Glyn Jones Centre

Glyn Jones

1905 – 1995

Glyn Jones’s life spanned almost the whole of the last century. He experienced all the movements and events in the life of Wales and the world throughout the period. Indeed, he took part in many of them.

He was proud to be a son of Merthyr Tydfil, and yet, like Gwenallt, he also had a great love of rural Carmarthenshire and country life. He tended to romanticise that way of life, especially in some of his short stories, as in Wat Pantathro, one of his favourite characters. At the same time, he could incorporate Welsh myths and Hengerdd (the corpus of the earliest Welsh poetry, from the sixth to the eleventh century) into his perception of the industrial scene of the valleys in his translations and in a novel such as The Island of Apples.

Glyn was a key figure in the literary life of our country, and a bridge between many segments of it. He was brought up as a Welsh-speaking, chapel-going youth in a society which was turning towards the Labour Movement and turning its back on religion. In this period, also, the industrial society, and much of the rest of the country, was tending to give up the Welsh language.

According to Glyn’s great friend, Gwyn Jones, the motivation of the Anglo-Welsh literary movement, which set out to create Welsh literature in English, was twofold: a rebellion against the Welsh language and against the chapel. To a large extent, the two were intertwined.

Glyn never turned his back completely on the Welsh language, and he remained a convinced chapel-goer all his life. And though most of his literary output was in English, he set to to re-acquaint himself with Welsh language literature and translated many of the Hen Benillion (‘The Old Stanzas’; traditional verses usually sung to harp accompaniment). He also always encouraged young Welsh language writers in their work.

In his seminal work, The Dragon Has TwoTongues, first published in 1968, Glyn stated that he chose to write in English because it was through that language that his imagination was awoken. D. H.Lawrence was one of the great influences on him, and Gerald Manley Hopkins in poetry. He wrote novels and short stories, poetry and criticism. And though his literary horizons were wide, Glyn was the Welsh author who tended to dissuade colleagues from writing about any place or any people other than Wales and the Welsh.

Not many remember the ill feeling which existed at one period between those who wrote in Welsh and those who used English. Gradually, enmity was replaced by mutual respect and even comradeship, and much of this was due to the catalytic work of the two presidents of the language sections, D. J. Williams and Glyn Jones. Glyn had stressed in that famous work that there was only one dragon, though she spoke with two tongues.

Glyn excelled at bridge-building. He was warm and friendly and possessed a lovely sense of humour. You can revel in his satire on school life in The Learning Lark. At the same time, he was also a dreamer, hiding some of the ugliest aspects of the industrial scene he loved by his use of lyricism in his prose as well as his poetry.

Glyn was also a man of conviction. A Merthyr man, where north Wales starts for many ignorant or biased people in our capital city. Merthyr town was the melting pot in many ways, but especially for the many nationalities who reached this capital city of the Industrial Revolution. Glyn defended Merthyr, as in his well-known poem telling how he was born there and wished to be buried there. A poem which was riposte to Saunders Lewis’s poem Y Dilyw, which scorned Merthyr and its motley people.

It must be remembered that Glyn, like Gwyn Thomas, always acknowledged that there was another, rural scene beyond the Brecon Beacons, to the north and west.

Glyn’s horizons extended internationally, and he was always aware of artistic movements in Europe, in the fine arts as well as in literature. But essentially, Glyn was a Welsh man of letters, and a Christian gentleman.

Harri Pritchard Jones