Welsh Journals

spondence columns are always demanding, and the questioners after the literary lectures. 'Why don't you give us the true Wales?' they say. 'The real Wales.' They can't understand there's no such thing. They're baffled and incredulous when you tell them that, and that Wales is a country of two and a quarter million unique human souls and bodies, not one of which will remain constant for two days running. I say nothing of diversified classes, movements, beliefs, ideas. How could any artist, either writer or painter, get such an elusive and impermanent mass into his book or his picture. How could he even want to ? All he can do is to show us the bit of Wales he sees and understands, and to show us this in his own particular way of seeing and understanding. But the big central puzzle of this article is still the same for me-Alun Richards blaming older Anglo-Welsh writers (unjustly, I believe), blaming them because they haven't done this or that when he shows no sign at all of doing it himself. If he were an academic critic of course I wouldn't say a word. But he's young, and Anglo-Welsh, and a story writer! Beats me. WRITE THEM YOURSELF, ALUN BACH. THE LITERARY SCENE: A Footnote By ALUN RICHARDS It's no answer of course, to say 'Write it yourself!' even in banner headlines, but this I'll come to later. My point was, and still is, that the Anglo-Welsh School with three exceptions (Goodwin, Lewis, Humphreys) isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and that their collective reputation deserves to be examined with suspicion. Why do I think this? Because it seems to me that 'the gift of the gab at the Olympian level' reeks, not of life, but of caricature and idiosyncrasy. I don't expect every writer to be engaged in his time or even with real people, but some-the professionals-why have they ignored so much? I quoted what I thought to be some of the vital issues in pre-war Wales. Let's take only one of them, THE MINER'S NEXT STEP, a proposal to take over the industry in the twenties. It wasn't an original thought, but men, looking about them at the injustices of a brutalising industry determined to do something about it. They must have met in