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From International Socialism (1st series), No.3, Winter 1960/61, p.32.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Rape of the Fair Country
Alexander Cordell
Victor Gollancz. 16s.
Hosts of Rebecca
Alexander Cordell
Victor Gollancz. 16s.
It seems that it is impossible to expect a good Welsh working-class novel. From a country that has contained all the elements of radical protest, that has for over two hundred years seen a series of minor revolts, working-class protest movements, that has persistently been slighted by its own and by English politicians, and that has itself produced one of the most neurotic of religious movements, we might have expected some literature that would get down to the basis of Welsh conditions and, in a language that spoke from the roots, produce an O’Casey, a Zola, or a Lorca. Instead we have been granted the gushing mythology of Dylan Thomas, the esoteric patriotism of Saunders Lewis, and all the pseudo-mining stories that the public have come to expect. Only two novelists stand out, and one or two poets. The novelists, however, have looked back and ignored the present: Llewellyn’s How Green was My Valley proved that novels about Wales could be interesting (but little more), while Jack Jones entered the world of the depression with rather more than gusto. But for over twenty years we have not had one novel that treated modern Welsh life with any genius, it being left to the Anglican vicar, R.S. Thomas to write poems about peasant life in a lucid, but paternalistic manner.
Alexander Cordell also looks back. His novels are ranting pieces of the nineteenth century which take in turn the Chartist riots of 1826-30, and the Rebecca Riots of the 1840s. Both novels are sketched round the Mortymer family. In the first the family is divided over the various merits of remaining independent or joining the Chartists, in the second the younger son is involved in anti-machine riots and in the creation of a workers active (and violent) protest movement. In the course of both novels we are given some useful detail of the Welsh valley life and the background of the riots seems to have been accurately sketched. There is plenty of bawdy fun and fighting against Redcoats, Irish, and all. The hills are covered with guerilla warfare and the houses filled with sobbing mothers. The mines are open-hearth and there are vivid scenes of worker-manager relations.
But the stories pander to the Welsh myth. The language is a nauseating dialect, reversed sentences and misplaced verbs, and the content is highly emotional and hokum. Throughout, the schoolboy-novel technique is stressed and over-stressed and finally, as at the end of Thomas’s A Grief Ago, we are left panting with sheer excess of language. One sentence will suffice. “Fresh from Bangor he was, following the iron up to the Eastern Valley, and mad for my sister the moment she bowed back at him.” And similarly throughout two sets of 300 pages.
And so, Chartists or no Chartists, we have not yet had a good Welsh novel. Whatever J.B. Priestley might say, these are unsatisfactory and trivial books.
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Last updated on 14 February 2010