Welsh Journals

Land', interesting, but hard to understand. Almost everything he says in it puzzles me. I don't think, mind, that he's written it with anything like the care he gives his short stories. For instance, who were the 'Anglo-Welsh' authors writing at the beginning of this century? 'My People' didn't appear until 1915, 1 think it was. Can he be thinking of Allen Raine? 'One only has to pause and wonder' he writes 'how Alun Lewis would have developed as a novelist if his critical interpretation of Army life had been repeated at home in post-war Wales'. Now what does that mean? What happens when we pause and wonder? And I would guess Alun Lewis was the man to have had enough of the army while he was in it without repeating his criticisms in post-war Wales. But what really bewilders me is this-here is Alun Richards, young, lively, gifted, ambitious-and he's actually complaining that older Anglo-Welsh writers haven't written about this, that and the other. He complains! He ought to be delighted! He grumbles that no Anglo-Welsh author has yet produced a decent sea-story. No sea- stories-and he's a writer who's been on sea himself! What can we make of that? Alun bach, write them yourself He doesn't say so in as many words, but I rather sense he feels the older Anglo-Welsh writers haven't paid in general enough attention to the recent history of our country. 'Where, one might well ask further', he writes, 'can one get any true feeling of times past expressed eruditely and succinctly in Anglo-Welsh literature?' Fortunately I can tell him. I'm not so sure about the erudition and the succinctness-those are qualities anyway I look for myself more in history and criticism than in literature, but apart from that I can help him. Gwyn Thomas The Literary Scene By GLYN JONES FICTION and all that I FOUND Alun Richards' article, 'The Never-Never