the

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inscription of the black female body by white Europeans as libidinous to the point of pathology – it is difficult to read his novel The Black Venus (1944)5 without hearing echoes of this older narrative. The black female body, as the sexualized emblem of ‘dark’ passions,6 is explicitly present in Davies’s novel, and the figure of the black female body is playfully manipulated by the author as a signifier of the sexual in the narrative. Furthermore, sexual desire is conceived of in atavistic terms, using the vocabulary of race and purity, breeding and miscegenation, savagery and civilization, linking sexuality to dark, primitive impulses which are relics of humankind’s barbarous and even bestial origins. The plot revolves around Olwen Price, the beautiful young heiress of T} Rhosyn, the wealthiest and most fecund farm in ‘ancient Ayron’ (1) during the reign of Edward VII (1901–10), with the third part of the novel spilling over into the years leading up to the First World War. An intelligent and idealistic young woman, Olwen is not content to marry the first man who asks her, and she puts on trial and rejects many suitors – much to the outrage of the village women in general and the Anglican Church in particular which disapproves of the old tradition of courting in bed (caru yn y gwely) as immoral and outmoded. The custom is defended by the chapel and other pillars of the community, while Olwen announces to this patriarchal establishment that it is her intention to educate the unworthy men of Ayron so that they will make better husbands for their future wives. Strictly obeying the decree that a bolster should be placed between the courting couple in bed, Olwen continues her search for her Prince Charming, until an uncommon young man, Rhisiart Hughes, appears on the scene. Reputedly the illegitimate child of the local magistrate, Rhisiart shuns all social conventions and company, preferring to hunt, fish and play his flute in the woods. Neglecting the bolster, Olwen becomes pregnant, but refuses to marry Rhisiart. Finally, bowing to the pressure of family and chapel, she marries another suitor, Noah Watts, a student preacher who has attracted her mind but not her eye, and proceeds to live a chaste life using her wealth and intelligence to serve the community in the various ways open to middle-class women before the First World War. The bulk of the novel, however, is taken up with Olwen’s frustrating search for a husband and the mounting disapproval of the community. Although the novel is for the most part a comic and light-hearted story, its portrayal of social desires and inhibitions, of sexuality and restraint, is complex.

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Sex, or the possibility of sex, is suggested in the text through references to the black Venus. In fact there are two black Venuses in the novel. One is a life-sized, nude, ebony statue of Venus which takes pride of place in the cluttered cottage of the fiercely independent hunchback, Lizzie Pugh.7 The other is ‘a buxom young negress’ which forms the centrepiece of the embroidered canopy of Olwen’s bed: ‘The bed was a large four-poster with a design of fishes and shells, boats and anchors, with, as a centrepiece, for no reason at all, a buxom young negress holding up a large key’ (40). Nor are these two black figures merely mentioned in introductory descriptive paragraphs in the text and then forgotten, only to be highlighted and brought to the fore by a careful reading of the novel. On the contrary, there are repeated references to both figures, carefully nuanced to fit the occasion, and the ebony statue in particular has a prominent role in the story. Both figures can be associated with the Roman goddess Venus, or her Greek precursor, Aphrodite, as can Olwen herself – the section of the novel which sees her receiving and rejecting her many suitors is entitled ‘Aphrodite in Ayron’, and Aphrodite was renowned for her many lovers although she did not marry. Olwen continually threatens never to marry, even while she is receiving suitors. Further parallels can be found in Olwen’s final sexual submission to Rhisiart Hughes, whose passion for and skill at poaching echoes the passion for hunting of Aphrodite’s favourite lover, Adonis. The ‘buxom young negress’ is clearly pictured in a version of the birth of Venus – Aphrodite was supposed to have been created from ‘the “foaming” remains of Uranus [that were] scattered in the sea by Chronos’.8 In a comic version of this watery creation, the ebony statue is (re)born9 when, after being pitched into a river because it had become a costly embarrassment to Lizzie, the black Venus is washed ashore onto a beach full of holidaymakers: ‘the tide cast it up out of the pearly foam’ (177; my italics). Nevertheless, despite the clever classical intertextuality of Rhys Davies’s Venuses, their exotic as well as their erotic credentials are firmly established. The embroidered negress, as centrepiece of a tapestry of fish, ships and the sea, holding up a key, is as evocative of slavery as of the birth of Venus. Olwen uses the chains of slavery as a simile for the condition of women, bound by conventions of sexuality, marriage and domesticity, and thus the proffered key held up by the negress may be read as an appeal for release from such chains. Addressing a group of men gathered in judgement on courting in bed in general and Olwen’s conduct in particular, Olwen says:

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A new century we are in. But still are women locked up. Shocking it is to admit that they want to be locked up. Why is this? Because no better they know and because the cramp of their chains is still in their limbs. Only harlots and not nice women are free . . . (21)

There are, of course, connotations here of shackles of a different kind – the chastity belt – and it is not insignificant that the proffered key is again highlighted in the text just as the sexually alluring Rhisiart Hughes is about to get into Olwen’s bed (minus the bolster) for the first time: ‘Among the rainbow fishes of the bed canopy, the negress held up her key’ (137). Thus the negress on Olwen’s canopy may be read as offering or symbolizing sexual freedoms, although, ironically, Olwen’s sexual permissiveness with Rhisiart finally leads to an imprisoning pregnancy. The body of the black woman as a symbol of (white) female sexuality is taken further in the form of the ebony statue of Venus – the black Venus of the title. Originally the property of Moesen Rowlands (a respected landowner, magistrate and traditionalist who still displays clear signs of his once legendary virility even in his eighties) the statue has distinctly exotic associations. Moesen Rowlands himself had travelled extensively and had ‘used the world’s countries for the full benefit of his mind, his heart, and his loins’ (24). Lizzie associates the statue with these exotic travels, saying, ‘From off the top of a grave in a foreign land she came . . . have them they do there’ (49). The sexual qualities of the statue of the black Venus itself are made explicit, and Olwen’s perception of the figure seems to conform to the construction of the black female body in reductive physical terms alone and the function of the statue as a sexual signifier in the novel works on the basis of this construction: Smooth and undisturbed her limbs, and the meek face was empty of all woe. Whatever stained it that body would come up shining. But, Olwen thought, it was clear from her aimless face that she had no brains to trouble her. Flesh she was, flesh’s dark beauty, and no more. (111)

When Lizzie moves to T} Rhosyn, where Olwen is mistress by the end of the novel, it is on the condition that the black statue does not accompany her, but as she fails to sell it or throw it away, the statue is instead banished to an outbuilding. At the close of the novel Noah Watts, Olwen’s husband in name for thirteen years, asks Olwen to

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allow Lizzie to have the statue in the house and declares that he will polish the figure himself when Olwen relents. That night, Noah throws gravel at Olwen’s window like a young courter and is allowed, for the first time, into her bed, albeit with the bolster stretched down the centre. Thus the admission of the statue into the house coincides with the suggested revival of Olwen’s sex life. Earlier in the novel, Lizzie sees a direct relationship between a tramp’s attempts to court her, and the black Venus: ‘ “Know they do I got a naked black statue,” Lizzie scowled. “No doubt she do draw them” ’ (110). The sexual connotations of the statue are initially suggested in the novel by Lizzie’s habit of covering the black Venus’s nakedness on the Sabbath: ‘On Sundays, and in deference to possible visitors, Lizzie always tied a muslin apron about its smooth thighs’ (49). This apron is of great significance as a symbol which not only functions within the confines of the text itself but resonates far beyond. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has drawn attention to how the traditional apron which Sarah Bartmann, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, wore when she was exhibited ‘became a highly eroticized article of clothing’.10 The apron covered Bartmann’s genitalia and onlookers were consequently forced to ‘imagine what [was] behind the “veil” (apron) . . . to discern the sexual mysteries of Africa’.11 Aprons became a tool of trade for nineteenth-century prostitutes and while Alan Corbin sees the fetishization of aprons as a result of their association with domestic servants and the way the garment is suggestive of women’s underwear, Sharpley-Whiting contests that the apron became ‘a highly charged sexual article’12 through earlier association with Bartmann. This extended ‘narrative of the black Venus’ was still being played out well into the twentieth century in French colonial cinema as well as a multiplicity of other racist discourses. Josephine Baker, an AfricanAmerican actress, and star of the French theatre as well as a number of French films during the 1920s and 1930s, appropriated the narrative which constructed black women as exotic, licentious, lascivious bodies, using ‘various costumes, ranging from feathers to bananas to a pink muslin apron’13 and dancing ‘topless and buttock accentuating dances’.14 As Sharpley-Whiting points out, Baker knew nothing of Africa or African women, but created a highly sexualized performance that would conform to, as well as titillate, white imaginings of black women. The erotic suggestiveness of Sarah Bartmann’s apron is echoed in the sexual connotations of Lizzie’s ritual of veiling and unveiling her

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statue. Lizzie covers her statue on Sundays, the traditional night for courting men to visit the bedrooms of their lovers, although, since it is the Sabbath, they cannot get into bed until the clock strikes midnight. Having indicated to a young farmer in chapel that he may court her, Olwen Powell goes home and duly lights a candle for the young man in her window, while Lizzie, in one of the many distorted parallels which echo through the novel, also goes home from chapel and lights a candle in anticipation of the village women who come to gossip on Sunday evenings. Impatient of the women, Lizzie turns them out and settles down to read and the chapter ends thus: ‘But as midnight struck from the church clock she rose, climbed on a stool, and removed the muslin apron from the black Venus. It was Monday now’ (52). Meanwhile, Olwen has received her suitor through the bedroom window and has talked with him until midnight. The chapter concludes: Olwen looked at the clock. She went to the bed, pulled back the covers, drew the long bolster from under the pillows and placed it down the bed, so that the space was halved. Then she lifted her arm and took the prong out of her hair. For it was midnight and Sunday was over. (58)

It would be a misleading simplification to describe Lizzie as Olwen’s alter ego, despite the many parallels between the two characters, for the relationship between the two is far more complicated. Olwen is fascinated by Lizzie’s flouting of social convention, while Lizzie’s attraction to Olwen is certainly partly avaricious, but it is also sexual. Lizzie is a fascinating character and she is herself closely associated with the exotic, with the savage and bestial. She never simply speaks, but is always described as screeching, croaking or bleating, if she is not spitting in anger or other expressions of malevolence. Her clothing is suggestive of exotic places; she wears an Indian shawl across her humped back, and, later, her tendency to wear trousers is described by another woman as a ‘Turkish custom’ and therefore ‘not so peculiar they look on [Lizzie]’ (192). The garish colours which she insists on wearing find an echo in a description of Olwen’s embroidered bed canopy with ‘its rainbow fishes and garish dressed negress’ (197; my italics). Lizzie collects all manner of objects in her small cottage and her fascination with brightly coloured trinkets and ribbons of little value is reminiscent of the items Europeans initially traded with the native peoples of Africa and the New World (although Lizzie is not

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averse to collecting what she thinks are valuable objects too). Hanging from the ceiling of her cottage, on pieces of twine tied around the waist, are ‘several dusty, woebegone dolls; one dressed as a sailor, swung by the neck, an everlasting suicide swinging in the breeze when the door was open’ (49).15 These dolls are reminiscent of the fetishes and figurines associated with black magic and voodoo, and further associate Lizzie, along with her ointments and predictions, with witchcraft and primitive darkness. Interestingly, the text seems to challenge the very associations it has implicitly constructed and thus perhaps also questions the reader’s easy recognition and response to such signifiers: ‘But nobody was more matter-of-fact than Lizzie. It was the other Ayron people, with their long racial memories, who couldn’t forget sorcery and the influence of statues, images and dolls’ (194–5). We are told that Lizzie is ageless and that her deformed body is ‘squeezed clean of the juices that vex others’ (3), yet she is full of (often malignant) passion. Her gender and sexuality are ambiguous: her black hair is ‘cut like a boy’s’ (3), she reads Gentleman’s Magazine, and by the end of the novel she is dressed in: ‘a crimson cloak flung back over her shoulders like a Roman toga. Beneath it were white cabin boy’s trousers and a tunic of green linen. It was not the first time she had worn trousers in T} Rhosyn’ (192). Lizzie’s cross-dressing is described by her as an attempt to distance herself from the low status of women: ‘Why is it I am always trying to change myself into a man that is not a man proper? Not because I like men is it, but because of women I’ve been [sic] and low as the crabs in the bottom of the sea is my opinion of them’ (193). There is far more to it than this, however. Her first fantasy about cross-dressing comes in the form of a plot to discover Olwen’s ‘tricks’ when Lizzie suggests that the village women find a woman prepared to dress as a man in order to court Olwen in bed. When they demur, she turns angrily upon them: ‘ “Well, find your own ways. A witch I am not. Let Miss Olwen grow fat in her pleasurings. Worth the whole pack of you she is . . . Poo,” she added with a spit of rage, “dress up as a man I wish I could – after her I would go” ’ (51–2). Lizzie’s feelings for Olwen are ‘at once jeering and admiring’ (45),16 but the sexual attraction is undeniable. At one point, Lizzie exclaims ‘If a man I was! I’d give that Olwen a courting in bed!’ (37). The confused suggestion of violence and sexual conquest are typical of Lizzie’s attitude towards Olwen. Lizzie acts as both confidante and

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agent in Olwen’s search for a husband, but at times Lizzie seems to act in the role of suitor, or perhaps rather the courted, herself. Olwen brings Lizzie gifts and when invited into her cottage a performance which echoes the courting scenes in Olwen’s bedroom is played out. The black Venus is, of course, prominent in this scene, ‘Reigning over the room the statue glowed darkly’ (111), and Lizzie informs Olwen that she ‘did her all over with beeswax yesterday . . . even her backside behind’ (111).17 Paralleling Olwen’s bedroom routine of providing wine and delicate cakes for her suitors: Lizzie brought [from her cupboard] a bottle of home-made wine, glasses and small honey cakes. Her wine was of a good taste and colour, thick and purple with a red under-tinge. They ate and drank under the statue’s mild but dark smile. Outside geese honked and the horse coughed. Lizzie said insidiously: ‘You and me, only two women of nice mind in Ayron. Oh, there’s love and hate your body I do, Miss Olwen! Better than my black statue you are. There’s pleasure it would be for me to bathe you. A faithful servant I would be.’ ‘Some day perhaps – ’ Olwen smiled. ‘Curd and honey in your flesh!’ Lizzie chanted in admiration. ‘A darning needle I could rip in it and dip a piece of bread in the juice . . . Someone to live for I want!’ she bleated. (111–12)

Here then, under the ‘dark smile’ of the black Venus, cannibalistic fantasies are articulated along with suggestions of lesbian sexual desire. As we have seen, the black female body was constructed as the epitome of (pathological) excess and a voracious sexual appetite was linked to other perceived pathologies, including lesbianism and cannibalism. The discourse which constructed black women as sexually pathological was, of course, part of a wider anthropological and ethnological discourse on race which was at its height in the nineteenth century but endured well into the twentieth and is still meaningful in racist constructions of the present. Rhys Davies regularly uses the term ‘race’ along with atavistic connotations in his fiction and this is particularly true in The Black Venus. Ayron itself is portrayed as an ancient, unchanging place with its ‘antique foothills’ and ‘dales where streams ran pellucid as in the dawn of time’ (1). Here, then, antiquity is associated with timelessness, just as the pristine African jungle was regarded as representing an ancient period, far back in European man’s

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development, and simultaneously the timeless childhood of man in a primeval or even prelapsarian world. The inhabitants of Ayron themselves are closely associated with the primitive, even to the point of suggesting humanity’s bestial origins. The most respected figure in the area, Moesen Rowlands (in whose veins ‘the blood of old traditional princes flowed’ (28)), is described thus: ‘In the olden days it was such as he who would have been the leader of the horde to whose side all the tribe’s women came, until a younger man challenged his failing powers’ (5). Throughout the text there are racial references, from the ‘Iberianheaded’ (43) maidservant at T} Rhosyn, to the ‘Saxon-faced’ (107) Mrs Drizzle who stirs up trouble about the custom of courting in bed. These descriptions recall scientific practices such as craniology that purported to be able to distinguish individual temperaments as well as the supposedly distinct ‘races’ of Britain.18 Although such ‘knowledge’ had been largely discredited by the time Rhys Davies was writing his novel the racial stereotypes informed by such discourses nevertheless endured for much longer as meaningful signifiers.19 Rhys Davies’s descriptions of other characters are also informed by discourses of racial breeding. One of Olwen’s suitors is described as: ‘Tall for his race, he had a high thin face not yet settled firm on its bones . . . As he jerked up to T} Rhosyn there was now the prance of a colt in his gait, and again the sure lope of a long-bred animal’ (53; my italics). Olwen’s parents’ success as farmers is portrayed as somehow inherited: ‘but because toil, cunning and patience had been used through hundreds of years by the ancient farming stock to which both Mr and Mrs Powell belonged, their house contained few mistakes and lamentations. Their blood was deep with old knowledge’ (44; my italics). Atavistic degeneration was a significant fear in late Victorian society and endured well into the twentieth century. Evolutionary theory had proved how humanity’s ancestry stretched back to the most basic of life forms. The suggestion that humans might retain some of these traits, either in their biological make-up, or, later, in the subconscious, and even that they might resurface at some point seemed to support these fears of regression. As we have seen, sex is often signified by the figure of a black woman in the novel, but even when the two black Venuses are nowhere to be seen, sex is still conceived of in terms of darkness and some kind of primitive, residual instinctive urge. Interestingly, Rhisiart Hughes, the only man to whom Olwen is sexually attracted, is described as ‘a throwback to savage times. Such beings

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swim up now and again from the deep pool of the past’ (139). Humankind’s psychological or rather subconscious links with the past are suggested by Noah Watts’s assertion that all the trappings of polite civilization are but a flimsy cover for the baser, sexual instincts of man where again cannibalism and sex are associated: ‘Tongues wag pretty . . . tongues wag in fashionable clothes, and upstairs is a different family sitting naked like a lot of wicked cannibals’ (142). Interestingly, the language of Victorian discourses of race, of savagery versus civilization, is used against the people of Ayron, by Ayron’s arch-enemy, Mrs Drizzle, the English incomer, who campaigns against the custom of courting in bed. She maintains that ‘courting in bed is an entirely barbarous habit left over from the dark ages’ (131). Ayron’s antiquity is proof of its backwardness to this woman, who, startled by gravel being thrown at her own bedroom window, thinks to herself: ‘Savages, savages. Secret and sly, they were prowling about in the night, come down from the mountains with their dark crafty faces. This ancient land was not civilised; it had the feel, particularly at night, of being a thousand miles from the railway station’ (65). Mrs Drizzle herself is not immune from equally insulting stereotypes couched in exactly the same language of race. We, as readers, are told that ‘The divinely appointed Anglo-Saxon race is known for its invading, missionary and exploring energies’ (130–1). Indeed, aspects of characterization are regularly dependent upon the reader accepting that certain traits are inherited as a result of the character’s racial or familial origins, and thus we must assume that the authorial voice, if not the author himself, takes such notions of racial heredity and breeding at face value. While the world-view implied by the narrative is, of course, not necessarily synonymous with the author’s own ideology, the lack of a distinct narrative voice can make it difficult to find the boundary between narrative, narrator and author. Rhys Davies’s use of images of black women’s bodies, and the vocabulary and ideologies of racial purity and degeneration is far from disingenuous. His manipulation of the themes of savagery and civilization, and the playful echoes which resonate and rebound through the novel make any simple analysis of his use of these contentious images impossible. More information about Rhys Davies’s sources and his own views on race, for example, might be helpful here and it would be interesting to know to what degree he may have been influenced by the anthropological studies of H. J. Fleure et al. A wider

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examination which considers Rhys Davies’s work in the light of his modernist contemporaries would also be enlightening, particularly D. H. Lawrence who, notably, also used a black (African) statue of a naked female figure to facilitate a discussion of sexuality linked to the primitive in Women in Love (1920).20 It would also be interesting to examine the author’s use of racial characterization and notions of heredity across his own fiction. A comparison of the treatment of race and sexuality in The Black Venus and some of his other works, such as ‘Glimpses of the Moon’ and ‘Fear’, not to mention ‘The Chosen One’, would also be illuminating.21 ‘Glimpses of the Moon’ is a story about an ex-soldier who, once married to a black woman in Africa, goes after his errant common-law white wife with a cattle cart and a ‘cattle-net’, to bring her home, pacified with alcohol, from the barracks-town where she has been enjoying herself. ‘Fear’ is another fascinating story, and M. Wynn Thomas has already highlighted links between the sexual undertones of the story and the racial otherness of the stranger in the carriage.22 Although Rhys Davies makes very deliberate and self-conscious use of the black Venus as a sexual signifier, and plays with themes of lesbianism and feminism, tradition and rebellion, the construction of the body of the black woman in terms of libidinous excess does not seem to be subverted, unless the very sexual and social rebellion which Olwen attempts, and which Lizzie takes much further and with which the black Venus is associated, can be read as a subversion or a disruption of the racist discourse which constructed the sexualized black female body as pathological. Despite Olwen’s refusal to be trapped by the sexual and gendered codes of the day, as well as the lesbian subtext of Lizzie’s relationship with Olwen, it is difficult to see how this might in turn work to disrupt the discourses which constructed the black female body as silent sexual signifier. This is a story about white, western sexuality, and not the black body used to signify it. In this sense Rhys Davies is complicit with the reductive racist discourse which inscribed the body of Sarah Bartmann and all other black women with a white, European fantasy of sexual voracity. For all its willingness to engage in what is often a subtly nuanced investigation of female sexuality, the novel is of its own time, 1944, when Britain still had an empire and an abundance of racist (and racially constructed) images to match. The Black Venus is a brilliantly playful novel (it would take a far longer study than this to illuminate all the intertextual allusions, not to mention the narrative echoes within

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the story itself 23) and it is not the intention of this essay to dismiss the novel on the grounds of political correctness. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that, in the use of the black female body to signify sexuality and desire, The Black Venus relies heavily on gendered stereotypes of the racial other.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11

Bartmann arrived in England called Saartje Baartman, but was christened Sarah Bartmann in Manchester in 1811. The black female body as a conflation of the discourses of female sexuality, pathology, race, etc., is an enormous subject and inadequately described in the simplified account above. For further discussions see Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985); H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), Bram Dijkstra, ‘A Congo song in the heart of darkness: the vampirewoman’s African genesis’, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 127–74; Kirsti Bohata, ‘Apes and cannibals in Cambria: images of the racial and gendered other in Gothic Welsh writing in English’, in Tony Brown (ed.), Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 6 (2000), 119–43. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 89. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualised Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Rhys Davies, The Black Venus (London and Toronto: William Heinemann 1944). All references to this novel appear in the text. The trial, conducted by the chapel, of the custom of courting in bed in general and Olwen’s conduct in particular is described as a ‘dark business’ (1), while the man who directly asks Olwen if she has had sex with any of her courters is addressed by Olwen as the ‘dark gentleman’ (25). Much later, Olwen’s sexual attraction to Rhisiart Hughes is intimated thus: ‘yet somewhere dark and faraway in her she felt an urge to turn back’ (165). The base of the statue bears the inscription ‘Venus’, and the figure is carved complete with tiny black pearls in her hair, suggesting that the statue is of the European deity, and has European features carved out of the black wood. Eric Smith, A Dictionary of Classical Reference in English Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984), 252. Venus was also the goddess of rebirth and designs of the scallop shells which symbolized this deity are often found on Roman sarcophagi. Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, n. 7. Ibid., 34.

The Black Venus: Atavistic Sexualities 12 13 14 15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

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Ibid., 65. Ibid., 107–8; original italics. Ibid., 108. It is tempting to read the hanging sailor as some sort of counterpart to Olwen’s embroidered negress in her seascape, especially given Lizzie’s later tendency to wear cabin boy’s trousers. Lizzie has a similar relationship with her statue; although she lovingly polishes the figure, she tells Olwen: ‘See the black pearls in her hair? Pretty she is. But when I’m in a temper very handy she is to spit on’ (111). This attention to the black Venus’s ‘backside’ is significant in terms of the extra-textual Black Venus narrative discussed above, for it was Sarah Bartmann’s buttocks that were the focus of the erotic gaze. However, it is also interesting that in another novel, Ram with Red Horns (1996), in which Rhys Davies portrays female homosexuality, it is the buttocks of the woman which are eroticized. ‘Rhonwen stared from the bed, eyes less milkily blue, a pinpoint of fire within them. Eireen’s apricot buttocks, a sepia birthmark on one, hypnotised her. She half-rose in the bed, and sank back, a wild impulse resisted’ (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), 98–9. See John Beddoe, The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (London: Trubner, 1885) for a description of how Celts, Saxons and Angles could supposedly be distinctly identified in the population of Norman Victorian Britain. See Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), where she describes how the eugenicist programmes of twentieth-century Europe continued apace until disrupted by the enormity of the Holocaust. Craniology was used to ‘prove’ the racial inferiority of Jews under the Nazi regime. There are ‘several negro statues, wood carvings from West Africa’ in the flat of Rupert Birkin’s bohemian friends. One in particular, representing a woman giving birth, is singled out for discussion and Birkin, the Lawrence figure in the novel, describes the artistic culture behind the carving as ‘pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual’ (London: Wordsworth Classics imprint, 1992), 81. It is interesting that this description seems to be echoed by Olwen’s perception of Lizzie’s black Venus: ‘It was clear form her aimless face that she had no brains to trouble her. Flesh she was, flesh’s dark beauty and no more’ (111). For a discussion of Rhys Davies’s story ‘The Chosen One’, see Bohata, ‘Apes and cannibals’. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘ “Never seek to tell thy love”: Rhys Davies’s fiction’, reprinted in this volume. This discussion has not even been able to touch upon the fascinating and prominent theme of feminism and Olwen’s status as a New Woman which has a bearing on her sexual behaviour, nor has it been able to discuss the other noteworthy female characters who surround Olwen.

‘Unspeakable Rites’: Writing the Unspeakable in Rhys Davies SIMON BAKER and JOANNA FURBER

Gwyn Jones once said that everything an author writes may be taken down and used in evidence against him. For a gay novelist writing in the middle third of the last century this witty remark had all the force of a harbinger of doom.1 The immanent legal and punitive threat for homosexual acts was bound to have an effect on Rhys Davies, on both his life and work. The result of this swinging ‘genital pendulum’ (PHF 65) is that his homosexuality is articulated by a subtle code in his autobiography, novels and stories.2 It is the code of illum crimen horribile quod non nominandum est, of ‘the crime not to be named among Christian men’, and ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. The code is, in short, that of naming something ‘unspeakable’ as a way of denoting (without describing) male same-sex activity. Davies searchingly and flexuously explored the limits of the unexpected rhetorical possibilities offered by an obfuscating family of locutions. They specify the homosexual secret by failing to specify anything, speak by refusing to utter, and form a dissonant crux between semantically ‘full’ yet descriptively ‘empty’ narrated events.3 Michel Foucault wrote that ‘the obligation to conceal . . . was but another aspect of the duty to admit to’, and our argument pursues this line of reasoning in that both closetedness and coming out may be taken as dramatizing certain features of linguistic performativity.4 For coherence we have divided the discussion into three main areas: the historical context, the theoretical agenda and a close reading of some stories. In 1533 Henry VIII passed an act making sodomy a capital crime (and deployed it to execute a fair number of his opponents!).5 Even writing about homosexuality became a capital offence, a law only repealed in 1861. Yet if Rhys Davies had lived a century earlier, he need not have worried. His autobiography reveals so little factually

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incriminating evidence about his life that any prosecution would have been doomed to failure. He had even dismissed the idea ten years before the actual publication: ‘A letter this morn. asking if I could write my autobiography for a publisher. I’m replying that it would be too gloomy and the truth . . . doesn’t bear telling’ (SL 56).6 To say that the final product is economical with the truth is an understatement. The original manuscripts reveal that he systematically rewrote the text in order to obscure rather than clarify the details of his life, intermittently set amongst a happy but cloying Rhondda shopocracy and a breathlessly anonymous London. It is a reticent masterpiece, largely devoid of dates, names and places. This is hardly surprising, given that when he began writing it in the mid-1960s the infamous Labouchere Amendment of 1885 was still in place. This magisterial piece of late Victorian puritanism made all forms of homosexuality illegal (including kissing and embracing). Its main effect was a series of fin-desiècle scandals which brought disgrace and ruin to a number of otherwise innocent men doing nothing more than indulging their sexual tastes. Oscar Wilde in 1895 is the most infamous, but its reverberations were still being felt as late as 1953: ‘The big scandal here has been the arrest of Sir John Gielgud for you-know-what. He got off with a £10 fine but it has caused uproar, esp. in theatreland’ (SL 130). To say that this period was a dangerous time to be gay hardly needs emphasizing. The debate surrounding the Wolfenden Report produced a veritable plethora of homophobic remarks. Amongst the more grimly amusing are William Shepherd MP, doubtless reminiscing: ‘Incest is a much more natural act than homosexuality.’7 Or Lady Lloyd, to her newspaper of choice: ‘All decent people long to see a cessation of the discussion. Behind a drawn blind a corpse may be rotting; the blind will not stop the smell, but at least it will hide from the passer-by the horrors of putrefaction.’8 Although Wolfenden published his findings in 1957, its recommendations did not become law until 1967. Unfortunately for gay men, it closed more loopholes than it corrected injustices. The tenor of the report can be judged by the fact that Wolfenden himself always used the euphemism ‘Huntley and Palmers’ (a biscuit manufacturer) instead of homosexuality and prostitution, in order to spare the blushes of his female typists! It is one of those ironies of fate that Wolfenden’s own gay son, Julian, later committed suicide.9 Such tragedies were not unusual, nor were they confined to London. Only sixty miles from Davies’s Blaenclydach home the infamous Abergavenny Sex Trial took place in 1942.10 Of the twenty-

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four defendants, eighteen received jail sentences of between ten months and twelve years, whilst thirteen received a total of fifty-seven years. Of the remaining three, one threw himself under a train, and the other two received ten-year sentences as well as a mandatory threemonth term for attempting suicide whilst awaiting trial. Against such a background, Davies’s own particular sexual proclivities left him on dangerous ground: ‘I met an amusing RAF boy from Yorkshire, very camp. Also two bits of native nonsense (while the moon was shining), one of which knew London very well indeed. As you may guess, I was last off the promenade at night’ (SL 71). There is only one direct mention of the term ‘homosexuality’ in his autobiography, and that as much for the sake of a droll story: I knew . . . only one man who took advantage of the new psychoanalysis treatment, plus a curative property apparently to be found in glandular injections, for his homosexuality. The result seemed unfortunate. Previously a normal talker, and of equable temperament, he developed a bad stammer and twitched like a marionette. But he married one of those patient martyrs who are always to be found. (PHF 106)

The rest of the time he hones his talent for ambiguous or enigmatic anecdotes, especially when recounting his friendship with Russian sailors and Welsh Guardsmen, given his autoerotic fixation with especially masculine, military men: ‘Giving sanctuary late one night – secretly, of course – to a hazy friend, my rickety bed collapsed under us, two of its legs dissolving and the wire underlay tearing from its frame. Rid of my friend without detection in the morning’ (PHF 115). Just occasionally, the mental cruelty associated with sex in his fiction becomes physical cruelty, betraying his interest in sadomasochism and sexual domination, as in ‘Doris in Gomorrah’: ‘Won’t you come and kiss Uncle . . . and I’ll be kind to you, if you’ll let me.’ ‘Oh you are funny . . . are all men like you, Uncle?’ She laughed in a fifteen-year-old manner . . . ‘Punish me . . . there’s a carpet slipper in the bedroom. Beat me, punish me.’ (CS III, 225–6)

Or ‘Arfon’: ‘Then gradually the stings seemed to lose their awful bites. Now they became different, warm and shuddering. He began to

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wait for them with a quickening of his blood’ (CS 1, 21). His success in concealing his sexuality, particularly in print, led to some interesting encounters in later life. A typical example is this Radio Wales interview with Delyth Davies in 1978: DELYTH: It’s interesting really that in spite of the influence, and the number of women that obviously have been in your life from time to time, that you’ve never married? DAVIES: Um, oh yes, there is that. I think this need for freedom I had in the Rhondda has persisted in that sort of way . . . I don’t want to marry – I don’t want to tie myself to any person, man or woman. (SL 155)

The enforced habits of a lifetime never died. The dry amusement of ‘Um, oh yes, there is that’ is balanced by the delicately suggestive ‘man or woman’. There is an odd metaphoric link between closetedness and coffins in his stories, as if Davies associates his sexual confinement with a kind of living death. It is surely no coincidence that in the one hundred tales in his Collected Stories, there are twenty-two coffins mentioned. Of his youth in south Wales, he wrote: ‘I always think of this period as a burial, with myself lying somnolent in a coffin, but visually aware of life going on . . . and content to wait until the time came for me to rise and be myself.’11 The necessity for closetedness, in his life and in his art, produced a range of linguistic performativity and covert metaphor which placed his writing in a fascinating double bind, effectively a Janusic predicament: to conceal, and yet to admit. Recent work done on masculinity and homosexuality has provided a framework for discussing how this historical and biographical context operates on and through Davies’s prose, presenting us with a wholly new kind of queer stylistics for our reading. In one of his shortest published stories, ‘Fear’, the narrative is overtly concerned with a boy’s horror upon meeting an Indian snake charmer on a train; yet covertly it is a story about sexual initiation and homoerotic anxiety. The opening sentence must have given the author considerable bemused pleasure: ‘As soon as the boy got into the compartment he felt that there was something queer in it’ (CS 2, 124). Sedgwick claims that ‘Queer’ is ‘a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant’. The word ‘queer’ itself means across, coming from the Indo-European root twerkw, which also yields to the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist) and English athwart.12 There is a sense of transitoriness, even transmutability, about

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it which links curiously well with Davies’s own obsession with the hare.13 Hares, like rabbits, are lunar creatures so that literally, as well as metaphorically, they are associated with living at night, appearing and vanishing with silence and speed, and they are proverbially sexually active. Symbolically, the hare is a brother or lover of the moon, a relationship usually deemed ‘incestuous or perverse, a type of lefthanded holiness’.14 In fortune-telling, the hare is a symbol of paradox, contradiction and transitoriness, both lucky and unlucky, ‘hop[ping] from one side to the other’. The Chinese associate the Year of the Rabbit/Hare with change, rebellion and waste, and Deuteronomy and Leviticus damn hares as unclean and forbidden. In Celtic lore the hare is tied to Hecate, the spirit who haunts crossroads and invented witchcraft. Contemporary Queer Theory is correspondingly and unsurprisingly concerned with disavowing the search for a single or singular identity.15 Instead, it seeks something less and something more than that: the vertigo of substitution and repetition. This vertiginous oscillation of ‘same’ and ‘different’ is the sensation most stably valued by its reading, and the one most identifiable with homosexual being. On the phonemic level, punning itself becomes homoerotic because homophonic. Aurally enacting a drive towards the same, the pun’s sound cunningly erases, or momentarily suspends, the semantic differences by which the hetero is both made to appear, and made to appear natural, lucid and self-evident. Jonathan Dollimore, to take a well-known instance, sees in Oscar Wilde’s propensity for grammatical inversion a destabilization of the essentialist category ‘self’, as well as an intimate relation to what he describes as Wilde’s experience of sexual inversion.16 From here it is a short step towards a reading structured around some diacritical differences – old/young, initiator/initiate, insertive/receptive, natural/artificial, openness/coverture and domestic/foreign, to name only a few – which are perceived as artistic modes of framing gay male identity. Such a model offers us some intriguing readings of Davies’s stories. Not only do his titles offer many obvious puns and allusions (‘Faggots’, ‘Doris in Gomorrah’, ‘Gents Only’), but his cryptic word-games become a compulsive tease for the wary reader (try Audrey v. Penis for Audrey P. Vines in ‘The Chosen One’!). Perhaps the element of grammatical inversion which pervades his writing is at least as much constitutive of his imitation of Welsh speech rhythms as it is evidence of a gay taxonomy. But the extension of it into gender inversion and

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transversion is much more unusual, particularly its continual recurrence in his writing career, beginning with ‘Arfon’ in 1931 (‘He’s Not Normal . . . Not Quite Right . . . Anyone can tell only by looking at him’, CS 1, 19); through the gender-neutral ‘Boy with a Trumpet’; the male gaze of Audrey Vines; and the mother in ‘Nightgown’ (‘she began to lose nearly all feminine attributes and was apt to wear a man’s cap and her sons’ shoes, socks and mufflers . . . her jaw jutted out like her men’, CS 1, 237). One could even extend it further into the realms of identity transitivity in the guise of apparently alive bodies who are actually dead (‘The Funeral’, ‘Pleasures of the Table’), and dead bodies who are actually alive (‘Man up a Tree’, ‘The Last Struggle’, ‘A Dangerous Remedy’). Davies himself was not afraid to echo Ulrich’s famous phrase about a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body, although he was always careful to direct it towards his idea of writing: ‘I suppose there’s a feminine element in my nature . . . But I think that a lot of writers are feminine, you know . . . there’s a feminine streak in there’ (SL 157). It is possible to link such remarks to the diacritical differences so favoured by gay literary readings, especially the gender homology (fe)male/male: man/(wo)man. These structural oppositions and mergings abound in Davies’s work. To take only one, say openness/ coverage, is to reveal a Pandora’s Box of thematic complexities, centring on secrecy, guilt, shame, concealment, threat of discovery, exposure, escape and public humiliation. It is a startling fact that over 70 per cent of his stories involve two or more of these facets. Equally revealing is the frequency with which the protagonists, believing that they have evaded detection, are ultimately exposed for the censure and approbation of the community. Rowland in ‘Canute’ and Ormond in ‘A Spot of Bother’ both suffer such reversals, but the most memorable is Catherine in ‘The Dilemma of Catherine Fuschias’. Having outwitted the Minister, Mr Davies (‘he, too, was trying to sniff the truth out of the air’, CS 2, 86) and Mrs Lewis (‘the lady is a nasty!’, CS 2, 87), she is exposed by her lover’s will in the final scenes of the story. Individual desire opposing communal prejudice is one of the many artistic and personal bonds uniting Davies with his friend and mentor, D. H. Lawrence.17 Occasionally one can detect the baleful influence of Lawrence’s prose style on the younger man, and less often his narrative thrust (‘The Last Struggle’ is a decent example – especially the ending). Although this might serve to remind us that the breakthroughs made by genius are always run into the ground by people of lesser talent,

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Lawrence’s influence on Davies was generally a positive one. One of the things it led Davies to reflect on was the nature of masculinity: an insistence on a belligerent kind of masculinity was a foible apt to display itself . . . surely, I thought, one took a hairy-chest quality in a man for granted – or not, if it just wasn’t there. A forced he-manship was tiresome. Was Lawrence over-aware of the element of feminine sensitivity he possessed so definitely (and which was so valuable to him as a novelist?). And did he, perhaps from some puritanic standpoint, watch its temperature graph neurotically? (PHF 139)

Davies was ahead of his time, for contemporary Queer Theory has substantially re-evaluated masculinity, treating it as an ambivalent gender site open to competing influences. The most provocative is the work of G. P. Haddon, whose thesis we believe has particular relevance to Davies: The male issue is to accept their genitals the way they are most of the time, rather than holding onto exaggerations of what the penis is like at erection as the proper image of masculine self-definition. Males need to honour and celebrate their personal experience with their genitals. Men have often reduced women to their biological sexuality [while avoiding or denying] the truth of their own. They have fabricated a steel fig leaf . . .18

In a Welsh context, it might be added that this would make it the only piece of steel still operational in the twenty-first century. Masculinity, in its psychological and cultural manifestations, is invariably assumed to be the homologue of phallic genitality, with correspondingly definite metaphoric connections: aggressive, violent, penetrating, linear, goal-directed. Lacking in this perspective is what Queer Theorists would call the testicular and testerical aspect of male anatomy and physiology. If the testicles are entered into the equation, an entirely different metaphoricity emerges, stemming from alternative characteristics: passive, receptive, stable – qualities that are lost when male simply equals penis. Sexual autonomy and physiology has provided a rich framework for women writers and theorists to explore femininity. Men can, and must, use their bodies to read and write, to construct and deconstruct their world.19 The implications this has for the way in which masculinity is represented (and the way it is read) in narrative are far-reaching.

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Perhaps it can best be explained by returning to the etymology of the Latin testes. Testis, the singular, means ‘witness’, as in the legal terms testify and attest. Its root lies in trei (three) and sta (stand) - literally a third person, bearing witness or observing a dispute. Which is where it derives its second suggestive meaning, for it also transmutes into ‘contest’ or ‘testiness’. Queer Theory has expanded on this duality to characterize the twin, usually negated, components of masculinity: the testicular, meaning patient, abiding presence, witnessing, observing; and testerical, meaning temperamental, morose, petulant, even inert and lacking in direction. To fully comprehend the nature of male identity and sexuality, one must embrace all of its components and their metaphorical indices: the phallic, the testicular and the testerical. This places Davies in a unique position. Almost alone amongst his Welsh contemporaries, he offers just such a complex view of masculinity, both in his narration and in his characterization: ‘The same schoolyard insistence on [phallic] masculinity mars some of the work of Ernest Hemingway. Men novelists cannot afford to be 100 per cent male’ (PHF 139). The disquieting and disquieted urbanity of his narrative voice is the central feature of his style. The sardonic distance imposed by his narrators between themselves and the world created in his stories seems to follow Julia Kristeva’s advice that ‘only by displacing ourselves from all that is known or believed can the writer or critic hope to eradicate the stain of our early social conditioning’.20 The observer as voyeur is a well-established character in gay fiction – one thinks of Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster and James Baldwin – and this has become closely allied to the idea of the ‘male gaze’ in Queer Theory.21 Davies’s interest in voyeurism can be traced through his autobiography (‘Keyhole spies, gifted with baleful second sight’: PHF 115), to stories like ‘The Chosen One’, ‘A Spot of Bother’, ‘The Old Adam’ and ‘The Doctor’s Wife’. Exilic distance may be half the answer, but it goes beyond that, and to what can surely be identified as a testicular view of human desire: narratorially observing, witnessing, stabilizing: In every village there is a Jezebel or the making of one, though sometimes they descend virtuous to their graves because of lack of opportunity or courage, fear of gossip or ostracism. (CS 1, 79) She had married Walt after a summer courtship during which they had walked together in a silence like aversion. (CS 1, 237)

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The ghost of urbanity, the spectre of suavity, haunts his forms and tones, with their fierce decorum and composed discomposure. Certainly no other Welsh writer assimilates such a multiplicity of references and idioms within a stable yet mobile mode of his own. The brazenly civilized yet uncomfortably exposed prose is marked by an acute sense of marginality, an uncomfortable awareness of being constantly on the outside, looking in on a world of which it can never be a part. It is in these instances that the voice begins to display those testerical qualities mentioned earlier: morose, disassociative, lacking in direction. But they were together in that house of the unanchored. And he was alone, not looking back from the edge of the dead land, the intersecting country where the disconnected sit with their spectral smiles. (CS 2, 94) It laid a shadow over him like a menace. His hatred of the world grew. He would like to do something to have his own back. He would like to see people crying and full of rage at something he had done. (CS 1, 21)

If, as Schopenhauer said, style is the physiognomy of the soul, then Davies learned a style from his homosexual desire (testicular) and his homoerotic despair (testerical). His masculine and emasculated narrators and characters (including the [fe]males) capture an emotion – usually loss, guilt or fear – which surpass the words used to describe such a feeling. In ‘The Dilemma of Catherine Fuschias’, Mrs Morgans, a friend of the protagonist, interrogates her in an effort to discover the truth about her affair: ‘Mrs Morgans nodded, still staring fixed and full on her friend, and sitting tense with every pore open. As is well known, women harken to words but rely more on the secret information obtained by the sense that has no language’ (CS 2, 85). It seems to us that this ‘secret information obtained by the sense that has no language’ is a useful way of investigating Davies’s stories. The French cultural theorist Louis Althusser has even provided a method of reading, or a critical code, called ‘relative autonomy’, for discussing this process. Relative autonomy ‘divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same movement relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first’.22 This disruptive literary gesture is simultaneously conditioned by, and critical of, its ideological context; a context which can be equated with literary conventions and whatever world-view they

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encompass (in this case, homophobia, censorship, and so on). This element of criticism need not always be an overt aspect of the text, and may even be the product of a contemporary reinterpretation. To understand it, one must remain alive to the metaphoricity of narrative constructs, and the way in which a fractured dissonance becomes the very crux of fictional creativity.23 It is our contention that an awareness of the historical context of homophobia and the critical methodologies provided by Queer Theory and relative autonomy are necessary prerequisites for analysing Davies’s stories. A good instance would be ‘The Public House’, written in the same year as the Abergavenny Sex Trial.24 It narrates a nameless young boy’s relationship with the publican’s spinster sister. The language describing their physical intimacy becomes increasingly suggestive. When she lifts him onto the bar, she ‘made him feel cautious . . . he experienced a vague, unformulated feeling when she gripped his knees . . . her hand lingered about him’ (CS 2, 62). Later on, he sees ‘her huge gaunt nose thrust out to him, the nostrils twitching’ (63), and the ‘power of her physical warmth and dominant voice encircled him. He wriggled and was subjected . . . her voice was a hoarse contralto’ (64). One afternoon, he gets dirty whilst playing, and goes to dry off in the pub: When Miss Sanders had got him inside, her mouth gaped and she screwed up her eyes . . . She stood in the middle of the room, her arms lifted, both her hands holding the high tower of her green-gold hair; she was looking at him meditatively now, having stopped laughing. ‘You come with me,’ she said at last. And she patted his head, took his hand and drew him upstairs. The swish of her hard shiny skirt was full of determination. What a big bathroom they had! And it was white and splendid and not like the poked-away corner of the one in his home. Miss Sanders was turning on the taps in the enormous bath; he did not have time to think anything; he gazed inscrutably before him. Briskly, with quick, firm gestures, Miss Sanders took hold of him and whipped off his jersey. He stood very still but once, as if trapped, he gazed round wildly at the door. Miss Sanders’s well-known arms, hard and brisk with power, encircled him. They dexterously peeled off his clothes. He was clammy and shivering, and he was overcome with some strange new feeling that presently solidified into a knot of resentment in his mind. Too late! She had got him into the bath. She rolled up her sleeves and, telling him that presently they would have some hot tea and pineapple together, she soaped him. There was

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no denying her. Busily, talking all the while with a bright, hard gallop of words, she kneaded and rubbed his flesh. The resentment swelled into anger. At home he washed himself without help now. But he could not bring his tongue to protest. She had the large, high power of the adult, and before this she had always behaved as a friend. ‘There now, there now, all white and clean again! My word, look at the water! Eh, your mother would have carried on, I’m glad you came to me first . . . I’ll wrap this hot towel around you and you must wear a little jacket of mine until your clothes are dry . . . ‘ She had lifted him out and was drying him vigorously, kneeling before him now, her breast oppressively against his face. He did not enjoy his tea, sitting in the woman’s jacket. Something had changed. He kept gazing straight at the bunch of snapdragons on the table, eating with a grave austerity and refusing a second helping of pineapple. He was glad when the publican came into the room. When his clothes were dry, Miss Sanders insisted on dressing him. Once she glanced sharply into his face and said: ‘You mustn’t be frightened, your mother won’t be angry now. We won’t tell her if you like.’ And she pushed two pennies into his hand. He saw that she was in extraordinary good temper, her grey eyes, under which there were mauve patches, bright-eyed as diamonds. The bar was open as he made a slow, almost funereal way through it. A resolve was at the back of his mind but did not declare itself: he made his exit with only a vaguely troubled emotion. For he never went back to the public-house. Daily it was before him, bright and tempting and full of gaiety. (64–5)

An analysis of this passage using the insights of relative autonomy and Queer Theory would focus on the metaphoricity of the descriptive words (puns, adjectives, grammatical inversions), and it would emphasize how a reader’s sense of the passage changes once free of the tyranny of gender directives. If we re-engage with the language on the basis of man/boy, initiator/initiatee, old/young, even insertive/ receptive, it takes on a quite different complexion: got him inside . . . mouth gaped . . . screwed . . . hands holding the high tower . . . looking at him meditatively now, having stopped laughing. ‘You come with me’ . . . patted his head, took his hand and drew him upstairs . . . swish . . . hard, shiny . . . full of determination . . . Briskly, with quick, firm gestures . . . took hold of him and whipped

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off his jersey . . . He stood very still . . . as if trapped, he gazed round wildly . . . hard and brisk . . . power encircled him . . . dexterously peeled off his clothes . . . clammy and shivering . . . overcome with some strange new feeling . . . had got him into the bath . . . soaped him . . . no denying . . . bright hard gallop . . . kneaded and rubbed his flesh . . . swelled . . . he could not bring his tongue to protest . . . the large, high power of the adult . . . before this had always behaved as a friend . . . ‘I’m glad you came to me first. I’ll wrap this hot towel round you’ . . . lifted him out and was drying him vigorously, kneeling before him now . . . when his clothes were dry . . . insisted on dressing him . . . ‘You mustn’t be frightened, your mother won’t be angry now. We won’t tell her if you like’ . . . pushed two pennies into his hand . . . did not declare itself . . . exit . . . vaguely troubled emotion.

Although this passage certainly works as a woman/boy sexual initiation, it surely works more effectively as a man/boy encounter. At the end of the story, when the boy is tempted to return to the pub for money, he decides against it, despite his desire for a ‘certain penknife’, and he ‘made a sudden headlong dive out of sight’. It is interesting to note that the apparent desire to escape in the final line is deconstructed by the pervasive metaphor of the hare, and all of the gender transitoriness which it implies. Four stories in particular illustrate Davies’s preoccupation with escaping the social pressures placed on gay men and women. In ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, the middle-aged, yet naïve Dr Morgan assumes that his uninterested young wife Phoebe is having an affair with a younger man, while the reader suspects the affair is actually with the dramateacher Miss Wright. She has ‘a personality in which feminine intuition was blended with a masculine decisiveness’ (CS 3, 139). The doctor attempts to catch his wife in flagrante delicto, which he does, without realizing it: ‘It was nice and unusual to see two women so fond of each other . . . he had seen them, through the chink, kissing each other in such a sweet way’ (144). Even their elopement to London does not seem to raise his suspicion. In ‘The Romantic Policewoman’ (CS 3, 200) the man-hating Ella Dobson believes she is rescuing a fallen young woman, Kathleen: ‘It maddened her to think that such a pretty and fragrant young girl could be so sordidly mishandled and ruined by low down ruffians of men’ (207). Ella ‘intended kneading vigorously the soft and pliant character of little Kathleen’ (207). Her self-delusion about her intentions is exposed by Kathleen’s

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boyfriend at the end of the story, who accuses her of lesbian desires: ‘in her eyes the terror of the revelation’ (213). Both stories involve a central character’s self-delusion about covert lesbian sexuality; in the former the delusion continues, in the latter the revelation is shattering. Equally shattering exposures lie at the heart of two stories focusing on homosexual desire. In ‘Wigs, Costumes, Masks’ a transvestite costume shop owner, Mr Simon, is investigated by two detectives about his association with a fugitive customer, Elmer Calvert (‘call me -ervert’?). His shop is ‘in the kingdom of pleasure . . . intersecting a district devoted to the night entertainment of the flesh’ (CS 3, 372). Mr Simon defends himself against the jibes of his ‘public executioners’: ‘can you blame people for wishing, whatever their sex, to escape themselves for the evening?’ (376). He escapes briefly from their clutches – ‘was Mr Simon trying to elude them? To decamp?’ (380) – only to plunge to his death from his burning shop, ‘down to the solidity, the malevolent facts, the punishment below’ (388). The story is full of a kind of ambiguous language, puns and double entendres, which were a constituent part of the required subterfuge necessary to remain concealed from the law: ‘Decamp’, ‘malevolent’, ‘punishment below’.25 The same threat of exposure closes ‘Doris in Gomorrah’, where a wanton young woman enters the life of two gay men: ‘You do like women, don’t you?’ At which he smiled, a kind of secret smile . . . so curious and unfathomable seemed the knowledge behind it. ‘Like . . . like! One can’t apply the word . . . women are necessary.’ (CS 3, 229)

When Doris’s amorous desires are rejected by Arnold, the older of the two men, she exits humiliated and vengeful, ‘ “Take care. I know enough about your goings-on to get you in trouble”. That put the fear of God into him’ (235). Fear is the central element in the lives of all of these characters. Phoebe, Miss Wright, Ella Dobson, Mr Simon, Bertie and Arnold, all exist under the threat of imminent exposure, with the subsequent humiliation and imprisonment. Davies’s language exactly captures the liminal sense of their being inside a community of which they are not a part. There are numerous advantages to reading Davies in the ways we have discussed. It enables a move away from the moral adjudication of his writing with regard to its representation of gender, on to a more

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nuanced investigation of masculinity (and femininity) as phenomena in their own right. A more subtle and flexible interplay is established between textual mechanisms and broader cultural movements, uniting a historicist perspective with the actual practice of reading. As we have endeavoured to show, it elucidates the ways in which his writing is motivated by a dual imperative: both to articulate and yet to contain, to disclose and yet to shield. If we are alive to the ‘secret codes’ of naming the unspeakable, then Davies’s stories are transformed into gay fables written in an unforgiving age. To list a random few, ‘Wrath’ discloses how oral carnality becomes a metaphor for elicit sexual behaviour; ‘A Bed of Feathers’ articulates covert homoerotic desire for the male physique; ‘Fear’ is a psycho-erotic drama of initiation into masculine sexuality; ‘Nightgown’ and ‘The Chosen One’ narrate the refusal of erotic pleasure by the interpolation of a private/public gaze; ‘Canute’ and ‘A Spot of Bother’ become parables of scandalous humiliation and communal exposure; ‘Boy with a Trumpet’ and ‘Arfon’ consider ‘otherness’, both mental and sexual, symbolically enacted through physical distinctiveness; and so on. To return to his favourite Blake poem, it is not ‘Never seek to tell thy love / Love that can never be told’, which are the most instructive lines, but ‘I told my love, I told my love . . . / Silently, invisibly.’26 Fiction, particularly short stories, offered Rhys Davies the opportunity to articulate a complete ‘being’, a perfect blend of truth and falsehood, depicted in its entirety: both who he was under the camouflage, and who he would like to be. In this it seems to us that he perfected every creative writer’s challenge: to know someone for a lifetime, and yet ultimately to keep him a secret.

Notes 1

2

3

In 1938 there were 134 prosecutions in England for sodomy, 822 for attempted sodomy and indecent assault, and 320 for gross indecency between men. In 1952, these figures had risen to 670, to 3,087 and to 1,686 respectively. It is an increase of 850 per cent, compared with 223 per cent for all other indictable offences. Figures recorded in Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment (London: Collins, 1990), 297. PHF = Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot, ed. Simon Baker (Bridgend: Seren, 1998). CS = Rhys Davies, Collected Stories, vols. 1–3, ed. Meic Stephens (Llandysul: Gomer, 1996). The most useful books on gay writing are: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

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(London: Routledge, 1989); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (London: Penguin, 1990). Plus others cited below. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Pantheon, 1978), 61. The best book for an overview on the historical context of homosexuality is Patrick Higgins (ed.), A Queer Reader (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), especially chs. 9 and 10. SL=Selected Letters of Rhys Davies, ed. Sarah Mabbett (University of Wales, Swansea, MA dissertation, 1996). William Shepherd, MP for Cheadle, House of Commons, 26 November 1958. Lest we imagine that such prejudice has abated, we refer the reader to Lord Longford’s recent comments, House of Commons, 16 October 2000: ‘I use the term “homosexualism” to denote the illness which I believe is afflicting these sad people.’ Both comments reproduced in Hansard. Lady Lloyd, letter to the Daily Telegraph (5 June 1960). Her husband, also a Tory peer, was given a caution for loitering near a public convenience two years later. Higgins, Queer Reader, 174–5. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, 275–6. ‘Davies, Rhys’, in Twentieth Century Authors, eds. Stanley Kuntz and Vinetta Colby (New York: Wilson, 1955), 263. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), p. xii. For a fuller account of the use of hares in Davies’s writing, see M.Wynn Thomas, ‘ “Never seek to tell thy love”: Rhys Davies’s fiction’. We direct anyone interested in Davies and homosexual writing to this seminal essay, reprinted in the present volume. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols (London: Penguin, 1996), 472–4. We are indebted to our former colleague, Dr Berthold Schoene, for his guidance in preparing this article, particularly with the following Queer Theory texts: Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (eds.), Theorizing Masculinities (London: Sage, 1994); Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Ben Knights, Writing Masculinities (London: Macmillan, 1999); Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London: Routledge, 1991). Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (London: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14–15. A relationship subtly probed in Davies’s story, ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ (CS 3, 408–43). G. P. Haddon, Body Metaphors (New York: Crossroads, 1988), 23. See in particular Arthur Flanagan-St-Aubin, ‘The male body and literary metaphors for masculinity’, in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities,

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21 22 23

24

25

26

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239–58; and W. Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 15, 45. Julia Kristeva, ‘A new type of intellectual: the dissident’, in Toril Moi (ed.),The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 298. Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze (London: Routledge, 1992). Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1984), 79. For a persuasive account of the way in which relative autonomy operates in short fiction, see Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20–30. A scandal which, by coincidence, began with a youth complaining about harassment from an older man at a local pub and cinema. The same kind of language pervades Davies’s The Painted King, a pseudobiographical novel based on the life of gay Welsh icon Ivor Novello. The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1966), 161.

‘Never Seek to Tell thy Love’: Rhys Davies’s Fiction M. WYNN THOMAS

Rhys Davies was born among ‘the fidgety population’ of the Rhondda in 1901. His parents kept the Royal Stores grocer shop in Blaenclydach. Desperate for freedom, he left Porth Intermediate School without academic qualifications, and soon hared off to London. There he ‘was [his] own interior master’1 and eventually became an exceptionally productive professional writer. His only permanent address was his writing. Otherwise he was a loner, restlessly jumping – again the hare in him is evident – from one temporary home to another. The respect he ultimately won for his fiction, officially acknowledged in his OBE, is also evident in contemporary reviewers’ comments. The Times described his stories as ‘exceptionally well written . . . admirable, enlivening company’, while The Irish Times remarked that ‘Nobody can describe Welsh country manners with more high-spirited appreciation’.2 I find these bland compliments utterly bemusing. Rhys Davies is to me a disquietingly bleak writer, best characterized as the Strindberg of Wales. He is also an enigma, as he reveals in his marvellous, and marvellously enigmatic, autobiography, Print of a Hare’s Foot: School had become relentlessly dull, and my bad terminal reports meaningless. One day, a week before a new term began, I refused to go back. I had my way. My parents were very busy in their harassing shop. My father said, ‘You’re an enigma,’ and I went to the dictionary for its exact meaning. He arranged an interview with his bank manager friend in Tonypandy, where there was an opening at the branch. The unconscious can produce a guardian angel when panic threatens. Passive resistance is the best sabotage weapon in its hand; in the long run, unlike raging or hysterical fights, it leaves few or no scars on all concerned. Throughout the interview with the benign manager I

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remained monosyllabic within my lighthouse and completely botched the simple arithmetical problem I was set. (PHF 98)

His subsequent career as a fiction-writer may be seen as a prolonged act of cultural sabotage in the form of passive resistance, and he made sure he remained essentially monosyllabic even while compulsively multiplying his printed syllables. Rhys Davies began as an enigma to himself, and he went on to become a lifelong cryptographer. He initially lacked a word, an image, for what he was. His society offered him no vocabulary of selfunderstanding, so he had to supply it painfully for himself, partly through his writing. And inseparable from this work of selfidentification was the work of self-protection. Here, again, his writing came to play a crucial role – it was his guardian angel throughout his life, and kept him closely in touch with his unconscious. But why all this mystery? Why indeed all this mystification? Why did Rhys Davies cover his hare’s tracks so very carefully, claiming for instance to have been born in 1903, when in fact he was born in 1901? It may all stem from his early, bewildered sense of difference, of not being as other men were, or at least of not being as men seemed to be in the ‘heavily masculine’ Rhondda of his youth. The dictionary of his time – whether we take the word ‘dictionary’ literally, or use it metaphorically to signify his society’s terms for daily life – offered him the word ‘enigma’, but did not, of course, include the word ‘gay’. Even the term ‘homosexual’ is a late nineteenth-century coinage, and as such is a reminder of how sexual identity may be as much socially constructed as naturally given. People’s experience of sex and of gender is inseparable from those templates of sexuality which are available to them in the social vocabulary of their own time. This is most evident in the way that sexual identity, and its related practices, can change startlingly not only from culture to culture but from period to period within the same culture.3 Rhys Davies was born six years after the notorious Oscar Wilde trials; he died eleven years after an Act of Parliament legalized consensual sex in private between adult males. Nine years before his death a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York provoked a reaction which eventually took the form of the Gay Liberation Front. It is evident that the concept, and the experience, of ‘same-sex passion’ underwent a radical change from the period when it was the love that dared not speak its name, and those involved were labelled ‘queer’, to the period when it was uneasily legitimatized and ‘normalized’.

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But, of course, the changes came too late to ‘liberate’ a Rhys Davies who emphasized, in a late radio interview, that it is up to the age of twenty that a person is most sexually confused and incoherent. Although he found a tolerance of his sexual orientation among his friends and in the London artistic subculture, he could never bring himself to make a public disclosure of it. Still a discreet, or closet, homosexual, at the age of seventy-seven, he explained on Radio Wales that he had remained single because of his need for freedom: ‘I don’t want to tie myself to any person, man or woman.’ The phrasing, which unobtrusively blurs and denies the difference between heterosexual marriage and a binding male–male relationship, is delicately equivocating – or enigmatic, perhaps. Discussing the prevalence of women, particularly bossy women, in his fiction, he explains: I don’t find dealing with men or women so difficult, and for some reason or other women are easier for me to deal with than men. I suppose there’s a feminine element in my nature which is fulfilled in that way by writing about women. But I think a lot of writers are feminine you know – the ones I’ve met there’s [a] strong . . . feminine streak there, they’re not the rugby-footballer types at all are they?4

As recent gay theorists have noted, the models of self-identity available to gays this century have been few, and all have until very recently assumed the normalcy, and priority, of the binary masculine/ feminine gender division.5 It was on this basis, for instance, that Edward Carpenter, around the time of Rhys Davies’s birth, tried to construct a positive image of gays as the ‘intermediate sex’. The implication, hinted at in Rhys Davies’s radio interview, is that gays might best conceive of themselves as possessing a woman’s sensibility in a man’s body. In Print of a Hare’s Foot he recalled going first as a boy to the Empire Theatre, Tonypandy, as chaperone of his family’s maid who was being taken by her young man. ‘The seats became packed. An attendant bawled “Close up”, and tightly wedged between Esther’s rigid thigh and Gwilym’s warmly thick one, I was too excited to be bothered by the palpitating silence of the two courters’ (PHF 55). There is a sense in which much of his fiction is written from that interstitial, intersexual, position. Insofar as that position could be defined as one of gender neutrality, Davies is able to write dispassionately about heterosexual passion. Cuttingly observant, he is a devastating anatomizer of the games –

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particularly of power and for possession(s) – that are played in the name of love. Having himself been repeatedly used, when a boy, as a go-between, relaying messages to and fro between his family’s maid and her boyfriend, he is dismayingly good at showing how subtly children may be sexually used and abused; we see this in those remarkable stories ‘The Fashion Plate’ and ‘The Public House’, two of his very best. There he is pitying. More often he is pitiless in his exposure of the wiles and wheedlings, the vicious games played by lovers. For him, heterosexual relations are often about men and women lying together, in more senses than one. He is as merciless as Strindberg in his dissections; his deconstructions of ‘normal’, socially approved, male–female relations reduce them to crude struggles for what really matters – that is, for power and advantage. But if in one sense he cultivated an armed neutrality, even a cool hostility, when it came to dealing with established gender practices, in another he displayed an androgynous imagination. In his early, Lawrentian, novella, ‘A Bed of Feathers’, he writes of Rebecca’s forbidden passion for her husband’s half-brother, Emlyn: She scooped water over Emlyn’s back and passed the soap over the collier’s black skin. And with her two hands, softly and ah, with such subtle passion, she began to rub the soap into his flesh, disregarding the rough flannel used for that task. Into the little hollows of his muscular shoulders, down the length of his flawless back, over the fine curves of his sides, she caressingly passed her spread hands. Beneath them his flesh seemed to harden, draw itself together as though to resist her. But – she could feel another answer to her quivering touch. She became exhausted, her breathing difficult. So she rested for a moment or two, and then, as he moved restlessly in his crouching attitude, she took a bowl of clean warm water and poured it over him. The flesh gleamed out, white-gold, a delicate flush beneath, like a heap of wheat burned hot in the sun.6

Davies does not just license female sexuality – although his doing that alone would in itself in the 1920s have been a counter-cultural achievement – he convincingly locates it in the beautiful desirability of a male body. Here, briefly, and movingly, we get direct, idyllic expression, of that sexual desire which, as we shall see, was later to find only agonized, oblique, emotionally ambiguous, expression in his fiction, notably through orality and food.

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Perhaps after ‘A Bed of Feathers’ he feared he had ventured out, had ‘come out’ as it were, too far? For much of Rhys Davies’s life, of course, homosexuality was not only viewed as socially abhorrent, it was actually illegal. Under such circumstances, concealment was all. And Davies’s fiction is full of concealment. Not only does the fiction itself consist of necessarily ingenious strategies of concealment, it also addresses concealment, particularly sexual concealment, as one of its main subjects. Davies’s reply to his oppressive society is to reveal its own concealments. It is not merely incidental that when, following a kind of nervous breakdown he suffered as a boy, Davies was sent to his stern religious grandfather’s house to recover, he slyly noticed there, even while in the very grip of his terror, the ‘genital pendulum’ of the clock (PHF 65). It becomes associated in the boy’s mind with the ‘huge wardrobe of blood-red wood’ that had so terrified him at home, whose ‘spotted oval mirror . . . held evil, the hanging clothes of grown-ups inside its thick silence was capable of walking out to dance a bodiless jig’ (PHF 65). How Freudian; and how clearly, even though secretly, Davies signals to us the significance of such imagery for that boy’s later development into a writer. No wonder the boy who had his own horrific vision of a pit and a pendulum was, in due course, to be awarded the Edgar Allen Poe prize for ‘The Chosen One’. Secret genitalia, and the disclosing of them, is a central motif in Print of a Hare’s Foot. The boy fumblingly feels under the sleeping maid’s nightdress and gropes his way to her ‘bush’. He is trapped into a secret ‘marriage’ with a young girl, only to find that at the end of the wedding ‘service’ she suddenly whips up her frock to reveal ‘the forbidden mystery. It was like a dusky apricot’ (PHF 32). The big carthorse the boy regularly rode bareback down to the grazing field regularly drew up ‘a moment before entering the choice pasture . . . and piss[ed]’ (PHF 11). Implicated in these images is a whole nexus of feelings that find repeated expression in the fiction: a wish to defy society’s prohibitions on sexual frankness and to uncover the secret acts and desires of the respectable; a yearning for a culture of openness, where the likes of Davies could, as it were, fully expose their identity; a mingled fear of and fascination with the female; an embarrassed and yet excited identification with the male. To be a homosexual was to be condemned to secrecy, to furtiveness, to codedness. Naturally, this situation had its own piquancy, its own relish, its own undercover excitement, and the painter Francis Bacon testified there were homosexuals who actually

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came to regret the legalization of same-sex practices.7 There are plenty of characters in Davies’s fiction who are secretly energized by the double lives they lead – Catherine Fuschias8 being a robust example – but he also repeatedly showed the complexity of the feelings and relationships generated by sexual subterfuge. His stories demonstrate an empathy with the excluded, the marginalized, the illicit; with the frustrated sexuality that causes a woman, in ‘Wrath’, to ‘turtle up, swell, and . . . to thresh the air as if with wings, like a roused swan’ (CS 174); with the ‘The Foolish One’ whose betrayal by her lover brings forth ‘a long, dry wail; it rose, circled through the stagnant air, seemed to recoil and hit her in the face, like a nasty fact flung at one’ (CS 125). She proceeds to plan her revenge, a familiar plot in Rhys Davies’s stories and one that may be closely related to his own early feelings of being humiliated by a homophobic world. In his posthumously published novel, Ram with Red Horns, Rhonwen avenges herself on her two-timing husband by murdering him. Perversely, however, she then finds herself drawn into a curiously intimate friendship with his mistress – a friendship so intimate that at one point it verges on same-sex passion. Rhonwen, jealous of the gentle beatings her husband used to give his mistress to spice up their sex, finds herself strangely attracted to the girl’s ‘apricot buttocks . . . The twin mounds of placid flesh looked as soft as their owner’s character. Had the cane of a feather brush brought weals to those sumptuous curves?’9 But the most poignant treatment of secrecy occurs in the celebrated story, ‘Nightgown’. A faded woman, fated to be drudge to her great big hulking all-male family of husband and five sons, scrimps and saves her pennies to buy by instalments a beautiful silk nightgown, which she squirrels away and keeps for her shroud. Dead, she lies there before the startled eyes of her husband, dressed in a parody of a wedding dress and revealing her previously obscured and degraded femininity. The links with Davies himself are obvious enough. Was he not nicknamed ‘Cash-Box Davies’ at elementary school, because he took such a box with him everywhere, ‘in the streets, to bed, and, once, to chapel’? People thought it prophesied wealth, but in it he furtively ‘kept crayons, foreign stamps, and marbles in its beautifully-fitting trays’ (PHF 88). And moreover this secret self he had symbolically created was constructed out of a discarded object that had had its useful place in his father’s grocer’s shop. In many of his stories Davies makes a shopkeeper, or a shop, the location of devious, not to say deviant,

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sexual practices. In ‘Wrath’ an adulterous affair is conducted entirely in terms of the coded language of buying meat, and is consummated on a sofa at the back of a butcher’s shop (CS 173–82). It is no accident that in ‘Nightgown’ the woman saves money for her secret purchase by reneging on her debts to other shopkeepers. In the Royal Stores, it was Davies’s mother who was renowned for her efficient way with debtors, and it is with his mother in particular that Rhys Davies seems to have had a lifelong love–hate relationship. But ‘Nightgown’ is also, like many another of Rhys Davies’s stories, about the transgressive love of the beautiful. And, as Alan Sinfield has pointed out, another of the defining images of the homosexual in the early part of this century represented the homosexual as effeminate, an aesthete, and a dandy.10 Sinfield has recently argued that this cluster of interconnected images derived from the example of Oscar Wilde, and originated as a parody of upper-class fashion. The stance proved particularly attractive to some men in the disillusioned aftermath of that Great War during which society had so destructively exploited the ideal of manly manhood. It was indeed during, and because of, that war that the teenage Rhys Davies ‘bought a pair of spats and a silver-topped malacca stick’ (PHF 90). In Print of a Hare’s Foot his dandyism is closely associated with his first, unsatisfactory, heterosexual encounter, and his resulting fear of being trapped – a fear that surfaces recurrently and obsessively in his fiction. As for his aestheticism, that manifested itself in diverse ways. Thinking that this peculiar son with a passion for writing might best be usefully employed in an office at the Cambrian Colliery, Davies’s father arranged for him to take his first ‘trip down-under’. After descending to the shaft-bottom, and making for the coalface, Davies saw ‘veins of walled coal gleam[ing] momentarily silver in our lamplight; I saw the imprint of an oakleaf clearly on one of these’ (PHF 99). So Rhys Davies unexpectedly, and subversively, aestheticizes a quintessentially male working environment! More conventionally, he recalls his adolescent passion for Swinburne and the aesthetes of the 1890s. He particularly relished Wilde’s play Salome, with its marvellous Aubrey Beardsley drawings. What he learnt from them was the power to equivocate that resides in literature and art. The play is ostensibly a moral work, purporting to depict and deplore wicked Salome’s sensual wiles, as she seduces Herod with her dancing in order to win from him the head of Iokanaan, the man of God. But ‘I read the text of the Oscar Wilde play’, wrote Davies, ‘and even I

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could tell that its illustrator, of whom I had never heard, made peculiar fun of it. I returned to the drawings. The alarming majesty of our Jehovah and other powerful biblical characters went awry and melted like wax’ (PHF 97). Art, then, can say one thing and mean another. It is in fact a wonderfully slippery medium, a veritable squirm of delicious possibilities. This is a lesson to bear in mind when reading Rhys Davies’s fiction, and even when reading a so-called autobiography like Print of a Hare’s Foot. By explicitly associating Salome in that work with a woman with whom, two pages earlier, he’d had sex in Porthcawl, Davies may be implying that here is the archetype, and source, of one of his own compulsively recurrent images of the female. ‘Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan,’ cries Wilde’s Salome as she gazes on his severed head: ‘Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit.’11 The literally devouring female is an ubiquitous image in Davies’s fiction, signifying perhaps for him the aggressive, oppressive, presence of socially approved heterosexuality, but also serving as the covert means of expressing homoerotic passion. A crude, melodramatic, example of the type is the woman in ‘The Trip to London’ who hypnotizes her male prey by conspicuous, noisy and juicy consumption of sweets and fruit: ‘she ate the last of her victuals – a most expensive-looking hot-house peach. She bit into its golden and rosy flesh with a relish at once greedy and delicate, dabbing at her chin and lips with a scrap of chiffon handkerchief’ (CS 192). She turns out, of course, to have a literally murderous appetite for male flesh. Altogether more interesting, because more complex, is Mrs Vines in ‘The Chosen One’. A voyeur, like several characters in Davies’s fiction, she has derived secret pleasure from her long-distance surveillance of young Rufus bathing naked. Driven, again like so many of Davies’s characters, by a sado-masochistic lust for powerstruggle, she goads her tenant Rufus into visiting her to beg for an extension of the tenancy of his cottage: Needing time to reassemble his thoughts, he watched as she carefully manipulated a sardine out of the tin with her pointed fingernails. The fish did not break. She held it aloft by its tail end to let oil drip into the tin, and regally tilted her head back and slowly lowered it whole into her mouth. The coral-red lips softly clamped about the disappearing body, drawing it in with appreciation. She chewed with fastidiously

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dawdling movements. Lifting another fish, she repeated the performance, her face wholly absorbed in her pleasure.12

The erotics of orality in Davies’s stories would certainly bear close and extensive investigation; so many of his characters are gluttons for sex. No wonder his favourite bed-reading in his lonely London apartments ‘became fat cookery books, soothing fantasy at such an hour, an apparitional range of elaborate dishes lapsing into dreams not to be fulfilled’ (PHF 170). When it comes to what he calls ‘the very poetry of food’13 he is indeed a laureate. Those raw materials of his parents’ grocery shop are subversively turned into pretty fancy cuisine! The malacca cane, the spats, the images from Salome – by such haphazard means, scavenged from a homophobic heterosexual culture, the young Davies patched together an account of who, and what, he was. But the trauma, the peril, the terror, of that process stayed with him and informed his writing. It forces itself to his, and our, attention, in the story ‘Fear’: ‘As soon as the boy got into the compartment he felt there was something queer in it’ (BRD 57). I cannot help suspecting that that use of the word ‘queer’ is coded. The story tells of the Indian who is in that compartment, his wailing chant to the accompaniment of the roar and hurling grind of the train (trains recur as ambiguous images of liberated sexual encounter in Davies), the dark tunnel, the brown wicker basket produced to calm the boy’s mounting fear, the opening of the basket and the releasing of the cobra, which turns aggressive in its terror at the boy’s terrified recoiling reaction. Only by humming a lullaby does Ali, the angry snake charmer, manage to soothe and pacify his cobra: ‘Its strange reared collar of skin sank back into its neck; its head ceased to lunge towards the boy. . . . Now the snake looked effete, shorn of its venomous power’ (BRD 60). The story has many possible meanings, and of those I shall concentrate only on one. ‘Fear’ bears all the marks of a racist text, so deplorably strongly is the dusky Indian associated with an evil compounded of a curious amalgam of cringing propriety and insolent aggression. But Davies has himself anticipated and deflected the racist charge: [the boy] seemed to sense a secret power of something evilly antipathetic. Did it come from the man’s long pinky-brown hands, the sinewy but fleshless hands of a sun-scorched race? Long tribal hands like claws. Or only from the fact that the man was of a far country whose ways were utterly alien to ours. (BRD 58)

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It is a striking anticipation of the concept of the Other, which has become utterly central to our contemporary discussions of class, culture and sexuality. By the Other is meant our projection onto others, in a construction of ‘foreignness’, of those half-feared and halfdesired characteristics which we inhibit in ourselves. In such a reading, the Other is always the mirror image, or alter ego, of ourselves. It is our shadow self. And gay theorists in particular have paid particular attention to the way in which cultures such as those of Arabia and India have long functioned as objectified images of transgressive desire, which in the past has justified their colonial subordination, their being made subject to western control.14 The boy’s encounter, then, is with the Other; an expression, perhaps, of the young Davies’s relationship to his own obscurely apprehended but fearfully intuited sexual identity, his own inherent ‘foreignness’ as the inhabitant of a sexual realm whose customs were so repugnantly and contemptibly alien to mainstream society. Considered in this context, the boy’s fear is sadly prophetic. Many of Davies’s stories deal with fear. There is, for instance, the opening of ‘A Human Condition’, where a man feels: a curious dead sensation of which he was frightened. It lay in the pit of his stomach like some coiled serpent fast asleep, and he was fearful that at any moment the thing would waken and writhe up in unholy destructive fury. And ultimately he would be destroyed. Not his critics, today collected in dark possession of his home. (CS 361–2)

His fear arises from the death of his wife, which has left him at the mercy of her relations who want to appropriate him and everything he possesses. His defence eventually takes the form of rebellion. With the utmost cunning he systematically drinks himself silly, and then returns home for the funeral, whereupon, standing on the brink of the grave and ‘look[ing] as if into an abyss of black tremendous loneliness’ he suddenly ‘shot down, falling clumsily, arms flapping out, his disappearing face looking briefly astonished, the mouth wide open and showing all his artificial teeth. There was a moment’s hesitation of unbelieving dismay. Then the bustling began. Mr Arnold lay down there on his stomach across the coffin. An upper denture gleamed out in the clay beside him’ (CS 371–2). Rhys Davies’s humour is often black enough to make you weep. It is not infrequently the grimacing expression of his deepest fears. In

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Print of a Hare’s Foot, Davies recalls the time he was caught up a pear tree, stealing the fruit. He might as well have been up a gum tree, for all the chances it seemed he had of escape. The bad-tempered, goitered Mrs Blow, ‘bulky in all her parts’, stood below, bellowing: Ague trapped me tighter in the fork. My knees trembled, yet could not move into action. Simultaneously came an agonized need to water. About to do it in my knickerbockers . . . I managed to unbutton, let loose, and, peeing into the thick net of leaves below, even then thought of our horse stopping before the field of dandelions flashed through my mind. (PHF 35)

Although he manages to escape, Mrs Blow tells his mother, who promptly confronts him with the question ‘Why did you do it? It dawned on me that the other thing [i.e. urinating] had been put into words. By women! Thieving was nothing in comparison. I hung my head. “She frightened me,” I whimpered’ (PHF 37). It is a shocking revelation that women actually speak this disgraceful scatological language – a lesson not lost on the later writer. And the incident also both exemplifies and as it were explains the way in which for Davies comedy and fear and the forbidden are so intimately interconnected. It is funny, as well as sad, to see reviewers and critics taking Davies’s humour so innocently at face value – a reaction he himself of course assiduously encouraged. Take for example the illustration to The Stars, the World, and the Women (1930), which depicts a comically rampant old man chasing a comically screaming old woman down stairs while farcically wielding a brush like an axe. The scene is, in fact, the climax to a long story in which delicate, sensitive, Bryn has had all the nonsense of his romantic, poetic dreaming about stars knocked out of him by the several persecuting women in his life. And the scene depicts his comic, and savagely farcical, revenge. There is almost always a frost on Rhys Davies’s frolics, a disquieting rumness about his merry romps. Perhaps the best preparation for reading them is to look at a story like ‘The Dark World’. Closely modelled on an incident reported in Print of a Hare’s Foot as true to Rhys Davies’s boyhood life, it tells of two lads whose favourite comic pastime is to hunt through the village for the closed blinds that signify there has been a death in the house. They then respectfully and solicitously enquire whether they can view the corpse, implying thereby that they are acquaintances of the deceased. The story turns, then, on the voyeurism and the

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obsession with death which abound in Rhys Davies’s fiction. But it also reveals the degree of his self-awareness, because one of the boys discovers one day that the woman whose cold corpse he is viewing, and whose dead baby is so rigidly clutched to her bosom, is his family’s former maid. Comedy collapses into its opposite, and the fear that has, of course, been underlying the youngsters’ oddly salacious game is desolatingly exposed and released destructively into their lives. ‘Fear’, that story about the snake, closes with a powerful paragraph. As the train draws into a station, the boy leaps away from the sinister snake charmer and opens the carriage door: There was a shout from someone. He ran up the track, he dived under some wire railings. He ran with amazingly quick short leaps up a field – like a hare that knows its life is precarious among the colossal dangers of the open world and has suddenly sensed one of them. (BRD 61)

In Print of a Hare’s Foot Rhys Davies would have us believe that his title refers harmlessly and lightly to the young man who mounted the train at Tonypandy station, already joyously savouring his escape to London. But I don’t believe him. The hare in ‘Fear’ tells us something altogether different and more consequential, and I believe reveals the real significance for Davies of so representing himself. The hare in Rhys Davies is a permanently endangered species. It lives by its wits and its fleetness of foot, goes ‘nimbly to ground’ (PHF 165) and it leaves only the lightest of prints for its pursuers. It is nervously alive, it moves by convulsive leaps and bounds – as does Davies in all his writings, including his autobiography. Only thanks to eternal vigilance is the creature exultantly free to go its own unorthodox way. The image recurs in ‘I Will Keep Her Company’, in celebration of glowering Nurse Baldock’s failure to ‘save’ an old man snowed up with his dead wife, to secure him as a trophy and bring back in triumph to an aseptic asexual old people’s home. On her homeward journey in the snowplough the nurse spots a hare: His jump lacked a hare’s usual celerity. He seemed bewildered, and sat up for an instant, ears tensed to the noise breaking the silence of these chaotic acres, a palpitating eye cast back in assessment of the oncoming plough. Then his forepaws gave a quick play of movement, like shadow-boxing, and he sprang forward on the track with renewed vitality. Twice he stopped to look, as though in need of affiliation with

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the plough’s motion. But, beyond a bridge over the frozen river, he took a flying leap and, paws barely touching the hardened snow and scut whisking, escaped out of sight. (BRD 80)

What better image could be found of Davies’s own situation relative to a homophobic culture? He could not just run free; he had to accommodate his movements, as man and as writer, to the temper and tempo of his times. As a homosexual – however discreet, and however inactive – he found his identity was inexorably defined, and negatively constructed, by the dominant heterosexual culture. We are chillingly reminded of the threat his time could hold when, in Print of a Hare’s Foot, he recalls how in Germany in the 1930s he took advantage of his literal fleetness of foot. He found his passage to a meeting with a friend blocked by ominous ranks of marching fascist brownshirts. Taking his life in his feet, he skipped across the road, ‘though half mesmerized by a row of lifted boots advancing towards me’ (PHF 173). One cannot help recalling what was shortly afterwards to happen to gays under Nazi rule. It will not do, though, to associate Rhys Davies too completely with his hares. After all, the public manner – of cool urbanity, impeccable elegance and self-possession – that he initially cultivated to cover his hare’s nature and his hare’s tracks, seems to have become an accomplished fact. Or rather, perhaps, an accomplished style, since both as a person and as a writer Davies seems to me to become a studiedly polished performer. A sardonic observer of others, he could also be an equally sardonic observer of his sardonic self.15 There is at least something of Rhys Davies the writer, I would venture to guess, in the Mrs Vines of ‘The Chosen One’, whose personal psychological torments are translated into an anthropologist’s coolly contemptuous observation of the practices of ‘natives’. By studying the lower-class Rufus through her Zeiss binoculars she ‘renewed an interest in studies begun during long-ago travels in countries far from Wales, and she often jotted her findings into a household-accounts book kept locked in an old portable escritoire’ (BRD 13). It is a fascinating example of Davies conflating his own practice of writing, and book-making, with that very opposite practice of book-keeping he had so despised in his mother. It is a kind of guilty self-accusation, confirmed, I feel, by his noting that Mrs Vines’s control over Rufus is in part rooted in her superior ability to use language. She takes a particularly malicious pleasure in watching him struggle with a dictionary as part of ‘his

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stupified reading of the deliberately perplexing phraseology of her letter’ (BRD 13). There are, I feel, in Rhys Davies’s fiction, symptoms both of his being what would now be vulgarly called ‘a control freak’, and of his extracting a kind of revenge on the world that had excluded him from its ‘normality’. And the best form of revenge for a writer is irony, as Muriel Spark shrewdly notices in her characteristically feline novel The Girls of Slender Means. She there registers the sardonic reactions of a young poet, Nicholas Farringdon, to the innocently narcissistic inmates of a hostel for young ladies: Nicholas was enamoured of the entity in only one exceptional way, that it stirred his poetic sense to a point of exasperation, for at the same time he discerned with irony the process of his own thoughts, how he was imposing upon this society an image incomprehensible to itself.16

Davies’s irony adds polish as well as point to his style, and that stylishness of his was penetratingly dissected by Lynette Roberts, in her review of Jubilee Blues in Wales (March 1939). ‘[W]e do not feel as deeply for the many sufferers in this novel as we might,’ Roberts observes. ‘One feels that Rhys Davies, like his own Cassie, is detached, frightened of any real contact, terrified to sink himself into the subworld of twisted and trampled lives lest he too should partake of the general deformity.’ It is a brilliant perception, as, in connection with it, is her conclusion: ‘It may be that the compression of the short story suits him better than an extended novel.’17 Roberts had, acutely, sensed that the short story became, in Davies’s hands, an instrument of psychological control – at once a form of counter-attack and a psychic defence mechanism. Spark’s Nicholas Farringdon is a romantic at heart, whose irony is in part a strategy to protect himself from himself. The same could also be said of Rhys Davies as ironist. His irony is partly commensurate with his vulnerability, to dangers both internal to the self and external to it. The sad truth, after all, was that for someone like Davies nowhere was safe. A preoccupation of his later years were the threats represented by socialism, and the liberal, humane welfare state. One suspects that, given his early background, he had considerable sympathy for these developments, but he also feared the rigidities and the puritanical intolerance of the collectivist mentality, however well intentioned. The Nurse Baldock mentioned above seems to be the very image of such a threat, but it is more subtly worked out in ‘A Visit to

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Eggeswick Castle’. What that story turns on is the way in which supposed liberation may consist only of a reversal of stereotypes. Passionate Fabians, upper-class Mr and Mrs Chalmers ‘made the cook and the housemaid travel first-class on the train, while they themselves, in obedience to their protesting principles (and perhaps as a hair-shirt for their well-off condition), went in the crowded third’ (BRD 81). The story then continues as it has opened, by tartly demonstrating how difficult it is to remove ingrained assumptions about class and gender; the common supposition, in this case, that young lower-class women are doomed to be the innocent prey of older middle-class men. Contemporary gay theory – like feminist theory before it – has much to say about stereotyping. It argues not that gender stereotypes need to be revised but rather that the prevailing cultural assumptions about ‘gender’ itself are radically misconceived. The very supposition that the sexual identities of human beings can ‘normally’ be neatly designated either masculine or feminine is, to militant gays, false. Such categories are, for them, social stereotypes that misrepresent, predetermine and in practice distort, actual sexual experience. Rhys Davies died before ‘gayness’ was defined, and expressed, in these terms. But, interestingly, his stories do include ambivalent engagements with gender stereotyping. An evident satiric instance is the story ‘Abraham’s Glory’, which is a savage portrait of a grossly philoprogenitive, cryptobiblical patriarch, whose only measure of his masculinity is how many children he can sire. By the end, ‘His history as father of twenty-one was related in the paper, together with all about that time when he had so bravely rescued Dai Dry Dock from under a fall of roof in the pits’ (CS 173). Given the context, the delicious double entendre in Dai’s nickname needs no gloss. The farcical tale ‘Gents Only’ offers a different ‘take’ on Davies’s stance on masculinity. When Lewis the Hearse’s wife leaves him for a paramour, leaving only a plate of tart for his tea, he revenges himself on the whole sex by advertising himself thereafter as J. J. Lewis, Gent’s Undertaker: ‘From now on, men’s funerals only’ (CS 240). Davies’s own intermittently hysterical fear of the feminine – a fear which I have tentatively been depicting as a function of the ways in which heterosexuality and homosexuality were actually ‘constructed’ in his day, but which could more unsympathetically be described as misogynistic – is again very evident in this story. The tale climaxes with Lewis’s would-be seducer, nubile young Lottie, being frightened

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out of her wits when Lewis threatens to entomb her in one of his coffins. The story is a disturbing example of the classic double bind – of the way a homosexual in Rhys Davies’s day could end up being trapped within the very gender stereotypes he wanted to subvert. Some of Davies’s most powerful stories pertain to his ambiguous position in a world officially divided, and polarized, between masculine and feminine. Such a story is ‘The Fashion Plate’. His sympathies are there distributed between the poignantly but bitchily frustrated Mrs Mitchell, who dresses to kill, and her poor ruin of a husband, whose eventual fate is symbolically adumbrated in the slaughterhouse scene glimpsed by the boy Nicholas: he saw in a whitewashed room hung with ropes and pulleys a freshly dead bullock strung up in the air by its legs; it swayed a little and looked startlingly foolish. Blood spattered the guttered floor and some still dripped from the bullock’s mouth like a red icicle. (CS 82)

If part of Davies saw in the defiantly stylish Mrs Mitchell ‘a vicarious triumph of [himself], a dream become courageously real’, another part of him was intimately familiar with ‘the cold isolation of the dead man lying helpless in that strange clothing’ (CS 91). ‘There was’, says Davies of that corpse, ‘nothing to astonish, and nothing to startle one into fearful pleasure’ (CS 91). His stories are ones where cold isolation and fearful pleasures seem to converge. Oddball Arfon, in the story named after him, finds that whenever he tries to draw women their forms acquire ‘a sinister ugliness’. But, says Davies, ‘the cruelty of that ugliness emerged in a desperately triumphant way from the luminous beauty of her physical form’ (CS 147) – a comment that illuminates his own writing. When the minister, Mr Watkin-Watkins, canes Arfon, the pain is at first cutting: ‘He almost swooned away. Then gradually the stings seemed to lose their awful bites. Now they became quite different, warm and shuddering. He began to wait for them with a quickening of his blood’ (CS 137). He later experiences a similar swoon after strangling his sadistically taunting girlfriend with the fur which is his present to her. The scene, of course, replicates that between Mrs Vines and Rufus at the end of ‘The Chosen One’. These scenes, along with many related examples in Rhys Davies’s output, are consistent with the description given of Arfon’s early upbringing:

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Arfon suffered a great deal. Except for a habit of dreaming visionary dreams and his unusual stature, he was like most other children. Especially when he was born. But as he grew, he found that the world was an ugly place. From the beginning he was aware of contempt and disgust. His mother’s resentful rejection of him and his father’s bad temper and anger that he would be a burden entered his heart without his being aware what they meant. And the mockery and jeering of the other young people in the place made him quiver with suffering. He had to attend the school on the hillside, and because he hated going among the other children, who poked fun at him mercilessly, he was a fool at the lessons. He would be numb with silent anger and pain. Once, after a particular bout of teasing from the other boys, and fury from the teacher, he had to be sent home with his knicker-bockers dirtied. The boys never forgot that. (CS 134)

How much of Rhys Davies’s own early story is there? A fair bit, I would guess. If so, then the way lies open for a psychoanalytic reading of his stories. Moreover, as a friend of D. H. Lawrence’s, and as one who described himself as coming of age in the 1920s when ‘Freud [was] a newly canonized redeemer’ (PHF 103), Rhys Davies himself would surely not have been unaware of that option – indeed, it may well be that his stories include his own Freudianized reading of himself. However, consistent with my sympathy for current gay theorists’ hostility to psychoanalytic ‘explanations’ of gayness, I shall, however reluctantly, reject this invitation from the stories, if not from their author, to pursue a line of psychoanalytical enquiry. Instead, let me note that Rhys Davies’s writings include fantasies of escape from the sexual order of his day. One such is his vision of Dr William Price, Llantrisant, who significantly puts in a lengthy appearance in Print of a Hare’s Foot precisely when one would have expected an extended portrait of Rhys Davies’s father and mother. They are replaced, or displaced, by the priapic Price, whom Davies represents as a kind of libertarian hero, an atavistic relic (as Lawrence Mitchell has pointed out) of a pre-industrial and a pre-Nonconformist Wales.18 As such, he is the antithesis of that actual modern Wales by which Davies felt himself to have been ostracized as ‘queer’, but he offers Davies a means of connecting himself with an alternative, autochthonous Wales, of supposedly pagan Celtic (or even Iberian) freedoms. William Price, wrote Davies, did not lose faith in the old druidic gods. Such gods alone had respect for sacred bards and their riddles which were linked to the principles of

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life. He wanted the old race back, with its bright-striped coats and purple cloaks, its lime-washed dyed hair and its circumspect hospitality to strangers at the gate’. (PHF 23)

Davies, himself a stranger at the gate, must have sensed in the freedom-loving, and free-loving Price – rampaging old ram though he was – an incipient cross-dresser and gender-bender. Price’s memorial, as Davies exultantly notes, ‘was to be a painted sixty-foot pole crowned with a crescent moon’. Outrageously phallic, of course, and perhaps the kind of object by which Davies himself would, secretly, have liked to have been memorialized. But instead, in Print of a Hare’s Foot, he chose a very different ‘phallic’ image to represent himself. It first appears when Davies mentions his adolescent début as a writer: ‘I built myself a private lighthouse’ (PHF 98), he notes, and it is to this lighthouse he again alludes in that scene, quoted at the beginning of this essay, when he manages to thwart his father’s plan to secure a place for him in the bank: ‘Throughout the interview with the benign manager I remained monosyllabic within my lighthouse’ (PHF 98). Then, on the penultimate page of his autobiography, the image reappears again, when Davies describes his experience of self-sequestration in order to write his first novel: I settled into the dismal winter, going out less and less. The solitary occupant of a lighthouse, or a spider weaving a web in the rafters, I had one of the loneliest jobs in the world. It was also self-chosen. There was not a bounden duty for anyone else to pay the slightest attention. The long wallowing in introspection brought cantankerousness, phobias, cold feet, neurosis, and saintliness. I starved vicariously and was conscious of the discomfort of a halo. (PHF 199)

Those sentences could, perhaps, stand as Rhys Davies’s epitaph as a professional writer. And in that image of the lighthouse it is possible to see a poignant image of the loneliness that was the accompaniment to a lifetime’s work of sublimating his ‘different’ sexuality into popularly accepted writing, and thus equivocally ‘normalizing’ it.19 ‘It seemed to him’, he wrote of Bryn, a character in The Stars, the World, and the Women who is crippled by his sensitivity, ‘that the loneliness he himself experienced could not be eased by another person. Loneliness was a thing that could never be touched by the service of another. It was a thing beyond that, it was a mystery that only death would make clear’ (SWW 25).

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David Callard has shrewdly surmised that, at least in his later years, ‘much of Rhys Davies’ sexual life took place in his imagination’.20 As a biographer, Callard properly bases this conclusion on the evidence of Davies’s friends. But the fiction tells much the same story. With its cast of voyeurs, its intricate symbolical displacements of sexual material, its narcissistic stylishness and its practised translation of intractable passion into tractable comedy, the fiction speaks of Davies’s masterful, studied, lonely aloofness from the perturbations of sexuality. And if I began by calling Davies the Strindberg of Wales, I might end by hazarding that he was, in some ways, the Mishima of Wales as well.21 And that does bring me almost to the end of what has manifestly been a lopsided discussion of Rhys Davies the writer; lopsided because there is so much of his fiction that I still have not read; lopsided because there is, of course, so much of the man and the writer I have left out of account. I have not begun, for instance, to consider his professionalism, and the way market requirements perforce influenced his style, his choice of form, and his subject-matter, however preoccupied with his own personal concerns he may essentially have been. Nor have I touched on issues such as his Welshness, his debts to Lawrence, his sometimes bizarre friendships or a dozen other aspects of his life and work. Worst of all, I have reduced the complexity of his life and work to the single issue of sexual orientation and gender identity. But the limited, and therefore necessarily distorting, terms in which I have chosen to conduct this discussion do at least have a rationale. These terms originated in my attempts to understand why the best of Rhys Davies’s stories seemed to me so disturbing while such discussion of his work as I had read seemed not to register, let alone address, such a reaction. It is, however, heartening to see signs, particularly in the recent work of J. Lawrence Mitchell and Simon Baker, that readings of Davies’s work are becoming much more enquiring and therefore much more perceptive.22 Welcoming such an advance into fuller understanding, I wrote the following in a review published a few years ago: As a quintessential misfit, Rhys Davies has tended to get short shrift from the acolytes of the collective . . . It has long seemed obvious to me that Davies’ fiction would benefit immensely by being approached from the direction of gay studies – this would provide us with a language for understanding his dark fascination with voyeurism, his

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delight in the aesthetic, his ambiguous feelings about the macho male, his attraction to the nexus of sex and power, and his coolly elegant mastery of the dandyism of style. Criticism of Anglo-Welsh literature has been so heavily dominated by historical and socio-political discourse that large areas, or dimensions, of the literature remain unexplored for want of the language to dis-cover it . . . at their best, [Anglo-Welsh poems and short stories] are so much more demandingly adult in their modes of being than we Welsh critics are, in general, intellectually prepared or terminologically equipped to recognise.23

This essay has, then, been my own stumbling attempt to discuss Rhys Davies’s adult fiction in answerably adult terms. As for my title, its significance has, I’m sure, long been apparent. Some time not long after arriving in London, Rhys Davies ‘bought a rhymesheet . . . a Blake poem decorated by Lovat Fraser – “Never seek to tell thy love . . .” – which for years hung pinned on the walls of my various bed-sitting rooms’ (PHF 106). That poem, radiating Blake’s fierce hatred of all disingenuousness, hypocrisy, cant and subterfuge in sexual relations, seems to me to read like the silent cri de cœur at the heart of Rhys Davies’s work, a cry against the very interdictions that paradoxically brought that work into being: Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be, For the gentle wind does move Silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears, Ah! she doth depart. Soon as she was gone from me A traveller came by, Silently, invisibly — He took her with a sigh.24

Sexual openness spurned; silence, secrecy, lovingly embraced in its stead. How deeply, yet ambivalently, Rhys Davies must have identified with Blake’s blistering indictment. In that novel left unpublished

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at his death, Ram with Red Horns, he wryly confessed at the very last, I feel, to the double bind of his own lifelong experience of living a double life. When Rhonwen tries to confess to the villagers that she is guilty both of murder and of arson, they flatly refuse to believe her, preferring to maintain the respectable, decorous status quo. In those villagers I see something of us, Rhys Davies’s readers, still wilfully uncomprehending of his fictional confessions, accomplices still in maintaining that enigma that was, and is, Rhys Davies. But then, as he also tells us in his novel, Rhonwen would not have confessed in the first place had she not been secretly convinced that she would never be believed.

Notes This essay is the text of the 1997 Rhys Davies Lecture, delivered at the University of Glamorgan. It was first published in Welsh Writing in English 4 (ed. Tony Brown, New Welsh Review, 1998). I am indebted to Dr Simon Baker, Dr Tony Brown and Dr Bert Schoene for assistance in preparing this essay. 1

2

3

4

Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning (London: Heinemann, 1969), 103. Further references are included in the text, abbreviated as PHF. Reviews quoted on the dust jacket of PHF. William Trevor’s assessment, reprinted from the Guardian, is, however, appreciably better than the others: ‘Gently wrapped, these stylish, perceptive tales have centres as hard as steel, and are all the better for it.’ I have found the following studies of men’s writing particularly useful: Joseph Bristow (ed.), Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing (London: Routledge, 1992); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Mark Lilly, Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1993); Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics: Queer Reading (London: Routledge, 1994) and The Wilde Century (London: Cassell, 1994); Joseph Bristow, ‘Irresolutions, anxieties and contradictions: ambivalent trends in the study of masculinity’, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 3 (1996), 165–79. A full transcript of this interview by Delyth Davies is printed in Sarah Mabbett, ‘A portrait of Rhys Davies’, MA dissertation, University of Wales

‘Never Seek to Tell thy Love’: Rhys Davies’s Fiction

5 6 7

8

9 10 11

12

13

14

15

16 17 18

19

20

281

Swansea, 1996, 150–7. The interview was broadcast shortly after Rhys Davies’s death, in August 1978. For gays’ self-imaging of identity, see particularly Sinfield, Wilde Century. A Bed of Feathers (London: Mandrake Press 1929), 45–6. See Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter of Francis Bacon (London: Century, 1993), and Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993). ‘The Dilemma of Catherine Fuschias’, The Collected Stories of Rhys Davies (London: Heinemann, 1955), 175–91. Further references are included in the text, abbreviated as CS. Ram with Red Horns (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), 99. Sinfield, Wilde Century. Salome, in The Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Lamb Publishing Co., Sunflower Edition, 1909), vol. 7, 83. The Best of Rhys Davies: A Personal Collection of Short Stories (1955; London: David Charles, 1979), 28. Further references are included in the text, abbreviated as BRD. The Stars, the World and the Women (London: William Jackson, 1930), 17. Further references are included in the text, abbreviated as SWW. See, for instance, Alan Sinfield’s discussion of the connections between the ‘effeminate’ homosexual and the supposed ‘effeminacy’ of subject, colonized peoples (Wilde Century, 75–8). Davies described his stories as follows, in an interview with Glyn Jones: ‘As far as I can be allowed to judge my own work, I would say that in my pattern is a design of human figures battling to rid themselves of blemishes, and, on the whole, failing – and in the centre of that design is a grotesque figure, quite detached from those wrestling others, but smiling – with a smile both loving and sardonic’ (‘Every genuine writer finds his own Wales’, New Welsh Review, 35 (Winter 1996), 14). Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (1963; London: Penguin, 1966), 71. Wales, 6/7 (March 1939), 208–9. J. Lawrence Mitchell, ‘ “I wish I had a trumpet”: Rhys Davies and the creative impulse’, in Belinda Humfrey (ed.), Fire Green as Grass (Llandysul: Gomer, 1995), 108; reprinted in the present volume. In talking with Glyn Jones about the work of writing, Rhys Davies uses a highly sensual, if not erotic, language: ‘[A subject] must strike a certain chord in me, and if it does, it begins to create a sort of rhythmic sense of urgency. I become stirred, excited, there’s an exhilarating blend of physical and mental pleasure, and I feel tuned up’ (‘Every genuine writer finds his own Wales’, 11). D. A. Callard, ‘Rhys Davies 1901–1978’, British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–1980, ed. Dean Baldwin, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 139 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), 57–72. I am grateful to David Callard for supplying me with materials relating to Rhys Davies.

282 21

22

23 24

‘Never Seek to Tell thy Love’: Rhys Davies’s Fiction

In the Glyn Jones interview he is explicit about the hidden sources of his work: ‘I, as a person, am obliterated, my everyday identity is submerged. Personally I think this part of the writer’s job is an interesting mystery. As far as I can understand it, I think that when the writer’s everyday ego is submerged, the purest part of his mind remains in the ascendant to guide him – or rather, acts as a judge of the mass of raw materials, the dreams and experiences that are stored in the subconcious. For this act of creative writing liberates them. The guiding judge rejects this image, censors that emotion, whittles-down or prunes an over-crude experience into something altogether more subtle’ (‘Every genuine writer finds his own Wales’, 12). J. Lawrence Mitchell, ‘I wish I had a trumpet’, 96–111; Simon Baker, ‘The dislocated mind: some aspects of the Anglo-Welsh short story, 1915–1988’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales Swansea, 1995. Review of Fire Green as Grass, New Welsh Review, 29 (Summer 1995), 92–4. Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Complete Writings of William Blake (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 161. The version printed here restores the original deletions.

Rhys Davies: A Bibliography MEIC STEPHENS

A Novels The Withered Root (London: Robert Holden, 1927; New York: Holt, 1928). Rings on her Fingers (London: Harold Shaylor, 1930; New York, Harcourt Brace, 1930; collector’s edn. in slip-case, signed by the author and limited to 175 copies, Harold Shaylor, 1930; Bath: Chivers, 1969, Portway Reprints). Count your Blessings (London: Putnam, 1932; New York: Covici Friede,1933). The Red Hills (London: Putnam,1932; New York: Covici Friede, 1933; German edn. Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1934; Bath: Chivers, 1970, Portway Reprints). Two Loves I Have (London: Cape, 1933; written under the pseudonym Owen Pitman). Honey and Bread (London: Putnam, 1935; Bath: Chivers, 1970, Portway Reprints). A Time to Laugh (London: Heinemann, 1937; New York, Stackpole, 1938; cheap edn., 1938). Jubilee Blues (London: Heinemann, 1938; Bath, Chivers, 1969, Portway Reprints). Under the Rose (London: Heinemann, 1940); adapted for the stage as No Escape (see below). Tomorrow to Fresh Woods (London: Heinemann, 1941). The Black Venus (London: Heinemann, 1944; New York: Howell Soskin, 1946; Readers’ Union, 1948; Pan Books, 1950; Bath, Chivers, 1966, Portway Reprints); Danish trans. Kirsten Heerup, Den sorte Venus (Copenhagen: P. Branner, 1947); Swedish trans. Nils Holmberg, Den svarta Venus (Stockholm: Fritzes Bokförlog; Helsingfors: Söderström, 1948). The Dark Daughters (London: Heinemann, 1947; New York, Doubleday, 1948; Readers’ Union, 1948); Swedish trans. Eva Marstander, De mörka döttrarna (Stockholm: Folket i bilds förlag, 1951). Marianne (London: Heinemann, 1951; New York: Doubleday, 1952; Popular Library, 1952). The Painted King (London: Heinemann, 1954; cheap edn., 1965; New York, Doubleday, 1954) The Perishable Quality (London: Heinemann, 1957; cheap edn., 1959).

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Girl Waiting in the Shade (London: Heinemann, 1960; Norwegian trans. Elizabeth Kostøl, Oslo: Green, 1969). Nobody Answered the Bell (London: Heinemann, 1971; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971). Honeysuckle Girl (London: Heinemann, 1975). Ram with Red Horns (Bridgend: Seren, 1996; with an introduction by Philippa Davies).

B Stories and Novellas The Song of Songs and Other Stories (London: E. Archer, 1927; edn. limited to 900 copies and a signed edn. of 100 copies, with a portrait of the author by William Roberts; some copies have a blue cover with label). Aaron (London: E. Archer, 1927; a privately printed edn. of 100 copies). A Bed of Feathers: A Dramatic Story of Love in the Welsh Coalfields (London: The Mandrake Press, 1929; with a wood engraving by Lionel Ellis; reprinted, New York: Black Hawk Press, in an edn. of 900 copies; 1935, a private edn. for subscribers, limited to 900 copies). Tale (London: E. Lahr, 1930; the second of the Blue Moon booklets; 100 copies for sale; another version, unnumbered and in a smaller format; this story was also published in New York by Black Hawk Press in 1935). The Stars, the World, and the Women (London: William Jackson, 1930; number 4 of the Furnival Books, printed at the Chiswick Press in an edn. of 550 copies, signed by the author, of which 500 were for sale, with a foreword by Liam O’Flaherty and an illustration by Frank C. Papé). A Pig in a Poke (London: Joiner & Steele, 1931; an edn. limited to 1,000 numbered copies; a signed edn. of 70 copies, of which nos. 1 to 50 were for sale in Britain and nos. 51 to 70 in the USA). Arfon (London: W. and G. Foyle, 1931; an edn. of 400 numbered copies and 12 copies lettered A to L and signed by the author; a much longer version of the story Aaron). A Woman (London: Capell at the Bronze Snail Press, 1931; 165 copies for sale, each numbered and signed by the author, and 17 copies for presentation and lettered A to L). Daisy Matthews and Three Other Tales (Waltham St Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1932; an edn. limited to 325 copies, with wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker and in a slip-case). Love Provoked (London: Putnam, 1933) includes A Bed of Feathers. One of Norah’s Early Days (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1935, in the Grayson Books series, with a frontispiece by Joy Lloyd; an edn. of 285 copies, of which 250, numbered and signed by the author, were for sale). A Bed of Feathers (New York: Black Hawk Press, 1935, a private edn. for subscribers and limited to 900 copies).

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The Things Men Do (London: Heinemann, 1936). The Skull (Chepstow: Tintern Press, 1936; 95 copies bound in buckram and 15 in pigskin, with wood engravings by Sylvia Marshall). A Finger in Every Pie (London: Heinemann, 1942). Selected Stories (London and Dublin: Maurice Fridberg, 1945; a paperback in the Hour-Glass Library, containing 10 stories). The Trip to London (London: Heinemann, 1946; New York: Howell Soskin, 1946; Bath: Chivers, 1966, Portway Reprints). Boy with a Trumpet (London: Heinemann, 1949; New York: Doubleday, 1951; the British edn. contains 12 stories and the American, which has an introduction by Bucklin Moon, 20 stories); German trans. Siegfried Schmitz, Der Junge mit der Trompete (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandl, 1960). The Collected Stories of Rhys Davies (London: Heinemann, 1955; has a short preface by the author and contains 43 stories). The Darling of her Heart and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1958); Hungarian trans. Klára Szöllösy, A mama kedvence (Budapest: Európa, 1959). The Chosen One and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1967; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969). The Best of Rhys Davies: A Personal Collection of Short Stories (Newton Abbot and London: David & Charles, 1979; contains 12 stories). Rhys Davies: Collected Stories (Llandysul: Gomer Press, vols. 1 and 2, 1996, vol. 3, 1998), compiled and with an introduction by Meic Stephens; contains 101 stories. A Human Condition: Selected Stories (Cardiff: Parthian, 2001).

C Miscellaneous The Woman among Women (London: E. Lahr; Blue Moon poem for Christmas 1931; 100 signed copies; also an edn. of 100 copies with drawing by Frederick Carter). ‘Introduction’ to Liam O’Flaherty, The Wild Swan and Other Stories (London: Joiner & Steele, 1932). My Wales (London: Jarrolds, 1937; New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1938). Y Ferch o Gefn Ydfa (Liverpool: Brython, 1938); Welsh trans. by T. J. WilliamsHughes of an otherwise unpublished play. The original English version was staged at least three times: it ran for a week in October 1952 at the Empire Theatre, Tonypandy, then at the Town Hall in Pontypridd, with the young actor David Lyn taking the part of Wil Hopkin, then at the Astoria Theatre in Llanelli. Sea Urchin: Adventures of Jörgen Jörgensen (London: Duckworth, 1940); Icelandic trans. Jörundur hundadagakongur, aevintyri hans og aeviraunir (Reykjavik: Bókfellsútgáfan, 1943). The Story of Wales (London: Collins, 1943; in the Britain in Pictures series; New York: Howell Soskin, 1946).

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No Escape (London: Evans Brothers, 1955); a play in 3 acts, in collaboration with Archibald Batty, adapted from the novel Under the Rose. Print of a Hare’s Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning (London: Heinemann, 1969); republished in the Seren Classic series, with an introduction by Simon Baker, 1998. ‘Introduction’, and (ed.), Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka (London: Owen, 1970). ‘Introduction’ and (ed.), Anna Kavan, My Soul in China (London: Owen, 1975).

A selection of Rhys Davies’s contributions to books and periodicals, together with reviews and articles about his work, are listed in John Harris, A Bibliographical Guide to Twenty-four Modern Anglo-Welsh Writers (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994).

Index

‘Aaron’ 156 Aaron, Jane 24 Abergavenny Sex Trial (1942) 245, 253 Ablett, Noah 46 ‘Abraham’s Glory’ 274 Abse, Dannie 115 Ackerley, J. R. 108, 127 Adam, G. F. 14 Aldington, Richard 111 Althusser, Louis 21, 252 Aphrodite 233 ‘Arfon’ 68, 87, 156, 162, 166, 213, 246, 249, 257, 275 Arnold, Matthew 18, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 101 Arts Council 8, 28 Bacon, Francis 264 Baker, Denys Val 13 Baker, Josephine 235 Baker, Simon 25, 278 Bakhtin, Mikhail 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 172 Baldwin, James 251 Balzac, Honoré de 156, 206 ‘Bard, The’ 17, 21, 162, 164 Bartmann, Sarah 25, 231, 235, 241 see also ‘Hottentot Venus’ Bates, H. E. 6, 19, 139, 141, 145 Beardsley, Aubrey 110, 134, 266 Beauvoir, Simone de 207 ‘Bed of Feathers, A’ 21, 178, 180, 257, 263 ‘Benefit Concert, The’ 57 Berry, Ron 55 Betrayal of the Blue Books 217

‘Betty Leyshon’s Marathon’ 23, 211 Bhabha, Homi 171 Black Venus, The (1944) 8, 22, 24, 57, 61, 186, 187, 216, 217, 219, 228, 231 et seq. Blake, William 122, 257, 279 ‘Blodwen’ 17, 58, 60, 93 Bloomsbury 119 Blue Books see Betrayal of the Blue Books Bohata, Kirsti 24 Boy with a Trumpet (1949) 8, 142, 143 ‘Boy with a Trumpet’ 20, 131, 148, 162, 169, 209, 249, 257 Brett, Dorothy 188 Brown, Tony 17 Browning, Robert 207 Bundling see Courtship in beds Burton, Philip 10, 142 Burton, Richard 142 Butler, Judith 213 Café Royal 111, 132 Caine, Hall 153 ‘Caleb’s Ark’ 205 Callard, D. A. 13, 14, 19, 108, 130, 278 Cambrian Combine and Strike (1910) 16, 30, 41, 45, 105, 126 see also Tonypandy Riots Campbell, Roy 155 ‘Canute’ 205, 249, 257 Carpenter, Edward 262 Carter, Angela 177 Carter Paterson & Co. 124 Chartism 44, 62, 205 Chekhov, Anton 6, 139

288

Index

‘Cherry Blossom on the Rhine’ 19, 141 ‘Chosen One, The’ 21, 130, 145, 162, 163, 165, 167, 212, 248, 251, 257, 267, 272, 275 Circe 111 Coffin, Walter 43, 73 ‘Conflict in Morfa’ 21, 162, 163, 173 ‘Contraption, The’ 205 Cooper, James Fenimore 100 Coppard, A. E. 13, 139 Corbin, Alan 235 Cordell, Alexander 16, 57 Corelli, Marie 153 Count Your Blessings (1932) 16, 56, 58 Courtship on beds 232 Crane, Hart 111 Crawshays of Cyfarthfa 42 Cripps, Stafford 2 Cuvier, Georges 231

Dickens, Charles 192, 205 ‘Dilemma of Catherine Fuschias, The’ 143, 249, 252, 265 Dixon, Michael J. 15 ‘Doctor’s Wife, The’ 251, 255 Dollimore, Jonathan 248 ‘Doris in Gomorrah’ 246, 248, 256 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 162, 169 Douglas, Norman 111

Daisy Matthews (1932) 19, 139 ‘Dangerous Remedy, A’ 249 Dark Daughters, The (1947) 24, 188, 216, 220, 224, 229 ‘Dark World, The’ 59, 131, 209, 270 Darling of her Heart, The (1958) 8, 144 Davies, Clara Novello 196 Davies, Colyn 142 Davies, Delyth 27, 247 Davies, Gertrude (sister) 4 Davies, Gladys (sister) 4 Davies, Idris 3 Davies, Jack (brother) 4, 141 Davies, James A. 22 Davies, Lewis (brother) 4, 28 Davies, Peggy (sister) 4 Davies, Pennar 84 Davies, Philippa 56, 180 Davies, Sarah (mother) 4, 29, 125, 129, 266 Davies, Thomas (father) 4, 29 Ddraig Goch, Y 83 ‘Death in the Family’ 59 Dedalus, Stephen 2 Derrida, Jacques 163

Fabians 274 ‘Faggots’ 248 ‘Farm, The’ 21, 162, 163, 165 Farr, Tommy 158 ‘Fashion Plate, The’ 23, 162, 163, 169, 170, 209, 210, 263, 275 ‘Fear’ 20, 133, 142, 241, 247, 257, 268, 271 ‘Finger in Every Pie, A’ 8, 20, 142 Fitzrovia 3, 26 Flaubert, Gustave 20, 151, 156 Fleure, H. J. 74, 240 ‘Foolish One, The’ 265 Forster, E. M. 251 Foucault, Michel 22, 170, 176 Fraser, Lovat 279 Freud, Sigmund 19, 108, 109, 112, 118, 119, 120, 264, 276 ‘Funeral, The’ 249 Furber, Joanna 25

Edgar Allan Poe Prize 8, 145, 264 Edwards, Ness 48 Ellis, David 175 Ellmann, Richard 147 Emma Bovary 12, 20, 151 see also Madame Bovary Empire Theatre, Tonypandy 262 Evans, Caradoc 2, 6, 11, 13, 19, 138, 141, 149, 150, 172, 205 Evans, George Ewart 3, 98 Evans, Gwynfor 98

Gallie, Menna 55, 68 Garber, Marjorie 23, 205, 208, 210 Gautier, Théophile 209 Gay Liberation Front 261

Index General Strike (1926) 7, 41, 49, 50, 51, 57, 183, 191 Genet, Jean 108 Gentleman’s Magazine, The 237 ‘Gents Only’ 248, 274 Geoffrey of Monmouth 222 Geographical Magazine, The 165 Gide, André 108 Gielgud, John 245 ‘Gift of Death, A’ 138, 139 Gilman, Sander 231 ‘Glimpses of the Moon’ 241 Gosen (chapel) 5, 108, 148, 192 Gramich, Katie 23 Gray, Thomas 90 Greenblatt, Stephen 209 Griffith, Will (Griff’s bookshop) 3, 159 Guests of Dowlais 42 Haddon, G. P. 250 Hall, Gladys Mary 172 Hamnett, Nina 3, 155 Hanley, James 75 Hanson, Clare 17, 71, 72, 84 Hardy, Thomas 166, 168 Hauliers’ Strike (1893) 16, 45 Heath, Stephen 212 Hemingway, Ernest 251 Henry VIII 244 Herod 110 Herodias 110 Hir Wen Gwd 121, 128 Hitler, Adolf 191 Homfrays of Penydarren 42 Honey and Bread (1935) 15, 34, 40, 41, 42, 44, 56, 61, 63, 65, 158, 159 Honeysuckle Girl (1975) 8 Hopkin, Wil 75 ‘Hottentot Venus’ 25, 231, 235 see also Bartmann, Sarah Houdini, Harry 132 How Green Was My Valley (1939) 10, 64 ‘Human Condition, A’ 130, 269 Huws, Catherine 56 Ibsen, Henrik 159 ‘I Will Keep Her Company’ 211, 271

289

Jenny Jones (1944) 8 John O’London’s Weekly 13, 157 Jones, Alma 156 Jones, David 147 Jones, Glyn 10, 16, 18, 20, 31, 84, 150, 151, 155, 157, 159, 162, 185, 209 Jones, Gwyn 55, 68, 244 Jones, Jack 14, 16, 47, 55, 56, 57 Jones, Lewis 14, 16, 31, 40, 55, 57, 68 Joyce, James 2, 20, 139, 147 Jubilee Blues (1938) 7, 9, 15, 16, 39, 41, 51, 66, 158, 273 Kavan, Anna 9 Keating, Joseph 55, 56 Kermode, Frank 104 Kington, Maxine Hong 115 Knight, Stephen 16 Kohut, Heinz 133 Kristeva, Julia 251 Lahr, Charles 6, 13, 19, 141, 148, 155, 158, 175 Lasch, Christopher 129, 130 ‘Last Struggle, The’ 59, 131, 249 Lawrence, D. H. 6, 12, 17, 18, 21, 22, 36, 40, 58, 59, 63, 65, 68, 74, 75, 77, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 106, 114, 124, 138, 153, 154, 155, 157, 175 et seq., 205, 241, 249, 276, 278 Lejeune, Philippe 114 Lewis, Saunders 31, 83 Listener, The 127 Liszt, Franz 187 Literary Digest, The 11 Little Lord Fauntleroy 129 Llewellyn, Richard 31, 55, 64, 68 Lloyd, Lady 245 Louis XIV 199 Mabinogion, The 164 Macpherson, James 90 Madame Bovary 20, 151, 152, 153 see also Emma Bovary Maddocks, Ann 63, 75

290

Index

Maddox, Brenda 6, 111 Maid of Cefn Ydfa, The see Maddocks, Ann ‘Man up a Tree’ 249 Mandel, Barrett J. 114 Mann, Thomas 251 Mansfield, Katherine 153, 154, 157 Marianne (1951) 24, 216, 225, 227 Marriott, Raymond 10, 139 Marx, Karl 46, 49, 51 Mathias, Roland 202 Maupassant, Guy de 6, 139 Mégroz, R. L. 5, 14 Melville, Herman 99 Millett, Kate 188 Mishima, Yukio 278 Mitchell, J. Lawrence 14, 20, 192, 276, 278 Modern Welsh Poetry (1944) 8 Morien (Owen Morgan) 159 Morgan, Dai Watts 37 Morgan, Owen see Morien ‘Mourning for Ianto’ 59 Murry, J. Middleton 154 Mussolini, Benito 191 My Wales (1937) 2, 12, 15, 17, 18, 31, 32, 63, 72, 74, 79, 83, 87, 88, 97, 98, 138, 158 National Library of Wales 18, 113 New Coterie 6, 138, 139, 175 New Welsh Review 14, 18, 21 New Yorker 8, 143, 145 ‘Nightgown’ 23, 57, 206, 207, 208, 210, 249, 265, 257, 266 Nobody Answered the Bell (1971) 8 Novello, Ivor 22, 191, 196, 197 O’Connor, Frank 71, 209 Oedipus 109, 129 O’Faolain, Sean 139 O’Flaherty, Liam 6, 13, 139 ‘Old Adam, The’ 251 Old Bailey 118 ‘On the Tip’ 141 ‘One of Norah’s Early Days’ 143

Orioli, Giuseppe 111 Orwell, George 75 Owain Glynd{r 41, 44 Painted King, The (1954) 22, 191, 197, 198, 201 Pandora’s Box 249 Peach, Linden 20 ‘Pearl of Great Price, A’ 205 Pelmanism 111 Penry, John 156 Penyberth 83 Perch, William 43 Perishable Quality, The (1957) 8, 11, 22, 191, 199, 200, 202 ‘Pig in a Poke, A’ 180 Pitman, Owen (pseudonym) 7 ‘Pits are on the Top, The’ 15, 36, 57 Plaid Cymru 83, 99 Planet 14 ‘Pleasures of the Table’ 249 Potocki, Count 3, 21, 118 Pound, Ezra 191 Powys, John Cowper 159 Powys, Theodore F. 6, 148 Price, Dr William 7, 12, 17, 18, 21, 41, 44, 61, 68, 75, 76, 105, 122, 130, 155, 158, 276 Print of a Hare’s Foot (1969) 3, 7, 18, 25, 30, 35, 40, 57, 59, 61, 65, 76, 77, 87, 89, 96, 104, 105, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 117, 121, 124, 127, 130, 132, 148, 155, 156, 176, 206, 209, 260, 262, 264, 266, 267, 270, 271, 272, 276, 277 Prys-Williams, Barbara 14, 18 ‘Public House, The’ 121, 253, 263 Queer Theory 26, 248, 250, 254, 253 Quinain, Louis and Greta 7 Raine, Allen 10 Ram with Red Horns (1996) 14, 56, 188, 265 Red Hills, The (1932) 16, 56, 59, 178, 181, 183, 185 Rees, David 14

Index Reid, Ian 71, 72 Reilly, Jim 155 ‘Resurrection’ 12, 59, 140, 142 ‘Revelation’ 58 Rhys Davies Lecture (1997) 26 Rhys Davies Trust 4, 28 Rhys, Keidrych 8, 10, 13, 74, 98 Richards, Alun 36 Riches, John Osborne 43 Rings on her Fingers (1930) 20, 56, 151, 153, 154 Roberts, Evan 22, 79, 191, 192, 193 ‘Romantic Policewoman, The’ 255 Royal Stores (Blaenclydach) 4, 260 Russo, Mary 170 Salome 110, 268 Saturday Evening Post 8 Schopenhauer, Arthur 252 Scotch Cattle 65 Scott, Walter 90 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 247 Shakespeare, William 222 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean 231, 235 Shepherd, William 245 Silures 73, 74, 75, 82 Sinfield, Alan 266 Smith, Dai 14, 54 Sollors, Werner 88 Song of Songs, The (1927) 6, 20, 149 South Wales Miners’ Federation 20, 33, 46, 151 Southern Review, The 115 Spark, Muriel 273 ‘Spectre de la Rose’ 142 ‘Spot of Bother, A’ 144, 249, 251, 257 ‘Stars, the World, and the Women, The’ 270, 277 Stein, Gertrude 9, 157 Stephens, Meic 185 Story of Wales, The (1943) 17, 61, 72, 78, 84, 149, 156 Strauss, George 2 Strindberg, August 260, 278 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 266 Tacitus 73

291

‘Tale’ 139 Taliesin 159 Taylor, Louise and Red 9 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 82 Things Men Do, The (1936) 7, 19, 140 Thomas, D. A. (Viscount Rhondda) 41 Thomas, Dylan 3, 22, 56, 59, 199, 202, 203, 209 Thomas, Gwyn 16, 55, 56, 65, 68 Thomas, M. Wynn 14, 24, 25, 26, 55, 56, 61, 209, 213 Thomas, Samuel 43 Thomson, David 3 Time to Laugh, A (1937) 10, 15, 16, 31, 34, 40, 41, 45, 47, 48, 54, 56, 64, 66, 158 Times, The 260 Toklas, Alice B. 9 Tolstoy, Lev 156 Tomorrow to Fresh Woods (1941) 7, 57, 60, 62, 65, 150, 156, 158, 159, 160 Tonypandy Riots (1910) 4, 15, 16, 30, 45, 47, 54 see also Cambrian Combine and Strike Trevithick, Richard 42 Tribune 2 Trip to London, The (1946) 8, 20, 142, 267 Tristan and Isolde 81 Twm Siôn (Shon) Catti 18, 63, 75 ‘Two Friends, The’ 59 Under the Rose (1940) 57 University of Glamorgan 26 Universities’ Association for the Study of Welsh Writing in English 14 Uranus 233 Urquhart, Fred 8, 108 Valentine, Lewis 83 Vaughan, Hilda 14 Venus 233, 234 Venus de Milo 160 Viscount Rhondda see Thomas, D. A.

292 ‘Visit to Eggeswick Castle, A’ 273–4 ‘Wages of Love, The’ 131 Wales 1, 2, 10, 13, 19, 31, 74, 141, 273 Wallace, Jeff 21 ‘Weep Not, My Wanton’ 209, 210 Wells, Vincent 7 Western Mail 156 Wheatsheaf (public house) 3, 142 ‘Wigs, Costumes, Masks’ 256 Wilde, Oscar 80, 110, 111, 134, 155, 248, 261, 266 Williams, Daniel 18 Williams, D. J. 83

Index Williams, Linda Ruth 177 Williams, Raymond 91 Winterson, Jeanette 209 Withered Root, The (1927) 2, 6, 16, 18, 20, 22, 56, 57, 58, 63, 89, 93, 96, 98, 148, 150, 156, 185, 191, 197, 198 Wolfenden Report 245 ‘Woman, A’ 21, 162, 163, 172, 173 Wordsworth, William 82, 122 Wormwood Scrubs 123 ‘Wrath’ 257, 265 Zobole, Ernest 17 Zola, Emile 156