Furious Interiors: Wales, R S Thomas and God [Paperback]

Wintle work must be the most exhaustive and definitive study of Thomas to date . Not only is there an erudite examination the increasingly difficult poems but also an honest and sometimes controversial examination of the poets life as it relates to his poetry .However this is not just a study of the life and art of Thomas . Wintle provides us with a refreshingly novel interpretation of Welsh history and an useful giude to Welsh literature . His treatment of Welsh language sources is admirable ; not least "Neb" Thomas's autobiography in Welsh and not translated at that time .This book should be read by all who would know more of these islands least known people and culture .

This controversial biography takes an unconventional approach to this Welsh poet who wrote prolifically (a thousand published poems at the time of this 1996 study) but sparely. Famously, he railed in eloquent English against the anglicization of Cymru. Learning its language beginning in his late twenties, he found himself unable to create but a couple of poems in it. He chose it for much of his mature prose, in which his purported autobiography became a cryptic record of his bitterness at man's depredations of the harsh beauty of his land. Working on behalf of the Established Church as an Anglican vicar, he often refused to address those he met on his daily birdwatching walks if they hailed him in English. Yet, he knew his own tensions and faced his own contradictions in verses that remain of a remarkably high quality- much more than his Romantic or Victorian predecessors' total output. He apparently belittled Wintle, and the author begins his investigation by relating a pub crawl that turns in the wee hours to ponder the poet's impact. (As Wintle critiques Byron Rogers' interviews of Thomas, we can now compare Rogers' "Man Who Went Into the West" biography, the authorized study published a decade later! See my review.)

Half of the results in 450 pages of narrative only take us up to Thomas around fifty, with a hundred poems down. The book, wisely, does not move entirely chronologically. It circles around its avian-loving, human-suspecting, divine-doubting subject cautiously. Wintle, with a background covering Southeast Asian conflicts, engages Thomas by taking on the microcosm- his readings of such creations as "The Lost" about language loss, Iago Prytherch's début as "A Peasant," "Abercuawg" compared to Yeats' "Curse of Cromwell," and the Ann Griffiths pair of poems turn engrossing as they burrow into the disquiet beneath surfaces that at first appear calm, gnomic, or mundane. Wintle knows that any reader of Thomas needs much help. The meanings that lurk demand explanation to those of us unschooled in, say, early Welsh saint's lives or metrics, let alone Kierkegaard, John Jenkins and Derrick Hearne, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Robert Graves' "The White Goddess," or Nonconformity and Antidisestablishmentarianism. Contained within this study, exegeses on Ned Thomas' "The Welsh Extremist," prospects for devolution under Westminster vs. independence under Brussels, and the development of philosophical and theological ontological and epistemological debates all sparkle.

Parts did prove wearying, and it's difficult to sustain the intensity that Thomas demands of his readers; Wintle appears to sense this. A welcome respite appears when he visits the vicar's former living at Aberdaron and talks to the locals. Wintle received opprobrium for his methods, but I defend his integration of the personal quest into the literary research: the interplay of the two nourishes and stimulates him and us. We need a break from the concentrated seminar. Wintle, if the poet will not speak with him, speaks to those who did- or did not- talk with Thomas. These informants reveal a guarded, prickly, but predictably unpredictable and sometimes kind and exemplary figure: as we would expect, a man no less contradictory than us.

Thomas accumulates verses. "Celtic gestalt," Wintle speculates, fragments cohesion: "splintering of the mother-lode into a thousand inter-coded messages." (300) "Whatever Thomas acquires as a poet is put into a constantly expanding retrieval system," and the poet- this book appeared a few years before Thomas' death- continues to revise and alter and rework his material. Today, it'd be akin to a blog or a database that constantly's tinkered with, perhaps a Welsh wiki!

... the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love's risen body.
(The Answer)

R S Thomas writes with an old and simple power. Read Wintle's book and that fact will etch itself on the walls of your preconceptions for ever after. But the unalloyed genius of Thomas is not what this book is merely about. Rather, the distinctive outcrop of the poet-priest's prosody provides Wintle, as an outsider, with a foothold in the cracks of Welsh culture, Welsh language, Welsh life, Welsh national identity.

R S Thomas is concerned with all these Welsh things a priori, they embed themselves in his work even more firmly than God - though, of course, the concepts are not for Thomas mutually exclusive. By closely and intelligently reading the poetry, by reading the surrounding work (be it the poetry of Yeats or the Welsh nationalist campaigning of Saunder Lewis), by walking across the land R S depicts, and by following where the man has spent his life living, Wintle provides the reader with a quixotical read. Without foreknowledge of the poet's work, I found myself fascinated by his project and awed by his capacity for expression. But it is as an insight into the mindset of every born Welshman that this book really proves its worth.

By foregrounding the writing of people like Ned Thomas on the matter of Wales and what it means to be Welsh, Wintle ushers across the border the plight of a nation that has been unable to determine its own destiny for many hundred years, yet has managed to withhold all onslaughts and somehow exists, both for real as a definable place, and in the dreams of those who would wrest power back from London as a beautiful ideal under the enlightened auspices of Hywel Dda. And as a Welshman, it is delightful to read a book that wrestles with the slippery nature of ones own national existence.

The same, you might suppose, applies to reading Thomas's poetry, yet you'd be wrong. Ronald Stuart may be a one-off, determinedly his own man with his own mind and his own, well-rehearsed opinions, but he can touch the very core of human emotions. If you get nothing else out of this book, at least you can turn back to the inclusion of A Marriage (page 31 in my paperback edition), and find out what a truly great poet can do.