Glyn Jones Centre

This tribute to Glyn Jones was first delivered at the Glyn Jones Day School, which was held in Cyfarthfa Castle School, Merthyr Tydfil in November 2005.

How difficult it is to convey to those who never had the privilege of meeting and knowing Glyn Jones what sort of person he was. How influential he was, how much energy and genius he possessed. He was absolutely central to the cultural history of our country almost throughout the last century. There was hardly an author of any import who hadn’t met and fallen under Glyn’s influence.

I did, some forty years ago, when he communicated with me to tell me how much he thought of my first attempts at creating literature. That blossomed into friendship, with both Glyn and Doreen, which included a live interest on their behalf in our family, including our children. He retained that interest in my literary career, and their interest in our children throughout the rest of his and Doreen’s life.

I was at a later stage to translate his comic novel about school life in the southern valleys, The Learning Lark, which was a wonderful piece of comic satire, including quite a chronicle of valley life. We cooperated and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Glyn was gloriously mischievous: those eye glinting as he pulled one’s leg or gently rebuked some fault. If eyes were ever mirror to a soul, his were. They revealed passion and compassion as well as the mischief; an abiding conviction about the essential goodness of the Creation as well as a searing painful awareness of all the horrors, the ubiquitous violence in human existence. He made his stand as a Conscientious Objector during the war, and paid for it with his job. He also wrote literature in defiance of cancer, economic and social exploitation and every inhumanity, as well as war. For Glyn was a brave believer not only in social justice, but also in just and forgiving God. Believer, yes, but he never made his creed into propaganda.

He used to boast that he had never written anything about any other country or any other people other than Wales and the Welsh, and that mostly addressed to his own people.

One could argue that that stance meant limiting his perspectives as an artist; that there was so much going on in the world beyond our borders he should be responding to. But the truth is that Glyn always saw things within the context of the wider world. Indeed, he saw things, also, sub specie aeternitatis. When asked once, ‘Do you believe in God?’ he gave the appropriate answer for any Christian humanist: ‘Yes, often.’

Yes, the matter of his work was Wales, but in is life and work he managed to demonstrate that the whole gamut of human experiences which were of human significance were to be had here in Wales, and also that there were specifically Welsh experiences, most of which had universal resonances.

Like James Joyce, who also never wrote about anywhere except his native country, and who helped make Irish literature in English a national rather than a regional one, so did Glyn secure that Welsh writing in English would become a national literature.

He wrote novels, short stories, poetry a libretto and translations from the Welsh. In The Dragon Has Two Tongues he reminded us all, Welsh and English speakers, that we were two sides to the same coin, brothers and sisters, and he did that bravely, having to face down backwoodsmen on both extremities of the linguistic divide. A divide he was determined to erase, and he did indeed perform wonders in that field.

As well as co–operating with his friends, Gwyn and Jack Jones, Dylan and Gwyn Thomas, John Ormond and Huw Menai, John Elwyn the painter and his partner Gill the musician – and a host of others – he befriended and supported the Welsh language writers, such as D. J. Williams, Fishguard, Kate Roberts and many others. And Glyn was a friend to the Welsh language itself. He went out of his way to encourage young writers in both languages.

As we know from The Dragon Has Two Tongues Glyn was born and grew up in his beloved Merthyr Tudful, a place he knew was deprived, but which he loved and defended against attacks such as that in Saunders Lewis’ poem Y Dilyw. He was almost unique within the Anglo-Welsh movement in having, and continuing to, frequent a Nonconformist chapel, and that being a Welsh-language one. 

We all know that English was the language of his youthful surroundings, and that he said his imagination was captivated in his youth by literary works in English, though many of these were, in fact, translation from Russian, French and other non-English literatures. And he fell in love with Irish, English and American authors. At this period Welsh language literature was often very moralistic, and full of categorical oughts. 

Such literature was anti-intellectual and anti- the imagination, and what an imagination Glyn had. In the midst of all the mess and misery of the valleys during the Depression, Glyn could imagine another life, another world, a better one; an Avalon such as he created in his novel The Island of Apples, which uses words from T. Gwynn Jones’ preface to his ode to The Departure of Arthur, namely the words Ynys Afallon ei hun sy felly, ‘It is only the Island of Avalon which is like that’.

As well as that escape through the imagination, Glyn had his secret place, his Argoed; like Gwenallt, he had family and spiritual roots in Carmarthenshire, in the Llansteffan area, in the parts which were English-speaking as well as those which were Welsh-speaking. There he enjoyed peace of a kind, and a renewal of energy, and that was where he chose to have his ashes scattered after his death.

I used to wonder at Glyn’s integrity and tolerance, when we might go to a pub with Jack Jones in Rhiwbeina, a day before he’d be serving as a deacon in Minny Street Annibynwyr chapel in Cardiff.

He did turn his back on many narrow, intolerant aspects of Nonconformist culture, but remained a believer. His faith caused his dilemma about military service during the Second World War, but also sustained him against the slings and arrows of outrageous persecution against his Conscientious Objection.
 
It was his faith also that enabled him to be such a wit and entertainer. He was fun to be with, complementing Doreen’s fondness for cigarettes and the odd glass of spirits with his temperance. He was also an elegant dresser, colourful but debonair. The man had style, and was aware of form as well as content; he loved the visual arts and delighted in colours and smells as well as sound.

As we fêted him on his seventieth and then his eightieth birthdays, he was gracious and grateful, wistful and witty, but also elegant in dress, gesture and speech.  And when I visited him after the amputation of his writing arm, when he was learning to write – and type on a newly acquired processor – with his other arm, he not only displayed indomitable courage, but also humour.

‘I’m changing the title of my autobiography,’ he asserted,
‘to the memoirs of a One-armed Pundit’!

At this time we, in the Academi Gymreig, organised a celebration of his life and work in Chapter in Cardiff. He wrote to me afterwards to thank us, and the letter is full of corrections to the typing, done on sticky pieces of paper which were stuck over the typing mistakes. All done with his left hand, which was not his usual writing one.

He would face down any nasty experience and believed everything was for the best in the end. In that respect, he was a romantic, but I think it more apposite to call him a conditional optimist.

He had a staggering ability to face human misery and suffering, as he to rejoice in goodness and beauty. He celebrated the latter two as he looked with compassion on those who were experiencing the former. He never indulged in polemic or aggression, but his protests against the dark side of life were strident ones, albeit always conscientious.  No wonder he got on so well with the Welsh-language Pembrokeshire poet, Waldo, both possessing a curious combination of youthful innocence and informed wisdom.

Glyn got on well with almost everybody, not because he was wishy-washy or obsequious, but, rather, because he was on the side of each and every human being.
 
As he said in one of his poems,

 An object has significance or meaning,
 Only to the extent that human feeling
 And intellect bestow them …
     the memory
 Of neighbours, worthies, friends and relatives,
 … My grandfather’r fantastic friends, old Sion
 O Ferthyr, occulist, meddler with the unknown - …
 My grandfather himself, musician, bard, …
 My undersized great granny, that devout
 Calvinist, with mind and tongue like knives, …

Glyn showed us that Wales is one, being aware of our heritage of a millennium and a half of literature in Welsh, but insistent that the experience of people in the industrial valleys was just as important, as valid, as Welsh as any other experience related in our literature and history in this century.

Harri Pritchard Jones