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 someone 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 characteristic 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 department that was attractive to students of all sorts and had a vibrant research culture. Undergraduate numbers grew rapidly; and his success in attracting research students was transported easily from England to Wales as he super- vised a series of PhDs that focused on the same area: the continuities in Professor Rhys W. Williams: An Appreciation 7 writing before and after 1945. Rhys was behind the strategic decision to focus research in a single broad area, so that expertise could be shared, and the idea proved to be a recipe for research success. German grew steadily through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, in terms of numbers of staff, undergraduates and postgraduates. Both in Swansea and in the subject area nationally Rhys was tireless in committing himself to the success of the German department, even if it meant unreasonable demands on his own administrative time and patience. I particularly remember him regaling anyone who would listen with stories of the absurd trivialities that occupied the time of the IT working party of which he became chair, and which bore the wonderful sprechende Name of the ‘Small Users Committee’; ‘Small Users’ will surely be the name of the campus novel that Rhys will inevitably write. What is more, German under Rhys led the way for the other languages in Swansea: quickly it became clear that the old departments of Romance Studies and German and Russian, far from being burdens for the university to carry, could become – as separate language departments of French, German, Ital- ian, Russian and Hispanic Studies – drivers of Swansea’s reputation. As a result of his efforts, new chairs were appointed in all of the language areas, and the School of European Languages, with Rhys as its head, became an increasingly big fish in the ponds of UWS and language studies nationally. By 1988, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts, too. Lest those who have not seen him in committee action think he had become a card-carrying appa- ratchik who lived only for committee work by now, I believe he still holds the record for the fastest Faculty meeting in Swansea’s history (the fact that the Whites were playing a Rugby match with a 2.30 kick-off that afternoon is, of course, purely incidental). My point might sound facetious, but, to return to my opening remarks, it seems to me that the secret of his success in university politics has always been the willingness to take on any task, without allowing himself to take it too seriously or lose sight of the outside world. Inevitably, then, Rhys soon rose to the position of PVC, a post that he – amazingly – held for over ten years. A measure of his successes in these areas is that, for several years in the late 1990s, he was simultaneously Head of the German Department, Head of the School of European Lan- guages, Cost Centre Manager for Languages, Dean of Admissions for the University and PVC (Academic). Not all colleagues have always realised 8 DAVID BASKER how much that commitment to the success of languages has fostered and protected the departments concerned over the years. Perhaps one of the most amazing aspects of Rhys’s career is that, despite his obvious commitment to university politics and administration and to nurturing his subject area, he has continued throughout his time in Swansea to steer the research activities of the German Department very effectively and to maintain his personal reputation as a researcher of the highest quality. Expressionism and the literature of the Federal Republic have been the main focal points of his own publications during the Swansea years and he is clearly among the leading experts in both fields in Britain. It seems incredible that he also found time to conceive of and – with Colin Riordan’s help – implement an ambitious writer-in-residence project in Swansea. The idea for the project, well fed over a number of weeks with the inspirational Welsh nutrient known as Brains’ bitter, became the Centre for Contemporary German Literature, out of which some twelve volumes of essays, interviews and previously unpublished works by some of Ger- many’s most prominent writers have been produced: Volker Braun, Uwe Timm, Sarah Kirsch, Jureck Becker and Herta Müller are just some of the writers who would never have come to Swansea had it not been for Rhys and Colin’s efforts. Indeed, there is a small but growing presence of refer- ences to Swansea in German literature as a result of these activities: Uwe Timm has written a short story set in Laugharne and which ends at High Street station; and Rhys appears in Sarah Kirsch’s poems on a number of occasions, as ‘mein grauäugiger Gastgeber’, for example, and as ‘mein bester mir zugeteilter Professor’.1 In fact, any research into the activities of the Centre would reveal some fascinating stories, too. Take, for example, the hopelessly disorganised author, who managed on the day of his departure from Swansea to forget his passport, but was able to prove his identity at passport control by showing the officials a picture of himself on the dust-jacket of one of his books. The Centre has certainly enlivened all of Swansea’s research activities and, here as elsewhere, Rhys leaves a powerful

1 Sarah Kirsch, ‘Mumbles-Bay’, in Erlkönigs Tochter (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags- Anstalt, 1992), 38. Professor Rhys W. Williams: An Appreciation 9 legacy, which will be much harder to carry forward without his commitment and enthusiasm. It would, of course, do no justice to Rhys’s career if I were to restrict my comments to his activities inside the institutions in which he has worked. He has worked equally tirelessly to promote those institutions to the outside world and to further the subject of German Studies nationally and internationally in ways that are too numerous to mention. Just to give you a flavour: he has represented Swansea in a range of roles at the level of the University of Wales and, more recently, lobbied the Welsh Assembly Gov- ernment to further the interests of Swansea University and of languages in particular; he has been Vice-President and President of the CUTG; he has served as external examiner and external assessor at a very wide range of UK institutions; his judgement and scrupulous fairness have been used well by funding bodies including the British Academy, the AHRC and the DAAD; and he has served as President of the Carl-Einstein-Gesellschaft and as a member of the committee of the Alfred-Andersch-Gesellschaft. The Auslandsämter of most of the universities in Bavaria count him among their friends; and there is a Gasthaus on the outskirts of Bamberg at which, for over ten years, we met our students on their intercalary year, where Rhys is greeted like a member of the family. It is clear from this brief account that Rhys has enjoyed an extremely full and varied career and he has affected the lives of his colleagues and countless students in many different ways. I have only made passing allu- sion to his interests outside his professional life which, as I have said, have maintained in him an admirable sense of perspective, even at the most pressured professional times: his love of rugby and cricket, his passion for detective novels, for solving crosswords, for cooking and for the red wines of Bordeaux. The memory with which my account begins, of that scene of levitation in the bar at the Gregynog conference centre, lies about twenty years in the past; time catches up on everyone and I am not sure that a repeat performance is likely. The underlying point defeats the passage of time, however: the most appropriate way to mark Rhys’s retirement is to express here, on behalf of everyone who has encountered him in his career, a heartfelt appreciation of his ability to combine a serious engagement with academic interests with as much sheer enjoyment as possible.