Pacifism, Peace and Modern Welsh Writing

Linden Peach

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786834034, 9781786834027
• eBook ISBN: 9781786834058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book introduces the contribution of modern Welsh literature to our understanding of peace and pacifism – an important and much overlooked subject in Welsh studies. Taking a literary-historical approach to the subject, it reveals how modern Welsh writing opens up history in ways in which historical discourse alone sometimes fails to do. It argues that the concepts of peace, peacefulness and pacifism have played a broader and more complex role in Welsh life than has been recognised, primarily through an influential Welsh-language pacifist intelligentsia. The author reminds us that Welsh pacifism is distinguished from English pacifism by the Welsh language itself, its links with Welsh nationalism and by the fact that it faced challenges and pressures never encountered by English pacifism. Authors discussed in this study include Tony Curtis, George M. Ll. Davies, Pennar Davies, John Eilian, Emyr Humphreys, Glyn Jones, D. Gwenallt Jones, T. Gwynn Jones, T. E. Nicholas, Iorwerth C. Peate, Angharad Price, Ned Thomas, Lily Tobas and Waldo Williams.

Pacifism and Protest

1

Mapping Welsh Pacifism

...methodd ein hen elyn

 diffodd y Goleuni Oddi-mewn

Y fflam sy’n oddaith yn ein hydref melyn

A’n troi, er trallod, yn goncwerwyr ewn.

...our old enemy failed

To extinguish the Inner Light.

The flame which is ablaze in our yellow autumn

Will turn us, despite sorrow, into bold conquerors.

(Iorwerth C. Peate, ‘Diwedd Blwyddyn’)

‘No nation has produced, in proportion to its population, a greater number of bards, preachers, musicians and rebels.’1 The fortunes of the Welsh peace movements, important as they have been to the pacifist cause, are only half the story. We must not overlook the wider network of intellectuals, writers, academics, teachers and theologians who have constituted the Welsh, especially the Welsh-language, intelligentsia. Through their individual and collective stand in the name of peace, as well as their contributions to specific peace organisations, a distinctively Welsh pacifism entered Welsh culture. Some of its principal concerns are, and have always been, different from those of English pacifism, and Welsh pacifism can only be understood through the Welsh-language literary platforms and media that have supported it, the forums in which issues have been debated, and the literature – both in Welsh and English – which it directly or indirectly produced.

How pacifism entered Welsh culture, and especially Welsh-language culture, is a complex story that is unique to Wales, as are many of the associations and concerns that it acquired along the way. But through all its twists and turns, what is exciting about Welsh pacifism is that it has always risen to the moment without ever allowing the moment to define it.

WHAT’S IN A WORD?

Pacifism is not something posted on a closed door. It is an ongoing intellectual, moral and spiritual challenge. The term ‘pacifism’ was coined by Émile Arnaud (1864–1921) at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in 1902. He meant it to mean a ‘celebration of peace’ rather than simply an ‘opposition to war’, which he thought of as ‘anti-war-ism’.2 As will emerge in this study, ‘Peace’ has a broader range of meaning than ‘not being at war’. The peace scholars David Cadman and Scherto Gill make a distinction between Western approaches to peace, which, they argue, ‘tend to focus on external harmony, accord and respect for citizens, institutions and nations’, and Eastern concepts of peace, which ‘are more oriented toward personal virtues and inner qualities’.3 But, as we shall see, particularly as our discussion of the celebrated Welsh pacifist poets Waldo Williams (1904–71) and D. Gwenallt Jones (1899–1968) unfolds, this distinction is not always applicable to Wales.

The meaning of ‘pacifism’, like peace itself, has proved fluid, acquiring different connotations and emphases at different times and in relation to changing circumstances. It is not necessary to read very far into Welsh pacifist writing before realising that Welsh pacifism is not simply an opposition to war but addresses the structural roots of conflict in society and the social causes of inequalities including gender, class, ethnicity and race, and in doing so supplants them by pro-peace values.

Examining ‘pacifism’ in a literary-historical context highlights how the meaning of the word, and the different associations which it has acquired, have determined the experiences and the sufferings of those who have declared themselves ‘pacifists’, often leading to accusations of cowardice, to personal abuse and assault, and to imprisonment and, even, death. A First World War Welsh-language recruiting poster read: ‘Anibyniaeth [sic] sydd yn Galw am ei Dewraf Dyn.’ In calling for the bravest men to volunteer, it immediately set up a stark opposition between those who were the bravest of men and conscientious objectors, which defined not only what was meant by ‘conscientious objector’ but also by ‘dewraf dyn’.

That there is no clear, stable relationship between the word ‘pacifist’ and what it signifies is a recurring theme of Welsh, particularly Welsh-language, pacifist writing. At the heart of this concern is the way in which the term relates to other words (or ‘signifiers’) such as ‘coward’, ‘hero’, ‘conscience’, ‘Christian’, ‘moral’, ‘saint’, ‘realist’ and ‘innocent’; how meaning is culturally constructed; and how this process of constructing meaning engenders binary oppositions and hierarchies, for example ‘war hero’ and ‘conscientious objector’, which determine how society sees pacifists. ‘Coming out’ as a pacifist, for that is what it is, means experiencing one’s own language and culture in ways that are not unexpected but nevertheless still shocking. In Welsh writing about pacifism, be it in Welsh or English, the cultural and linguistic divisions within Wales stand more revealed.

One of the most important twentieth-century Welsh pacifists, George M. Ll. Davies (1880–1949), characteristically pulls no punches in his posthumously published collection of reflective essays and meditations, Pilgrimage of Peace (1951): ‘We are living according to the thought standard of the “herd” and are unconsciously dominated by these subtle and disguised herd instincts.’4 Davies was a Nonconformist through and through, and, as the literary critic Wynn Thomas says, this meant ‘radically dissenting, both in spirit and in actual social practice, from the comfortably established order of things’.5 In his essay, ‘In Forma Pauperis’ (1922), Davies argues that from a radical pacifist point of view, language as well as actions have to be ‘stripped of its camouflage’.6 By camouflage he means the political and ideological inferences language acquires. In relation to war, he suggests that this is often ‘according to the outlook of victors and vanquished’, so there is an ideological difference between ‘Guards in red and Red Guards’; ‘guards and gun-men’ and between how a ‘martyr’ in Ireland is a ‘miscreant’ in England (ETP, p. 66). It is an argument that others, such as the Welsh cultural critic Ned Thomas, have taken further. Thomas maintains:

Languages are very delicate networks of historically accumulated associations... [with] innumerable and untraceable connections with the thought of past centuries, with the environment... with the moral and emotional terms in which the community has discussed its differences.’7

SPECTACLE OF WAR AND PEACE

Much Welsh pacifist writing seeks to undo conventionally accepted systems of classification and hierarchical distinctions. The cultural historian David Gee points out how British and Commonwealth soldiers ‘are universally promoted “heroes”, as if the cardinal virtue of their profession were heroic choice rather than obedience to orders’.8 Thus,

if a roadside bomb blows a soldier into pieces, he has ‘made the ultimate sacrifice’, as if he had chosen his own death, and his ignominiously eviscerated body joins ‘our glorious dead’. However, a soldier on the other side of the war is never heroic, always ‘the enemy’, always nameless, and not killed but ‘neutralised’.9

Although the way in which war is presented has changed over the centuries, in our mass media and consumer culture, militarism has become what is often termed a ‘spectacle’. Spectacle, as Gee says, is the product of two features of Western consumer culture: ‘ideological consumption’ and a sense of ‘alienation’ from the world in which we are consumers, as if we live in a spiritual void. These cultural forces, acting together, have resulted in ‘our growing immersion in the “spectacle” at the expense of critical awareness of the world’.10 Perhaps not surprisingly then, the importance of critical awareness is at the heart of pacifism. Indeed, it is ‘critical awareness’ which the Peace Pledge Union has promoted since 1934:

We believe there is no justification for the widespread promotion of the heroic status of military personnel nor the frequent insistence that children should be grateful to the war dead. We believe that the distribution to every school of educationally questionable material which uncritically praises the armed forces by the government and at remembrance time by the British Legion should be challenged and severely restricted.11

In his pamphlet Religion and the Quest for Peace, George Davies insightfully argues (which many contemporary world leaders would do well to note) that despite ‘high pronouncements’, war has always failed to deliver ‘mankind from want and fear and force’.12 His focus is not simply on the carnage of war, the subject of works such as ‘Gweriniaeth a Rhyfel’ (Republicanism and War) (1920) by the pacifist poet Niclas y Glais (T. E. Nicholas, 1879–1971), but on how war fails to stem the tide of ‘the moral degeneracy’ that he believed brought it about: ‘force, fraud, savagery, untruthfulness’ (RQP, p. 8). These are brave words, but Davies always associated pacifism with courage, imagination, education and critical awareness.

As an example of how culturally constructed meanings and hierarchies can become periodically fixed in ‘spectacle’, Gee offers the symbolic red poppy. When it was originally introduced after the First World War, it was meant to signify the ‘sentiment of “Never Again”’ which ‘percolated through the population’.13 But it has become, Gee argues, an invitation to ‘lionise British and Commonwealth fatalities as “The Glorious Dead”’, as in the annual remembrance parade in London and the British Legion charity.14 By contrast, the white poppy has a more inclusive meaning, signifying the ‘remembrance of all the victims of wars – whether soldiers or civilians, whether ours or theirs – and declaring a commitment to build a culture of peace’.15

The movement to ‘lionise’ the war dead in British culture has shaped the way in which the spectacle of war has been perceived in Wales as well as in England. The notable Welsh historian Kenneth O. Morgan maintains that the Zulu War generated anxiety over the status of Wales as an imperial power, but this ‘paled by comparison with the acclaim won by the South Wales Borderers at Rorke’s Drift and Isandhlwana’.16 However, what Morgan overlooks is the way in which Rorke’s Drift became a ‘spectacle’ of militarism and, linked with the consequent ‘rash of Welsh Victoria crosses’,17 fostered an uncritical appraisal of the war.

Many Welsh pacifist writers have addressed the militaristic connotations of national images and symbols and the way in which they have been accepted uncritically. George Davies, for example, unveils the ‘historic emblems’ of the ‘[Great] Powers – the American Eagle, the British Lion, the Russian Bear, the Welsh Dragon, and other terrifying animals, [as] symbols of conceptions and methods of barbarism, of Terror as Power’ (PP, p. 29). In his work, it is part of a wider analysis, based on his own experience, of the social structures and hierarchies by which pacifists are oppressed. For example, in Triniaeth Troseddwyr (Treatment of Criminals), one of the Heddychwyr Cymru (Peacemakers of Wales) pamphlets by Welsh pacifists at the start of the Second World War, his experience of imprisonment causes him to see warders, governors and prisoners alike as ‘so many cogs in a vast machine’.18 In the essay ‘Bottom Dogs – II’, this time writing as a conscientious objector undertaking enforced work in rural Carmarthenshire, he sees the social structure as a pyramid in which the governor is at the apex, underneath whom are the county council, contractor, timekeeper, ganger and, at the bottom, the conscientious objector as prisoner.19

MILITARISM, DISCOURSE AND MASCULINITY

In confronting the militaristic state, the pacifist is faced with discourses embedded in a complex entanglement of state-sanctified ideologies, social structures and symbolism. This is an important motif in Emyr Humphreys’s modernist novel A Toy Epic, begun when he was working as a conscientious objector on a farm in west Wales in 1941 and completed in 1958.20 It is a book with which many Welsh readers will be familiar from their school, college or, simply, general reading. Written in the voices of three boys from different Welsh backgrounds and set in the late 1930s, the novel, as I have explained elsewhere,21 is influenced by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). This novel did not come easily to Humphreys, and Woolf’s text seems to have helped him resolve some of the difficulties that he was having with it. Like The Waves, it is a novel driven by the consciousnesses of a small group of individuals rather than by plot, and how closely Humphreys used Woolf’s model is evident in the way he has employed exactly the same phrase as Woolf to signal a change in the speaking voice – ‘...said...’ (as in, ‘The first day I went to school, said Albie, I was escorted by my mother’).22 At the time Humphreys wrote this novel, he was interested in modernist fiction, particularly the work of William Faulkner, and As I Lay Dying would have offered him an example of the kind of novel he wanted to write. But it was clearly Woolf who provided him with the most appropriate model because Humphreys was interested not simply in employing different voices but different consciousnesses. The 1930s, in which the novel is set, was not an easy time for pacifists and in Wales they faced challenges which did not trouble pacifists in other parts of the UK, challenges which the consciousness-driven novel enabled Humphreys to explore.

Although Humphreys adapted the model of The Waves, the two novels are different in as far as their content is concerned. Humphreys reduced Woolf’s six young men and women to three young men, and further developed her concern with the way in which cultural forces and symbolic discourses define and construct masculinity. Since Humphreys’s three boys come from different backgrounds, the most obvious interpretation of the novel is that it explores the varied, regional nature of Wales and what constitutes ‘Welshness’. But a further reason why the boys come from different parts of Wales may be that Welsh pacifism involved not only people from different backgrounds but depended on particular cultural and geographical contexts within Wales (such as Welsh-speaking, rural, Nonconformist west Wales) more than others.

Given the decades in which A Toy Epic was written and set, and the author’s commitment to peace as a conscientious objector, it is unsurprising that the novel frequently touches on the subject of pacifism. However, this is a motif which scholars have surprisingly overlooked. Early in the book, Humphreys invokes popular, pacifist stories about the First World War. One of these involves a British soldier who, at the last minute, baulks at the prospect of killing a German who begs him for his life; another concerns two young British and German soldiers, who, on encountering each other, both lower their guns as the Germa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors' Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Pacifism and Protest
• Peace and Peacefulness
• Conflicting Worlds
• Notes
• Select Bibliography