It is natural to think in terms of centres and peripheries. A capital city has everything, government, banking, embassies, publishing houses, national museums, theatres, concert halls, opera houses, and more. Anyone with ambition gravitates there.
Ancillary ‘centres’ may exist like Oxford and Cambridge, but they act as feeders for the real centre, in this case London. Beyond the centre, by definition, is the periphery, which goes by various derogatory names—backwoods, backwaters—where yokels live. Part of this periphery of course is the ‘Celtic fringe’ inhabited by paddies, taffies and jocks.
If you live on the edge you feel the centripetal pull. In these islands, for centuries, if you wanted to make a name for yourself you had to make it in London. And it is still true, because on the periphery you are always facing the centre, while the centre most definitely will not be facing you.
You may wish to challenge this and turn away, but there is a cruel ironical fact—to gain recognition as an artist, musician, composer, dramatist, poet, novelist, you have to gain recognition at the centre. The attention you attract there will be reflected back to where you happen to be, because the periphery deals in reflected light, just as the Moon reflects the light of the Sun.
This has been especially true for English-language writers in Wales—even for so thoroughgoing a patriot as R.S. Thomas. He published almost all his books with London publishers, or in later years, with Bloodaxe, a leading provincial English publisher. His subject was Wales (and God), but as far as his publishing career was concerned, his gaze was fixed on England.
Publishers in Wales can rarely keep their most successful authors, for, like it or not, they act as nurseries for the far bigger London publishing scene, and Welsh authors almost to a man or woman leap at the chance of being published there. The rest are small fry not worth the catch, to be thrown back in the sea.
Coming from the ‘Celtic fringe’ myself—and indeed from a fringe of the fringe in the border town of Abergavenny—I had these attitudes myself, and for many years I tried to get published in English magazines and submitted poetry collections to London publishers without success.
What Australians call the ‘cultural cringe’ vis-à-vis London is powerful, and I cannot help seeing my failure to achieve publication there as an indicator of my failure as a poet.
However, another side of me thinks differently. This side thinks there are many centres like raindrops falling on the surface of a pond. Each raindrop sends out ripples that overlap with ripples from other raindrops. Where is the centre? Each is a centre, and their centres interact with others, perhaps eventually reaching the far side of the pond.
Sometime in the 1970s, when I taught at Copenhagen University, I attended a reading in the English Department by Sorley MacLean. I don’t think I had heard of him but we didn’t have that many readings by poets so I went along. There were about a dozen of us, a poor turn-out MacLean must have thought, and perhaps a measure of his worth? (At about the same time, Seamus Heaney read to a packed audience in a large lecture hall.)
I am glad I went because it was the greatest experience of poetry I have ever had. MacLean talked about each poem, then read it, first in Scots Gaelic and then in his own English translation. He read with a keening tone in a way no longer used by poets but which was common to poets of his generation—R.S. Thomas had it to a degree, and you can hear it in the recording of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ read by W.B. Yeats.
Sarn y Plas
All the tragedy of Scots Gaelic was enfolded in those tones, a lament for his lost world of Raasay and for the young men with whom he fought and who he saw die in the desert campaign of the Second World War. His reading of the Gaelic sent cold chills down my spine in a way that had never happened before and has never happened since. The translations were illuminating, of course, and moving in their own way, but at the deepest level they were not necessary.
I have often thought about that afternoon. There was one such centre, in the Western Isles of Scotland (‘remote’ or ‘far-flung’ needs to be added if you are a metropolitan), and ripples from it had touched me deeply.
The idea of multiple overlapping centres of culture is particularly relevant to Wales, because we have never had a metropolis in the way the English have in London. Wales has always been decentred. It is true that Cardiff has become the official capital of the country and that political power now resides there. Culture, however, does not. Travel in Wales is easier today, but writers and artists are dispersed across the land in small towns and villages in a way that is not so different from how it was in the fourteenth century.
Seen from within the gravitational pull of the metropolis, this confirms the status of Wales as a backwater, and if you think in these terms then that is undoubtedly what we are. Didn’t Dylan Thomas escape to London as quickly as he could? Didn’t R.S. seek publication there? Yes, and yes.
See photos Sarn y Plas
Dylan Thomas was always the outsider in London, though, and all his poetry and fiction is deeply infused with ‘provincial’ Swansea and west Wales. He succumbed to the gravitational pull of the English metropolis and it bought him fame, but at the price of helping to destroy him.
R.S. Thomas felt the pull but was only partially drawn in by it. He remained true to the source of his poetry in ‘obscure’ (metropolitan-speak) country parishes in Mid and North Wales. Visiting Sarn y Plas a couple of years ago— the tiny bwthyn built out of massive boulders overlooking Porth Neigwl where he wrote and his wife Mildred Eldridge painted—I peered through dusty panes at the emptied rooms, the bare floorboards.
Here too had been a centre, a great centre. On the way north from Aberystwyth we also paid a visit to Hedd Wyn’s family farmhouse, Yr Ysgwrn, now a museum in honour of the poet. There was another centre, one of the many that ripple and overlap in the formation of Welsh culture.
Yr Ysgwrn
All of this will seem like special pleading, of course, if you subscribe to the metropolitan view of things, and there can be no arguing about this. I think I am right, however, even though it leaves me no clearer as to where I stand myself.
SARN Y PLAS
Peered in windows at emptiness
where mice used to watch and listen
to fingers raised above typewriter keys
conducting a poem into the world
to be a conductor of many little things
to be a builder who brick by brick
raised a building of poems then left
shutting the door without looking back.