Smith Dream On

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-909844-10-0
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 318 Seiten

Composite novel Dream On is a black comedy, a flashlight noir thriller, and a meditation on the lives and stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living: of Digger Davies and his one cap for Wales and ultimately untimely death...and the award-winning photographer whose return home will become a quest for his own forgotten identity and compromised life...the thwarted politician in a hospital bed writing his own obituary...and a beautiful girl caught in time, alive in an old man's memory...

Dai Smith is a part-time research chair of the cultural history of Wales at Swansea University and has been a lecturer at the Universities of Lancaster, Swansea, and Cardiff. He is a series editor of the Library of Wales and a chair of the Arts Council of Wales. He has written extensively about modern Wales, including Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales and Wales: A Question for History. He is also the author of In the Frame, and Raymond Williams and the coauthor of A University and Its Community and The Fed: A History of South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Dai

Leseproben

Obit. Page

Obituaries had been commissioned. Some had even been written, and filed. An admirer had sent him one, updated to take account of his soon-expected death. He held it in his hands, and shrugged as he read it over again. Not for its accuracy – it was accurate enough as these things went – but for its banality, and not of the prose but of the life, his own, which it so scrupulously recorded. It even had a headline on the typescript, though doubtless the eventual newspaper would economise on that. It read: “A Life in Politics: A Politic Life”.

He could feel, with an immediacy he no longer expected to hurt, the pain of the omission of the definer he would have wanted. It should have been, of course it should, “A Political Life.” Two missing letters, and an epithet that damned rather than lauded. Well, that was how he felt about it. Others, accordingly, saw it differently, welcomed the judicious balance of the adjective they felt to be, even in political terms, the better one. Certainly, like his life, the more politic one.

It would make a half-page spread in the national broadsheets. Decent enough, and with a photograph, one of the early ones with his hair fashionably long, and perhaps his fist raised in mid-80s anger, one of the action shots Billy Maddox had taken during the Miners’ Strike. Or perhaps that would not be politic enough. There was the usual Obit. Opening to set the scene:

A political career that opened with much promise ended, if not with major practical achievements undertaken in office, then with superlative accomplishments recorded in his chosen literary forms: the essay and the biographical study.

How easily, though, it all read like someone else’s life. Anyone else’s life in its inability to evoke anything more than dates and offices held and ideas proposed. Most of the barebone facts were tabulated in a detached endnote.

Born in 1944. School in the Valley and then in Birmingham from 1956 when his father gained a Headship.

Oxford, and then that surprising nomination for the Party when local squabbles and factions let a young, dark-horse but native-born, academic through a crowded field and on to election in 1970. The rest, looking back on it forty years later, was a blur. Junior office at Trade and promotion in Defence when the Party came to power and the despond years that followed that first promising decade. He considered that he had been happy despite the waiting-room feel of the politics themselves, and despite, too, being overtaken and quickly sidelined by others more ruthless than him, when a return to government eventually came. He had led a life free from Westminster’s too frequent family mishaps and his books and pamphlets and biographies had been carefully chiselled and respectfully received, even in the academia he had deserted, for the insights which his political practice had brought to them. On the Obit. page they were duly listed and respectfully weighed. It was for what, he reflected, he would be best remembered.

There had been such a lot of downtime in Westminster. Time to think as well as to write. The fashion had been for hefty double-decker biographies, story-time narratives with the happy endings of definitive footnotes or, at least, fulsome acknowledgements and learned bibliographies. Jenkins on Asquith. Foot on Bevan. Always the Leaders. Never the Led. History, he considered increasingly, as it was sieved not how it had been lived. Instead he listened to Voices Off. He talked to those who Also Served. He contemplated a Culture for a Society. Over the years a trilogy of studies emerged. He turned to the Obit. proof to check if it had expressed more than a titular sense of them:

His first book, Vox Pop: A Vocal Culture (1981), was an examination of the rhetoric and oratory of industrial South Wales – its excess, some in his Party were already concluding – through speech, accent, gesture and effect, but it slipped, intriguingly and often infuriatingly, into riffs on singing, choral and solo, onto disquisitions on humour on stage and in literature, through the roar of crowd behaviour to the antiphony of reserved silence in reading rooms and the cacophony of saloon bars. It met with a mixed reception but won a Welsh Arts Council Prize. Out of office and buffeted by the internal strife of the Foot and Kinnock years – he was a steadfast supporter of both – he wrote the biographical sketches published in book form as Acolytes and Assassins (1988). Here the intention, not always successfully achieved, was to throw light on major political or union careers by illuminating those who waited in the shadows, ready to assist or, as his provocative title indicated, to assassinate. So, instead of, say a portrait of that Colossus, Nye Bevan, we had a brilliant sketch of his Famulus, Bevan’s fixer and confidante, the diminutive and destructive (of others) Archie Lush. The spotlight was turned, for the once powerful Communist Party, not on the ebullient and engaging Arthur Horner, President of the South Wales Miners’ Federation in 1936, but on the apparatchiks who always placed Party diktat before proletarian DNA. Then he swung to the right to put the egregious George Thomas, the ludicrously self-christened Viscount Tonypandy, in his sights: “of this Tartuffe, a study in sentiment and narcissism, let us say the Sunday School superintendent was always more cross bencher than cross dresser for in this, too, he had the courage of every conviction but his own.” Many found the acid of such “truth-telling”, if that is what it was, too scalding an element for their own political health at the hustings. Even his obituary of Will Paynter, that tough intellectualised comrade who had succeeded his own mentor, Horner, as General Secretary of the NUM in 1959, had not resisted the temptation to speculate on exactly what a CP political commissar would have done in Spain in 1937. At the fever-point pitch of the Miners’ Strike this had not pleased the cheerleaders of 1984. Yet, in his final foray into this field, after Tony Blair had overlooked him for any kind of office in 1997, he wrote lightly and sunnily of those whom he had directly served for thirty years. Epiphanies appeared to muted acclaim in 2001, but we can now see it bears a classic status. Here, “The Terraces”, as he calls them, echoing the writer Gwyn Thomas, are laid before us as a landscape, one humanly fabricated and artfully framed by and for a people who had, he claims, once created a past fit for whatever future they might inhabit. How does he do this? By a set of interlocking cameos that take us from “The Value of Allotments: The Alloting of Values” to “The Cooked Dinner: Civilisation after the Club” and “Standing not Sitting: Philosophy on the Bob Bank”. All linear lines and flat planes were rejected by this prismatic writing, a form that gave a crystalline light and a receding depth to the pastimes and dreams, but ones lived and relished, of a people he clearly feared were being bypassed by a more brutalist history and that history’s political helpmeets, even those from within the ranks of Labour.

He let the obituary he would not live to see in print slip from his fingers onto the duvet. Not quite what he had meant his writing to say. But close enough, and praising enough, not to be begrudged. He resolved, again, to stop being grudging. It was, none of it was, anybody’s fault. Not even his own. He would, without a grudge, accept the praise and accolades it helped them to give him. Particularly the family he had nurtured, and had, he knew, despite all, neglected more than he would have wished. They didn’t seem to notice; perhaps they didn’t feel it. He didn’t know. They didn’t say.

His son, who had developed an irksome habit of patting his hand as he sat propped up in bed so that he might look out of the picture window and over the Valley, kept telling him what “A Great Life” he’d had and how he would “not be forgotten”. He smiled and nodded, politic as ever, even managing a whispery “Thank you, love” when his daughter, on the other side of the bed, reminded him how much he was “Loved by Everybody”. It was true, he thought, that his wife whom he’d met at Oxford had, in her own patrician way, “loved” him and he’d sorrowed over her early death in the car smash she’d had with her parents when on holiday in Italy. He’d stayed home that summer on constituency work, intending to join them later. She had never felt “At Home” in the Valley and had never hidden her disdain, her fear perhaps, of its inhabitants. Ironically, the sympathy he garnered with the death of the woman his supporters had privately called “The Duchess” strengthened his control of the local party. He steered a middle course and, by the end, this end as he might now put it, he was consulted on all sides for his political nous, his historical grip and his experienced counsel. Oh, and for the colour copy his reminiscence of the Party’s greats gave to journalists. He was restored. One of them. One of us. Ours.

Yet none of this was why he had come back for selection. And stayed as the elected member. He could barely explain it to himself sometimes. Yet he knew that there had been deep inside him political idealism, and an allied will to serve. He knew this to be true of himself even then. In his father’s telling, the people of the Valley, his Valley, from which he had been wrenched so young, were mythic, generation by generation, and heroic, deed by deed. If it was an absurd generalisation, it was also vividly true. It had been...