Caradoc Evans

When Caradoc Evans's novel Nothing to Pay appeared in 1930, it met with much admiration and also much resistance. His ruthless exposure of the Nonconformist establishment undermined the commonly held view that the Welsh were a pastoral, God-fearing people. As Jeremy Brooks put it The Independent, "What the Welsh could not forgive was that they recognized themselves only too clearly in Evans's satirical portraits." But Dylan Thomas praised Evans's work relentlessly, and H.G. Wells said in a lecture: "There was one, who is too little esteemed, who has done the thing [of telling about the trade shops] with a certain brutal thoroughness, and he tells a great deal of truth. That is Caradoc Evans in his book Nothing to Pay." (In America, H.L. Mencken saw in Evans the fundamentalists of the South laid bare, and offered one hundred free copies of his story collection to the local YMCA.) Nothing to Pay relates the story of Amos Morgan, an ambitious draper from Cardiganshire who works his way up to London through the shop trade. Largely autobiographical, this novel was admired by the Welsh literati and has since become a classic of Welsh literature, not only for its scathing satire, but for its brilliant linguistic inventiveness and poetic style.

Our God is a big man: a tall man much higher than the highest chapel in Wales and broader than the broadest chapel. For the promised day that He comes to deliver us a sermon we shall have made a hole in the roof and taken down a wall. Our God has a long, white beard, and he is not unlike the Father Christmas of picture-books. Often he lies on his stomach on Heaven's floor, an eye at one of his myriads of peepholes, watching that we keep his laws. Our God wears a frock coat, a starched linen collar and black necktie, and a silk hat, and on the Sabbath he preaches to the congregation of Heaven. Heaven is a Welsh chapel; but its pulpit is of gold, and its walls, pews, floor, roof, harmonium, and its clock—which marks the days of the month as well as the hours of the day—are of glass. The inhabitants are clothed in the white shirts in which they were buried and in which they arose at the Call; and the language of God and his angels and of the Company of Prophets is Welsh, that being the language spoken in the Garden of Eden and by Jacob, Moses, Abraham, and Elijah. Wales is Heaven on earth, and every Welsh chapel is a little Heaven; and God has favored us greatly by choosing to rule over us preachers who are fashioned in his likeness and who are without spot or blemish. Every Welsh child knows that the preacher is next to God; "I am the Big Man's photograph," the preacher shouts; and the child is brought up in the fear of the preacher. Jealous of his trust, the preacher has made rules for the salvation of our bodies and souls. Temptations such as art, drama, dancing, and the study of folklore he has removed from our way. Those are vanities, which make men puffed up and vainglorious; and they are unsavory in the nostrils of the Big Man. And look you, the preacher asks, do they not cost money? Are they not time wasters? The capel needs your money, boys bach, that the light—the grand, religious light—shall shine in the pulpit. That is the lamp which burns throughout Wales. It keeps our feet from Church door and public house, and it guides us to the polling booth where we record our votes as the preacher has instructed us. Be the season never so hard and be men and women never so hungry, its flame does not wane and the oil in its vessel is not low. White cabbages and new potatoes, eggs and measures of corn, milk and butter and money we give to the preacher. We trim our few acres until our shoulders are crutched and the soil is in the crevices of our flesh that his estate shall be a glory unto God. We make for him a house which is as a mansion set amid hovels and for the building thereof the widow must set aside portions of her weekly old age pension. These things and many more we do, for forgiveness of sin is obtained by sacrifice. Such folk as hold back their offerings have their names proclaimed in the pulpit.

The classic study of the English-language writing of Wales in the first half of the twentieth century by Glyn Jones, drawing on his personal acquaintance with writers like Dylan Thomas, Idris Davies and Caradoc Evans. Tony Brown had the opportunity to discuss the book with Glyn Jones before his death in 1995 and has had access to Glyn Jones's own proposed revisions and to manuscript drafts. This first paperback edition therefore includes some up-dating of the text and a new bibliography. Glyn Jones's first-hand knowledge of the writers, coupled with his shrewdness of critical comments, established the book as an invaluable study of this generation of Welsh writers. At the same time the autobiographical, first chapter in which Glyn Jones examines his own life and literary career - the boy who goes from a Welsh-speaking home in Merthyr, loses his Welsh as a result of his English-language education and cultural changes in industrial Merthyr, takes a job teaching in the slums of Cardiff, re-discovers as an adult the Welsh language and its rich literary tradition and becomes, in a full awareness of that tradition, one of Wales's major English-language writers of fiction and poetry - provides a "case study" of the cultural shifts which resulted in the emergence of a distinctive English-language literature in Wales in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Welsh Gothic, the first study of its kind, introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, telling us much about the changing ways in which Welsh people have historically seen themselves and been perceived by others. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who enter literature from folk lore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, cŵn Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches. Contents Prologue: ‘A Long Terror’ PART I: HAUNTED BY HISTORY 1. Cambria Gothica (1780s–1820s) 2. An Underworld of One’s Own (1830s–1900s). 3. Haunted Communities (1900s–1940s). 4. Land of the Living Dead (1940s–1997). PART II: ‘THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE CELTIC TWILIGHT’ 5. Witches, Druids and the Hounds of Annwn. 6. The Sin-eater Epilogue: Post-devolution Gothic Notes Select Bibliography Index

Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. The succeeding chapters address and seek to answer such questions as: What exactly did the Welsh chapels believe and do? Why have the English-language writers of Wales, from Caradoc Evans and Dylan Thomas to R.S. Thomas and the authors of today, been so fascinated by them? How accurate are the impressions we've been given of chapel life and chapel people in the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales? The answers offered may alter our views both of the Welsh Nonconformist past and of Welsh writing in English. One of the ideas advanced is that many of Wales' most important writers went to war with the preachers in their texts, and that their work is therefore the site of cultural struggle. Theirs was a war in words waged to determine who would have the last word on modern Welsh experience.