The Centenary EditionRaymond Williams

Who Speaks for Wales?Nation, Culture, Identity

Raymond Williams, Daniel G. Williams, Daniel G. Williams

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786837097
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the words of the philosopher Cornel West, Raymond Williams was 'the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals'. A figure of international importance in the fields of cultural criticism and social theory, Williams was also preoccupied throughout his life with the meaning and significance of his Welsh identity. Who Speaks for Wales? (2003) was the first collection of Raymond Williams's writings on Welsh culture, literature, history and politics. It appeared in the early years of Welsh political devolution and offered a historical and theoretical basis for thinking across the divisions of nationalism and socialism in Welsh thought. This new edition, marking the centenary of Williams's birth, appears at a very different moment. After the Brexit referendum of 2016, it remains to be seen whether the writings collected in this volume document a vision of a 'Europe of the peoples and nations' that was never to be realised, or whether they become foundational texts in the rejuvenation and future fulfilment of that 'Welsh-European' vision. Raymond Williams noted that Welsh history testifies to a 'quite extraordinary process of self-generation and regeneration, from what seemed impossible conditions.' This Centenary edition was compiled with these words in mind.

LITERATURE

DYLAN THOMAS’S PLAY FOR VOICES

Critical Quarterly, 1 (1959), 18–26.

Collected in C. B. Cox (ed.), Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice-Hall Inc., 1966), pp. 89–98.

I

Under Milk Wood, in approximately its published form, was first played in New York only a few weeks before Dylan Thomas died there. His work on it, during the last months of his life, was work against time and breakdown, yet in essence we can regard it as complete. The marks of the history of the play are, nevertheless, quite evident, and in particular the many revisions which the plan of the play underwent remain as separable layers, if not in the total effect of the work, at least in its formal construction. The play grew from a broadcast talk, ‘Quite Early One Morning’, which described the dreams and waking of a small Welsh seaside town. Daniel Jones, in his preface to Under Milk Wood, describes the stages through which this developed towards the work as we now have it. There was the insertion, and subsequent abandonment, of a plot, in which the town was to be declared an insane area, and the blind Captain Cat, at a trial of sanity, was to call the inhabitants in their own defence. The defence was to be abandoned, finally, after the prosecution’s description of a sane town, the inhabitants of Llaregyb at once petitioning to be cordoned off from such sanity.¹ Thomas worked on this scheme, under the title ‘The Town was Mad’, but later changed the action back to a simple time-sequence description of Llaregyb itself. This was published, as far as it had been written – up to the delivery of letters by the postman Willy Nilly – as Llaregyb, a Piece for Radio Perhaps, in 1952. Then this was again revised, the title changed to ‘Under Milk Wood’, and performed, again incomplete, in May 1953. John Malcolm Brinnin has described the last-minute writing and revision for this performance, which was part of Thomas’s American reading tour.² By the following October, having left aside certain things he had planned to include, Thomas had finished the play as we now have it.

This confused and racing history seems not to have affected the spirit of Under Milk Wood, though the loss of ‘The Town was Mad’ is a thing to regret. It is in construction that the different intentions are evident, and in particular in the multiplication of narrators. The original narrator, the blind Captain Cat, was an obvious device for radio. Then, in the scheme of ‘The Town was Mad’, Captain Cat became a central character, so that eventually another narrator was necessary. With his public readings in mind, and following also the habits of this kind of radio play, Thomas moved steadily back towards emphasis on the narrative voice. In the final version there are two narrators, First Voice and Second Voice, and there is also narration by Captain Cat and the Voice of a Guidebook. Formally, this is confusing, though part of the difficulty lies in the whole concept of a play for voices.

A primary complaint against the majority drama of this century has been the thinness, the single dimension, of its language. The development of domestic drama, and the emergence of the theory of naturalism, had brought themes and situations nearer to ordinary everyday life at the sacrifice of the older intensity of dramatic language. The words to be spoken by ordinary people in ordinary situations must be a facsimile of their ordinary conversation, rather than a literary expression of their whole experience. But then the paradox is that the very method chosen to authenticate the reality of the experience – that the play sounds like actual people talking – turns, in its overall effect, to a deep conviction that, after all, important elements of reality have been excluded. And this is, indeed, not difficult to understand, when we consider the nature of speech and experience, and ask ourselves to what extent our own sense of personal reality, the full actuality of our experience, can in fact be adequately communicated in the terms of ordinary conversation. Many of our deepest and richest experiences are unlikely to be reducible to conversational terms, and it is precisely, the faculty we honour in poets that, by means of art, such experiences can find public expression.

However, in the case of drama, it is not easy to accommodate this kind of communication within the framework of an action limited to observed external probability. The revolt against naturalism, which has distinguished the drama of this century, is a many-sided attempt to get beyond the limitations imposed by a criterion of reality which is essentially external. The difficulty has been, throughout, that in certain respects drama is inescapably explicit, has inescapably to be shown. The idea of the play for voices, primarily developed in terms of sound broadcasting, is one of many attempts to make a new convention in which the necessary explicitness is preserved, yet without limitation to a single dimension of reality. It is a very difficult undertaking, and it is not surprising that the device of narration should have gained such a crucial importance. In terms of recent stage drama, narrative can be called undramatic, but in fact, on a longer view, it can be seen that in some of the most satisfactory dramatic forms ever achieved – in Athenian tragic drama in particular – narrative has had an important place. The rehabilitation of narrative, in broadcast drama, was a sound instinct, and Under Milk Wood, in spite of the crudity of its narrative structure, is the most successful example we have of its dramatic usefulness.

There is another reason for the emphasis on narrative. The craft of dialogue, in modern drama, has been ordinarily so much practised in terms of naturalism, that to a poet, or a writer with similar intentions, it has come to seem the hardest and most baffling part of drama: not only because it is in any case difficult, but because to lapse into the dialogue of a single dimension is so easy and so frustrating. Narrative, in comparison, is free, and in a way is turned to in relief. There is a similar turning, wherever possible, to such devices as chorus and song, because these again follow relatively directly from kinds of writing practised elsewhere. In the case of Under Milk Wood, the narrative structure must be seen, finally, as in part a successful convention for a particular kind of play, in part a residue of weakness following from both general and personal inexperience in this kind of dramatic attempt.

II

I have distinguished three elements – three kinds of writing – in Under Milk Wood: narrative, dialogue, song. If we look at examples of each, we can make certain important judgments of value. The narrative of the first and second voices is, in my opinion, relatively unsuccessful – perhaps, indeed, because it was too well-known, too easy a manner. This sinuous, decorated, atmospheric writing has become commonplace in broadcast drama, and I think it is ordinarily unsatisfactory, and particularly so in Dylan Thomas, where it opens the gate to certain observable weaknesses of his poetry. Near the beginning, for instance, we find

the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

The ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack’ device seems a nervous habit rather than actual description; a facile assonance rather than a true dramatic rhythm. This can be seen more clearly by contrast with a piece of successful narration, where significantly Thomas is involved with action and character rather than with suggestion of an atmosphere:

The Reverend Eli Jenkins, in Bethesda House, gropes out of bed into his preacher’s black, combs back his bard’s white hair, forgets to wash, pads barefoot downstairs, opens the front door, stands in the doorway and, looking out at the day and up at the eternal hill, and hearing the sea break and the gab of birds, remembers his own verses…

The suggestiveness of the former piece is strictly casual, a simply verbal device, whereas in the latter piece the rhythms point and make the action, and the verbal order plays its part in character. ‘His bard’s white hair’ is not merely decorative, like ‘sloeblack’; it contains both relevant meanings, the man’s appearance and the sense, in the word order, of the bard’s part he is acting. The rhythmic stop and surprise, so casually placed, of ‘forgets to wash’, is again serving the whole situation being presented. It is the difference between dramatic writing and unattached tremolo.

There is some significance in this distinction, when extended to Thomas’s work as a whole. Under Milk Wood is important because it seems to break a personal deadlock, a long imprisonment in a particular kind of practised effect, in much the same way that Yeats’s plays mark the development from the imprisoning ‘wan, pale, languishing’ world of his early poetry to the fine hardness and clarity of his later work. It is a movement out of a self-regarding personal rhythm into a more mature and more varied world. Whenever Thomas touches the action of his town and its people, there is a sudden sharpening and deepening, very different in effect from the posing rhythms of the anxious, word-locked, suggestive observer.

The actual voices are very different from the atmospheric voices of the narrators:

2W. And look at Ocky Milkman’s wife that nobody’s ever seen.

1W. He keeps her in the cupboard with the empties

3W. And think of Dai Bread with two wives

2W. One for the daytime one for the night.

4W. Men are brutes on the quiet.

It is ordinarily this one sharp comic lilt, but it is markedly better than

The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring …

The imprisoning rhythm is broken whenever the drama is actual, and it is interesting to notice that it is also broken for the songs, which are not set romantic pieces, but ballads in the mood of the successful dialogue:

In Pembroke City when I was young

I lived by the Castle Keep

Sixpence a week was my wages

For working for the chimbley sweep.

Those of us who were most critical of Dylan Thomas’s earlier method, though recognizing that it had produced three of four remarkable poems, welcomed Under Milk Wood because it was the beginning of a break-out from a fixed, affected manner, which he seems to have recognized, in his last years, as increasingly unable to express all the varied life that was actually his experience, and that at last broke through in this play.

III

The main literary source of Under Milk Wood is the similar ‘play for voices’ in the Circe episode (Part Two, section twelve) of Joyce’s Ulysses.³ The parallels are remarkable, and some of them should be cited. I will put what in Ulysses is printed as stage-direction (though of course it is not this) into the narrative-voice form which Thomas adopted:

N. Ellen Bloom, in pantomime dame’s stringed mobcap, crinoline and bustle, widow Twankey’s blouse with mutton-leg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her hair plaited in a crispine net, appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand and cries out in shrill alarm

EB. O blessed Redeemer – what have they done to him! My smelling salts!

N. She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out.

EB. Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all, at all?

N. Bloom, mumbling, his eyes downcast, begins to bestow his parcels in his filled pockets but desists, muttering. A voice, sharply

V. Poldy!

B. Who?

N. He ducks and wards off a blow clumsily.

B. At your service.

N. He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him …

If we compare this with the ordinary method of Under Milk Wood, the technical continuity is obvious:

N. Mr. Pugh reads, as he forks the shroud meat in, from Lives of the Great Poisoners. He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round the book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up at Mrs. Pugh, poisons her with his eye, then goes on reading. He underlines certain passages and smiles in secret.

Mrs. P. Persons with manners do not read at table,

N. says Mrs. Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a horse-pill, washing it down with clouded peasoup water. Mrs. P. Some persons were brought up in pigsties.

P. Pigs don’t read at table, dear.

N. Bitterly she flicks dust from the broken cruet. It settles on the pie in a thin gnat-rain.

The continuity, moreover, is in more than technique. Compare:

Mr. Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through spinneys of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs. Pugh a venomous porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her until her ears fall off like figs (Thomas)

I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you. (Joyce)

Soon it will be time to get up.

Tell me your tasks, in order.

I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.

I must take my cold bath which is good for me. (Thomas)

You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the different rooms. You’ll be taught the error of your ways. (Joyce)

There is an evident similarity between Under Milk Wood and Ulysses (each covering the life of an ordinary day), not only in kinds of imagination, but also in certain marked rhythms. I do not make the comparison to show Thomas unoriginal, though that he learned from Joyce is obvious. The interest is rather in the kinds of speech both are able to develop, as alternatives to one-dimensional ‘public’ conversation. Thomas is writing for speaking, rather than writing speech (conversation) in the ordinary sense. The ordinary poetic alternative to conversation has been rhetoric, but this is by no means the only variant. There is the chorus of cries:

Try your luck on spinning Jenny! Ten to one bar one! Sell the monkey, boys! Sell the monkey! I’ll give ten to one! Ten to one bar one! (Joyce)

How’s it above? Is there rum and laverbread? Bosoms and robins?

Concertinas? Ebenezer’s bell? Fighting and onions? (Thomas)

Or the simple, hard chanting:

I gave it to Molly

Because she was jolly

The leg of the duck

The leg of the duck. (Joyce)

Boys boys boys

Kiss Gwennie where she says

Or give her a penny.

Go on, Gwennie. (Thomas)

By weaving a pattern of voices, rather than an ordinary conversational sequence, the reach of the drama is significantly enlarged. It can include not only things said, but things left unsaid, the interpenetration of things seen and imagined, the images of memory and dream, the sharp rhythmic contrasts of this voice and that, this tone and that, this convention and others. When we first read Ulysses, it seems that we are reading actual conversation, hearing our own full voices, spoken and unspoken, for the first time. The ordinary dialogue of a naturalist play seems, by comparison, artificial and theatrical. Under Milk Wood is slighter than Ulysses, but there is the same achievement of a living convention: the voices, in their strange patterns, are among the most real we have heard. This success raises interesting possibilities for the drama as a whole, when we remember that, in England at any rate, the ordinary modern alternative to naturalism has been, not a pattern of voices, but the single general-purpose poetic rhythm of Eliot or Fry. It is significant that the varied pattern of voices has been achieved only in the context of an abandonment of ordinary naturalistic action. The Circe scene in Ulysses, and Under Milk Wood, follow the methods of expressionist drama, which similarly aims not at representation but at a pattern of experience. Yet it is not only in modern expressionism that we find this intention; we find it also in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, in the Walpurgisnacht scene of Goethe’s Faust, and, interestingly, in the storm-scenes in Lear. The pattern of voices of Lear, the Fool, and Edgar as Poor Tom seems to me basically similar, in method and intention, to this writing by Joyce and Thomas. Lear is an obviously greater work, and the storm-writing is only one element in it, but the resemblance matters, and the authority of Lear is important, if we are not to confine our conception of drama to a single-level, tidy, public representation.

IV

I have emphasized technical points, in the foregoing analysis, because we are still searching for a satisfactory contemporary dramatic form, and the partial success of Under Milk Wood is particularly instructive. It was not written for the stage, yet in fact, after some rearrangement, it was staged very successfully. It remains true, in the drama and the theatre, that we do not know what we can do until we have tried; our ordinary conceptions of what is theatrically possible, what is properly dramatic, remain timid and custom-bound, though constant experiment is essential. Under Milk Wood justifies itself, if only as this.

Yet in substance, also, it is not inconsiderable. I...