Darlithoedd

Traddodwyd y ddarlith hon gan M Wynn Thomas yn The Cutting Edge, Bae Caerdydd fel rhan o noson i ddathlu agoriad Canolfan Glyn Jones ar 6ed Hydref 2005.

Mae’n anrhydedd arbennig i gael y cyfle hwn i ymuno yn y dathliadau wrth agor Canolfan Glyn Jones yng Nghanolfan y Mileniwm. Rwy’n cofio’r cyfnod yn dda pan gychwynnodd yr Academi ymlwybro tuag at y nod hwn, ac ni allaf beidio dwyn i gof rhai o’r troeon a fu yn yr yrfa – ac ambell un ohonynt yn agos at fod yn dro pedol, wrth inni deimlo temtasiwn go gryf i gefnu ar y cyfan.  Ond heddi fe welir y fantais  o gael ffenest siop genedlaethol a rhyngwladol a fydd yn ein galluogi ni i gyflwyno dwy lenyddiaeth Cymru i’r byd.

Ac on’d yw hi’n briodol mai enw  Glyn Jones sy’n gael ei goffáu yn y modd hwn?  Pwy na fydd yn cofio heddi am ei ymrwymiad brwd, teyrngar, di–wyro i’r Academi hyd ddiwedd ei oes?  A chofio’n arbennig am ei garedigrydd hynaws, tawel, i lenorion ifainc – arwydd, wrth gwrs, o haeloni meddwl eithriadol yr annwylaf a’r mwyaf diymhongar o’n hawduron mawr ni.  Dyma un o’r hen benillion a gyfieithwyd ganddo fe:

D’wedai hen ur llwyd o’r gornel,
‘Gan fy nhad mi glywais chwedel,
A chan ei dad y clywsai yntau,
Ac ar ei ôl mi gofiais innau.

Fe fydda i’n meddwl am Glyn fel yr hen ur hwnnw, fel dolen gyswllt sy’n cydio cenhedlaeth wrth genhedlaeth, yr iaith Gymraeg a’r iaith Saesneg, a gorffennol ein llên â’i phresennol ddwyieithog, oherwydd fe lwyddodd Glyn i esgor ar lenyddiaeth gyffrous o arbrofol drwy gydio’r hen wrth y newydd, a sodro llên Gymraeg wrth lên Saesneg Cymru mewn amryw o ffyrdd cwbl wreiddiol.

The grey old man said from the corner,
‘I heard stories from my father,
And from his father he had heard them.
After my father I recall them.’

In that translation of a Welsh folk rhyme Glyn Jones spoke for himself in his double aspect – the unlikely enfant terrible of Anglo-Welsh poetry by virtue of his electrifying youthful experimentations, who was also even then a grey old man of Welsh literature, ever conscious that authentic revolution in the arts was paradoxically the contemporary face of tradition.  And in Glyn’s case, tradition meant the Welsh-language tradition, an informed awareness of which alone, he believed, could enable Anglo-Welsh writing to take an authentic modern, and even modernist, form.  He was very conscious of himself as a cross-over writer, a member of that thirties, grammar-school educated generation, of young Welsh talent that was the hybrid, creative product of language-change and culture-shift.

Glyn was that rarity, a great soul, as well as an outstanding writer; a good man, if ever I’ve met one. And remembered so by all who, like me, felt humble at the honour of his gentle, unassuming company in his old age.  The runt of the litter – that is how he described himself to me, wryly recalling how he had disappointed the mother whom he adored to the end of his life by being supposedly plain, whereas she was majestically beautiful.  In her eyes, he believed he was a failure; but in ours, he should surely be accounted a cultural visionary – one whose prophetic work demonstrated, in the remarkable revolutionary forms it took, the creative synergies that a truly bilingual, bicultural Wales made possible. 

In 1994, a year before his death, he published an anthology of his work, with a title which was clearly his own quizzical valediction to life: Goodbye, What Were You?  The painful fact is that Wales ignored it; and thereby virtually rejected him.  So few copies were sold that Gomer, the publishers, left with so much surplus stock, kindly offered me several dozen copies to be disturbed, gratis, to my students.  The episode will remain, for me, a grimly disillusioning parable of contemporary Wales’s cultural condition.

Glyn was almost ninety when that book appeared, and, following an amputation, had metamorphosed into the one-armed bandit of Welsh literature.  Because from his youthful colourful emergence onto the Welsh scene in the early thirties down to his eventual late exit, this mildest, most unassuming of people was, in fact, a buccaneer of the imagination; a swashbuckler in language. This puritan was a sensuous cavalier of the word. And this pacifist was an extremist of the printed page. Yet in person he was ever recognizably the youngster Dylan Thomas so vividly mocked: ‘He is a nice, handsome young man with no vices.  He neither smokes, drinks nor whores.  He looks very nastily at me down his aristocriatic nose if I have more than one Guinness at lunch.’  But then, as  Glyn himself sadly pointed out in a notebook comment, ‘My friendship with Dylan was bound to lapse because I represented all that he was trying to get away from.’  And yet, Glyn was an innovator every bit as radically disconcerting as his more flamboyant friend. If you pressed him on this astonishing, surreal contrast between his ordinary social self and his writings, he would assume total inarticulate bewilderment at the ghastly contents of his own mind, as betrayed in print. But what his writings clearly, arrestingly, show, is an imagination almost traumatized by life – by turns (or at times even simultaneously), exhilarated, awed, disgusted, terrified and fascinated, by the naked, unaccommodated truths of the human condition. Images of Bedlam disorder recur throughout Glyn Jones’s work, to the very end.  It suggests a constant terror of psychic annihilation by an unintelligible, mentally uncontrollable world, which Glyn Jones clearly associated initially with the socio-political environment of the thirties and subsequently with our present, globalised civilization.  It makes him a writer very relevant to our today. But the other side of this anarchic vision is the creative possibilities that emerge out of the breakdown of inherited order;  and it is these – variously expressed as carnival, metamorphosis, the comic grotesque  – that triumph in the end, although the victory remains a precarious one. Glyn’s benediction on the world was all the more moving because it was so hard won.

Unaccommodated truths, I said, and the term is an important one for highlighting the uncompromising ethic and aesthetic integrity of Glyn’s work. In this connection, the conclusion of his wonderful late poem, ‘The Common Path’, is as powerfully revealing of Glyn the artist as of Glyn the man.  You’ll remember that he rebukes himself for a failure of sympathetic imagination, because, in the blitheness of his own good health, he had ignored the mute appeals of a middle-aged spinster afflicted with cancer:

What I remember, and in twenty years have
Never expiated, is that my impatience,
That one glance of my intolerance,
Rejected her, and so rejected all
The sufferings of wars, imprisonments,
Deformities, starvation, idiocy, old age –
Because fortune, sunlight, meaningless success,
Comforted an instant what must not be comforted.

Glyn’s was an artistic imagination that would not be comforted.  Think, for instance, of that eye that Evans produces out of his pocket in the short story ‘Wil Thomas’:

It was a real eye, fresh and glistening in the lamplight, with threads of thin steam rising from it and the nerve-roots hanging out between the preacher’s fingers.  It lay solid and big as a fine peeled egg, shining among the camphor balls on his shaking palm, polished like china in the lamplight with the pupil and the khaki iris gazing up at Wil in a fixed way he didn’t like at all.  There were no lids on it and it stared wickedly up at him all the time so that he couldn’t avoid it whichever way he looked.

I think of that as Glyn’s own eye – his inner eye; the terrible, beautiful, wickedly truthful eye of his creative imagination – as that took on real, objective, material form in the stories, so that his ordinary self became deeply disturbed by it.    There was no getting away from it.  Nor was there a getting away from what it saw – and what it saw is signified by its lidlessness;  it was an imagination that could never filter out, let alone shut out, the raw violence of everyday life  And so, he remained fearfully alive to ‘All that sensational news/ The heart hears, before she starts to bruise/ Herself against the universe’s rocky rind’, as he himself put it.  That sensational news is imaged in the crazy paving of his language, the jagged mosaic of his text – and Glyn himself likened the process of his own writing to the crafting of mosaics.

Un o’r darganfyddiadau pwysicaf i Glyn fel awdur, debygwn i, oedd darganfod yn ifanc fod gan gywyddwyr mawr Cymru – a chan Ddafydd ap Gwilym yn fwy na neb – ddychymyg modernaidd, ffrwydrol o swr-real.  A hwyrach bod cael eich magu gan ddiwylliant Saesneg yn medru bod o fantais yn hyn o beth, gan ei gwneud hi’n haws gwerthfawrogi fod yna ddeunydd chwyldro yng ngormodiaith dychymyg, ac eithafiaeth iaith y cywyddau mawrion. Yn y cyswllt hwn, fe ellir ystyried  Glyn Jones yn ddisgynydd Gerard Manley Hopkins ac yn rhagflaenydd Tony Conran a Bobi Jones.  Fe welir yn glir y modd yr oedd ei ddychymyg yn cael ei gyffroi gan y cywyddwyr yn ei gyfaddasiad o gerdd Dafydd ap Gwilym am ‘Yr Wylan’:  ‘The snow-semblanced, moon-matcher,/ The sun-shard and sea-gauntlet/ Floating…habited/ Brilliant as paper-work.’ 

If writers like Dafydd ap Gwilym helped Glyn Jones’s imagination quicken into poetry, then the peculiar source and nursery of that imagination was surely Merthyr. He announced the fixed location of his imagination in the very first poem he contributed to that great thirties periodical, Wales :

This is the scene, let me unload my tongue,
Discharge perhaps some dirty water from my chest…
I might have been, and liked it, born like you
Westward, or north beyond the crooked coalfields.
But night on the valleys and my first star stands
Voluble above those Beacon peaks
Gesticulating like a tick-tack man.
Standing now where that birth-star was eloquent
I see my bitter country dawn between
My hands.  I grieve above five valleys leaning
Suppliant against my unstruck rock.
The cream rose blushing sweet and scarlet stares
Back along the barren pink-hooked stem.
I hear my heart speak to the bleaky sky,
Coal and the valleys were my lucky egg,
As though some bird should scribble his short song.

That remained Glyn’s lifelong apologia as a writer not only of, but for, Wales.

It was his friend, Idris Davies who laconically remarked that the fashionable, synthetic surrealism of Dalí and others could never really convince let alone excite anyone who had grown up in that most genuinely surreal of environments, an industrial valley in the South Wales coalfield. So, too, the world presented itself to the young Glyn Jones as a lurid tangle of experiences, as a landscape bewilderingly honeycombed by sociocultural differences. Add to that his intimate acquaintance with the pre-industrial landscape of his forefathers’ rural West Wales, and his young adult’s shocked experience of working in a Cardiff slum school during the Depression years, and you begin to understand where Glyn Jones is coming from in his writings.

Un o nodweddion amlycaf Glyn yw ei fod wedi ei fendithio â doniau pur amrywiol.  Roedd ganddo fe lygad craff artist gweledol, ac fel llenor roedd e’n gystal bardd ag oedd e’n storïwr, ac yn feirniad llên o’r radd flaenaf yn ogystal ag yn hanesydd diwylliannol hynod wybodus.  Ac nid dawn deall a sgrifennu go eithriadol a arwyddir yn unig gan yr hyblygrwydd hwn.  Na, roedd rhychwant y medrau hyn hefyd yn fynegiant o haelioni ei ddychymyg dynol cynhwysfawr ac o’i fawrfrydedd fel person.  

Glyn was the most hospitably minded and magnanimously imaginative person I have known. That was a gift rare enough.  But rarer still was that such qualities could exist in tandem with the sharpest, most discriminating kind of moral and literary intelligence.  That is why, for me, he remains a model critic, able to record the most penetrating criticism in the most conciliatory yet unmistakable of terms.   When I published a version of Emyr Humphreys’s A Toy Epic in a form specially edited for school consumption, I appended an afterword to the novella that analysed the text in very great detail.  The book was reviewed by Glyn, who praised it very generously, but concluded by remarking that so thorough was the Afterword that it left very little to the reader’s imagination.  I took the point, and did not, of course, take offence.  Nor did even Dylan Thomas when Glyn wrote a less than wholly favourable review of  25 Poems.  ‘’Of course I didn’t think it was unfair’, he wrote: ‘it’s about the best I’ve seen of the book, and it helped me a lot, it really was constructive. I never knew, for instance, that I was such a numerical demon.’

Harri Prichard Jones has perceptively described The Dagon Has Two Tongues as ‘a very important work of criticism, pietas and synthesis.’  While John Pikoulis has thoughtfully suggested that Glyn could be considered ‘as Anglo-Welsh’s first man of letters.’ The present Chairs of the Academi’s Welsh Language and English Language sections singing from the same hymn-book, whatever next?  Who knows, under Glyn’s benign spell, they may both yet end up as staunch Nonconformist deacons?  But, in earnest, what better evidence could we have for Glyn’s quiet powers of cultural synthesis?

Ar ddiwedd ei ragymadrodd i’w lyfr olaf, noda Glyn fod llawer wedi gofyn iddo, droeon, a fyddai fe wedi hoffi bod yn awdur Cymraeg yn hytrach nag yn awdur Saesneg ei iaith?  Byddai, meddai’n ddibetrus,  ond fe â yn ei flaen i ychwanegu nad oedd ei anallu i sgrifennu yn y Gymraeg yn wewyr meddwl iddo.  Na, meddai, roedd ei Gymreictod yn berffaith gyfan ac yn berffaith sad, er iddo, fel awdur, gael ei amddifadu o’r iaith a garai mor angerddol.

‘English has been one of the languages of Wales for a few hundred years’, Glyn wrote in the concluding paragraph of his last book.  ‘And if the advocates of a bi-lingual society in Wales are truthful, which I have no reasons to doubt that they are, it will also be so for the future. My concern in my work is always Wales and the Welsh people.’  That was, to the end, his credo as a writer and his vision as he looked to the future, towards us, towards this revivified and remodeled Academi.  As we know, as the most touching and most palpable earnest of his faith in the Academi’s developing cultural role, he left it a very substantial sum for furthering its work, in the same spirit in which he left us a legacy of remarkable books ‘that …will give pleasure to … readers, whether they are speakers and readers of English or of Welsh, or if they are of that blessed and growing band who are speakers and readers of both.’  The words are, of course, adapted from Glyn’s own last printed comments, and they ring not only with the passion of his cultural commitments but also with all the remarkable resonant generosity of his interest and faith in young writers, the writers of the future.  One of his grandfathers had been known in chapel as ‘Jones y Cyhoeddwr’,  Jones the announcer, and that would have made a good bardic name even for softly-spoken Glyn himself, because his pages loudly proclaim a vision of Wales.

‘Calling Dylan Dillun is like calling a Frenchman Jeen’, said Glyn, and the remark remains very close indeed to my heart.  What he was insisting on, of course, was mutual respect between Wales’s two historical cultures as the precondition of meaningful dialogue and collaboration. It was what he had so magnificently exemplified in his own life and work for the best part of the whole of the twentieth century. He loved to place on record the names and stories of the many Welsh-language poets who had been among his own ancestors.  One of them, disguised as a humble insurance salesman, was his grandfather, the celebrated Llwch-haiarn, ‘ a great talker and debater, theologian, politician, philosopher, singer and musician, an indefatigable competitor, and frequent winner at eisteddfodau, a poet of sufficient reputation to have had delivered safely to him from America addressed merely to “Llwch-haiarn, Wales”’.  ‘Glyn Jones, Wales’ – that, too, says it all; and now that the Academi has bestowed on him this further notable recognition by naming after him a centre that has the whole world in its sights, then who knows, a letter from America may indeed arrive safely here in Cardiff one day addressed in that suitably pithy fashion.

M. Wynn Thomas
CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales), Prifysgol Abertawe
Hydref 2005