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    Herbert Williams
    Herbert Williams
    Herbert Williams
    Ebook156 pages1 hour

    Herbert Williams

    By Phil Carradice

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Herbert Williams is one of Wales' most celebrated and distinguished writers. A man of many talents, he is a poet, novelist, short story writer and historian. This book provides a critical survey of his life and writing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Wales Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2010
    ISBN9781783163991
    Herbert Williams
    Author

    Phil Carradice

    Phil Carradice is a well-known poet, story teller, and historian with over 60 books to his credit. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and TV, presents the BBC Wales History program The Past Master and is widely regarded as one of the finest creative writing tutors in Wales.

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      Book preview

      Herbert Williams - Phil Carradice

      1

      A Welsh Childhood

      In the winter of 1991–1992, shortly after the untimely death of the actor Ray Smith, Herbert Williams was asked to produce a tribute article for the New Welsh Review. Drawing on both his personal and professional relationship with the man, Herbert Williams commented: ‘Above all he loved words. It’s great to have some good words to say, he would remark.’1

      It was an astute comment, but Herbert Williams could so easily have been talking about himself. Words have always been important for him – saying them, reading them and, above all, writing them. Searching for the right words, the best words in the best possible order, has been the central focus of his life, firstly as a journalist and, then, as a writer of poetry, biography, history and fiction. Trying to find a voice for ideas, emotions and dreams has been a quest where clarity of thought and ease of expression have remained paramount.

      Herbert Williams is an accessible writer. He does not know how to be obscure, would not even know how to begin. To an extent this approach might be due to his long years as a journalist and radio/television producer but it is also due to a deeply-held conviction that a writer’s first duty is to communicate, both with himself and with his public. When a critic like Robert Minhinnick, reviewing Herbert Williams’s poetry collection Wrestling in Mud states that, ‘most of the sixty plus pieces have a journalistic clarity’ and, later, complains that the book is ‘a collection of often over-explained poems’2 he misses the point entirely. For Herbert Williams clarity of thought and expression are a virtue. It is the search for clarity that makes the man a writer of consequence. While he writes primarily for himself – something, with self-effacing honesty, to which he readily admits – he also wants and needs others to understand what he is saying. In order for this to happen the search for accessibility is ongoing and essential in everything he writes. He can write with a deliberate and knife-sharp irony, happy to laugh at himself as much as anyone else, but it is the clarity of his phrasing, whether he is writing poetry or prose, that makes his work special.

      Herbert Williams remains something of a rarity in Anglo-Welsh writing – Anglo-Welsh being a term he both dislikes and rejects but it was the descriptive phrase in common parlance when he began publishing his poetry and stories in the early 1960s. Despite an early flirtation with the wordy imagery of Dylan Thomas, it was an infatuation that was soon to pass. He has become something of a people’s champion, writing poetry that can be understood and appreciated – in head, heart and belly – by anyone with an eye and ear for a well-turned phrase. Not for him the intricate word-play of some poets where the arrangement of the lines and the cleverness of the idea are paramount. As Peter Finch has claimed:

      Herbert makes his poetry with a clean, straight measured and accessible line. Clarity, no tricky deviation. If he were English, then he’d find kinship with the Movement poets, with Larkin, with Peter Porter, with those whose pastoral tradition goes back through Edward Thomas to Thomas Hardy and beyond. But he’s Welsh as is obvious from so much of his subject matter – Aberfan, chapels, Mam, the old Welsh ways and a history that is so different from 1066 and the Wars of the Roses. He’s happier in the company of Harri Webb, John Tripp, Sally Roberts Jones, Leslie Norris. They all arrive in the same breath.3

      Over the years, searching has increasingly become a part of Herbert Williams’s persona. He has moved insistently and restlessly through life, searching for his place and vocation, for his role, roots and purpose, always knowing that the answer is just around the corner or in the pages of the next book. The need to search, to seek out new situations, has led to an almost gypsy-like quality to his existence, changing jobs on a regular and consistent basis, routinely moving home and up-rooting his family every few years. It is a restlessness that has sometimes led to more than a little pain and discomfort and probably has its roots in an idyllic but, ultimately, traumatic childhood and adolescence.

      This restlessness and the need to access new experiences also shows itself in the wide range of work he has produced since his first published efforts in 1961. Although acknowledging that he is, first and foremost, a poet, he has always been fluent in a range of different literary genres. With deceptive ease, he moves from poetry to novels, from biography to history, from short stories and novellas to journalism and reviewing, constantly searching for the perfect form of expression.

      Most of what he writes is about human experience, much of it related to Welsh history and to the lives of family and friends. He does not neglect the big themes or issues – love, death, war, and patriotism – but it is the individual experience and individual responses to such imponderables that are crucially important. Even in very early poems the searching theme is evident, even if the search is not always fruitful:

      They say this is no place for the ambitious.

      The young men leave, trailing

      A pity for the people left behind

      (…)

      Far from the accustomed hills they build

      The structure of success which they were told

      Would monument their paragon advance,

      If only they were bold enough to leave

      The moment they were old enough to go

      (…)

      But ambitious they are, ambitious to a man,

      Made ambitious by their education,

      Prisoners of their nourished talents.

      So they display the customary

      Pity for the people left behind.

      But their bleak hearts speak

      The bitter language of the dispossessed.4

      In this poem Herbert Williams’s young men are desperately searching for success and, in the traditional Welsh way, feel they have to leave the country of their birth in order to find it. It is a move that Herbert Williams himself made and came to regret several times. Already, in this early work, he displays some of the qualities that will mark his later poetry – the subtle, almost unobtrusive use of repetition (‘pity for the people left behind’) and alliteration that slips easily into the sub-consciousness. The final line with its two harrowing words, ‘bitter’ and ‘dispossessed,’ deliberately and consciously chosen, underscores the ultimate failure or futility of the search.

      Men and women battling against adversity, enduring what life throws at them as they seek their security or survival, are recurring themes in Herbert Williams’s work. He is genuinely interested in people, whoever or whatever they are. He has a warm but not uncritical affection for human beings, disliking pretentiousness and affectation, often making them targets for his more sardonic, satirical and ironic verse. His affection for – and interest in – people in general is a theme that runs through all his work. His biographies of individuals like the industrialist David Davies of Llandinam and the writer John Cowper Powys are as powerful as any work of fiction. Even in seemingly austere or esoteric books like Stagecoaches of Wales he manages to fill his text with human interest – it is the drunken coach drivers and their unwitting passengers who catch and hold the imagination of the reader.

      In order to understand the significance of searching as a driving force behind Herbert Williams’s writing – indeed, to reach below the deceptively straightforward style that has deceived many critics and, thereby, gain any proper understanding of his work – one cannot ignore his life experiences. It is a truism, a cliché maybe, that a person’s present has been decided by his or her previous history but, perhaps more than many Welsh writers of recent years, the events of Herbert Williams’s past have impinged themselves powerfully onto his creative processes. They have been so significant and have, arguably, been so devastating that they have gripped him like a vice for the whole of his adult life. These experiences have shaped him, made him the way he is, and have become recurring themes in both his poetry and prose. And to fully understand those one needs to go back to the beginning, to the seaside town of Aberystwyth.

      The youngest son of Richard and Minnie Williams, Herbert Lloyd Williams was born at four in the morning on 8 September 1932 at 18 Glanrafon Terrace, Aberystwyth. A late child who was unplanned and, perhaps because of this, greatly loved by all family members, he was born within a few months of his mother’s 45th birthday. Herbert tells the story of a Gypsy pedlar – a common enough sight in those days, virtually unknown now – who came around the streets selling pegs and bunches of lucky heather. Seeing the toddler standing next to his mother on the doorstep, she refused to believe it was Minnie Williams’s son and insisted on calling him her grandson. When he began to attend school the young boy could not understand why the mothers of the other children all seemed so young.

      In the 1930s, Aberystwyth was a remote and distant community, situated on the western coast of a country that had little understanding of its past and almost no inclination to look to the future. In an unpublished autobiographical fragment, Herbert Williams has caught the mood of the house and the town where he was born and lived for his formative years:

      We lived at 18 Glanrafon Terrace, bang in the middle of three blocks of redbrick terraced houses by the river Rheidol in Trefechan, the ‘little town’ just south of the bridge in Aberystwyth. It was known at the time as ‘Turkey’ and nobody quite knows why; perhaps because some of its inhabitants were as ferocious as Turks were imagined to be. I like to think it was here that the true Welsh people lived in the earliest days of the borough, when only English settlers were allowed inside the small, protected community that grew around the castle. The castle

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