New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930-1949 Laura Wainwright A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in English Literature Cardiff University 2010 UMI Number: U585B95 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U585395 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 1 Contents List of Figures 2 Abstract 4 Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 When was Welsh Modernism? 1 ‘The dissolving and splitting of solid things’: Welsh 10 Modernism’s ‘crisis of language’ 2 ‘Always observant and slightly obscure’: Lynette Roberts as 66 Welsh Modernist 3 Vernon Watkins’s ‘modem country of the arts’ 98 4 Cadaques and Carmarthenshire: the Modernist ‘heterotopias’ 137 of Salvador Dali and Dylan Thomas 5 The grotesque Modernism of Gwyn Thomas and Rhys Davis 167 Conclusion 208 Bibliography 210 Appendix Figures 1-27 List of Figures Figure 1. Cover of Blast No. 1 (1914) Figure 2. Carlo Carra, Interventionist Manifestation (1914) Figure 3. Tullio Crali, A ir Battle I (1936-38) Figure 4. Otto Dix, Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1914-15) Figure 5. William Blake, Dante Runningfrom the Three Beasts (1824-27) Figure 6. Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1852) Figure 7. Salvador Dali View of Cadaquesfrom Play a Poal (1920) Figure 8. Salvador Dali, View of Cadaquesf rom Mount Pani (1921) Figure 9. Salvador Dali, The Persistence ofM emory (Soft Watches) (1931) Figure 10. Salvador Dali, Vertigo — Tower of Pleasure (1930) Figure 11. Salvador Dali, The Spectre of Sex Appeal (1934) Figure 12. Salvador Dali, Untitled (William Tell and Gradiva) (1933) Figure 13. Salvador Dali, The Hand — Remorse (1930) Figure 14. Salvador Dali, The Red Tower (Anthropomorphic Tower) (1930) Figure 15. Salvador Dali, The Enigma of Desire — My Mother,: My Mother; My Mother (1929) Figure 16. Salvador Dali, The Great Masturbator (1929) Figure 17. Salvador Dali, Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act ofM ilking a Cranial Harp (1933) Figure 18. Salvador Dali, Illuminated Pleasures (1929) Figure 19. Otto Dix, Prager Strasse (1920) Figure 20. Otto Dix, The Skat Players (1920) Figure 21. George Grosz, Dedicated to Oskar Panina (1917-18) Figure 22. Conrad Felixmuller, Industrie — Regenlandschaft (1922) Figure 23. Conrad Felixmuller, Ruhrrevierl (1920) Figure 24. Erich Heckel, Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait) (1919) Figure 25. Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilette of Salome (1893) Figure 26. Aubrey Beardsley, The Mysterious Rose Garden (1894) Figure 27. Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax (1893) Abstract This thesis aims to surmount the perennial critical neglect of literary Modernism in Wales through revealing and examining the Welsh Modernism of eight, key Anglophone Welsh writers. In chapters one, two and three, in which I examine work by Gwyn Thomas, Glyn Jones, Idris Davies, David Jones, Lynette Roberts and Vernon Watkins, I demonstrate how, in different ways, the linguistic experimentation of Welsh writers both reflects and constitutes their engagement with the potentially revolutionary, Modernistic conditions generated by unprecedented linguistic, social and cultural change in modem Wales. In chapter four, I draw a comparison between Dylan Thomas’s use of rural Carmarthenshire, and Salvador Dali’s use of Cadaques, on the Catalonian coast, to create psycho-geographical spaces of Modernist transgression; while in chapter five, I identify and explore similarly combative and progressive Modernist techniques — specifically, of the grotesque — in the work of Gwyn Thomas and Rhys Davies. I conclude that Welsh writing in English from 1930-1949 saw the emergence of a distinct, Welsh Modernism that challenges conventional literary histories and, in more than one sense, takes Modernism and Modernist studies into new territories. 5 Acknowledgments I would like to extend my sincerest thanks To Professor Martin Coyle, Dr. Claire Connolly and, most of all, to my supervisor, Dr. Katie Gramich, in the Department of English Literature at Cardiff University — diolch o galon, Katie - for their generosity, wisdom and friendship. To my parents, Lizzie and Howard Wainwright, for their unwavering support, encouragement and kindness; and to my sister, Rebecca, whose creativity, insight and humour have been constant sources of strength and inspiration. And to Darrell Thomas — whose contribution surpasses words — with love, always. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of both the School of English Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 6 Introduction When was Welsh Modernism? On 17 March 1987, Raymond Williams presented a lecture as part of a series convened by the University of Bristol. The lecture was called When Was Modernism?’ — a title that Williams ‘borrowed from a book by [his] friend Professor Gwyn Williams: When Was Wales?'— and posited the following argument: After Modernism is canonized [. .] by the post-war settlement and its accompanying, complidt academic endorsements, there is then the presumption that since Modernism is here in this specific phase or period, there is nothing beyond it. The marginal or rejected artists become classics of organized teaching and of travelling exhibitions in the great galleries of the metropolitan cities. ‘Modernism’ is confined to this highly selective field and denied to everything else in an act of pure ideology, whose first, unconscious irony is that, absurdly, it stops history dead. Modernism being the terminus, everything afterwards is counted out of development. It is after, stuck in the post.2 Nowhere is the exclusionary force of conventional histories of Modernism more palpable than in the country of Raymond Williams’s birth and the subject of Professor Gwyn Williams’s book: Wales. With the exception, perhaps, of Saunders Lewis in the Welsh language, and Dylan Thomas, occasionally Caradoc Evans, and David Jones (whose work is most often studied in the context of English or ‘British’ Modernism) in English, Wales’ writers have been, in the main, debarred from scholarly discussions of literary Modernism. In the case of Welsh writing in English, a minority of scholars have at least addressed the prospect of a Welsh Modernism as part of more discursive studies of the literature of Wales — notably M. Wynn Thomas in Internal Difference: Twentieth- Centuiy Writing in Wales (1992) and Corresponding Cultures: The Two Uteratures of Wales (1999), and Tony Conran in Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry (1997). Yet no sustained nor 1 Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism?’, in Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London and New York: Verso, 2007), pp. 31-35 (p. 31). 2 Ibid., pp. 34-35. 7 sufficiently wide-ranging study of Anglophone Modernism in Wales has been undertaken. Christopher Wigginton recognises this deficiency in his recendy published book, Modernism from the Margins: The 1930s Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas (2007), stressing that Welsh Modernism continues to be neglected, even within Wales’;3 but he too limits the scope of his critical enquiry to Dylan Thomas, only mentioning other potentially Modernist Welsh writers in passing. My aim in this thesis is to begin to afford the topic of Welsh Modernism the critical scrutiny that it has so far been ‘denied’, by considering Anglophone Welsh writing from the 1930s and 40s in the context of European Modernist literature and art. In a sense, I combine Gwyn Williams’s question, When Was Wales?’ with Raymond Williams’s adaptation, When Was Modernism?’ and ask, When Was Modernism in Wales?’ Part of the reason why the notion of a Welsh Modernism has gone mosdy unexplored, it seems, is the (often superficial) dissimilarity between canonical Modernist literature and art, and Anglophone Welsh writing of the first half of the twentieth century. With no firmly established ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literary tradition from which to deviate (an issue which I examine more closely in chapter one of this thesis); flourishing, for the most part, after the high Modernist period, between 1930 and 1949; and tending to be concerned with rural and industrialised locations and milieus in a way that contravenes the popular conception of Modernism as ‘an art of cities’,4 Anglophone Welsh writing, has, to use Williams’s terms, ‘been counted out of development’ — ‘stuck in the post’ and on the periphery. Yet to exclude Welsh writing from discussions of Modernism on the basis of these narrow criteria is, now, in the current climate of Modernist studies, completely unjustifiable; for critics have recendy begun to recognise the divergent, 3 Christopher Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins: The 1930s Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas (Cardiff: University o f Wales Press, 2007), p. 111. 4 Malcolm Bradbury, T he Cities o f Modernism’, in Modernism: A. Guide To European Literature 1890-1930 , ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFariane (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 96-104 (p. 96). 8 multifaceted character of Modernism, and to