Welsh Journals

has ignored South Wales in his novels, the John O'Haras, the James Gould Cozzens' have not made their appearance to date. But the same conflicts for power, the movements between classes, the almost precisely similar social conditions have existed and do exist in Wales. Our ports are as cosmopolitan as any, our quota of immigrants not so small as to be unnoticeable, and yet one looks in vain for aWelsh sea story comparable to any of James Hanley's. We have had Poles, Slavs and other refugees with us for many years, and yet scarcely a mention of them or their problems appears in print. We are told that the Welsh language was actively discouraged in the early years of the century. We read of the fight for Disestablishment, of syndicalist pamphlets like 'The Miner's Next Step', of the Means Test, but none of these appear in Anglo-Welsh literature of any note. Where, one might well ask further, can one get any true feeling of times past expressed eruditely and succinctly in Anglo-Welsh literature? One has to change one's mind about Mr. Greene's proposition eventually. The books we read in childhood do influence us most and can have damaging consequences. There seems to be a danger that Welsh writers brought up on Welsh writers and deeply influenced by them in childhood, become adults who either have to somersault their way out of the literary never-never land created by their predecessors, or stand gabbling in the spurious traditions of a barely credible past. Either way, whether acrobatic or passive, the temptations of the invented world populated-and a final quote- by the twisted souls and foxy minds of spiritual troglodytes' -never quite disappear. It is as if there is something in that old druidical stuff after all. The Celtic Twilight, the Welsh mist, has never quite lifted. One day we might wake up goggle-eyed to find ourselves confronted by some coldly analytical, un-poetic, anti-lyrical English novelist who has done it all over the week-end. It is no comfort somehow that one could give him a few good titles. He would need really to mutter a few words of caution on the fly-page. 'This is Wales. Read carefully. The truth is so permanent. Beware!' P(R)OEM g ourds ortofshap edstanzaihave longedforgodwales andwomanwhati slastingl ongin g NICHOLAS EVANS