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Professor Rhys W. Williams: an Appreciation

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Professor Rhys W. Williams: an Appreciation Professor Rhys W. Williams: An Appreciation DAVID BASKER Inspired by a personal memory, I should like to begin my account of the career of Professor Rhys Williams by addressing the subject of levitation. I had been in Swansea as a postgraduate student for about three weeks when I was persuaded by my new Head of Department to set off in a ‘luxury coach’ for the annual meeting of German departments in the University of Wales at the conference centre at Gregynog in Powys. Three stomach-churning hours on the B-roads of mid-Wales later we arrived and, following some Alka Seltzer, an agreeable dinner and an even more agreeable evening in the bar, I witnessed something remarkable in the small hours of the morning. The aforementioned Head of Department, who had enjoyed plenty of what the bar had to offer by this point, swung himself up onto a table and, as if suspended by wires from the ceiling, in a prone position balanced his whole body weight on his finger-tips above the table surface. As a feat of levitation by a senior academic, it was second to none. To the growing frustration of the assembled twenty-year-old, athletic male students, no one could even come close to emulating the gravity-defying exploit. Our levitator was, of course, Professor Rhys Williams. And this was just the tip of the iceberg as far as his mystical powers were concerned: the double-headed coin trick and the disappearing coin trick followed (indeed, a well-worn joke in Swansea has it that he could make any departmental deficit disappear in much the same way). Naïve though it may sound, I was spellbound: here was some- one who could, in quick succession, speak with authority about any aspect of German literature and culture, give a closely argued assessment of the best scrum half ever to play for the All Whites (Robert Jones, of course), and make a 50-pence-piece vanish into thin air. What impressed me that evening is what has impressed everyone who has come into contact with Rhys in the course of his career: his outstanding academic achievements 4 DAVID BASKER and professional successes have always been allied with a very wide range of interests, an incorrigible sense of fun and the capacity to enjoy life to the full under any circumstances. While my focus here will, of course, be on Rhys’s professional career, an appreciation of that career needs to look outside the strictly academic too. To begin at the beginning, Rhys came into the world in 1946 in what is now the Celtic Manor Hotel on the edge of the M4, then one of Gwent’s leading hospitals. His father, M. J. Williams, was a clergyman – I should perhaps say the most important clergyman – in the Baptist Union of Wales at the time and he subsequently rose to become leader of the church and receive that typically Welsh accolade of being known simply by his initials. M. J.’s career shaped Rhys’s early life in ways his father had not, perhaps, intended. Growing up in Milford Haven and attending his father’s serv- ices two or three times every Sunday, Rhys quickly developed a thorough knowledge of the Bible, a scepticism for religion and a capacity to memorise and replay in his head poems and rugby matches, which helped to kill the boredom. It was clearly not with the intention of preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps into a career in the church, therefore, that Rhys first moved to Swansea as an eleven-year-old to attend secondary school. It is a curious fact that that secondary school – Bishop Gore in Swansea – was the same school in which Rhys’s wife Kathy would become a teacher some years later. Like nearly all Welsh grammar schools Bishop Gore had high academic standards, which Rhys easily met. It is worth noting, too, that Bishop Gore provided the first opportunity for Rhys to encounter life in Germany, through the town’s twinning agreement with Mannheim. Trav- elling to Germany became then – and still is, for Rhys – an experience of fascination, excitement and freedom. In 1965 Rhys left Swansea for the bright academic lights of Oxford, having been awarded the Welsh Foundation Scholarship to study at Jesus College, where he read French and German. He rose easily to the chal- lenges which study in Oxford offered and, among other accolades, was awarded the Junior Heath Harrison Scholarship, which he spent at the LMU in Munich. Oxford gave Rhys the opportunity to immerse himself in European literature and in the real ales of the Cotswolds. In character- istic fashion, he studied hard and still found time to enjoy himself and, of Professor Rhys W. Williams: An Appreciation 5 course, to meet his future wife, Kathy. He graduated in 1968 with first-class honours and inevitably won a Major State Studentship, which enabled him to move on to postgraduate study at Jesus College. He settled, for the topic of his DPhil, on the works of Carl Sternheim, a subject ideally suited to someone who combined an incisive, positivistic reading of literature with a keen and subtle sense of humour. This period saw further opportunities to live and work in Germany, first at the Literaturarchiv in Marbach as a result of a further prize, then as a Lektor at the University of Erlangen in northern Bavaria. Thus began a close relationship withFrankenwein which continues to this day. Rhys was awarded his DPhil – ‘Carl Sternheim’s Aesthetics in Theory and Practice’ – in 1973, having already begun his first academic job, a Tuto- rial Research Studentship at Bedford College in London. In 1974 he moved to a lectureship in German at the University of Manchester, where he worked for the next ten years. This, of course, was in the days when a German department consisted of a series of period specialists, each jeal- ously guarding his or her own turf. It is characteristic of Rhys’s versatility that the post in Manchester was actually the ‘eighteenth-century job’ in that department, to which he turned his hand easily; but it was some time before he was allowed to set foot in the areas in which his real academic interests lay: Expressionism, post-war literature of the two Germanies, and contemporary German literature. Eventually he was able to establish a set of courses on twentieth-century German literature that appealed to undergraduate students and inspired the best of them to go on to complete postgraduate study with Rhys as their supervisor. Indeed, it is one of Rhys’s great achievements in our profession that he has consistently attracted PhD students, instilled in them a practical approach to completing their research, and prepared them effectively for successful academic careers: there are a Vice-Chancellor, a number of professors, and an even larger number of senior lecturers and lecturers who owe their successful careers to this hard-headed approach. In terms of his own academic research, the Manchester years saw an enviable list of prominent publications in areas that chart his developing interests: a series of articles on Sternheim, Carl Einstein and Georg Kaiser and the publication of his DPhil dissertation as a book are accompanied by an increasing number of essays on more 6 DAVID BASKER recent figures: Heinrich Böll, Alfred Andersch, Martin Walser and Sieg- fried Lenz, to name just a few. These publications served to establish his reputation as one of the leading experts on modern German literature of his generation. While Rhys’s career clearly flourished in Manchester, there is an extent to which he was in an alien environment, a Welshman abroad; perhaps it was the lack of a decent rugby team, perhaps it was the northern accent, perhaps it was the rain-soaked newspapers clinging to his legs as he walked through the streets of Rusholme on the way to work. Whatever the precise reason, with the encouragement of some prominent academics outside Manchester who had read and been impressed by his growing body of work, Rhys was persuaded to begin applying for chairs elsewhere. As luck would have it, the first opportunity that arose was the chair of German in a very familiar location and he was immediately successful: in 1984, Rhys was appointed to the Chair in Swansea and returned to the place that he had always regarded as home. I am sure that those who worked in Swansea at that time will forgive me for saying that German was not in a particularly strong position. While Rhys’s predecessor, Morgan Waidson, certainly had his qualities – as the excellent library holdings in German in Swansea prove – the drive to build a large, flourishing department was not among them. Rhys quickly set about addressing the relative weaknesses of German with a combination of sharp political acumen, single-minded determination and the ability to charm the birds off the trees – or, should I say, money out of the Vice-Chancellor. Pity the Professor of Engineering or Chemistry who thought that he was dealing with just another Arts professor who would roll over and play dead in the face of their attempts to grab money and power at the expense of languages. It is perhaps still among one of Rhys’s favourite compliments that one Swansea colleague bemoaned: ‘They have put a gangster in charge of the German department’. The Al Capone of German studies made a series of strategic appoint- ments to German in Swansea that, almost at a stroke, turned it into a depart- ment that was attractive to students of all sorts and had a vibrant research culture.
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