Welsh Journals

direct me." Thus the book is peopled by a wide range of characters brought vividly and memorably before the reader. Parents and grandparents, ministers and priests, play their part. The family doctor a frequent visior to a sickly child brought his own contribution of urbane scholarship to the child's recept- ive ear. Most notable in the adult experience are the poets, painters, sculptors who have been Merchant's friends and through whose precisely recollected conversations the book's central theme begins to emerge, that of "the creative power (which) is the true end of our critical disciplines, and the key to our common responsibilities." The desire to make things, which originated in the eight year old's delight in his grandfather's skill, re- emerges in the course of creative friendships with Josef Herman, John Piper and supremely, Barbara Hepworth so he becomes a sculptor. Similarly the child's involvement with language ("I had read all the novels of Dickens before I was ten ") leads naturally into friendships with poets and writers and to publicat- ion of his own poetry, a series of novels, and this autobiography. Fragments of a Life captures and conveys the rich multiplicity of a life in which interlocking vocations as priest and pastor, professor and teacher, have been held in a creative tension. Merchant recounts experiences as diverse as the close relationship with Ezra Pound in his latter years, and the demanding involvement with Dino di Laurentiis's projected film The Bible. Of very particular significance in the whole vista of his life were four years "in and out of time" spent as a priest and pastor in the ancient church and parish of Llanddewi Brefi a time of refreshment which he celebrated by initiating a festival of the arts, thus bringing together the many strands of his life in an offering to Wales- Moelwyn Merchant's former students who read this work will undoubtedly wish that the nature and quality of his teaching could be conveyed in the written word. They will recognise however in the autobiography the same creative energy they knew in his lectures and seminars. It is clear with hindsight that his early lectures and sermons were already demonstrating what he later articulated in the words "criticism without creativity is sterile" as applicable to the Christian as to the academic and a fitting summary of a rich and many-faceted life. Ena Jenkins Newport, Gwent. Geoffrey R Orrin and F G Cowley, A History of All Saints' Church, Oystermouth, Gomer Press, Llandysul, 1990. 110 pages. ISBN 0 86383 705 0. Price £ 5.00. Eight hundred and fifty years is a long time by any standard. All