THE DRAGON HAS TWO TONGUES This page intentionally left blank THE DRAGON HAS TWO TONGUES Essays on Anglo-Welsh Writers and Writing by Glyn Jones Revised edition Edited with an introduction and notes by Tony Brown UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2001 © Meic Stephens,2001 © Introduction and Notes,Tony Brown,2001 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–7083–1693–X All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted,in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 6 Gwennyth Street, Cardiff,CF24 4YD. Website:www.wales.ac.uk/press Typeset at University of Wales Press Printed in Great Britain by Dinefwr Press,Llandybïe Er cof am Doreen This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Preface to revised edition ix Acknowledgements xi Editor’s acknowledgements for the revised edition xii Introduction xiii I Letter to Keidrych 1 II Autobiography 5 III Background 37 IV Introduction to short stories and novels 46 V Three prose writers:Caradoc Evans,Jack Jones, Gwyn Thomas 60 VI Introduction to poetry 117 VII Three poets:Huw Menai,Idris Davies, Dylan Thomas 131 VIII Conclusion 192 Notes 197 Bibliography 211 Index 220 This page intentionally left blank PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION DURING the closing years of his long life, Glyn Jones expressed the wish that The Dragon has Two Tongues,the first book-length study of the English-language literature of Wales, be republished. Discussion ensued,with my colleague Dr John Pikoulis and then with myself,as to quite what form this should take,given that some quarter of a century had ensued since its original publication,years in which,of course,much new writing,both creative and critical,had appeared.Glyn himself went through the text of The Dragon,identifying what would need updating and drafting some revisions to passages in the early chapters. He also drafted a Preface to the new edition,which indicated his intentions: The Dragon has Two Tongueswas first published in 1968.I had intended in writing it that it should deal with a certain group of writers of our country and with certain events and literary developments during the previous thirty years or so in which these writers had been involved. I think it would be a mistake for someone with my experience to try to bring up to date here what I had to say in 1968.Far too much has changed in Wales for me to attempt to do this adequately.The events of the last quarter of a century surely deserve treatment in a book by a different hand. Glyn Jones felt,however,that clearly some revisions had to be under- taken – the insertion of dates of the deaths of those writers who had died since 1968,the correction,in his words,of ‘some errors of fact’ and the removal of ‘a few infelicities of expression’.He also wanted to incorporate as many as possible of the footnotes in the original edition into the text. I have attempted as closely as possible to follow Glyn Jones’s wishes in editing this new text,including consulting his own copy of the book which contains his marginal queries.The death of some authors whom he discussed has of course necessitated some alteration of tenses, and some passages which deal with factual and statistical matters now well out of date have been revised or removed.Some explanatory notes have been added.The attempt has been,in other words,to produce a text which has few obvious signs of datedness and and to allow Glyn Jones’s account of the evolution of Wales’s English-language literature and his reflections on that first generation of writers, the writers whom he knew personally,to speak to the reader as freshly and directly as ever.