Adams / Edwards Letters from Wales

Memories and Encounters in Literature and Life
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-914595-08-0
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 800 Seiten

'Letters from Wales stands alone as an invaluable guide to Welsh writing.' - Sam Young, Wales Arts Review 'In these columns, as impressive for their depth as they are for their intellectual breadth, Adams analyses the work of acclaimed Welsh writers ... with scholarly panache' - Joshua Rees, Buzz Magazine 'illuminating and entertaining' - Jon Gower, Nation.Cymru Since 1996, Sam Adams's 'Letter from Wales' column has been appearing in PN Review, one of the most highly-regarded UK poetry magazines, offering insight and appreciation of Welsh writing, culture and history. This landmark volume collects these letters - a quarter century of work - and offers one of the most unique, independent and passionate critical voices on the writing and cultural output of Wales during this period. Here you will find erudite appreciations of the work of a wide range of recent and contemporary Welsh writers from Gillian Clarke to Roland Mathias, RS Thomas to Rhian Edwards. Alongside this, Adams offers us lyric essays to Welsh history, and clear-eyed examinations of the institutions of Welsh culture. Collected for the first time in this volume, the 'letters' are among the most significant and sustained attempts during this period to present Welsh writing to an audience throughout the UK and beyond.

Sam Adams was born in 1934, and raised in the small mining valley of Gilfach Goch, when it still possessed three working pits. In common with most of the valley's children at that time, his father and grandfathers were mineworkers. He was educated at a local primary school, Tonyrefail Grammar School and the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he studied English. He began writing in the corners of a busy working life in the education service, emerging first as a poet. His work appeared in all the Anglo-Welsh magazines and he became successively reviews editor then editor of Poetry Wales. For the University of Wales Press he has written three monographs in the 'Writers of Wales' series, on Geraint Goodwin, T J Llewelyn Prichard and Roland Mathias, and edited Mathias's Collected Poems and Collected Short Stories. His three novels, Prichard's Nose and In the Vale (both Y Lolfa), and The Road to Zarauz (Parthian) have attracted critical praise, as has Where the Stream Ran Red (Y Lolfa), an amalgam of family and local history. His connection with Manchester-based Carcanet began in 1974 when he edited Ten Anglo-Welsh Poets for the press. Since 1982 he has made more than 150 contributions to its magazine PN Review.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Adams, Sam

Edwards, Jonathan

Leseproben

Introduction

Writing in March 2020 in ‘A Letter from Wales’, Sam Adams describes the process of cleaning a brass coal miner’s lamp. It belonged to his grandfather and he has looked after it as a tangible reminder of his roots and of the wider history of industry in South Wales. Now he tries a new way of cleaning the lamp, and makes a surprising discovery:

Recently I tried submerging the lamp in a solution of a new kind of cleaner. It was not a complete success as traces of Brasso remain, but the brass looks refreshed and, much to my surprise, when I emptied the bowl I found at its base a layer of the finest coal dust somehow displaced from recesses in the interior of the lamp. There it was; the very same black death that silted the lungs of my grandfather and snatched him away from us so shockingly in middle age, no more than a week after I was born. That is why I bear his name: Samuel.

This image of coal dust in the bottom of the bowl is a resonant one for Sam’s Letters from Wales. Passionate about history and about a Welsh way of life, the letters offer us a continuous process of discovery and preservation. Sometimes the writing is explicitly historical, exploring memories of childhood or of wider life in Wales. More frequently, it is concerned with the major writers of Wales’s present and past, and Sam shows the same tender care in these pieces for the canon of Welsh writing in English, the same desire to look after, burnish and protect, as he shows for the lamp when he cleans it. His writing respects writers, respects the past and, because of this quality, it continuously offers readers something surprising and new.

One of the most significant aspects of the work collected in this volume is its initial audience, the people whom Sam’s discoveries were offered to. If gaining coverage of Welsh writing in influential English publications has long been a challenge for all sorts of reasons, Sam’s ‘Letter from Wales’ column is an important exception to this situation. Since 1996, the letters have been appearing in PN Review, one of the most highly-regarded English literary magazines. Together, they constitute one of the most significant and sustained attempts during this period to present Welsh writing to an audience throughout the UK and beyond. Their collection for the first time in this volume offers a fascinating cross-section of Welsh literary culture during this period.

When I was approached to edit this collection, the publisher’s suggestion was that the letters could be arranged thematically, to give a coherent reading experience to the book as a whole. This has not been easy to do: the letters are precisely that – letters – and Sam pursues whichever subjects he is most passionate about at the time of writing, in pieces intended for individual publication. One might as well manage to curate a boxful of diamonds, each of which is singular and beautiful.

My solution has been to create three loosely framed categories: ‘On Writers’, ‘On Wales’ and ‘On the Literary Scene’. Each section moves backwards in time, starting with the most recent letters, and offering a journey into the past. I’ve also given each letter a title to give some sense of its most prominent subject but, like any good road trip from Cardiff to Caernarfon, these titles only give a sense of where the letter might take you, rather than everything you might see along the way. My hope is that this approach offers a flexible structure that will allow for sustained reading, as well as allowing readers with special enthusiasms to dip in and browse, using these titles as a guide.

The first section of the book offers fascinating coverage of many of the best regarded recent and contemporary Welsh writers, from Gillian Clarke to Roland Mathias, R.S. Thomas to Rhian Edwards. There are also important pieces about writers of Wales’s past, from the familiar to the more obscure. We hear of the Book of the Year and readings at Hay, the passing of important writers is honoured and the emergence of new talent is celebrated. A number of the letters constitute important introductory capsule essays to the work of individual writers, and are part of Sam’s attempt to bring the literature of Wales to a wider audience.

Among interesting things about Sam’s work in this section of the book is the balance he achieves between respect for writers’ public achievement and the close understanding which is generated by his personal knowledge of them as people. His September 2018 letter about Meic Stephens, for example, properly honours the writer’s achievement, calling him ‘probably the most influential figure in the literary life of Wales in the second half of the twentieth century’, and exploring the full range of his political activism, journalism, arts and academic work, alongside his writing. But the piece is also able to offer us a fascinating and telling glimpse of the life lived. In the 1960s, Stephens was invited by Harri Webb to move into a house in Merthyr Tydfil, and Sam’s description of the life there and the inception of so many things of cultural significance in Wales is fascinating. The house, he writes,

was conveniently near Ebbw Vale [where Stephens was about to start a teaching job], space was available at the top of the house and, since ownership of the property was uncertain, no one came to collect the rent. These were persuasive arguments: Meic joined the group at Garth Newydd. Soon, Radio Free Wales, a pirate radio station, was broadcasting from his room to a few neighbouring Merthyr streets, while downstairs Harri was editing Welsh Nation, Plaid Cymru’s newspaper. Working alongside Harri, Meic learned essential editorial skills and in 1963 he launched his own publishing imprint, Triskel Press. It was under this banner that the first number of Poetry Wales appeared in 1965, price three shillings.

As with any letter-writer, Sam has his enthusiasms, and one of the most interesting we encounter in this section of the book is T.J. Llewelyn Prichard, author of Twm Shôn Catti, greeted on publication in 1828 as ‘the first Welsh novel in English’. Prichard had an enigmatic and fascinating life, including the loss, at some point, of his nose. Sam summarises the life like this: Prichard was ‘an actor in the London theatre, lost his nose somewhere, and died in Swansea in 1862 after falling into his own fire’. I hope the reader will enjoy the several visits to Prichard that are made throughout this book: these enjoyable letters are pieces of writing through which, as Sam puts it, ‘Prichard capers’.

The second section of this volume, ‘On Wales’, explores a number of significant aspects of Welsh history, from the Chartist Rising to the history of mining, from the flooding of Tryweryn to the settlement in Patagonia, from St David’s Day to St Dwynwen’s Day. The writing here has a great deal in common with those great writers of Welsh history, John Davies and Jan Morris, who are celebrated in a number of the letters.

Another feature of this section of the book is the intensely personal, moving exploration of Sam’s childhood in Gilfach Goch. Here, the experience of being young in Wales is examined with an intensity and lyricism worthy of ‘Fern Hill’, by that other great writer this collection admires, Dylan Thomas. In a letter of March 2012, Sam takes his grandchildren on an uphill hike so that they can look down on his childhood home. In doing so, he outlines a motivation – passing on his own sense of history to others – which can be seen as beautifully achieved in the writing he has done in this book:

I wanted them to view Gilfach as it is and handicapped myself for the stiffish climb with the weight of a couple of books containing photographs of the way it was when I was a boy and three working collieries filled the valley floor. The coal industry has gone, the close community it engendered has gone; neither will ever return. My sense of personal history, of rootedness, has become more demanding as I grow older, and with it my guilt and frustration that I did not ask my parents all the questions about their parents and their younger days that leave me now searching hopelessly for answers. I want our grandchildren to have the chance to avoid my mistake. I feel very strongly that, whatever route they take through life, they should know at least where the Welsh side of their ancestry comes from.

The third section of this volume, ‘On the Literary Scene’, will be fascinating for anyone who works in or cares about the arts in Wales. Sam loves Welsh writing and praises everything that is good about the institutions that support it. His love is also manifested in a frustration with petty constraints: Sam is an astute and honest critic. Importantly, he is brave enough to put his name in writing to positions on some of the powerful institutions in Welsh writing, which most people might only whisper about in dark corners. The writing shows, then, a generous and selfless commitment for things to be better for everyone. Reading a number of points that Sam raises, one feels at times a sadness that some of the issues mentioned have not been effectively...