Saunders Lewis. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1993 by Eric Glasgow

Bruce Griffiths. University of Wales Press. Cardiff, 1989. pp: 94. Paperback, 5.95 [pounds].

A century ago the Welsh Nationalist, Saunders Lewis (1893-1985) was born at 61 Falklands Road, Wallasey, of a devotedly Welsh family. From 1901 to 1911, he attended the Liscard High School for Boys, just across the Mersey from Liverpool. His links with Liverpool are curious and significant. That great cosmopolitan city' has since 1800 collected large numbers of Welsh-speaking folk. By 1855, Liverpool contained about 20,0000 people of Welsh descent. Their cultural influence centred on music and song; their religious influence centred on the Nonconformist Chapels. Everton was one of the districts of Liverpool where Welsh folk tended to settle, perhaps because of its proximity to the docks. It is on record that one ~such Welsh family, settled in Everton, played a large and profitable part in the wholesale tea trade, using forty strong horses to convey their imports of tea from India and China, between Liverpool and London.

Saunders Lewis, of course, was of a later generation. Welsh folk in Victorian Liverpool distinguished themselves in the promotion of culture as well as trade. It was a period of what has been described in the local history as the ~Celtic Elysium'. Perhaps it has rarely been acknowledged that, while in Wales itself the structure of its ~Federal University' was being gradually assembled--its constituent Colleges being at Aberystwyth (1872), Cardiff (1883), and Bangor (1884), with that of Swansea to follow, as late as 1920-there was the very comparable movement in Liverpool for the establishment of its ~University College' (1882). Early in the twentieth century, this was fully-fledged as the University of Liverpool. That was important for Saunders Lewis, because his first literary interests were in English, not in Welsh. He attended University in Liverpool, between 1911 and the outbreak of war in 1914. During the war of 1914-18, he served in France as a lieutenant in the South Wales Borderers. It was for him a hallowing and impressionable experience. ~I still do not know whether the earth is friendly or hostile, and it never reveals itself'. In 1917, he fought--for the British--in the Battle of the Somme. He complained in his letters that he could not get the ~dry, caked mud' of the Somme out of his too luxuriant hair. Demobilized at last, he returned to University in Liverpool, to continue his studies in English literature under the famous Oliver Elton. He graduated with first-class Honours in English. Even in Liverpool, he was prominent in its Welsh Society. He lectured in Welsh at University College, Swansea, from 1922 to 1936. One of the founders of Plaid Cymru in 1926, he was jailed in 1936 for his symbolic ~arson' of an RAF bombing range in North Wales.

By then, therefore, Saunders Lewis was set on his course as a fervent Welsh Nationalist, working for both the revival of the Welsh language and culture, and some sort of political self-government for Wales. Plaid Cymru tended to focus on the political objectives, by a process of gradualism. Saunders Lewis moved away from them subsequently, joining the more militant Welsh Language Society in 1962. He wanted, above all, cultural revival, even before political emancipation (after all, the former would presuppose the latter). He ended his long and demonstrative life, therefore, even more enthusiastic than ever he had been in his youth: for the revival of the Welsh language and literature.

He is certainly the major Welsh-language writer of the twentieth century. The connection between literature and politics in his life and work is intricate and ultimately inseparable. Nevertheless, he was primarily a man of Welsh letters, and as such he must go down in history. His widespread and lasting influence accounts for a lot of the present-day vitality and originality of the Welsh language and literature: as around Lampeter and Llandyssul, Bangor and Caernarvon. But it is interesting here to observe that even Saunders Lewis derived the artistic sensibilities of his youth from English rather than Welsh literature, and in Liverpool rather than in Wales itself. The gulf between the two cultures, seen in such literary contexts, is by no means huge or unbridgeable.

Saunders Lewis first emerged as a creative poet confronting the grim realities of the War of 1914-18 in France. His vision then of the stricken earth was humanistic, rather than specifically Welsh (although after 1918 it was so firmly based on his own Welsh patriotism). Writing thereafter almost exclusively in Welsh, it was inevitable that up to his death in 1985 his English associations and validities should have been greatly neglected. Yet, perhaps, his whole story needs always to be seen as a balancing act, between Welsh and English; and it should be kept in the perspectives of both his Merseyside youth and his abiding concern for literary values in general; English as well as Welsh.

The University Press of Wales, therefore, is to be congratulated for gradually making available to English readers, who have no Welsh, these thorough and reliable studies of Saunders Lewis: life and work. Previously, about the only study of him in English was that by Ned Thomas, published in 1971 under the title of The Welsh Extremist -- A Culture in Crisis. Today, however, we must make a more detached and conclusive verdict. Bruce Griffiths supplies a short but lucid study of the diversity of Saunders Lewis: in theatre, poetry and literary criticism, as well as in politics. The composite volume, Presenting Saunders Lewis, contains (in English) some of his best essays and poems, as well as scholarly studies of his work. Joseph P. Clancy -- an American Professor of English -- has translated, faithfully and evocatively, more of the poetry of Saunders Lewis, thus rendering it open to English scrutiny. It is altogether earthy, honest, forthright and memorable for students of English, as well as of Welsh.