R(onald) S(tuart) Thomas (1913-2000) didn’t keep a diary and threw away his drafts (he wrote with a waste-paper basket between his feet) and produced four autobiographies (three in Welsh; one, weirdly, written in the third person, in which he refers to himself as ‘the rector’). This is the worst lot for a biographer: a lack of original material to unearth, and a plethora of pre-existing, partial information already in the public sphere. Rogers has navigated it adeptly by gathering anecdotes and ‘witness statements’ from friends, parishioners and colleagues, providing at 315 pages a condensed, extremely readable book.
The presiding impression I have after reading it is that Thomas’ afterfame as an ogre may have been shaped by his son and literary executor, Gwydion, who was packed away to boarding school as a young boy and seems never to have quite forgiven his father for it.
Rogers’ book suggests both Gwydion’s father and mother, the successful artist Mildred Elsie (‘Elsi’) Eldridge, were not natural parents, and removing their one child from the vicarages gave them the peace to pursue their creativity. Gwydion’s displeasure at his father grew when both his parents were in their dotage, living in a surreal cave-cum-cottage in Aberdaron (any further west and they would have been in the Irish Sea). Gwydion’s gripe seems to be that Thomas did not force Elsi to accept central heating in the place; she, always more concerned with aesthetics than comfort, had it ripped out because she didn’t like the look of the radiators. The Thomases thus lived in a home that barely got above freezing, and Elsi sat painting with her feet in a cardboard box.
This is unfortunate because it does seem that Thomas was not quite the ogre he is famed to be. As vicar he was assiduous in his pastoral care of the sick and needy, generous with money and – at times – funny (Jon Gower, BBC Wales’ Arts Correspondent: “I’ve met three funny men in my life. One was Lenny Bruce, one was Ken Dodd. The third was RS Thomas”).
While at Oxford Gwydion’s acting ability saw him in a play starring Richard Burton. The Thomases had lunch with Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Gwydion Thomas: “During a lull in the conversation, I heard [Thomas] say, ‘And have you tried plaice?’ He was talking about flatfish to Elizabeth Taylor.” Miss Taylor, Thomas told friends, had not been his cup of tea.
The complex love-hate relationship Thomas had with Wales is the central plank of Rogers’ book, as it is with the poems of the man himself. Thomas disliked the South Welsh in particular for what he saw as their acceptance of anglicisation…
Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales,
With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females,
How I have hated you for your irreverence…
...yet was born in Cardiff to non-Welsh speaking parents, and possessed a cut-glass English accent he perfected at theological college to distance himself from what he saw as his ignorant countrymen.
As an Anglican vicar, Thomas was a conformist in a predominantly Nonconformist Wales. He married an Englishwoman, and had a soft-spot for the way the English upper middle class lived. His poems often lambast his fellow countrymen as dim “oafs and yokels” who deserve everything they get…
…an impotent people,
sick with inbreeding,
worrying the carcass of an old song...
…yet he supported the motives of Meibon Glyndwr, the 1980s Welsh nationalist cell that took to setting fire to (up to 200) English-owned holiday cottages (“even if one Englishman got killed, what is that compared to the killing of our nation?”).
He eventually learned Welsh, but never well enough to write poetry in it. When approached by English holidaymakers asking for directions, he would simply shrug and say “no English”.
England, what have you done to make the speech
my fathers used a stranger at my lips…
Perhaps his contradictory feelings are best summed up by his response towards the end of his life to the question of what he would like to see happen to Wales: “Send the English back, then concrete everything over.”
Rogers sorts through four boxes of belongings collected by Gwydion after his father’s death in 2000 (Elsi died in 1991). He finds a disparate collection of belongings of a life: The skull of a hare; a cheese box containing a puffin’s beak; an envelope containing snow bunting feathers; an envelope containing a single dead prawn; a book of phone numbers – containing none.
Essentially, it is as Philip Larkin stated: “What survives of us is love.” This hill-walking, bird-watching, machine-hating misanthrope wrote some of the finest love poetry in the post-war English language.
We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
`Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance, and she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.
Ian Hamilton’s rather sour assessment of who he called a ‘sour’ man in Against Oblivion, his 2002 book on 20th Century poets, may have been different in light of this biography, which may help start a tentative revision of our view of Thomas. Of the work, I prefer to go with Andrew Motion’s assessment, after a tribute to Thomas was held at Westminster Abbey. “I had been aware that some of the poems were similar, and that night I realised why this was. They were all fragments of a Masterwork.”
In my estimation, RS Thomas is - alongside Larkin - one of the two 'pillars' of post-war British poetry.
[2012-03-01]