Welsh Journals

critics of both linguistic groups need to take on board the reality of their mutual existence-and mutual precariousness-as constituting a shared 'Welshness', without falling prey to a destructive vision of each other as necessarily inimical. The 'fear of Welsh-language culture' experienced by some groups within the English-speaking sector 'needs to affect and modify'-and in its turn be affected and modified by- the fear for Welsh-language culture' felt by Welsh-speaking Wales (p. 170, my italics). The book follows the course of the two cultures' troubled relation through many of the major epochs of twentieth-century Welsh history. It compares, for example, in a chapter which does much to rehabilitate hitherto neglected authors, Welsh- and English-language dramatic representations of the social and familial tensions to which the growth of the Welsh labour movement gave rise. A chapter on Glamorgan's writers, in which the Welsh-language poet Gwenallt is compared favourably, in terms of his depiction of the harsh realities of industrialization, to the more 'anti-social' texts of writers like Dylan Thomas, is followed by one which contrasts Welsh- and English-language responses to the Second World War. The differing reactions of the poets Alun Lewis and Alun Llywelyn- Williams to the destabilization of war are presented as in part a consequence of the extent to which each could feel grounded in his own respective English- and Welsh-language culture. Subsequent chapters explore English-language literary reactions to the growth of Welsh nationalism, and the Welsh-language movement, largely through analyses of the work of Emyr Humphreys and R. S. Thomas, while the final chapter views three novels of the 1980s, including Angharad Tomos's Yma o Hyd, from the perspective of the 1979 Devolution referendum and its aftermath. But this resume is to some extent misleading, in that it conveys the impression that Mr Thomas approaches his subject matter in a more systematic and schematic manner than in fact he does, or wants to do. In his 'Preface' the author distances himself from the single-minded socio-cultural-or cultural materialist-approach to literature, criticizing it instead as one which is 'false to the elusive terms on which literature itself actually functions'. To press home his point, he includes, as the second of his two chapters on R. S. Thomas, a psycho-biographical analysis of the poet's writings on his immediate family which eschews any exploration of the personal or the political, or the historical. And yet earlier in this book writers have been praised for their ability to understand and bring out 'the historical aspects not only of public events but also of private relationships' (p. 20, on J. O. Francis), or for presenting 'personal affairs as ultimately inseparable from the social problems, economic difficulties, class tensions, spiritual crises and political ideologies of a whole society at a clearly given point in its history' (p. 85, on Emyr Humphreys). Why, one wonders, is a consistent socio-cultural and historical understanding of life and literature a good thing in a creative writer but a bad thing in a critic? One is left with the curious impression that Mr Thomas is reluctant wholly to be persuaded by the most exciting and strongly argued aspects of his own thesis. But this puzzle did not distract me long from the pleasure I took in reading this book, not shake my conviction that it is likely to prove a contribution of major significance to the development of Welsh studies. JANE AARON Aberystwyth