Welsh Journals

HARRI WEBB. By Brian Morris. University of Wales Press for the Welsh Arts Council, Cardiff, 1993. Pp. 113. £ 4.95. In this latest volume in the excellent Writers of Wales series, Brian Morris argues, with some justification, that no one has been more of a Writer of Wales-as fact and fantasy, in prose and poetry-than the subject of his book, Harri Webb. He presents the writer as an amicable, irascible obsessive and as a thoughtful, manic visionary. The Opposition Deputy Chief Whip in the House of Lords and Chairman of the Prince of Wales' Institute of Architecture is clearly, if a little surprisingly, an ardent fan of the Welsh Republican who once called, fruitlessly and despairingly, for a 'blood sacrifice' to make Wales the nation he so ardently desired. Harri Webb was born in Swansea in 1920, the only child in a solid, respectable, working-class home with roots in a Welsh rural and linguistic past which his parents had left behind. This link became an important way back for Harri Webb (unlike his slightly older Swansea compatriot, Dylan Thomas) when, in 1946, he returned to Wales and learned to speak Welsh himself. This was after a degree in European languages at Oxford where his precocious academic brilliance took him between 1938 and 1941. His degree, a Third, and his feeling about Oxford, low and silent, were exactly those of his Welsh predecessor there, Gwyn Thomas. It was probably the only thing the two satirists shared thereafter. Certainly, after war service in the Navy and the settling into the life of a municipal librarian in south Wales, Harri Webb dedicated his life, as a political activist and as a writer on many fronts-journalist, essayist, scriptwriter and variegated poet-to reverse the social and cultural direction of Welsh life. For a long time he sought to do this either in republican groups, or in Plaid Cymru or, indeed, within the Labour Party. Eventually, in the 1980s, he seems to have accepted the compensation of being a fulminating solo voice. All this, in a lucid and sympathetic fashion, is chronicled by Brian Morris. There is extensive and intriguing use of Webb's unpublished journals, along with a harvest trawled from his decades of occasional articles in now obscure periodicals. Readers of this journal may be a little taken aback to read of his sixteen-page pamphlet of 1956 on The Merthyr Rising that it is 'an accurate narrative, which the researches of subsequent historians have done little to modify or correct', but it is the case which he makes for the poet, in his rollicking and in his lyrical mode, which gives Brian Morris's book its real panache as a convincing piece of literary criticism from a past pre- modernist master. There is effective quotation from, and close reading of, the verse which, over his maturity, underwent a sea change, now light then dark, here direct there complex, and always a key component in understanding one bright and fierce spirit in what Harri christened the Green Desert of Wales. He may not have irrigated it as he would have liked but his was a literary adventure which has added much to the gaiety of the nation even if the more sonorous monologues rumbled over the head of his disinterested, though civil and tolerant, fellow citizens. DAI SMITH Cardiff