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"I worked for years as a lecturer with the 'Educational Association in South Wales' (W.E.A.)
up and down the Glamorgan valleys, the hardest and most
vitalising phase, brought to complete fulfilment the attitude and
expression for which I had been groping. I wrote a novel called 'Sorrow
For Thy Sons' for a competition run
by Gollancz who was looking for a novel on unemployment. It was
based on the troubles of the anti-means test campaign in which I had
served as committee-man and refulgent orator. The novel was
praised but turned down by the firm's advisers who thought the
bitterness of the work so wild and searing it would be read only by
readers with asbestos underwear.
From then I approached my material with the sidling malicious
obliquity of which the first successful product was The
Dark Philosophers' in 1940. The novel 'A
Stranger at My Side', in I954, was an attempt to write a
philosophic novel that could serve simultaneously as a comic script. The
effort was so knotting it left me in a permanent state of mental hernia.
It hastened my drift away from fiction and towards the theatre and a
state of discursive introspection. |
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Coming to a manuscript in the early evening already exhausted in spirit and voice was a rehearsal for crucifixion. The cerebral frenzy boiled away without a pause inside a body that had become a sick, unwilling mule. It had one peculiar physical effect on my work. My handwriting took a simple revenge on the tensions I was forcing upon it. It ceased to be legible. I wrote two immense novels that were not published; they were not even typed, for the script had assumed a total inscrutability that defied transference on to the machine. It was like the product of a seismograph in a permanent state of alert. The masses of useless writing will remain a sort of Rosetta Stone in the strange landscape of Welsh writing." |
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