Pacifism, Peace and Modern Welsh Writing

By Linden Peach

This book introduces the contribution of modern Welsh literature to our understanding of peace and pacifism – an important and much overlooked subject in Welsh studies. Taking a literary-historical approach to the subject, it reveals how modern Welsh writing opens up history in ways in which historical discourse alone sometimes fails to do. It argues that the concepts of peace, peacefulness and pacifism have played a broader and more complex role in Welsh life than has been recognised, primarily through an influential Welsh-language pacifist intelligentsia. The author reminds us that Welsh pacifism is distinguished from English pacifism by the Welsh language itself, its links with Welsh nationalism and by the fact that it faced challenges and pressures never encountered by English pacifism. Authors discussed in this study include Tony Curtis, George M. Ll. Davies, Pennar Davies, John Eilian, Emyr Humphreys, Glyn Jones, D. Gwenallt Jones, T. Gwynn Jones, T. E. Nicholas, Iorwerth C. Peate, Angharad Price, Ned Thomas, Lily Tobas and Waldo Williams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781786834058

Linden Peach

Professor Linden Peach is Director of Educational Development at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, London. He has published extensively on modern literature, including important works on the Welsh novelist and pacifist Emyr Humphreys, and on Welsh women’s writing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the English Association.

Book preview

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Pacifism, Peace and

Modern Welsh Writing

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WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies

General Editors: Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams (CREW, Swansea University)

This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.

Other titles in the series

Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1)

Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1)

Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8)

Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)

Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)

Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (978-0-7083-2053-2)

Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (978-0-7083-2153-9)

Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2)

Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)

Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist (978-0-7083-2217-8)

M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (978-0-7083-2225-3)

Linden Peach, The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (978-0-7083-2216-1)

Daniel Westover, R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (978-0-7083-2413-4)

Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (978-0-7083-2483-7)

Judy Kendall, Edward Thomas: The Origins of His Poetry (978-0-7083-2403-5)

Damian Walford Davies, Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English (978-0-7083-2476-9)

Daniel G. Williams, Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845–1945 (978-0-7083-1987-1)

Andrew Webb, Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies: Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature (978-0-7083-2622-0)

Alyce von Rothkirch, J. O. Francis, realist drama and ethics: Culture, place and nation (978-1-7831-6070-9)

Rhian Barfoot, Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-Sexual Servitude (978-1-7831-6184-3)

Daniel G. Williams, Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (978-1-7831-6212-3)

M. Wynn Thomas, The Nations of Wales 1890–1914 (978-1-78316-837-8)

Richard McLauchlan, Saturday’s Silence: R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading (978-1-7831-6920-7)

Bethan M. Jenkins, Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century (978-1-7868-3029-6)

M. Wynn Thomas, All that is Wales: The Collected Essays of M. Wynn Thomas (978-1-7868-3088-3)

Laura Wainwright, New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930–1949 (978-1-7868-3217-7)

Siriol McAvoy, Locating Lynette Roberts: ‘Always Observant and Slightly Obscure’ (978-1-7868-3382-2)

Pacifism, Peace and

Modern Welsh

Writing

WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

LINDEN PEACH

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2019

© Linden Peach, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN:       978-1-78683-402-7 (hardback)

                 978-1-78683-403-4 (paperback)

e-ISBN:    978-1-78683-405-8

The right of Linden Peach to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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The University of Wales Press acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council in publication of this book.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Doves © Freepik. Montage Clifford Hayes.

Original peace (ND) symbol designed by Gerald Holtom (1958)..

i

Angela, Hedley, Matthew a Kate

ac er cof am fy mam, fy nhad a’m chwaer Cynthia

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Preface

Acknowledgements

Pacifism and Protest

1  Mapping Welsh Pacifism

2  Disruptive Bibles

3  Prison(s)

Peace and Peacefulness

4  The Spirit of Pacifism: Waldo Williams and D. Gwenallt Jones

5  Unpeaceful Voices: Writing the Home Fronts

Conflicting Worlds

6  Post-Pacifism: Peace and War

7  A Welsh Pacifist Translation of an English Classic... an Afterword

Notes

Select Bibliography

Series Editors’ Preface

The aim of this series, since its founding in 2004 by Professor M. Wynn Thomas, is to publish scholarly and critical work by established specialists and younger scholars that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. The studies published so far have amply demonstrated that concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies can illuminate aspects of Welsh culture, and have also foregrounded the potential of the Welsh example to draw attention to themes that are often neglected or marginalised in anglophone cultural studies. The series defines and explores that which distinguishes Wales’s anglophone literature, challenges critics to develop methods and approaches adequate to the task of interpreting Welsh culture, and invites its readers to locate the process of writing Wales in English within comparative and transnational contexts.

Professor Kirsti Bohata and Professor Daniel G. Williams

Founding Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (2004–15)

CREW (Centre for Research into the English

Literature and Language of Wales)

Swansea University

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Preface

Pacifism is not passive. It is part of the radicalism of Wales associated with protest, rebellion and insurgency. The popular conviction that there is, or has been, a tradition of pacifism in Wales has been questioned by reputable Welsh historians, who have traced the way in which the peace organisations have waxed and waned in Wales over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the part that pacifism has played in Welsh life is broader and more complex than the fortunes of the peace movement and is linked to an influential Welsh-language, pacifist intelligentsia.

While this study addresses the organisational history of peace movements in Wales, it is primarily concerned with how pacifism has contributed more widely to Welsh culture, and especially its literature. The part that pacifism has played, and still plays, in the political and cultural evolution of modern Wales is a subject which a literary-historical approach is well equipped to examine and this book breaks new ground in exploring pacifism through texts written in Welsh and English. If anything distinguishes Welsh and English pacifism, it is the Welsh language itself and how Welsh pacifism faces challenges and pressures which never confronted English pacifism. In combining, for the first time, an examination of the history of pacifism with pacifist writing, this study argues that Welsh pacifism and campaigns for peace – through Welsh-language periodicals, pamphlets and literary texts – were brought into existence by a Welsh, and primarily Welsh-language, intelligentsia which it did much, in turn, to constitute.

The texts discussed in this book have been published in English or have been published in translation. The latter is not unproblematic for many reasons, not least because Welsh–English translation is inevitably enmeshed in the wider vicissitudes of Welsh social and cultural politics. Inevitably, these come to the fore in the translation of Welsh pacifist writing into English because pacifists, who historically have been in the vanguard of campaigns in support of nationalism and the Welsh language, have often found themselves confronted by a seemingly impermeable anglicised cultural and political establishment. But in discussing Welsh texts in translation, this book has sought to concentrate on how translators have responded to the subtleties of meaning and the richness of the original Welsh, and have displayed sympathy with the pacifist intentions of the work and its breadth of understanding of pacifism. Beginning with the assumption that readers come to a creative work, whether in translation or in the original language, for the enjoyment of words, the emphasis throughout is on the way in which translators have engaged with particular structures, vocabularies and forms of expression.

It is not news that meaning is always the product of difference between words, but it is particularly important to a discussion of ‘pacifism’ to keep in mind that the meaning of words is never stable and changes over time. Central to this book is how the concepts of ‘pacifism’, ‘peace’ and ‘war’ stand revealed differently in different works and acquire fresh significances in new contexts. In conflating literature and history, context inevitably assumes considerable significance and this study examines how literature opens up history in ways in which historical discourse alone sometimes fails to do, while always recognising that for many Welsh- and English-language writers context is often a site of anxiety.

This study argues that through a literary-historical approach, relying on the original Welsh or on translation, the philosophical depth, social realism, psychological momentum and even the doubt and despair involved in ‘coming out’ as a pacifist in a non-pacifist society are more convincingly unveiled. The best Welsh pacifist works, or creative works indebted to concepts which have been developed by Welsh pacifists, are among the most innovative in Welsh writing. In them, it is not only customary discourses, beliefs and preoccupations that are challenged but concepts of time, memory, insight, ‘knowing’ and ‘being’. Thus, this study is poised around how pacifist writing unearths a hidden stream of cultural thought, memory and reflection that for the many reasons explored in this study, whether written in English or Welsh, is distinctly Welsh.

This cultural stream is followed through select key texts from the beginning of the twentieth century, when Welsh pacifism was associated primarily with anti-war and no-conscription movements, to the mid-twentieth century, when it evolved into a much broader social ideology concerned with the wider quality of human life, and to the latter half of the twentieth century, when the emphasis within pacifism shifted to anti-nuclear protest and the need to protect and preserve life and the planet itself. The changing nature of pacifism is linked with the evolution of the language of peace and war and an examination, through these varied texts, of where and how they became fixed, albeit temporarily, in wider binaries and hierarchies of meaning. Within this framework, the book explores how the different affiliations which the language of peace and conflict acquired at different times affected the experience of pacifism and conscientious objection.

The experience of conscience, reflection and ‘spirituality’ constitutes an important part of these texts, many of which are ‘religious’ in the widest sense. At one level, the failure to recognise this emerges as one of the reasons why Welsh pacifism, beyond a sequence of movements and organisations, has not been fully explored. However, the ‘drama’ which we find in Welsh pacifism and in many Welsh pacifist texts often lies in the conflict of voice and perspective, the analysis of event and conscience, and the shifting nature of the relationship between the internal and the external. It is the connection between these different levels of insight, reflection, drama and conflict in Welsh pacifist writing that this study begins to explore.

The book also explores how ‘pacifism’ in Wales came to mean much more than what we might call ‘anti-war-ism’, and ‘peace’ itself came to mean not only ‘not being at war’ but, in the work of some writers, an inner peacefulness. While ‘pacifism’, which often slips into discussion of opposition to war and violence, and ‘peace’, where it signifies a peaceful mode of being, are often distinguished from each other and explored as if they are separate spheres, this is not the case in Wales. The work of the key Welsh pacifist-cum-political writers, such as Waldo Williams and D. Gwenallt Jones, reaches out to an external world comprised of a multiplicity of human voices and complex social and communal structures which they seek to transform by their nationalist ambitions and their pacifist values. Even the most ‘political’ of the Welsh pacifist poets, including T. E. Nicholas, famous for his prison sonnets, and those torn apart by doubt and depression, are motivated by the connection between an innate peacefulness and being human.

acknowledgements

Like all books by teachers in higher education, this work has benefited from discussions with colleagues and students, and I am grateful to all at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts who have contributed to the development of my thoughts and arguments in ways in which some of them may not even be fully aware. In its later stages, the book also benefited from insights and discussions at an international conference on Virginia Woolf and pacifism at the University of Kent, where I delivered a paper on Woolf’s influence on the work of one of Wales’s leading pacifist writers, Emyr Humphreys.

I have been inspired by scholars and colleagues who have argued for, and have demonstrated in their own works, an interdisciplinary approach to literature, history and geography and by those who have pursued relationships between Welsh- and English-language literature. My own Welsh has provided me with fresh insights into the history and culture of Wales without which this book would not have been possible, and I am indebted to tutors in Welsh at the Open University and Welsh for Adults, Bangor University, for that.

I am grateful, also, for the encouragement and support of the University of Wales Press and especially Dr Llion Wigley (commissioning editor, Welsh Language and Topics) and his colleagues in the production and marketing divisions.

Many authors are indebted to the patience and support of their families who are up to their necks in their own projects, and in my case I must gratefully acknowledge my wife, Angela.

Pacifism and Protest

1

Mapping Welsh Pacifism

...methodd ein hen elyn

 diffodd y Goleuni Oddi-mewn

Y fflam sy’n oddaith yn ein hydref melyn

A’n troi, er trallod, yn goncwerwyr ewn.

...our old enemy failed

To extinguish the Inner Light.

The flame which is ablaze in our yellow autumn

Will turn us, despite sorrow, into bold conquerors.

(Iorwerth C. Peate, ‘Diwedd Blwyddyn’)

‘No nation has produced, in proportion to its population, a greater number of bards, preachers, musicians and rebels.’¹ The fortunes of the Welsh peace movements, important as they have been to the pacifist cause, are only half the story. We must not overlook the wider network of intellectuals, writers, academics, teachers and theologians who have constituted the Welsh, especially the Welsh-language, intelligentsia. Through their individual and collective stand in the name of peace, as well as their contributions to specific peace organisations, a distinctively Welsh pacifism entered Welsh culture. Some of its principal concerns are, and have always been, different from those of English pacifism, and Welsh pacifism can only be understood through the Welsh-language literary platforms and media that have supported it, the forums in which issues have been debated, and the literature – both in Welsh and English – which it directly or indirectly produced.

How pacifism entered Welsh culture, and especially Welsh-language culture, is a complex story that is unique to Wales, as are many of the associations and concerns that it acquired along the way. But through all its twists and turns, what is exciting about Welsh pacifism is that it has always risen to the moment without ever allowing the moment to define it.

WHAT’S IN A WORD?

Pacifism is not something posted on a closed door. It is an ongoing intellectual, moral and spiritual challenge. The term ‘pacifism’ was coined by Émile Arnaud (1864–1921) at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in 1902. He meant it to mean a ‘celebration of peace’ rather than simply an ‘opposition to war’, which he thought of as ‘anti-war-ism’.² As will emerge in this study, ‘Peace’ has a broader range of meaning than ‘not being at war’. The peace scholars David Cadman and Scherto Gill make a distinction between Western approaches to peace, which, they argue, ‘tend to focus on external harmony, accord and respect for citizens, institutions and nations’, and Eastern concepts of peace, which ‘are more oriented toward personal virtues and inner qualities’.³ But, as we shall see, particularly as our discussion of the celebrated Welsh pacifist poets Waldo Williams (1904–71) and D. Gwenallt Jones (1899–1968) unfolds, this distinction is not always applicable to Wales.

The meaning of ‘pacifism’, like peace itself, has proved fluid, acquiring different connotations and emphases at different times and in relation to changing circumstances. It is not necessary to read very far into Welsh pacifist writing before realising that Welsh pacifism is not simply an opposition to war but addresses the structural roots of conflict in society and the social causes of inequalities including gender, class, ethnicity and race, and in doing so supplants them by pro-peace values.

Examining ‘pacifism’ in a literary-historical context highlights how the meaning of the word, and the different associations which it has acquired, have determined the experiences and the sufferings of those who have declared themselves ‘pacifists’, often leading to accusations of cowardice, to personal abuse and assault, and to imprisonment and, even, death. A First World War Welsh-language recruiting poster read: ‘Anibyniaeth [sic] sydd yn Galw am ei Dewraf Dyn.’ In calling for the bravest men to volunteer, it immediately set up a stark opposition between those who were the bravest of men and conscientious objectors, which defined not only what was meant by ‘conscientious objector’ but also by ‘dewraf dyn’.

That there is no clear, stable relationship between the word ‘pacifist’ and what it signifies is a recurring theme of Welsh, particularly Welsh-language, pacifist writing. At the heart of this concern is the way in which the term relates to other words (or ‘signifiers’) such as ‘coward’, ‘hero’, ‘conscience’, ‘Christian’, ‘moral’, ‘saint’, ‘realist’ and ‘innocent’; how meaning is culturally constructed; and how this process of constructing meaning engenders binary oppositions and hierarchies, for example ‘war hero’ and ‘conscientious objector’, which determine how society sees pacifists. ‘Coming out’ as a pacifist, for that is what it is, means experiencing one’s own language and culture in ways that are not unexpected but nevertheless still shocking. In Welsh writing about pacifism, be it in Welsh or English, the cultural and linguistic divisions within Wales stand more revealed.

One of the most important twentieth-century Welsh pacifists, George M. Ll. Davies (1880–1949), characteristically pulls no punches in his posthumously published collection of reflective essays and meditations, Pilgrimage of Peace (1951): ‘We are living according to the thought standard of the herd and are unconsciously dominated by these subtle and disguised herd instincts.’⁴ Davies was a Nonconformist through and through, and, as the literary critic Wynn Thomas says, this meant ‘radically dissenting, both in spirit and in actual social practice, from the comfortably established order of things’.⁵ In his essay, ‘In Forma Pauperis’ (1922), Davies argues that from a radical pacifist point of view, language as well as actions have to be ‘stripped of its camouflage’.⁶ By camouflage he means the political and ideological inferences language acquires. In relation to war, he suggests that this is often ‘according to the outlook of victors and vanquished’, so there is an ideological difference between ‘Guards in red and Red Guards’; ‘guards and gun-men’ and between how a ‘martyr’ in Ireland is a ‘miscreant’ in England (ETP, p. 66). It is an argument that others, such as the Welsh cultural critic Ned Thomas, have taken further. Thomas maintains:

Languages are very delicate networks of historically accumulated associations... [with] innumerable and untraceable connections with the thought of past centuries, with the environment... with the moral and emotional terms in which the community has discussed its differences.’⁷

SPECTACLE OF WAR AND PEACE

Much Welsh pacifist writing seeks to undo conventionally accepted systems of classification and hierarchical distinctions. The cultural historian David Gee points out how British and Commonwealth soldiers ‘are universally promoted heroes, as if the cardinal virtue of their profession were heroic choice rather than obedience to orders’.⁸ Thus,

if a roadside bomb blows a soldier into pieces, he has ‘made the ultimate sacrifice’, as if he had chosen his own death, and his ignominiously eviscerated body joins ‘our glorious dead’. However, a soldier on the other side of the war is never heroic, always ‘the enemy’, always nameless, and not killed but ‘neutralised’.⁹

Although the way in which war is presented has changed over the centuries, in our mass media and consumer culture, militarism has become what is often termed a ‘spectacle’. Spectacle, as Gee says, is the product of two features of Western consumer culture: ‘ideological consumption’ and a sense of ‘alienation’ from the world in which we are consumers, as if we live in a spiritual void. These cultural forces, acting together, have resulted in ‘our growing immersion in the spectacle at the expense of critical awareness of the world’.¹⁰ Perhaps not surprisingly then, the importance of critical awareness is at the heart of pacifism. Indeed, it is ‘critical awareness’ which the Peace Pledge Union has promoted since 1934:

We believe there is no justification for the widespread promotion of the heroic status of military personnel nor the frequent insistence that children should be grateful to the war dead. We believe that the distribution to every school of educationally questionable material which uncritically praises the armed forces by the government and at remembrance time by the British Legion should be challenged and severely restricted.¹¹

In his pamphlet Religion and the Quest for Peace, George Davies insightfully argues (which many contemporary world leaders would do well to note) that despite ‘high pronouncements’, war has always failed to deliver ‘mankind from want and fear and force’.¹² His focus is not simply on the carnage of war, the subject of works such as ‘Gweriniaeth a Rhyfel’ (Republicanism and War) (1920) by the pacifist poet Niclas y Glais (T. E. Nicholas, 1879–1971), but on how war fails to stem the tide of ‘the moral degeneracy’ that he believed brought it about: ‘force, fraud, savagery, untruthfulness’ (RQP, p. 8). These are brave words, but Davies always associated pacifism with courage, imagination, education and critical awareness.

As an example of how culturally constructed meanings and hierarchies can become periodically fixed in ‘spectacle’, Gee offers the symbolic red poppy. When it was originally introduced after the First World War, it was meant to signify the ‘sentiment of Never Again’ which ‘percolated through the population’.¹³ But it has become, Gee argues, an invitation to ‘lionise British and Commonwealth fatalities as The Glorious Dead’, as in the annual remembrance parade in London and the British Legion charity.¹⁴ By contrast, the white poppy has a more inclusive meaning, signifying the ‘remembrance of all the victims of wars – whether soldiers or civilians, whether ours or theirs – and declaring a commitment to build a culture of peace’.¹⁵

The movement to ‘lionise’ the war dead in British culture has shaped the way in which the spectacle of war has been perceived in Wales as well as in England. The notable Welsh historian Kenneth O. Morgan maintains that the Zulu War generated anxiety over the status of Wales as an imperial power, but this ‘paled by comparison with the acclaim won by the South Wales Borderers at Rorke’s Drift and Isandhlwana’.¹⁶ However, what Morgan overlooks is the way in which Rorke’s Drift became a ‘spectacle’ of militarism and, linked with the consequent ‘rash of Welsh Victoria crosses’,¹⁷ fostered an uncritical appraisal of the war.

Many Welsh pacifist writers have addressed the militaristic connotations of national images and symbols and the way in which they have been accepted uncritically. George Davies, for example, unveils the ‘historic emblems’ of the ‘[Great] Powers – the American Eagle, the British Lion, the Russian Bear, the Welsh Dragon, and other terrifying animals, [as] symbols of conceptions and methods of barbarism, of Terror as Power’ (PP, p. 29). In his work, it is part of a wider analysis, based on his own experience, of the social structures and hierarchies by which pacifists are oppressed. For example, in Triniaeth Troseddwyr (Treatment of Criminals), one of the Heddychwyr Cymru (Peacemakers of Wales) pamphlets by Welsh pacifists at the start of the Second World War, his experience of imprisonment causes him to see warders, governors and prisoners alike as ‘so many cogs in a vast machine’.¹⁸ In the essay ‘Bottom Dogs – II’, this time writing as a conscientious objector undertaking enforced work in rural Carmarthenshire, he sees the social structure as a pyramid in which the governor is at the apex, underneath whom are the county council, contractor, timekeeper, ganger and, at the bottom, the conscientious objector as prisoner.¹⁹

MILITARISM, DISCOURSE AND MASCULINITY

In confronting the militaristic state, the pacifist is faced with discourses embedded in a complex entanglement of state-sanctified ideologies, social structures and symbolism. This is an important motif in Emyr Humphreys’s modernist novel A Toy Epic, begun when he was working as a conscientious objector on a farm in west Wales in 1941 and completed in 1958.²⁰ It is a book with which many Welsh readers will be familiar from their school, college or, simply, general reading. Written in the voices