Anglo-Welshness: the semantics of hyphenation

Diane Davies

Diane Davies is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Testamur Course Director at the University of Exeter.

The question of deciding to which nation we belong, or rather want to belong, has at times an irresistible magnetism for the Welsh. Personally, I like to think of my nationality as being rather like two concentric circles, the inner one Welsh, the outer, enclosing one British. Abroad I'm happy to be, simply, British, though feel a need to correct anyone who assumes this is synonymous with 'English'; in England I'm definitely Welsh (and from welsh Wales at that). It is in Wales itself that the picture becomes confused, since there I know that my Welshness is of the 'hyphenated' kind, the kind more at home in Hay-on-Wye and the border country than in the more Celtic enclaves of West Wales, where I was born. On visits home to the town of Newcastle-Emlyn (Castell Newydd Emlyn, to give it its Welsh name ), I invariably find myself, sooner or later, surrounded in a local shop by a voluble crowd of Welsh speakers. Being able to understand the gist of their conversation (if I'm lucky) doesn't make up for the fact that my spoken Welsh, slowly eroded by English from about the age of six, is no longer what I would term a viable linguistic proposition.

Strictly speaking, the term 'Anglo-Welsh' is a literary one, denoting writers Welsh by birth or association who, for a variety of reasons, choose to write in English. I thought I'd focus on some of these writers, mostly poets, because it seems to me they bring into sharp relief the dilemmas of nationhood and national identity with which we're concerned. I'm interested in the extent to which these poets reveal a need for, or wish to escape from, a sense of rootedness in a Welsh nation and culture. In the past few years there has been a growing debate in periodicals concerned with writing in Wales on the question of whether the label 'Anglo- Welsh', with which a number of writers and critics have been uneasy almost since it first came into general use in the late 1 930's, has ceased to serve a useful function and should now be dispensed with. Indeed, it has already been abandoned in some academic circles: in the University of Wales, for instance, there is now an MA course, not in Anglo-Welsh writing, but in 'Welsh writing in English'. One can partly understand, perhaps, why some feel strongly about the hyphenated term, with its classical combining form 'anglo' determining and binding what follows the hyphen no less imperially than in 'Anglo-Indian' and no less provocatively, they might argue, than in 'Anglo-Irish'. Obviously, even if it was never meant to do so, the 'Anglo-' in 'Anglo-Welsh' carries more than purely linguistic connotations and the hyphen resists rather than allows merger, keeping two old adversaries apart who continue to eye one another with some distrust across the divide. On the other hand, 'Welsh writing in English' makes the position quite clear. Or does it ? I rather doubt that it does, as we'll see later.

Let's turn first to some examples of Anglo-Welsh poetry from the post-World War II period to the present day. Of course,Wales produced some notable writers in the earlier part of the century, Dylan Thomas being the most important and influential. However when we think of Dylan Thomas, we usually recall a larger-than life,Joycean-type experimentalist whose focus was London (thought by welsh writers at that time to be the intellectual oasis they had to reach) rather than Wales; we think of Romantic isolation and self imposed alienation from the community. His impact on the course of Anglo-Welsh writing was to be in terms of his dexterity with words rather than a consciousness of belonging to a different literary tradition from that of the English. Admittedly, Thomas did a great deal to interest the outside world in the writing coming formless as did Richard Llewellyn, whose novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) became a famous film in 1941, directed by John Ford. Yet Wales and the Welsh were idealised in such writing to suit English tastes at the time. The critic and historian Roland Mathias makes this clear in his book Anglo-Welsh Literature :An Illustrated History (1986) when he terms the novel "an exercise in Romanticism which the English, themselves in a late stage of industrialisation, found especially poignant and the more believable...because it took place in a society with which they were still only very partially acquainted .

With the publication of the first volume of poetry by another Thomas, R. S. Thomas, in 1946, a new phase in Anglo-Welsh writing began, one in which poets wrote more consciously from their Welsh roots, questioned their relation to a remembered Welsh language and culture and took a more nationalistic stance in their political thinking. These writers saw Wales, not London, as the center to which they would always return. In 'A Welshman at St James' Park' Thomas rejects the pull of the metropolitan center through the symbolic gesture of keeping a return ticket, recalling the Welshmen who fought with Henry Tudor against Richard III in 1485:

I think of a Welsh hill
That is without fencing, and the men,
Bosworth blind, who left the heather
And the high pastures of the heart. I fumble
In the pocket's emptiness; my ticket
Was in two pieces. I kept ha f

Poem after poem in the early R.S. Thomas is concerned with the need to defend an increasingly exploited Wales from outside interference (i.e. Englishness!), though as we see in the embittered 'Reservoirs', the Welsh are also blamed for allowing so much of their culture to die:

Where can I go, then, from the smell
Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead
Nation? I have walked the shore
For an hour and seen the English
Scavenging among the remains
Of our culture, covering the sand
Like the tide and, with the roughness
Of the tide, elbowing our language
Into the grave that we have dug for it.

There is no doubt that Thomas and many other poets of this period see national identity as being inextricably linked with the question of the survival of the Welsh language. Thomas himself learnt Welsh as an adult and, though never able to write poetry in the language, has written a great deal of prose in it. He also went about his daily life as an Anglican priest, before retiring, almost entirely through the medium of Welsh (in the strongly Welsh speaking community of the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales). In spite of a shared language, however, this priest-poet usually sees his flock as distant and intractable, leaving him to struggle alone with his faith, like Jacob with the angel. This fate has a peculiarly welsh harshness, as we see from these lines from Service':

I am saved by music
From the emptiness of this place
Of despair. As the melody rises
From nothing, their mouths take up the tune,
And the roof listens. I call on God
In the after silence, and my shadow
Wrestles with him upon a wall
Of plaster, that has all the nation's
Hardness in it. They see me thrown
Without movement of their oblique eyes.

Other poets of Thomas's generation have countered his stark, doom laden view of the Welsh nation with more measured or more satirical approaches to the issue. In 'Bilingualism' Raymond Garlick uses the image of a horse and canal barge facing in opposite directions as a conceit illustrating the search for a way in which Welsh and English may work together for the good of a Wales destined, otherwise, to become a mere backwater and tourist leisure park:

The problem's how
to turn the horse and the barge's prow
in one direction, harness each
to the other one before this reach
stills to a pool of green pond weeds
and, nose to stern across the reeds,
the barge lies like a monolith,
the stabled horse dies into myth,
means of communication silt
into a water-garden spilt
with dragon-flies, and marsh-worts sway
for picnickers on holiday.

By contrast, Harri Webb, a popular satirist and balladeer, chooses to get his nationalistic message across by exposing those 'How- greenwas-my-valley' myths which a dependent Wales has been unable to fight off. Here is his 'Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel':

Dai K lives at the end of a valley. One is not quite sure
Whether it has been drowned or not. His Mam
Loves him too much and his Dada drinks.
As for his girlfriend Blodwen, she's pregnant. So
Are all the othergirls in the village-there's been a Revival.
After a performance of Elijah, the mad preacher
Davies the Doom has burnt the chapel down.
One Saturday night after a dance at the Con Club,
With the Free Wales Army up to no good in the back lanes,
A stranger comes to the village; he is, of course,
God, the well known television personality. He succeeds
In confusing the issue, whatever it is, and departs
On the last train before the line is closed.
The colliery blows up, there is a financial scandal
Involving all the most respected citizens; the Choir
Wins at the National. It is all seen, naturally,
Through the eyes of a sensitive boy who never grows up.
The men emigrate to America, Cardiff and the moon.
The girls Find rich and foolish English husbands. Only daft Ianto
Is left to recite the Complete Works of Sir Lewis Morris
To puzzled sheep, before throwing himself over
The edge of the abandoned quarry. One is not quite sure
Whether it fiction or not.

Through the fifties and sixties new magazines were set up to offer more outlets to Anglo-Welsh writers (The Anglo-Welsh Review in 1957 and Poetry Wales in 1965). In 1967 a devolved Welsh Arts Council replaced the less effective 'Welsh Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain'. In 1968 the Welsh Academy (then Yr Academi Gymreig) agreed to establish an English Language Section. In 1970 the magazine Planet (subtitled'TheWelsh Internationalist') was founded as a platform for political and social discussion of the problems of Wales and other minority cultures worldwide. All in all, it was a good time to be Anglo-Welsh and a number of writers, as well as publishers, were to benefit from new grants and bursaries made available to them. An optimistic note was also struck in the seventies, with the editors of the anthology Twelve Modern AngloWelsh Poets (1975) confidently asserting that "however far the AngloWelsh poet may move from Wales, it continues to sustain his poetry - and nostalgia,'hiraeth', is a characteristic emotion". At the same time, however, they suggest that something is missing when they note a danger in "the tendency to narrowness, the failure to look beyond the Welsh pale to the wider perspectives of world literature".

Well, as things have turned out, they needn't have worried on that score. The Anglo-Welsh poetry being written today is certainly capable of looking 'beyond the Welsh pale', and that, indeed, is the problem. The question now being asked in literary periodicals in Wales is, in fact, whether there is anything 'Anglo- Welsh' about this poetry at all. Though there are of course exceptions, most of the younger poets now lack attachment through family and social background to the Welsh language (which we tend to take for granted in the case of those writing from the 1930's to the 1960's). Nor do they seem to want to rediscover and redefine a supposed 'lost 'Welsh culture, whether connected to the language or, for example, the rural areas of Wales. New concerns are taking the place of older anxieties, concerns that cannot be limited to the Welsh or AngloWelsh way of life. Younger poets like Robert Minhinnick, who works for 'Friends of the Earth', and Christopher Meredith, once a worker in a steel plant and now a schoolteacher in Brecon, express values and fears that go beyond a regional or national setting. In 'The Mansion', for instance, Minhinnick records his feelings on being formally invited to a large country house to which, as a boy, he had had no access except by trespassing. Still resentful of class privilege, he writes:

These hands laid gently on my arm
Disturb an earlier trespasser,
That child under the yew hedge

Who watched the long cars slide through his village
And women shaped like candle flames
Moving over the lawns.

Above his head the berries swelled
As soft as wax around each nucleus,
The black nugget of poison that would grow.

Christopher Mededith's 'Jets' describes the interruption of his teaching by low-flying aircraft on 'mock' bombing missions (a fairly common occurrence in rural Mid-Wales). His weakest and most vulnerable pupil is, necessarily, the first to be distracted and to give up the struggle with language in favour of the wordless symbols of power overhead. Where R.S. Thomas might have made of this material a justification for intense anglophobia, stressing the Englishness of the military hardware and the Welshness of the land disturbed by it, Meredith emphasizes rather the sense of defeatism (as well as a degree of guilt) felt by many teachers today in their attempt to foster human values through their work:

This boy, the fat one, has been rifled too.
Belongs to the plane and every bomb it sends,
Absorption melted from his ragged row

Of words. Just now he, my bluntest blade
Inevitably felled first in any game,
Looked from the tortured page, the word-wrought board,
To a sky where steel hammered its own scream
And smiled.

Poets like Minhinnick and Meredith have, in their distinctive ways, rejected Anglo-Welshness as a theme in its own right. However, this is not the result of indifference to environmental, cultural or, in the case of the Welsh-! peaking Meredith, linguistic realities in Wales. Rather, it seems part of a shift towards both greater immediacy and breadth of relevance, together with a more contemporary idiom. Joining them (though not consciously) in effecting such a change are a number of more experimental poets with a popular following on the poetry reading/performing circuit. One such writer is Penny Windsor, whose discourse offers a striking contrast to the rather academic, earnest and male-dominated language of the Anglo- Welsh tradition. Here is the opening to her 'Heroines':

We are the terraced women
piled row upon row on the sagging, slipping hillsides of our lives
We tug reluctant children up slanting streets
the push chair wheels wedging in the ruts
breathless and bad tempered we shift the Tesco carrier bags from hand to hand
and stop to watch the town.

John Barnie, editor of Planet, wrote in February 1992 of the "progressive Anglicization of Anglo-Welsh literature, both in content and form", recognizing that writers may now be free "to explore what might be considered a broader terrain, but also...the increasingly featureless landscape of Anglo-American culture, where the epithet 'Welsh' seems to lose any real significance". He diagnoses the problem interestingly when he makes the important point that "there is a danger when 'Anglo-Welsh' is defined, equated with and measured by the 'Welshness' of the content of an author's work". Barnie goes on to distinguish between this'identification-through subject-matter'alone and a truly 'rational literature':

For in a national literature, the writer is free to write about any subject, set his novels or dramas in any context, and still be recognized as a writer of his or her nation. This is the case with Welsh-language literature which is unequivocally Welsh by virtue of the language it is written in, even if the setting is Nazi-occupied France. But for the Anglo-Welsh writer it is different.

Of course, this argument ignores the linguistic reality that the English actually used by the majority of the population in different parts of Wales is clearly distinguishable from, say, the English of Surrey or Herefordshire. If poets in Wales are alert to the speech they hear around them (as, indeed, some of them are, incorporating local dialect in their poems), they can surely be said to be identifiable as Anglo-Welsh in a way that has nothing to do with mere subject matter. Having said this, however, there is as yet nothing in this occasional use of dialect to suggest that it has the scope of, say, Scots to be strikingly non-standard and literary at the same time, a quality illustrated by the following lines from a poem by the contemporary Scots poet Willie Hershaw:

A cauld, sleety wind angles coon the High Street.
It blaws aff the Forth and ower the Links,
Past the butcher's, the bookies', the pub and the Store.
It rattles the lichts on the toun Christmas tree,
It birls the newsagent's sign aroond,
It blaws like a mad Blake picter On this mirkfu januar efternin.
The Siberian wind kyths fae an airt fang held in ice
And has brawn whaur a biggin-wa's ca'd doon.

The new label 'Welsh writing in English', as I hinted earlier, will not, I think, reverse the process through which Anglo-Welsh writing is becoming less recognizable. However, this will matter very little to some of the writers themselves who, according to Robert Minhinnick in a recent article,"are no longer deferential to a mythic Wales or another culture" and "have the confidence not to flaunt the ridiculous Welsh 'credentials' that mar the verse of some of their predecessors". Dismissive though his remarks are, they can strike a chord at a time when readers of poetry and serious literature in general are in an ever-dwindling minority and when, to have a readership at all, a poet can hardly afford to speak in an outmoded language or espouse a view of the nation influenced more by nostalgia than current reality.

So where, then, does this leave Anglo-Welshness and its commitment to the description of a special,'hyphenated' identity? Clearly more conscious than their predecessors of the pluralism within Welsh society and the ever-increasing influence of the mass media, the new poets fight for different causes and with different voices. In the end, it is up to us, as individual readers with our own multiplicity of perspectives on both nationhood and writing, to decide what the cultural impact of such a change is likely to be.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Honno, Welsh Women's Press, for extract from poem by Penny Windsor; John Barrie, editor of 'Planet', for extracts from articles by himself and Robert Minhinnick;J.D. Lewis, Gomer Press, and authors, for extract from poem by Raymond Garlik and for poem by Harri Webb; R.S. Thomas, for extracts from three poems; Seren Books, Poetry Wales Press Ltd, for extracts from Anglo- Welsh Literature: an Illustrated History by Roland Mathias and from poems by Christopher Meredith and Robert Minhinnick;Willie Hershaw, for extract from one poem.

References
Note:
The poems by Raymond Garlick, R.S. Thomas and Harri Webb quoted in the text can be found in Dale-Jones end Jenkins (1975) below. See Stephens (1991) for the poems by Christopher Meredith, Robert Minhinnick and Penny Windsor.

Barnie,J. (1992) 'Where Next?', Planet 91:3-10.
Dale-Jones, D. &Jenkins, R. (eds) Twelve Modern Anglo- Welsh Poets, London: University of London (1975).
Hershaw,W. (1991) 'Januar- Winds of Revolution', Poetry Wales 27/2:56.
Llewellyn, R. (1939) How Green Was My Valley London: Michael Joseph.
Mathias, R. (1986) AnRlo- Welsh Literature :An Illustrated History Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press.
Minhinnick, R. (1991) 'My Petition to the Zoo Keeper', Planet 90:13-17.
Stephens, M. (ed) (1991) The Bright Field :An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry From Wales Manchester: Carcanet.