Welsh Journals

Every biographer has to be charmed just a little by his subject and Ellis is no exception. He provides a full portrait of his subject: a Welshman with no interest in 'footer', alcohol, the cinema or the theatre, but of course a great reader, a good listener, an impish, lively fellow with a happy family life and a distinct preference for female friendship. Only occasionally does the author let his irritation show and Jones is sharply rebuked for vehemently defending the levels of unemployment benefit in the 1930s even as he awaits the chauffeur-driven Rolls which will take him to yet another free weekend. But the author recovers his affection and in later pages he resists the temptation to quote Michael Astor's famous and devastating comments on that Welshman who was always hanging around at Cliveden. A great Welshman, certainly, but ultimately one who was not a little frustrated by the way things turned out. He should have been a preacher but he lost the faith; he should have been a great college head but was seduced into public life; he should have been in the first Labour Government but instead had settled for advising all governments. Alienated by the extremism and polarization of his age, he was driven into being a superior clerk, an oiler of wheels and puller of strings. It was all to add up to a thoroughly honourable and wholly creative career, but Jones himself was well aware that the ball was more often at the feet of other players. To his great friend Nancy Astor he looked rather too much like 'an undertaker's assistant': Dr. Ellis's photography selection bears this out. Quite incredibly there is one shot of half of Tom Jones's face appearing over Hitler's right shoulder. As always the Welsh 'Zelig' was there. PETER STEAD Swansea INTERNAL DIFFERENCE: LITERATURE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY WALES. By M. Wynn Thomas. University of Wales Press, Cardiff. 1992. Pp. xv, 196. £ 12.95. Future historians of Welsh cultural studies are likely to view this book as a major milestone in the development of the discipline. In 1968 Glyn Jones in The Dragon has Two Tongues highlighted the fact that, for all their linguistic differences, Welsh writers in English are the 'often unwitting' inheritors of the same history and culture as Welsh-language writers (p. 43). In 1985 Denis Balsom, in The National Question Again, edited by John Osmond, presented in his 'Three-Wales Model' a map of modern Wales as divided into three cultural groups, one Welsh-speaking and Welsh- identified, the second English-speaking and Welsh-identified, and the third English- speaking and British-identified, and stressed that the first and second of these groups have more in common than the second and third, 'ethnic identity being a stronger discriminator than language' (p. 6). But M. Wynn Thomas's new book is the first full-length study not only to bring together, through its comparative analysis of representative texts, the Welsh and English-language literatures of twentieth-century Wales, but also to insist upon the need for such integrated explorations of 'internal difference' if a specifically Welsh identity is to survive. 'The meaning of modern Wales' lies, he argues, 'in the interplay between the two cultures' (p. 81). Writers and