A Writer's House in Wales

This small book is certainly not fictional, but it is not all hard fact, either. It describes a writer's home, and it is tempered by a writer's fond imagination. I dedicate it to the two ever-present guardians of the house: Elizabeth who shares it with me, and Wales which is its patron and its inspiration.

—Trefan Morys, 2001

CHAPTER 1
A House in Wales

CHAPTER 2
A Welsh House

CHAPTER 3
A Writer's House

CHAPTER 4
A Writer's House in Wales

Trefan Morys is the name of my house in Wales, and I'll tell you frankly, to me much the most interesting thing about it is the fact that it
is
in Wales. I am emotionally in thrall to Welshness, and for me Trefan Morys is a summation, a metaphor, a paradigm, a microcosm, an exemplar, a
multum in parvo,
a demonstration, a solidification, an essence, a regular epitome of all that I love about my country. Whatever becomes of Wales, however its character is whittled away down the generations, I hope my small house will always stand in tribute to what has been best in it.

Do you know where Wales is? Most people in the world have no idea. It is a peninsula standing at the heart of the British Isles, on the western flank of England facing Ireland. It is some 200 miles long from north to south and never more than seventy miles wide, and it is known in its own language as Cymru, signifying a comradeship or comity. Wales is part of the United Kingdom, all too often thought by foreigners to be synonymous with England itself, but its people form one of those ancient minority nations, from the powerful Catalans to the infinitesimal Karims, who have miraculously contrived to maintain their identities, to one degree or another, through the infinite convolutions of European history. They are all subject to the political domination of some greater State, but they remain determinedly themselves, and generally hope to stay that way within the framework of a uniting Europe.

Such quixotic survivals suit me. I want no pomp or circumstance, and would much rather be a poet than a President (unless, like Abraham Lincoln, I could be both at the same time). Small may not always be Beautiful, as a mantra of the 1970s used to claim, but for my tastes it is usually more interesting than Large, and little nations are more appealing than great powers. In 1981 the titular Prince of Wales, who has almost nothing to do with the country, and possesses no house in Wales, was married amidst worldwide sycophancy to the future Princess Diana, at Westminster Abbey in London. It was to be a vast display of traditional ostentation, with horses, trumpets, coped ecclesiastics, armed guards, royal standards and all the paraphernalia of consequence, the whole to be transmitted by television throughout the world. I thought it exceedingly vulgar (besides being romantically unconvincing), and with a small band of like-minded patriots decided to celebrate instead an anniversary of our own that fell on the same day. Exactly 900 years before, the Welsh princes Trahaearn ap Caradog and Rhys ap Tewdwr had fought a battle on a mountain called Mynydd Carn, and that's what we chose to commemorate—an obscure substitute perhaps for a televised royal wedding at Westminster, but at least an occasion of our own. We stumbled up that very mountain in a persistent drizzle, and while the entire universe gaped at the splendors in the abbey far away, we huddled there in our raincoats congratulating ourselves upon celebrating a private passion rather than a public exhibition.

Actually national ostentation seems to be gradually going out of fashion even in England. Just as the tanks no longer roll through Red Square on May Day, so formality is fading in royal palaces, even in the most traditionally decorous of them all. I was at a Buckingham Palace reception recently, and when I left I could find no queen, prince or duke to thank for the royal hospitality. I told the policeman at the gate that I had been brought up to say “thank you for having me,” but finding nobody inside the house to say it to, would say it to him instead. “Not at all, madam,” he at once replied, “come again.” Yet if the style of the English monarchy is relaxing, the English nation can never be unpretentious. It is too far gone for that. Simplicity is the prerogative of smaller States, and in particular of the minority nations, like Wales, which are not States at all—by the nature of things, grandeur is seldom their style.

Patriotism, on the other hand, rides high among them. I dislike the word “nationalist,” which seems to imply chauvinism or aggressive traits, but I respect honest patriotism everywhere, and I have come to think of myself as a minority patriot, a cultural patriot perhaps—one who believes that the characteristics of a people, however insignificant, a language, a tradition, an ideal, are worth preserving for their own sakes. Political sovereignty may be necessary for the job, but it can be sovereignty essentially defensive, offering no threat to anyone else and chiefly wanting to be left alone. And anyway, since none of these national enclaves has more than a few million people, and none is armed with anything more awful than an air gun, they can hardly go in for bullying.

 

Wales is not the smallest of Europe's minority nations, with some 2.9 million people, but its history is among the most complex. Almost everything about it, in fact, is convoluted—long-winded, its critics might say—and its self-esteem is considerable. Long before there was such a thing as England the Celtic Welsh people, the Cymry, were the original Britons. They lived all over the island and they followed the druidical animist faith, which was powerful over much of Europe and had some of its supreme sanctuaries in western Britain. The Romans came, eliminating the hostile priesthood of the Druids, and when they withdrew from Britain their cruder Saxon successors drove most of the Cymry out of England into Wales.

There they lived heroically, beating off all assaults, governed by their own princes and noblemen, honoring their own laws, their own values and their own poetical language. Wales was converted to Christianity by wandering missionaries from Ireland, and it developed an indigenous church with a plethora of native saints: St. Teilo and St. Illtyd, St. Pedrog and St. Beuno, Padarn and Cybi and Elian and Curig and Non—Rome never heard of any of them, but they are respected in Wales to this day. For a thousand years the Welsh were alone in the world. England was Saxonized, and lost its Celtic tongue. The Irish were more often enemies than friends. The remaining Celts of northern Britain were cut off and far away. Wales was Wales, ruled by free Welsh princes, cap-a-pie.

In the folk-memory at least it was to be remembered as a golden age, when glittering Welsh aristocrats lived amidst poetry and music, with beautiful women and handsome horses, feasting in high halls and celebrated by bards. Below the ranks of the princes (who very often, I have to admit, quarreled disgracefully among themselves), was a cultivated class of gentry, the
uchelwyr
or noblemen, and the Welsh literature that was born then, mystical, merry, humorous and resplendent, has survived from that day to this. King Arthur himself speaks to us out of that misty Welsh Camelot, and his knights of the Round Table were uchelwyr every one.

It was the Normans, from France, who put an end to the dream. They had taken England for themselves, and soon they were swaggering into Welsh countrysides the Saxons had never entered, and setting up their own rival earldoms all along the English border. They turned thousands of free Welshmen into serfs, they humiliated many a disputatious prince, and in the end, mutating over the generations into Englishmen, they became the masters of Wales. The final Welsh independent ruler, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, was killed by the soldiers of Edward I of England in the year 1282, and is remembered by the Welsh still as Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, Llywelyn Our Last Leader. Ever since then Wales has been subject to English domination, sometimes passive beneath the yoke, sometimes restless or obdurate. It has inevitably been Anglicized, like many another English colony, but so far it has remained unmistakably different from its overbearing neighbor, and half a million of its people, the Cymry Cymraeg, still speak Cymraeg, Welsh, by now one of the oldest literary tongues in Europe.

Some Welshmen would claim
the
oldest, but then some Welshmen would claim almost anything for the glory of their country. Pride of race, pride of literature, pride of history, pride of landscape, pride of language, pride of rugby football, pride of singing, pride of kinship and heritage—all these various self-gratifications are endemic among Welsh patriots, and have been irritating or boring their neighbors ever since the English finally conquered the country. For they conquered it, they never extinguished it, and in every generation there have been thousands of Welsh people determined to ensure the survival of Welshness, its language and its culture. They never let up! Skimble-skamble stuff, is how Shakespeare's Henry V characterized Welsh mystical grandiloquence, and to this very day English people are liable to grumble that the Welsh will go on and on…

 

Go on and on indeed! It is only by going on and on that they have preserved their identity down the ages, confronted so closely by so mighty an alien Power—itself, nowadays, hardly more than an agent for the even more monstrous forces of English-speaking globalization. Much that is most Welsh about Wales goes on and on, or is at least inflated beyond its size. The mountains of Wales, so often celebrated in song and legend, seem much bigger than they really are, if only because they are so often masked in mist and drizzle. The history of Wales, though almost unnoticeable by the standards of the great world, is so snarled about by feud and battle, inheritance and tradition, and so often illuminated by suggestions of the tragic or the arcane, that it can seem a tale of colossi. The melancholy myth of the Welsh coal miners has touched hearts everywhere through film and novel. Welsh poetry is essentially deft, lyrical and limpid—sometimes as minimalist as haiku—but the magical prose tales of Welsh medievalism can be as elaborate in plot and illusion as a biblical epic, and no operatic chorus of slaves, pilgrims or prisoners has ever seemed much more terrific than a Welsh choir in full-throated, great-hearted, on-and-on-going voice.

Unquenchable down the centuries, then, the spirit of Welsh patriotism has been a devoted and often beautiful abstraction. Long after Llywelyn the Last was dead it burst into a final full-scale rising, led by the charismatic Owain Glyndŵr in the fifteenth century. Glyndŵr united most of Wales behind him in his struggle against the English, summoning a national parliament, striking up an alliance with the French, and fighting on through triumph and chagrin until he faded into oblivion, his grave undiscovered to this day. His hopeless grasp at glory did Wales no practical good, but it has remained always an inspiration in the national memory. So have the words of a venerable citizen known to tradition as The Old Man of Pencader. One day in the twelfth century, it seems, this ancient was standing at the gate of his house when King Henry II of England rode by with a troop of soldiers, in the course of one punitive campaign or other. The king condescendingly inquired, as kings do, whether the old man thought Welsh resistance to England was likely to last, but he got a dusty answer. Wales would never be subdued by the wrath of man, the Old Man said, unless the wrath of God concurred, and “no other nation than this of Wales, in any other language, whatever may hereafter come to pass, shall on the day of supreme examination before the Supreme Judge, answer for this corner of the earth.”

 

I hope he was right, but of course like everywhere else modern Wales is threatened more than ever by the levelling powers of internationalism, distributed even here through every possible channel of communication. The world's corrosion is inevitably setting in—beside the welcome new comforts and excitements, the dross of television and advertising, drugs, crime, general dumbing-down and sheer
ordinariness
. Even the Welshest parts of Wales are less Welsh than they used to be, and the values that Welsh people consider peculiarly their own are being whittled away, or so influenced by ideas and principles from elsewhere that cynics wonder if there really are any specific Welsh values at all. The English language is ubiquitous here nowadays, and so are English people, seeping in as settlers and entrepreneurs into almost every corner of the country their forebears failed to expunge. There have been times when it has seemed, to the Welshest of the Welsh, that everything of theirs was being overwhelmed and obliterated by the English—the bloody Saxon, the Saeson, the eternal enemy.

It is a little like Tibet. Geographically, even historically, Tibet is undeniably part of the Chinese landmass, but its cultural identity is just as undeniably separate, and its people feel their religion, their language, their whole way of life to be threatened by the influx of Han Chinese from the east. Also analogous is what used to be called Palestine. Wales is about the same size as the Holy Land, and in many ways its modern history has not been unlike an ironic cross between the history of the Palestinian Arabs and the history of the Palestinian Jews. On the one hand the Welsh have had to resist, as the Arabs have, the incursion of a more advanced and confident people—foreigners to themselves, as the Jews were foreigners to the Arabs. On the other hand they have been fighting to sustain, like the Palestinian Jews, a proud and ancient culture against an unsympathetic majority.

Outsiders have often considered these attitudes mere sophistry. Are not Arabs and Jews equally Semitic, is not Tibet patently part of China, are not the Welsh and the English equally British? Not to the peoples on the ground, they aren't, and in Palestine, in Tibet and in Wales the indigenes have painfully tried to discover ways out of their dilemma. Will cultural autonomy be enough to enable a people to keep its identity, or must there be political autonomy too? Can it be achieved by peaceful politics, or must there inevitably be violence? Nowadays at least the Welsh are not fired by any religious antipathy, like Muslims and Jews confronting each other, but they were once, when the Celtic church of Wales found itself challenged by the Roman Catholic Church of England; and it is no coincidence that in the struggle to maintain their language, the Welsh patriots have borrowed ideas from the saviors of Hebrew.

Many Welsh people look rather Semitic themselves. Englishmen working in the Middle East have told me they often find dealing with Arabs very like dealing with Welshmen, but more often they have been likened to Jews. In fact some Welsh people have seriously believed themselves to be the Lost Tribe of Israel. Long familiarity with the Bible has meant that the map of Wales is spattered with Palestinian names, from Salem to Nazareth to the village of Bethlehem itself, which provides a favorite postmark for Christmas mail. Perhaps the long centuries of suppression, and the consequent sharpening of wits and wiliness, really have similarly affected Welsh and Jews, and made both peoples touchy but unextinguishable.