Welsh Journals

characterised many of the seventeenth century theologians. One suspects he would have been nonplussed by the dictum of one: "Charity before rubrics." Peart-Binns has done a workmanlike job in this biography, as might have been anticipated, and provides us with a good outline portrait of a complex and often far from attractive man. He has not said all that could be said. In a few instances he has perhaps said rather more than needed to be said. Overall he has said enough. JRG Moelwyn Merchant, Framents of a Life. Gomer Press, Llandysul. 1990. xvi + 367pp. ISBN 0 86383 647 X. £15.95. Unlike T S Eliot's fragments, desperately "shored Against my ruin", those of Moelwyn Merchant are gathered, shaped, and placed into a mosaic. His own word in the Preface is "collage" but the strength and colour of stone would seem, to this reader at least, an image more appropriate to the work and to a writer who is also a sculptor. Writing in old age, Merchant discerns a pattern in his life seeing in recollected moments of childhood Wordsworthian "spots of time later to be recognised as seminal or prophetic In the incident with which the book opens he describes himself at seven or eight years old being taken by his 'grandfather to see him at work as a shearer in a Port Talbot tin works. Here the child was transfixed by two things the craftsman and the craft. He sets alongside this vision of skilled and disciplined work his grandfather's "scrupulous freshness" at meal times and at Sunday worship. Two major influences on his life are here identified the dignity of the craftsman and the orderliness of family life lived in the context of a worshipping community. One might speak of a third early influence, that of Welsh language and culture, were it not that the word "influence" implies "external", and Merchant's Welshness is as much a part of him as is his genetic inheritance. "My stock", he writes, "seems imeccably Welsh", and as the pattern of his life develops and he moves into the world of university, church and the art^ in both Europe and north America, impeccably Welsh he remains. He is confident and at home in other languages and cultures because secure in his own. He does not directly reproach those of us who have lost it, but inspires a longing for the riches which have been lost, exemplified in the life and work of Saunders Lewis and in the parochial life of Llanddewi Brefi. In the Preface to this autobiography, Moelwyn Merchant states that his purpose has been not to make a work shaped by narrative or chronology but "to move from topic to topic as my friends