“If I were you, I’d have the red rather than the White.” Or it may have been the other way round. Whatever! That was the sum total of my conversation with one of the great writers of Wales. Oh yes, he said, “Thank you.”
This less than scintillating exchange came back to me when I was reading the two novellas “The Alone to the Alone” and “The Dark Philosophers” by Gwyn Thomas. Reading them makes me wish that I had had a rather more searching conversation with the author.
These novellas published in 1946 and 1947 deal with the fictitious Welsh location of The Terraces based on the memories of the Rhondda of Gwyn Thomas’s childhood and youth. Cantered on a group of middle aged unemployed friends who meditate (and take action) on the politics and meaning of life the two stories present a sardonic, searching, personal and above all funny view of a period in the life of the Valleys that was anything but amusing.
The action in the stories is slight enough but constantly fascinating because of the easy to pastiche but hard to imitate style of Gwyn Thomas. Take a sentence which is, if not typical, then at least representative from “The Alone to the Alone”: “She was a fair specimen of that woeful daftness that spoils all dignity and negates all purpose in a community whose intimate traditions and self-conceits had taken a thorough shellacking, a gripless fatuity of mental action that undermines the whole system of interlocking relevancies and reduces the equipment of social existence to a dangerous and chilling fragility.”
We are given an almost irresistible mixture of exasperated insight linked to the mundane and archaic in appealing constructions like “woeful daftness” and “gripless fatuity” and the use of a word like “shellacking” wonderful stuff!
This Thomas lacks some of the more obvious self-conscious wordsmithing of Dylan while preserving the darkness of R.S. and the poetic quality of Edward!
I must admit that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed reading him. I thoroughly appreciated his later stuff, even though some of it was perhaps facile and sometimes complacently anti-parochial in that culturally depreciating way that some Welsh writers in English can display.
These two stories appealed in a sort of atavistic way to a memory that I (brought up in a Cardiff suburb) simply do not have – except as a shared folk memory of deprivation and belief in education that was still seeping down the valleys to flavour the growing commercial and administrative wealth of Cardiff even when I was a boy.
But nationality is irrelevant for the reader: these are stories which transcend their background and yet are deeply rooted in it. In the same way that Chekov (to whom Gwyn Thomas has been prepared) is not limited by the Russia in which he sets his tales, so Thomas uses what he knows to explain what any reader can understand.
I think that “The Alone to the Alone” is the more satisfying of the two tales, perhaps because it is the less rounded of the narratives, and anyway how can a story fail with such a title!
I do urge people to read Gwyn Thomas. If you haven’t read him before you are in for a reading delight if you have read him before, then revisit.
The woeful (that word comes courtesy of Gwyn Thomas) weather continues with rain all last night and this morning: snow! Luckily it doesn’t seem to be settling where we are but that must mean that the situation is much worse elsewhere. If it snows in Barcelona then the disruption in the higher reaches of the area must be severe indeed!
In spite of my reiterated plea to close the school we seem to be soldiering on with one of my free periods being taken to cover the class of a colleague who has now been away for over a week and a half. We have some colleagues who are looking at the snow and realizing that they live in the hills and that they stand a chance of not getting home easily. Trust me to live absolutely at sea level just when the weather seems to be about to close schools!
I hate snow with a visceral loathing while still appreciating its picturesque value in decorating far mountain tops. It is when the level of precipitation impinges on my living space that I object! And my school doesn’t close.
That’s the galling bit!
This less than scintillating exchange came back to me when I was reading the two novellas “The Alone to the Alone” and “The Dark Philosophers” by Gwyn Thomas. Reading them makes me wish that I had had a rather more searching conversation with the author.
These novellas published in 1946 and 1947 deal with the fictitious Welsh location of The Terraces based on the memories of the Rhondda of Gwyn Thomas’s childhood and youth. Cantered on a group of middle aged unemployed friends who meditate (and take action) on the politics and meaning of life the two stories present a sardonic, searching, personal and above all funny view of a period in the life of the Valleys that was anything but amusing.
The action in the stories is slight enough but constantly fascinating because of the easy to pastiche but hard to imitate style of Gwyn Thomas. Take a sentence which is, if not typical, then at least representative from “The Alone to the Alone”: “She was a fair specimen of that woeful daftness that spoils all dignity and negates all purpose in a community whose intimate traditions and self-conceits had taken a thorough shellacking, a gripless fatuity of mental action that undermines the whole system of interlocking relevancies and reduces the equipment of social existence to a dangerous and chilling fragility.”
We are given an almost irresistible mixture of exasperated insight linked to the mundane and archaic in appealing constructions like “woeful daftness” and “gripless fatuity” and the use of a word like “shellacking” wonderful stuff!
This Thomas lacks some of the more obvious self-conscious wordsmithing of Dylan while preserving the darkness of R.S. and the poetic quality of Edward!
I must admit that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed reading him. I thoroughly appreciated his later stuff, even though some of it was perhaps facile and sometimes complacently anti-parochial in that culturally depreciating way that some Welsh writers in English can display.
These two stories appealed in a sort of atavistic way to a memory that I (brought up in a Cardiff suburb) simply do not have – except as a shared folk memory of deprivation and belief in education that was still seeping down the valleys to flavour the growing commercial and administrative wealth of Cardiff even when I was a boy.
But nationality is irrelevant for the reader: these are stories which transcend their background and yet are deeply rooted in it. In the same way that Chekov (to whom Gwyn Thomas has been prepared) is not limited by the Russia in which he sets his tales, so Thomas uses what he knows to explain what any reader can understand.
I think that “The Alone to the Alone” is the more satisfying of the two tales, perhaps because it is the less rounded of the narratives, and anyway how can a story fail with such a title!
I do urge people to read Gwyn Thomas. If you haven’t read him before you are in for a reading delight if you have read him before, then revisit.
The woeful (that word comes courtesy of Gwyn Thomas) weather continues with rain all last night and this morning: snow! Luckily it doesn’t seem to be settling where we are but that must mean that the situation is much worse elsewhere. If it snows in Barcelona then the disruption in the higher reaches of the area must be severe indeed!
In spite of my reiterated plea to close the school we seem to be soldiering on with one of my free periods being taken to cover the class of a colleague who has now been away for over a week and a half. We have some colleagues who are looking at the snow and realizing that they live in the hills and that they stand a chance of not getting home easily. Trust me to live absolutely at sea level just when the weather seems to be about to close schools!
I hate snow with a visceral loathing while still appreciating its picturesque value in decorating far mountain tops. It is when the level of precipitation impinges on my living space that I object! And my school doesn’t close.
That’s the galling bit!
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