A Writer's House in Wales (10 page)

For a sense of the transcendental is, to my mind, always present at Trefan Morys—as it is in Wales itself. This is an evasive, mercurial slab of the Earth's surface, now buoyant, now despondent, as though some mood-changing wind is constantly blowing through it. Sometimes when I look out of my window it seems to me that all must be lost, that life is fading, time itself running short, so bleak and loveless does the country seem out there, so enervated do the very sheep appear, listlessly nibbling the grass. But then the cloud passes or the sun comes out, and instantly it is a very prospect of hope outside my window—life can never be subdued!—time is ours to command!—and now that I look more closely, those sheep are not disheartened at all, but are humming with happiness as they eat!

 

Trefan Morys itself is not a place of moods—it is solid of structure and apparently steady of character—but it is attended by a powerful numen. Many people feel it, and its presence is older than even the Welshness of the house, older than the mountains, as old perhaps as nature itself. It would be pleasant to suppose it the result of some perfect balance to the building, a structural equivalent of the human equilibrium that philosophers used to talk about. Many of them thought that the four bodily humors, sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, must be combined in equal measure to fulfill man's true potential, and I suppose the same criteria might be applied to a house.

Some dissenters used to argue, though, that if all four were equally represented in a man's character it would make for a dull fellow, and that one or other should be supreme. I am inclined to agree with them, but I cannot say that any particular trait is predominant in the metabolism of Trefan Morys, which is generally cheerful, intermittently sad, bad-tempered occasionally and patient with most of my absurdities. Since it seems to me to be anything but a dullard house, I look for some other humor in it, something less visceral, less definite, and I find it in that indefinable numen of the place. But it is more than a humor really. It is a mixture of wish, idea, memory, illusion and aspiration. The old Polynesians, those most visionary of pagans, would have called it mana.

I am a pagan myself, of agnostic pantheist preferences, and if I had to choose one god to preside over this house, of all the endless divinities that men have devised for their allegiance, it would be the horned and goat-footed Pan, the Great God of the ancient world, patron of fertility and a mischievous synthesis of everything mysterious, merry and fecund in animal and human life. Anything goatish suits the mythology of Wales, and I myself have long been convinced that
gafr
the goat will one day take over the world, in alliance with left-handed humans; so I particularly honor the combination of the prankish and the formidable, the peculiar and the entertaining, that the Great God represents.

The world stood still, we are told, when Pan died in the haunted days of antiquity, branches drooped in mourning over wine-dark seas and the very oracles ceased their prophecies. But he still lives in the atmosphere of Trefan Morys, and I hear his pipes plaintive on summer evenings, jolly with the plygain singers at Christmastime.

 

I am speaking figuratively, of course—aren't I? But I really do sense the effect of some imperturbably independent spirit playing around my house. The mana is present even in the yard outside. The most prominent objects there are generally our two cars, parked on the moss-strewn, mud-puddled slate-and-gravel mixture which is the nearest we have got to the grace of a country-house approach. You may think that automobiles have little to do with Pan, numen or transcendence, but there I disagree with you.

I often tell solemn academics or earnest progressive artists that the only things I read are car magazines, and although I do this really just to
épater les bourgeois,
there is some truth in it. As I go on to tell them, I am intensely interested in cars, because almost every aspect of modern human existence is reflected in them—the state of design, social progress, national confidence, sexual aspiration, human psychology, economic conditions, ecological awareness, engineering ingenuity—all is there, I cry, in those two machines standing in my yard, as expressive of their particular age as any art or architecture. This fluent spiel usually floors the intelligentsia, and I am sure gets the approval of the listening Great God, who has seen a vivid selection of motors come and go from Trefan Morys. We have run the gamut of the marques and nationalities, English, German, Italian, and lately a succession of Japanese. I prefer my cars to be fast and flashy, and so does Pan.

Nor is a love of cars incongruous to the neighborhood, although the general preference is for the simpler makes, without too many electronic gizmos. A century ago most of the men of these parts were, when they not were sailors at sea, vocationally concerned with horses in one way or another, and for many of their descendants the internal combustion engine seems to have replaced the ceffyl as their speciality. In innumerable sheds behind houses men are tinkering with old cars, repainting old motorbikes, cannibalizing them, bartering them or buying them for a song. The automobile sits easily within the Welsh culture. The most prominent playwright of Eifionydd pays an annual visit to the TT motorcycle races in the Isle of Man, and when Twm's Morris Minor recently needed some attention to its bodywork, he was able to pay for the job with a poem in honor of the mechanic's wife.

So the cars of Trefan Morys are perfectly at home. Our yard is not large and not at all grand, but it is hedged by tall trees—a sycamore, some ash trees and infant oaks, hollies, hazels, horse chestnuts, a pine or two—and the garden beds around it are themselves meant to suggest the bottom of a wood. Honeysuckle, the Welsh symbol of fidelity, clambers here and there, the ivy traditionally stands for permanence, and I hope there is a rowan somewhere about, to guard us against demons. There is certainly a white quartz stone set in a wall, essential for warding off the Evil Eye. All is deliberately haphazard, in keeping with my taste for mock simplicity—the kind of innocence that masks extreme sophistication. In the spring snowdrops, primroses and daffodils sprout all over the place, among scrambled rhododendrons and azaleas. Here and there blackberry brambles show signs of aggression. Ferns proliferate not in the domesticated way the Victorians loved, but with an almost drunken abundance. Ivy and Virginia creeper threaten to smother the house. There is so much vibrant life here, of plants and insects and small animals, that if I were a poet or philosopher exiled here for my convictions, like Virgil at Constantia, I would be happy enough for the rest of my life contemplating a few square feet of Trefan yard.

It is an untidy yard. Formal gardeners would hate it, and one lady, inquiring with interest the name of a plant I was nurturing in an earthen pot, went quite pale when I told her it was an anonymous weed I happened to like. There are flowerpots on the doorstep, and peat sacks, and there is a clothes dryer and a white iron bench with Ibsen often asleep on it—Ibsen the terror of the local fauna, taking time off from his murderous prowls around the bushes in search of shrews and field mice. A couple of stone sheds in one corner were once dog kennels. In the other corner the disintegrating stone heads of a lion and a unicorn are refugees from the former offices of the
Times
in the City of London. An acquaintance of mine, passing up Blackfriars Street one day, saw the royal crest, which stood above its doors just about to be demolished by navvies with electric drills, and rescued its supporters for this gentle Welsh retirement: Now above their heads a stunted hawthorn, having seeded itself on a narrow stone shelf, stands in tribute like a flowering bonsai. Two stone plaques are affixed to the house—winged lions of St. Mark, one from Split in Dalmatia, the other from Venice itself. They are modern replicas, but in order to attract a lichenous sense of age to them, for months I regularly doused them in yogurt, and now they look quite venerable.

On the terrace is an image of a symbolic Mayan jaguar, acquired by Twm and Sioned in Mexico and poised there now in sinister sentinel. There are also two sculpted busts, and these are decidedly a jape of old Pan's. A delightfully generous reader of mine in Chicago wrote to me to say that he would like to commission a bust of me, to be made by an eminent sculptor from New Zealand. He wanted to have one for his own collection, and a second cast he would have made for mine. My collection? It would
be
my collection! The eminent sculptor from New Zealand turned out to be just as delightful as his patron, and as he worked on the terrace upon my image, which everybody thought just fine, we shared several bottles of white wine. “Well,” said I as he labored away, “since everybody admires your work so much, why don't you do another portrait bust for me, and thus double my collection at a stroke?” I had in mind Admiral Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, “Jacky” Fisher, about whom I had lately written a capricious biography, and with whom I propose to have an affair in the afterlife. “Until then,” I said, “why can't I have an image of him up here on my deck, close to the image of me?”

Great idea, the lovely sculptor thought, and he named his standard fee, about as much as the whole of that capricious biography had earned me. “Marvelous!” I bravely cried, taking another gulp of the Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, “we have a deal”—and so it is that up there above the yard, studiously not facing each other across the terrace, “Jacky” and I expectantly stand, listening to the pipes.

 

Through a narrow gate beside the lion and the unicorn, in summer almost impassable because of the honeysuckle that grows over it, and heavily infested by wild ferns—through an unnoticeable gateway we pass into a vegetable garden. It is all that we kept from the walled kitchen gardens of the Plas, a corner of Trefan that I always used to find particularly suggestive because of an insidious herbal scent that seemed to meander all around it. I found it impossible either to isolate or identify this fugitive perfume, the nearest thing I knew to it being the tantalizing sage aroma that sometimes haunts the American West, and in the end I put it down to Pan. I was not surprised when, some time after we had sold the land, I looked down there early one summer morning and saw greedily grazing among the apple trees a large and virile goat.

Nowadays Elizabeth, eccentrically dressed in a kind of linen bonnet, to keep off the flies, grows most of our green victuals here—carrots, artichokes, potatoes, raspberries, gooseberries and salads of all kinds. Sometimes we are self-supporting in these foods, sometimes not. It depends on the slugs. A half-derelict shed is her command post, cluttered with the esoteric paraphernalia of the gardener's craft, cloches, slug pellets, mouse traps, compost bags, secateurs, things of that kind. Among the growing beds low box hedges are a reminder that the place has seen grander days. Flowers abound here too, all among the workaday edibles, it being a maxim of Elizabeth's style of gardening that growing plants of all kinds happily coexist (although she can never accept my own sentimental fondness for the Japanese knotweed). Lush patches of grass grow untended, speckled with buttercups in season, and close to the house there is a solitary delicate little tree.

This was given to us long ago, and we had no idea what it was until one day, on the island of Fraueninsel in the Bavarian lake Chiemsee, we chanced to see one just like it in a cottage garden. “It is the Tree of Life,” its owner said, when we asked her what it was, but it really turned out to be a weeping elm. Ours presently grew into a delectable thing, never tall but beautifully shaped, with luxuriant branches falling like a canopy all around it. You could sit on a deck chair in there, cool and dappled. One morning, however, I looked out of my window and saw it had become a Tree of Death. Overnight all its leaves had gone, its branches were withered, and it looked like a sorry skeleton of a tree.

Nobody could tell us why. A virus? Pesticides? Slugs? All we could do was wait, and hope for its recovery. All one summer we waited, all one winter, and only when another spring came did a single shy and leafy young twig appear, the sort of thing the dove brought back to Noah in the ark, to tell us that the Great God Pan had been revisiting the garden, and life was stirring in that little trunk again.

 

Beyond the yard the woods begin, and fall away to the river below. They are not majestic ancient woods, as it happens. Most of the old oaks here were felled during the First World War, to serve as pit props, and the growth since then has been straggly and unkempt. Moss is everywhere, old leaf mold, scattered sticks and snapped branches. Trees are often felled by the wind, and left to molder among the wood anemones, or topple into the river out of the shallow soil at the water's edge. When the daffodils are blooming everything changes, of course, and the place is luminous with yellow radiance; when the bluebells come it is as though some impossibly extravagant interior decorator has invested our money in acres of new carpeting; but at most times of the year, in the twilight especially, these unkempt glades remind me of the gnarled faery woods that used to appear as frontispieces in the storybooks of my childhood—where goblins might be, or old women living in shoes, and where little people in pointed hats danced beneath the moon.

In our part of Wales the native trees are not generally stately, anyway. The dire conifers introduced by foresters, loathed by patriots, conservationists and aesthetes alike, do possess a certain lugubrious majesty, standing there in their regimented thousands as they wait to be pulped into newsprint for the tabloids; but the wiry sessile oaks that cling to the sides of mountains, as emblematic of the country as the mountains themselves, are rough and springy, like terrier trees. Still, the fourteenth-century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym thought them noble enough to imagine their thickets as natural cathedrals, where the nightingale raised the Heavenly Host, and even our straggly Trefan woods, running along the river's edge, have inspired many poets in their time. In high summer the bats flicker through them, and if you are still and silent you may sometimes glimpse badgers plodding through the twilight; in the winter their tangled complexity, with slim toppled trunks as diagonals, and frosted pools in mossy gulleys, always suggest to me Japanese gardens in Kyoto. After heavy rain the woods are sometimes mired in deep mud: I remember a cow so helplessly up to her belly in it that she had to be hauled out by a tractor with ropes. Once, in a secret corner among the trees, a donkey of ours gave birth to a magical foal.