The Dragon Has Two Tongues

Glyn Jones

Description

First published in 1968, The Dragon Has Two Tongues was the first book-length study of the English-language literature of Wales. Glyn Jones (1905–95) was one of Wales’s major English-language writers  of fiction and poetry, and the book includes chapters dealing with the work of Dylan Thomas, Caradoc Evans, Jack Jones, Gwyn Thomas  and Idris Davies, all of whom the author knew personally.

This first-hand knowledge of the writers, coupled with the shrewdness  of Glyn Jones’s critical comments, established The Dragon Has Two Tongues as a classic and invaluable study of this generation of Welsh writers. It also contains Glyn Jones’s own autobiographical reflections on his life and literary career, his loss and rediscovery of the Welsh language, and the cultural shifts that resulted in the emergence of a distinctive English-language literature in Wales in the early decades  of the twentieth century.

This edition of The Dragon Has Two Tongues was edited by Tony Brown, who discussed the book with Glyn Jones before his death  in 1995 with unique access to the author’s proposed revisions and manuscript drafts, and it was first published by the University  of Wales Press in 2001.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Idioma inglés
• Irish
• English
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Wales
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786833129
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE DRAGON HAS TWO TONGUES
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
Revised edition first published by the University of Wales Press in 2001.
Originally published as Glyn Jones, The Dragon Has Two Tongues: Essays on Anglo-Welsh Writers and Writing (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1968).
© The Estate of Glyn Jones, 2018
© Tony Brown, Introduction and Notes to the revised edition (2001), 2018
© Reprinted with the permission of Literature Wales
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, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-1693-1
elSBN 978 - 1 - 78683 - 312 - 9
Rights of authorship for this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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 design: Olwen Fowler
Cover image: OBEYphoto/Shutterstock
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Doreen
CONTENTS
Preface to revised edition
Acknowledgements
Editor s acknowledgements for the revised edition
Introduction
I Letter to Keidrych
II Autobiography
III Background
IV Introduction to short stories and novels
V Three prose writers: Caradoc Evans, Jack Jones, Gwyn Thomas
VI Introduction to poetry
VII Three poets: Huw Menai, Idris Davies, Dylan Thomas
VIII Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION
D URING 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 Tongues was 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 undertaken - 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.
Glyn Jones dedicated the original edition of The Dragon has Two Tongues to his wife, Doreen. This edition is dedicated to her memory.
ACKNOWLEDCEMENTS
I should like to express my indebtedness and gratitude to the following: Cyngor Llyfrau Cymraeg (the Welsh Books Council) for their kindness in answering my questions; the Town Clerk of Merthyr Tydfil and the Director of Education for Glamorgan for a similar courtesy; Mr Brynmor Jones of the National Library of Wales for undertaking to read my book in manuscript and for allowing me to see his unpublished bibliography of Anglo-Welsh writers.
EDITOR S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR THE REVISED EDITION
M Y greatest debt is, of course, to Glyn Jones himself, for many fascinating and happy hours of discussion about his writing, including the present volume. I am also much indebted to the preliminary textual work on The Dragon has Two Tongues which was undertaken by my colleague Dr John Pikoulis; Dr Pikoulis s sharp eye identified many of the textual issues which I needed to consider and resolve, including some that I might otherwise have missed. I am also extremely grateful to Mrs Linda Jones, Research Administrator in the Department of English, University of Wales, Bangor, both for her detailed work in transferring the text into an electronic form and for her constantly reassuring assistance with proofs. My thanks are due to Dr Meic Stephens for supplying me with bibliographical information on Glyn Jones and Gwyn Thomas. As ever I am deeply grateful to Sara and Alys (who remember Glyn Jones fondly as the first real writer they met) and Nancy for all their support - and their tolerance.
The publishers wish to thank the following for their permission to reproduce material in this edition:
John Harris for the work of Caradoc Evans and Oliver Sandys; the National Library of Wales for The Gale by Trefîn; Mrs Nel Gwenallt for Glyn Jones s translation of Rhydcymerau by Gwenallt; Arfon Menai Williams for the work of Huw Menai; Gwyn Morris for the work of Idris Davies; Felix de Wolfe for the work of Gwyn Thomas; Mrs Valerie Eliot and Gwyn Morris for the unpublished letter from T. S. Eliot to Islwyn Jenkins; J. M. Dent and the estate of Dylan Thomas for extracts from The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (J. M. Dent, 1985), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (J. M. Dent, 1940), The Notebook Poems, ed. Ralph Maud (J. M. Dent, 1988). Extracts from Dylan Thomas, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, copyright © 1940 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of material reproduced in this volume. In the case of any query, please contact the publishers.
INTRODUCTION
I was a boy with a romantic spirit and, like my father, a great reader. I would consume so many books that Mam would sometimes turn to me and say: For goodness sake take your nose out of that old book for a change . 1
T HIS is Glyn Jones at the age of fourteen. What was he reading, this imaginative, romantic young boy, brought up in a Welsh-speaking family in Merthyr Tydfil in the early years of the twentieth century? Glyn Jones lists some of them in the same memoir: Captain Marryat s Children of the New Forest and Mr Midshipman Easy, Sir Walter Scott s Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward and Kenilworth, the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tom Brown s Schooldays, and the novels of G. A. Henty Not only are these books in English, of course, but they include books whose essential ideology was that of the English middle classes: the public school and its ethics, the Empire, the achievement of personal honour and integrity in defence of the Crown. These are works which were being read not only by boys across England but by English-speaking boys across the Empire.
As Glyn Jones emphasizes in the autobiographical chapter of The Dragon has Two Tongues, while Education Acts passed at the Westminster Parliament from the 1870s onwards had made state secondary education available to all, the Act of 1889 establishing state secondary education in Wales had laid down that the medium of that education was to be English, regardless of the child s native language. Obviously there were other factors which were causing English to become the language of the streets and homes of Merthyr in this period, mainly the massive incursion of English-speaking workers in the late nineteenth century to develop the coal and iron industries of south Wales. But it was above all the government s determination that Wales should be educated in English that brought about for the first time, in Glyn Jones s generation, a significant body of literature expressing the distinctive experience of Welsh life not in Welsh but in English. Glyn Jones argues in The Dragon has Two Tongues:
It seems to me that the language which captures [a writer s] heart and imagination during the emotional and intellectual upheavals of adolescence, the language of his awakening, the language in which ideas - political, religious, aesthetic - and an understanding of personal and social relationships first dawn upon his mind, is the language likely to be the one of his creative work. 2
And so it was, not only for Glyn Jones but for the generation of writers whom he dis