Welsh Journals

The Never-Never Land ALUN RICHARDS SPEAKING IN A BROADCAST TALK some years ago, Grahame Greene stated his view that only in childhood do books have any deep influence on our lives. As adults, we are entertained, we may modify some of the views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already. It occurred to me at once that this may well not be the case as far as the literate post-war generation in Wales is concerned. Consider the picture that the Joneses, the Davieses, the Thomases and Evanses have painted in their novels and short stories published before and after the war. Cutting one's teeth on these authors, one accepts what one reads uncritically. Of course, one says, there were benefit concerts to buy various Jenkins' artificial legs, the peasant women did eat rats to provide presentation Bibles for scoundrelly ministers and no doubt, ponies and choirs, bum bailiffs and funerals and boxers going top speed to hell were all part of the contemporary scene. One reads about this land in childhood and it is only a matter of time before one has the essential ingredients of an anthology-worthy Welsh-short story at hand. A pony or trap, a wide-eyed boy in chapel, a mingy deacon, a potential suicide or ambitious footballer-and here one might also lift a title from Gwyn Thomas- And A Spoonful of Grief To Taste'-and one has a representative picture of what apparently was wanted and accepted as part of the Welsh literary scene. It is rather late now to ask, did all this really happen? Was Wales like this— ever? As a child one did not question it, but as far as Anglo-Welsh literature is concerned, Mr. Greene's presumption at first sight seems scarcely tenable. We must do more than modify the views we already hold. Taking theWorld's Classics Anthology of Welsh short stories as a guidebook, who nowadays free of association from what one might call 'the windy boys and a bit', can accept the work of the most distinguished practitioners of the Welsh short story in English, as providing a representative picture of the first half of the twentieth century? Ignoring the obvious idiosyncracies of what the Editor calls writers who were 'larger than life', it is useful to consider this anthology's portrayal of the 'hungry twenties'. The Editor writes in the introduction of 'ferocious starving townships and the healing hills between' and cites Gwyn Thomas as the chief portrayer of