The angry summer: a poem of 1926

143 Pages·1993·1.46 MB·English

by  Idris Davies

title: The Angry Summer : A Poem of 1926
author: Davies, Idris.; Conran, Anthony.
publisher: University of Wales
isbn10 | asin: 0708310907
print isbn13: 9780708310908
ebook isbn13: 9780585261539
language: English
subject General Strike, Great Britain, 1926--Poetry.
publication date: 1993
lcc: PR6007.A72A75 1993eb
ddc: 821/.912
subject: General Strike, Great Britain, 1926--Poetry.
Page iii
The Angry Summer
A poem of 1926
Idris Davies
Introduction and notes
by
Tony Conran
CARDIFF
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
1993
Page iv
© The Angry Summer, the Estate of Idris Davies
© Preface, Introduction and Notes, Tony Conran, 1993
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 CF2 4YD.
The right of Anthony Conran to be identified as author of the Preface,
Introduction and Notes to this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-7083-1090-7 hardback
0-7083-1080-X paperback
Typeset by Alden Multimedia, Northampton
Printed in England by the Cromwell Press, Melksham, Wiltshire
Page v
Contents
Preface vii
A Note on Illustrative Material xi
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction xiii
A Note on the Text xxxiii
The Angry Summer 1
Notes 67
Reading List 73
Page vii
Preface
The root idea of this book goes back to a multi-media event in Bangor
as long ago as 1973, produced by Lesley Bowen and myself. A group
of students and others, who were interested in acting The Angry
Summer as a dramatic poem, used to meet every week in my house.
We read and mulled over it, sorted out the various voices in it, and
thought which of the lyrics ought to be sung. This 'academic'
processwhich is part of rehearsing any performancegave us all a
powerful sense of the integrity and value of the poem, and the close-
knit inter-relationship of its parts, particularly as a dramatic whole. It
certainly felt more of a drama than Under Milk Wood, for example,
with more sense of interpersonal conflict and resolution as well as
considerably more social insight; it shares with Dylan Thomas's work
an ambiguous position between play and poem so that the term 'play
for voices' is probably not inappropriate for bothalthough they can, of
course, both be staged. What seems prima facie a collection of lyrics
is an unexpected form for drama; but one recalls, for instance, how
Greek tragedy arose from choral lyrics called dithyrambs, and (in the
Middle Ages) Adam de la Haille developed a kind of lyric drama,
Robin and Marion from trouvère songs; and of course the later
development of opera from the Italian madrigal. If the Welsh were
ever to take drama seriously, this poem by Idris Davies is one of the
places they could start.
But of course we weren't only interested in it as drama. The long
struggle of the Welsh miners to maintain their communities, in the
face of the British state's hostility and the savage vagaries of 'market
forces', is a major part of our history. It is a struggle that is even now
not quite over. Many of us who gathered every week to read the poem
were from the Valleys, or at any rate south Wales, and one was an ex-
miner. The poem spoke directly to themand
Page viii
to all of us in varying degreesof the web of aspiration and suffering
out of which their generation had emerged.
We entrusted the music to a local folk group called Yggdrasil; and we
decided to set the performance of the poem in a documentary context.
I suppose the not-too-conscious models for our project were the radio
ballads of Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl: 'Singing the Fishing',
for example, where actual voices of working-class fishermen were
collaged with songs and commentary. The radio ballad had been too
hot for radio to handle in the fifties and Charles Parker had been
dismissed. Even so, the type of documentary we had in mind was not
common anywhere except on wireless and television.
Lesley and I enlisted the help of Jim Davies from Pontypool and we
all descended on the Rhymney Valley, interviewing old miners,
shopkeepers and teachers about what happened in 1926, the year of
the General Strike. We met friends of Idris Davies, took photographs
of mines, pit-ponies, chapels, what have you, and spent a whole day in
Cardiff Library, reading and making slides of contemporary press
reports. It was an exhausting and exhilarating few days, and we
enjoyed it immensely. I had never been in a mining community before
and the friendliness and humanity we found there has stayed clear in
my memory ever since. I can well understand how writers from the
Valleys can spend their lives trying to recreate them, hardly able to
talk of anything outside that magical, exasperating and tragic world.
We were very bad at it. Apart from Jim as a photographer, we lacked
all the professional skills and resources needed for such a project. Our
interviewing technique was pretty abysmal. The soundtrack we made
was littered with the extraneous noise. Our biggest lack was time: we
were trying to create a new, multi-media art-form in four days! Still,
we did it. The miners were incredibly helpful and very willing to tell
their story. Our show worked. The poem was given its first dramatic
première in the drama studio of the College. The poet's sister actually
came to it, with other people
Page ix
from Rhymney. One of the highlights of the performance was when
we flashed on to the screen a tattered photograph of a soup-kitchen,
given to us by an old miner. Our visitors could not contain themselves.
'There's old so-and-so,' they called out, and 'Look, there's . . .'
You could hardly have had a more telling intersection of art and life:
we sensed in that moment how terrible it was that Idris Davies,
because of the cultural stranglehold of capitalism on us all, never
reached his natural audience in the Valleys, but only a small left-wing
élite catered for by Faber and Faber poetry books at six shillings a
timethat's perhaps five pounds at today's prices. Terrible for
Rhymney; but terrible also for Idris Davies. The Angry Summer
should have been the beginning of his work as a dramatic poet; but the
cultural starvation he endured, and his growing uncertainty about
whom he was writing for, made that impossible and his later work
lapsed into self-doubt and mediocre elegizing. To compare The Angry
Summer with his last published sequence, 'Tonypandy', written a
couple of years later, is to see cultural deprivation at work.
Obviously, we should have toured around the Valleys with our show.
That we did not was due partly to our own amateurishnesswe hadn't
done any of the groundwork necessary to such an enterprise, and now
the moment had passed; but partly also to an Arts Council system
which sets no store by spontaneity or the demands of the topical, but
treats all art as if it were already in a museum, bespoken for eighteen
months ahead. Well, we all know about that! But the opportunity went
by, and has haunted me ever since.
This book is partly an attempt to assuage that ghostit won't of course,
nothing now willand at least to try and show The Angry Summer in the
sort of context we found for it in 1973. In a book, of course, not a
performance: but a book has virtues of relative permanence that make
it good as a memorial. While we were doing our show, we met several
people who certainly qualified as