Cartographies of Culture : New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English [1 ed.] 9780708324776, 9780708324769

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Writing Wales in English

Cartographies of Culture New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English

Damian Walford Davies

University of Wales Press

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Cartographies of Culture Writing Wales in English

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CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies General Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (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, and, along with Gillian Clarke and Seamus Heaney, one of CREW’s Honorary Associates. Grateful thanks are extended to 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)

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Cartographies of Culture New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English Writing Wales in English

damian walford davies

university of wales press cardiff 2012

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© Damian Walford Davies, 2012

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 except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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 form the British Library. ISBN 978-0-7083-2476-9 e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2477-6 The right of Damian Walford Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988

Typeset by Mark Heslington Ltd, Scarborough Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Wiltshire

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For Francesca

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Contents

General Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction: Triangulating Welsh Writing in English

ix xi xiii 1

1

Mapping Borders: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Literary Hydrography

20

2

Mapping the Miracle: Hopkins and the Psychocartography of Welsh Space

43

3

Mapping Islandness: Brenda Chamberlain’s Celtic Archipelagos

78

4

Mapping Moatedness: Brenda Chamberlain’s European Archipelagos

125

5

Mapping Partition: Waldo Williams, ‘In Two Fields’, and the 38th Parallel

172

Conclusion: The Digital Literary Atlas of Wales

203

Notes

210

Bibliography

242

Index

263

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General Editor ’s Preface

The aim of this series is to produce a body of scholarly and critical work that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. Drawing upon the expertise both of established specialists and of younger scholars, it will seek to take advantage of the concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies to promote a better understanding of the literature’s significance, viewed not only as an expression of Welsh culture but also as an instance of modern literatures in English worldwide. In addition, it will seek to make available the scholarly materials (such as bibliographies) necessary for this kind of advanced, informed study.

M. Wynn Thomas CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) Swansea University

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Acknowledgements

For advice and assistance, I am grateful to the following: Robert Barber, Vernon Beynon, Hugo Brunner, Christine Evans, Jasmine Donahaye, Tim Fulford, Jeffrey Grey, John Harvey, Robert Holland, Matthew Jarvis, Reuven Jasser, Alan Vaughan Jones, Richard Marggraf Turley, Suzanne Matheson, Alan McPherson, Kevin Mills, Jill Piercy, M. Wynn Thomas, Charles Travis, Huw Williams and Rowan Williams. A version of chapter 1 was published in Nicholas Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). A version of chapter 5 was published in T. Robin Chapman (ed.), The Idiom of Dissent: Protest and Propaganda in Wales (Llandysul: Gomer, 2006).

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Illustrations

Introduction   1 Ordnance Survey leaflet, 1930s, with artwork by Ellis Martin   2 The trig points of the present study

2 18

Chapter 1   1 Borderland – detail from Nathaniel Coltman’s county map in William Coxe’s An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, Illustrated with Views by Sir R. C. Hoare (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1801)   2 Amelia de Suffren, From Piercefield Walks [the junction of the Wye and Severn]; aquatint, May 1802   3 River Severn Old Passage, Surveyed by Captain Beechey; J. & C. Walker sculpt. (London: Hydrographic Office, 1846)   4 Detail of the 1830 Ordnance Survey (‘Old Series’) map of Avonmouth   5 Charting the composition of ‘Tintern Abbey’, 11–13 July 1798, against Thomas Kitchin’s Map of the Rivers Severn and Wye (London: R. Baldwin, 1782)

22 29 37 41 42

Chapter 2   1 ‘A map illustrating Hopkins’s comparison of the Clwyd Valley and the Sea of Galilee’, in Christopher Devlin, SJ (ed.), The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: 46 Oxford University Press, 1959)

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xiv

2

3 4 5 6

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Galilee in Wales: Hopkins’s delineation of the Sea of Galilee, superimposed on the ­one-­inch ‘First Edition’ or ‘Old Series’ Ordnance Survey map of Denbighshire and Flintshire, whose sheets were published between 1839 and 1841 The area around St Beuno’s, from the ­six-­inch ‘First Edition’ Ordnance Survey map, published in 1872 The area around St Beuno’s, from the ­twenty-­five-­inch ‘First Edition’ Ordnance Survey map, published in 1872 Map of the Sea of Galilee and surroundings by the Palestine Exploration Fund, reprinted in E. H. Plumptre (ed.), The Bible Educator (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1877) Gwlad Canaan; Ar Gynllun Gogledd a Deheudir Cymru i Blant (‘The Land of Canaan; On a Plan of North and South Wales for Children’), by ‘Ap Dewi’. Published by the Sunday School Union of Great Britain in 1900

47 54 55 61

67

Chapter 3 1

From Aran to Léros – the axis of Brenda Chamberlain’s European archipelagos 2 Lewis Morris, The North Entrance of Bardsey Sound and the Roads in Caernarvonshire, from Plans of Harbours, Bars, Bays and Roads in St. George’s Channel (1748) 3 Lewis Morris, Aberdaron Road, the South East Side of Bardsey Sound, in Caernarvon Shire, from Plans of Harbours, Bars, Bays and Roads in St. George’s Channel (1748) 4 Hugh Hughes, Dame Venodotia, alias Modryb Gwen: A Lady Incog. (first engraved c.1835) 5 (i and ii) Brenda Chamberlain MSS, NLW MS 21486C: the beginning of an early draft of ­Tide-­race, opposite a map of Bardsey, traced by Chamberlain 6 ­Title-­page of part one of ­Tide-­race, ‘The cave of seals’ 7 ­Tide-­race, p. 134 8 ­Tide-­race, p. 35 9 ­Tide-­race, p. 81 10 ­Tide-­race, p. 37 11 Tide-­race, pp. 50–1 12 Tide-­race, p. 131 13 Tide-­race, p. 164

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79 81 82 98 104 106 108 111 112 117 118 120 121

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Illustrations

xv

Chapter 4 1

Pen drawing of the ‘Obernburg’ (Gut Oberbehme, near Löhne, north ­Rhine-­Westphalia); The ­Water-­castle, p. 9 2 Germany: Zones of Occupation, 1946, from Earl F. Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944–1946 (Washington DC: U.S. Army Centre of Military History, 1990 3 The ­Water-­castle, p. 115 4 Brenda Chamberlain’s Aegean archipelagos: Greece, National Geographic Magazine map, 1958 5 A Rope of Vines, pp. 96–7 6 A Rope of Vines, p. 41 7 A Rope of Vines, p. 90 8 Poems with Drawings, pp. 6–7 9 Poems with Drawings, pp. 20–1 10 Poems with Drawings, p. 25

129 142 149 153 154 156 157 169 170 170

Chapter 5 1

2 3 4 5 6

Asia and Adjacent Areas: detail of the 1942 National Geographic map used by Colonels Bonesteel and Rusk in August 1945 as part of General Order Number 1, formulated by the US Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff The Korean Theater, from James A. Field, Jr., ‘History of United States naval operations: Korea’ Detail of the Ordnance Survey ­six-­inch county series, 1905–6, showing the two fields, Weun Parc y Blawd and Parc y Blawd, ­south-­east of Llandysilio Detail of the ‘Popular Edition’ Ordnance Survey map of 1922–3, showing the Pembrokeshire–Carmarthenshire county boundary as Waldo Williams knew it Ceding ground: Boundary Commission for Wales map of the area transferred from Carmarthenshire to Pembrokeshire in 2002 The Isolation of Wales, from William Rees, An Historical Atlas of Wales: From Early to Modern Times (London: Faber and Faber, 1951)

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184 185 188 189 190 199

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Conclusion 1

Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949

205

Colour section Iwan Bala, Byd Bach y Byd (2005) Iwan Bala, Ewropa (2005) Iwan Bala, Hon I (2004) Iwan Bala, Adlewyrchu Ynys (2001) XTide (version 2.10) open source tidal prediction (centred on Avonmouth) for 10–13 July 1798 6 and 7 Brenda Chamberlain, Winter Rhythms in Island Life, Joan Rhys Collection; Size B, Box 2; Picture Store 3; 0200303834/ 1 and 2 8 John Piper, Snowdonia, North Wales (1945–9), watercolour on paper 9 John Piper, In Llanberis Pass (1945–6), watercolour, pen and chalk

1 2 3 4 5

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Introduction: Triangulating Welsh Writing in English

THIS IS A MAP ‘Cartography’ and ‘map’, Wystan Curnow reminds us, ‘belong to the vocabulary of writing cultures, and denote the paper or cloth on which inscription takes place’.1 Thus, with the carta of this opening page unfolded, the distinction between map and text already erased, you are reading cartographically. Introductions are expected to perform rather like the open charts foregrounded in Ellis Martin’s cover images for the new ‘Popular’ and ‘Tourist’ Ordnance Survey maps during the 1920s and 1930s. These trumpeted the authority of the map and interpellated readers as assured, mobile wayfarers (figure 1). As David Matless notes: Martin placed the map at the centre of his designs, in the hands of a user invariably stationed on a hill overlooking a valley, a prospect embodying principles of both order and revelation. The traveller would come over the hill, the valley revealed, and the view named and ordered with grid lines of survey and ­co-­ordinate laid over as the map was unfolded. Even when the map does not appear … the event depicted is the discovery of a valley folded into hills, unseen from the outside, unknown save from a map. Unfolding the map unfolds the country.2

The above verbal chorography (or particularist cartography) of an image on a map depicting another map, on which an ‘overlooked’ physical

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1  Ordnance Survey leaflet, 1930s, with artwork by Ellis Martin. With the kind permission of The Ordnance Survey

landscape is inscribed in two dimensions, teases out some of the expectations brought to the reading of both map and monograph. Both should appear to ‘embody principles’. Both assume a literate user positioned at a vantage, expecting an overview and way through. And both should offer

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‘order’ and ‘revelation’ alike. There should be no question of finding oneself lost, of experiencing the breakdown of the expected visual and verbal semantic codes. But the mise en abyme of Martin’s map covers, and the very recursiveness of the above ekphrasis, engage a salutary hermeneutic of suspicion regarding the map’s positivist credentials. How precisely do maps (and monographs) signify? What is their relation to the material environment they claim to represent? By what strategies do they ‘collaps[e] striated to smooth space, the local to the global, or the concrete and particular to the abstract and the universal’?3 ‘Unknown save from a map’, writes Matless; ‘unknown, safe from a map’, language writes back, in its deconstructionist (and wishfully ­anti-­imperialist) ­‘counter-­map’.4 Rhetorical discursivity is shared by monograph and map. Thus a monograph on literary ‘map space’ involves itself in particularly complex projections.5 DISCIPLINARY TURNS: CULTURAL, SPATIAL, VISUAL, GEOMETRIC, CARTOGRAPHIC (AND EMOTIONAL) The conceptual territory inherited and inhabited by Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English needs to be rehearsed. The 1980s and 1990s can now be recognized as marking a distinct and influential ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, as cultural geography embraced social theory to explore ‘the created space of social organization and production’, the ‘concrete’ and socially ‘embodied’ forms of spatiality, and the navigation of both ‘physical and mental space’.6 From the 1970s, a number of theorizations and performances of space have conspired to form what Stephen Daniels identifies as a ‘fast moving research frontier’ that has engaged the humanities, social sciences and sciences in fruitful dialogues.7 These critical charts of space include the politically charged Situationist remappings of the 1960s and 1970s; Henri Lefebvre’s ­neo-­Marxist analysis of the social construction of space, ‘tied to the relations of production and to the “order” which those relations impose’;8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s valorization of the map (as against the mere ‘trace’) as an ‘open and connectable’ (‘rhizomatic’) cultural model, ‘a medium of spatial perception which allows for the reformulation of links both within and between cultures’;9 Fredric Jameson’s and David Harvey’s materialist diagnoses of the ‘inherent spatiality of the postmodern condition’ and the ‘spatial practices’ of triumphal capitalism’s ‘social game’;10 Edward Said’s

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‘geographical inquiry’ into the operations of western imperialism; J. Brian Harley’s deconstruction of ‘cartographic positivism’;11 the postmodern syntheses of Edward Soja, centred on Los Angeles; and recent ‘feminist cartographies’ and ‘decolonizations’ of the map.12 As Ogborn and Withers note at the beginning of a recent book on ‘Georgian geographies’, ‘terms such as “space”, “place”, “mapping” and “national identity”’ have become ‘a subject of enquiry for historians, scholars in cultural and literary fields and for historians of art and of science as well as for geographers’.13 The diffusion of ‘geographical questions’ across various bodies of knowledge has resulted in the revitalization of cartography itself as both discipline and heuristic.14 Jack Hitt notes that a ‘craft that once languished in the outback of academe has become a mainstay in innumerable disciplines, all of them seeking to visualize, or map, their data’.15 Harley’s deconstructionist unpicking of the map was crucial in this process; cartography became a discourse to be critically and creatively reinhabited. Harley’s late-1980s ­post-­structuralist turn threw his own previous contribution as a cartographic historian into salutary crisis. Drawing on Foucault and Derrida, and acknowledging that he was taking a cue from literary studies’ openness to theory, he helped reorientate the map as a ‘cultural text’ constituted by the rhetoricity of a semantic code – a ‘tropography’ – where previously ‘scholars had found only measurement and topography’.16 Freeing up the map from an assumed ‘mimetic bondage’ with the world, Harley revealed it to be a ­value-­laden ‘social actor’, carrying ‘subliminal geometries’ that reinforce – and in turn recreate (the map as ‘anterior’ to social reality) – the ‘social structures’ in whose service the map operates.17 Cartographic discourse after Harley became saturated with the language of ­post-­structuralist textuality (‘hierarchicalization’, ‘symbolization’, ‘discursivity’) and Foucauldian power (‘disciplinary structures’, ‘juridical power’, ‘spatial panopticon’). Maps appeared both as an imprisoning ‘spatial matrix’ (‘instruments of power’ alongside ‘revenue administration, judiciary, army, police, schools, census’)18 and as sites of ­counter-­hegemonic ‘new vistas’.19 Scientific transparency was (gladly) exchanged for the challenges of textual opacity; we learned ‘to recognise the narrative qualities of cartographic representation’ as an instrument of state control.20 A map, with its ‘distortion formulas’, its hidden strategies of ‘selection’, ‘smoothing’, ‘enhancement’, ‘displacement’, ‘combination’, ‘exaggeration’ and ‘thematization’ came into bright new focus as a ­verbal-­graphic text.21 Moreover, as with ‘literary’ texts, the categories of author (and his

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death) and reader/consumer suddenly seemed crucially relevant. As William J. Smyth remarks in his study of colonial and early modern Ireland: ‘maps are better understood not as autonomous images of a reality but as “accents” or “dialects” within a wider framework of representation and discourse … part of larger, interlocking narratives and practices’.22 A map’s ‘emotive or aesthetic properties’23 – ‘the reverie it suggests to the gaze’, its liberating ‘dimensionality’, its seductive affect – were also identified as worthy of exploration.24 Critical attention was also accorded to the graphic and verbal registers in which a map ‘plays’,25 the nature of the uncanny traffic between ‘the abstraction of the image and the substance of the real’, and the way a map ‘sacrifices’ a ‘third dimension’ only to prompt a cognitive recreation of it.26 Cartography and literary studies seemed to require similar hermeneutic skills, similar bodies of theory, as aids to reading. Like literary texts, maps had ‘lost their “innocence”’.27 Being able to read critically and sceptically what Harley calls a ‘language – or perhaps more aptly a “literature” of maps’ became the precondition of one’s ability not only to resist their ‘fictions’, but also to rewrite them.28 The ‘increased interaction between geography and literary theory’29 that the ‘new’ cartography made possible led to the prominence of ‘mapping’ as a ‘key theoretical term in current critical discourse, describing a particular cognitive mode of gaining control over the world, of synthesizing cultural and geographical information’.30 Literary studies has been particularly liberal with the term. As a number of critics have noted, it has been subject to an ‘inflationary use’ that ‘tends to ignore … the boundaries between the metaphorical and the material’.31 In claiming that ‘there is very little to suggest that the “spatial turn” has progressed beyond the level of metaphor’ in some quarters, May and Thrift ignore the ways in which recent engagements with, say, the ‘spatial consciousness’ of early modern culture and the ‘shaping of space’ in literary modernism have taken account of the materiality of maps as circulating discursive objects.32 However, they are right to draw attention to the often inert – and opportunistic – metaphoricity of the term as used in much merely fashionable critical discourse.33 In 1999, Denis Cosgrove noted ‘the startling explosion of academic, artistic and cultural interest in ‘the epistemological and interpretative challenges’ posed by mapping.34 More than a decade on, the geographical turn in literary studies is still in the process of being theorized. Marc Brosseau notes that ‘literature was integrated into the broader intellectual agenda of geographers’ from the 1970s in a bid to ‘bring people and

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human agency back to the core of research from which they had been somewhat evicted’.35 Cultural geographers seized on the literary work as a valuable tool, asking imaginative writing ‘to participate in a precise geographical agenda’ in a number of guises. Literature served as ‘a complement to regional geography’, ‘a transcription of the experience of place’, ‘a critique of reality and hegemonic ideology’, and as an ‘analogue to the evolution of geography’ as a discipline.36 The emergence in the past decade of a stringently theorized ‘literary geography’ or ‘textual geography’ (sometimes incarnated as a ‘geography of literature’, with an obvious difference of emphasis) marks the possibility of a more meaningfully interdisciplinary enterprise. Commentators such as Angharad Saunders and Andrew Thacker have highlighted the range of methodologies involved in a project concerned to explore ‘the relationships between words and spaces’, situatedness in writing and the situatedness of writing, the cultural mobility of the literary text, the influence of ‘the positionality of imaginative writers’ on ‘the structural form of their work’, and the ways in which writing ‘define[s] social and spatial hierarchies’ – in general (and for literary critics, possibly unpalatable) terms, literature as ‘a meaningful source of geographical knowledge’.37 Though literary geography has hitherto been fixated on the novel, especially the ­nineteenth-­century realist tradition with its ample, seemingly ‘transparent’ delineations of space, recent ­literary-­geographical engagements with modernist and postmodernist works have sharpened our sense of the literary text and its constellatory spaces as discursive constructions embedded in wider social practices. Clearly, however, literary studies needs to resist the vectors of an approach that persists in seeing the literary text merely as a resource or tool. Writing in 1994, Brosseau was aware of the need to achieve ‘a more dialogic relationship [between literary studies and geography] with a much greater focus on the text itself’ in order to challenge ‘the tendency to use literature in a predominantly instrumentalist fashion’.38 More recently, Brooker and Thacker have called for ‘a fittingly transdisciplinary’ encounter with literary modernism that would constitute a ‘critical literary geography’.39 The debate as to how ‘the analysis of literary texts can be enriched by the use of geographical ideas and practices’ remains an urgent one.40 Thacker advocates that we should not only reconnect the representational spaces in literary texts … to the material spaces they depict, but also reverse the movement, and understand how social spaces dialogically help fashion the literary forms of texts … another line of investigation for a critical literary geography might be to analyse the occurrence of

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maps and mapping in specific texts … how cartography functions as an instance of visual culture … Rather than only treating ‘mapping’ as a metaphor it seems important to return to the map as a set of material signs, and to understand what is at issue when a text employs an actual map as a component of the narrative … spatial, geographical thinking [is needed] to complement temporal, historical analysis … if we have a term for critiquing forms of ahistorical thought, then why don’t we have a category of critique for the ageographical or the alocational?41

The atlas of five ‘maps’ offered in Cartographies of Culture responds to each of Thacker’s prompts. ‘WE’RE ALL PSYCHOGEOGRAPHERS NOW’ Critical engagements with the anglophone literature of Wales have yet fully to embrace the challenge of a formal, critical literary geography, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that ‘place’ has been such a stock, diffusive concept in the ­‘Anglo-­Welsh’ tradition (both creative and critical). At the same time, it is to be observed that, recently, ‘place’ has begun to give ground to terms – ‘environment’, ‘space’ – that more stringently, if less romantically, register an awareness of the ‘complex networks of social relations and interests’42 that condition one’s experience and representation of a particular locus.43 Moreover, as witnessed in Peter Finch’s Real series, ­post-­industrial Welsh urban and oppidan space (Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Llanelli, Merthyr, Aberystwyth, Wrexham), and metropolitan and municipal/‘regional’ English space (Bloomsbury and Liverpool) have been the subject of Welsh and ­Anglo-­Welsh psychogeographical dérives (driftings) that embody acts of ‘performing the map’.44 A recent addition to the series is Real South Pembrokeshire, whose title bears witness to the continuing corroboration and construction of that unseen cultural and linguistic ‘border’, the Landsker, between the county’s ‘Englishry’ and its ‘Welshry’ (terra [terror!] Wallia incognita) in the north. In the form of ‘new pastoral’ fiction, too, imaginative mappings have been ‘rippling out’ of their urban contexts towards rural Welsh space, where, as Duncan Campbell argues, they function as ‘a means of reasserting the claims of memory, identity and difference’ in the face of ‘the brutal ­mono-­culture of chain Britain’ and ‘the relentless march of the same’.45 The recent success of literary tourism in Wales (‘Waldo Williams’s Pembrokeshire’; ‘Idris Davies in the Rhymney Valley’; ‘Resistance in the Olchon Valley with Owen Sheers’; ‘Tolkien’s Wales in the Black Mountains’) testifies to an

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appetite for a readerly inhabitation of (or, that strange thing, a choreographed dérive through) locations that have ‘produced’ literary works, and which have in turn become saturated and cognitively remapped by those works.46 Campbell’s claim that ‘It looks like we’re all psychogeographers now’ will not be contested too vigorously. But the Welsh art scene got there before the literary critics and theorists did. Indeed, artistic remappings of Welsh space took a significant cartographic turn in the early 1980s, alongside the spatial turns in cultural geography and social theory outlined above. Emerging as part of the ‘active, interventionist, political art practice’ of the ‘Beca’ group, Paul Davies’s various cartographic artworks and performances (such as his Wales Map, made from the mud of the Fishguard Eisteddfod field (1981), and his Flag of the Welsh Coast, or Salute the Red, White, Black and Blue (1985)) contest the ‘familiar associations of landscape art’ and ‘acknowledge the power of mapping as an instrument of control and colonisation’.47 Other ­map-­forms by Davies confronted the viewer/reader with ‘Wales as a woman, by turns vigorous, sensual and ­warrior-­like or young, gentle and wounded’, prompting revisionary gender mappings of Welsh culture and national identity.48 In the poem ‘Was it So?’, Tony Conran pays tribute to Davies’s iconic cartographies by attesting that they ‘created an action committee, an affray’. In another poem commemorating the artist – ‘Map into Heraldry’ from All Hallows: Symphony in Three Movements (1995) – Conran implicitly acknowledges the seductions and ideological entanglements of all maps, unmasking the ­verbal-­visual cartographic text as a crude political blazon: It is time to make shapes of my country. Block them with hardboard, Planks, bits and pieces. Glue them, tack them down. It is time we recognised that that shape Had a future. Make your templates brash With the red and the gold. It is time for the shape of Wales To have a future. Hoist it up with bravado So the cock Wales can crow.49

As Paul Davies’s ‘debris’ maps emphasized, a map is a ‘made’ thing, a culturally constructed, circulating text and intertext, loaded with the

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9

values of its makers, conditioning space. The blocking, glueing and tacking in Conran’s poem not only celebrate the democratic materiality of a Davies map; they also concede that all maps are ‘staged’ entities with powerful graphic effects, the result of a ‘complex social placing of images present and absent, in the context of other symbolic, ideological and material concerns’.50 Conran is aware, as was Davies, of the hard abstraction of cartographic representation – its panoptic ‘framing’ of space. The fluid plural – ‘shapes of my country’ – in the first stanza changes in the second and third to the delimiting singular. Multiple, aspirational cultural ‘shapes’ harden into one cartographic ­map-­form, into what Denis Cosgrove calls ‘an aesthetic of closure’.51 The poem’s manifest ‘narrative’ (or politics) suggests that this singular geographical representation of Wales is an icon to be embraced as a bold ‘template’. Yet the poem shows itself to be wary of the tyrannous visual rhetoric of the ­map-­cum-­heraldic symbol, ironizing its sloganeering about the ‘future’ with a reference in ‘the red and the gold’ to a national defeat of the past. I suggest that the phrase invokes the final lines of a canonical ­Anglo-­Welsh poem (until recently all too blithely read as an ‘authentic’ articulation of the south Wales proletarian experience)52 that Conran has famously edited: Idris Davies’s The Angry Summer (1943). The conclusion to that poem elides the brutal reality of the defeated 1926 General Strike in its ­all-­too-­easy invocation of the ‘heroic legend of socialism … the colours of the Hammer and Sickle, the communist flag’: ‘Toiler and toiler, side by side, / Whose faith and courage shall be told / In blaze of scarlet and of gold’.53 In this context, I read Conran’s ‘Map into Heraldry’ as a warning against both the petrification of space in cartographic representation and the ­propaganda-­work of the ­map-­as-­flag. Thus Conran also scrutinizes the ‘brash template’ offered at the end of Idris Davies’s poem (a work that is itself profoundly aware of its own evasions). Paul Davies’s cartographic riffs on the ‘shapes’ of Wales throughout the 1980s and early 1990s imagined it anew each time. In Conran’s poem, however, Davies’s cartographic ­events-­in-­space have become a ­cock-­sure banner, ‘hoisted’ with ‘bravado’. The Welsh dragon (a beast invoked as shorthand for what cartography doesn’t yet know – ‘Here be dragons’) is absurdly exchanged for a crowing (and ultimately betraying) cock. The tyranny of the cartographic gaze and the potentialities of the cartographic imagination have entered the Welsh cultural consciousness most potently in the last decade in the shapes (plural) of artist Iwan Bala’s maps, which extend Paul Davies’s project into aspirational cartographic space. Located by the artist himself as a contribution to

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‘­ post-­colonial art’, his images seek to ‘repossess the thing that was lost, or create from the lines imposed on the country by the subjugator an image more in tune with the new situation’.54 Iwan Bala ­self-­consciously ­re-­maps the Victorian ­cartoon-­cartography of Wales as an old woman (see chapter 3 for Brenda Chamberlain’s own inflection of the image), and ­re-­territorializes Wales as a fluid cartographic entity rather than a fixed and delimited object of knowledge. His interest in mapping an ‘archipelagic’ Wales is also something that identifies him as a Chamberlainian heir. The artist’s Welsh maps are energized not only by a postcolonial reappropriation of cartographic representation, but also by a ­post-­structuralist dismantling of cartography’s signifying regimes. Byd Bach y Byd (‘The World’s Small World’, 2005) maps in multiple projections a constellatory, ­extra-­terrestrial and ­de-­coupled Wales. She is also a voyaging Wales, an island seeking ways through, her ample skirts appearing as billowing sails; hanging huge in a night of possibility is an illuminated globe on which Wales appears as an insignificant ­land m ­ ass (colour plate 1). Ewropa (2005) offers a revisionary map of Europe, an imaginative tectonic ­re-­bordering that renders cultural contiguities between Wales, the Mediterranean and Africa powerfully literal (colour plate 2). Maps that claim territorial authority conceal their own erasures; this map confidently advertizes its elisions. I suggest that the image should be read as a response to Eurocrats’ effacement of Wales from the map gracing the cover of the Eurostat Yearbook of 2004. The omission (no persuasive technical explanation was forthcoming) caused a furore, prompting a debate about ideological ‘airbrushing’, political ‘oversight’ and the use of Wales merely as a ‘unit of measurement’ (as in that now standard ­pseudo-­geomorphic formula, ‘an area so many times the size of Wales’). Commentators found themselves caught between the literal and metaphorical as they wrestled with the question of how to put Wales (back) on the map. The projection of a Europe shorn of Wales elicited from MEP Glenys Kinnock the revealing statement: ‘The reality is that Wales is on all the maps that matter, in terms of getting substantial amounts of structural funds and so on’ (£1.4 billion, in fact, between 2000 and 2006). The assertion itself airbrushes out the regional disparities within Wales and configures centralized fiscal mapping as the only cartography ‘that matters’. The omission of Wales also involved a Eurostat spokesman in an entertainingly absurd instance of cartographic ekphrasis: ‘I don’t think there are any fjords, for instance [on the cover map], and some of the Mediterranean islands are probably missing, although I must admit the whole of Ireland is there.’55 The splayed, erotic

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form of Iwan Bala’s Hon I (‘This One I’, 2004) – the first in a series of maps that equate the ground of Wales with a kinetic, wayfinding female body that nakedly democratizes and personalizes cartographic know­ ledge and power – is an ambivalent icon of both separatism and bloody rupture; Wales’s trailing border with England is suggestively dark and dimensional (colour plate 3). And in Adlewyrchu Ynys (‘Reflecting an Island’, 2001), the ­map-­form is a rocky island, south Wales uncannily the new Snowdon, its cultural depths – or amorphous English hinterland – submerged, an isle both barren and fantastic (colour plate 4).56 Playing with cartographic codes, Iwan Bala’s maps raise issues that exercise the four principal writers discussed in Cartographies of Culture: the cultural, political and ontological status of borders; Wales as ‘island’ space; maps as instruments of both normalization (agents of social control) and defamiliarization (active dissident objects articulating ‘contrapuntal cartographies’);57 and mapping as a mode of writing the self as well as the world. Or, in another list: the ‘cognitive, performative, semantic and symbolic richness’ of literature’s maps.58 CRITICAL COORDINATES And so to the final folds of the critical map designed to orientate the reader through the varied cultural landscapes of this study. My chosen literary texts in Cartographies of Culture are not used as mere ‘instruments’ for geographical analysis, a data field from which to secure abstracted cartographic ‘knowledge’. That said, I am certainly interested in offering a response to Christian Jacob’s question: ‘What are the links that bind the map to writing?’59 To see literary texts as inescapably sites of a ‘struggle over geography’ (Said’s phrase)60 and as a priori cartographic is different from proposing merely to examine isolated forms of ‘cartographic discourse’ in literature.61 Cartographies of Culture reveals the forms and structures of the ‘cartographic imagination’, the discursive embeddedness of material maps in the syntax of writing and reading, and the various immanent (not merely ‘pendant’) cartographies of literary discourse.62 To put it differently: this book asks the reader to consider how the literary text triangulates not only the world, but itself – how it ‘may constitute a “geographer” in its own right’.63 A geographer in its own right – not merely by virtue of local instances of what Thomas Pynchon in the introduction to Slow Learner famously calls fiction’s ‘old Baedeker trick’, but by dint of a complex network of cartographic

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‘orientation effects’.64 Cartographies of Culture is predicated on the conviction that literary texts rehearse and create specifically cartographic ‘forms of thinking and feeling about space’ that define both their power as social and political agents and their achievement as imaginative writing.65 This principle commits the critic to close reading as well as theoretical argument. A literary text’s ‘mapmindedness’66 takes many forms, and this study therefore involves itself in negotiations with maps and mappings both actual and figurative, textual and graphic. The maps discussed in this book are literal physical entities, verbal chorographies and textual and visual figures. Recently, some of the most potent artistic engagements with cartography have been concerned to create ­‘counter-­maps’ that reorientate the viewer and ‘articulat[e] the kinds of spaces’ that official mapping for so long ‘saw fit to silence’67 – namely the ‘livings’ of the individual subject or political dissident. Whatever the contours of its own imaginative worlds, the literary text has always functioned as a mapper of alternative social space and as a prompt to go beyond mere ‘formal geometries’ to challenge the various ‘substantive geographies’ that condition the limits of our social lives on the ground.68 Given my interest throughout this book in opening up a dialogue between literature, science and the social sciences, and the various graphic forms taken by my literary geography, it may initially be supposed that my project is indebted to the work of Franco Moretti. In certain ways, it is. Like Moretti, I am convinced that ‘geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history “happens”, but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth’.69 And like Moretti, I find maps to be invaluable visual aids for an understanding not merely of the broad contours of literary history, but also of certain ­time-­space components – Moretti calls them ‘chronotopes’ – within the narratives of fictional works (Moretti’s chosen data field). Moreover, Moretti’s call for literary studies to embrace maps as more than ‘metaphors’ or ‘ornaments of discourse’ is crucial.70 But there are major distinctions between his work and mine. My own engagement with Welsh writing in English does not rely on the kind of abstracted, structuralist cartography used by Moretti as a way of refocusing literary history. Moretti’s two major interventions in the field of the new literary geography are Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (1998) and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005, first published as a series of articles in the New Left Review). In the latter, he turns to ‘a trio of artificial constructs’ drawn from ‘the natural and the social sciences’ to extend the diagrammatic spatializing of Atlas. Moretti

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chooses to chart the ­nineteenth-­century European novel by extracting from a text a certain narrative unit (the chronotope) and plotting it on a cartographic plane in order to reveal aspects of a novel’s ‘spatial system’, the ‘rhythm’ of its ‘narrative pattern’ and ‘the semiotic domain around which a plot coalesces and ­self-­organizes’.71 Although his maps allow him to deal in greater textual detail with his chosen texts than his other two models (graphs and morphological diagrams of genetic trees), and although he offers intellectually bracing readings of particular narrative moments and linguistic ‘happenings’, in neither book is Moretti interested in offering a holistic critical engagement with works of fiction by means of a cartographic analysis sensitive to the precise literary contours of fictionalized space and place. Rather, his maps – which, he later conceded, are not maps at all but diagrams – are structuralist instruments or ‘intellectual tools’ that focus a ‘matrix of relations’ rather than the meaningful emplacement signalled by ‘individual locations’.72 In other words, his is properly a geometrical rather than a geographical or cartographic paradigm.73 What emerges is a type of what Moretti terms ‘distant reading’, which is part of a wider enterprise of getting a purchase on the novel as a transcultural, global form and thus defining methods for the study of a newly conceptualized Weltliteratur. Through ‘a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction’, a text yields a ‘model’ in the form of ‘all sorts of shapes’ plotted on a map: ‘linear trajectories, binary fields, triangulations, ­multi-­polar stories’ and ‘rings’.74 After all, Moretti says, a map ‘is always a look from afar’. Far from being an ‘obstacle’, this ‘distance’ from the text is, for Moretti, the very condition that enables analysis of his data: it makes possible ‘a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection’.75 Unapologetically, Moretti states that his quantitative methodology ‘disregards the specificity’ of his ‘various locations’, and focuses ‘almost entirely on their mutual relations’; further, his interpretative models ‘share a clear preference for explanation over interpretation’ and for ‘the explanation of general structures over the interpretation of individual texts’. As Robert Tally notes, ‘Moretti’s point is not to perform new readings of the texts he discusses; rather, he uses his abstract models to define the “patterns that are their necessary preconditions”.’76 So far so fair; Bill Benzon is right to argue that literary critics should not take umbrage at Moretti’s approach but rather consider how his work might help to ‘clear a space for literary reading’.77 However, critics such as Tally and Jonathan Arac have understandably registered their unease at the ‘political implications’, no less

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than the ­literary-­critical consequences, of a loss of textual depth and a sense of geographical and cultural ‘particularity’.78 Attending to what Moretti terms ‘extension’ (structural spatial relations on a flat plane) rather than ‘intension’ (‘the quality of a given space’) involves the literary critic, if not the literary historian, in a process of standardization akin to the ‘economic and cultural leveling process’ of globalization. What Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ elides are, in Tally’s terms, ‘the particulars that make the study of literature critical’.79 Here, Tally’s pun on ‘critical’ enacts the very cultural particularity and difference whose loss on the globalized plane of Moretti’s ­sub-­cartographic diagrams he laments. How, then, do the methodologies I employ to read the locations and triangulations of works of Welsh writing in English differ from Moretti’s? For Moretti, the cartographic labour is always that of the literary ­historian-­cum-­scientist, and not that of the work itself. As already suggested, cartography in the present study is not a model imported from the sciences or social sciences but a modality recognized as immanent in the literary work itself and crucial to its cultural and historical distinctiveness. Moretti uses maps as sociological ‘questions’, ‘put to the form of the novel, and its internal relations’. For me, by contrast, maps are the very quarry of a literary criticism/theory that seeks to reveal the ways in which a work of imaginative literature questions itself with maps, and locates itself in precise cultural, historical and emotional territory. What is missing from Moretti’s (important) work is a dynamic conception of literary works as always already cartographically active – that is, not merely entities whose conditioning ‘patterns’ are mappable, but themselves (in different respects) maps. Moretti himself admits: ‘maps don’t interest me because they can be “read” more or less like a novel – but because they change the way we read novels’.80 As this book will show, I am profoundly interested in ‘reading’ maps – especially, as in the case of artist Brenda Chamberlain, maps drawn by writers of imaginative literature and variously embedded in literary works. Reading maps as literary works fails to interest Moretti; what, then, of that other equation he does not mention: reading a literary work as a map? There is a profound difference between extracting a map from a novel and seeing it as already characterized by a cartographic sensibility – already engaged in a process of cultural and historical/historicist triangulation that defines its very specificities (of conception, language and location). While Cartographies of Culture certainly charts Moretti’s ‘extension’, the book analyses intraand ­extra-­textual maps as a method of revealing the literary work’s sense

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of its own geographical ‘intension’, its habitable depth of field. Faced with a structuralist embarras de choix, Moretti asks in Atlas of the European Novel: ‘which characters should I map? which narrative moments? which elements of the context?’81 A more interesting question seems to me to be: ‘in what ways, and by what means, does this work seek to map itself as a totality?’ (with ‘map’ there signifying cartograph­ ically, not merely rhetorically). Cartographies of Culture, then, attempts a fluid literary cartography that in its engagement with a range of literary forms and genres seeks to resist the planar flattening that all maps, in their subtle gesturing at the ­three-­dimensional ­‘co-­text’ of the world, also actually seek to redress. This book argues that the cartographic imagination is a profoundly important mode of intension for authors of Welsh writing in English. One of my central claims is that in the anglophone literature of Wales, maps are a means of signalling and contesting cultural difference and emplacement. They are, in other words, modalities of cultural and political identity. The particular cartographies I reveal in this study are the means by which the constitutive tensions of one body of literature (national, regional) may be defined in relation to, and disaggregated from, another. To put it differently, and to bring all this ‘home’: a culturally plural, historicized cartographic paradigm is of crucial importance in the critical and cultural project of defining the Welshness (variously conceived) of Welsh writing in English, defending it against various strategies of ‘distance reading’ (whereby its peculiarity is effaced), and putting it on the map. Although Moretti is alive to the ideological nature of maps, the parameters of his study mean that he is not concerned with the political valence and ideological entanglements of cartographic representation. My own study reveals how the anglophone writing that has emerged ‘out of’ and ‘in relation to’ Wales is stringently attuned to the ‘ideological work’ of maps. In each of this book’s five chapters, maps emerge as ways of both articulating and seeking to elide the emplacement of the literary work. Cartographies of Culture shows how cartographic paradigms are deployed in order to territorialize cultural affiliation; it also reveals how maps are invoked to contest the essentialisms of cultural ‘belonging’ and render them merely relational. As the first sustained cartographic locating of Welsh writing in English, Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English joins a burgeoning ­trans-­disciplinary debate about the spatialities of culture. The book attunes itself to what Brian Jarvis identifies as ‘the politics and poetics of space, especially at boundaries and frontiers’,82

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and is offered as a contribution to the ‘interdisciplinary reorientation’ of Welsh writing in English and as an intervention in recent critical engagements with ‘Celtic geographies’ and ‘emotional geographies’ (geography’s ‘emotional turn’).83 It has also been written as an encounter with the ‘iconographies’, ‘textualisation’ and ‘social power’ of landscape – what used to be called ‘the politics of landscape’.84 My choice of authors and texts certainly needs a word of explanation, if not quite justification. An extended timescale – 1798–1970 – has been selected so that the changing contours of the cartographic imagination, conditioned by social and cultural transformations, can emerge within the broadly historicist framework that operates alongside the book’s other conceptual lenses. That timeframe is also an acknowledgement of the eighteenth- and ­nineteenth-­century genetics of Welsh writing in English. In its delimited conception and choice of literary genres (novels and detective fiction), Franco Moretti’s work lacks the universalism its methodology claims. For my own atlas, I have sought out a range of literary genres for study – each, moreover, fluidly hybrid – in order to test the usefulness and validity of a cartographic reading of Welsh writing in English. The genres are: poetry, a sermon, devotional writing, life writing, ‘autobiographical fiction’, the journal and works in which verbal and visual codes exist in dialogue (as on a map). My study seeks to demonstrate that different spaces of writing have profound consequences for the contours of literary form and genre. In tune with a rhizomatic redrawing of the map, I also want to ­re-­territorialize Welsh writing in English, and expand the cultural spaces in which an anglophone literature designated ‘Welsh’ has hitherto been legitimated and allowed to take place.85 My inclusion of two canonical ‘English’ authors is designed to stimulate a debate about the parameters and paradigms of our literary history. Bobi Jones’s still persuasive (it seems to me) 1973 definition of the ­‘Anglo-­Welsh’ condition as a phenomenon distinct from ‘the natural environment of Wales’ is relevant to the case of English ­authors-­in-­Wales (pace Jones’s own claims to the contrary) in ways that have yet to be fully explored: if ­[Anglo-­Welsh literature] ceased for one moment to be unnatural it would lose its central feature and cease being truly ­Anglo-­Welsh … it is a perversion of normality, it is a grunt or a cry or an odour rising from a cultural wound of a special kind … it belongs to the colonialist predicament in some way or other … [it is] a literature written by a person or persons undergoing a certain cultural crisis. And as such, ­Anglo-­Welsh literature is part of a great ­world-­wide phenomenon.86

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With these terms in mind, why may we not speak of modalities of ­Anglo-­Welsh writing or Welsh writing in English? A ­‘de-­bordered’, ­‘trans-­cultural’ study such as this lays claim to those terms not simply in its engagement with other domains of cultural and scientific knowledge but also in its attempt to shift the borders of an ­‘Anglo-­Welsh’ literary tradition, making it more fluid, permeable and ­trans-­national. I begin with William Wordsworth as a mapper of Welsh and English tidal borderspace, and suggest that ‘Tintern Abbey’, in its ­self-­conscious propagation over multiple boundaries, might well be the arch-­Anglo-­ Welsh utterance. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is more than an act of simply ­writing-­Wales-­in-­English. It evinces a cultural, geographical and emotional indwelling (Moretti’s missed ‘intension’), a geographical mobility and a mapping of cultural ‘crisis’ that make it emphatically ‘Welsh writing in English’. Moreover, I hope that this first chapter accomplishes its aim of devolving Wordsworth, rendering ‘Tintern Abbey’ (and with it, English Romanticism) uncanny, and defamiliarizing Welsh ground (and with it, Welsh writing in English). ‘Tintern Abbey’ seems to me to be Welsh writing ‘with a foreign (not a dialect) accent’, in Bobi Jones’s phrase. Every act of mapping is an invocation of an absent but conditioning elsewhere. Chapter 2 takes the case of ­Welsh-­identified Gerard Manley Hopkins, encountering him in a tract of Flintshire frontier space that is ‘composed’ as the Holy Land. The ­‘Anglo-­Welsh’ Hopkins87 of the St Beuno’s period provides a signal example of the imaginative cartographic ‘summonings’ of the age and their investment in imperial ‘possession’ – at ‘home’ and abroad. Psychically overdetermined and newly mapped by the Ordnance Survey in the 1870s, the Vale of Clwyd was a space where colonial ­power-­knowledge could be articulated as ‘geopiety’, and where physical and spiritual terror had to be cartograph­ ically rehearsed. Coincident with celebrations of the centenary of Brenda Chamberlain’s birth, Cartographies of Culture extends the various mappings of water in chapters 1 and 2 into a contribution to nissology – the discipline of island studies – in its focus on Chamberlain’s (unaccountably neglected) archipelagic ‘charts’. Beginning with Bardsey/Enlli (the most westerly Welsh coordinate in my atlas), with J. M. Synge’s Aran islands as geographical and cultural intertexts, chapter 3 explores Chamberlain’s fraught Welsh/ Irish chorographies (both verbal and visual) as theatres of female tragedy, revealing cartography to be a modality of hyperconscious ­life-­writing. Gathering to a cartography of imprisonment, an islograph of political

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2  The trig points of the present study

terror and emotional desiccation, chapter 4 (like the previous chapter a work of literary and archival recovery) extends the Chamberlainian archipelago, and Welsh writing in English, to the moated spaces of ­post-­war Europe and to the Mediterranean. Chamberlain could attest to the truth articulated by Karl Figlio: ‘Every mapping into geometrical spaces – every picturing – leaves a gap between what was present in emotional space and what appears in the mapped space.’88

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The book’s final map is of a ­Welsh-­language poem of 1956, mapped both in the original and on the borders of multiple English (‘Anglo-­ Welsh’?) translations: Waldo Williams’s ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ (‘In Two Fields’). Encountered through and as cartography (underpinned by practical fieldwork), the poem comes into focus as radical geopolitical intervention – a projection, from rural Wales, of a ­de-­bordered world in the form of a literary ­counter-­map of the Korean peninsula, where ‘history is present and future’.89 Thus the main trig points of Cartographies of Culture, located in the four corners of Wales (see figure 2) – each gesturing to other, present-­ absent geographies and locations of culture – constitute a graphic rhetoric wholly characteristic of a map: an invitation to future literary geographers of Welsh writing in English to triangulate the space in between, and to do so in the knowledge that in the ­‘post-­national order of Europe’, we are now ‘dispersed a little everywhere’.90

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1 Mapping Borders: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Literary Hydrography

SITUATING ‘TINTERN ABBEY’ Ever since Marjorie Levinson in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (1986) gave us a portrait of a disingenuous poet who in ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ ‘artfully assembled’ an idealized locus through strategies of displacement and sublimation, commentators have animatedly exchanged views on the poem’s geographical and psychic emplacement.1 Sensing that ‘Tintern Abbey’ ‘is an especially difficult work to situate’, Levinson audaciously sought to ‘reconstruct’ a ‘scene of composition’ and recover the components of an ‘observed’ topography in order to lay bare Wordsworth’s bad faith, his occlusion of the ­socio-­political and his flight into the mind.2 Diagnosing the poem as a pathological ‘allegory of absence’, a transvaluation of place and its human networks, Levinson rendered the poem uncanny. The borderland landscape above, at or below Tintern Abbey (see figure 1) has been combed in the service of various arguments for and against Levinson’s brand of ‘deconstructionist historicism’3 – a methodology that has an interesting analogue, though (importantly) not a precise parallel, in the hermeneutics of suspicion governing J. Brian Harley’s seminal deconstructions of the map in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a ‘duplicitous’ social agent constituted by ‘silences’ that must be ‘teased out’ to reveal ‘how the social order creates tensions within its content’.4 Despite the clamour of voices, however, the poem’s situatedness – its localness or locatedness in the Wye Valley – has remained stubbornly intact. In part,

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‘Tintern Abbey’ and Literary Hydrography

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this is no doubt due to the poem’s insistently presentist modality (its timeshifts notwithstanding), and its sense of a real landscape empirically apprehended: ‘The day is come when I again repose / Here, under this dark sycamore.’5 Indeed, the debate as to the poem’s locus has fetishized a static paradigm of the relation between poem and landscape, despite the acknowledgement that Wordsworth and Dorothy were energetically on the move from 10 to 13 July 1798. Moreover, the acts of critical emplacement referred to above have proved doubly incarcerating since they have not been sufficiently sensitive to the cultural meanings of the poem’s borderland coordinates. Though attuned to Wordsworth’s anxious sense of ‘shifting geographical configurations and changing history’, Michael Wiley in Romantic Geography has emphasized the way in which ‘Tintern Abbey’ ‘brings narrative to a pause at a carefully situated spot and historical moment’. Wordsworth is seen to take ‘his famous meditative “stand”’, adopting a ‘stationary position’, even as he speaks of ‘both an extended region, ranging from a spot upriver of the rural Abbey ruins to urban areas, and an extended span of time’.6 Specifically concerned to ‘resolve the location’ of the poem, David Miall identifies its geographical and imaginative nodal point in the vicinity of Symonds Yat, north of the abbey – a scene whose ‘particular configuration’, Miall argues, provides an imaginative paradigm for the rest of the poem as ‘nature itself models how nature can be understood as a ground for human experience’.7 Further, James M. Garrett has recognized how Wordsworth’s ‘narrative’ depends ‘on movement through space and time’, despite the ‘stationary quality’ of the poem, which ‘gives the illusion of standing still upon a single spot of earth’.8 But while a number of critics have valuably sought to chart the poem’s various ‘movements’ – meditative, syntactical, structural – such ‘motion’ has been narrowly conceptualized as an ­intra-­textual phenomenon. And so, despite its ‘vagrant’ currents, ‘Tintern Abbey’ has in Romantic studies been consigned to a static position in a Wye Valley rendered profoundly acultural.9 One might say that attempts to recover the originary ‘scene’ of the poem (elided or not) represent a modern critical incarnation of the obsessive picturesque debate in contemporary guides and tours regarding the most advantageous position from which to achieve a view of Tintern Abbey itself.10 Like Marjorie Levinson, I want to render ‘Tintern Abbey’ uncanny. My own strategy involves a critical ­‘de-­bordering’ that also serves to bring the poem into focus as a paradigmatic ‘border’ utterance – a poem of Monmouthshire and of the Welsh March that is profoundly attuned to

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1  Borderland – detail from Nathaniel Coltman’s county map in William Coxe’s An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, Illustrated with Views by Sir R. C. Hoare (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1801)

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the cultural, political and psychological impact of boundaries. Bringing ‘Tintern Abbey’ into the orbit of the discipline of Welsh writing in English while invoking other, ­non-­literary, bodies of knowledge occasions both a necessary stranging up and a salutary naturalization of the poem as a characteristically ­‘Anglo-­Welsh’ inscription of shifting ­frontier-­land identities at what Robert Stradling calls ‘an axial point of British geography’.11 In addition, I aim to replace the ‘static’ model of composition identified above with a more kinetic conception of the poem’s multiple cultural and geographical locations. I suggest that ‘Tintern Abbey’ is dynamically constituted by motion through the various frontier topographies of its composition. Thus we are able to see ‘Tintern Abbey’ not merely as a poem of the Wye (ambiguously Welsh and English) and of walking, but also as a ‘tidal’ utterance of the Severn Estuary (that other ­Welsh-­English interspace), the Avon and the West Country, even as a ‘suburban’ utterance of Bristol. The poem’s ‘Welshness’ is hybrid – as, therefore, is its ‘Englishness’. If, as Duncan Campbell has suggested in a discussion of recent trends in Welsh writing in English, psychogeography is ‘a species of ­border-­writing, standing uneasily between so many oppositions (mind and world, city and country, myth and history), never resolving in favour of one side or another, and above all, never forgetting’, then ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a classic text of ­Anglo-­Welsh psychogeography whose bourdon is ‘the specific effects of the geographical environment … on the emotions and behaviours of individuals’.12 Crucially, I argue that the poem is vitally conditioned by tidal action, in both literal and figurative senses, and my ‘hydrographic’ reading seeks to reveal the poem’s response to and calibration of actual water depths and speeds of flow. Indeed, composed at the end of the very decade in which, like the ‘national work’ of the Ordnance Survey,13 hydrography was officially and professionally recognized in Britain (Alexander Dalrymple became the first hydrographer to the Admiralty in August 1795),14 the poem is itself a hydrographic map of the littoral, riverine, ­inter-­tidal, estuarine and marine topography that conditions its utterances, and a textual inscription of the various border crossings that Wordsworth negotiated during its peripatetic composition. In that sense, ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a performance work avant la lettre – akin, in its mapping of the interdependence of body and environment, to the work of such ­Wales-­based practitioners as the ‘movement artist’ Simon Whitehead, whose ‘experiential maps’ ‘internalise the rhythms and textures of this land’, rendering them ‘familiar, lived, part of [the] body’.15

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The phrase Wordsworth would coin in a poem of 1813 to describe a surveyor triangulating the southern extremity of the Lake District from the summit of Black Combe – ‘geographic Labourer’ – captures the cartographic ‘work’ of ‘Tintern Abbey’ with equal force and aptness. To chart the genesis of ‘Tintern Abbey’ in such terms is to bring a poem, uncannily, into the realm of contemporary European printed ‘river maps’;16 it is also to locate the poem in the sphere of activity of Welsh poet Lewis Morris (1701–65) – ­self-­taught pioneering hydrographer of the coast of Wales and a determining influence on British marine cartography.17 I therefore see Wordsworth’s paradigmatically ‘Romantic’ poem as at the same time paradigmatically ‘Welsh’, located in a line of descent from Morris’s maps (also considered in chapter 3). In addition, a tidal hermeneutic allows us both to confirm and to contest some of the assumptions of various historicist readings of the poem, while a cartographic rubric offers a way of revitalizing increasingly tired historicist paradigms. Over and above its supposed pantheism, its ‘pictures of the mind’, ‘Tintern Abbey’ represents a compelling ­psycho­geographical chart. Drawing on scientific data, this chapter offers a radical geographical and disciplinary ­re-­territorialization of ‘Tintern Abbey’. It does so by encountering a work of imaginative literature through the lens of recent theorizations located in that exciting zone between cultural geography, social theory and literary studies. Here, place becomes space – ‘dynamic, contested, and multiple in its symbolic qualities and representative identity positions’, rich in its ‘possibilities for liminal experience’.18 Himself located liminally on the cusp of the millennium, Denis Cosgrove remarked in 1999 that In the opinion of many observers, it is the spatialities of connectivity, networked linkage, marginality and liminality, and the transgression of linear boundaries and hermetic categories – spatial ‘flow’ – which mark experience in the late ­twentieth-­century world. Such spatialities render obsolete conventional geographic and topographic mapping practices while stimulating new forms of cartographic representation to express not only the liberating qualities of new spatial structures but also the altered divisions and hierarchies they generate. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reference to the rhizome as a metaphor for ­half-­submerged, ­non-­hierarchical, open and unplanned spatial connections is a signal example.19

In this chapter I want to argue that, remarkably, Wordsworth’s hydrographic map of ­Welsh-­English space anticipates these very ‘spatialities of connectivity, networked linkage, marginality and liminality’ that characterize postcolonial and postmodern experience. Further, with its

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commitment to ‘spatial “flow”’ and to an open, rhizomatic connection with the external environment, ‘Tintern Abbey’ offers itself as a poetic embodiment of Cosgrove’s ‘new forms of cartographic representation’. And what Cosgrove cites as a ‘third strand of the revolution in spatial representation’ from the 1970s onwards – the ‘kinetic cartography’ enabled by information technology with its ‘continuous manipulation and transformation of spatial coordinates and the data they reference’ – is likewise prefigured in the persistent adjustments, recentrings and decentrings of an ­Anglo-­Welsh poem that theorizes itself as already ­post-­cartographic.20 COMPOSITION GEOGRAPHY The composition history – or, better said, composition geography – of ‘Tintern Abbey’ during the period 10–13 July 1798 is not easily recovered since Wordsworth left us with ‘alternate recollections’ of the process.21 According to the note he dictated to Isabella Fenwick, he began the poem ‘upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye’ on 13 July, and ‘concluded it just as [he] was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days’ with Dorothy. Wordsworth added: ‘Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.’22 However, in a letter of September 1848, the duke of Argyle informed the Revd T. S. Howson that Wordsworth had told him that ‘he had written Tintern Abbey in 1798, taking four days to compose it, the last 20 lines or so being composed as he walked down the hill from Clifton to Bristol’.23 Further contradictory evidence appears in Christopher Wordsworth’s Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851): We crossed the Severn Ferry, and walked ten miles further to Tintern Abbey … The next morning we walked along the river through Monmouth to Goderich [sic] Castle, there slept, and returned the next day to Tintern, thence to Chepstow, and from Chepstow back again in a boat to Tintern, where we slept, and thence back in a small vessel to Bristol.24

Crediting the evidence of the Fenwick note, John Bard McNulty in 1945 drew the logical conclusion that ‘Tintern Abbey’ was composed partly – indeed, mostly – on board the ‘small vessel’ that carried Wordsworth ‘across the Severn Estuary and up the River Avon to Bristol’.25 It is an intriguing possibility that critics have not pursued. Even the ‘orthodox’ critical position – which takes its cue from Mary Moorman’s 1957

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biography and Mark L. Reed’s meticulous 1967 chronology in accepting the itinerary outlined in the Memoirs and in assuming that the poem was ‘probably’ begun on 11 July as Wordsworth walked north to Goodrich and completed on the evening of 13 July – entails the recognition that ‘Tintern Abbey’ was partly composed on river and estuary water, both eddying with tidal currents.26 This fact, I suggest, has ‘no trivial influence’ (l. 33) on our understanding of the poem. In the argument that follows, I accept the ‘received’ interpretation, sketched above, of Wordsworth’s movements and of the chronology of the poem’s composition. THE WYE VALLEY: SHIFTING SCAPE, KINETIC SPACE A notable feature of contemporary tours of the Wye Valley is the way in which the landscape itself is conceived as motile, and movement is established as crucial to an aesthetic appreciation of the scenery. This is observable not merely in those tours describing the fashionable boat trip from Ross through Monmouth to Chepstow, in which one would expect motion to constitute a defining aspect of tourists’ experience of the Wye. Contributing to this sense of the shifting nature of the terrain was the status of the Wye Valley as uncanny frontier land and border space, and of the Wye and the Severn as literally fluid lines of demarcation (or rather areas ‘constantly undergoing processes of both fixing and blurring’) between Wales and the West Country, and between Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire.27 Legally and culturally, Monmouthshire itself, of course, has always been a ‘debatable’28 land of hybrid identities and ambiguous cultural allegiance, described by William Coxe in his Historical Tour in Monmouthshire (1801) as ‘the connecting link between England and Wales; as it unites the scenery, manners and language of both’.29 Observing that in Monmouthshire ‘all are home views, even where the whole Estuary of the Severn forms a part of the enchanting scene, and the points of the Horizon are the Hills of Glocester [sic] and Somerset’, David Williams in his History of Monmouthshire (1796) offers a choice illustration of how a borderscape, both heimlich/ homely and unheimlich/other, is experienced as uncanny.30 The physical topography of the Wye prompts debate as to the precise meanings and location of ‘home’. It is surprising that the historicist energies so liberally expended on ‘Tintern Abbey’ have so far failed to illuminate the poem’s concern to map various ­intra-­national borders – a project that is

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intimately bound up with the poem’s multiple histories of the self and (contra Levinson) its avowed political resonance. Describing the famous Piercefield walks, on the ‘Welsh’ side of the border south of Tintern, Coxe remarks on the effect of the interrupted vistas created by the mazy Wye (a maziness registered in its Welsh name, Gwy), not, as one might expect, in terms of discontinuity, but rather in terms of uncanny transition, sinuous doubling and cultural conveyance: The screen of wood prevents the uniformity of a bird’s eye view, and the imperceptible bend of the amphitheatre conveys the spectator from one part of this fairy region to another without discovering the gradations … hence at one place the Severn spreads in the midst of a boundless expanse of country, and on the opposite side to the Wy [sic]; at another, both rivers appear on the same side … Hence the same objects present themselves in different aspects and with varied accompaniments; hence the magic transition … from the mild beauties of English landscape to the wildness of Alpine scenery.31

In this uncanny chorography – the cartographic or verbal description of a particular region – geographical delimitation paradoxically results in the apprehension of border space as a physical and cultural continuum. This is a vista that naturalizes paradox while also avowing difference – national, it is implied, as well as topographical. It is a frontier land that offers itself as show, a performance that interpellates visitors as inhabitants of a peculiar interspace whose cultural hybridity seems bound up with a landscape that itself insists on shifting ‘sides’. Charles Heath’s popular cento of passages from contemporary tours, The Excursion Down the Wye from Ross to Monmouth, first published in 1796, warns the prospective tourist that ‘the attention is not suffered to pause long on a particular object, so rapid are the attractions on each bank’.32 When elements of the landscape were found to ‘occur’ too tamely, tourists craving the picturesque had recourse to an imaginative ­stage-­managing of the scene, designed to secure a more dramatic debouching of the natural and built environment into the touristic, specular arena. Thus Richard Colt Hoare sought the theatrical thrill of the kinetic as he boated down the Wye: Chepstow castle comes in sight. I could wish the banks before it on the left were covered with wood, as it appears in part only over a narrow neck of land not in a very advantageous point of view; whereas it would break on the sight most nobly and surprize every beholder if it could possibly be hidden till the boat turns the angle.33

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The proximity of ‘break’ and ‘neck’ conspires to offset a sense of leisurely enjoyment and relaxed connoisseurship with a suggestion of radical, exhilarating speed. What emerges from such descriptions is the concept of the Wye’s borderscape as a dynamic chronotope – that is, a territory experienced, dislocatingly, as both space and time, a ‘geography of temporality’.34 Complementing such encounters was an acute awareness on the part of tourists of the motion of the river itself and of its tides. Charles Heath’s vade mecum combines basic hydrography, geology and the discourses of travel writing and topographical poetry to draw tourists’ attention to ‘the variety of the current’ and to the Wye’s water music: here, deep, majestic, slow; – there, huddling and brawling over a wide expanse of pebbles; – and now again, foaming over ragged strata of projecting rocks, or eddying round the huge fragments that have fallen from the neighbouring heights … the pensive wanderer … admiring, through its transparent stream, the successive strata of sand, of gravel, and of rock, over which it flows, has his ear regaled, in a few hundred paces, with all the varieties of plaintive sound, from the faintest murmurings to the sullen roar.35

William Gilpin in his Observations on the River Wye (which Wordsworth is likely to have brought with him) was also concerned to articulate how the varying speeds of flow, the eddyings and agitations caused by rocks, weirs, cascades, and the contrary actions of ­flood-­tide and river flow, imparted a corresponding motion to the surrounding landscape, animated in a kinetic continuum: In all the scene we had yet passed, the water moving with a slow, and solemn pace, the objects around kept time, as it were, with it … But here, the violence of the stream, and the roaring of the waters, impressed a new character on the scene: all was agitation, and uproar …36

The Wye Valley is experienced first as temporal and physical drift in the upper reaches of its picturesque corridor (‘the objects around kept time … with [the river]’), then as motion and aural uproar. Visitors were also alive to the changing ‘complexion’ of a river that, to a distance of around two miles north of Tintern, was affected by tidal action. A. M. Culyer, travelling past the limit of the tidal stream in 1807, noted that south of Tintern, the water ‘lost that fine transparency, which had distinguished its smoother parts above Llandogo’,37 while Henry Skrine, standing on the Gloucestershire side of the Severn Estuary a few years later, was attuned not only to the ‘new beauties’ of the riverscape near the Wye’s confluence with the Severn south of Chepstow (see figure 2), but also to

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2  Amelia de Suffren, From Piercefield Walks [the junction of the Wye and Severn]; aquatint, May 1802. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/ The National Library of Wales

the way in which the estuarine water was becoming ‘more and more influenced by the tide’.38 As R. J. Fertel has argued, Wordsworth’s footnote to the opening movement of ‘Tintern Abbey’ that ends with the phrase ‘With a sweet inland murmur’ – ‘The river is not affected by the tides a few miles above Tintern’ – marks his empirical awareness (Fertel calls it a ‘humble recognition’) that ‘sweet’ (that is, fresh) water ‘would murmur and roll differently from salt water’.39 The line, and the note, signal a sensitivity to hydrographic limits and riverine and estuarine tidal action that interfuses the poem as a whole and provides an interpretive paradigm that allows us to chart in ‘Tintern Abbey’ the fluxes and refluxes of a ‘tidal’ sensibility operating in a charged space traversed and defined by ­intra-­national borders. Levinson’s statement that ‘Tintern Abbey’ is ‘a transitioning, a liminal poem, delivered by a man who situates himself at a junction of inland waters and ocean tides’ (a position he would adopt again at the end of the ‘Intimations’ ode: ‘Hence, in a season of calm weather, / Though inland far we be, / Our souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither’) is a valuable insight.40 My concern is to examine the forms in which ‘Tintern Abbey’ registers the pull of bodies of water that are, at the same time, bodies of knowledge, feeling and social and cultural belonging.

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‘STREAMING INFRASHAPES’ Thomas McFarland remarks that Wordsworth was ‘virtually hypnotized by the idea of running water’.41 Critics have long recognized the centrality of the paradigm of the stream to Wordsworth’s imagination, and analysis of the form and characteristic movements of ‘Tintern Abbey’ has often, unsurprisingly, invoked and sometimes (not always helpfully) internalized metaphors of flow. Seeking to understand Wordsworth’s identification of the poem as fundamentally ‘odal’ – ‘I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode; but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition’ – Stuart Curran speaks of the poem’s ‘dialectical transition[s]’ and the ‘course’ of its argument.42 ‘[N]o movement in the poem is without counterflow’, he notes: ‘Everything Wordsworth celebrates must be eroded’ – as if the speculativeness of the poem’s current is wearing away its banks and bedrock of certainty and hope.43 Pamela Woof’s reading likewise emphasizes ‘The ­river-­like flow, the flux and ­re-­flux that is the movement of the poem’; Wordsworth’s rhythms are felt to ‘surge onwards’.44 Identifying ‘Tintern Abbey’ as ‘a living embodiment of the movement of a stream’, McFarland has argued that the poem ‘overlie[s] a streaming infrashape’ (as, he suggests, does the longer Romantic lyric generally). He detects in the general ‘flow’ of the poem – sustained by enjambment, polysyndeton and apposition – an ‘ineluctable’ current, and describes syntactic and conceptual movements as local ‘eddies’ and ‘streams’.45 Though clearly recognizing that riverflow powerfully infuses the structure of the poem, however, these critics are concerned with the symbolic resonances of the phenomenon. I suggest that Wordsworth’s cartographic ‘infrashape’ bears a more radically motivated relation to the ground navigated by the poet during the composition of ‘Tintern Abbey’. In a thoughtful recent intervention that considers the challenges for a ‘literary geography’ of ‘locating writing in place’, Angharad Saunders has emphasized the need for human geographers sensitive to the spatial ontology of literary production (and by implication, literary critics attuned to recent renderings of space in geography and social theory) to recognize ‘the capaciousness of the space of writing’ and ‘the positionality of imaginative writers as an influence on the structural form of their work’.46 My mapping of ‘Tintern Abbey’ provides a ­test-­case for the expansion of literary geography endorsed by Saunders; it also goes beyond the parameters of current ­literary-­geographical practice, not least in its

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interdisciplinary mapping of poetry on various scalar levels, as opposed to the more customary ground of the realist and modernist novel. In signally dynamic ways, ‘Tintern Abbey’ exemplifies the merging of the ‘space’ and ‘practice’ of composition/writing; it also brings into focus the genetics of imaginative literature as what Saunders calls a spatially and culturally ‘lithe’ form – an ‘enlivened act, which appreciates the immediacy of its undertaking’ and which involves the reader in ‘the very livedness of the writing process’.47 Saunders’s particular concern is to expand our sense of the production and reception of ‘textual meaning as it is differentiated across space’; my engagement with ‘Tintern Abbey’ suggests how a poem can be constituted geographically. In Saunders’s terms, ‘writing inevitably coalesces and moves with the practices and, of course, through the spaces of the everyday’, and Wordsworth’s poem ‘locates the meaning of space – textual, material, imaginary – not in the drawing of boundaries but in the flow and eddy of habitation’.48 Given that some ‘reaches’ of ‘Tintern Abbey’ were without doubt composed on water, might literary criticism not equip itself with appropriate scientific data in order to reach for a reading of the poem as a chart of Wordsworth’s contact with shifting river- and ­estuary-­scapes? Venturing outside the comfort zone of traditional literary studies to engage in dialogue with a discipline not regularly inhabited by critics of either Welsh writing in English or Romanticism – hydrography – yields startling results. I want to offer a radically new method of ‘sounding’ a poem whose ‘ground’ has hitherto been mistaken in crucial ways. Mapping hydrographic data onto ‘Tintern Abbey’ reveals how the poem’s syntactical and conceptual ‘tides’ – what one might call its verbal ‘propagation’ and bathymetric form – occur in response to the physical prompt of actual tidal motion within an extended geographical and chronological field hitherto elided by critics. A hydrographic encounter with ‘Tintern Abbey’ enables us to calibrate an organic literary ‘responsiveness’ to Welsh (and English, and disputable) ­space-­in-­time at startlingly intimate levels. The new cartography of the poem that this makes possible is embedded – indeed, enacted – by the poem itself. An encounter with the poem that is both responsive to its literary contours and open to the insights of other (startlingly adjacent) disciplines reveals ‘Tintern Abbey’ to be a hydrographic and cartographic chronotope, a verbal construct enacting a ‘place- and ­time-­dependent context’.49 Thus I am concerned to show how geography conditions the verbal ground of a poem, how a poem as a ­physico-­verbal construct bears traces of its geographical and hydrodynamic ‘origins’, and how literary form can

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itself be understood as a modality of cartography. While I share Franco Moretti’s interest in what he terms, in Atlas of the European Novel, ‘the ­place-­bound nature of literary forms’, ‘each of them with its peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favorite routes’, and while my deployment of graphs throughout the remainder of this chapter may at first suggest the type of literary geography he has pioneered in literary studies, our methodologies and aims fundamentally differ, as already outlined in the Introduction.50 My aim is not to create a structuralist cartography of the poem derived from a single ‘extractable’ element – a map of a ‘network raised from its anchorage and cast into a new field’ (in Moretti’s characteristically insistent formulation).51 Rather, by drawing on scientific evidence, I propose to read the poem in its entirety as a dynamic, always already interdisciplinary and transcultural entity of time and space that encodes its topographical genesis and range of ‘histories’ in a startlingly motivated way. CHARTING ‘TINTERN ABBEY’ The precise hydrography informing Wordsworth’s cartographic imagin­ ation in ‘Tintern Abbey’ can be extrapolated with astonishing precision, using data generated by XTide open source Tidal Prediction software, which deploys tidal algorithms developed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Each graph in colour plate 5 shows the height in metres of the flood- and ­ebb-­tides in the Severn Estuary (Avonmouth being the tidal gauge) over ­twenty-­four hours, the four graphs, taken together, covering the period 10–13 July 1798 (the window during which Wordsworth’s tour took place).52 The blue and green areas under the tidal curve denote the flood- and ­ebb-­tides respectively, and the dark- and ­light-­blue zones above the curve mark night and day. The data sets offer us interdisciplinary access to ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a poem responsive to plural topographies. It also allows the poem to emerge as the product of a highly attuned ­frontier-­land sensibility, and thus as a particularly habitable text for critics of Welsh writing in English. If in what follows my mapping of Wordsworth’s geographical position in relation to the contours of ‘Tintern Abbey’ appears dogmatic – another inscription of the acts of emplacement deprecated at the beginning of this chapter – the reader should bear in mind that the boundaries drawn between the poem’s movements are necessarily approximate and therefore permeable and negotiable. As Schimanski and Wolfe remind us,

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borders are not only ‘divides’ but ‘joins, fuzzy areas, overlaps, ­in-­between zones’ in textual as in topographical terms.53 As Lamont and Rossington argue, a border is always a ‘notional line, inviting discussion as to what it separates and what are the possibilities and consequences of crossing it’.54 And as Denis Cosgrove and Paul Carter have stressed, the coastline, ‘that elemental separating line between land and sea’ and between federal entities and nation states – ‘at first sight the most fundamental and obvious boundary on any ­small-­scale map’ – is ‘unstable space’, a ‘zone’, not a ‘line’.55 The boat carrying Wordsworth and Dorothy across the ‘Old Passage’ over the Severn from Aust to Beachley on 10 July 1798 would most probably have waited for low tide’s ‘slack water’ – ‘The time at high or low water when the tide is not flowing visibly in either direction’ (OED) – which occurred at 10.32 a.m. (see colour plate 5, graph 1). Disembarking at Beachley (Gloucestershire landfall), they headed north, crossing the remnants of Offa’s Dyke – the ancient political boundary between Mercia and Wales – near Sedbury, before proceeding up on the Gloucestershire side of the Wye, near or even on Offa’s Dyke in places, and crossing the river (whose southward flow was by now contending with the ­flood-­tide, its fresh water increasingly interfused with estuary salt) to Tintern and into Monmouthshire/Wales. Thus before he began to compose ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth had negotiated a number of significant, palpable borders. I suggest that such ‘passages’ are discernibly registered in ‘Tintern Abbey’. Wordsworth travelled north on the Monmouthshire/Welsh side of the river on 11 July, past the limit of the tidal stream, hence his footnote about the tidal reach of the Wye. It is on this day that he is likely to have begun composing ‘Tintern Abbey’. For some two miles north of Tintern, his journey that morning would have been attuned to the harmonics of an ebbing tide (see colour plate 5, graph 2). There is a sense in which the persistent enjambment of the opening ­twenty-­three lines of the poem enact the downward tidal ebb and the natural southward flow of the Wye. That recognition aligns the motivated flow of the ­poem-­river with the direction of the ­‘ebb-­flow’ of reading itself, thus drawing the reader southwards as the location of the poem tracks northwards – a ­psychogeographical counterflow that is there also in Wordsworth’s ‘present’ act of recalling his past (‘Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs’). ‘Thoughts of more deep seclusion’ (l. 7) is Wordsworth’s first inscription of an awareness of – and an anxiety about – depths in the poem, submerged in synaesthetic collocations. Developing his insight

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that ‘Space acts upon style’ in an analysis of Sir Walter Scott’s fiction, Franco Moretti suggests that ‘Although the novel usually has a very low “figurality” … near the border, figurality rises: space and tropes are entwined; rhetoric is dependent upon space.’ It is important to emphasize that the ‘border’ for Moretti is ‘seldom a geographical entity’; rather, he claims, it ‘belongs to a scale of experience for which the term “geography” is wholly inappropriate’ – for example, ‘The staircase of the Gothic, the window in Wuthering Heights, the threshold in Dostoevsky, the pit in Germinal: here are some “frontiers” of great metaphorical intensity – none of which is however a geographical border.’56 A hydrographic mapping of ‘Tintern Abbey’, however, bears out – in striking geographical terms – Moretti’s exhilarating insight that an ‘impact’ with a border generates what he terms a ‘figural leap (much like the “monsters” of old mapmakers)’.57 It is an idea that posits a motivated relationship between topography and literary form. Wordsworth’s ­much-­debated ‘vagrant dwellers’ and his ­hermit-­figure (ll. 21–3) – unconscionable sublimations, as some critics would have it, of grim ­socio-­political realities – might signal the figural ‘leap’ occasioned by Wordsworth’s negotiation of two further borders on 11 July: the crossing of the Wye at Monmouth and the entry into Herefordshire, ­south-­west of Symonds Yat. Indeed, the opening paragraph of ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a whole displays a deepening commitment to the figural triggered by the ontological (and physical) shifts involved in the act of crossing borders. Admittedly, the negotiation of county boundaries – to which contemporary tours were remarkably sensitive – hardly compares with the much anticipated and famously ‘missed’ Alpine ­border-­crossing inscribed first as deflationary disappointment and then as imaginative release and insight in book VI of The Prelude (a paradigmatic Romantic­/Anglo-­ Welsh experience that Brenda Chamberlain was to invoke on German heights, as we shall see in chapter 4).58 Nevertheless, it may have motivated the ‘crossings’ from the ‘analytical predicates’59 of the poem’s opening to the metaphorics that have hitherto been interpreted as marking an occlusion of the disturbing social ‘truths’ of the Wye Valley (industrial encroachment, abject poverty). The notion of a link between the apprehension of a border and an escalation of figurality offers an alternative reading that rescues Wordsworth from such charges and identifies the metaphoricity of ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a product not of a transcendentalizing drive – a ‘Romantic ideology’ – but of material contact with charged frontiers. As a mutual edge, a joint sign, a border appropriately prompts the doubleness, the gesturing elsewhere, of all figural language.

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The ­half-­line break – that spatial turn – at line ­twenty-­three visually denotes a border crossing as both poet and poem strike into new topographical and textual territory, marking the morning of 12 July, as Wordsworth and Dorothy cross back into Welsh space and proceeded down to Tintern, past the tidal limit near Bigswear Bridge. Their journey coincided towards midday with the last of the ­ebb-­tide and the incipient ­flood-­tide (12.32 p.m.; see colour plate 5, graph 3). Wordsworth’s composition begins to be affected by an awareness of turning tides, especially since at this point he and Dorothy would have made the decision to proceed to Chepstow and return that afternoon to Tintern by boat on the Wye. The tide’s inescapable dialectic makes itself felt in the emotional and syntactic countermotions of the passage, as the lines ‘cast doubt on all their positive affirmations by being shadowed by negative words and prefixes, by a modifying “perhaps” or an “I trust” or by verbs in a “may have”, subjunctive mode that allows doubt to enter’, as Pamela Woof has observed.60 Negative shadowing, careful modifying and a subjunctive modality are proper to a tidal waterscape that constitutes not merely a county boundary but also a national border (the topographical and cartographic equivalent of a hyphen). They are proper also to the fissiparous sense of oneself as at once in Wales and in England, at once Welsh- and ­English-­identified (a classic ­‘Anglo-­Welsh’ quandary). Wordsworth now measures his experience of and deep debt to the Wye Valley’s ‘forms of beauty’ specifically within a hydrodynamic paradigm. Memory’s ‘sensations sweet’ (‘sweet’ resonating again, as in line 4, with the sense of ‘fresh’ as opposed to ‘saline’) operate physiologically as the motion of fluids: ‘Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, / And passing even into my purer mind / With tranquil restoration.’ And again: ‘the motion of our human blood / Almost suspended’ (ll. 29–31, 45–6). Those phrases ‘Almost suspended’ and ‘in the blood’ (where, as has often been noted, ‘along the blood’ would be expected61) are poised between motion and stasis, the adverbial qualification and prepositional frisson conspiring perfectly to embody the sense of slack water between the motion of ebb- and ­flow-­tides, when water is itself almost ‘laid asleep / In body’ (ll. 46–7). That suspension marks an identity suspended between nations, committed to each, both and neither, a cultural allegiance here creatively laid asleep. As Wordsworth nears Chepstow, the poem’s preoccupation with literal depths deepens, and increasingly clear views of the Severn Estuary give rise to a bathymetry of the spirit – ‘the deep power of joy’ (l. 49) – that is the product of material sensation. It will intensify markedly from this point.

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Having reached Chepstow, Wordsworth and Dorothy are likely to have waited until an hour or so after low water at 12.32 p.m. (see colour plate 5, graph 3) so as to use the afternoon ­flood-­tide to convey them to Tintern back up the Wye. The river was now brackish, the incoming tide whirling against the flow of its current. A site of tidal contention, divided against itself, the Wye as Wordsworth experienced it during those July days was in a continual process of redefining its own borders. This enables us to identify the energizing paradox at the heart of the final compositional movement of 12 July (ll. 50–8). Wordsworth claims that imaginative returns to the ‘sylvan Wye’ have provided a healing counterforce to ‘the fretful stir / Unprofitable and the fever of the world’ (ll. 53–4). The increasing ­flood-­tide eddying against the riverflow in an area characterized by an extreme tide differential (noted by contemporary tourists) provides a paradigmatic example of fretful stirring. That fretfulness is consonant with the poem’s many counterflows, its generic instability (‘the oscillation between sonnet and ode’, as Philip Cox has argued62), its status as impassioned impromptu63 and its sensitivity to the Wye Valley’s many borders as sites of cultural and aesthetic interfriction. Paradoxically (but appositely), the river Wye is constructed in ‘Tintern Abbey’ as both the epitome of, and the antidote to, febrile agitation. The paragraph break between lines ­fifty-­eight and ­fifty-­nine is yet another frontier for Wordsworth and the reader to cross. I suggest it is now the early morning of 13 July; Wordsworth, beginning the longest section of the poem, crosses the Wye at Tintern from Wales/Monmouth­ shire into England and, as Pamela Woof notes of this movement of the poem (her own critical idiom taking Moretti’s ‘figural leap’), ‘Future, past and present swirl and jockey in the mind.’64 Negotiating stretches of Offa’s Dyke once more as he and Dorothy accompany the morning’s ­ebb-­tide to the sea (see colour plate 5, graph 4), Wordsworth conjures past, present and future selves and meditates on mutability, a stone’s throw from a river whose switchback, ­Welsh-­English waters are the very medium that has enabled him – albeit fitfully, given their changing complexion – to ‘see into the life of things’. Figurality rises again as Wordsworth ­criss-­crosses the ­border-­tump of the dyke: ‘when like a roe’; ‘more like a man’; ‘Haunted me like a passion’ (my emphasis) – three similes in the space of ten lines. As shared limits, borders encourage similes – are spaces for relational meaning as well as exclusionary rhetoric. And nearing the sea and his point of embarkation for Bristol (either Chepstow or, most likely, Beachley), Wordsworth is again moved to take bathymetric soundings: ‘by the sides / Of the deep rivers’, ‘the deep and

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gloomy wood’ (ll. 69–70, 79; my emphasis). Borders, one might say, run deep. The time of departure in the ‘small vessel’ approaches, and the poet’s famous reflections on loss and recompense (ll. 86–9) at (I suggest) the landing pier at Beachley are ­inter-­tidal thoughts, motivated by the

3  River Severn Old Passage, Surveyed by Captain Beechey; J. & C. Walker sculpt. (London: Hydrographic Office, 1846). ‘Shows drying and submerged banks and rocks, soundings, direction and speed of tidal flows … Panel at bottom shows vertical section of River Severn to 100 feet below high water line.’ By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/ The National Library of Wales

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dramatic displacement in the estuary close to low tide and by its altered water music – ‘the still, sad music of humanity, / Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power / To chasten and subdue’ (ll. 92–4). The paradox of ‘still … music’ again captures the ‘stand of the tide’ at slack water with delicate precision. And now, sometime around 12.30 p.m. on 13 July (see colour plate 5, graph 4), Wordsworth and Dorothy embark on their journey south across the estuary so as to catch the last pull of the ­ebb-­tide to assist their passage ­south-­east to the mouth of the Avon. They would literally have felt a pull ­south-­east towards England. Here, ‘Tintern Abbey’ is for the first time composed on open water, now subject to the convolutions of estuarine tidal currents and to the ‘confluent waves’65 – cultural no less than hydrographic – propagated at the Wye’s dramatic disgorging or ‘embouchure’ into the Severn.66 This is an area known for its extremely fast, and potentially fatal, tidal flow: see Beechey’s striking hydrographic map of 1846 (figure 3), which charts the dividing channel of the Severn as a series of plumbed depths and speed vectors, rendering perilous (perilously scientific, one might say) the picturesque views of the Severn that traditional literary criticism has found more ‘readable’.67 The poetic passage on which Wordsworth now embarks responds fully to the physical sensations of the estuarine passage on which he has just embarked; Pamela Woof notes that the lines generate an ‘upward movement propelled by simple “ands”’; ‘We are swept … into a holding together.’68 Once again, the critic’s evaluative idiom is itself swept up with tidal motion and emotion. Wordsworth may couch his observations in the past tense, but what he describes is experienced now – in and as the flow of the estuary, before it is registered as pantheist metaphysics: And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.69

Simply stated, the passage stands as a remarkable description of tidal action; the motion and the spirit are those of the tides. This is the heart of the poem’s cultural hydrography. With the offing (that portion of the sea

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‘at a distance from the shore beyond anchorages or inshore navigational dangers’, OED) now visible, and as he feels the channel’s depth of water beneath him, Wordsworth takes another bathymetric sounding as he attunes himself physically to ‘something far more deeply interfused’.70 Indeed, his description of ‘nature and the language of the sense’ as ‘The anchor of my purest thoughts’ (l. 110; my emphasis) betrays an anxiety regarding the very need – now, here – for anchors. It is the very instability of the element on which he is moving that conditions his desire at this moment for groundedness: ‘Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth’ (ll. 103–6). That the phrase ‘this green earth’ refers to a borderland landscape the now castaway Wordsworth has left behind him to the ­north-­west is a registration of this kinetic poem’s awareness of spatial displacement. Or to put it another way: ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a shipwreck poem manqué.71 Separated at the beginning of the poem’s final movement – Of all my moral being.  Nor, perchance …

– the two halves of line 112 are a visual trace of the channel into the Avon, into England. The ­flood-­tide is now increasing (see colour plate 5, graph 4), carrying the vessel up the Avon towards Bristol. The Avon: that English river, whose uncanny Welsh name (afon = river) marks a fold in the linguistic map, a shared but now occulded Brythonic inheritance. This turn for home marks the turn to Dorothy, Wordsworth’s other ‘anchor’, and to her companionable form, the ­tide-­governing moon: ‘Therefore let the moon / Shine on thee in thy solitary walk’ (ll. 135–6). But that turn is troubled: ‘Nor, perchance, / If I were not thus taught, should I the more / Suffer my genial spirits to decay’ (ll. 112–14). The characteristically Wordsworthian negatives; the glancing ambivalence (or tidal switchback) of ‘Suffer’; the peculiarity of the conception that ‘spirit’ can ‘decay’ (pantheist immanence of spirit notwithstanding) all identify these lines as a site of anxiety. So it is: as the boat was carried between Dungball Island (later dredged away) and the Avon Battery and its nearby barracks at the mouth of the river, Wordsworth would have passed between two ­gibbet-­masts, clearly marked on the 1830 Ordnance Survey map (see figure 4). Whether or not bodies were displayed on them on 13 July 1798, they put Wordsworth in mind of punishment and perishability.72 Their presence both makes the turn to Dorothy as an emotional ­sheet-­anchor all the more explicable, and reveals the fragility

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of that act. The echo of Psalm 23 (‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me’) in the next line – ‘For thou art with me’ – maps this entrance to the Avon as literally ‘the valley of the shadow of death’, as opposed to the ‘green pastures’ of the Wye and its (less than) ‘still waters’. A destabilizing irony infuses the subsequent reference to ‘this fair river’ – actually a deathly Avon (here, now) at ­flood-­tide rather than a verdant, psalmic ­Anglo-­Welsh afon. Coasting on an increasingly fretful flood between two gallows, Wordsworth needs to feel that he can elevate ‘joy’, ‘quietness and beauty’, ‘lofty thoughts’, ‘chearful faith’, ‘blessings’ and ‘healing thoughts’ above ‘evil tongues’, ‘Rash judgments’, ‘the sneers of selfish men’ and ‘greetings where no kindness is’. Indeed, haunting this boat’s return to port with its freight of ‘wild eyes’ and its emotional cargo of betrayal, judgement and remedial blessings is the narrative of that other sailor at the mercy of wind and tides: Coleridge’s west country ancient mariner. The references to ‘evil tongues’, ‘Rash judgments’, ‘the sneers of selfish men’ and ‘greetings where no kindness is’ (ll. 129–31) may also have been motivated by Wordsworth’s contact with the estuary pilots ferrying him home – men described by Richard Warner (who had been ferried across the Severn less than a year earlier, and whose A Walk through Wales, in August 1797 Wordsworth had just read) as being ‘as rude, turbulent, and violent, as the æstuary they navigate; each individual resembling the Stygian ferryman, described by Virgil’.73 The analogue is troubling: it transforms the Avon, Severn and Wye into that ultimate ontological border, the Styx; it casts Warner, and the Wordsworth who remembers him, as dead men. Disembarking probably at one of the many quays along the Avon, and walking down to Bristol through Clifton, Wordsworth’s immediate contact with the tide ceases. And yet the anxious eddies of the mind to which streaming water has given rise continue. The suburban villas of affluent, expanding Clifton provide him with archetypes of ideal (and, after the shocks of a revolutionary decade, defensively conservative) inner spaces – ‘thy mind / Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, / Thy memory be as a ­dwelling-­place / For all sweet sounds and harmonies’ (ll. 141–3). These structures – material edifices first, before they are transformed into metaphors – are bulwarks against future ‘solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief’; they are psychic fortifications against unwelcome thoughts, not merely of Wordsworth’s demise in ‘after years’ (‘If I should be, where I no more can hear / Thy voice’ (ll. 148–9)), but also of his chilling proximity to ‘Rash judgments’ and death in Paris at the end of

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4  Detail of the 1830 Ordnance Survey (‘Old Series’) map of Avonmouth, showing the two ‘gibbet poles’ at the entrance to the Severn Estuary, one on ‘The Dungball Island’, and the other below it on the north shore. By permission of the Royal Geographical Society

1792 (the ‘poor mistaken and bewildered offering’ of book X of The Prelude). Within the chronotope of actual composition, ‘[T]his delightful stream’, ‘these steep woods and lofty cliffs, / And this green pastoral landscape’ (ll. 151, 158–9) are now those of Clifton Gorge to Wordsworth’s right, not those of the (now merely recollected) Wye. Wordsworth, I suggest, is at this point fully conscious of these uncanny foldings, doublings and substitutions – what one might call ­shadow-­chronotopes. The ­already-­industrialized Welsh March is cognitively mapped on to suburban Bristol. This ‘moving’ poem is characterized by chronological and geographical ‘displacements’ more radically grounded than those figured by historicist/psychoanalytic readings such as Marjorie Levinson’s. The poem’s values are in flux, as is the poem’s form, conditioned as it is by movement over a varied landscape. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is about the slippage between the apparent and actual referents of its insistent demonstrative adjectives (‘this’, ‘these’) – about the slippage between Wales and England, and between the Wye, Severn and Avon. Taking the ­poem-­as-­hydrograph out of the critically overdetermined

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5  Charting the composition of ‘Tintern Abbey’, 11–13 July 1798 against Thomas Kitchin’s Map of the Rivers Severn and Wye (London: R. Baldwin, 1782). By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/ The National Library of Wales

space of the Wye Valley – or, more precisely, allowing it to take us out of the Wye Valley – is to recognize it as amphibious and kinetic, as a profoundly material product of physical sensation. That materiality survives at the very heart of the poem’s imaginative transformations in the form of tidal movements that ensure that ‘Tintern Abbey’ cannot ever petrify into the dogma of the transcendent, or fossilize into the parenthesis of the local. The map in figure 5 is not, pace Moretti, merely imported to plot deracinated aspects of the poem on a (pseudo-)cartographic plane; rather, it is already embedded in the poem itself. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a layered cartography of culture, an anatomy of imaginative response to the natural environment and a chart that grounds language itself in the phenomenal world. If read robustly through the lens of other disciplines – engaged, as poetry itself is, in seeking to understand that world – it will remain contemporary. Moreover, like the tides, it will continue to propagate.

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2 Mapping the Miracle: Hopkins and the Psychocartography of Welsh Space

On the evening of ­mid-­Lent Sunday, 11 March 1877, the 32-­year-­old Gerard Manley Hopkins climbed to the ‘pulpitlike enclosure’ above his fellow scholastics in the refectory at St Beuno’s College, Tremeirchion, in the Vale of Clwyd to deliver a ‘Dominical’ – a ­thirty-­minute practice sermon during the evening meal.1 It was a test that came at the end of a trying period of examinations and lectures for the Jesuit Theologate.2 Taking as his text Christ’s instruction prior to the miracle of the loaves and fishes – ‘Make the men sit down’ (John 6: 10) – he proceeded to outline to his already tired brethren a detailed and idiosyncratic map, bearing all the hallmarks of what Carol T. Christ and Walter J. Ong have identified as Hopkins’s ‘Victorian particularist temperament’.3 Judged as an exercise in pious prandial communication, this sermon on the feeding of the 5,000 was an abject failure. As an articulation of the cartographic imagination operating in and on Welsh space, however, it constitutes a sophisticated act of geodesy (or surveying), deeply invested in late Victorian cultures of ­power-­knowledge, piety, national and imperial ­self-­definition, and the visual.

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COMPOSING PLACE As Robert Bernard Martin remarks, Hopkins began the sermon with ‘admirable fidelity to the Composition of Place’4 – that formal heuristic, learned from the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, through which gospel geographies and events were conjured with ‘particularist prescriptiveness’ and emotionally inhabited.5 Embedded in the exercise was the recognition that, as Maurice Halbwachs has observed, a truth is ‘settled’ in ‘the memory of a group’ by its attachment to ‘a location’; that ‘symbolic reflection’ unfastens resonant locations from their wider ‘physical environment’; that remembrance and the devotional imagination live by multiple acts of localization.6 The Ignatian modality of thought had given geodetic precision to Hopkins’s already highly developed visual faculty (nurtured both before and after his conversion to Catholicism in 1866), producing a mobile and radically actualizing cartographic eye, attuned to the Holy Land’s literal and symbolic geographies. As he wrote in his notes on the Contemplation of the Nativity: ‘It will be here to see with the eyes of the imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem, considering its length and breadth, and whether it is a straight road or by cliffs and valleys.’7 Hopkins began his sermon by cleverly interpellating his peers, collapsing geographical and temporal planes and constituting the community of St Beuno’s as a type of the audience that Christ himself had composed before his miracle: ‘And in the meanwhile let the men sit down, that is / be at rest, be still, be attentive, listen for what is to come’ (S, p. 225). And then the work of mapping began. At first, Hopkins’s cartography unfolded happily, engaging his audience’s ‘local knowledge’:8 And now where was the place? It was beside the Sea of Galilee or the sea of Tiberias, which lake is 12 miles long and 7 miles wide at the broadest, and the Jordan running through it with a strong stream; so that if it were in this valley it would stretch from Rhuddlan to beyond Llanrhaiadr or from St Asaph to Ruthin, let us say that – from St Asaph to Ruthin, and would fill the valley from hill to hill, – only the Jordan runs from north to south, not like the Clwyd from south to north. (S, p. 225)

As the speaker warmed to his theme, however, his Jesuit brethren would immediately have recognized that the Spiritual Exercises were being taken into new rhetorical, conceptual and geographical territory. Hopkins was deploying a kind of cartographic epic simile that painstakingly folded back on itself to make the Holy Land, and the Sea of Galilee in particular – the resonant ‘spatial frame of [Christ’s] activities’ – home.9 It

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is a remarkably bold act of chorography: the ­verbal-­cartographic depiction of a bounded, particular place. In ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (written at St Beuno’s) – to which, as we shall see, the Dominical is bound in complex ways – Hopkins had already identified Galilee as the primary landscape of Incarnation: ‘It dates from day / Of his going in Galilee.’10 Having told his audience ‘I beg of you to lend me your ears’, Hopkins returned the favour: And here I will say what may be useful to you in thinking of places where our Lord often was. The lake is shaped something like a bean or something like a man’s left ear; the Jordan enters at the top of the upper rim, it runs out at the end of the lobe or drop of the ear. One Bethsaida – Bethsaida Julias – stands by the Jordan as it were above the ear in the hair; Capharnaum on the bow or rim nearer the cheek; the other Bethsaida, where Peter and Andrew and Philip lived, against the cheek where the bow of the ear ends; Tiberias on the tongue of flesh that stands out from the cheek into the hollow of the ear; Chorozain and Gergesa outside, on the outer bow. So that in this valley, St Asaph would be where the Jordan enters the valley; Bethsaida Julias would be Rhuddlan; Capharnaum would be near Llanefydd standing high; but Bethsaida near Henllan; Tiberias would be Denbigh; Chorozain might be Bodfari; and the place of the miracle seems to have been at the north end of the lake, on the east side of the Jordan, as it might be at this very spot where we are now upon the slope of Maenefa. (S, pp. 225–6)

Hopkins was clearly working with an actual map of the Clwyd Valley. Geodetic accuracy is a spiritual aid. His map’s auricular paradigm chimes not only with the gospels’ ‘theology of the ears’,11 but also with the investment that the poetry of the Welsh period shows in the Clwyd Valley as an aural as well as visual space: ‘thrush / Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring / The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing’ (‘Spring’); ‘On ear and ear two noises too old to end / Trench’ (‘The Sea and the Skylark’) (see PW, pp. 142, 143). It is also in tune with the notion, confirmed during Hopkins’s time in Wales and central to the prosodic theory surrounding ­stress-­centric sprung rhythm, of reading ‘with the ears’.12 Hopkins’s ­verbal-­aural chart – literally illustrated as a sketch map in the 1959 edition of the Sermons and Devotional Writings (figure 1) – is a fine example not only of the ‘detailed verbalized attention to picturable detail’ inherited from Ignatius, but also of what Ong sees as Hopkins’s ‘cultivated Victorian particularizations’.13 It should also alert us to the various senses in which one might usefully see Hopkins as (an ­Anglo-­Welsh) cartographer, a mapper of scapes, engaged in what one might call (deploying Hopkins’s own term for an object’s

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distinctive ‘measurements and specifications’) a topographic ‘personalling’.14 ‘[S]omething like a man’s left ear’: in the sermon, Hopkins asks the audience to hear land in a particularly challenging, synaesthetic way (just as his own verse, he emphasized, was ‘oratorical’, ‘less to be read

1  ‘A map illustrating Hopkins’s comparison of the Clwyd Valley and the Sea of Galilee’, in Christopher Devlin, SJ (ed.), The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 227. By permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Provence of The Society of Jesus

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than heard’).15 His transhistorical map collapses the visual and the aural into what one might call an ‘aurotope’ (compare Wordsworth’s Welsh chronotope, explored in chapter 1). Listen, and the ‘eyes of the imagination’ will see, Hopkins is saying. Orientating his listeners around this Welsh Bible land, Hopkins seeks to ‘compose’ them as pilgrims.16 Moreover, this act of cartographic ‘summoning’ involves a ‘miraculous’ stereoscopic apprehension of disparate elements – the Sea of Galilee is suddenly present in the Clwyd Valley, Welsh land and the ­geo-­body of a holy waterscape conjoined and mutually mapped. And the ‘place of the miracle’ itself, where 5,000 were fed, is dramatically located at St Beuno’s, as the Jesuit brothers ate their meal (see figure 2).

2  Galilee in Wales: Hopkins’s delineation of the Sea of Galilee, superimposed on the ­one-­inch ‘First Edition’ or ‘Old Series’ Ordnance Survey map of Denbighshire and Flintshire, whose sheets were published between 1839 and 1841. By permission of the Royal Geographical Society

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While Hopkins’s audience may have been absorbed (if also increasingly tickled) by his unconventional cartographic move, their attention soon began to wander. The scrupulousness evident in Hopkins’s imagin­ ative geodesy extends to the rest of the sermon, where it is managed less effectively and becomes absurdly fastidious: ‘Here, brethren, remark a mystery. Philip is a Greek, not a Jewish, name; it has a noble air; it suits noblemen, like Guy or Marmaduke or Perceval – with us. It means fond of horses, proud of his stud’; ‘There is a boy here – a little boy it is in the Greek, just a boy in the Latin: certainly a little boy, just a boy, could not carry much’ (S, pp. 228, 230). He tries to recall his audience with a return to his miraculous mapping of the surrounding landscape, but now the effect is less excitingly uncanny than perplexing: For the neighbouring villages could not supply such a crowd: he and the rest would have to tramp away wearily to Bethsaida Julias, as far as Rhuddlan – to Capharnaum, as far as Bodelwyddan and that not as the crow flies but skirting the lake. (S, p. 229)

Hopkins’s concentration and composure failed him; he never reached the motto ‘Laus Deo Semper’ – Praise Always to God – that marked the end of all Jesuit sermons. The simile in which he once again returned to local topography as the very ground of salvific refreshment was never delivered: ‘As when here a sheet of white rain coming from the sea blots out first the Orms’ Heads on Moel Hiraddug, then spreads … along the Vale of Clwyd, so the refreshment of the barley bread was spreading though that multitude’ (S, p. 231). His note at the end of the manuscript reads: This was … delivered … as far as the blue pencilmark on the sheet before this. People laughed at it prodigiously, I saw some of them roll on their chairs with laughter. This made me lose the thread, so that I did not deliver the last two paragraphs right but mixed things up. The last paragraph, in which Make the men sit down is often repeated, far from having a good effect, made them roll more than ever. (S, p. 233)

Despite acknowledging some of the strengths of the sermon (such as its ‘ingenuity’17 and the ‘unexpected combination of orders of experience’18 that also characterizes his poetry), critics and Hopkins’s fellow Jesuits have tended to take this sermon as evidence of ‘that curious lack of proportion’ he was capable of displaying as a pulpit orator ‘when he wandered over the line of the witty into the ludicrous or inappropriate’.19 Such a lack of ‘proportion’ in Hopkins’s homiletics is certainly evident in his ‘dithering over numbers’ and in the way in which his repetitions

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become ‘a comic chorus’.20 Norman White remarks that the sermon ‘is a product of the study rather than for the pulpit’ and that, while Hopkins’s ‘transposition from Galilee to north Wales was made with geographical neatness’, the layering of ­place-­names ‘crowds too much detail into the attention of men at table at the end of a day’s work’.21 Recently, Paul Mariani has seen the sermon as a ‘composition within a composition’ and Hopkins’s spatial conjury as (interestingly) an ‘unconscious parody of the Ignatian composition of place’;22 while Joseph J. Feeney, seeking to read Hopkins ‘from the perspective of play’, has recognized in his sermon ‘old habits’ of wit that work to contest ‘the ­over-­familiarity of the Gospel stories’.23 ‘The laughter that spoiled Hopkins’s sermon was a regrettable affair’, Devlin remarked debonairly in 1959, ‘but it will not do to make a Joycean tragedy of it – the shrinking poet amid the coarse and brutal clergy, etc. The laughter is on the other side now anyway’ (S, p. 314). In fairness to Hopkins’s original audience, however, more than a ­high-­handed acknowledgement of Hopkins’s poetic achievement from the ­vantage-­point of the present is needed for the laughter to be ‘on the other side’ in this particular case. In this chapter, I propose to offer just such an apology for the sermon. SACRED PLACE MAKING As suggested above, I see the Dominical as a complex (psycho-)cartographic act – inescapably ‘ideological work’ embedded in what Jackie Feldman calls ‘the poetics and politics of sacred place making’.24 Hopkins’s radical Wales–Holy Land palimpsest participates in contemporary discourses of geopiety – a term first used by John Kirtland Wright25 to signify a profound devotional attachment to a ­‘real-­imagined’ Holy Land, constructed – often in cartographic terms – from what Burke O. Long calls a ‘curious mix of romantic imagination, historical rectitude, and attachment to physical place’.26 In other words, the object of geopiety was not so much an actual place as a ‘conceptual space’ that served a variety of cultural, political, devotional and personal agendas.27 (In Hopkins’s case, as I hope to show, one should add ‘dogmatic’ and ‘psychospiritual’ to that list.) To see the verbal chorography or ­sermon-­map of March 1877 merely as a (characteristically idiosyncratic) rhetorical embellishment is to miss the ways in which it is bound up with the national and imperial ideologies and major cartographic projects of the age. As an ‘articulation of holy lands at home’ that encodes particular

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formations of social and ­socio-­spiritual relations, the sermon – and with it, the great poetry of the Welsh period – help to shape a complex contemporary discourse of cartographic knowledge, ownership and power in the context of the period’s pervasive ‘Holy Land consciousness’.28 Moreover, charting Hopkins’s cartographic imagination allows us to extend Catherine Phillips’s recent work on ‘what Hopkins “saw”’ as he inhabited the expanding ‘visual worlds’ of the Victorian period.29 THE CLWYD VALLEY: BORDERS, ELEVATIONS, VISTAS, MAPS Silent, for the time being, as a poet, Hopkins arrived at St Beuno’s in August 1874 to begin his ­three-­year Theologate – the last period of training before his ordination. Norman White sees him at this moment as a borderer drawn to peripheral terrain: by the time his train puffed over the River Dee into Wales on 28 August 1874, Hopkins had already crossed several frontiers of a more elusive kind, and was someone without a conventional identity, who inhabited a region of uncertain allegiances … he had made a habit of not accepting or settling within the secure conventions of any geographical or ideological location, always being on the edge of a territory and trying to elasticise its boundaries.30

As White also reminds us, the ancient boundary line of Offa’s Dyke skirts Tremeirchion, St Beuno’s and Moel Maenefa (as it does Wordsworth’s Wye), and Hopkins’s early forays would have ­criss-­crossed its tangible, erratic course.31 White posits a mind acutely aware of the permeability of geographical and spiritual boundaries and their energizing stress. I suggest that Hopkins also brought with him an already highly developed cartographic faculty. It had been nurtured by his familiarity with the ubiquitous illustrated Bibles of his (Protestant) youth and by the various (unidentified) maps he hung in his rooms at Balliol alongside portraits of poets and artists.32 It had been refined by the internalization of what Sulloway has called the ‘panegyric accuracy’ of observation demanded by his beloved Ruskin in the disciplines of art and architecture and, as we have seen, by St Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises.33 Hopkins’s responses, as writer and artist, to the natural world already combined geometric exactness with inventive delight. Thus the young Jesuit who came to north Wales was acutely responsive to the contours of a landscape he would describe a few months after the Dominical in

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‘Pied Beauty’ as ‘plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough’ (PW, p. 144).34 ‘Plotted’ here suggests both the ordered and variegated terrain apprehended by the observer ‘in the field’ and the cartographic marking (or symbolic inscription) of that terrain on a map. A map is a tool that combines detailed observation with a governing ­meta-­perspective. St Beuno’s position on the hillside beneath 290-foot Moel Maenefa, from which there was ‘a vast prospect over the ­long-­drawn valley of the Clwyd’ with Snowdonia visible beyond, invested his ­day-­to-­day observations and his very habit of thought with modalities of pitch and prospect, elevation and overview.35 It was from ‘dark Maenefa the mountain’ that he would take his bardic nom de plume – Brân Maenefa (The crow of Maenefa). His room, either in Hamlets corridor or in Mansions Gallery, commanded striking views either over the Clwyd Valley or over the vertiginous garden and up to Moel Maenefa. To his father in late August 1874 he wrote: ‘The garden is all heights, terraces, Excelsiors, misty mountain tops, seats up trees called Crows’ Nests, flights of steps seemingly up to heaven.’36 His journals reveal that during his first two months at St Beuno’s, he was forever seeking out and occupying ­vantage-­points in the vicinity, locations from which to survey and possess this new territory (knowing he would soon have to leave it – the impermanence of Jesuit postings in the English province being a fact of life). One of his first acts on arrival was to climb the hill ‘behind’ Maenefa – probably Moel y Gaer – with his fellow Jesuit, William Kerr, from which he could look ‘round the whole country, up the valley towards Ruthin and down to the sea’: The cleave in which Bodfari and Caerwys lie was close below … The heights by Snowdon were hidden by the clouds but not from distance or dimness … All the length of the valley the skyline of the hills was flowingly written all along upon the sky … Looking all round but most in looking far up the valley I felt an instress and charm of Wales.37

The effort of apprehending such a vista – a view at once panoptic and localized – is rewarded by instress: the force (for which Hopkins had recently discovered a philosophical and theological justification in Duns Scotus) that sustains the distinctive, individualizing ‘selfhood’ of Wales’s topography and in turn exerts a thrilling ‘stress’ on the perceiver. As we shall see, that ‘stress’ immediately translated itself into wider cultural, linguistic and doctrinal cartographies. A month later, having walked back from Cwm through Rhuallt woods with another friend, he described the Clwyd Valley lying before him, ‘so like Ribblesdale from

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the fells that you might have thought you were there … full of Welsh charm and graceful sadness, all in gravel colours … like a painted napkin’.38 Once again, an image of a much-loved and internalized landscape (in this case that of Ribblesdale, Lancashire, where he had just completed his Philosophate) is projected onto Welsh ground. And the simile Hopkins deploys gestures at an understanding of landscape and graphic/linguistic ‘representations’ of it that goes beyond the merely analogic, metaphorical and symbolic. Hopkins is likely to have known that ‘napkin’ is etymologically related to classical Latin mappa (piece of cloth), which later signified a surveyor’s map (usually drawn on fabric). Moreover, coupled with ‘graceful sadness’, ‘gravel colours’ and Hopkins’s always devotional gaze, ‘painted napkin’ seems quietly instinct with the suggestion of St Veronica’s Napkin or sudarium – the holy cloth reputedly bearing the image of Christ’s face. Welsh ground, map and holy presence combine in another geopietistic palimpsest, or in what D. K. Smith, picking up on the idea of the ­map-­as-­text(ile) as the ‘cloth of the world’, calls a ‘semiotic interweaving’.39 Hopkins’s very next journal entry – 19 October 1874 – records a second trip with another scholastic to Cwm ‘and back by the woods on the Rhuallt’ a week later: I was there again with Purbrick, at the scaffolding which is left as a mark of the survey at the highest point. We climbed on this and looked round: it was a fresh and delightful sight. The day was rainy and a rolling wind; parts of the landscape, as the Orms’ Heads, were blotted out by rain. The clouds westwards were a pied piece – ­sail-­coloured brown and milky blue … but all the nearer valley was showered with tapered diamond flakes of fields in purple and brown and green[.]40

The prospect is clearly the source of Hopkins’s ­geographical-­ meteorological simile for the miraculous ‘refreshment of the barley bread’ in his Dominical sermon: ‘As when here a sheet of white rain coming from the sea blots out first the Orms’ Heads …’ But it is more than that: it is a paradigmatic outlook in all senses – Hopkins on the trigonometrical station on Rhuallt Hill, ­north-­north-­west of St Beuno’s, triangulating his new Welsh ground (trigonometrically in ‘tapered diamonds’), engaging in a composition of place he implicitly associates with the recent geodetic activity of the surveyors who had charted Flintshire in 1870 and 1871 for the ­six-­inch and ­twenty-­five-­inch ‘First Edition’ Ordnance Survey maps.41 Here, place is ‘composed’ cartographically in an ‘embodied’ process that involves (as it did for the surveyors themselves) ‘direct, sensual contact with the spaces to be mapped’.42 For

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Hopkins, the landscape’s affect cannot be separated from the power of cartographic acts of naming and knowing; even the opacity of ‘parts of the landscape … blotted out by rain’ has its analogue in the ‘rebus’ of absence and presence that constitutes the ‘made object’ of a map.43 The trig points on Mynydd Cwm and on Moel Maenefa are clearly visible on both Ordnance Survey maps, published in 1872 (see figures 3 and 4). ­Hand-­coloured on demand, these maps – another example of the Victorian ‘particularist temperament’, and the nexus between knowledge and power – were texts thick with ‘graphic and linguistic codes’ that parcelled out, recursively constructed and legitimized the parish as a controlled social entity.44 Take the ­twenty-­five-­inch map, on which, as J. B. Harley emphasizes, Every road … field, fence or hedge, stream and building [is] shown; non-­ agricultural land is distinguished by ten different symbols for categories of woodland, marsh and rough pasture … hundreds of minor place names, including field names until 1888, appear on a map for the first time … The exact shape and area of each enclosure is maintained, the series being the first to show field boundaries with complete accuracy.45

Hopkins must have heard local stories of professional surveyors, accompanied by labourers, moving about the landscape carrying 66-foot, 100-link chains marked with arrows, measuring rods and tapes, and ­ten-­foot ‘station staffs’, ‘shod with iron at the lower end and having a small red and white flag at the top’.46 Indeed, since work on the ­one-­inch ‘Second Edition’ (new series) map of Flintshire extended from 1870 to 1885, surveyors may well have been active in the Tremeirchion area during Hopkins’s time at St Beuno’s. They would have been seen sketching, ascending the area’s ­vantage-­points to triangulate the terrain with the help of a theodolite, ‘plotting’ and ‘piecing’ the landscape in trigonometric space in order to create a cartographic representation that would disaggregate ‘woodland, marsh and rough pasture’ – just as Hopkins was to demarcate the geographical haecceitas of ‘fold’ (grazing ground), ‘fallow’ (land left unsown) and ‘plough’ (cultivated land) in poetry that would imaginatively survey the contours of the Clwyd Valley and other Welsh landscapes. (Thus the line ‘And this bright landscape under survey’ from Hopkins’s Merionethshire poem of August 1876, ‘Penmaen Pool’, begins to resonate in interesting ways.) Wales confirmed Hopkins as a Catholic, ­English-­Welsh cartographer who demarcated and elasticized the borders of Welsh ground in relation to other ‘holy’ lands in an extended act of spiritual geodesy. Just as cartography is always

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3  The area around St Beuno’s, from the ­six-­inch ‘First Edition’ Ordnance Survey map, published in 1872

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4  The area around St Beuno’s, from the ­twenty-­five-­inch ‘First Edition’ Ordnance Survey map, published in 1872

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already marked by a politics, a rhetoric, a ‘hierarchicalisation of space’ and a Foucauldian ‘juridical power’, so Hopkins’s sectarian cartography claims Clwydian space in the service of an idea.47 HOPKINS AND THE MAPPING OF (THE) HOLY LAND Hopkins’s sacralization of Welsh space in the Dominical sermon takes characteristically individual form, but it should be understood as a thoroughly Victorian project. The map outlined in the refectory at St Beuno’s in March 1877 was part of a wider contemporary pietistic endeavour focused on ‘possessing’ the Holy Land. As Kathleen Stewart Howe reminds us, ­nineteenth-­century Palestine was a paradoxical site in the western consciousness. On the one hand, as a political backwater of the Ottoman Empire (ruled from Damascus), it was crucially indeterminate (or rather overdetermined) space, its borders ‘variously drawn by religious tradition, scholarly research and competing historical claim’ – a ‘nebulous geographical concept’. On the other, it was ‘the site of fervent religious certainty, a landscape of belief’.48 Eitan ­Bar-­Yosef suggestively identifies it as ‘a land whose boundaries were not so much geographical as emotional’.49 Many ­nineteenth-­century travellers and explorers experienced the region as a spiritual chronotope – ‘as if they were traveling into some distant biblical past’, as John Davis observes, ‘with the contemporary Ottoman realities remaining unacknowledged and ignored’.50 For so long an internalized space of spiritual yearning in the Western mind – particularly for evangelical Protestantism – Palestine in the ­mid-­nineteenth century became the site of intense spiritual desire and geographical and cartographic scrutiny that served both to demystify the Holy Land and sacramentalize it anew. Passionate scholarly and (from the 1830s) touristic interest in the holy ground of Palestine – ‘a hallmark of the ­nineteenth-­century engagement with religion’51 – was intensified as the disciplines of historical topography and biblical geography pioneered by such explorers and Protestant apologists as the American Edward Robinson (whose highly influential Biblical Researches in Palestine first appeared in 1841)52 took a formal, comprehensive cartographic turn in 1865 with the founding in London of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Partial surveys had been conducted by the Royal Engineers in previous decades, but the PEF’s aim was ‘the systematic topographical mapping of the whole country and the recording of its ancient remains’53 – or,

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more dramatically, in the words of the biblical scholar, the Revd George Williams, the subjection of Bible lands to ‘the unreasoning though logical tests of theodolite and land chain, of altitude and azimuth instruments, of the photographic camera, and the unerring evidence of the ­pole-­star and the sun’.54 The PEF’s explorations were marked by a revisionist approach to biblical history and topography; its researches were fervently followed and eagerly scrutinized at home by a pious public anxious to give each biblical story a local habitation and a name.55 Salvation was to be related ‘in its geographical aspect’.56 The PEF’s enterprise fed, but did not always gratify or fulfil, the devotional desire (both Protestant and Catholic), to ground Christian revelation ‘in an actual place available for discovery and plotting with geographical coordinates’, while retaining the romanticized and nostalgic images of the mind’s eye.57 The ‘new cartography’ of the period ‘reflected scientific developments in Europe in mathematical theory, geodesy, and map-­ making’, yet technical cartographic survey is never a neutral act.58 The process of ‘matching biblical ­place-­names with actual geographical sites’ (compare Hopkins’s own careful equivalences – ‘Bethsaida Julias would be Rhuddlan; Capharnaum would be near Llanefydd … Bethsaida near Henllan; Tiberias would be Denbigh; Chorozain might be Bodfari’) had the effect of disseminating a conception of the Holy Land ‘as a space which encouraged, rather than resisted, assimilation’.59 From the first, the activities of the PEF were inescapably bound up with a network of complementary and competing devotional, military and imperialist agendas.60 As John Moscrop emphasizes, the PEF ‘came into existence … during a period when Britain was struggling to define its imperial purpose and secure its imperial frontiers’; it served as ‘a justification for the existence of an Empire on a truly global scale’.61 At the first meeting of the PEF, William Thomson, archbishop of York, explicitly defined the Holy Land as an English possession, and by extension, the planned cartographic enterprise as an exercise in spiritual dedication and national ­self-­definition as the Chosen People: This country of Palestine belongs to you and me, it is essentially ours … It is the land towards which we turn as the foundation of our hopes; it is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do this dear old England which we love so much.62

A similar discourse of possession pervaded contemporary American articulations of the Holy Land in the work of such authors as Robinson and William McClure Thomson (author of The Land and the Book

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(1859), which proved formative in Britain as well as in America).63 So much more is at stake here than spiritual aspirations. As Kathleen Howe remarks, ‘an expedition conceived in the spirit of British physical and intellectual possession of the Holy Land’ brought together ‘military surveyors, philologists and biblical scholars in a ­quasi-­military campaign articulated in terms of the great intellectual project to know the Orient’.64 And, as John Moscrop puts it, the British Empire, whose high watermark was approaching, ‘was to be rooted physically in the soil of Palestine’ by the PEF’s excavations and, ultimately, its maps.65 Thus as the PEF, controlled by an ‘Anglican English ascendancy’,66 extended their survey across the Holy Land, their work constituted not only a geodetic record central to the ‘interpretation and confirmation of the biblical record’, but also a ‘geography of religious possession and religious strategy’67 marked by a ‘Liberal Protestant’ and ‘modernist’ ideology.68 It is no exaggeration to see the work of the PEF as an expression of a thrusting and thoroughly politicized evangelical Protestantism; geodetic survey and the production of maps became ‘a ­near-­divine vindication of Britain’s place in the world’.69 The PEF’s guiding Protestant agenda would of course have been alien to the ultramontane Catholic Hopkins – a point to which I want to return – but he would certainly have been in sympathy with aspects of the project’s imperialist mentalité. As Hopkins began his Philosophate in Lancashire in 1870, the PEF turned from the hitherto primary enterprise of exploration to mapping (a ‘turn’ that divided opinion in the PEF, which was now supported by the War Office).70 Seven years later, on the very day (11 March 1877) Hopkins delivered his Dominical towards the end of his Theologate at St Beuno’s – plotting the Holy Land onto a local, inestimably dear, landscape that existed for him as physical reality, sacramental space and cartographic projection – Lieutenant Horatio Kitchener was ‘tak[ing] the levels at the Sea of Galilee’ and, with Captain Claude Reignier Conder, was bringing to a close the monumental Survey of Western Palestine, begun in 1871 and completed in 1877.71 By the late 1870s, geography had only just established itself ‘as a distinct academic discipline’.72 The survey’s ­twenty-­six map sheets (one inch to the mile – the British standard scale),73 published with discursive memoirs in the 1880s, were the result of a topographic endeavour that went beyond the (merely) geodetic by excavating layered Jewish, Arabic, Christian and Syrian ground. By both confirming and reorientating received biblical history and geography, these maps served to corroborate and inflect the coordin­ ates of spiritual identity in the West since the ‘nature and structures’ of

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the Holy Land held ‘significance beyond that of landscape and architecture’.74 The cartographic acts outlined above – that of the Ordnance Survey in Wales, the PEF’s in Palestine and Hopkins’s at St Beuno’s – are not coincidental; rather, they are articulations of a moment in British imperialist history when spirituality, mapping and contending ‘British’ identities merged in an ideologically conflicted enterprise of land possession and knowledge. Even in the ‘private’ and ­self-­sustaining communities of his various Jesuit institutions, Hopkins would have known of the PEF’s grand enterprise. The events of the day provided topics for seminarian debates, and we know that from 27 March to 6 May 1871, during Hopkins’s Lancashire Philosophate at St Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst, The Recovery of Jerusalem: A Narrative of Exploration and Discovery in the City and the Holy Land (1871)75 – note the crusading title – was read out in the refectory.76 This is a detailed account of the excavation and mapping of Jerusalem and its environs by Captain Charles Wilson and Captain Charles Warren – both prime movers in the PEF. Wilson’s topographical detail and his descriptions of Galilean weather effects in The Recovery of Jerusalem – ‘Tiberias, Mejdel and other buildings stood out in sharp relief from the gloom behind; but they were soon lost sight of as the thunder gust swept past them, and rapidly advancing across the lake lifted the placid water into a bright sheet of foam’77 – would undoubtedly have appealed to Hopkins’s particularizing, chorographical and cartographic senses. So too – perhaps as a sort of challenge – would Wilson’s revisionist discourse on the ‘actual’ site of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Towards the beginning of the section on the Sea of Galilee, Wilson emphasized how geographical and cartographic survey harmonized with the gospel accounts, and quoted Ernest Renan to argue that the lake and its environs constituted ‘un cinquième évangile, lacéré, mais lisible encore’ (a fifth gospel, torn, but still legible).78 Read out as Hopkins ate his evening meal, the words radically (and Protestantly) textualize the Holy Land.79 Ancient topography, the gospels, the PEF’s bright new maps and Wilson and Warren’s own recently published volume (food for Catholic thought) coalesce into decipherable – and yet still mysterious – space. Maps themselves, such publications seemed to imply, were now modes of access to Revelation – one might say modes of religious experience. The Bible, the Holy Land and the new cartography entered into a fascinating codependent relationship, a ­‘geo-­spiritual fusion of writ and religion’.80 If, as Hilton Obenzinger remarks, ‘time’ for Holy Land tourists and explorers in this period ‘was continually adjusted to the

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textualized necessities of biblical narrative’,81 then, by the same token, one’s reading of the Bible was continually adjusted from the mid-1860s by the ‘textualized necessities’ of the PEF’s new diagrams and maps and by the newly ‘legible’ Holy Land that they were uncovering.82 As a number of cultural historians have recently demonstrated, the resonance of the Holy Land in the Victorian imagination was amplified not only through the PEF’s written accounts but also through various visual discourses (including, of course, the map as iconic sign) that resulted in what John Davis has identified as a ‘universal Holy Land visual literacy’, to which both the Protestant and the Catholic mind were already constitutionally attuned.83 Contemporary images of the Holy Land became widely available through new technologies, confirming ‘the view from Pisgah – the passage of the Jordan – the rock of Zion – the fountain of Siloa – the shades of Gehenna – the lake of Gennesareth [Galilee]’ as ‘the household imagery of Christendom’,84 in the words of Arthur Penrhyn (later ‘Dean’) Stanley, author of Sinai and Palestine in Connection with their History (1856) – a book Hopkins may well have known as a student at Oxford.85 The diffusion of visual representations and uncanny embodied simulacra of the Holy Land in Victorian popular culture resulted in a pervasive ‘Holy Land consciousness’. It also guaranteed that ‘a set of colonial assumptions’ (the ‘foundation of national privilege’ prominent among them) were deeply internalized by those in Britain and America with an appetite for topographical and cartographic fantasies. What Branham has identified as the ‘consumerisation of faith’86 took many forms, generated by what Eitan ­Bar-­Yosef (employing Philippa Levine’s term) sees as an ‘invisible college’ of ‘producers’ of the Holy Land, operating across various disciplines, ‘from scientific surveys and poems to sermons and Royal Academy paintings’.87 The availability, consumption and ‘virtual possession’ of the Holy Land began at home in the form of illustrated Bibles with inset maps that tracked the ‘Journeyings of the Israelites from Egypt to the Land of Canaan’ and Paul’s missionary travels.88 As Zur Shalev notes, such maps became (for Protestant and Catholic alike) objects ‘to admire and meditate upon’.89 These views and cartographies were powerfully confirmed by Sunday school pedagogy in the form of larger, more detailed and more imaginative maps, and by the practice of requiring children to fill in the topographical features of maps drawn by the instructor and to draw their own biblical maps from memory.90 The contemporary need to visualize and emplace the gospel narratives in relation to geographia sacra was further fed by a host of scripture atlases, manuals and other

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5  Map of the Sea of Galilee and surroundings by the Palestine Exploration Fund, reprinted in E. H. Plumptre (ed.), The Bible Educator (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1877), III, p. 169. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

works of ‘reference’ such as E. H. Plumptre’s The Bible Educator (1877), which carried the latest PEF maps (see figure 5). In his Sabbath School Teachers and Parents (1838), David Stow asked Sunday school instructors to encourage their pupils’ ‘mental vision’ by requiring them to

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‘picture out’ the Sea of Galilee as visual image or map in relation to familiar objects from domestic landscapes, so that they could ‘imagin[e] the Oriental by using the vernacular’.91 What ­Bar-­Yosef calls ‘the array of geographical projections and fantasies’ and ‘the multiplicity of Holy Lands which populated the Victorian cultural imagination’92 gained increasingly affective visual definition from ­mid-­century onwards in ‘panoramas, dioramas, models and exhib­ itions’.93 In America, the domestication of the Holy Land would by the late 1870s manifest itself in expansive physical replicas and ‘theatres’ of holy space, such as Palestine Park, Chautauqua, New York (complete and uncanny with its miniature Sea of Galilee).94 But it was in photographs – like maps, ‘instrument[s] of documentation to support ideology’, conflating pilgrim, explorer, scientist and artist – that Palestine was most dramatically brought home to Hopkins’s generation.95 Photography was an important element of the PEF’s exploratory enterprise, evolving within the same ­politico-­cultural context. Having completed the Western Survey, Kitchener himself published a portfolio of ‘twelve views of his own selection’.96 Early daguerreotypes gave way to calotypes and ­wet-­plate photography. Affordable stereoscopes and, from the 1870s, ­dry-­plate photography paved the way for ubiquitous ­mass-­market reproductions, all of which served as important tools of faith alongside Scripture itself. Publishers of photographic guides to the Holy Land sought to convince their readers that their latest portfolio offered ‘the experience of following the “footsteps” of Christ’, and this ‘without leaving home’.97 Spiritual psychogeography is precisely what Hopkins’s Ignatian Composition of Place, with its exegetical visuality, also promised his St Beuno’s audience. The stereoscope, which ‘superimposed’ and ‘amplified’ two views of a scene to create ‘a three-­dimensional simulacrum’, became ‘a popular ­nineteenth-­century metaphor … to explain the ­all-­important union of the Bible and the land’ in what the Revd Hugh Macmillan ingeniously described as ‘the stereoscope of our faith’.98 Burke O. Long rightly sees the new technology as located ‘at the intersection of technical scholarship and popular culture … a mix of nascent archaeology, ethnography, geography, cartography, and biblical literalism, all entangled in ideologically charged renderings of the Holy Land’.99 One stereographic device was meant to be used with a map on which pairs of lines were drawn, forming a V ‘that delimited the peripheral scope of the photographic view’ and showed ‘exactly how much territory in the map was depicted by the stereo card’.100 The stereo­ scope thus provides a fascinating analogue for Hopkins’s act of mapping

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the Holy Land onto the Clwyd Valley: just as the popular new technology used the ­two-­dimensional map and the stereocard’s depth of field to conjure sacred space, so Hopkins calls on his audience devotionally to compose a ­hyper-­real sacred space which he then grounds in a binocular layering of lands and timescales. And just as the stereoscope, as John Davis emphasizes, ‘provided assurance to the home viewer that the faraway landscape’ had been ‘subjected to a rigorous visual plotting’ – ‘regularized and triangulated, brought under control by multiple commanding perspectives’ – so Hopkins’s Welsh mapping encodes not only the driving cartographic ideologies of the age but also the ‘commanding perspectives’101 of his own Catholic faith and those of the Ordnance Survey, whose agents had recently triangulated the ground of St Beuno’s. The visual discourses alluded to above provided Victorian culture with a powerful ‘surrogate’ experience of the Holy Land – what Long, following Edward Soja, calls ‘a fantasized reality on the ground’ – a socially constructed ‘affective geography’ in which, as Soja states, ‘all histories and geographies, all times and places, are immanently presented and represented, a strategic space of power and domination, empowerment, and resistance’.102 Since devotion, imagination and myths of cultural possession were also powerfully in play, to describe as merely vicarious the encounter with the Holy Land that these visual artefacts engendered in the viewer is to underestimate the extent to which the pious Victorian mind already felt the landscapes of the Bible to be inhabitable space. This ‘spiritual identification with place’, inescapably embedded in a particular socio- and ­geo-­political context, is neatly articulated in the term ‘geopiety’. In part, geopiety is an expression of a ‘longing to have our everyday lives set within the horizon of a sacred story’, in Timothy K. Beal’s expressive formulation.103 Geopietistic inhabitations of place have often been seen as fetishistic,104 with that fetishism being aided by the sense in which the sacred terrain in question is constructed as a space apart whose ‘demarcated and differentiated’ borders, to employ ­Yi-­Fu Tuan’s conceptual frames, allow it to be easily transplanted to other spaces by ‘symbolic thought’ operating within particular social conditions.105 Bar-­Yosef and others have shown that acts of conscious transplant­ ation were barely necessary in late Victorian England owing to a prevalent English Hebraism and ‘Orientalist thought’ that had already configured the Holy Land as England, and the English/British nation as the Chosen People. Ideologies of imperial power, a sense of Protestant

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election and complex networks of geopiety combined to deconstruct ‘the series of stark oppositions – East/West, self/other’ that have come to characterize the ‘binary logic’ of Saidian Orientalism. Rather, ‘Palestine [was] a “there” which [was] already a “here”’.106 Timothy Mitchell notes that ‘the internalised East’ was apprehended ‘as a map one already carried in one’s head’.107 The Sunday schools’ ‘scriptural geography lessons’ both expanded pupils’ cartographic imaginations and, as ­Bar-­Yosef remarks, ‘reinforced the domestic, ­inward-­looking Bunyanesque fantasy of discovering Jerusalem just around the corner’.108 And so to negotiate the Holy Land, from the mid-1860s onwards in particular, was to engage in an act of national location and ­self-­definition. Such was the strength of the identification of England and the Holy Land that travellers’ actual contact with Palestine and the discoveries and remappings of the PEF took on the uncanny quality of the ‘already known’. Alexander Kinglake, author of Eothen; or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (1844), remarked of the Sea of Galilee: ‘There she lay … Less stern than Wastwater – less fair than gentle Windermere – she had still the winning ways of an English lake.’109 Even Captains Wilson and Warren in The Recovery of Jerusalem refer to Galilee as ‘that lake district’ (a term in common use since the 1830s) ‘in which our Lord passed so large a portion of the last three years of His life’ – as if Christ were Cumbrian.110 Indeed, so thoroughly had the concept of an English Holy Land pervaded the cultural imagination that, as ­Bar-­Yosef goes on to argue, The same language which could engender a broader imperial claim over parts of the East was also the language employed to resist this imperial quest – renounce the distant, Middle Eastern Holy Land in favour of a ‘Holy Land’ that was ‘dear old England, which we love so much’ … the metaphorical appropriation of the ‘Holy Land’ overshadows the literal focus itself.111

The ­‘Anglo-­Israel’ (or ­‘British-­Israelite’) theory promulgated from the 1870s onwards introduced more tortuous ethnographic, millenarian and essentialist discourses of election and belonging into cultural circulation. Geopiety was no less important in ­nineteenth-­century Protestant Welsh culture. It was fed by a ­long-­standing indigenous identification with the Holy Land and the Jews (dating back in a recognizable form to the seventeenth century, though actually much older) that Dorian Llywelyn has called the ­‘Wales-­Israel tradition’.112 As commentators such as Jasmine Donahaye have shown, this tradition operated (as did its

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English incarnation) across a number of disciplines and discourses, constituting a powerful tool of national ­self-­definition – indeed, a ‘national myth’ that emphasized cultural and moral difference.113 As Llywelyn contends: ‘Political expression of a distinctive Welshness being difficult, national identity was translated to a separate spiritual sphere’ and shaped in terms of a ‘national spiritual eminence’ that was tantamount to ‘a national election along the lines of Israel’.114 Again, what we see here is the potent exercise of symbolic thought within specific ­politico-­historical circumstances; place (or rather conceptualized space) and national identity merge to form a geopietistic cultural (and later political) nationalism. National(ist) articulations of a ‘providential destiny’115 could also, of course, operate in terms of an ­extra-­historical teleology: little Wales would find itself ennobled on the other side of time. ‘Welsh Israelitism’, which Llywelyn calls ‘the most resonant bourdon in Welsh history, both spiritual and political’,116 operated in many forms: as philological theory, polemical ethnology, Welsh conversionist and colonial projects (such as the Palestinian settlement proposed by the Revd John Mills in 1858, which would restore the visibility of Wales ‘on the map of the world’117), and as a deep vein in Welsh nonconformity, whose cultural and political triumph during the Victorian period marks the most forceful articulation of ‘the myth of Welsh holiness’ as a mode of national identity.118 Dorian Llywelyn has suggested that at the heart of Welsh Protestant nonconformity and its conception(s) of election was – perhaps surprisingly – a ‘sacramental’ paradigm that bound together land, religion and people in what Derec Llwyd Morgan identifies as ‘essential’ as well as ‘comparative’ ways.119 Comparisons between Palestine and Wales regularly emphasized their similar geographical size; resemblance was also construed within a discourse of marginality and disempowerment.120 In the Victorian and Edwardian periods, a significant – and within the context of ­ever-­strengthening British imperialism, deeply conflicted – aspect of the ­Wales-­Israel trad­ ition was the ‘binary opposition to Englishness’ it posited, as Jasmine Donahaye has emphasized.121 This ­multi-­layered cultural ‘mapping’ of an ‘ideal’ Wales in relation to a Holy Land that remained tractable and ahistorical conceptual space was aided by travel accounts that simply would not leave Wales behind. Take Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine (1856), for example, which, as noted above, Hopkins may well have consulted at Oxford. Here, Wales in all its topographical variety serves as a recurrent geographical and conceptual frame within which the Holy Land achieves

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definition: ‘Those wild uplands of Carmel and Ziph are hardly distinguishable (except by their ruined cities and red anemones) from the Lowlands of Scotland or of Wales’; ‘The hills, except where occupied by vineyards and ­olive-­groves, are covered with disjointed rocks and grass, such as brought back dim visions of Wales.’ Stanley even allows himself the fantasy of ‘transplant[ing] Wales or Westmoreland into the heart of the Desert’ of Palestine in an attempt to communicate a sense of the comparative fertility of the Holy Land.122 And, as John Harvey has shown, this uncanny ‘affinity’ extended during the period to ‘topographical engravings of Wales and Palestine’, in which visual ‘equivalences’ between Welsh and sacred topographies gave the Holy Land ‘a permanent memorial in the Welsh landscape’.123 This uncanny sacralization of native ground was enhanced by the Hebrew names of so many ­chapel-­centric Welsh villages (Bethel, Bethesda, Bethlehem, Beulah, Golan, Hebron, Nazareth). A native geographical ‘theatre’ of divine acts, both benedictory and retributive, was everywhere: to the south of the righteous ground of St Beuno’s lay the hamlet of Sodom. A striking example of this impulse to emplace the Holy Land in domestic territory is the map issued by the Sunday School Union of Great Britain in 1900, whose bold ‘overmapping’ emerges directly, I suggest, from the various cultural articulations of the ­Wales-­Israel trad­ ition and the ‘stereoscopic’ cartographic culture outlined above. Though published at the turn of the twentieth century, Gwlad Canaan; Ar Gynllun Gogledd a Deheudir Cymru i Blant (‘The Land of Canaan; On a Plan of North and South Wales for Children’; see figure 6), drawn by ‘Ap Dewi’, represents a compelling visual context for Hopkins’s Dominical sermon. It renders his mapping of the Sea of Galilee onto the Clwyd Valley less idiosyncratic, allowing us to appreciate the extent to which Hopkins’s imagination participated in the circulating discourses of the day.124 As John Harvey notes, the Gwlad Canaan map showed the geographical location of the lands of the twelve tribes of Israel in Old Testament times and the regions into which Palestine was divided in New Testament times, set within the boundary of Wales … As far as possible the principal towns and cities of the Holy Land matched those towns and cities of Wales situated roughly in the same position …125

Of particular relevance in the context of Hopkins’s Dominical is the position of the Sea of Galilee, represented on the crudely drawn but culturally potent map as Bala Lake, just to the south of Hopkins’s chosen geography. As a pedagogic tool that also functioned as a map of cultural

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6  Gwlad Canaan; Ar Gynllun Gogledd a Deheudir Cymru i Blant (‘The Land of Canaan; On a Plan of North and South Wales for Children’), by ‘Ap Dewi’. Published by the Sunday School Union of Great Britain in 1900. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

and spiritual identity, the uncanny act of what might be called stereocartography accomplished by Gwlad Canaan would have confirmed in receptive minds the ‘affinity’ between Wales as sanctified ground and the sacred land of Palestine. One can go further: what this map, along with so many other late-nineeteenth-­century articulations of the ­Wales-­Israel tradition (including Hopkins’s sermon) are claiming goes beyond mere ‘affinity’ and ‘equivalence’ (the terms in which this map has hitherto been discussed).126 Emphatically, Wales here is holy land. MODALITIES OF THE MAP: SACRED/SECTARIAN SPACE, COLONIALISM, PSYCHOCARTOGRAPHY The powerful intersection of piety, imperialist endeavour, cultural val­idation and cartographic rationalism outlined above should leave us in

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no doubt that Hopkins’s map is doing complex and conflicted ‘ideological work’ that throws up fraught issues of possession and inhabitation. The Dominical map is emphatically an example of the ‘emplaced performance of the Bible’ and of the geographical embodiment of biblical text that to this day characterizes the construction of sacred space.127 Hopkins’s devotional ordnance survey is both a product and a driver of the ­multi-­layered geopietistic culture of his age. But the precise ‘entanglements’ of his mapping with ‘ideologically charged social space’– to use Long’s formulation – need further teasing out.128 The ­rhetorical-­devotional aspect of the Clwyd Valley–Galilee map emerges clearly enough in the Ignatian Composition of Place that Hopkins demanded of his (ultimately uncomposed) listeners. The land that Jesus walked and sanctified is brought ‘home’ to the pietistic imagination through Welsh equivalence. But, as I have suggested, Hopkins’s mind worked not through analogy merely, but through sacramental transposition and emplacement. Critics have long remarked on Hopkins’s incarnational, sacramental view of nature, and this should be extended, I suggest, to the concept of space, territory and maps. Thus, for the (albeit curtailed) duration of the Dominical, Wales becomes sacred space. Wales is not a Palestine manqué, and the Holy Land is not summoned within the frame of ‘virtualist’ or ‘memorialist’ illustration. Rather, it is ‘effectively conjured’; the Clwyd Valley as Holy Land is ‘substantially summoned’ in a miraculous, Christic act of cartographic transubstanti­ ation (to deploy the terms of the ­critical-­theological debate), with Hopkins as its priestly mapper.129 Alongside Jeffrey B. Loomis’s concept of Hopkins as ­‘scribe-­priest’ whose poetry seeks to ‘baptize all his readers into Roman Catholic Christianity’, one might place his role as a ­cartographer-­priest, whose sacralization of Welsh space accomplishes similar work.130 At Stonyhurst, Lancashire in 1883, Hopkins in ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe’ would conceive of the continued, endlessly refreshed, embodiments of Christ in the modern world in terms of geographical incarnations, toponymic instantiations: He does take fresh and fresh, Though much the mystery how, Not flesh but spirit now And makes, O marvellous! New Nazareths in us, Where she [the Virgin] shall yet conceive Him, morning, noon, and eve; New Bethlems, and he born

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There, evening, noon, and morn – Bethlem or Nazareth …  (PW, p. 174)

The topography of the Clwyd Valley becomes a new arena of the miraculous. Charles Wilson in The Recovery of Jerusalem had remapped the miracle of the loaves and fishes, asserting that it did not take place on the east side of the lake, as Hopkins (following ‘[a]ll late writers on Palestine’) insists in his Dominical, but near Tiberias on the west side.131 ‘But a glance’ at the PEF map – bright with modernist, Protestant light – will show as much.132 But Hopkins remaps the miracle in a cartographic ­counter-­reformation, placing it nearer to the traditional site of the miracle at Bethsaida Julias, ‘at the north end of the lake, on the east side of the Jordan, as it might be at this very spot where we are now upon the slope of Maenefa’.133 Christ’s miraculous feeding of the 5,000 is happening now, here, at supper at St Beuno’s; the Holy Land is now and Wales. Hopkins’s Dominical is one of the most dramatic contributions to the ­nineteenth-­century ­Wales-­Israel tradition. It is also thoroughly sectarian and dogmatic – an act of specifically Catholic possession of this (lost, mostly Wesleyan and, beyond the coastal towns, still ­Welsh-­speaking) corner of Wales. If the PEF sought to map Palestine for Protestantism, Hopkins’s cartographic energies would be spent reclaiming Wales for Catholicism. All around him in the Clwyd Valley, he saw traces of the Welsh Catholic past, ­ghost-­presences on the new Ordnance Survey maps. This was desecrated space. The resonant absences and ruined presences of the Clwyd and Elwy Valleys testified to the loss of Wales to Protestantism. As well as broad vistas (identified by Jackie Feldman as a ‘Protestant’ mode of seeing), Hopkins was drawn to the enclaved space of former Catholic shrines.134 Soon after arriving at St Beuno’s he visited despoiled Ffynnon Fair (St Mary’s Well), a few miles east ‘in a beautiful spot in the valley of the Elwy at a ruined chapel’. He drew the well in his journal, remarking: ‘The shape is something as opposite: the five points are perhaps to recall the five porches of Bethesda and their symbolism.’135 The Holy Land was already here (‘These things, these things were here and but the beholder / Wánting’, as he would write in ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’); the ­five-­porticoed healing pool of Bethesda (see John 5: 1–9) – the site of another of Christ’s miracles – was already located in the ­spiritual-­topographical ambit of St Beuno’s. But this was a Holy Land ruined and dishonoured. Even the presence of physical buildings bespoke loss: to the south of St Beuno’s was the Rock Chapel (a haunt of

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Hopkins’s), ‘built fifteen years before by a corps of volunteer Irish navvies, in their spare time from constructing the local railways’; it was meant ‘to make reparation to Our Lady for the sanctuaries that had been snatched from her in the Vale of Clwyd’.136 Hopkins’s great spring of inspiration, remarkable St Winefred’s Well (also ­five-­porched, to recall Bethesda) at neighbouring Holywell, was, however, still intact and in use, and served for Hopkins as a point of spiritual gravitation, ‘the spring in place leading back the thoughts by its spring in time to its spring in eternity’, as he recorded in his journal.137 Hopkins’s Galilee map floods the local topography of neglected springs and wells with Catholic energy in a bold conversionist act of restoration. It revivifies the Clwyd Valley’s Catholic ­water-­spaces (whose aquatic ‘pressure’ – both ‘a ­welling-­up, and a containment’, as Conran has it 138 – would become a central motif and ‘mnemonic peg’139 in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’) in an act of inescapably sectarian geopiety that takes many of its contours from the cartographic fantasies of the age. Hopkins’s map – itself a Catholic icon – is a Jesuit answer to the PEF’s Protestant mapping project, the evangelical Protestantism of the ­Wales-­Israel tradition and the Ordnance Survey’s rationalist scrutiny. It is a wholly characteristic irony that Hopkins would have been generally sympathetic to the imperial project within which the PEF operated. Hopkins offers a chart whose ‘reality’ is projected onto space through the Ignatian force of devotional belief to form a continuum or chronotope in which Wales and the Holy Land are coeval, and in which Welsh ground is claimed for the Old Faith. The Dominical marks a proselytizing move entirely in tune with the doctrinaire endings of Hopkins’s two great shipwreck poems. In the final stanza of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, a ‘shrill, triumphalist’ poet asks the drowned tall nun to ‘Remémber us in the róads’ and calls for ‘Our kíng back, Oh, upon Énglish sóuls’.140 In ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’, written during his next posting in Derbyshire, Hopkins ‘deplore[s]’ the ‘riving off’ from Catholicism of his doomed Protestant ‘Fast foundering own generation’, and laments ‘our curse / Of ruinous shrine’ and ­‘hoar-­hallowèd shrines unvisited’ (see PW, pp. 128, 151–2). I suggest that we should recognize the Dominical map as sacral cartography of the same uncompromisingly dogmatic, ultramontane kind and as an articulation of Catholic (and specifically Jesuit) hiraeth for a ‘homeland’ (not merely a Jesuit – and English – ‘province’) that disenfranchised, peripatetic Catholic religious could experience only as uncanny. Hopkins’s map is a Welsh–Catholic version of what Robert L. Wilken terms Jewish ‘territorial realism’.141 The outline of the Sea of Galilee that Hopkins

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must have traced out on a recently published Ordnance Survey map of the Clwyd Valley in advance of his sermon demarcates this beloved topography (a striking localization of the ­Wales-­Israel tradition) as a miraculous Christified see – evangelized and made witness anew, returned to the fold. Long’s notion of the ideological entanglements of all maps should alert us to the fact that the Catholic act of cartographic reclamation sketched above is only one of many, intersecting paradigms. Considered in ­politico-­cultural terms, Hopkins’s mapping of Palestine onto Wales is only the latest inscription of the imperialist desire to fix the Orient as an ‘object of knowledge’ and possession, or to domesticate and appropriate it as Wales/England/Britain, ‘using the familiar, the indigenous, the stuff of “here”’.142 The Victorian Holy Land is thus doubly colonized: by the Ottoman empire, and by English/British exploratory enterprises. Even the ­Wales-­Israel tradition (despite its ­cultural-­nationalist inflections) can be seen to operate within this imperialist frame. But as is true of all maps, Hopkins’s can be seen in a different light: his mapping of a colonized, disenfranchised and commodified Holy Land onto Wales brings into focus the colonized status of Wales itself – a territory that is still emphatically ‘other’, still debatable land. Catholic chorography becomes cultural ­counter-­map. Equally, Hopkins’s precise localization of the Sea of Galilee might be seen as marking a desire to contest a ‘national(ized) model of space’ and privilege a ‘devolved’, localist frame of spiritual activity.143 There is also a case to be made for Hopkins as a cartographic thinker who (to draw on Talissa Ford’s recent analysis of Blakean ­anti-­imperialism) recognizes that ‘people inhabit, use, and share space in ways that cannot be contained by national divisions’ and who promotes (if only briefly in this Dominical sermon) ‘an entirely different type of imaginative work: an undoing of the binaries (here/there, us/them) that privilege the land of the “Holy Land” and assume such distinctions between holy and unholy space to be out of our control’.144 Most consumers of Holy Land artefacts, from maps to curios for Victorian cabinets, experienced Palestine as recognizable space. This was because most of the cultural objects that catered to the public appetite for the Holy Land represented contemporary Palestinian life as contextual staffage, erasing from view the cultural tensions and conflicts – ‘the particular ­on-­the-­ground social realities of competing ideologies’ – that marked it as land worth ‘possessing’ in the first place.145 Yet, as Long emphasizes:

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contemporary Palestine kept thrusting its resilient pressure onto the focal plane of the camera and across the path of ­would-­be pilgrims. Photographic image and commentary thus regularly framed problematic space between idealized biblical past and contemporary present.146

These social and cultural realities seem also to have been elided from Hopkins’s Galilee map. Yet, in the welter of Holy Land visual discourses, Hopkins could not have remained unaware of contemporary Palestinian reality on his culture’s focal plane. Moreover, his map signifies only relationally – pressure is exerted upon it by all other contemporary maps and images of the Holy Land, and by the underlying social contestations they either register or suppress. In other words, to offer any map of the Holy Land in the 1870s was to raise the issue of ideologically contested ground. In turn, mapping such ground onto the culturally contested Welsh/English, Protestant/Catholic space of the Clwyd Valley is a suggestive cultural and political act that prompts consideration of the political resemblances between eastern province and British principality. It also seeks to interpellate Hopkins’s listeners as inhabitants of a sacred but fraught borderland. Further, might Hopkins’s relocation or reincarnation of his chosen tract of Palestine – a tool to ‘survey’ the West by means of the East (even if that East had first been mapped by the West) – be seen as an attempt imaginatively to ‘deliver’ this exploited territory from its colonial condition and geography? Clearly, the map Hopkins outlined in St Beuno’s refectory is constituted by conflicting alignments and affiliations. Hopkins’s multiple cultural identities have yet to be fully dissected. His desire to convert the Welsh was necessarily bound up with his psychologically fraught relationship with the Welsh language. The rector at St Beuno’s deprecated his learning the language ‘unless it was purely for the sake of labouring among the Welsh’. Having pondered the dilemma ‘by St. Ignatius’ rules of election’, Hopkins reluctantly relinquished the idea. ‘I had no sooner given up the Welsh [sic]’, he wrote in his journal, ‘than my desire seemed to be for the conversion of Wales and I had it in mind to give up everything else for that’.147 He did take Welsh lessons, however, and the received image of Hopkins is of one who connected vitally with the language at least in a literary context and who was capable of telling his mother: ‘I have always looked on myself as half Welsh’.148 Yet, this misses the psychocultural complexity of his relationship with the native tongue as a member of an English Jesuit institution like St Beuno’s, which, with its ‘strong, squat tower, and its fake portcullis’ looked like one of the ­‘border-­castles or strongholds of

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an alien culture surrounded by wild natives’, as Norman White puts it.149 Hopkins was certainly alive to ‘the anomalous position of an English-­ speaking community in the heart of a remote ­Welsh-­speaking countryside’ – a locality already marked by educational institutions with the ‘alien purpose of educating native ­Welsh-­speakers in English culture’, such as the British School at Rhuallt with its ­‘red-­brick awkwardness’.150 Hopkins’s Catholic scruples about the ‘purity’ of his motivations – if they weren’t scrupulously conversionist, Welsh was merely a cultural distraction – together with the colonialist mentality of his superiors (a purely utilitarian use of Welsh at St Beuno’s had died out by the 1870s) meant that he experienced the language as loss, absence and disconnection from place and people, what Norman White suggestively calls a ‘surrender’.151 Considered in this light, Hopkins’s Dominical, I propose, does for Welsh ground what his calling did not allow him to do with the language: possess it – with God’s blessing. Hopkins’s Welsh cartography is also acutely personal. The Dominical map charts what I would like to call a psychogeography of atonement relating specifically to his response to the disaster of the Deutschland, the iron, ­single-­screw steamer, bound for America, that struck the treacherous sandbank known as the Kentish Knock in the Thames Estuary on 6 December 1875 with the loss of sixty lives. The event, in particular the death in the wreck of five Franciscan nuns – exiled victims of the Falk laws of Bismark’s Kulturkampf – called forth from Hopkins the astonishingly stressed and unconventional (and yet in many ways characteristically Victorian) utterance, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ – like the Dominical sermon, a text his limited audience could not understand. Justifying the ways of God (and his wrecking sea) to man in this spiritual epic, he wrote as a ‘Catholic Milton’.152 At the same time, he was justifying himself to God, embedding his own identity in this ­ode-­narrative of physical and emotional strain in a particularly revealing way. As Jill Muller remarks, the poem begins ‘with Hopkins’s conversion’ and concludes ‘with his triumphant conflation of bardic and sacerdotal authority’ as a ­priest-­poet who has found a new proselytizing voice after seven years of ­self-­imposed censorship.153 I suggest that ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, written between December 1875 and probably early summer 1876, is a poem wracked by guilt, notwithstanding Hopkins’s reference early in the poem to the divine ‘stress’ and ‘stroke’ that ‘guilt is hushed by’ (see ll. 41–6). It is guilt for which the spiritual cartography of the Dominical sermon of 1877 seeks to atone. The guilt is twofold. Following the dense, muscular

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descriptions of the horrors of shipwreck in stanzas 13–19, Hopkins turns in stanza 24 to compare his own coordinates and condition with those of the tall nun: 24        Away in the loveable west,        On a pastoral forehead of Wales,      I was under a roof here, I was at rest,        And they the prey of the gales;    She to the ­black-­about air, to the breaker, the thickly    Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails,      Was cálling ‘O Chríst, Chríst, come quíckly’: The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her ­wild-­worst Best. 25        The majesty! what did she mean?        Breathe, arch and original Breath.      Is it lóve in her of the béing as her lóver had béen?        Breathe, body of lovely Death.    They were ­élse-­mínded then, áltogéther, the mén    Wóke thee with a We are périshing in the wéather of Gennésaréth.      Or ís it that she críed for the crówn thén, The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?  (ll. 185–200; PW, p. 125)

Hopkins’s Welsh pastoral, his restfulness in the west, contrast starkly with the turbulent suffering and fierce cold besetting the shipwreck victims on England’s east coast. The ‘loveable west’ also resonates with its uncanny other (or alter ego), the holy ‘East’. Thoughts of his own security in a bucolic Welsh valley lead to an interrogation of what exactly prompted the nun’s cry (variously reported in the newspapers, sent to him by his mother, on which he relied for ­second-­hand information about the wreck). Did the nun wish to undergo what her lover, Christ, had experienced – death? This in turn leads to a conjuring of the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Gennesaret(h). If such was indeed the nun’s desire, then, Hopkins contends, the disciples caught in a tempest on Lake Gennesareth as Christ slept (Matthew 8: 23–7) were of a different mind, not in the least wishing to perish. Hopkins summons the Sea of Galilee – the locus of another (potential) shipwreck, and numerous gospel miracles (ll. 219–21 will allude to the ‘apparition’ of Christ walking on water in the stormy dark) – as a paradigmatic site of fear and stress that ghosts, even in its avowed dissimilarity, the seas around the Kentish Knock. Thus I suggest that Hopkins’s flooding of the

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Vale of Clwyd with the waters of the Sea of Galilee in the Dominical sermon in March 1877 fulfils a ­deep-­seated need on his part to involve himself in such stress, to atone for the ease and comfort of his pastoral emplacement at the moment the Deutschland ran aground in the snows of early December 1875. The ‘pastoral forehead of Wales’ exists in suggestive proximity in the poem to ‘the wéather of Gennésaréth’; ‘Wales’ is made to rhyme with the less than easeful ‘gales’ and ‘quails’. It would take the Dominical sermon to map them as one. That map – a compulsive imaginative forfeiting of land and life on the part of a ­guilt-­ridden Hopkins – engulfs the Clwyd Valley with potentially killing waters. Later, in stanza 31, Hopkins asks God whether such ‘natural’ disasters, together with the ­last-­minute conversions he imagines they may have motivated, can be understood as agents of a divine garnering: ‘is the shípwrack then a harvest, does témpest carry the gráin for thee?’ The psychological complexities of Hopkins’s ‘investment’ in the tragedy he seeks to justify have not received the analysis they deserve, and critics seem to have been reluctant to explore the painful ironies of his position. Elisabeth Schneider has noted that wrecks ‘were a main part of the business of his father’, Manley Hopkins, who was head of ‘a firm of marine average adjusters’ (who dealt with marine insurance law and managed claims in cases of loss occasioned by sea disaster). He was therefore a professional whose ­middle-­class comfort was founded on foundering ships. Schneider rightly claims that ‘The whole [Hopkins] family seems to have been a company of horrified amateurs of maritime disaster, too ­high-­minded to rejoice in others’ misfortune but vividly interested.’154 Only two years before the Deutschland disaster, Manley Hopkins had published The Port of Refuge, or Advice and Instructions to the ­Master-­mariner in Situations of Doubt, Difficulty, and Danger (1873). This is a fascinating ­co-­text for his son’s great poem. The work’s disquietingly spare epigraph – ‘“There was a ship”, said he’ – from Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner invests this instruction manual with submerged narratives of culpability. What Manley Hopkins writes concerning losses and gains is shadowed by irony and family guilt. Discussing ‘Average [i.e. loss] as Misfortune’, he states: to meet with an average is to meet with a misfortune. It is a ‘sinistre’, as the French properly call it. There is no disguising the plain fact. It leaves the parties concerned in the voyage and adventure with loss, or it lands them in expenses. No doubt, there are persons and classes who incidentally receive advantage by cases of average, as there are others who deliberately intend to

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find good fishing in troubled waters. Yet the old legal maxim contains the sound and humane view, that no one ought to gain by another’s losses. It behoves the shipmaster especially to keep his hands very clean from any gains which are sometimes put within his reach whilst his vessel is under average.155

A sinistre: Manley Hopkins relishes the technical vocabulary of accident. Mishap, misfortune and disaster are the enabling conditions not only of Hopkins’s privileged Balliol education but also of its most profound consequence – his conversion to Catholicism. One might wryly say that there are indeed ‘persons and classes’ who ‘incidentally receive advantage by cases of average’ and who find ‘good fishing in troubled waters’. The troubling ironies of Manley Hopkins’s professional life would surely have been obvious to father and son. Indeed, The Port of Refuge might justifiably be seen as itself a tortured act of confession in the guise of a guide: ‘Like the dying camel – “the ship of the desert” – on which birds of prey fasten, in its extremity, a ship in difficulties is, as it were, the right of those who look for and love cheap bargains.’156 Some of the book’s purple passages also evince that fascinated imaginative inhabitation of ­sea-­peril that Schneider has identified: Then, at last, comes the sudden loom of a dark shadow, a crash, a wild despairing cry, the grinding of a keel over deck and spars, a plunge downwards into the black depths, – and night has no other story to tell of the fate of the unlighted craft, and the two or three valuable but careless men who went down with her.157

Discussing St Andrew in the Dominical sermon, having just registered his wish ‘to return to the gospel and the sea of Galilee’, Hopkins wrote: ‘Andrew’s name means Manly’ (S, p. 230). The capital letter marks a fascinating Freudian slip. His father is a tempestuous and guilty Galilean presence that the ‘culpable’, Oedipal Hopkins cannot exorcise. Moreover, Hopkins’s first major poetic ‘harvest’, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, was itself, of course, deeply implicated in maritime disaster, not merely ‘concerned’ with it (the ambiguous word used at the equivocatory start of his other shipwreck poem: ‘The Eurydice – it concerned thee, O Lord’). Norman White is right in claiming that in the Dominical, Hopkins was turning over words and ideas already expressed in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’: ‘Crown Him now who can crown you then, kiss the hand that holds the dreadful rod’; and the Galilee scene, like that of the Kentish Knock sandbank, ‘was full of the sense of royal majesty, of more than prophetic power, of divine glory’.158

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I suggest, then, that the ‘Galilee scene’ of the Dominical map also carried with it for Hopkins the psychospiritual terror of ‘the wéather of Gennésaréth’, summoned in St Beuno’s refectory as a means of expiating his guilt concerning his insulation in Wales from the mortal agony and ‘martyrdom’ of the exiled nuns, the poetic capital he made out of the tragedy in a poem he recognized as a major achievement, and the human and material losses on which his family’s comfortable existence was based. The Galilee–Clwyd Valley map outlines a deathly, ­self-­lacerating psychocartography that enacts a fantasy of expiatory drowning. As far as his immediate audience was concerned, Hopkins’s cartographic project failed. Tired after a gruelling period of examinations, they were resistant to Hopkins’s project of sacralizing space. No doubt their own attachment to the enthralling ground of the Clwyd Valley was not as emotionally and psychologically significant as Hopkins’s. Nor, perhaps, was their sense of the conflicted cultural dynamics of their environment felt as acutely. As belly laughs filled the refectory and Brother Hopkins’s delivery began to falter, the prospect of interpellating them as ­co-­pilgrims through imaginatively and devotionally embodied space evaporated. With it went the possibility of detecting in Hopkins’s map – which, like all maps, was necessarily coded, ambiguous, constituted by ‘selective processes of production’159 – ‘the various livings, the histories and social realities that convert protean geospace into specific place, a territory of particular, often suppressed, interests’.160 This chapter has argued that such ‘livings’, with all their ideological entanglements, make Hopkins’s cartography a particularly rich example of Welsh writing in English, at once characteristic and idiosyncratic. Most of Hopkins’s Jesuit brethren present in the refectory on the evening of 11 March 1877 had, a week earlier, passed their examinations ad audiendas confessiones – to hear confessions. What they heard that evening was also a confession, couched as cartography, and Hopkins had after all asked them to lend him their ears.

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3 Mapping Islandness: Brenda Chamberlain’s Celtic Archipelagos

In the Brenda Chamberlain collection of manuscripts at the National Library of Wales are two coloured ­sketch-­maps of Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli), catalogued under the title given at the head of one of them: Winter Rhythms in Island Life (see colour plates 6 and 7).1 Both inhabit the hybrid space that Chamberlain spent her creative life exploring: the interface of graphic art, literary discourse and cartographic inscription. Their suggestive compound notation offers an emotional and psychological chart of Chamberlain’s response to life on ‘this deluding scrap of rock and turf’, as she referred to Bardsey (her home from 1947 to 1962) at the end of ­Tide-­race (1962).2 Indeed, both serve as maps of Chamberlain’s life and ­literary-­artistic career as a whole, from Bangor to the ‘maternal middle ocean’ surrounding her Mediterranean archipelagos, and back again.3 In this chapter – the first of two on Chamberlain – I want to suggest that her work constitutes a European map of island spaces (both literally and imaginatively inhabited) and a cartographic meditation on the condition of ‘islandness’ (the preferred term in island studies, or nissology, as against ‘insularity’, with its ‘semantic baggage of separation and backwardness’).4 This ­intra-­insular map, of which all her published works are part, is drawn along a deepening ­south-­easterly axis (see figure 1), from the Aran islands and Wales, through enisled Westphalian land and German border zones, to ­Argo-­Saronic and Dodecanese rocks set ‘in the

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1  From Aran to Léros – the axis of Brenda Chamberlain’s European archipelagos

jade sea of legend’ (RoV, p. 27). Chamberlain’s literary imagination became increasingly cartographic. As practical instruments, talismanic forms, metaphorical figures and heuristic tools, maps were crucial to her prolonged meditation on the condition of enislement. Those aspects of her gender, sexual, cultural and imaginative identity that were permanently under pressure are insistently mapped onto interconnected island spaces (a Chamberlainian paradox) to form a series of charged chorogr­ aphies emancipatory in their detail and imprisoning in their boundedness. Cartography gives her literary and artistic achievements a compelling unity. THE BARDSEY MAPS Discussing the interface between literary culture and Welsh anthropological study from the 1930s to the 1950s, Linda Adams identifies at one end of the ‘first flowering’ of Welsh writing in English the ‘anthropological dystopia’ of Caradoc Evans’s My People, and at the other, a ‘study

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of a tiny bounded population, an ideal case study from the early days of anthropological fieldwork’ – Chamberlain’s ­Tide-­race.5 Adams’s focus is on the Caseg Broadsheets project in which Chamberlain was centrally involved, but she suggestively contextualizes the literary ventures of the period in relation to a pioneering work of anthropology whose cartographic overture offers a lens through which ­Tide-­race might also fruitfully be understood: Alwyn D. Rees’s Life in a Welsh Countryside (1950): ‘The area of study – the parish [landlocked Llanfihangel yng Ngwynfa] – is outlined on the first map, which becomes an island later to be inscribed with dots and lines, abstractions representing the facets of community life.’6 Communicating through a semiotics of form, colour and word, Chamberlain’s Winter Rhythms in Island Life maps offer interpretative paradigms – themselves ‘later … inscribed with dots and lines’ – of Chamberlain’s signature preoccupations. They aspire to the condition of ­verbal-­graphic art, whose composite dynamics Chamberlain’s work seeks to lay open.7 Both also exemplify emotional chorographies. In the first, rather sketchier, chart, the island – with Mynydd Enlli (Bardsey Mountain) on the eastern side coloured purple – is plotted centrally in relation to the western tip of the Llŷn Peninsula. The map suggests a possible indebtedness to Lewis Morris’s two hydrographic charts of Bardsey Sound, published in 1748 (figures 2 and 3), the second of which pioneers a literary cartography in its little ­mid-­Sound essay on Arthurian onomastic myth, complete with a quotation from a cywydd by Robert Leiaf. Chamberlain’s chart is an image/text that articulates what Baldacchino has called ‘the dialectic of islands’ – ‘the anxious balance between roots and routes’,8 between isolation and association, incarceration and ‘[s]alutation to the shores of worlds’ (TR, p. 39). The dotted lines traversing ‘Bardsey Sound’ and ‘St George’s Channel’ in various carefully plotted patterns are labelled ‘possible landing of men not boat’; they represent the chor(e)ography of the Enlli craft as it negotiates the fierce ­tide-­races of the potentially treacherous Sound. Implied in the flurry of dotted lines is the horror of being mapless (as Chamberlain had already imagined in a mid-1950s ­prose-­poem: ‘The new ships have no charts. They must give themselves up to the ocean currents. THERE IS A GREAT FISH WAITING!’9). ‘Possible landing’: Chamberlain is careful to emphasize the contingent nature of these projected (life)lines to the mainland, these channels of affiliation. Moreover, in the ‘legend’ of this map, at least, the boat itself never makes it to dry land, but remains perpetually in search of an anchorage. Llŷn is within hailing distance; it is also unreachable, ‘alien land’ (TR, p. 73). These perforated lines across

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1  Iwan Bala, Byd Bach y Byd (2005). By permission of the artist

2  Iwan Bala, Ewropa (2005). Private collection. By permission of the artist

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3  Iwan Bala, Hon I (2004). By permission of the artist

4  Iwan Bala, Adlewyrchu Ynys (2001). Private collection. By permission of the artist

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5  XTide (version 2.10) open source tidal prediction (centred on Avonmouth) for 10–13 July 1798; http://www.flaterco.com/xtide. With thanks to Dr Robert Barber

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6 and 7 Brenda Chamberlain, Winter Rhythms in Island Life, Joan Rhys Collection; Size B, Box 2; Picture Store 3; 0200303834/1 and 2. By permission of the Estate of Brenda Chamberlain and Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

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8  John Piper, Snowdonia, North Wales (1945–9), watercolour on paper. Copyright the Artist’s Estate and Reading Museum (Reading Borough  Council). All rights reserved

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9  John Piper, In Llanberis Pass (1945–6), watercolour, pen and chalk. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London and the Artist’s Estate

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2  Lewis Morris, The North Entrance of Bardsey Sound and the Roads in Caernarvonshire, from Plans of Harbours, Bars, Bays and Roads in St. George’s Channel (1748), plate 11. Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/ The National Library of Wales

turbulent water also enact fantasies of (female) passage that Chamberlain had already explored in her published prose. As Chamberlain’s annotations, adrift on the white tide of the page, make plain, everything depends on ‘the state of the tide’ and ‘the state of the sea’. Close daily observation becomes crucial. The map charts acts of strained watching across bodies of water that are characterized in ­Tide-­race as ‘too big for contemplation’ (p. 95). It asks us to join Chamberlain in ‘looking westwards’ from the safety of her house, ‘Carreg’ (denoted by the black square at the very centre of the island), out to the Irish Sea, and ­south-­west to Carreg yr Honwy, the rock whose shape mirrors in miniature that of the mountain and of the island as a whole. This form would become a haunting emblem for Chamberlain as she moved away from figurative representation towards what I would like to call cartographic abstraction; towards the end of her life she would be in a position to declare: ‘I don’t make paintings in the conventional sense: I make talismans.’10 At the ­north-­east tip of the island and on Mynydd Enlli on the eastern coast, black circles mark lookout points

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3  Lewis Morris, Aberdaron Road, the South East Side of Bardsey Sound, in Caernarvon Shire, from Plans of Harbours, Bars, Bays and Roads in St. George’s Channel (1748), plate 12. Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/ The National Library of Wales

where one can tell ‘the state of the sound’ and judge the likelihood of death by water (one of Chamberlain’s central motifs) from the ‘amount of foam on rocks, or Gwylans[,] in A.[berdaron] Bay’; as she would record in ­Tide-­race: ‘Maen Bugail, in her blackness and savagery resembling a wrecked coaster, lay in the distance of the Sound. She is full in the track of the tide’ (TR, p. 20). This is a map encoded with the tensions of a sensibility on the stretch. As we shall see, the literary works following ­Tide-­race would extend this paradigmatic ‘gazing’ stance into more regulatory, panoptic, ­post-­war territory. More expansive archipel­ agic vistas and alignments are also sought in the map: ‘about 40 mls’ out west to the Wicklow Hills in Ireland, and ­south-­east towards ‘Cardigan Bay’, where the ‘horizon’ represents both a line of demarcation and an artificial boundary to be breached by memory and the imagination. Encircled by the ‘N’, ‘S’, ‘E’ and ‘W’ of the compass points, the island itself becomes a huge compass needle, pointing ­south-­west ‘towards South America … towards the shipping lanes’ (TR, p. 179) – an orientation Chamberlain adopts in ­Tide-­race more than once. In its linguistic miscegenation – ‘Gwylans’, ‘Bardsey’, ‘Henllwyn’, ‘Trwyn y Gwyddel’

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– the map also offers a linguistic chorography that identifies this ground as culturally contested space. Further dotted lines link Chamberlain’s Carreg, via the lookout station, to the southernmost dot – ‘Tŷ Pella’, home of William and Nellie Evans, fictionalized as Jacob and Rhiannon Lloyd in ­Tide-­race (in which the house appears as ‘Tŷ Draw’). The path from Carreg to the lookout post on the north coast gives another black dot a wide berth – the double farmhouse called Nant, occupied by Thomas ‘Twm’ Griffiths, prototypes for the tormentor Cadwaladr Tomos and his farm, ‘Pant’, in ­Tide-­race. Chamberlain’s stippled lines can be seen to sketch bonds of attachment and antagonism that divide green and purple island space into zones, triangulating the distance between people and the ‘feud’ that was ‘handed down almost without variation except in the nature of the participants, from year to year’ (TR, p. 141). She was to remark in ­Tide-­race that ‘Land boundaries … inflamed the hot blood of the islanders’ (p. 144); indeed, Cadwaladr invokes maps as instruments of his island regime of terror: ‘As the whim took him he would invent “ancient trackways” which he said were on the old maps, cunning paths that gave him an excuse for walking along carefully fenced banks as near to our houses as possible’ (TR, p. 148). (Jonah Jones’s Afterword to the 1987 reprinting of ­Tide-­race likewise summons the authority of old maps to establish continuity and a (dubious) sense of the ‘immemoriality’ of the island: ‘Colonel Colby’s first Ordnance Survey map published in 1839 shows the island’s topography much as it is today’.11) Chamberlain’s chart represents a ­counter-­map to Cadwaladr’s cartographic ‘web of dread’ (TR, p. 148). The island is partitioned on her map in other ways as well. As the note at the bottom left emphasizes, the ‘whole west side & south end from [the] Cafn [the landing place] southwards, deserted in wintertime’. The island’s central track, terminating in the lighthouse at the South End, is marked in orange crayon. It appears as a bold frontier line, separating the green sanctuary of the lowland valley, with its farmhouses ‘nest[ling] in pairs like mated birds’ (as R. M. Lockley described them on a visit in the late 1930s), from the high mass of the mountain.12 The ink and crayon contour lines of this bulwark against the easterlies fan out like the whorls of a shell; in the pen drawings of ­Tide-­race, island and shell forms would be mapped onto each other obsessively. In a strikingly literal way, the Llŷn headland, shaded green at the top right of the map, reveals the extent to which cartography, despite its claim to scientific objectivity and universality, is always partial and partisan, the product of a specific time, place and ­world-­view. The

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l­ozenge-­pattern of the surface on which Chamberlain, sitting at her desk at Carreg, coloured the headland is clearly visible. Thus this map traces its author’s cultural emplacement, rendering uncanny its ­personal-­public representations. And on that headland, Chamberlain is careful to locate a spring of fresh water across the overdetermined salt fathoms. Just as Hopkins was drawn to Ffynnon Fair (St Mary’s Well) in the Elwy Valley, so Chamberlain here marks out her own ‘St Mary’s Well’ at the foot of Mynydd Mawr, the last resting post of medieval pilgrims bound for Bardsey. On the map, this spring (inundated twice a day by the tide) has the status of a personal, devotional space of refreshment, connected by lines of sight and desire both to the island and in ­Tide-­race to the absent lover: ‘there is an unearthly bond … between the man and the well in which I conjured his return’ (TR, p. 68). The second Winter Rhythms chart (which can be dated between 1958 and 1962)13 similarly offers a critical map – a metacartography – of Brenda Chamberlain’s literary and graphic work as a whole. It is another composite text, in which discursive prose flows around a coloured, annotated map of Bardsey. Anne ­Price-­Owen notes how the textual element flowing over and under Chamberlain’s large 1950 portrait, Children of the Seashore, ‘contribut[es] both discursively and pictorially to the final effect’.14 The same is true of the prose and the graphic element of this Winter Rhythms map, as verbal and visual texts assert themselves independently and demand to be read together as ‘counterpoint’ (which is how Chamberlain conceived of the relationship between text and image in her Poems with Drawings (1969)).15 The prose runs as follows: Winter Rhythms in Island Life Not so long ago on such an isolated ­sea-­rock, the rhythm of life was an ­all-­embracing pattern, a communal pattern, in which work & play was [sic] closely shared by all inhabitants. On Bardsey, owing partly to the coming in of new blood from outside on a permanent level, & from the transitory coming of people of many different walks of life, people imagine a lot of romantic ­moon-­shine about islands – talking of complete freedom; actually, it is a life of strict behaviour[,] ­self-­discipline, ­self-­reliance & duty to one’s neighbours: a highly civilized code of behaviour that evolves elastically to fit new situations. Our sense of custom & taboo is extremely highly developed[.] For instance, boat crossings. G. T. W. Men only, to the lighthouse except in strict emergency, illness or boat overdue. Open mainland community, endless variations in behaviour; on an island in wintertime, the patterns are constant, but constant only to each house. In Eddie[’]s, life centres round the new child: the mother & child, the fire: the daily visit to the grandmother. The father & his animals, his garden, his occasional work at the lighthouse.

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Generically and stylistically, this little essay is fascinatingly – and wholly characteristically – hybrid. Its poetic title yields a narrativized, lyrical opening befitting a folk tale; the idiom, however, immediately cedes to anthropological discourse: ‘communal pattern’, ‘new blood’, ‘transitory coming’. The first clause leads the reader to expect a tale of an already fictionalized, mythologized recent past; what is then delivered is ethnography. The phrase ­‘sea-­rock’ conjures the very imaginative fantasies (or bourgeois idealism and naive ­neo-­Romanticism) that the passage goes on to decry as ‘romantic ­moon-­shine’ – the preserve of those who, according to Ronald Lockley in his essay on Bardsey in Islands Round Britain (1945), ‘sip their morning coffee in ­ultra-­fashionable urban cafés’, seeking their own Welsh ‘millen[n]ium’.16 In Chamberlain’s account, aboriginality contends with outsiderness, settlement with trans­ humance, ‘freedom’ with ‘strict behaviour[,] ­self-­discipline, ­self-­reliance & duty to one’s neighbours’. Even Chamberlain’s corrective list is paradoxical, as ­self-­sufficiency rubs up against ­co-­operative obligation. Moreover, the strict island ‘code’ turns out to be ‘elastic’, adapting to new realities on the ground. As this chapter will demonstrate, tidal eddies of thought and genre are typical of Chamberlain’s work. The final section of this intriguing island testament outlines not merely a practical division of labour but also the gendering of island space according to the internalized imperatives of ‘custom & taboo’. The lighthouse is an exclusively male site; the boat crossings mapped in the first Winter Rhythms map are likewise strictly gendered – indeed, riddlingly encoded here as ‘G. T. W.’ (standing, I suggest, for Guto Griffiths (‘Tudur’ in ­Tide-­race); his father, Thomas ‘Twm’ Evans of Nant; and Will Evans, Tŷ Pella). Such gender anathemas generate contesting female fantasies of action that are given rein in Chamberlain’s prose and poetic works. The island essay ends with a brief personal sketch of ‘Eddie’ – ­ex-­merchant seaman Eddie Roberts, who became the tenant of Tŷ Nesaf (‘Tŷ Bychan’ in ­Tide-­race) after Chamberlain and her French partner, Jean van der Bijl, took up residence at Carreg, and who married Jane, the daughter of Will and Nellie Evans, Tŷ Pella. Chamberlain’s account of the conventions governing daily, practical routine on the island both elides and curiously foregrounds the notion of the island as creative space for the literary and artistic imagination to inhabit. ­Tide-­race was to highlight the disjunctions and ‘violent changes’ of a life of ­‘co-­operative action with regard to boats and cattle and sheep’ in which Chamberlain ‘managed by sheer stubbornness’ to ‘continue [her] real life, which is of the imagination’ (TR, p. 182).

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The text discussed above offers itself as a pendant to, or legend for, the contiguous map of Bardsey, whose outline had by this time seared itself onto Chamberlain’s imagination, reproducing (or strangely mimicking) itself in image after image, as in the two Winter Rhythms charts themselves. The second map can fruitfully be read as an exercise in anthropological cartography, psychogeography and ­life-­mapping (the chorographic equivalent of ­life-­writing). It is a visual text that again serves to reveal the partisan nature of all maps. While the first map was mainly concerned to map outward vistas and routes over a dividing sea, this second map, energized by a tension between individualism and communitarianism, plots the island’s inner dynamics. As with its ­sister-­chart, Chamberlain places herself at the centre of the map; next to the largest black dot, the simple ‘Me’ denotes the ontological island self (the ‘I’land’ subject17) as well as the geographical location of her house, Carreg. Coloured – indeed, ­colour-­coded – lines track routes of practical communication, emotional and political alignment and kinship between island residents, and between the human population and the natural and built environment, just as the indicative map at the beginning of Alwyn D. Rees’s Life in a Welsh Countryside reappears later in the book, now ­criss-­crossed with ‘bonds of kinship’ that plot the ‘intricate social fabric’ and ‘social relationships’ of the parish.18 On Chamberlain’s map, a hot, red line stretches nearly the full length of the island from Nant – Thomas Griffiths’s (Cadwaladr’s) farmhouse – to the lighthouse. Will and Nellie Evans, their names inscribed next to the inked spot of Tŷ Pellaf, are represented by a blue channel stretching (in Will’s case) from the lighthouse and up via Chamberlain’s Carreg to their daughter and ­son-­in-­law’s house, marked ‘Jane & Eddie’. The latter’s yellow social groove stretches down via ‘Me’ and Nellie and Will’s house to the clearly marked square of the boathouse. Chamberlain’s physical and emotional wake is mapped in green. From ‘Me’, it reaches south via Plas Bach (‘Garthwen’ in Tiderace) – inhabited first by the English ‘Hopkinsons’ of ­Tide-­race and then by the tormented Polish hermit, Berthold Panek (‘Wolfgang’), who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown during Chamberlain’s time there and had to be removed from the island. (The cross next to Plas Bach perhaps gestures at the proscribed place it became as the hermit plunged into ‘spiritual chaos’: ‘Hide me in the most secret cupboard; in the dark; anywhere; under the stairs, away from the devils’ (TR, pp. 206, 207).) Chamberlain’s ‘green lane’ continues to the boathouse, but not, as the pendant text emphasizes, further south to the lighthouse. Fainter lines of green traverse the coastline, interior and high ground of the island; at the

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north end, even the farmhouse of Thomas ‘Twm’ Griffiths is incorp­ orated into the network. If the main, broad green line represents the daily ‘corridor’ of Chamberlain’s existence on the island, the fainter, more sinuous and unrestrained green lines chart more private, imaginative explorations. Personal they may be, but the compulsion to visualize and externalize them panoptically on a map suggests once again the fear of being without a chart or chartable territory. The map becomes a visual anchor for the self, a text that delimits imaginative freedom just as it salutarily resists imaginative excess. While ‘Jane & Eddie’ and ‘Nellie [&] Will’ are plainly named, Twm Griffiths is given a satirical alias – ‘Playboy of the Western World’ – that transforms chorography not only into wider archipelagic cartography, but also into a literary map. The Mayo/Aran world of J. M. Synge’s play is summoned – and rooted – here as place, text and person, revealing the Irish genetics of Chamberlain’s own ‘fiction’ of this western isle. ‘Jane & Eddie’, next to the ‘Playboy of the Western World’: this is uncanny cartography – a census rendered strange by the literary representations and transformations of ­Tide-­race. It is a metacommentary on the radical ways in which Chamberlain, from the 1940s onwards, obsessively maps biography onto fiction (and vice versa), ‘steering her imagination between the real islands of a real outside’, as Anthony Conran puts it, to the extent that her ‘great act of fiction was herself’.19 The shape we see on the map is both real and fabled space. The gendering of space revealed in the accompanying ‘essay’ is also marked on the map alongside ‘Pen Cristin’ (‘Pen Clogwyn’ in ­Tide-­race) – the headland to the south of the mountain. The first Winter Rhythms map plotted lines of strained sight over the Sound; the present map genders them. Chamberlain designates Pen Cristin as the ‘look out for boat [–] Women or women & children’. This ‘lookout hut’ on an exposed ­‘rock-­shelf’ (TR, p. 195) is female space, the site of fretful watching and waiting – a paradigmatic, ‘fated’ and fateful stance adopted (and contested) by so many of Chamberlain’s fictionalized selves. Two other female spaces are marked on the mountain (whose contour lines again suggest the whorls of a shell). The unlabelled point near the summit of Mynydd Enlli, though bypassed by the green lines of Chamberlain’s own island movements, suggests a site that the mapper is reluctant fully to reveal through naming – a private space, perhaps, such as a personal viewpoint, or indeed a point of vantage where the gaze can be directed inwards, not outwards. From the top of the mountain, 150 metres above sea level, Chamberlain’s green ‘trace’ turns at right angles down to the

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‘Seal Cave’, that nodal point of ­Tide-­race and of the poetry. The cave is resonant perimeter space (both rock and sea) where reality and history are transmuted into myth, the human and ­non-­human commune, and gender and sexual identities are fantastically, emancipatingly porous. Both Winter Rhythms in Island Life maps are key documents in that they focus the anxieties that energize the distinguished productions of Chamberlain’s final, fraught decade. During that time, the cartographic project on which she had embarked was pursued both critically and compulsively, resulting in a series of literary and artistic charts of linked European archipelagos whose contours became increasingly minimalist, and whose colours – like Chamberlain’s emotional life – became ever more bleached.20 TOWARDS BARDSEY: MOUNTAINS AND (NEO-)ROMANTIC MAPS From the moment the 20-­year-­old Brenda Chamberlain met Karl von Laer, a young student from Thuringia, the ‘green heart’ of Germany, on a visit to Bangor, her imagination became cartographic. Explored in her collection of poems, The Green Heart (1958), and her novel, The ­Water-­castle (1964), the complex emotional – one hesitates to call it ‘romantic’ – bond she formed with him over the next three decades expressed itself in her need (both acknowledged and sublimated) to locate herself in relation to an absent other – literally and figuratively to map the territory between a ‘here’ and an ‘elsewhere’. In the first instance, this imagined and inferred ‘elsewhere’ was the moated schloss of von Laer’s ancestral estate at Schlotheim, Thuringia, and subsequently the moated ­manor-­farm and smaller farmstead in Westphalia, to which he fled as a refugee after the war, having fought on the Russian front. Those ‘elsewheres’ proliferated as Chamberlain’s grounding coordinates shifted over time. As a result, her mapping became suggestively structuralist, charting one territory in relation to other, implied spaces. From the published poetry and prose journals of the 1940s onwards, she can be seen to chart lines of communication and response over dividing bodies of water, and across policed fronts and patrolled borders. This involves a transgression of generic boundaries, a desire to conflate voices, forms and increasingly ‘fantasy haunted’ selves, and collapse traditional literary boundaries. For Chamberlain, mapping became an instrument of what she refers to in the preface to her ­dramatic-­confessional

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sequence, The Green Heart, as her ‘nervous awareness’ – a means of charting one’s emotional life in relation to widening European and Atlantic space. That preface is itself a map of Chamberlain’s imaginative cartography: Much of [The Green Heart sequence] was produced in communication across ‘deep water’ with the friend [von Laer] to whom this volume has been dedicated. During the war, contact being temporarily broken between us, I turned to his old letters; these were the basis of the poetry. This constant, silent dialogue brought me so close to him that though we were far apart in space and in our ways of living, a similarity of temperament and nervous awareness caused the experience of one to become the property of both.

Communication across ‘deep’ gulfs of separation; a ‘hailing’ through the consecrating act of literary dedication; the textualization of the absent other at a time of crisis; the silent ‘conversation’ of reading; the blurring of selves and voices, lyrical and dramatic modes; and the nervy, acute receptiveness of both ‘enisled’ respondents: these are the impulses of a writer for whom actual and metaphorical maps became instruments of psychological, geographical and historicist grounding on the one hand, and of imaginative flight from the constraints of community, nation, state and ‘history’ on the other. From 1936, when Chamberlain returned to Wales from the Royal Academy Schools to live with her husband, John Petts, at Tŷ’r Mynydd above Llanllechid, Caernarfonshire, to the late 1940s, she contributed to, and was in turn influenced by, a series of contemporary mappings of British landscape and culture. As early as November 1939, Chamberlain and John Petts had been credited as the ­co-­makers of an image of mountain geology that would not only prompt an enlargement of a nation’s visual imagination (by emphasizing ‘the essential function of geography as a training of the mind in visualization’21) but also effect a coming to national(ist) consciousness. The nation was Scotland, and the writer who singled out the image for praise was none other than Hugh MacDiarmid. He was speaking of the impressive wood engraving of Coire Mhuic Fhearchair – ‘three bold buttresses capped with grey quartzite’ – that illustrated the couple’s account of their recent visit to the Western Highlands, published as ‘From Other Hills’ in The Welsh Review.22 Referring to the engraving in his autobiography, Lucky Poet (1943), MacDiarmid wrote: few pictures have ever affected me so profoundly and, I am sure, permanently … it is a pity a big reproduction of it does not occupy one of the walls of every Scottish ­school-­room. That would involve a tremendous revolution in Scottish

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education and life – precisely the revolution that is needed; that picture would take such a tremendous living up to! – ­shallow-­ness, meanness, stupidity would, I feel sure, soon be eliminated in those who had to face up to it daily in their most impressionable years.23

Chamberlain’s ambiguous relation to what she saw as the constraining enislement of national identity would certainly have made her sceptical of some aspects of MacDiarmid’s cultural project. However, her work can usefully be seen in the context of contemporary cartographic enterprises that took a ­neo-­Romantic form – recording and memorializing projects motivated by ‘a complex spectrum of anxieties’ including the swift pace of social change and the threat of wartime annihilation (from which Britain was partly protected, of course, by its very islandness).24 One of these was the Recording Britain scheme, developed by the Ministry of Labour and the Pilgrim Trust: its aim was to produce a ­county-­by-­county visual ‘map’ – a ‘pictorial Domesday’ – of England and Wales. The project was manifestly a ‘celebration of “Englishness”’ (David Mellor reminds us that ‘Scotland was not covered and Wales was represented by only ­seventy-­six pictures, substantially less than London’).25 However, it contributed to a cultural cartography of the Home Front predicated on a (re)discovery and heightened awareness of the local landscape and built environment in the context of both internal pressures and external threats. Chamberlain was not part of the project, but the years at Tŷ’r Mynydd, during which she produced, with Petts and Alun Lewis, her own wartime ‘record’ of the two literatures of Wales in the form of the Caseg Broadsheets, saw her chart her native territory in a poetry of jagged stoniness where foot- and ­hand-­holds (literal, cultural, existential) are difficult to find. As ‘an experienced ­hill-­climber’ from her teenage years and as a mountain guide for the Red Cross during the war, she had internalized a map of the Carneddau and Glyderau, using her knowledge of the terrain to locate injured climbers and downed aircraft.26 A series of poems published during the period 1941–4 map Snowdonia’s screes with a geological, epitaphic lexis that is often severed into compound adjectives that have us fighting for readerly ‘handhold and foothold’ (‘Dead Climber’): ‘nightmare quartzite, chips of granite’; ­‘stone-­shot gully’; ‘crevice and goat height’; ­‘beetle-­shard’; ‘iceplant ways’; ‘jaggèd clefts’; ­‘bowel-­rock’; ­‘cloud-­ascending rib and slab of stone’; ‘corniced snows’; ‘a ­winding-­sheet upon a pinnacle’.27 It was under north Wales rock, in the caverns of Manod quarry, Blaenau Ffestiniog, that the national collection of art was housed at this time, safe from German bombers – Welsh geology encasing the British visual tradition.28

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Art, geology, cartography and poetry came together most suggestively during this period in the work of John Piper, whose presence in Chamber­ lain’s own mountain fastnesses at this very moment raises tantalizing questions of affinity and contact. As Frances Spalding reminds us, Piper’s ‘first visit to the mountains of north Wales is said to have been occasioned by a commission … to paint the cavern inside Manod’, where the national collection was in safe internal exile.29 Piper’s move to the Welsh ‘margins’ – now an artistic ‘centre’ – was part of what Linda Adams, speaking of Chamberlain’s return from the metropolis to Wales with John Petts, characterizes as ‘the ­Neo-­Romantic relocation of artists to rural margins … in search of an authentic engagement with the land’, and what David Mellor calls ‘the wartime mapping out of an “other” Britain’.30 For Iwan Bala on the other hand, Piper’s work inescapably ‘participated in a colonization of Welsh landscape through art’.31 ‘Authenticity’ (that overdetermined concept) in one’s ‘engagement with the land’ naturally meant different things for different artists, both native and ‘touristic’. I suggest that one of the most culturally probing representations of Welsh terrain at this time took the form of an anxious ­neo-­Romantic cartography. In 1945, John Piper rented ‘Pentre’, a cottage near Bethesda in the Nant Ffrancon valley, and subsequently another base, ‘Bodesi’, near Capel Curig, at the foot of Tryfan. The late 1940s saw him return frequently to paint the dramatic screes of Chamberlain’s native topography (her beloved Cwm Caseg included). Thomas Pennant’s Journey to Snowdon (1781), Edward Pugh’s Cambria Depicta (1816) and A. C. Ramsay’s The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales (1860) served as guides and prompts for an artistic vision – troubled by war and its aftermath – that conflated cartography and the ­neo-­Romantic gaze.32 As David Fraser Jenkins argues, ‘For more than a generation there had been no significant paintings of the mountains of north Wales before Piper first went there in 1943.’33 Malcolm Yorke has emphasized the way in which the ‘architecture of geology’ offered Piper ‘a new structure of interest’.34 Piper’s work in the ‘private, improbable ­rock-­world’35 of Snowdonia represented a new departure – indeed, a ‘new discipline’.36 Just as his ‘knowledge of architecture had directed his paintings of buildings’, so now his inwardness with geology and geography radically informed his representations of the Snowdon massif and its surrounding peaks.37 Take, for example, Snowdonia, North Wales (1945–9) and In Llanberis Pass (1945–6) (colour plates 8 and 9). The former shows the classic

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corrie of Y Garn, one of the Glyderau, and Llyn Idwal, with massive glacial boulders occupying the foreground. Piper has startlingly textualized the landscape: the ­rock-­strewn zone comprises a series of charts­on-­stone that seem to offer uncanny maps of the dramatic vista beyond. The patterns on the two large boulders and on the remnants of the wall to the left occupy a space between cartographic symbology, geological ­field-­sketch and abstract art. With its contour lines radiating down the sides of its hollow bowl, Y Garn – again uncannily – appears to map itself, yielding to the ­two-­dimensional cartographic overview. One detects here a desire to register how these slopes were being traversed and locally mapped with a new energy by climbers and walkers during the 1940s. Also present, I suggest, in Piper’s cartographic gestures are, first, the need (born out of wartime fear) to record, inscribe and, ultimately, textualize these scenes; and second, the instinctive recourse to the ­man-­made map as an emotional and psychological bulwark in the face of the terror of the Sublime, and of war. The aerial perspectives of the bomber pilot are also relevant here. Piper’s cartographic vision owes much to his interest in the textualization and flattening out of ­three-­dimensional ground achieved by aerial photography, whose ‘redemptive historiography’38 reveals ‘the recoverable signs of the text of British history which were inscribed upon the land’.39 This interest (which Alexandra Harris has smartly called ‘high altitude history’40) is visible also in David Jones’s drawings of the period such as The Lord of Venedotia (1948), which ‘resemble complex maps with their scatters of small coded symbols amidst a maze of meridians which dissolve the body back into the land’.41 Though the north Wales paintings were not part of the Recording Britain scheme, David Fraser Jenkins’s contention that Snowdonia became for Piper ‘the sublime at first hand, not mediated through historical association’ misses the way Piper’s painterly chorographies are haunted by historical anxieties relating to the ‘mapping’ of Britain’s ‘heritage’ – both natural scene and built environment – during and after the war.42 I suggest that Piper was emphatically a ‘war artist’ in Snowdonia. At moments of dislocation, Brenda Chamberlain would similarly turn to maps as anchors. In Llanberis Pass represents another essay on the theme. It presents a curiously architectural, (amphi)theatrical scene in which slabs of stone appear textualized as discarded, fraying, epitaphic maps, their symbology now marked more sketchily. The painting’s textural effects were ‘achieved by washing watercolour over areas loosely rubbed with wax crayon or the stub of a candle’.43 In the right foreground, drawn in chalk,

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is a pale, outspread ­rock-­map, its glacial striae suggesting folds. To the left of the central boulder in the foreground, itself cartographically marked, are four others. Further to the left, a shape suggestive of a tensed hand emerges from underneath the scree. As Chamberlain was to do on Bardsey, Piper was ‘anatomis[ing] the gaunt body of the land’ within a cartographic paradigm.44 Since maps are ‘enframing’ agents of ­‘power-­knowledge’, ‘an accumulation of choices made among choices[,] every one of which reveals a value’,45 then we might choose to see Piper’s cartographic iconography as an agent of that English/British ‘colonisation of Wales through art’ cited by Iwan Bala – a mapping of Welsh space that inscribes the reach and territorial control of a British state anxious to prescribe cultural and political homogeneity at a time of national crisis. What such an interpretation overlooks, however, is the depth of these paintings’ ­self-­awareness, their staged interrogation of what Denis Cosgrove identifies as ‘the complex accretion of cultural engagements with the world that surround and underpin the authority of a map’.46 The emotional geographies of these paintings seem to gesture at a ­non-­human ­rock-­world that remains unaccommodatingly other and unknowable, ultimately resistant to the cultural appropriation of inscribed cartographic symbologies. Piper’s textualization of Welsh ground asks the viewer to consider the gaps, substitutions and abstractions underlying both cartographic semiotics and artistic representation; the mise en abyme prompts an unravelling of the map’s authority in a complex Verfremdungseffekt whose proliferating perspectives and repetitions bring us back in the end to the reality of hard rock. Moreover, the cartographic ­markings-­on-­stone in Snowdonia, North Wales suggest the carved symbols of an earlier, indigenous race. In other words, Piper’s paintings lay bare the graphic strategies of colonial power, revealing the map to be ‘naturalized, but not natural’.47 In March 1944, the year before Piper began mapping Snowdonia’s mountains, Chamberlain published in The Welsh Review her remarkable ‘Poem for Five Airmen’ – a work unaccountably neglected by scholars of Welsh writing in English.48 It is a poem in which Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ is brutally earthed, then remapped. Mapping Chamberlain’s poem onto Piper’s painting (which Chamberlain may have seen exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 194849) reveals the scope of a celebratory and epitaphic cartographic gaze in the years immediately preceding Chamberlain’s move to Bardsey, when the coordinates of her imagination shifted. As the title makes clear, the poem is

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dedicated to the victims of an aircraft crash, ‘Burnt to death inside their aeroplane in Cwm Pen Llafar’ (the valley below the Ysgolion Duon and Carneddau). Wreckage from the plane, a Vickers Wellington, DV800, which crashed on 19 July 1942, is still visible today; it is possible Chamberlain was personally involved in the recovery effort.50 Dedicated also to ‘the mothers who mourn’ the dead airmen, the poem takes as its epigraph and conceptual frame a quotation from the Middle Welsh prose tale, Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys – ‘the second plague was a shriek which came on every ­May-­eve over every hearth’ – thus locating the poem as a product of the transhistorical cultural map of the Caseg Broadsheets. Cwm Pen Llafar becomes the confluence of a ‘fabled past’ (‘the plague / My bone, heart remember’) and the anglophone Welsh literary tradition in the form of echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s own wreck poem (in which Germany is also the aggressive agent), ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (‘Spring’s green ­May-­eve / Terror in loveliness’) and Dylan Thomas’s ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ and the elegy ‘In Memory of Ann Jones’ (which had featured on Caseg Broadsheet 5 in the year of the Cwm Pen Llafar crash – ‘Now as then we are dumb / ­Tongue-­dumb, ­muffled-­bell dumb’).51 In ‘To Dafydd Coed Mourning his Broken ­Mountain-­Dog’ (first published in 1942), Chamberlain saw the killing gullies of the Ysgolion Duon range as ­‘grief-­stones’; John Piper was to describe rocks on the Glyderau as ‘giant coffin slabs’ and the atmosphere of the range as that of ‘an affectionate cemetery’.52 Viewed alongside ‘Poem for Five Airmen’, the boulders of Piper’s In Llanberis Pass become both crumpled wreckage and epitaphic ­map-­texts, ‘guides’ to a tradition of Welsh elegy of which Chamberlain’s own poem is now part. The architectural topography of Piper’s Welsh paintings is present also in Chamberlain’s identification of this ‘Rock and ­cloud-­walled up’ valley of death as a ­‘mist-­smoked amphitheatre’ – the stage for a startling metamorphosis of the airmen’s physical selves into ‘birdmen’, purged of their ‘glazed and steeled’ machine. ­‘Feather-­ruddered / ­Wing-­tipped of living quill’, these ­bird-­forms are Done with instrument and gauge, Log-­book; their destination, Purpose of journey, No man’s rocked hand No God’s long finger Has presumed (or dared) to state. The page blows clean beside the cindered shoulder.

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‘No man’s rocked hand’ curiously anticipates the ghostly rock hand figured in chalk in Piper’s painting. The airmen achieve the bird’s-­eye ­view of the cartographer but now leave behind – in the unfurled maps visible in Piper’s In Llanberis Pass – the textual relics (‘Book and boot the fire missed’) of the male, colonialist imperative to master land and air.53 Such vestiges (and instruments of war) include maps. Chamberlain’s poem is a lens through which Piper’s painting can itself be interpreted as a chart of Europe’s wrecked ‘map’, profoundly conditioned by his earlier responses to the Blitz. That European perspective had been explicitly announced in Chamberlain’s ‘Dead Ponies’, published in The Dublin Magazine in 1941 (a month or so after neutral Dublin had been hit by German bombs): ‘There is death enough in Europe without these / Dead ponies on the mountain.’ It would also be present in the reference to the tang of gunpowder drifting ‘from the cwm below where officer cadets were at mock battle’ and in the description of the ­blitz-­like electric storm in her prose journal, ‘Mountains of Rock’, published in September 1945 (an imaginative record of the periods she spent on Esmé Firbank’s farm on the slopes of the Glyderau – an account that would later be mapped onto island space in ­Tide-­race).54 Implicit in Chamberlain’s address to the grieving mothers in ‘Poem for Five Airmen’ – ‘Women, your sons have taken plumage / … Crying over steel, dead engines, slivered wood / Their own ­sky-­requiem’ – is a celebration of the fact that, for the fallen, the need for technical ‘instruments’ of knowledge and dominance has been purged away. Indeed, it might be argued that for both Chamberlain and Piper, Snowdonia during the 1940s became the site of a complex elegy for cartography itself as a discipline of male power and human knowledge in time of war. IRISH ALIGNMENTS The range of magazines and anthologies in which Chamberlain’s work appeared during the 1940s and 1950s itself constitutes a map of her archipelagic, European and Atlantic cultural coordinates. The way in which poems were often recycled and revised between Irish (The Dublin Magazine), Welsh (Wales, The Welsh Review), English (Life and Letters, Poetry London, Poetry Quarterly), European (Botteghe Oscure) and American (New Directions in Prose and Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Poetry Chicago) outlets suggests a plotting and circulation of self in global territory. It was from the United States that Kenneth

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Rexroth (that most international of writers) hailed Chamberlain in 1949 in the influential anthology The New British Poets as the most important younger poet then writing out of Britain – one who had ‘been able to recapture and transmit or transmute some of the technical, syntactical, psychological devices and felicities’ of 1920s modernism (under which other Welsh poets, thought Rexroth, were still labouring) into ‘a new, ­post-­romantic style’.55 In January 1947, Chamberlain announced a change of physical and emotional coordinates in an unlikely place – a review in Life and Letters of J. E. Q. Barford’s Climbing in Britain. She confessed that her lukewarm response to this mountain ‘guide’ was conditioned by her disillusionment with the wartime commodification of Snowdonia by the weekending urban bourgeoisie: I had begun to feel that I never again wanted to go into certain areas of my native hills. For they are done for, utterly spent and done for, reduced to the level of gymnasia by people who have not even begun to adjust themselves to the spirit of the landscape. Rocks begin to look diseased as a background to men of a diseased and despairing generation.56

The part played by poetry and art – her own included – in that ‘invasion’ is not acknowledged. What is clear is that Chamberlain was searching for fresh territory to map – a western space where her ecological, ­neo-­Romantic sensibility would not be so affronted. Having briefly encountered Bardsey Island for the first time the previous year when she crossed the Sound with Henry Michalski, a Polish friend and ‘exile from Hitler’s persecution’,57 Chamberlain, now divorced, visited again with Jean van der Bijl during the harsh winter of 1946 and established a home on the island in the spring of 1947. Jonah Jones has suggested that she ‘came to the island ­part-­wounded in some way’– socially bruised, certainly, and emotionally thirsty.58 Chamberlain’s mapping of European archipelagos began soon after her first visit to Bardsey in the form of published ‘journals’ and fiction in Life and Letters and The Welsh Review – material that would appear, ­re-­inflected, in ­Tide-­race. The first of these, ‘From a journal: silkie and tide race’ (September 1946), which describes Chamberlain’s first encounter with the island (‘Listen: I have found the home of my heart’), begins with a telling cartographic image that signals her intention to offer a revisionist map of island life and ground: ‘Pilgrim roads run veinlike along the arm of the Welshwoman to end where she points into the ocean. It is as if physical forces were to indicate that there, beyond the

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rocky finger, is the heart of a spiritual cause.’59 The reference, I suggest, is to Hugh Hughes’s famous caricature map of north Wales as an old woman hauling a sack on her back: Dame Venodotia, alias Modryb Gwen: A Lady Incog. (first engraved c.1835; figure 4) – the burdened ancestor/other of Iwan Bala’s postcolonial, aspirational ­counter-­maps of Wales, such as Walia Dominatrix (2005) and the striding, bounding and flying cartographic icons of the Hon: Ffurf fy Ngwlad (This One: the Shape of my Country) series (2004–5).60 Chamberlain summons the cartoon – essentialist by its very nature – only to deconstruct the political and gender stereotypes on which it is predicated. Her passage to Bardsey plays with various gender paradigms. Serving as epigraph for the prose piece is a quotation from ‘The Ballad of the Grey Silkie of Sule Skerrie’: ‘I am a man upo’ the lan’ / An’ I am a silkie in the sea’; further, the author’s consciousness of ‘the great deep of the living sea’ causes her ­‘ram-­horned battering of the ego’ to dissipate, so that she seems ‘to have lost identity’. Powerfully male paradigms of land and self evaporate around Hugh Hughes’s archaic image of the Llŷn Peninsula as the arm of an old, ­put-­upon, Welshwoman. Hughes’s image is itself revised by Chamberlain as she strips bare the flesh of a female Wales to show the veins leading to the spiritual ‘heart’ that is Bardsey. Maps in Chamberlain’s work frequently signal moments of metaconsciousness and metacommentary – ­self-­conscious meditations on the interpretative frameworks in play. Lady Venodotia is refigured in Chamberlain’s verbal chorography as her own self – a Welshwoman pointing westward, away from bombed and overrun mainland Wales to a locus of spiritual encounter beyond caricature, beyond the cartoon misrepresentations of the past. The Llŷn Peninsula is Chamberlain’s deictic finger, pointing in late 1946 to Bardsey as a space of new emotional geographies. As we have seen, the symbology of the second Winter Rhythms in Island Life chart was to identify Twm Griffiths of Nant as the ‘Playboy of the Western World’, mapping him onto ­self-­mythologizing Christy Mahon, the opportunistic individualist of Synge’s play (in which the western world is America, as well as Aran). In ­Tide-­race, there is no mistaking the Irish literary model through which elements of Twm-­ Cadwaladr are filtered: ‘Watching him helplessly, he became in our eyes the embodiment of invincible devilry until he grew bigger than life in the glory of putting so much fear into us’ (p. 148). However, critics have been reluctant to explore the full extent of the interface between the chorography of ­Tide-­race and that of Synge’s plays and prose writings. I suggest that representations of island space in ­Tide-­race are

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4  Hugh Hughes, Dame Venodotia, alias Modryb Gwen: A Lady Incog. (first engraved c.1835). By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/ The National Library of Wales

insistently mapped onto Synge’s cartographies of Aran, Wicklow and Mayo, to the extent that Bardsey becomes a cultural palimpsest – like the first Winter Rhythms map, gesturing westwards to Irish ground in an act of intertextual cartography and archipelagic accommodation: ‘Other men in western isles must have been crouching as we were crouched, on ledges a few feet above the sea’ (TR, p. 83). The three plays, The Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), together with The Aran Islands (1907) offered Chamberlain compelling conceptual and stylistic templates for her portrait of island existence and her reflections on islandness. Clearly, this is not to say that Chamberlain’s Bardsey is not physically and imaginatively its own place. Rather, it is to emphasize that Synge – and for that matter, subsequent literary charts of Irish islands, such as Liam O’Flaherty’s The Black Soul (1924), Peadar O’Donnell’s Islanders (1928), Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years ­A-­growing (1933), Tomás O’Crohan’s The Islandman (1934) and in particular Robin Flower’s The Western Island (1944) – could not easily be elided since these Irish

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cartographies afforded models through which Chamberlain’s relation to Bardsey could be focused.61 Anthony Conran, for whom Chamberlain’s work is an exercise in ‘invent[ing] her own life’, forcefully articulates a contrary view. ‘Nothing could be gained’ he claimed, in 1972, from a comparison between ­Tide-­race and ‘Synge’s study of the Aran islands’, since Brenda Chamberlain had very little real interest in the culture or speech of the Bardsey Islanders, who in any case were not remnants of a tribal past like the men of Aran, but a relatively heterogeneous collection of fairly recent colonists. It is, though, entirely characteristic of the author that she nowhere tells us whether they spoke Welsh or English. Indeed, as far as I can find, she does not mention the Welsh language at all; which is surely remarkable for a book about the most westerly part of Welsh Wales. Partly it is a sign of her disdain for things that divide mankind one from another – class, or race, or nationality, or language. But partly it indicates a real limitation of her interests.62

Conran’s anthropological distinction between the ethnoscapes of Aran and Bardsey is correct. As Beirne and O’Donnell remark, a ‘provocative ­Darwinian-­driven discourse about race’ developed at the fin de siècle on Aran, which became the site of ethnographic and political debates about ‘radical and cultural purity’.63 Correct also is the emphasis, seconded by Katherine Holman, on Chamberlain’s internationalist sensibilities.64 Many of these statements, however, need refining. The categories Conran cites are too narrow to allow the ­Hiberno-­Cambrian alignments of Chamberlain’s cartography to emerge. Irish and Manx by descent (Welsh only by birth), Chamberlain speaks of ‘the memory of a Manx kinsman who had been in and out of [her] young days, a tall bearded fisherman in a black jersey’, and recalls being ‘nudged … slyly’ by her ‘unremembered Irish grandmother … towards the rock in the Irish sea’.65 She found in the plays and in the complex cultural anthropology of The Aran Islands a model for an ambiguous and subversive chorography in which national myths of belonging are submitted to rigorous critique. Meaningfully ­co-­optable neither by ‘the ­nation-­building agendas of the new Irish State’ (as a ‘stable signifier for classic Irish Revivalism’) nor by a cosmopolitan ­‘Counter-­Revivalist’ mentality (wary of a ‘repressive nativism’), Synge offered both ‘elegy’ and ‘exposé’.66 As P. J. Mathews has argued, Synge sought to ‘break down and devolve abstract ideological issues into ­micro-­contexts where questions of power, personal motivations, psychodynamics, group relations and determinisms of environment and culture can be laid bare’; he also ‘opened up the possibility for the discovery of ­avant-­garde potentials within local and

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traditional culture’.67 Synge showed Chamberlain how bounded, ‘marginal’ territory could be the very ground of the pan-­European imagin­ation (and not merely by force of reaction). As Chamberlain puts it in ­Tide-­race: ‘The island has succeeded in making me love mankind; crowded Piccadilly, quaysides, foreign cities, exotic fruits, faces, gatherings, le Corbusier’s architecture’ (p. 197). Synge’s anthropology of Aran was a literary lesson in how to incorporate the mythological within a sceptical frame of reference, and how to demystify the island self in the very act of yielding ­(self-­consciously) to an atavistic Celticism and the essentialist discourses of primitivism and eroticized orientalism: ‘Their red bodices and white tapering legs make them as beautiful as tropical sea birds, as they stand in a frame of seaweeds against the brink of the Atlantic’; ‘these girls wore a raw sheepskin on their shoulders, to catch the oozing ­sea-­water, and they looked strangely wild and ­seal-­like with the salt caked upon their lips and wreaths of seaweed in their hair’.68 His immersion in Gaelic notwithstanding, Synge the literary European, the Parisian flâneur, was fully aware of the dangers of an unthinking nativism. One recognizes what Eugene Benson regards as the ‘characteristic note’ of Syngian drama – the traffic between a brutal act and a ‘mythic deed’ (‘dirty deed’ and ‘gallous story’ in the words of Playboy) – as a note sounded also by Chamberlain in her portraits of island life (even if ­Tide-­race largely resists Synge’s ironies).69 Moreover, I suggest that Chamberlain found in Synge’s plays, which, as Oona Frawley has emphasized, ‘initiated the Irishwoman into the drama in a new and significantly vocal way’, a template for ‘feminine tragedy’ in which female agency and the female voice struggle to assert themselves against constricting folk and nationalist traditions.70 What Bonnie Kime Scott has identified as Synge’s ‘feminine models of creativity’ and his interest in women as ‘fashioners of tales’ would certainly have appealed to a writer who was forging a new writing space for herself at this time.71 Chamberlain would also have recognized in The Aran Islands a carefully drawn gender map of the Aran isles, where the ­cliff-­top as much as the hearth emerges as a female, maternal space of emotional distress. As Chamberlain’s Winter Rhythms maps graphically attest, Chamberlain could relate directly to Synge’s isolated, watching females (in particular Maurya in Riders to the Sea, whose prototype was the old woman of Inishmaan ‘still weeping and looking out over the sea’ in The Aran Islands72) – a figure central to the plays’ ‘enactment of anxiety rather than action’.73 Chamberlain’s resistance to a bourgeois mapping of Bardsey as a national (or nationalist) symbol – masculine or

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feminine – can also be said to bear a Syngian signature. Generically and formally, Synge’s The Aran Islands – ‘situated within some of the emergent discourses of modernity such as photography, ethnography, anthropology and documentary realism’– was a crucial influence on the ‘discursive method’ of Chamberlain’s journal writing.74 Elaine Sisson reminds us that the episodic form of The Aran Islands combines documentary and autobiography, external record and inner meditation; indeed, Synge asks the reader to test each mode against the other.75 Robin Skelton charts in The Aran Islands (which is emphatically ‘in journal form’) ‘a movement from a rather ­low-­key meditative coherence to a much more vivid fragmentation’, ‘a symphonic construction of impressions’ and a ­proto-­metafictional account of ‘an introspective ­myth-­making which feeds upon any evidence that supports it’.76 All this holds true, not only of ­Tide-­race itself, but of Chamberlain’s continuing experimentation with the discursive strategies of the journal as she moves out into Europe. The Aran Islands regularly surrenders itself entirely to folk narrative in the form of shanachies’ tales; ­Tide-­race, with its ‘islanded’ journal entries – now lyrical, now documentary – also gives itself to ­self-­contained narratives of folk- and ­self-­mythology. In The Aran Islands and Synge’s travel essays, Chamberlain would also have responded to what James Clifford has called ‘the ethnographic allegory’, where local contexts and the ‘documentary’ mode are imbued with wider geographical, ideological and existential significance.77 She found in Synge’s ‘poetic theatre’78 an articulation of a fatalism on ‘the Greek tragic pattern’ to which she was already herself greatly disposed.79 Such a Weltanschauung is embodied most hauntingly in Maurya’s ‘foreboding’ and in ‘the keening women as a chorus’ in Riders to the Sea;80 it issues from what Synge identifies in The Aran Islands as ‘the whole passionate rage’ that ‘lurks somewhere’ in desolate people who ‘feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas’.81 In Chamberlain’s work, it would reach a pitch in A Rope of Vines. From set pieces describing the crossing of treacherous sounds to folk tales of great fish and kings’ daughters; from fantasies of cleansing ­death-­by-­water and meditations on artistic alienation to the insistent European cultural alignments of The Aran Islands, Synge’s Irish chorography marks the western limit of Chamberlain’s archipelagic chart of Europe and the self. ­Tide-­race would be the first major projection of that chart.

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HYBRID CHOROGRAPHY: ­TIDE-­RACE (1962) Tide-­race does indeed offer, in the words of Tony Brown and M. Wynn Thomas, ‘an intimate map of [Chamberlain’s] own mythopoeic and cosmogenic imagination’.82 It is important to remember that in both manuscript and printed forms, it opens with actual maps. An early draft (NLW MS 21486C) begins not with the typed ‘Part 1’ on the recto, but with a talismanic map of Bardsey on the facing verso (figure 5, i and ii) that imposes on the work both the symbolic form of the island and the concept of locatability implied by the map’s gridwork. The map – clearly traced by Chamberlain from an atlas or guide book, and filled in with details of the natural and built environment – seems to throw out a challenge to the imagination: escape from this geographic, cartographic ‘reality’, if you can. And yet, the longer one stares at the map, the more it becomes an artful form and paradoxical object. Uncanny transform­ ations of the ­two-­dimensional cartographic plane into fantastic forms would occupy Chamberlain later in ­Tide-­race as she considers the mind’s inability fully to grasp the condition of islandness: This is a world for the enchanted young, who learn at an early age that this ­rock-­fragment which on a map is a drawing of a treasure island taking on an unreal fantasy in certain moods of summer weather, is set in an element too big for contemplation. The impact with reality is enough to unnerve a child. (TR, p. 95)

The passage serves also as an insightful commentary on the ‘fantasy’ space generated by all maps (especially maps of islands). The slippage between cultural sign and signified, overdetermined symbolic representation and ‘reality’, while also ‘too big for contemplation’, offers the imagination room to play. In published form, ­Tide-­race was also to begin with a map, transmuted into a creaturely ­sea-­shape – its gridlines now compressed into ­fin-­ridges and the ruffled waters of the sound, with the ­rock-­form of a vestigial ­compass-­rose giving both author and reader their bearings, for now (figure 6). The metamorphosis of traced map to ­fish-­form marks the ­co-­opting of cartography as a mode of imaginative projection. Even when the (merely) symbolic valence of a map (as opposed to the lived experience of place) is acknowledged by Chamberlain, the map asserts its conceptual magnetism, becoming through apposition an uncanny simulacrum, a creaturely ‘thing’ that bursts the bounds of its ­two ­dimensions. Contrasting her own experience of the island with that of her partner, Chamberlain writes:

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How can we speak of anything that is to me tangible, a fragment of earth lived on by men and women who curse and laugh in gusts of spray; but is to him a place on a map, a thing of contours, a magnetic stone inhabited by unknown creatures[?] (TR, p. 110)

Here, Chamberlain seems to consign cartography to the realms of mere ­second-­hand experience, an unlived supplement. Yet the visual dimension of ­Tide-­race asserts otherwise: the map is a lens through which her lived experience is conceptualized, complete with cartographic ‘creatures’. Chamberlain’s mapping of Bardsey began on the mainland with the momentary but unnerving fantasy that only the map itself was real, and that its referent was not there to ‘realize’, cartographically or otherwise: ‘we had brooded over the map, poring over the speck of land out in the sea. Was it real? Would we ever be there? It was so far, it was not realisable’ (TR, p. 145). The map, as well as the salt sea, is estranging; it renders reality fantastic. Hybridized, rendered graphic, from the outset, the map of Bardsey achieves the power of an icon that conditions Chamberlain’s representation of external objects. The pen drawings that exist in creative dialogue with the text are miniature chorographies of reality – graphic riffs or fractals on a cartographic theme. Chamberlain’s cartographic art anticipates the concern of ­twenty-­first-­century artistic practice and theory with the aesthetics and iconography of the map.83 In a specifically Welsh context, Chamberlain’s map art begets Iwan Bala’s. Katherine Holman is right to state that ‘Bardsey is not named’ in ­Tide-­race (the early ‘trailers’ published in magazines were more geographically frank).84 In addition, the linguistic geography of the island is for the most part elided by a writer who, as Anthony Conran puts it, was always ‘expatriate’ in her ‘chosen culture’.85 Yet, as a geographical and cartographic entity, Bardsey is assiduously mapped in ­Tide-­race. Objects surrender to the metaperspective of cartography; by the same token, the ­map-­as-­text gains life (sometimes a deathly one) and depth of perspective, becoming imaginatively whorled, spotted and, as we shall see, powerfully eroticized in the pen drawings. Bardsey’s ­map-­form was a crucial element in Chamberlain’s move away from figurative art (of which there are three examples, reproduced as colour plates, in the first edition of ­Tide-­race86) towards the austere abstraction of her final decade. Each icon communicates suggestively with the adjacent text, itself islanded in discrete, numbered sections that visually enact the condition of enislement on which Chamberlain meditates.

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5(i)

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5  (ii) Brenda Chamberlain MSS, NLW MS 21486C: the beginning of an early draft of ­Tide-­race, opposite a map of Bardsey, traced by Chamberlain. By permission of the Estate of Brenda Chamberlain and Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

Recollecting the winter of 1946, during which she made the decision to establish a permanent home on the island, Chamberlain recalls ‘dark thoughts, rooted in nightmare and the untrusting mind’ and fears of ‘death by drowning’:

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6 ­Title-­page of part one of ­Tide-­race, ‘The cave of seals’

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I asked myself whether happiness could come to me here; whether it was wise in relation to my work; to my future life, to cut myself off from the outside world. I had done it once before, with disastrous results.   Now I proposed to do it in an even more uncompromising way. I wondered whether Paul [Jean] was as prepared as he thought for this revolutionary change … (TR, pp. 134–5).

Above the text is the old, unexorcizable ­map-­form (figure 7). It appears on the right as at once ­island-­shape (internally repeated, with the extent of Mynydd Enlli and contour lines retained), shell and bleached ­bird-­skull. On the left is a truncated version of the same icon. The drawings map a moment of apprehension, when Bardsey threatens emotional separation and ossification of the blanched spirit, while at the same time holding out the possibility of ‘a new self’ (TR, p. 45). That moment of no return – the winter of 1946 – coincided with the publication in Wales of one of Chamberlain’s most revealing meditations on her own fated, incarcerated and enisled condition as a woman poet and artist: the poem ‘Blodeuwedd’.87 It, too, has been much neglected. Though the first half of the poem had appeared two years previously in Poetry London, ‘Blodeuwedd’ can be read as life mapping – a chart of Chamberlain’s 1946–7 move from mountains and marshland to Bardsey. Mapping her own physical and emotional circumstances onto the ‘ruthless legend’ of Blodeuwedd, Chamberlain inhabits the ­flower-­woman’s conjured existence, here rendered aquatic: ‘And I who swim within her dream turned nightmare / Show an inverted image in the brackish / Eye of the marsh.’ A ‘chillness of cloud’, ‘unfooted rock’, ‘the wave’s madness’ and ‘green water meads’ identify the landscape of Blodeuwedd’s unnatural ‘birth’ as a strange composite of the ­Piper-­haunted mountains, lowland valleys and seashore. In an image that was to return at the very end of ­Tide-­race, Chamberlain has Blodeuwedd (and herself) pulled inexorably by ‘puppet string stretched from her head’ to ‘the marriage stage’ – outlandish territory for a free spirit who felt ‘the pull of earth and weather’. Terror ensues. Decoupling itself from Blodeuwedd, the speaking voice draws attention to Blodeuwedd’s enislement: Look, Love, there is no way out We are ringed about … Wanton or bride, matron or virgin, loving or lusting What tide sets in you?

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It was a question Chamberlain must have asked herself in various forms as she considered a permanent move to Bardsey with Jean during the winter of 1946, following the end of her marriage to Petts (the Lleu Llaw Gyffes of the poem?): ‘Damp rots the marriage bed and the air reeks / With fog and sodden leaves’ (Blake there, fused with the Eliot of The Waste Land and Four Quartets). Blodeuwedd’s liaison with Gronw Pebr, ‘the heart’s king’, is seen as a cruel, ‘predestined’ trick of the outwardly ‘unprophetic’ afternoon. The poem becomes a meditation on the poet’s yearning for ­self-­sovereignty and autonomy in the face of societal conventions and male jealousy, so damagingly internalized by the woman as ‘guilt’, which causes her to flee ‘into the fastness / Of rock and waterhole’ with ‘festering’ wounds. It is a suggestive mythologization of Chamberlain’s first passage to Bardsey in 1946. What the speaker/ Blodeuwedd takes to the island, ‘Thinking to build new lives’, are ‘women, little backward glancing puppets’ who (again) feel ‘strings tugging their long hair’. The ­night-­haunting owl that Blodeuwedd becomes prefigures the many creaturely metamorphoses that occupy the fantasies of ­Tide-­race, which invariably articulate anxiety about what Chamberlain calls ‘the truth about me’, together with the search, beyond quotidian responsibilities, for ‘my real life, which is of the imagination’ (TR, p. 182).88 Chamberlain’s final writerly separation from her female subject marks an awareness of a Welsh heritage of female incarceration: And I who swim with tired limbs Through the green fable, Trace the cyclic vengeance From the grave’s conclusive Stag branching legend Reaching to the Now.

Focusing the ‘cyclic’ nature of that female heritage in 1946 was the cyclic form of the island itself – the ultimate imprisoning ground. As we have seen, the second Winter Rhythms map was to offer another meditation on the major themes of the Blodeuwedd story in its anthropological refractions: ‘people imagine a lot of romantic ­moon-­shine about islands – talking of complete freedom; actually, it is a life of strict behaviour[,] ­self-­discipline, ­self-­reliance & duty to one’s neighbours: a highly civilized code of behaviour … Our sense of custom & taboo is extremely highly developed.’ The two Winter Rhythms maps with their complex symbologies represent cartographic ­aides-­memoires – coloured recensions – of the

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verbal maps of ­Tide-­race. The maps act as clarifying ‘legends’ (in the cartographic sense) through which the most significant contours of Chamberlain’s literary response to her new ‘limited landscape’ (TR, p. 13) can be focused – a curious reversal of the conventional dynamic between visual map and discursive legend. The coordinates of the second Winter Rhythms map direct attention to the forceful gendering and eroticization of space in ­Tide-­race, in which two locations on the eastern flank of Bardsey become gravitational sites of ­self-­examination and ­self-­projection: the Seal Cave (from which part one of ­Tide-­race takes its name) and the lookout point on Pen Cristin. Thomas and Brown see the ‘cosmos’ of ­Tide-­race as characterized by ‘sexual (and gender) confusion’ and Chamberlain herself as ‘ever a questionable “woman” in the limiting terms of her day’, whose ‘gender crisis’ is ‘deeply implicated in her sense of being an outsider’.89 It is a subject too few critics have chosen to examine, despite the fact that the first reviews of ­Tide-­race raised the issue of whether it was ‘a feminine book’, or whether it was ‘progressively harder to distinguish [in it] the work of a woman artist’.90 ‘Genuinely islandish’ is how The Tatler assessed Chamberlain’s ‘attitude to living’ in ­Tide-­trace.91 The term tricksily begs its ­near-­homophone, ‘outlandish’, in both its literal (‘alien’, ­‘non-­native’) and extended (‘beyond what is considered normal or acceptable’) meanings. Certainly, island space in ­Tide-­race becomes a theatre for extraordinary performances of multiple gender identities and transgressive desire – performances that are mapped by the cartographic imagination. One instance of such gender (re-)mapping is the pseudonym ‘Cadwaladr’ for the petty despot, Thomas Griffiths. It has gone unnoticed that his name subverts and ironizes his masculinity and that it is a means of enacting a masterly (as it were) sisterly revenge. The name is that of the last Bardsey schoolteacher, Dilys Cadwaladr (known on the island by her married name, Scheltinga), who was compelled to leave soon after Chamberlain’s arrival, owing to what she regarded as Griffiths’s persecution.92 Significantly, she was also the first woman to win the Crown at the National Eisteddfod (1953). She therefore serves as a model of female creative authority whose literary crown renders the famous tin crown of Bardsey hopelessly patriarchal and superannuated. This ludic, ­gender-­charged naming is part of a complex play of identity in ­Tide-­race in which the precise contours of the island environment play a conditioning role. Beginning with ‘conflicting tides’, section five of part one of ­Tide-­race sees Chamberlain, in the company of one of the English ‘outsiders’ on

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the island, Stewart Hopkinson, enacting a conflicted fantasy of infantile return to the mother and birth, high up on the cliff: I inserted myself in the entrance and wormed up into the darkness of the narrow cleft. When it became so constricting that I could push no further, and when head was bent to the breast by the roof, I cautiously put out my arm into the dank air, to find that at full stretch I could feel inside the deep nest made of grass stems and wool; three, four, five pulsating heads. Their beaks gaped wide in a clamour for food. Carefully, I passed one chick down for Stewart to touch … After it had been returned to the nest, we retreated to the rocks below. (TR, p. 34)

Chamberlain is at once the mother in childbirth, delivering midwife and returning child; in dramatically psychic terms, the rock ‘cleft’ is at once prison – Chamberlain would have known that Bardsey had actually been used as such during the civil war93 – and sanctuary: the island’s two primary conditions, as emphasized by Chamberlain in her Foreword. (‘All of us’, Chamberlain declares in the next section, ‘with severed, perished navel strings, desire the mother from whom we were cut by the scissors of a nurse’ (TR, p. 39); later: ‘It is more than I can bear, this moving into the womb of a hill’ (TR, p. 70).) The line drawing at the head of section six graphically enfolds island space, maternal identity and sexual fantasy in another Bardsey ­map-­form (figure 8). Peering through ‘a narrow fissure’ down into the Seal Cave, Chamberlain sees a seal cow; then suddenly the bull seal emerges, patrolling his ‘harem’, ‘smooth and black as oil, nine feet of solid flesh’, his ‘black bull head dripping’ (TR, p. 36). As well as pointing forward to the later image of ‘the bull poised thrusting on the heifer’s back’ (TR, p. 64), the description summons the sexual presence and ­pent-­up violence of Cadwaladr – nicknamed ‘the ­Bull-­neck’ (and seen by Conran as Heathcliffian).94 Though labouring under an emasculatory name, he is in ­Tide-­race ‘possessed of an ancient virility in the strong thrust of his thighs’ (TR, p. 19); ‘It is only he who makes me feel I am a woman in a boatload of men.’95 Also called ‘Caliban Cadwaladr’ and ‘Caliban the beast’, he plays the brutish ­man-­fish to Chamberlain’s Miranda (or Ariel, or female Prospero and Stephano).96 Bardsey is thus mapped onto the island of The Tempest (whose implied location is the Mediterranean) – that hybrid space of magic and political terror, sexual desire and regulatory control, exile and colonial anxiety. Fascinatingly, ‘studies’ of Bardsey during the 1930s and 1940s are shot through with a discourse of politics and internal colonialism that bespeaks fantasies of a ­gender-­equal Welsh separatism.97 Enthralled by

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the figure she calls ‘Taûros’, the ‘Slavering, ­thunder-­throated Bull’, and by Picasso’s 1935 Minotauromachia etchings (a reading of which she offered in Life and Letters ­To-­day in 194598), Chamberlain represents Bardsey as a Prosperoean island of ambiguous identities where the newly enisled self must inhabit creaturely (and male) forms – ‘I, I, I, ­ram-­horned battering at the holy isle, at the ­mocking-­rock of the seal cave in the east … What am I?’ (TR, p. 46) – and where a father must be prevented from ‘whipp[ing] out his ­fish-­knife for the purpose of cutting the umbilical cord’ of a child born in transit over the threshold of the Sound (TR, p. 81). This latter ­birth-­scene with its hints of multiple borders transgressed is amplified by another cartographically indebted pen drawing (figure 9), a miniature study of internal and external borders, a gutted fish and a grotesque, interfolded representation of a newborn and a mother in childbirth. Following the ­birth-­fantasy on the cliff, Chamberlain carves out for herself a ‘personal folklore’.99 The seal cow takes ‘the lonely woman living on a desert beach, without husband, without children’ down to her ‘deepest roots nurtured on legend and fantasy’. This is a cultural return ad fontem that goes hand in hand with a maternal instinct that turns transgressive: One day, [the seal cow] said, so great had been my desire to be a mother that I stole a baby seal[,] ­silken-­haired and innocent, from a rock that spray blew over … It screamed with the voice of any human child. The bereft cow roared and came up from the surf to beat my door and windows with her flippers … After a time, my adopted child grew listless, the fight went out of it, and at last it pined away, dwindling inside its long fur. It died; then, because I feared the vengeance of its real mother, I went to live far away from the seal’s breeding ground. (TR, pp. 36–7)

Mapped onto the folk tale is the psychic turbulence of (childless) Chamberlain’s cultural unbelonging, maternal desire and ­post-­war disillusionment, charted in simpler and less revealing terms in her 1947 review of Barford’s Climbing in Britain, discussed above. Chamberlain continues with what I suggest is a remapping of her failed marriage with John Petts, absent perforce from Tŷ’r Mynydd during the war, when Chamberlain looked after his young brother, Peter. ‘Was it your baby I stole sometime in a former life?’, she asks the seal cow, before rooting ‘deeper in legend’ for a narrative in which she marries ‘a stranger’ and lives ‘in great contentment above the tidal ledge’ until he begins to leave her ‘for whole weeks with only turnstones and greenshanks for company’:

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But one night … I went to the shore to gather driftwood by the moon’s light. A bull seal had risen from the sea and lay resting on a rock. He was singing with a human voice, an old song, ‘I am a man upon the land, I am a silkie in the sea’.   The shock of it made me scream; and hearing me, he gave a great bellow of disgust because I had seen him as he really was, and flapped away into his true element away from me for ever. (TR, p. 37)

This section of ­Tide-­race had already been articulated as a poem – ‘Seal Cave’– first published in 1951, in which the bull seal emerges from the ‘pulsating’ sea of his ‘mammalian bedroom’, and the seal cow tempts the speaker (‘a lonely woman / Living on a lonely strand’) to ‘a salt death’. From these deep soundings of past and present attachments and geographical locations (possible, one might argue, only from a condition of islandness), Chamberlain surfaces in ­Tide-­race to a literary supra-­ consciousness, only then to offer a strange zoology – part folklore again, part (hardly disguised) sexual fantasy: ‘In truth, and quite apart from the weaving of legends, a bull seal sometimes shows sexual interest in women when they are swimming near him; particularly in fearless young virgins.’ She recalls ‘bathing at night’ with ‘young people among a herd of seals’, and seeing a bull seal swim towards a girl ‘with powerful interest, stare into her face and at the last moment dive between her legs’. ‘There is often so strong a link between woman and seal’, she adds, ‘that it would seem almost normal for them to ­co-­habit’ (TR, p. 38). The cumulative effect of such ­set-­pieces, enisled in detached sections, is to eroticize her ­map-­derived representations of the island, from the dappled seal cow of this very section (figure 10) and the ­hump-­backed ­shell-­form accompanying her account of islanders’ sexual jealousy (figure 11), to the biologically explicit cartographic talisman inscribing the island women’s Syngian response to the sea: ‘[Nans] said bitterly: “That whore out there wants all our men and won’t be content till she gets them”’; ‘Myfanwy, whose lover, Dai Penmon, was one of those out at sea, gazed bleakly … She seemed to be watching the wild erotic dances of nereids and syllids … She bent down to pick up a shell; and sniffed it to catch the faint tang of salt’ (TR, pp. 130, 131; figure 12). These graphic maps of ­bow-­backed Bardsey as shell, fish and beast serve both to exoticize and to demystify the island as ‘an escapist’s paradise, but … one that whitened the hair and bowed the back, that would raise ­sea-­monsters of hatred and despair’ (TR, p. 56). In this context, Thomas and Brown are right to claim that ­Tide-­race ‘affords examples aplenty of Chamberlain’s ‘borderline mental states’.100 Adept at inscribing maps of Bardsey with

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the borderlines of gender and with the horizons of imaginative sight (as the Winter Rhythms charts attest), the Chamberlain of ­Tide-­race is engaged in an extended project of mapping the porous boundaries of ground, gender identity and cartographic representation itself. The lookout posts over the angry Sound, logged on the first Winter Rhythms map, are nodal gendered sites throughout ­Tide-­race. They are the points from which the island boat is watched going ‘into the offing’ – always ‘to the lamentation and foreboding of those women left behind’ (TR, p. 143). This vista becomes a compulsive psychological aperture through which Chamberlain frames her creative desires and emotional health: ‘I was constantly afraid for [Paul]; staring through the studio window to see him standing in the tiny boat appear and disappear in the strong tideway as he made his way back from the west side’ (TR, p. 140) – a prospect (through the framing space of her painting room at Carreg) precisely mapped in the first Winter Rhythms chart. As suggested above, such lookout sites are also coordinates that connect Bardsey to Aran and to a Syngian creative anthropology, offering Chamberlain stages for what Holman has called ‘her own Celtic keening spirit’.101 ­Tide-­race is a moving meditation on the condition of the female watcher – fated, it seems, to be forever associated with the memorialization and verbalization of grief, and with a perimeter she experiences as ­hard-­edged.102 The book also articulates Chamberlain’s struggle against this deathly role – which of course involves a struggle with the model found in Synge. Bardsey did not initiate her study of this lonely watching stance; her island experience merely gathered it to a pitch. As early as 1942, a poem such as ‘Give No White Flower’ lays bare the physiology (‘heart torn open’, ‘valves’, ‘cusp’, ‘veins’) of an emotionally vulnerable woman whose death would signal that ‘there would be no more / A woman standing with expectant hands / When the tide falls away from the shore’ – an ending that both contests the inevitability of this passive, watching attitude and consigns the female to its fatal consequences. Chamberlain’s sea- and ­island-­poems of the 1940s (some of which ­pre-­date her move to Bardsey) and early 1950s – ‘Lament’, ‘Third Woman’s Lament’ (later ‘Fisherman Husband’), ‘Old Wives Shoregathered’, ‘Young Fisher Brought to Land’, ‘I Think of You in a Time of Storm’ (later ‘Song of a Woman from the Western Island’), indeed the whole emotional temper of The Green Heart sequence – extend the study of this island condition in which women’s eyes are ­‘surf-­dimmed from gazing’.103 One might suggest that those Caseg Broadsheet poems that inhabit a female consciousness and the psychology of ­sentry-­figures are in the orbit of the

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10 ­Tide-­race, p. 37

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11 ­Tide-­race, pp. 50–1

same project.104 The Pen Cristin vantage point recorded on the second Winter Rhythms chart is verbally mapped in ­Tide-­race in a tour de force ­set-­piece whose vision of lone femaleness and dramatic fatality is indebted to the apocalyptic De Quincey of Suspiria de Profundis. ­Life-­writing is channelled here into a visionary mode. Chamberlain positions herself at the boathouse near sheltered Cafn Enlli: ‘the women who have waited and the women who will wait for men to come over the waves, are round me in the darkness’; the universe is one of ‘grey watchers among grey stone’. Suddenly, the self is disorientatingly doubled, mythologized, classicized, made Syngian; the writing fluctuates tidally between vision and ethnographic record: I have seen her on other nights when we have been returning over the sea, the shrouded figure standing motionless in a corner of the cliff: high on the mountainside over the white, the wine dark red, the mussel blue ramparts. She is not this or that familiar woman of the island, but a symbol. Monumental in patience, the woman watches the Sound … This is a woman of the island: shawled in garments like a nun’s, with face almost yellow in pallor; her grey eyes large and clear, ­black-­lashed. Over them arch ­thick-­haired brows that

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meet at the root of the primitive nose … She has the face of one haunted by the imminence of death … but however weak in health, strength of custom and the power of love draw her feet up the hill path through the bracken to the place where she has the extent of the water between the isle and the mainland. (TR, pp. 60–1)

The woman’s vision incorporates past and future into a fateful ‘living moment’ that reveals to her the returning boat, her cargo of oysters now sold ‘to the ­red-­faced, roystering merchants of a seaport on the coast of England’, her crew mad, drunk and ‘sink[ing] into nightmare’: ‘one woman in a cotton skirt hooped in a bell shape of wire, floats in to the shore … one breather to remember a drunken voyage; one inherited memory to fill a woman’s sight when she sits in the summer rain’ (TR, p. 62). Generically, this vision is a startling hybrid. Precise topography, already rendered cartographically in the Winter Rhythms charts, provides a theatre for gendered allegory, ­life-­writing, a keening lyricism whose tones are partly Synge’s, and anthropological record (evident throughout ­Tide-­race – pace both Conran and Holman – in Chamberlain’s focus on ­sea-­ancestry, Bardsey physiognomies, degeneracy, the island’s ‘dark Iberian stock’ and physical deformation).105 These are suffused with a visionary De Quinceyan psychodrama and Chamberlain’s own Welsh island gothic, through which she seeks both to confirm her own insertion in this ­female–death equation and to write herself out of it. The Homeric ‘wine dark red … ramparts’ (which later returns as ­‘wine-­dark Odyssean sea’ (TR, p. 189)), aligns Chamberlain’s Celtic archipelagos with those of the Aegean (classical and contemporary, mythological and modern), which she was destined soon to map and whose gravitational pull ­Tide-­race subtly charts.106 Reviewers had already drawn attention to Chamberlain’s uncanny brand of Welsh Hellenism. Of the sea poems in The Green Heart, the Hudson Review commented: ‘her Welsh fishing villages have a Mediterranean quality about them; The Furies, the Sirens, are about to appear … these are the Aegean islands and these the archaic fishermen of Homer’; P. N. Furbank in Time and Tide referred to the poems’ ‘Delphic bareness’. In ­Tide-­race, the reviewer for the Manchester Evening News detected the ‘almost Mediterranean colouring’ of a Welsh world ‘that, in other eyes, might seem all greens and greys’.107 Chamberlain would certainly have known of H. J. Fleure’s Aegean ethnography of the Welsh, plotted in 1939 in the pages of Wales108 in such a way as to make Wales seem ‘a sort of island’, as Linda Adams has noted.109 Synge spoke of the ‘Greek kinship’ of the tales he heard on

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13 ­Tide-­race, p. 164

Aran.110 As we have seen in the context of ‘Blodeuwedd’, Chamberlain likewise recognized in Welsh tales a tragic, theatrical, fatalistic note – the very note she strikes at the beginning of ­Tide-­race, with what is in effect a dramatis personae. She sounds it again at the end, as epitaphic metacommentary, reminiscent of a Greek chorus, merges with the ‘alienated’ ­meta-­awareness of absurdist theatre: A little larger than life, dancing with more abandon and grotesqueness than the others; with the devil nudging his elbow and manipulating a wire in his head, is [Cadwaladr] … On this small stage, this microcosm, in the middle of a scene, the shadow of death falls on the players. (TR, p. 222)

The dotted lines over Bardsey Sound in the first Winter Rhythms map inscribe not only ‘possible landing[s]’, as Chamberlain calls them, of the Bardsey menfolk, but also personal fantasies of passage between homeland and outland. I suggest that in an extended fantasy in the final part of ­Tide-­race, Chamberlain reverses the gender dynamics of the female watcher–male voyager paradigm, discussed above. This is not only an act of empowerment. It is another attempt to write herself out of the identification of the Bardsey female with a passive waiting and with the fate of ‘the melancholy old woman who went over the cliff with only birds for witnesses’ (TR, p. 222). The voyage across the Sound she imagines in the ‘Deep soundings’ section of ­Tide-­race (pp. 161–70) first appeared as a short story, ‘The Return’, in the September 1947 issue of Life and Letters, at the end of her very first summer as a Bardsey resident.111 It is a highly charged early response to the condition of islandness and separation. In it, Chamberlain triangulates the relations between an island resident, Captain Alec Morrison (who is clearly consumptive); his

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wife, Ceridwen, who ‘had refused to live on the Island’ but whose return is imminent; and Bridget Ritsin, who is emotionally and physically involved with the ailing Morrison, and thus the subject of the gossip, ‘cheap traps’ and ‘filthy jokes’ of the mainland village. Ritsin’s solo passage across perilous Bardsey Sound, which becomes a space for distressful ­self-­analysis (‘But how have I sinned? I didn’t steal another woman’s husband’) is the cultural taboo around which Chamberlain’s triangulation of emotional lives is accomplished: ‘My dear Mrs. Ritsin, no woman has ever before navigated these waters. Why, even on a calm day the Porthbychan fishers will not enter the Race’; ‘It isn’t right for a woman to ape a man’ (‘The Return’, 216, 217). This early in her Bardsey life, Chamberlain was already imaginatively contesting the gender roles she was later to record (and implicitly challenge again) on the two Winter Rhythms maps. It is the woman who is the voyager here, the man the deathly watcher: ‘he will be standing in the door wondering that I do not come’. And yet the pull of contemporary normative constructions of the female’s domestic role asserts itself throughout: ‘When you get home, will you come to me, be my little wife?’ (‘The Return’, 221). The story dramatizes anxiety regarding Chamberlain’s move to Bardsey: the voyage across the Sound, haunted by the phantoms of Alec and Ceridwen, has the quality of nightmare – even though being on the mainland is also ‘like a death’. Ritsin moves through ‘gulfs’ in which the mind’ has ‘too much freedom’; shadow and fog converge on her as ‘imprisoning walls, tunnels along which the boat moved only to find nothingness at the end’. Sublimated here, too, is a fretfulness regarding Chamberlain’s (unmarried) partnership with Jean van der Bijl (whom she calls ‘husband’ – once only – towards the end of ­Tide-­race (p. 214)) in the wake of her failed marriage to John Petts. Bridget Ritsin safely makes landfall, though not without much trauma, which includes an encounter with a ­siren-­like seal cow and a ­dream-­vision of an ascent of Mynydd Enlli ‘under a sky dripping with blood’. Towards the end of the story, she stands naked in Morrison’s kitchen in the early morning light, her body a sensual island form: Little channels of moisture ran down her flanks, water dripped from her hair over the points of her breasts … he watched the skin stretch over the fragile ribs. He touched her thigh with his fingers, almost a despairing gesture. (‘The Return’, 227)

Emotional and physical fulfilment are denied, however, as Bridget lies down beside the ravaged Alec in a deathly bed. Significantly indebted, I

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suggest, to the surreal, ­wrong-­footing narrative of return in Dylan Thomas’s short story, ‘The Dress’ (1936), Chamberlain’s ‘The Return’ is an autobiographical fantasy in which a power beyond the protagonist’s control, beyond the socially constructed proscriptions of island life, thwarts female desire and fulfilment. Chamberlain’s revisionary gender cartography of Bardsey Sound culminates in a deathly map of the body: ‘His face was bleached, the bones too clearly visible under the flesh … his face was like a death mask … What will become of us, what will become of us?’ (‘The Return’, 227). Tide-­race remaps the story as ­first-­person ­life-­writing. While it preserves the fantasy (and it was emphatically a fantasy – apparently a source of much amusement to the island men112) of lone female passage, it significantly alters the emotional tenor of the original story by doing away with the third element of the triangulation – the islander’s estranged wife – since the two coordinates, here in ­Tide-­race, are now Chamberlain herself and her partner Jean. The village ­tittle-­tattle that revolved in ‘The Return’ around that triangle is now focused on the heterodoxy of the Chamberlain–van der Bijl relationship and of the solo female crossing itself. The baleful prognostications of the phantom Ceridwen, amidships in ‘The Return’, become those of ‘reason’ in ­Tide-­race (p. 166). In addition, the deathly aspect of ‘The Return’ is also redrawn: while Jean (‘Paul’) is sick, it is clear his illness is not mortal, and there is a sullenness to their eventual reunion in the house – ‘We drank tea in silence, standing far part’ (TR, p. 170) – as Chamberlain empties the highly charged ending of ‘The Return’ of both erotic and thanatic resonances. However, the emotional complexities and sexual fantasies of ‘The Return’ still haunt the ­Tide-­race recension of the tale. Accompanying the ­re-­inflected version is one of the most disturbingly ossific figures in the book (figure 13): a piece of ­Bardsey-­shaped driftwood or bone, hollowed out and shadowed. It is an emblem (again cartographic, taking its cue from the description of Alec Morrison’s bleached, bony face in ‘The Return’) of the relation between the present incarnation of the story in the frame of ­Tide-­race and its darker autobiographical shadow in ‘The Return’, which encodes the deeper traumas and sexual desires generated by the emotional and physical upheavals Chamberlain experienced during the 1940s. It is significant that on waking from her ­dream-­vision in the boat, the Ritsin/Chamberlain persona (for Chamberlain renders herself fictional even in ­Tide-­race) reflects on layered depths of enislement: ‘What a simple world; and below, the undercurrents’ (TR, p. 169). The pen drawing is map, bone, text and self, all spectrally doubled; it

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communicates the fact that ‘The Return’ is the shadowy unconscious of the present account of the crossing in ­Tide-­race – a literary revenant. The drawing is also a powerful emblem for Chamberlain’s own method of writing the self, which involves an imaginative ‘salvaging’ and redeployment of personal documents (such as Karl von Laer’s letters, as acknowledged in the preface to The Green Heart sequence), and a compulsive return to previous versions of prose writings and poems ­(Tide-­race goes so far as to showcase successive versions of both ‘Rose of Lima’ and ‘Shipwrecked Demeter’113) in an act of palimpsestic remapping.114 This chapter began by considering the two Winter Rhythms in Island Life maps as cartographic talismans, textual and graphic keys to Chamberlain’s mapping of the self across the archipelagos of Europe’s western seaboard. By the time she drew those charts, she had already completed a draft of her only novel, The ­Water-­castle (1964). This work extends her cartographic project into the heart of partitioned, ­post-­war Europe, whose enisled spaces and patrolled borders provide the map for her next published ‘plotting’ of the riven, southbound self.

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4 Mapping Moatedness: Brenda Chamberlain’s European Archipelagos

In late December 1952, five years after moving to Bardsey, Brenda Chamberlain, accompanied by Jean van der Bijl, visited Karl von Laer in his Westphalian ‘exile’ from his ancestral moated schloss or ­‘water-­castle’ at Schlotheim, now ‘lost’ in the Russian eastern zone of Germany. When she returned to Britain in February 1953, Chamberlain began remapping this ­post-­war reunion with the man whose letters had sustained her emotionally and imaginatively since their first meeting at Bangor in ‘that student summer’ of 1932 as a novel: The ­Water-­castle (1964).1 It is the second major instalment of Chamberlain’s European map, whose ­inter-­island spaces are ‘alive with relational meaning’.2 Pete Hay has suggested that ‘the island edge is more than just permeable; perhaps it is actually the portal to roads and ­sea-­trails fanning out to other (is)lands, a natural bridge to the world beyond’.3 This certainly rang true for Chamberlain: The ­Water-­castle – pitifully neglected even by Chamberlain devotees – extends the study of enislement in ­Tide-­race into continental territory and into a new conception of insularization-­as-­ cultural-­asylum that I would like to term moatedness. It is a work that contests what Godfrey Baldacchino calls the ‘jaundiced, ­mainland-­driven impression of the sea as “the most effective barrier of all”’.4 Like ­Tide-­race, the novel is cartographically attuned – alert to the hardening of Germany’s borders and the wider ­post-­war ‘zoning’ of Europe. Personal crises are played out on an unstable map whose newly redrawn

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boundaries and strange foldings also engender a crisis of genre in which personal documents and ­life-­writing – ‘more intimately personal than anything else Brenda Chamberlain wrote’ – are uncannily cast as fiction.5 The lengthy period she spent on Bardsey notwithstanding, Chamberlain’s life from 1947 to 1967 (when she returned to Wales as a ‘voluntary exile’ from the Greek island of Ídhra) can be seen as ‘a state of peripatetic ­island-­hopping’ which, as Hay argues, is almost ‘the island condition’ in which ‘island identities … are endlessly remade’.6 For Katherine Holman, writing in 1976, The ­Water-­castle is flawed as a novel (it is advertised as a novel on the ­dust-­jacket, though interestingly, and tellingly, not on the ­title-­page) owing to the fact that Chamberlain is naively ‘too close’ to the ‘sentimental fancies’ of the central, narrating consciousness of the novel.7 It is a view, repeated by Holman in her 1997 monograph, that fails to consider the nuanced ways in which ‘island identities’ are ­self-­consciously ‘remade’ in the work, and how the novel encodes a sceptical metacommentary on Chamberlain’s emotional and creative dependence on von Laer that marks the distance between herself and the narrating persona of this (admittedly painfully personal) novel. The ­Water-­castle is in many ways an experimental work that sets out to explore the limits of the ­first-­person-­narrated novel, challenge the outmoded, realist category of ‘objectivity’ and actively test the formal compatibility of journal and novel.8 Thus Anthony Conran’s view (shared by some contemporary reviewers9) that ‘The ­Water-­castle shows how little [Chamberlain’s] imagination has to do with the shape of a story – longer, that is, than a fable or anecdote’10 misses the ways in which ‘crystalline’11 fables achieve critical mass as narrative, differently conceived. The novel’s ­self-­awareness is bolstered by Chamberlain’s responsiveness, through the cartographic observations of her principal character, to the freezing effects of totalitarian systems as they manifest themselves on maps, in the landscape and in human communities. The ­Water-­castle is a ‘story of Europe’,12 and a major novel of the Cold War. THE ­WATER-­CASTLE: MOATEDNESS AND ­SELF-­MAPPING ‘Ordinarily, I keep no sort of journal, but during those weeks on the little farm, at the ­water-­castle, and in the Harz mountains, I recorded the events as they happened’ (TWC, p. 7): Chamberlain presents The ­Water-­castle as the (precisely dated) ‘journal’ of Elizabeth Greatorex, described by Klaus von Dorn (the fictionalized von Laer) as ‘the

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­ ell-­known English poet’. That identification is immediately undercut w by Elizabeth’s jealous husband (behind whom is Chamberlain’s partner, Jean van der Bijl): ‘“She isn’t a ­well-­known poet.” Antoine could not resist it’ (TWC, p. 104). Given this exchange, and given that Elizabeth/ Chamberlain refers to poems prompted by details recorded in Klaus’s/ Karl’s letters ‘across “deep water”’ (in the words of the preface to The Green Heart), the novel is an analysis not only of emotional and political anxieties, but also of artistic ones. How dependent – ‘parasitic’ as Conran’s puts it – on ‘her own biography’ is this female poet (and artist)?13 To what extent is she in thrall to what the novel refers to as ‘translations’ of another’s – a man’s – texts?14 What constitutes a ­‘well-­known’ poet? Rendering herself as a persona in the novel allows Chamberlain to confront rather than evade such issues. Elizabeth Greatorex is a cultural composite that bespeaks a desire on Chamberlain’s part to resist ‘national distinctions’ by pluralizing archipelagic identity. While an earlier MS draft of The ­Water-­castle clearly presents Elizabeth as a Welsh poet and her poems as ‘pure creations of North Wales’,15 the published novel allows the reader to think of her as English, even though the past meeting with Klaus is still ‘in Wales’, and her ‘preface’ identifies her as living ‘on a small ­half-­forgotten island in the Irish sea’ (plainly Bardsey) where she and her partner are ‘forced in upon [themselves] in an often painful proximity to tides and storm and seafowl’ (TWC, p. 7). Further, I suggest that Chamberlain took the name Elizabeth Greatorex from Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819–97) and her daughter, Eleanor Elizabeth Greatorex (1854–1917).16 Both were successful artists, the former ­Irish-­born (and in 1868 the first woman to be elected associate of the American National Academy), the latter ­American-­born. Both travelled and painted in Germany. Elizabeth Greatorex’s preface – brief, compressed, not a little cryptic – refers to her visit ‘to friends in the world outside’, as if the strained inwardness of her Welsh island life has configured the whole world as an ‘out there’. Thus, by encoding exilic identity and models of artistic success, international reputation and female accomplishment, the character’s name itself marks a step ‘outside’ Bardsey and Wales – west to gather Irish roots, further west to cultures of American opportunity, and east to England; then, as Elizabeth embarks for the continent, ­south-­east on ‘a long comfortless’ nocturnal journey across the North Sea and down through Holland to the British Occupation Zone in ­north-­west Germany. In a 1947 review, published in The Dublin Magazine, of Gwyn Jones’s collection of stories, The Buttercup Field, Chamberlain stated her own

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need to get ‘through the narrow archway of the enchanted castle that is Wales into the no less enchanted universe outside, of which the castle and its inhabitants are part’.17 Wales itself here is figured as moated; as Elizabeth Greatorex in The ­Water-­castle, Chamberlain would cross Welsh and English sounds in search of another, ­already-­ceded, ‘baroque’ castle – Karl von Laer’s ancestral Schlotheim in the Russian eastern zone. However, at the ‘sordid’ Schäferhof – the ‘ugly Westphalian farm’ now inhabited by Klaus and his pregnant wife Helga – she finds a very different material reality. Moreover, mapped at the Obernburg – the much grander ­‘water-­castle’ (moated grange or Gut) owned by Klaus’s absent cousin, which is represented in a small pen drawing in the novel (figure 1) – is the Balkanization of a continent.18 In the Harz mountains in a frore January, Elizabeth skis the very frontiers of the Cold War. Thus the novel’s three sections – ‘The ­Water-­castle’, ‘Oberharz’ and ‘Tidal wave’ – bring Elizabeth from the ­prison-­sanctuary of Bardsey to ­post-­war ­refugee-­space in Westphalia; thence to (and imaginatively beyond) the boundaries of a bitter Eastern bloc; then ‘home’ (with that concept now radically disturbed) over the pitching ‘salt fathoms’ of the North Sea through familiar Bardsey fantasies of ­death-­by-­water. In the first section of the novel, Elizabeth enters an uncanny, ­frost-­bound world of ‘sad Westphalian fields’19 and displaced persons comprising culturally and literally enisled enclaves – an archipelago – in which refugees struggle to preserve elements of their ­pre-­war material lives and sensibilities. She is drawn feelingly into the orbit of the inhabitants of these spaces, all of whom are in some way connected with Klaus; yet her journal reveals them to be anachronisms20 – what P. T. Hughes in a review in the Sunday Independent called ‘postwar debris looking back in sorrow on their past glories and freedoms’.21 At the Obernburg estate they seek to ‘recreate a little of the old grandeur of their past lives … by their winter games and hare shoots’.22 This replication of the past as an uncanny simulacrum summons memories both ‘gracious and brutal’.23 It is an act in which Elizabeth/Chamberlain is also complicit as she ­re-­encounters Klaus/Karl and compares the literary representations of his ­post-­war letters and those of her own poems against the reality of Westphalia’s natural and built environments. ‘I now so late shared his experience and found the poem true’ she writes, early on, failing to disaggregate the literary and the real, like a ­modern-­day Catherine Morland, transplanted from Northanger Abbey to a German country seat. The result is that lines of sight are always rearward: ‘I felt myself to be going backwards in time’ (TWC, p. 18).24 The past is also rehearsed in

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1  Pen drawing of the ‘Obernburg’ (Gut Oberbehme, near Löhne, north ­Rhine-­Westphalia); The ­Water-­castle, p. 9

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the form of memories and haunting photographs of Klaus’s first wife, Brita, who died of a ­self-­administered insulin injection moments after giving birth to a boy, who died two days later (TWC, p. 62). Chamberlain’s persona in ‘The Green Heart’ sequence configures these seemingly ubiquitous photographs of Brita as killing frames: ‘I stand windowed in the frame of your dead love’ (‘windowed’ yielding ‘widowed’, involving the Chamberlainian persona herself in spousal loss). Thus a condition of ­siege-­like moatedness and grief provides the physical and psychological context of Elizabeth’s intense (indeed, suspect) accounts of her German experience. Lost Schlotheim is itself a res-onant presence in the novel: ancestral ground that was already the province of fable for Elizabeth Greatorex, mediated as it was by Klaus in letters over two decades. Schlotheim is the ­never-­seen, moated fairy castle projected by a female persona whose emotional and sexual yearning has hitherto manifested itself in poetic renderings of another’s life and letters. In this regard, the novel is uncannily ghosted by the ‘Green Heart’ sequence, published six years previously in the volume of the same name. A reader familiar with the poems of The Green Heart will recognize some of them as the very poems to which Elizabeth refers in The ­Water-­castle. Thus the novel, an early draft of which actually included ­pre-­war letters from von Laer,25 is intent on gesturing outside its own fictiveness. In a bold Verfremdungseffekt, the text flaunts its ­re-­inscription of the ‘matter’ of The Green Heart (which is heavily indebted to von Laer’s pre- and ­post-­war letters, and to recollections of Chamberlain’s visits to Germany).26 This traffic between (apparent) fiction and (auto) biographical poetry configures each text as the uncanny ‘supplement’ of the other, prompting in the reader a salutary scepticism regarding the complex processes of invention involved in writing the self across genres. Far from being a novel in which Chamberlain is too close to her subject, as Holman and Conran have argued, The ­Water-­castle shows Chamberlain to be a highly ­self-­conscious writer, forever subjecting her own ­self-­representations to profound ironic scrutiny. The cataclysm of the Second World War (during which Karl von Laer fought for Nazi Germany on the Russian front) and its aftermath have rendered both place and self uncanny, alien, irredeemable: Herr von Ravenstadt went round the table, ladling the hot punch into our glasses. He was gallant to me: ‘The drawing you made, the ­self-­portrait when you were a student; the one you sent to Klaus, it was a good drawing.’   ‘Where is it now? He has not still got it, has he?’

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  ‘No, it was left behind in Schlotheim. The Russians have it now. Perhaps Herr Stalin put it on his bedroom wall.’   He laughed immoderately at his own joke. (TWC, p. 47)

The joke not only euphemizes the Soviet terror that has pushed Klaus’s family west along dangerous roads but also marks the ways in which the war and the subsequent division of Germany mark a rupture of ­self-­image and subjectivity, a relocation of the self to strange new environments. In the company of Antoine, Elizabeth Greatorex moves between various enisled households in part one of the novel: Klaus’s Schäferhof, another ‘larger’ Schäferhof, Schwarzenmoor, the Obernburg and dreamy Schlotheim. The Obernburg – the ­water-­castle of the title (which of course also gestures at relinquished Schlotheim with its ‘elegant proportions, its statues, its rose garden, its peacocks’ (TWC, p. 21) – is the gravitational centre of this first movement.27 It is a hybrid space. The dwellings encountered in the novel house disparate groups – extended families, friends, dependants; they are not so much homes as cultural and political asylums, places of refuge. Elizabeth’s initial sight of the Obernburg is unheimlich in the slippage between imaginative constructions and encountered ‘reality’: ‘So this was the reality behind the dream, the reality behind the poem of the ­ice-­covered moat round the sleeping castle. It is exactly as it was in my imagination.’ And yet physical sight now reveals more than the emotionally invested mental image and poetic fantasy would allow, despite (or precisely because of) their crystalline clarity and precision: My mental picture had been a curious one though … showing the ­pale-­coloured façade from the end of the wall to the bridge over the moat, on the left side. There had been nothing of the other half of the façade. The focus of the image had been the dark windows at the furthest end of the wall above the stagnant water. (TWC, p. 26)

Formed by Klaus’s ­post-­war letters (compare ‘The Green Heart’, I, vii: ‘The frost has built an ice bridge / Over the lake round our house / Where the wild duck swam in warm weather’), the ‘mental image’ is of half the façade only. It is deathly in its focus on the pallid walls, the ­ice-­bound waters of the moat (‘stagnant’ is used here in its glaciological sense) and the occluded windows that offer neither a view in nor, it seems, a prospect out. Emerging later from a ‘dream of the castle and the moat’, Elizabeth is told by Klaus: ‘Those two windows at the end were the rooms where Brita and I lived’ – which Elizabeth receives as an explanation for the condensed, truncated form of her mental image and as proof

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of the emotional bond between them, ‘so strong that I had been almost unconsciously living in him and through him these many years’. ‘The bridge, the frozen waters, the windows had been there’, she records; ‘They were all I had needed … The windows … were the dead windows of locked rooms’ (TWC, p. 37). Here, connectivity, completeness and fulfilment – Elizabeth’s fantasy of an almost preternatural bridging of time and ­salt-­estranging space between Wales and Germany – is destabilized by the sheer deathliness of the Obernburg with its blind casements, its haunting absences, its literal, ­ice-­bound enislement and indeed Elizabeth’s own deathly abbreviation of the answering symmetry of its façade. I suggest that the corrective offered by the full physical contours of the Obernburg proceeds from Chamberlain’s desire to test Elizabeth’s fantasies – and her own – against more bitter realities, and to establish a measure of objective distance between the novel’s governing authorial consciousness (inferred throughout by means of such ironies and disjunctions) and that of the narrating subject. Comprising a number of separate apartments, ‘unlighted corridors’ and passages, the Obernburg is both warm refuge and, like its façade in Elizabeth’s imagination, a space of amputation and absence. Klaus and his now dead wife Brita ‘had fled from the east into the western zone’ at the end of the war, ‘and had lived for some time at the Obernburg’ which at one stage ‘housed ­ninety-­five people’ (TWC, pp. 21, 39). The ­water-­castle, now with ­twenty-­eight residents, is in the stewardship of Kurt Hastfer, who has also been ‘forced to flee with his family from their estate in the east’ (TWC, p. 27); it actually belongs to Klaus’s cousin, who has for seven years been ‘a prisoner in Russian hands’: ‘His sentence as a political prisoner was due to run for twenty years. In Siberia, the former proud officer of cavalry had been put to ­house-­painting and the digging of graves’ (TWC, p. 27). Thus the enisled Obernburg is mapped in relation to the Siberian Gulags (famously configured at exactly this time by Solzhenitsyn as a deathly archipelago, a ‘chain of islands’). Despite the elaborate breakfasts, ‘green hunting jackets and knickerbockers’, painting lessons, Christmas tree and crib, coach and hunting parties, there is something Siberian, ­prison-­like, about the Obernburg in this icy winter, its inhabitants yearning after a multitude of ‘home[s] in the east’ (TWC, pp. 27–31). Shockingly, the daughter of one of the ‘old peasants’ who live with Kurt at the unlovely Schäferhof (from which Antoine is exiled at night, owing to lack of space) is described by Greatorex as ‘a young woman of terrifying aspect. She may well have been a wardress in a prison camp,

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for she is a giant with a brutal face’ (TWC, p. 22). The description summons to ­post-­war Westphalia both the Soviet prison camps and the Nazi death camps. Just as Bardsey was configured in ­Tide-­race as both ‘sanctuary’ and ‘prison’, so each Westphalian estate is both a protective asylum and a place of forced internment where past ‘freedoms’ are pitifully ­re-­enacted and superannuated feudal privileges are clung to. There is something funereal about the ‘white flowered’ cyclamen chosen by Elizabeth on the day of her arrival (TWC, pp. 15–16). Even the children’s playhouse in the Obernburg grounds, to which Elizabeth is taken by Helga (‘She was trying to create an illusion, to build comfort out of the wintry derelict garden’), is surrounded by ‘a miniature moat … in imitation of the castle’, its inside walls painted with ‘murals of ­fairy-­tale characters, Red Riding Hood, the wolf, Hansel and Gretel and the old witch’ – all parables of atrocity and primal fear. Chamberlain has Elizabeth express her pleasure at the apparent stability and personal and cultural continuities of the Obernburg: ‘How secure they seemed in their traditional way of life.’ Yet that statement is radically destabilized by the inhabitants’ awareness of brokenness, incompleteness and discontinuity. Even Elizabeth, constitutionally prone to euphemism, is forced at this point to acknowledge the fragility and superficiality of the comfort offered by the Obernburg estate: ‘In the security of his cousin’s ­dining-­room it must have been easy for Klaus to forget that next day he would have to get up in the raw darkness to pick frozen brussels sprouts for market’ (TWC, p. 39). ‘They have no future such as they were born to expect’, she later declares (TWC, p. 59), and at the very end of the novel there is even a measure of jaded irony in her response to yet another rehearsal of the past: ‘After coffee, the inevitable album came out … We are invited into the past, to meet the dead or exiled’ (TWC, p. 139). Performances of aristocratic identity and feudal relations are themselves deathly events that ­re-­enact wartime displacement and violence: These horses, and the fine thoroughbred behind which we sat, had been among those brought on the trek from the east, Helga told me. The horses had been on the roads for six months at a stretch, carrying refugees, furniture, books, china, and plate.   The horn! The horn! A hare on ­long-­springing legs ran up the ploughed field, followed by a straggle of beaters. A man appeared in front of a tree. It was Klaus, with a gun at his shoulder. (TWC, pp. 32–3)

‘We were six months on the roads, and many of us died, particularly the young children and the very old people’; ‘Planes machined us on the roads when we were coming from the east’ (TWC, pp. 41, 63). The social

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ceremony of the hunt – ‘From time to time, I saw in gaps between the trees the coachman picking up dead hares’ – is both a sign of these refugees’ heroic togetherness and a reminder of their hurt. Chamberlain’s experience of the hunt was to return as nightmare in ‘The Green Heart’ sequence: ‘The temper of the world is against the tenderhearted. / Hounds, wild boar, elk, pursue us / Down tortuous passages’ (GH, p. 53) – lines that summon Eliot’s germane ­post-­war meditation in ‘Gerontion’ (1920) on the ‘cunning passages’ and ‘supple confusions’ of a ‘History’ seen by the traumatized, (self-)disenfranchised subject as paradoxical and unaccountable – as giving ‘too late / What’s not believed in.’ The allusion brings with it a literary and historical metaperspective and sceptical ­self-­scrutiny that separates Chamberlain from her fatalistic and at times unreflective dramatic persona in both ‘The Green Heart’ sequence and The ­Water-­castle. The story of Schwarzenmoor, home of Klaus’s brother Johannes and his wife Sidi, is also one of extreme racial and class violence. As Sidi explains to Elizabeth, its previous inhabitants ‘were old; they had two sons who ran the farm. One night, when they were sitting quietly by the stove in the ­living-­room, their Polish servants came outside the unshuttered window and shot them dead’ (TWC, p. 46). This fatal inheritance once again links windows not with ­outward-­looking vistas and light, but with death. The novel is at its most powerful at such moments, when it renders spaces ambiguous, haunted and ironized – when apparent present comfort is compromised by history’s ‘supple confusions’. Despite her wish to see fantasies borne out by reality, Elizabeth is often attuned to these moments of historical irony: Now, sitting in the panelled room, in the security of family life, with the decorated [Christmas] tree’s fragrant branches speaking of the Westphalian forests, it seemed impossible that ­hatred-­maddened men had taken aim through those wide innocent windows, that dead bodies had lain in pools of blood on this floor. Who was our enemy, to creep up on us unawares? (TWC, p. 46)

The final sentence already has the rhetorical accents of The Protagonists, the stark product of her final distressful cartographies. Elizabeth wills herself to see here the ‘security of family life’; yet her description of the Schwarzenmoor children destabilizes that security: she recognizes Justi (the name suggesting an ironic pun on that scarce commodity in ­post-­war Germany, Justiz, justice) as ‘the boy with the dead hawk’ and Inser as ‘the girl with the ­Medusa-­hair’ (TWC, p. 43) she had seen at the Obernburg. Thus this Christmas gathering is disturbed by accipitral, gorgonic presences. With its Yeatsian cadences and diction, Elizabeth’s

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meditation on the paradox that is Schwarzenmoor summons the Irish­ man’s meditations in the poems of Michael Robartes and the Dancer and The Tower on inheritances of hate and blood, the paradox of ‘ancestral houses’ (compare the Obernburg) built by ‘Bitter and violent men’, and the drowned ‘ceremony of innocence’. Likewise, part two of the ‘Green Heart’ sequence configures freezing Westphalia as a Yeatsian cartography of fear: ‘There is danger, danger on the roads / Menace in the air, danger … / The horse stamps in his stable’ (GH, pp. 51–2) – lines instinct with the terror of the final section of Yeats’s ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’: ‘Violence upon the roads: violence of horses.’ In this cold, militarized landscape (we catch British soldiers hurrying about (TWC, p. 49)) and atavistic culture of fear and alarm, the autobahn to which Elizabeth and Sidi are walking as the Schwarzenmoor’s ghosts are revealed (TWC, p. 46) seems to belong to an entirely different world. Such incongruities and ironies invest Chamberlain’s Westphalia with a dislocating surreality. Wounds at the Obernburg and its satellite ‘islands’ are distressingly physical. This is in all senses amputated space, constituted by lack. Obscene violence is written on the body: Klaus himself was wounded on the Eastern front (TWC, p. 98); his brother Johannes has a ‘sabre scar’ (p. 18); Kurt Hasfter, steward of the Obernburg, who is first encountered wearing ‘cavalry breeches’, has ‘only one arm’, the ‘empty sleeve falling from his ­convulsively-­twitching left shoulder’ (p. 27); Helga’s sister’s right hand has been ‘hideously mutilated’ by ­‘machine-­gun fire on the way westward’ (pp. 38, 63); the same woman’s husband – a ‘cadaverous’ Latin scholar ‘with thin lips and pointed teeth’ – returned a ‘skeleton’ from another Siberian camp (p. 38); we learn that during her pregnancy, Brita’s legs became ‘discoloured and covered with sores’ (p. 63); Herr von Ravenstadt, the ­‘young-­old man’, has a ‘duelling scar on his cheek’ (p. 44); the bitter ‘thin young man’ at the Obernburg who still clings to the feudal enislement of the past, bewailing ‘the passing of the big estates’, has also been a prisoner in Serbia (pp. 33–4); and at Schwarzenmoor is the brooding presence of an uncommunicative ‘blond young man’, who has been ‘a prisoner of war in England’ (p. 45). The Obernburg is itself fetid ‘because it stands in the water’ (TWC, p. 61). This is, then, a landscape of confinement, physical and mental dislocation, and residual Prussian militarism (with its ­caste-­bound ideology, hinted at by the fact that Klaus and his wife Helga are cousins). The unhealthy inwardness of the Obernburg and its inhabitants is further amplified by the emphasis Chamberlain places on various

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conditions of blindness – called forth always by memories of Klaus’s dead wife Brita – in this first part of the novel. Westphalia is a place not merely of backward glances and memories, but also of unseeing eyes. The ‘dead windows of locked rooms’ encountered from the bridge over the castle moat are mirrored in Klaus himself, whose eyes were ‘so blue they gave him almost the look of a blind man, the blue of an icefall’ (TWC, p. 15). He turns towards an emotionally hungry Elizabeth ‘a blind face’ and, on pointing out the rooms where he and Brita had lived, ‘looked around him like a blind man whose white wand has been snatched away’ (TWC, pp. 36, 37). The present is opaque, occluded and overlaid by the past. There is a sense here, too, that the unseeing eyes are those of Elizabeth, whose ‘mental image’ of the Obernburg, nursed over many years of ‘separation’ from Klaus, truncates the full façade of the ­water-­castle in a partial vision suggestive of a state of ­half-­knowledge – an unwillingness (or inability) fully to confront reality and the nature and consequences of her own desire. At Schwarzenmoor, it is over a number of maps (around which Elizabeth and the family are gathered to decide on a location for a skiing trip) that Herr von Ravenstadt suddenly utters the word ‘Brita’, his eyes ‘fixed in a dead tormented gaze’ (TWC, pp. 44–5). The recollection of recent traumatic personal loss (which engenders a debilitating ‘blindness’ ­vis-­à-­vis present and future) extends symbolically in this paradigmatic scene to the whole of broken Germany, spread out cartographically before them. That map is also superannuated: its old frontiers rendered anachronistic by new borders imposed precisely at this moment, as we shall see. And it is Brita and her ­sore-­covered legs that form the subject of conversation between Greatorex and Selma Hastfer as they walk back in wintry weather to Klaus’s farm: ‘We walked on. It was not possible fully to open one’s eyes. The hail cut and burned like knives’ (TWC, p. 63). ‘It was not possible fully to open one’s eyes’: the statement is another of those sceptical authorial encipherings that encourage the reader to scrutinize the extent to which Elizabeth Greatorex’s fraught inner life is the product of ­self-­delusion, fantasy and the euphemization of sexual desire. For Chamberlain, it is also, of course, a modality of painful ­self-­scrutiny. As Holman reminds us, Chamberlain ‘was convinced that Jean [van der Bijl] was consumed with the jealousy attributed to Antoine in The ­Water-­castle’. As well as writing to Chamberlain in 1953 to advise her to stay with Jean, Karl von Laer also ‘wrote to Jean in German regretting that they had quarrelled because of him, and assuring the Frenchman that he did not intend to take Brenda away from him’.28 I read The ­Water-­castle

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as a ­self-­conscious, sceptical ‘othering’ and fictionalizing of the self in which Chamberlain subjects her (clearly passionate) relationship with von Laer, together with the demonstrative rhetoric employed in the ‘Green Heart’ sequence (‘Put your left arm around me; ‘Dear heart’; ‘For you / the honey of my body’; ‘Darling, darling’) to sceptical evaluation. Back at the Schäferhof, Elizabeth sees Klaus stare with ‘unseeing eyes’ at ‘the colour reproduction of Dürer’s Virgin and Child … outside the children’s room’. At that moment, ‘The drawbridge went up on Klaus’s face’ (TWC, p. 65). Here, Klaus finally becomes the Obernburg – a moated body, ­inward-­looking, unreachable, unknowable. From Bardsey and England to a Balkanized Germany, the Eastern front (glimpsed in Klaus’s sketch maps of the campaign – ‘the advance on Orel, and the retreat to Kessel’) and Siberia, this first section of The ­Water-­castle asks the reader to summon a map not only of archipelagic Westphalian moated granges but also of brutalized ­post-­war Europe at a time when its new boundaries are being imagined and imposed. Towards the end of part one, with the arrangements for a skiing trip to the Harz Mountains concluded, Elizabeth spends the day before their departure at the Obernburg. Tired and warmed by Klaus’s schnapps, she sleeps on Selma Hastfer’s bed, to which she has been led almost as a child by Selma: ‘She … covered me up, and kissed me as her mother had done. She burst out laughing when she saw how little space I took up on the divan. “Why, you are no bigger than Vivica: you are only a child!”’ Tellingly, the dream of Schlotheim into which she slips is generated by a cartography of disquiet and decay. It is worth quoting this paradigmatic section at some length: A photograph of a dead wife, tall windows steamed by heat, dark carpets on the floor and on the walls, first editions stacked on the desk, sketch books, engraved goblets, a few pieces of china, are all that are left of a way of life, of a culture. The mouldy ceiling is mapped with damp patches.   I feel that I am home; it is wonderful to be at home and loved: not only by Klaus, but by the whole circle of friends … whereas on the island I feel more strongly each day my exiled state …   These people, deprived of their lands and homes, are sustained by memories of the past; they live for the immediate present too … Of the future, they speak but seldom; when they do, it is with dread of the Russians, and of what they may do next …   Helga, perhaps because she is shallow; perhaps because she is wiser than the others, talks frequently of, ‘When Klaus returns to Schlotheim we shall be rich’. I cannot believe she will ever be the mistress of Schlotheim. Forcing myself to be honest, I know it disturbs me to think of her as its mistress. Of

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Brita, whom I never met but of whom I heard so much in letters, I was never resentful … since Brita cannot return there, then it is for me to go. Schlotheim is part of my ­myth-­inheritance; I could walk out onto the terrace from the cool interior and know the individual shape and colour of each flower hanging between lacquered leaves. The ripe wheatfields would smell like the new bread peasant women carry home on ­two-­wheeled carts from the baking oven in the village. I thought of Thuringen, the green heart of Germany, that with its hills, its charcoal burners’ huts, its farms, has become part of me.   I must have slept for nearly two hours. (TWC, pp. 59–60)

It is a revealing section, in which the ceiling ‘map’ prompts further acts of mapping. The Obernburg interior is clammy, claustrophobic. Here again is the apposition of dead wife and blind windows; carpets darken not only the floor but the walls as well; and since it was earlier emphasized that the carpets ‘formed the walls’ of tents during the trek from the East (TWC, p. 41), they enshrine the family’s refugee status. Further, the room’s accoutrements bespeak an anachronistic culture of connoisseurship and faded privilege. In a wholly appropriate inversion (this is the world turned upside down by war and dreamwork), the Obernburg ceiling becomes the ground of a fraught, neurotic cartographic imagination. With mould and damp, the ­water-­castle maps its own decline and dank enislement. This map is also a ­post-­war picture of a devastated, divided Germany. ‘I feel that I am at home’ thus comes as a shock: recapitulating an earlier pronouncement – ‘With [Klaus] I was not in a foreign land, but at home’ (TWC, p. 41) – it seems perverse here, rather than merely romantically ­counter-­intuitive. Unacknowledged thoughts of the ­water-­castle’s fatal encirclement by water leads to compensatory reflections on the comforts of ‘the whole circle of friends’ (my emphasis) and the configuration of Bardsey as the site of emotional and physical exile. Next, the spreading patches of mould conjure cartographic fears of the Russians’ threatened encroachment; then cartography becomes personal in a fantasy inspired by emotional and sexual frustration, disdain and envy (her unsavoury class prejudices are in evidence throughout the novel), and by the literary paradigms of eighteenth- and ­nineteenth-­century romance novels in which the heroine is finally allowed to become the ‘mistress’ of the ­long-­wished-­for estate. One wonders what ­‘myth-­inheritance’ actually means: whatever it is, it remains abstract, an idea rather than a physical place, despite the fanciful inhabitation of cool interiors and fecund terraces. The ‘lacquered leaves’ suggests an artificiality that underscores the fact that Elizabeth’s fantasies always already contain the seed of their own decay. The same is true

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of the image of the wheat fields that ‘smell like the new bread’ carried by peasant women from a communal oven. This is a mythical land of Cockaigne very far from the wintry, harsh landscapes of Westphalia and the patrolled borders of a Soviet red (rather than ‘green’) Thuringia. The reader might be forgiven for thinking that Elizabeth has slept, not for ‘nearly two hours’, but for the duration of the war. Elizabeth remains within the emotional world of her ­‘myth-­inheritance’ even in the second part of The ­Water-­castle, which takes her towards newly delimited borders that are the physical manifestations of hardening Cold War ideologies. THE ­WATER-­CASTLE: FRONTIERLAND AND THE REMAPPING OF EUROPE The account of the skiing trip that occupies part two, ‘Oberharz’, is an uncanny conflation of liberating recreation and ­frontier-­land fear. It is made clear before the trip that the ‘holiday’ in the Harz mountains will take place in contested, ambiguous territory: ‘Almost the whole of that region is now in Russian hands; only a small area is in the British zone, so we shall be within a few miles of the Russians’ (TWC, p. 56). The journey to the borders of Thuringia, the ‘green heart’ of Germany, brings Elizabeth, Antoine and Klaus tantalizingly close to Klaus’s ancestral ground, now appropriated and partitioned. At the end of part one, Selma Hastfer’s injunction to Elizabeth prepares the reader for Chamberlain’s nuanced essai on borders – and the transgressing of borders – in part two. It is a warning that subtly hints at the ways in which fraught emotional bonds and actual physical contact in this novel are related to powerful cartographic symbologies and the desire to test the empty signs of cartography by transgressing them in actual physical space: ‘You will be quite near Thuringia when you are in the Harz,’ she said suddenly. ‘You must be careful to watch Klaus when he comes to Andreasberg. It is seven years since he left Schlotheim. He will be tempted to cross into the Russian zone and to try and find his way home.’   ‘Do you think I could prevent him from going?’   ‘You must hold him by the hand to prevent him from doing anything foolish: he is quite mad. You must hold him by the hand. He might try to ski across the border.’ (TWC, pp. 62–3)

What Klaus, Antoine and Elizabeth discover in the Harz in January 1953 – this ­journal-­novel dates itself unambiguously (see TWC, p. 56) – is that

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physical boundaries are petrifying at exactly this moment into impassable frontiers that render the emotional subject intransitive, bereft of the object it seeks on the other side of the divide. As with the Westphalian fields and moated properties of part one, the inner German chorography of part two is the ground of a metafictional meditation on Chamberlain’s autobiographical project. Elizabeth first travels to ‘a medieval town made magically beautiful by a light sprinkling of snow’: Goslar. In January 1953, it was a border garrison town, filled, as Elizabeth notices, not only with skiers with ‘the unmistakable snowlight on their faces’ (TWC, p. 69), but also with British soldiers. Its significance as the location from which Elizabeth, ­hyper-­conscious now of her relationship with Klaus, ascends to the Harz mountains lies not only in its status as edgy ­frontier-­land but also in its Wordsworthian links. As Chamberlain would have known, this is where Wordsworth, in late 1798 and early 1799 (the severest winter of the century), began the autobiographical project of The Prelude, turning inwards for the first time to analyse the very sources of adult consciousness and imaginative power in a profoundly ­self-­critical act of ­life-­writing. Other ­self-­conscious allusions to Wordsworth’s metaperspectives on the self work to convince the reader that The ­Water-­castle remains a sceptical examination of Chamberlain’s emotional life, not an uncritical and insufficiently ‘dramatic’ externalization of personal experience. For example, Elizabeth’s ‘wrong turning’ and ‘mistake’ during an outing in the mountains recall Wordsworth’s celebrated account in book VI of The Prelude of his having crossed the Alps without realizing it (which in revision became the springboard for a remarkable invocation of the power of a suprahistorical, autogenetic ‘Imagination’: ‘Imagination – lifting up itself / Before the eye and progress of my song / Like an unfathered vapour’). Only a few lines later in The ­Water-­castle, the uncanny vision of ‘the shoulder of the Bruckberg’ islanded by a sea of cloud, which Klaus identifies as a Thuringian Bardsey (TWC, p. 102), summons Wordsworth’s ‘seascape’ on the summit of Snowdon at the climax of The Prelude. The Wordsworthian ‘stage’ of Goslar (compare Elizabeth’s early figuring of the Harz as ‘the enchanted world of Goethe’) is the symbolic site of a highly ­self-­conscious representation of the self, against which the euphemizing strategies of Elizabeth’s ­self-­inscriptions are to be tested. The very year of Chamberlain’s visit – 1952 – was the defining year in the creation of the Cold War borders of Europe. The second part of The ­Water-­castle plots Elizabeth’s deepening attachment to Klaus against

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these ‘hardening’ frontiers (in the parlance of ­geo-­political studies). Established at the end of the war in Europe in 1945 to demarcate the Western and ­Russian-­controlled zones of Germany, the ‘inner German border’ (innerdeutsche Grenze, ­deutsch-­deutsche Grenze or Zonen­ grenze) from 1949 separated the Federal Republic of Germany from the communist German Democratic Republic. From 1945 to 26 May 1952, it remained a ‘green border’, relatively easy to cross, though the eastern regime began to fortify the boundary from 1947. A strict line of demarcation was instituted by the GDR in May 1952 in order to stem the westward flow of economic migrants and political ‘dissidents’ (figure 2). From the Baltic to Czechoslovakia, the border on the eastern side became a series of patrolled zones – the ploughed strip on the border itself, the adjoining ‘protective strip’ or Schutzstreifen, and the ‘restricted zone’ or Sperrzone – all subject to the panoptic Soviet gaze. Elizabeth’s references to the ‘green heart’ of Thuringia euphemize the reality of a ‘green border’ that, in the year of her visit, had become a ‘special regime’ boundary, and which was to become, from 1967, an infamous ‘modern frontier’. Begun in 1953, The ­Water-­castle should therefore be recognized as one of the earliest ­English-­language novels dealing with the physical, emotional and psychological displacements created by the inner German border. ­Tide-­race had mapped islandness and the various internal boundaries of Bardsey; part two of The ­Water-­castle extends that cartographic study to the cold heart of ­post-­war Europe at the very moment it is ossifying into ideological antagonism. The ­Water-­castle is an eerie Cold War romance. Westphalia’s distressing landscape of lack extends, it seems, to the ­frontier-­land village of Sanct (properly Sankt) Andreasberg. Arriving by bus, Elizabeth and Antoine (Klaus is to follow later) are greeted by ‘a ­one-­armed man in a thick leather coat’, standing in one of the ‘gaps’ that have been ‘cut at intervals through the snow banks’ on either side of the main road. They discover that their names ‘were not down’ on the list. The private accommodation they find (in a street ‘occupied by American soldiers’) is at ‘Schützenstrasse 99’. The name resonates both with schützen – ‘to protect’ – and Schütze – gunman: another uncanny rendering of German ground. Language itself is ambiguous along this militarized border. In the Bahnhof restaurant, whose oppressive atmosphere and ‘crude’, politically glib clientele Elizabeth grows to hate, hangs ‘a colour print of a painting: Napoleon in Exile’ (TWC, p. 76). The painting of the enisled emperor, either on Mediterranean Elba or on Atlantic St Helena, evokes the aftermath of another total war, Elizabeth’s/ Chamberlain’s ‘exilic’ subjectivity on Bardsey, and her increasing sense

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2  Germany: Zones of Occupation, 1946, from Earl F. Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944–1946 (Washington DC: U.S. Army Centre of Military History, 1990), showing (in bold), the increasingly fortified line of demarcation that became the ‘inner German border’, separating West and East Germany

of social and cultural alienation at Sankt Andreasberg: ‘I feel my foreignness’. Again, I suggest that Chamberlain’s linguistic equivocation and embedded cultural allusiveness are heuristic tools that assist her in preserving an analytical perspective on her ­self-­representations in this hybrid ­journal-­novel, together with a depth of historical perspective beyond that which Elizabeth cares to admit. Despite enjoying the obvious emancipatory energies of the skiing trip in the second week of the new year, Elizabeth cannot liberate herself from tropes of enislement, from her Bardsey self: she finds ‘cold ­snow-­dust on the face’ as ‘exhilarating as salt water’. Seemingly incidental details are carefully chosen: at the end of the trip she buys a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (a ‘lay’ of war and rape, and a ­self-­referential ‘poetological portrait of a young artist in the

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disguise of a folkloric tale’),29 in the ­‘Insel-­Bücherei’ – the ‘Island Library’ – edition of 1912.30 The memory of salt water and choice of reading material – in part one it was Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and in part three Antoine, appropriately sitting ‘apart’, will read Rachel Carson’s work of popular oceanography, The Sea Around Us (TWC, pp. 19, 24, 142) – prefigure the discussions of enislement and the return to England and Bardsey in the final section of the novel.31 The Harz is also a landscape of mental dislocation. One road ‘home’ into the village from the ski slopes, often taken by Elizabeth, leads past a ‘long grey’ echoing sanatorium. Its precincts, with ­black-­clad nurses and patients watching from balconies, ‘waiting for death’, are gothicized by Elizabeth until they become part of a ‘spectral’ landscape of ‘demons’ and ‘dinosauri’ that takes in the witch-, devil- (and Heine-, Goethe- and Coleridge-) haunted mountain of the Brocken (TWC, pp. 81, 82, 94, 108). The Brocken is of course the locus of the meteorological phenomenon of the ‘Brocken Spectre’, appropriated by the Romantics as the image par excellence of the haunted self and divided identity. Chamberlain had referred to the spectre in ­Tide-­race: The gaining sun threw beside each of us a green image of ourselves, quite unlike a noontide shadow or a mooncast ghost; and yet it was not the Brocken Spectre, the shape cast by the sun on bright drops of early morning mist and that flings a huge haloed figure out into the air.32

This green doubling of the self on Welsh island ground is the prelude to a violent communal assault on the ‘devil’ Cadwaladr; it thus suggests not only the new purchase on the self (both imaginative and critical) that Bardsey prompts, but also the possibility of fresh, new identities untrammelled by Cadwaladr’s ‘web of dread’. The absence of any mention by Elizabeth Greatorex of the Brocken Spectre is significant: it is a trope too closely bound up conceptually with needful ­self-­examination. It is Chamberlain herself who painfully confronts her own Brocken Spectre – the flung, haloed figure of the self – in the very writing of The ­Water-­castle. For Elizabeth Greatorex, the newly fortified border and the resonant spaces surrounding it become powerfully charged emotional and psychosexual phenomena. She sees Klaus as being ‘like’ the ­‘hoar-­grey watch tower, Jordanshöhe’, a short way outside Sankt Andreasberg, with its ‘slit windows’, ‘snowy battlement’ and ‘narrow spire’ – ‘strong and solitary and enduring’ (TWC, p. 82). It is a remarkable comparison, not so much in its obvious sublimated sexual content as in its apparent

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occlusion of ­historico-­cultural pressures. Klaus is compared to the intimidating physical manifestation of the bitter ideological divisions Balkanizing central and eastern Europe. A poem in the ‘Green Heart’ sequence turns on the same comparison; however, in its references to a ‘frozen roebuck on a sledge’, its preoccupation with the speaker’s mortality and its pleas to be protected by Karl von Laer ‘in the desert of London’ (GH, p. 54), the poem at least registers a sense of the deathliness and danger of the landscape even if it further euphemizes the tower as a ‘protective’ entity. Moreover, Chamberlain in The ­Water-­castle uses one of Elizabeth’s journal entries to emphasize how her fear of losing Klaus is intimately bound up with this landscape of fear and surveillance, and with a map of Germany that now insists on division and difference: ‘Last night, under the surveillance of the clock, I lay awake, thinking of the eventual return to the island; my mind full of dread’ (TWC, p. 109; my emphasis). Elizabeth’s awareness of the physical dangers and political meanings of the ­snow-­bound, recreational space she traverses is euphemized here; it is nevertheless sharply logged elsewhere, albeit with little reflective commentary. What Elizabeth sees as her deepening relationship with Klaus – ‘[it] has taken a decisive step forward’ – is accompanied by the ‘sound of firing from the Russian side of the Brocken’, ‘a succession of rifle shots’, the bark of a patrol dog and the roar of ‘Jet plane engines’ in a weirdly empty sky (TWC, pp. 91, 96, 100–1). Direct contact with individuals separated from relatives in the deprived ‘proscribed zone’ over the border, and with such figures as the boy Elko Stork, whose British army cook father is now back in England, map the likely ending to her own relationship with Klaus. It is increasingly hard to disentangle the dynamics of that relationship from the ambiguous, evacuated, proscribed or circumscribed spaces of the riven Harz, whose mountain slopes afford Elizabeth cartographic vistas across forbidden territory. Moments registered in the journal as intimate and meaningful occur ‘within the small zone of safety’ near the border, next to ‘the area of ­no-­man’s land cleared of timber’ – sites of desire where Klaus can ask her ‘Shall we go? We could cross the frontier at night’, and where Elizabeth, desiring to see not only Schlotheim (as its mistress) but also her own youthful self, asks: ‘Would my ­self-­portrait, given to Klaus twenty years ago, still be hanging on his study wall?’ (TWC, p. 86). ‘Each day we come a little nearer to the Russians, closer to the gunfire’, Elizabeth records, as if the brutally divided landscape of the Harz, of the heart, provides a fitting context for the novel’s emotional drama. A ‘rumour that a woman skier had disappeared over the frontier’ yields to

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the ‘truth’ that ‘a married couple and their child skied over the frontier by mistake’ and have been incarcerated ‘for a few days’ (TWC, p. 95). Elizabeth’s characteristic lack of further reflection on the matter suggests the way in which the obscenity of militarized borders is sublimated as a fantasy of dramatic spousal ‘escape’ with Klaus. Bound up in Elizabeth’s mind with the notion of imaginative and emotional release, the transgression of borders is formulated under the Wordsworthian pressure of the famous passage in book VI of The Prelude, already cited, in which the poet (and Welsh friend), unbeknownst to them, find that they ‘had crossed the Alps’. As suggested above, the ‘Green Heart’ sequence often acts as another of those analytical lenses through which the representations of The ­Water-­castle can be tested and refocused. The fourth poem of part two is the first published inscription of the event recounted by Elizabeth in her entry for 13 January 1953 in The ­Water-­castle: her encounter, in the company of Klaus and Antoine, with an ersatz charcoal burner’s ‘hovel’, built by a ‘peasant’ for a ‘research student’ who is ‘preparing for a journey to Lapland’ (see TWC, pp. 90–2). Each version of the event is the uncanny ­co-­text of the other, and thus constitutes a site of interpretative tension. The account in The ­Water-­castle states that in the strange (indeed, absurd) space of the culturally overdetermined ‘wigwam’, ‘Antoine and the student ceased to exist’ for Elizabeth. From the outset, the poem in The Green Heart writes out Antoine entirely, as does Elizabeth’s subsequent notebook sketch of the hut’s interior, mentioned in the novel (‘I have shown the interior and the entrance with the fire and cooking pot, the bench, the bed, the figure of a man sitting beside a woman’). The ­Water-­castle is full of wishful elisions, but at least the novel’s account of this particular incident contests the significant occulsions of The Green Heart: The frontier is a mountain away: There is a sound of gunfire by day. At night, only deer move on the plateau Where we sleep in the ­charcoal-­burner’s hut On hammocks slung above the wet ground Softened by our cooking fire. The hut Is built of tall forest trees Walled with bark, in the Lappish style. Outside, thrusting from the snows, are The sable forests. O dear one, Our time in paradise is almost over:

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We breathe an exhausted air between wars. Tomorrow perhaps the virgin field May be scored by enemy ­ski-­marks. (GH, p. 55)

At the same time, the poem acts as corrective supplement, offering in its final three lines more acute and historically reflective formulations of the terror of this ­frontier-­land in January 1953 (already a dislocating space entre deux guerres – the Second World War and the deepening Cold War). While Elizabeth in The ­Water-­castle finds herself ‘back at the beginning of time’ in the hut, the speaker of the poem in The Green Heart is at pains to contrast an imagined ‘paradise’ with ­socio-­political realities – articulated at the end in a fiercely concrete, contemporary image (the poetical pirouette of ‘the virgin field’ notwithstanding). Clearly, the ‘thrusting’ forests and the ‘scoring’ of the ‘virgin’ snow also encode sexual fear and desire, and this frontier poem works to map this sublimated sexual content onto a precisely drawn landscape acknowledged as a site of terror. In The ­Water-­castle, Elizabeth maps her daily recreation and emotional upheaval onto the bitter geopolitical landscape and its implied human horrors, but does so in a way that suggests diversion and displacement (emphasized by the bricolage effects of the journal form). In its partial acknowledgement of the physical brutality that goes to the making of national borders, Elizabeth’s recollection of faces lacerated by falls on the ski slopes – ‘Men look as though they have been slashed with fine whips’ – hints at a truth struggling for articulation. However, this almost-­ insight cedes without warning to such ­self-­deceiving self-­dialogues as: ‘The quarrel continues, regarding my relationship to Klaus. Antoine repeats, over and over: “Why did you not tell me before about yourself and that man?” It is useless to protest the truth, that up to now there has been nothing to tell’ (TWC, p. 107). Such displacements are absurdly enacted by Klaus himself ‘on the flat crest of the Rehberg’ as he looks at the prospect with ‘his head between his legs’ – a perspective learned from Elizabeth (‘“I taught you to look at the landscape upside down,” I said, remembering’ (TWC, p. 91)). Instead of salutarily estranging the landscape and bringing it into sharp new focus, the inversion merely renders it ‘much more wonderful’. Chamberlain’s various forms of metacommentary (irony, cultural allusiveness, intertextuality, chorography itself), prompt the reader to recognize such moments as symptomatic not only of the ­self-­delusions at the heart of this ‘romance’, but also of the blurred substitutions of literary representation (indeed, all writing). Katherine Holman states that The ­Water-­castle offers ‘little

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defiance … to counter the melancholy fatalism’, and cites ‘the ­post-­war sense of destruction’ as a possible explanation. I read the novel very differently: its carefully drawn chorographies of the inner German border are themselves modes of protest and defiance. To recast Said: ‘If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of ­anti­totalitarianism, it is the primacy of the cartographic in it.’33 The end of the ‘Oberharz’ section of the novel is a subtle comment on the ways in which history renders cartography merely synchronic, and thus forever superannuated, and on how history’s victims, with or without maps, become lost in a welter of historical change. Here at the centre of Germany, where abstract ideology causes a physical border to be imposed around the features of an actual landscape, cartographic inscription is ­always ­already superannuated, overtaken by events. As artist and writer, Chamberlain had long pondered the slippage between image/word and thing, and the dynamics of the symbol; here she extends that meditation to cartography: .

By this morning’s post there was already a letter from Klaus, written and posted in Goslar while he was waiting for his train. He had taken our ­ski-­map by mistake, and now returned it with a letter illustrated by a drawing of Antoine and me, surrounded by phantom trees like those on the Rehberg.   … ‘I forgot to give you the map. Perhaps you won’t be able to find the tracks and you will stand in the forest for a whole week with snow falling on your heads and shoulders. Here is the map. With it, perhaps you will be able to find the trails without your guide.’ (TWC, p. 106)

First, there is the physical absence of Klaus, who is nonetheless ‘present’ in the form of the map – misplaced, now returned – and the haunting, emblematic sketch of Elizabeth and Antoine in a spectral forest. Both items emanate from Goslar, that space imbued historically with Wordsworthian worries about the substitutions and silences involved in ­self-­representation. Then there is the strange insouciance of Klaus’s attitude to the dangerous possibility of losing one’s way in a landscape where to cross a border at this time is to risk imprisonment and even death – a scenario at which he has already grimly gestured in the sketch. This is followed by a sudden conjuring – ‘Here is the map’ – that performs a physical handing over; finally there is the ludic traffic between Klaus’s ‘With it [the map]’ and ‘without your guide’, through which Elizabeth is asked to negotiate the (almost staged, it seems) substitution of Klaus for the ­ski-­map (and attune herself to the substitutive logic of the map itself as text). In other words: in what sense is Klaus now the very map Elizabeth holds? And what is the ‘value’, now, of this

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­ ap-­text? It is fatally compromised as an instrument of geographical m ‘knowledge’ and recreational pleasure by the fact that the recent hardening of the inner German border has already rendered it an anachronism – a spectral representation of a landscape whose geopolitical ‘meaning’ has altered radically. The equation established between the map and Klaus suggests that the relationship between Klaus and Elizabeth is also obsolescent, dead. As J. S. Keates emphasizes, ‘The user operates with the map in the present, but the information on it is dated to some time in the past.’34 Even Klaus’s now obsolete map was ­always ­already constituted by absence – predicated a priori on acts of selection and ‘social and environmental exclusion’ that ‘creat[e] a field through processes of ­“de-­territorializing” and ­“re-­territorializing”’.35 Thus the ‘Oberharz’ section ends in a phantom territory of gaps, substitutions, empty restitutions and cartographic whiteout. The new maps of the Harz will be more explicitly tools of surveillance and control. The final part of The ­Water-­castle – ‘Tidal wave’ – constitutes an extended meditation on that familiar Chamberlainian theme, death by water, and on the various conditions of enislement that ­Tide-­race and the first two sections of the novel have explored. Chamberlain’s pen drawing at the head of the section, while gesturing at abstraction, suggests two ­tide-­races running in heavy spate between enisled objects (figure 3). The frost of part one became snow in part two. Here in the final section, as Elizabeth, now back in Westphalia, ‘safe in Klaus’s love for another few days’ (TWC, p. 121), prepares to leave Germany, it melts to rushing and enisling water. Elizabeth’s Welsh island is drawn more explicitly into an archipelagic relationship with Westphalian moated spaces as conversations between Elizabeth and Klaus turn on their respective physical, social and psychic moatedness – a condition that is misunderstood by others, they sense, as voluntarily embraced, ‘romantic’ seclusion. Elizabeth’s profession of love for Klaus, together with his guarded responses, map a rising body of dividing water across Europe – ‘“We loved one another for twenty years,” he said softly, “but there is much water between us”’; ‘The wind is rising. The sea will be rough tonight’; ‘Listen! the trees are roaring like the sea at high water’ (TWC, pp. 128, 129, 130). And it is a sexualized but once again euphemized image of the enisled female self that Klaus finally employs – with that troubling insouciance of tone noted above – finally to consign Greatorex to her own island space: ‘Perhaps, when you get home, you will sit on a rock, my little mermaid, and will look out over the ocean’ (TWC, p. 130). Klaus exiles Elizabeth into ­romantic-­tragic

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3  The ­Water-­castle, p. 115

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myth, casting her as mermaid and as that Chamberlainian familiar, the selkie. At the same time, ­‘fantasy-­haunted’ Elizabeth is ­self-­exiled, intent still on construing her life within the paradigms of Renaissance love poetry, from Louise Labé earlier in the novel to John Donne’s ‘Elegy XIII: His Parting from Her’ in this final section (see TWC, pp. 105, 132). Such exchanges between Elizabeth and Klaus are inescapably coloured by proximate details of the ­post-­war human ‘debris’ all around. Elizabeth learns, for example, that the young blond man at Schwarzen­ moor has since his incarceration as a POW in England been a patient at a ‘mental hospital’ owing to the family ‘taint’, and that he will soon depart for more ‘shock treatment’. Physical and mental incarceration and hurt now define Elizabeth Greatorex’s imminent return to her island, on which she feels ‘too much alone’. Her impressionistic – desultory even – mode of recording disparate events does not indicate a lack of structural tautness on the part of Chamberlain as author; rather, what I have referred to above as the journal’s expertly managed bricolage effects conspire to locate various apparently disparate elements relationally, so that the novel’s personal drama always partakes of contemporary political anxiety. Take Sidi’s ‘savage’ outburst at Schwarzenmoor: What we want is internationalism, not nationalism; and true freedom for women … It is terrible, always to be in fear. I am afraid, increasingly afraid, for Inser. She is only thirteen years of age, but already, she is very tall for her years. If the Russians came, she would be noticed at once, and taken to Siberia. Perhaps this year, or maybe next year, Russia will overrun the west zone as she overran the east. The whole of Europe will become her colony. (TWC, p. 123)

It is the most explicit political comment in the whole novel, and yet the fretfulness expressed has been in play throughout, on every level of the ­journal-­narrative. The passage can just as easily be read in personal terms, as an articulation of Chamberlain’s own fears of the enisling effects on her cosmopolitan imagination of a stridently defined ‘nationalism’ (which her deepening map of Europe seeks to counteract), and as the ­anti-­totalitarian statement of a woman artist who sees artistic freedom as one of the many casualties of an ideological war that threatens to become another war of territorial aggression. Chamberlain would spend the rest of her life confronting these issues. Even incidental details are calculated to resonate with political meaning. Sidi’s outburst reflects ironically on the new Italian film the Schwarzenmoor company considers going to see – the comedy, Don Camillo and Peppone (1952), based on Guareschi’s Italian novels, which dramatize ‘an ante litteram model of

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the “compresso storico” (historical compromise)’ between communism and Christian democracy in ­post-­war Italy.36 The obsessive meditation on ­sea-­estrangement in the ‘Tidal wave’ section gathers to an ending that uncannily rehearses Chamberlain’s short story, ‘The Return’ (discussed in the previous chapter) on the waters of the North Sea. Chamberlain maps Elizabeth’s return ‘home’ against the historical inundation of the ‘Big Flood’ of 31 January 1953 (‘the worst natural disaster to befall the British Isles during the twentieth century’) when a ­storm-­surge battered the east coast, crossed the Channel and wreaked destruction on the low coasts of Holland.37 Just as the short story of 1947 dramatized anxieties regarding Chamberlain’s move to Bardsey and her relationship with Jean van der Bijl, so this voyage back from Europe in The ­Water-­castle becomes the stage for another triangulation of her physical and emotional coordinates in 1953. As we have seen, ‘The Return’ was ­re-­inflected in ­Tide-­race as ­first-­person ‘autobiographical’ narrative; here at the end of The ­Water-­castle, Chamberlain’s autobiographical fiction and her fictionalized autobiography are one, her governing authorial metaconsciousness present now in a mode of ­self-­referentiality that positions this novel as a ‘sequel’ to ­Tide-­race in its knowing triangulation of the island self and of the self in transit between European archipelagos: Klaus’s face was printed on the night at sea… . The vessel began to pitch and shudder; she rolled sideways. I lay awake, aware of silver schools of fish; and of ­limp-­clawed lobsters killed and brought to the surface by the submarine cataclysm; of salt fathoms, of the meaning of ­sea-­fathoms, of fathoms deep … (TWC, p. 149)38

GERMANY TO GREECE: MAPPING THE ‘MATERNAL MIDDLE OCEAN’ By the time The ­Water-­castle appeared in 1964, Brenda Chamberlain had already given up her house, Carreg, on Bardsey, at the request of the landlord, Lord Newborough, owing to the indignation caused by what was seen as the provocative exposé of ­Tide-­race. The Greek island of Ídhra (Hydra, or ‘Ydra’ for Chamberlain) – at that time the island of choice for what she later called an ‘unreal International Set’ – had claimed her.39 She first visited Greece with a male companion in 1962, and spent the summer and autumn of 1963 on Ídhra; apart from short return trips to Britain, she would be resident there from 1964 to 1967,

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‘clearly an outsider, if not quite a tourist’, in Anthony Conran’s formulation.40 Bardsey had become a submerged world of the past. Since 1957, she had been spending only the summer months there; in addition, she and Jean van der Bijl had separated. So began a period of loneliness and spiritual thirst that she would explore in A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island (1965), The Protagonists (1967) and Poems with Drawings (1969) by mapping the archipelagos of a ‘fatal’ Greece towards which her cartographic imagination had always tended (figure 4). Chamberlain noted that on Bardsey, ‘The Mediterranean washed [her] dreams.’41 A manuscript prose fragment, written, it seems, just before she left Bardsey, configures the Mediterranean (in an echo of the aching Keats) as the ‘bright South’ – the vivid ­south-­eastern theatre of her European map. For Chamberlain, it is in the Aegean that ‘the Welsh sea’ joins ‘its ­fountain-­head, the maternal middle ocean that hisses round promontories of ­pale-­boned islands’.42 At the beginning of A Rope of Vines, she announces a spiritual ‘surfacing’ from the submarine territory of Bardsey to the ‘nourishing’ light of ‘the world above around in [sic] the mittelmeer’ (RoV, p. 15).43 The spray of prepositions conveys the headiness of her initial response to the ­light-­drenched ­Argo-­Saronic gulf, the use of the German term (literally, ‘middle sea’) emphasizing that A Rope of Vines is part of the same cartographic continuum as The ­Water-­castle. Moreover, Ídhra, like Westphalia, is consciously mapped back onto Bardsey, strengthening the physical and psychic links between Chamberlain’s chain of European islands: ‘I find myself surprised by homesickness for my own island when small ­fishing-­boats come into sight, with men standing up in them, as they do in the Enlli craft’ (RoV, p. 14).44 As in her previous two books, Chamberlain adopts a metaperspective on the articulation of the self in A Rope of Vines, which is cast in the form of a journal with numbered sections. I suggest that Lawrence Durrell’s account of his residence on Corfu, Prospero’s Cell (1945), is a major influence on the focus (‘Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself’), form and method of the book.45 A number of examples of ­self-­quotation, actually identified by quotation marks, from Chamberlain’s own notebooks defamiliarize the self and render it uncanny – an effect also employed by Durrell: ‘Fragment from a novel about Corcyra [Corfu] which I began and destroyed: “She comes down through the cloud of ­almond-­trees like a sentence of death.”’46 At such moments the journal form becomes a means of confronting past selves, or of rethinking the self. As Chamberlain’s Ídhra begins to take on ‘a

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4  Brenda Chamberlain’s Aegean archipelagos: Greece, National Geographic Magazine map, 1958

sense of nightmare unreality’ (RoV, p. 141), such strategies of ­self-­analysis result in multiple perspectives on Chamberlain’s island selves, which are both woven into ‘the dream, the legend’ (RoV, p. 71) and ruthlessly demythologized. This is ­life-­writing that often seeks to estrange itself as fiction (to the extent of deploying third- for ­first-­person narration at one point), then reconstituting itself as documentary and confession.48 The book also examines the motivations behind such moves, and the ways in which the distinctions between myth, the historical record and the writing of the self break down, and essentialist notions of authentic identity are challenged: ‘Who is this woman I stare at in the mirror? Did I invent her, or did she make me up in the glass?’ (RoV, p. 116). ‘It was a secret joke, never spoken of, that sometime I would write my autobiography, but it should be invented … “I come of a long line of ladies’ maids” … What a marvellous springboard into a fictional life’ (RoV, p. 68): such wry metacommentary adds tonal and

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narratological ambivalence to the portrait of a ‘forbidding’ island that, more fully than Bardsey, blurs into dream and fantasy as Chamberlain negotiates the claims of ‘touristic’ and ­non-­exploitative ‘residential’ identities. Generically, A Rope of Vines distils the narrativized poetic impressions of The ­Water-­castle and the descriptive verve and ­set-­piece fantasias of ­Tide-­race in entries that often gesture at the prose poem. Thus this last of Chamberlain’s published ‘journal’-texts presents a particularly challenging map of artist and place. The cartographic inheritance of A Rope of Vines as a study of the island condition is apparent in its status as expressive object. Chamberlain writes: ‘It must be good to write flowingly and with detachment. It’s always by massive bounds and blank pauses, with me’ (RoV, p. 15). Those ‘blank pauses’ are visually endorsed by the startling amount of white space surrounding the text, which becomes a series of islands forming a textual archipelago of ‘moated’ enunciations, enisled but seeking connection with adjacent ‘bodies’ of thought. This enisling whiteness enacts the various conditions of freedom and incarceration that A Rope of Vines explores. The book is a meditation on being ­‘cell-­enclosed’ – on islands, in whitewashed monastery cells, and in the flesh: ‘I, you, each in a separate cell, a cocoon of self, which we cannot disown or creep from, or break, or exchange for another’ (RoV, p. 97). Such pronouncements are made on pages that are themselves

5  A Rope of Vines, pp. 96–7

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whitewashed canvases (see figure 5), where colour has been burned away by the intensity of the author’s ‘stocktaking of the spirit’ on an ­‘iron-­bound savage island, ­Ydra-­shale’, in excoriating Aegean light. Scoring the book’s physical whiteness are numerous pen drawings (see figure 6, where the coffin is ­Bardsey-­shaped, and figure 7).48 Starker in line than those in ­Tide-­race, the drawings in A Rope of Vines exemplify the deliberate paring down of form as Chamberlain moved towards a more suggestively epitaphic and desolate art in tune with a more uncompromising dissection of the self and its relation to its environment, both natural and cultural. Holman contends that Greece awoke in Chamberlain ‘rudimentary political convictions, up to that time absent’ from her oeuvre.49 The political sensibility at work in A Rope of Vines is far from ‘rudimentary’; moreover, to regard ­Tide-­race as apolitical is to miss the ways in which it constitutes an analysis of tyranny and control; as this chapter has shown, The ­Water-­castle shows a profoundly ­self-­aware negotiation of the politics of a hard frontier, registered through strategic ironies and intertextual slippages. That said, Holman is right to sense that the residency narrative of A Rope of Vines confronts various histories of violence. It begins with the ‘manslaughter of an English tourist’ by the writer’s ‘friend’, Leonidas, and concludes with fears of a ‘police state’ in a way that eschews previous strategies of indirection. It is in A Rope of Vines, in the exilic ‘strong context’ of a Greece that is both known (albeit through ‘the dream of classical myth’) and alien (‘I had dreamed of a classical Greece, but in fact, this is already the East’ (RoV, p. 24)), that Chamberlain confronts most explicitly the irruption into her fantasy life of the pressures of the ­socio-­political. The ‘uneasy island’ of Ídhra becomes the site of conflicting models of history. A sharpening of the historicizing imagination occurs as Chamberlain reflects on the conflicting tendencies of the self towards ‘withdrawal’ and ‘worldliness’ (RoV, p. 28) in the context of Ídhra’s own dualities (often enshrined as balanced paradox rather than contending opposition).50 These include the contemplative, ­monastery-­filled uplands as against ‘the battle of the ­market-­place’ and the port ‘with its ­sea-­traffic and its crippled ­sponge-­fishers’ (RoV, 101); the island’s lush green and seared scrub – its topographical doubleness; its pagan and Christian (Orthodox) heritage; the culture of the native Ydriots as against that of the visiting ‘tender élite’; the sense of classical Greece as foundationally European and of modern Greece as ‘an intermediate cultural zone between Europe and Asia – in Europe but not of it’ (in David Wills’s

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6  A Rope of Vines, p. 41

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7  A Rope of Vines, p. 90

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classification).51 And yet the historicizing imagination fails fully to exorcise the old paradigms of absurd(ist) contingency and classical fatedness: Chamberlain still speaks of ‘a trick of the gods’ (RoV, p. 74). It is a worldview that serves to highlight the ­pan-­European archipelagic vector that links Ídhra in Chamberlain’s cartographic imagination with the Celtic islands of the ­north-­west: the ‘primitive, lost cry of the heart of a savage woman’ heard on Ídhra conjures the fatal and fated keening figures of Bardsey and Aran. Still committed to acts of ‘transformation’ whereby ‘the complicated cities of the plain’ become a ‘vision’ and then ‘a kind of sacrament’ (RoV, p. 153), Chamberlain certainly does not conclude the book with a philosophy of materialist determinism: Pandora’s box, the alabaster jar which was first opened for me in the ­nettle-­bed and ­slate-­fenced days of childhood in Wales to let out the Furies, is not forgotten, for now again the dreaded insects escape in a cloud when the lid is opened, to sting and blind and sting again. Behind the ­sun-­soaked pillars and the classical sites and the caryatids swaying under the olive trees rise the Dirae screaming for vengeance. (RoV, p. 125)

Out on a fishing caique in ­‘fire-­gleaming, passionate waters’, thinking of Odysseus and the Sirens, Chamberlain imagines Ídhra as violent, erotic cartography, ‘unfurling’ to her ‘like a scroll’: ‘savage, more savage, green, orange pink, naked and crude’ (RoV, p. 123). What the journal of A Rope of Vines does offer, however, are various acts of historicization that replace a sense of history as something consigned to a distant past in the guise of ‘cultural beauty’ with an experience of violence that results in a shocking politicization: Since childhood I have believed in the mask, the blood upon the steps, the chorus saying this is inevitable, these things are because they must be. It had served very well to have such things always at one remove, a cultural beauty, part of the background to life, but when it proved real in our time too, it stunned. (RoV, p. 125)

‘Somehow reality must be fitted into the dream, the legend with which childhood was filled has to take into itself the present which is the growth of history’ (RoV, p. 71) is another historicization of the self, even if it marks ‘history’ as ultimately enfolded by the imagination. A ­moatedness-­within-­islandness is achieved as Chamberlain responds to the arrest and later ­prison-­sentence of Leonidas (‘set apart like a god, by violence’) by testing the efficacy of ‘withdrawal and prayer’ in the convent of Agios (properly Agia) Efpraxia. The archipelagic mapping continues: just as Bardsey and the moated spaces of Westphalia were

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both sanctuaries and prisons, so the Greek ‘cell’ (which The Protagonists will put literally centre stage in the form of prison bars) becomes both a cool, regulated space of spiritual restoration and a space of denial, incarceration and terror. Although A Rope of Vines does not employ the dramatic ironies of The ­Water-­castle, various other modes of irony are present. Chamberlain would have known that Agia Efpraxia and, hard by, the monastery of Profitis Elias (another gravitational centre), served as prisons in which Greek fighters were incarcerated during the War of Independence, the most famous inmate being General Theodoros Kolokotronis (1770–1843), imprisoned in Profitis Elias in March 1825. Affording cartographic perspectives on the port below, the convent and monastery – ‘this ­terrace-­eyrie of the interior’ (RoV, p. 105) – are inhabited by history’s ghosts and by the energies of the ongoing struggle against imperialist and totalitarian tyranny. It is through a wry conflation of touristic vistas and penal delimitation that Chamberlain articulates the testing conditions of island retreat and incarceration (the latter identified by fellow ­Anglo-­Welsh author and Ídhra resident, Norman Thomas, as one of the central ‘problems’ of the book):52 Leonidas has been found guilty of manslaughter, and has been sentenced to imprisonment for nine months. He has sent me a letter, calm and cheerful on the surface, full of submerged tension.   He has written: ‘The prison is a tall grey building on a hill, with a distant view of the sea.’ (RoV, p. 130)

As we shall see, The Protagonists would take such ironies into the realms of the Absurd. Justifying her initial ‘retreat’ to the convent, Chamberlain states that the nuns ‘will protect me in the same way as [Leonidas’s] ­fellow-­prisoners, the ­safe-­breaker, the murderer, will, I imagine, look after him’ (RoV, p. 74). The correspondences here are profoundly unsettling, and yet are offered, I suggest, with only a hint of irony. They mark an awareness that the proposed withdrawal to a whitewashed cell on this prison island may lead not to a historical forgetting but to a sharpening of one’s awareness of terror and change. Ídhra’s various convent cells become sites of female struggle, too: at Agios Nikolaos, a febrile fantasy of incarceration registers Chamberlain’s ambivalent response to the enisling of the female self: ‘Good God. A nun wants to get out, she cannot bear it any more.’   The windows are barred, she has been on her knees the whole day in the airless room, and she is going mad to be let out into the ­thyme-­heavy air. (RoV, p. 39)

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However, the subsequent portrait of the ­‘witch-­caretaker’ of the deserted convent complex corrects the feverishness of the fancy, and complicates the opposition of interior and exterior. Chamberlain is led by the old woman into a room that smells of ‘decay and despair, touched by the outside world of politics and war’: ‘Photographs and sacred pictures covered the walls. Here was her son killed in Egypt, there was a bridal group. A black dress hung by the closed window’ (RoV, pp. 39–40). If the air outside is ­‘thyme-­heavy’, the musty interior is ­time-­heavy, marked by loss and violence. Enislement offers no escape. The caretaker’s cell on the Greek island is another Westphalian moated space, not a sanctuary from, but a product of, ‘the outside world of politics and war’. The astonishing phantasmagoric rehearsal of an earlier mainland excursion to the monastery at Metéora in Thessaly recalls ‘a floor with holes onto space and frescoes with ­bullet-­holes in them’ (RoV, pp. 108–15). Throughout A Rope of Vines, art is understood as inevitably pockmarked by the ­socio-­political. Such interfoldings (of inside and outside, of 1960s Greece and ­post-­war German zones of occupation) display the geographical range and conceptual acuteness of Chamberlain’s European chorographies of enislement. To claim, as Holman does, that Chamberlain ‘continued to be uninterested in politics’ in so far as it ‘concerned the opposition of ideologies or political parties’ is to ignore the fact that A Rope of Vines summons Greek national(ist) struggles as the very ground of its autobiographical project.53 While the ideological thrust of The ­Water-­castle was directed against aggressive, totalitarian and militarist nationalism (we recall Sidi’s cry: ‘What we want is internationalism, not nationalism; and true freedom for women’), A Rope of Vines historicizes the crisis of the female self in the context of various Greek campaigns for ­self-­determination or enosis (union). It does so fully cognizant of the ethical ambiguities involved in nationalist aspiration and defence. The very name of the ‘murderer’ Leonidas conjures the Spartan stand against Persia at Thermopylae, investing the manslaughter of the ‘English tourist’ (with which A Rope of Vines – with challenging insouciance – opens) with a cultural and political burden whose very disproportionality brings into focus the violent cultural tensions of contemporary Greece. Dreaming of ‘classical Greece’ towards the beginning of A Rope of Vines, Chamberlain finds ‘in crudely drawn letters’ near her house the abbreviation EOKA, Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston or National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters, the ­guerrilla-­terrorist movement formed in the mid-1950s (their declaration invoking King Leonidas) to

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fight British colonial rule and seek Greek enosis for that other tense, divided island, Cyprus (considered in detail in the final chapter). EOKA: it is an abbreviation that would have brought home to Chamberlain the difference between literary sympathy with classical Greek agon and the violent realities of recent Greek ethnic agoniston – ‘Greece is a fighter’s land’ (RoV, p. 123) – on an island at the eastern limit of the Mediterranean. Soon afterwards, Varvara, Chamberlain’s ‘maid’, appears in ‘one of her husband’s shirts, torn and faded’, which made her look ‘like a guerrilla girl’ (RoV, p. 33). The simile implies that Varvara is engaged in her own domestic struggle for female definition and enfranchisement. In an atmosphere of ‘latent violence’ that seems now meteorological, now social and political (‘the ­sea-­wind [had] blown the island to a hateful mood of violence, with policemen at every corner’), we learn of a strike of ferry crews broken by the navy with a ‘pocket battleship’, the firing of ‘battery cannons’ to mark ‘the great Rising against the Turks’ and the burning of a boat ‘beyond the harbour wall as a symbol of the destruction of the Turks’ (RoV, p. 67). Likewise, Chamberlain is careful to record the anniversary of Oxi Mera (‘Day of the No’), commemorating General Metaxas’s response on 28 October 1940 to Fascist Italy’s demand for surrender (RoV, p. 147). Such details key Chamberlain’s text into 1960s touristic inscriptions of Greece, with whose surface colour A Rope of Vines flirts. At the same time, the accumulation of various histories of violent national struggle (from Leonidas and General Kolokotronis to EOKA, General Metaxas and the modern Leonidas), together with the careful imbrication of ­life-­writing and ‘spiritual autobiography’,54 demythologize ‘touristic’ constructions of Greece and embed the crises of the self in history. In this context, what may at first be misunderstood as distasteful racial stereotypes – ‘A ­gispy-­boy stood beside a ­cross-­eyed Turk type’; ‘The ­Turk-­type desired him’; ‘An Asiatic type, smooth and brutal’ (RoV, pp. 113–14, 128) – might more accurately be interpreted as a mode of free indirect discourse in which are embedded narratives of prejudice, aggression, national(ist) ­self-­definition and defence, designed to bring the reader to political knowledge. A Rope of Vines shows Chamberlain to be all too aware of the temptation to elide the ­socio-­political in favour of what one might call an expatriate Aegean pastoral: ‘Perhaps Leonidas is thinking: “What is all this talk of the flowering desert, birdsong, nuns on donkeys? Why does she not write and tell me of what happened on the island at Election time?”’ (RoV, p. 132). From Aran to the Aegean, Chamberlain’s island chorographies demonstrate a deepening engagement with the

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s­ elf-­in-­history and the ­self-­as-­history. ‘The island of decisions? There can be no ­half-­measures on this rock, no poetic dreams’ (RoV, p. 150): it is as an island of decisions (emotional, political) that Ídhra is presented in the final movement of A Rope of Vines, in which the Greek general elections of October 1963 appear as both lived event and objective correlative. Chamberlain’s sense of physical and emotional entrapment and the pull of the old Chamberlainian fatalism and ­self-­wounding (the original title of A Rope of Vines was The Pelican55 – that bird of pious ­self-­harm) achieve political form in her fear of ‘the ­police-­state, of ships with loudspeakers that come to tell the people the way they shall vote’ (RoV, p. 154). ­Rifle-­bearing marines stand outside polling stations. The ‘excitement and exultation’ that greets the victory of Papandreou’s Centre Union Party over Karamanlis’s conservative National Radical Union, explicitly recorded by Chamberlain (RoV, p. 132), does not, however, accommodate a ­re-­centring of the self at the end of A Rope of Vines. This is so despite Chamberlain’s claim that, having been ‘on the fringe of other people’s lives’ on Bardsey, she has now ‘found [her] way of life again, having [her] own table at [the taverna], with my friends, my guests’ (RoV, p. 133). Rather, the journal is thrown into an obsessively interrogative modality, ending with a series of questions that pull against the enticements of each new ‘minor apocalypse’ (in the words of the Times Literary Supplement reviewer56) and Chamberlain’s renewed tendency to fable: ‘Of what use are the strings and strings of ex votos of silver? Eyes, legs, crosses, arms, artificial flowers?’ (RoV, p. 145). Traditional orthodox ­ex-­voto offerings in the form of body parts become the disturbing disjecta membra of historical conflict. The political situation at the end of A Rope of Vines remains tense and unresolved. It would soon turn into nightmare. The journal’s examination of islandness as a condition of psychological, emotional and political incarceration uncannily prefigures the events of April 1967, to which Chamberlain responded with two chorographies of terror that pushed her archipelagic map of Europe to its most sinister island space: the hitherto unpublished play, The Protagonists (written 1967) and Poems with Drawings (1969). A ­self-­referential – and again ­self-­wounding – pronouncement in the former serves as a sardonic, Saronic summary of Chamberlain’s physical and emotional coordinates between A Rope of Vines and the turn to drama in The Protagonists (though it applies just as appositely to the period following the publication of ­Tide-­race):

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I don’t believe this is happening in reality. It keeps reminding me of something I wrote a while back. My publishers were shocked by it, said they thought if that was the effect the place had on my work, I should try making a home somewhere else. They didn’t know it was already too late for me to get out. I remember their words:   ‘If you are so unhappy and sick at heart, couldn’t you find another island? There are many of them’.57

‘HAVE YOU A MAP, ANYONE?’ THE PROTAGONISTS AND POEMS WITH DRAWINGS With its Brechtian epic, Sartrean existentialist and absurdist genetics, its explicitly political subject matter, and its stark discourses of oaths and edicts, The Protagonists may at first appear to be a remarkable departure – a formal and psychological rupture testifying to the effect on the author of the ­right-­wing Generals’ Coup that heralded the ­seven-­year rule (1967–74) of the Greek military junta. It is certainly markedly different from Chamberlain’s previous work, which took the paradigm of the journal as its ground for experimentation. The lyrical mode, to which Chamberlain had hitherto always gravitated, survives in The Protagonists only as a discourse of desolate recollection and thwarted aspiration: ‘Lemon, venetian vetches, orchis fritillary. How hard to remember an olive tree when the soul is behind bars’ (P, p. 16). And yet, together with Chamberlain’s Poems with Drawings, with which it is intimately connected, the play represents the culmination of a ­career-­long mapping of the self in various conditions of European moatedness. The touristic paradigms with which Chamberlain had flirted in her previous two books (and, one might argue, in ­Tide-­race, too) have in The Protagonists become a ­foul-­mouthed parody, ironically lineated as poetry: How’s this, for next season’s slogan? Delectable island, solid rock, no vegetation. Set in the fucking sea[.] (P, p. 47)

The Brechtian alienation effects of The Protagonists – the ‘distancing’ strategies through which the audience, located ‘on three sides’ of the stage,58 is directly apprised of its social responsibilities beyond the fiction of the play – are simply the dramatic incarnation of the metafictional mode that exists in some measure in all of Chamberlain’s work. In other words, despite the fact that the Generals’ Coup and subsequent

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Regime of the Colonels did – radically – inflect the modalities of Chamberlain’s work (and indeed the balance of her emotional life), The Green Heart, ­Tide-­race, The ­Water-­castle and A Rope of Vines were always gathering to the bleak cartography of incarceration articulated by The Protagonists and Poems with Drawings. There had been signs of the impending coup in the atmosphere of ‘latent’ violence throughout A Rope of Vines. In April 1967, Chamberlain arrived back on Ídhra from one of her return trips to Bangor (where her mother had entered a care home) in the very week of the swift (and soon murderous) ­right-­wing putsch against the ­pro-­tem Greek government that had been installed by the king after he had dismissed the centrist prime minister, Papandreou, in 1965. Chamberlain, with her superstitious determinism, must have interpreted the action of the ‘anarcho-­communist’-fearing Greek generals as the stuff of history’s tragic order; at the same time, her political materialism recognized all too well the geopolitical and social tensions that had led to the military takeover. ­Cold-­blooded murders were committed by the junta, civil liberties were suppressed and those deemed dissidents were exiled to remote Greek islands. A police state, relying on institutionalized torture, came into being overnight; chillingly, the junta’s radio announcements began with the formula ‘We decide and we order’. Astonishingly – it is not wholly clear how – it was in this atmosphere that Chamberlain in October 1967 visited a political detention centre at Parthénion on the island of Léros in the Dodecanese (see figure 4, p. 153). There was even a second visit.59 She began what became The Protagonists immediately, though the work found its form only after an American friend had responded excitedly to its dramatic possibilities: ‘God, how strong, this is a play!’60 Chamberlain recalls writing it ‘at ­white-­heat in three weeks’ (that is, October–November 1967).61 Since the 1950s, Léros had been the site of state prisons and sanatoria, thus it is a space connected in Chamberlain’s cartographic imagination with Sankt Andreasberg in The ­Water-­castle.62 Chamberlain left Greece a ‘voluntary exile’ in November 1967, having, according to Holman, ‘sent home two copies of The Protagonists via Cyprus, and concealing one in a shoulderbag’. This is a dissident text that clandestinely crosses policed borders. The play was read by the literary manager of Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company, Jeremy Brooks (author of Jampot Smith and Smith, As Hero) – a man who had put down roots in Chamberlain’s Snowdonia during the 1950s. Brooks praised The Protagonists as ‘A most distinguished and powerful piece of writing.’ In the event, it was given its first two (and,

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to date, only) performances at the Prichard Jones Hall at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, on 11 and 12 October 1968, where it was staged by The Welsh Drama Studio (‘formed to produce new plays by Welsh authors’ and ‘to promote Welsh Drama into [sic] the European scene’).63 The play was produced by David Lyn; Chamberlain herself supervised the rehearsals.64 The often imprisoning island of Bardsey in ­Tide-­race, the moated anachronisms of The ­Water-­castle, the nun’s cell in A Rope of Vines and Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell (written in exile in Alexandria after the Italian invasion of Greece) become in The Protagonists literal prison cells – six of them, starkly exposed on stage. The six prisoners (known only as O, A, Z, J, H and L (the last being the sole female, described as looking ‘Egyptian’) are dissidents, imprisoned for crimes that remain Kafkaesquely undefined, but which are clearly odious to the state. State power and its performance are represented by the unseen General, the Guard (dressed ‘after the fashion of a circus ­lion-­trainer crossed with the ­ring-­master’) and the Edict Maker, who issues absurd totalitarian diktats: CONCLUSIONS ARE NOT TO BE DRAWN TO LOVE CRY OUT FOR MERCY ASK FOR FREEDOM JUSTICE OR DARKER AND MORE NOURISHING BREAD DONKEYS UNDER [A] LOAD OF ICE BLOCKS WOULD BE ILL[-] ADVISED TO RELAX THEIR HAUNCHES IN FRONT OF BUTCHER SHOPS … (P, pp. 6–7)

The prisoners – ‘huddled together … bearing up like refugees, being ugly together, braced against the anonymous generals’ (P, p. 14) – are doubly incarcerated, since it is made clear that the prison stands on a remote island, on which identity is erased and violently reassigned (‘It has been discovered who you are not, not who you are, which is a matter for further enquiry’). Humanity itself is effaced: A: [T]he men who are in power have expelled us to a certain rock of so hopeless a ship’s passage it discourages all but the most determined or insensitive voyagers. The rats followed on a ­rodent-­ship. We have become ­breed-­brothers, indistinguishable. Hardship has brought out the hairy likenesses[.] (P, p. 5)

The traffic between cells throughout the play and the reversal of the roles of captive and captor articulate the insight that totalitarian ideology incarcerates everyone without distinction. It also deepens Chamberlain’s blurring of inside and outside:

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H: You out there, how does it feel? J: Much the same as inside. I can still see bars in front of my face[.] (P, p. 26)

At the same time, it hints at the possibility of reprieve, deliverance and justice. However, the ­prisoner-­gaoler binary remains in force, even though (or precisely because) it is amenable to deconstruction. Chamber­ lain called Ídhra ‘this distant corner of the labyrinth’ in A Rope of Vines (p. 158). The Léros of The Protagonists is located in a remote segment of the archipelagic map – ‘A melancholic beach and desolate wastes of salt water without end, leaping to another ­far-­off shore.’ Here, incarcerated identities are acted out in full view of an audience that is itself forever reminded of its own conditions of temporary physical ‘imprisonment’. The theatre becomes an ­island-­prison. The disenfranchised speakers, who move ‘in and around and among’ the audience (as Holman states, the play was performed ‘almost “in the round”’),65 appeal for the instruments of lost freedom and movement, maps among them: O: I need water when will the custodian come back? where does that road go? J: straight on left; right go on; stop O: Have you a map, anyone? is there a guide amongst us? we need a guide who has the key? do you know the way? how many hours’ walk? (P, p. 12)

Allied here with ‘guide’ and ‘key’, the map seems an agent of democratic freedom. But, even if forthcoming, it will show either a chorography that no longer exists, or a new totalitarian inscription of Greek land (and enisling sea).66 It is just another text, banned or legitimized by the junta. The first of Chamberlain’s Winter Rhythms in Island Life charts, which hydrographically mapped the perilous ­tide-­race between Bardsey and the Welsh mainland (discussed in the previous chapter), is subject to ironic recollection in The Protagonists as prisoner A questions the defiant claim of Z to be autonomous (‘I’m my own pilot on this particular course’): ‘Have you the chart with quicksands and currents marked, or do you put a blind trust in this God of yours?’ (P, p. 35). It is a question Chamberlain directs at herself as fatalist cartographer, who at one point

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in The Green Heart had represented the ­post-­war world and her own emotional universe as chartless: ‘The new ships have no charts. They must give themselves up to the ocean currents’ (GH, p. 64). From cage number 3, prisoner Z speaks ritualistically in the Latin of the Vulgate, ‘the gabbled words of the Mass’.67 Only the maternal, compassionate and still imaginatively responsive L, whose female history of terrible hurt and bereavement – ‘my boy was done to death’ – emerges piecemeal throughout the play, can (or will) translate him.68 Throughout The Protagonists, the language and principles of Christian faith are subject to brutal irony: ‘This cell I make my church, I claim sanctuary.’ Also subjected to fierce criticism is an art that does not in some way seek to confront totalitarian tyranny. Referring to J’s ‘fourth forthcoming book’, prisoner A spits out a response: ‘I know how you’d end it, coward. Say it was a dream, go so far as to say it’s allegorical, that dirty word! Say it was a myth.’ Here, A articulates Chamberlain’s own anxieties (dating as far back, I suggest, as her 1940s exchanges with Alun Lewis, and still not resolved at the end of her life) regarding the social function of imaginative literature and the visual arts.69 Prisoner Z becomes increasingly frantic, raving about devilish assailants. Léros is again mapped back onto Bardsey here: Z, who at the beginning of the play wears ‘a monk’s cowl’ and a ‘heavy cotton tunic belted with a thick cord worn low on the hips in the old Russian style’, is clearly an incarnation of ‘Wolfgang’, the raging Polish hermit of ­Tide-­race. Or is the ‘satanophobic’ Z merely ‘foxing’, indulging in his own version of the Edict Maker’s ­‘double-­talk’? The Protagonists brings into focus the play acting, the suppression of the individual self, that all totalitarian regimes require of their subjects. It aggressively interpellates members of the audience as political undesirables, initiating them into the discourse of dangerous ­border-­crossing and locating them at the newly hardened frontiers of Europe’s authoritarian regimes: ‘You need to apply, to declare, to sign, countersign, ­rubber-­stamp the ­rubber-­stamp … (to another) You are an alien. Your face needs endorsement. (to another) Bloody foreigner, I’d like to examine your baggage’ (P, p. 25). The geography and cartography of the cell had now become Chamberlain’s governing rubric. Just as the ‘deleted passage from near the end’ of prisoner J’s ‘forthcoming book’ in The Protagonists imagined ‘men digging ­escape-­tunnels that ended in the next cell, or the ­next-­but-­one ­cell-­block or in a flooded sewer or before the grille of a ­confession-­box’ (institutionalized religion itself becoming a space of incarceration and ­self-­flagellation), so Chamberlain’s next published

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work, Poems with Drawings (dedicated ‘As before, with The Green Heart, to Karl von Laer’) was a movement from one cell to another.70 It appeared in 1969, the year Chamberlain suffered a nervous breakdown after a period of emotional isolation and financial worries; from the summer of that year she gave weekly art therapy classes at Denbigh hospital, where she was a patient. I read the ­verbal-­visual project of Poems with Drawings (which was also mounted as a touring exhibition entitled Word and Image in 1970, a year before her death from an overdose of sleeping pills) as her final, deeply troubled, cartographic projection. The chief sites of Chamberlain’s archipelagic cartography of Europe are graphically represented in Poems with Drawings as a series of bold, bare shapes demonstrating what Maurice Cooke calls ‘a Greek purity of line’.71 The significant addition here is the grid on which many of these images exist in a cartographic collage.72 These ‘graticule[s] of longitude and latitude’73 suggest Chamberlain’s characteristic attention to precise geographical and cultural location. At this time of political and psychological dislocation, they also powerfully suggest prison bars. The map of the Chamberlainian oeuvre has now become a prison, showing a sequence of enislements – from Aran and Bardsey to Westphalia and Thuringia, down through Ídhra to Léros and Cyprus, and back, now, all the way, to the ‘island’ of Upper Bangor – constituting a life imprisoned in Euclidean, Cartesian space.74 Or, rather, erasing it. In Poems with Drawings, Chamberlain yields to cartography’s abstractions – what J. Brian Harley has termed a map’s ‘textual poverty’, its ‘lexicon without people’, its ‘vacuous image’ of the human, and what De Certeau identifies as the map’s ‘colonization’ of space, its ‘erasure of the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility’.75 Harley goes on to quote from ‘Looking at a Map’ by Dannie Abse (whom he identifies as an ‘English’ poet, himself imposing a cultural graticule that effaces the poet’s Welsh and Jewish coordinates).76 The decontructionist agenda of Abse’s poem exposes the gap between emotional geography and cartographic representation, which incarcerates ‘the whole land behind / a strict cage emptied of noughts and crosses / where no happy latitude is given’, and measures ‘a lifetime’s journey / in inches, these little, exact circles / for names of places where untamed people / privately hide and love and cry’.77 Chamberlain’s cartographic drawings communicate both the emotional blankness she was experiencing towards the end of her life, her outrage at the way the ‘happy latitude’ of space had been contracted to incarcerating islandness by the Regime of the Colonels, and her

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awareness of the repressions (in all senses) underlying cartographic representations. Many of the brief, ­pared-­down poems in Poems with Drawings, which exist in complex counterpoint to the equally distilled drawings, are taken from The Protagonists, where, as Holman reminds us, they are spoken by the female prisoner, L.78 Her song of eternal transmutation, ‘There is never an end. / Nothing ever finishes, we flow like wine, / generation into generation, not dying’, is accompanied by one of the freer, lighter images in the book: a Bardsey ­rock-­form that seems to be seeking, in the words of the poem, ‘new shapes’ out of ‘archaic moulds’ (figure 8).79 The shape is doubled, untrammelled by ­grid-­bars. From this point, however, images of shapes in archipelagic patterns against gridlines proliferate (the ­wrap-­around cover carries another of these collages, literally enfolding the whole book). Passages from The Protagonists in which prisoner L seems to lament the torture of her son, and prisoner O, with painful irony, calls for a map, reappear together in Poems with Drawings opposite an archipelagic aggregation of pebbles and rocks in a grey, imprisoning sea (figure 9; PD, pp. 20–1). Also depicted against the gridlines of this biographical cartography (significantly, the volume contains poems from the period 1945–67) is what appears to be an image of Welsh mountains or hills in ­cross-­section. Thus this drawing (dated ‘August 1966 Ydra’ – that is, before the Generals’ Coup) constitutes a retrospective map of the various geographical locations of Chamberlain’s literary production on which the shades of the ­prison-­house have already closed. ‘How hard to remember an olive tree when the soul is behind bars’: prisoner L’s memorable statement from The Protagonists (which ironizes the preceding lyrical meditation on ‘the young almond / soft to the touch

8  Poems with Drawings, pp. 6–7

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9  Poems with Drawings, pp. 20–1

and taste’) faces a thickly and darkly framed Chamberlainian ‘islograph’ (figure 10) – Carol Farbotko’s neologism, denoting ‘a performance of island space in words, images and symbols’.80 The island forms appear in front of the gridlines, suggesting – disturbingly – not that they are free of the cage, but that we as viewers are within the cartographic ‘cell’ with these forms, looking out. Chamberlain thus locates us inside the prison of maps and islands. Other poems and images in the volume dare to imagine ways out of the

10  Poems with Drawings, p. 25

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prison, ways beyond the map, but the psychological effect of the imprisoning gridlines is too great. Drawn across Europe, that truth – ‘How hard to remember an olive tree when the soul is behind bars’ – stands as Brenda Chamberlain’s carceral-­cartographic epitaph.

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5 Mapping Partition: Waldo Williams, ‘In Two Fields’, and the 38th Parallel

Between Two Fields These two fields a green ­sea-­shore, the tide spilling radiance across them, and who knows where such waters rise? And I’d had years in a dark land, looking: where did it, where did he come from then? Only he’d been there all along. Who though? who was this marksman loosing off bolts of sudden light? One and the same the lightning hunter across the field, the hand to tilt and spill the sea, who from the vaults above the ­bright-­voiced whistlers, the keen darting plovers, brought down on me such quiet, such Quiet: enough to rouse me. Up to that day nothing had worked but the hot sun to get me going, stir up drowsy warm verses: like blossom on gorse that crackles in the ditches, or like the army of dozy rushes, dreaming of clear summer sky. But now: imagination shakes off the night. Someone is shouting (who?), Stand up and walk. Dance. Look. Here is the world entire. And in the middle of all the words, who is hiding? Like this

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is how it was. There on the shores of light between these fields, under these clouds. Clouds: big clouds, pilgrims, refugees, red with the evening sun of a November storm. Down where the fields divide, and ash and maple cluster, the wind’s sound, the sound of the deep, is an abyss of silence. So who was it stood there in the middle of this shameless glory, who stood holding it all? Of every witness witness, the memory of every memory, the life of every life? who with a quiet word calms the red storms of self, till all the labours of the whole wide world fold up into this silence. And on the silent ­sea-­floor of these fields, his people stroll. Somewhere between them, through them, around them, there is a new voice rising and spilling from its hiding place to hold them, a new voice, call it the poet’s as it was for some of us, the little group who’d been all day mounting assault against the harvest with our forks, dragging the ­roof-­thatch over the heavy meadow. So near, we came so near then to each other, the quiet huntsman spreading his net around us. Listen! you can just catch his whistling, hear it? Whistling, across the centuries of blood on the grass, and the hard light of pain; whistling only your heart hears. Who was it then, for God’s sake? mocking our boasts, tracking our every trail and slipping past all our recruiting sergeants? Don’t you know? says the whistling, Don’t you remember? don’t you recognise? it says; until we do. And then, our ice age over, think of the force of hearts released, springing together, think of the fountains breaking out, reaching up after the sky, and falling back, showers of falling leaves, waters of autumn. Think every day, under the sun, under these clouds, think every night of this, with every cell of your mind’s branching swelling shoots;

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but with the quiet, the same quiet, the steady breath, the steady gaze across the two fields, holding still the vision: fair fields full of folk; for it will come, dawn of his ­longed-­for coming, and what a dawn to long for. He will arrive, the outlaw, the huntsman, the lost heir making good his claim to ­no-­man’s land, the exiled king is coming home one day; the rushes sweep aside to let him through.  Rowan Williams, From the Welsh of Waldo Williams1

FIELDWORK: THE GROUND OF ‘IN TWO FIELDS’ Ironically, it is perhaps the democratic inclusiveness of Waldo Williams’s celebrated poem of summer 1956, ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ – ‘In Two Fields’ – that has rendered the poem ‘difficult’ for many readers (difficult enough, at any rate, to elicit a gloss from the poet: ‘Had I known it was dark, I would not have published it’).2 Naturalization of paradox; chiaroscuro lighting effects; shifts between ‘singular and plural, personal and collective’, ‘affirmative’ and ‘questioning’ modes;3 exhilarating expansions and stringent contractions of perspective that allow an insistent, even prosaic, localism to yield to the universal and visionary, which in turn funnel back down to this ground and to history, newly apprehended – such techniques make ‘In Two Fields’ at once accessible and very demanding. (Of course, it is a poem about different kinds of ‘access’: to land, to history, to moments of vision, to other human beings.) ‘In Two Fields’ is a topographical poem that in the original Welsh names the fields in question – Weun Parc y Blawd and Parc y Blawd – three times, boldly braving the pedestrian, knowingly negotiating what Michael Cronin has referred to as ‘the romanticism of the particular’.4 Considering the challenges of translation, Rowan Williams catches the effect succinctly: ‘the names … seem to me to hold up the poem in translation, giving a moment either exotic or banal’.5 But the mirroring of the names strengthens our sense of the poem’s investment in geographical – indeed, cartographical – precision: OS SN 126 203, for the record. It also has the important effect of acclimatizing us, through echo and repetition, to the poem’s governing aesthetics–politics of ­difference-­in-­unity. (Fieldwork reveals that Parc y Blawd – ‘Flour Field’ – as the name suggests, is a wheat field, while Weun Parc y Blawd – ‘Flour Moor Field’

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– is more marshy, suited to potato crops and grazing.6) ‘In Two Fields’ is also a metaphysical/religious poem – Quaker, Baptist, mystical, apocalyptic, millenarian. This most ecumenical of poems characteristically admits of various denom­inational readings – or rather, asks us to dissolve the whole idea of denominationalism.7 It is also a sort of Welsh Prelude in miniature, identifying the source of the sustaining vision underlying Williams’s moral and political outlook in the revelation of universal brotherhood he experienced as a teenager in 1917 or 1918 in the gap between two fields in Carmarthenshire – not Pembrokeshire, where readers more concerned with the myth of the man than with maps have always plotted the poem.8 (That fact alone should make us attend more carefully to the poem’s interest in boundaries.) Williams recalled: Weun Parc y Blawd and Parc y Blawd are two fields on the land of a friend and old neighbour of mine, John Beynon, Y Cross, Clunderwen. In the gap between the two fields about forty years ago, I realised suddenly and very vitally, in a personal circumstance of great definition, that men are, above all, brothers. (Rh, p. 88)

For Williams in the summer of 1956, however, the poem was first and foremost a protest poem and political intervention, not a recollection of his teenage ethical and/or religious convincement. Too often read as univocally celebratory, ‘In Two Fields’ constitutes both a rehearsal and a radical modern reformulation of pastoral as an arena of political contestation. The poem offers a particularly focused chorography of its acreage. Moreover, it recalibrates the whole notion of territoriality at various levels – ‘subnational’, ‘national’ and global ­‘inter-­state’. In this sense it is engaged in what human geographers, concerned with the production of ‘state space’, have identified as ‘the restructuring of territorially demarcated forms of state power’ and the ‘decentering of nationally scaled forms of state activity’ – a move that has involved such processes as ‘debordering, reterritorialization, and rescaling’.9 By mapping rural Wales onto a recent theatre of war in the Far East, I suggest that Williams’s Korean cartography of two Carmarthenshire fields posits new charts, new spaces of cohabitation and a radically revised contract between the individual and the state. To those familiar with the poem but unfamiliar with Williams’s commentary on it, this may well come as a surprise, since ‘In Two Fields’ cannot be said to flaunt its political or cartographic credentials. Its own coordinates in Williams’s single collection, Dail Pren (Leaves of a Tree, 1956), are significant; this is a poem that is ­hyper-­conscious of the place

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it occupies. It is preceded by a poem of 1942 that homes in on the presence of the arms depot at ­Tre-­cŵn, north Pembrokeshire (‘Ar Weun Cas’ Mael’ – ‘On Puncheston Common’); it is followed by a poem of 1939 protesting against the requisitioning by the War Office of the Castlemartin Peninsula, south Pembrokeshire, as a tank range (‘Daw’r Wennol yn Ôl i’w Nyth’ – ‘The Swallow will Return to its Nest’).10 Moreover, the great polemical prose ­co-­texts of Williams’s annus mirabilis of 1956 – ‘Brenhiniaeth a Brawdoliaeth’ (‘Sovereignty and Brotherhood’) and ‘Pam y Gwrthodais Dalu Treth yr Incwm’ (‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’) – together with his published gloss on the poem and other documents, confirm that the ground of ‘In Two Fields’ is the poet’s philosophical anarchism and pacifism, and that the poem is an imaginative inscription of the campaign he was waging throughout the 1950s against conscription, war, imperial possession and the superpower state. That campaign led to his being twice imprisoned, in 1960 and 1961. By scrutinizing the poem’s manifest and latent cartographies, I want to bring ‘In Two Fields’ into focus as a poem of the twentieth century’s ‘forgotten’ war in Korea (1950–3) and as a response to the conflict in Cyprus during the 1950s. Seeking to recover the poem’s historicity through cartography serves also to recover the relegated narratives of these tragedies. The war in Korea has too frequently been read as ‘a footnote or as a prelude to engagements that have much deeper and more intense cultural penetration’, such as the Second World War and Vietnam.11 W. D. Erhart and Philip K. Jason note that ‘With scant attention by anthologists and critics, it’s no wonder that the prevailing view is that few, if any, writers had their imaginations sparked by the war in Korea.’12 I hope that this chapter’s engagement with ‘In Two Fields’ will contribute not only to the current retrieval and serious critical assessment of this neglected body of Korean War literature (in many languages), but also to our understanding of the methods – and instruments – by which a poet might choose to write war.13 Previous discussions have valuably gestured at the way in which ‘In Two Fields’ is keyed into conflict, but they have tended to elide the complex vocality of the poem’s war idiom by privileging its spiritual, apocalyptic or broad cultural dimensions.14 Its cartographic rubric has gone unnoticed. The historicity of ‘In Two Fields’ deserves more sustained consideration. Taking as its ground two fields that are in many ways one, the poem is a politicized meditation on disputed space and the (psycho-)topography of unity and division. We need to be reminded of the precise political significance of this terrain in the context of the

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1950s. Excavating the poem’s geographical contours and identifying its cartographic moves allow us to experience ‘In Two Fields’ as a map of the international conflicts of the 1950s – Korea, Cyprus – and as an aspirational projection (in cartographic as in other senses) of a new world geography, a unificatory, redemptive geopolitics. This act of imagining is in line both with Waldo Williams’s stated hope that Dail Pren would be ‘a practical help to my nation in the confusion of this age’ (Rh, p. 90) and with the biblical resonance of the volume’s title, which is a phrase that becomes firmly rooted in ‘In Two Fields’ itself: ‘the leaves of the tree [of life] were for the healing of the nations’ (Revelation 22: 2).15 Pennar Davies gave a sense of the poem as material ground and habitable space when he remarked of ‘In Two Fields’: ‘Cân ydyw y gellir byw ynddi ac arni’ – ‘It is a poem one can live in and on’ – while Hugh Bevan noted that Williams’s is a poetry ‘of the open field’.16 Referring to ‘In Two Fields’, Rowan Williams speaks of the ability of the alert translator to ‘trace [the poet’s] movement across a territory of perception and feeling’.17 I want to deepen our sense of the poem’s expansive projection of space and offer a close reading of ‘In Two Fields’ (and of the ­poem-­in-­translation) as political cartography. Various translations of the poem are interesting in this regard. Translation itself is an act of remapping that is both a debordering and a rebordering. Thus the Welsh poem’s charting of borders prompts a transplantation into new linguistic and cultural ground. How have various translators encountered ‘In Two Fields’, and in what forms have its cartographical alignments survived conscription into another (Williams’s mother-) tongue, across linguistic borders? Of particular import here is the way in which these translations – each a critical reading of sorts, as commentators have noted18 – can be seen to focus, amplify or diffuse the political discourse of the original. Appropriately, translating ‘In Two Fields’ gives the reader access to two cultural fields; it is an act of doubling in tune with the spirit (and indeed anxieties) of the original.19 Waldo Williams’s whole oeuvre, says Anthony Conran, ‘is a protest against violence’: ‘[O]f all the possible attitudes to armed conflict that poets can take – Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Alun Lewis, Sorley MacLean – his is the most extreme in its opposition.’20 The trajectory of that ‘opposition’ must be charted in order to establish a meaningful context for a cartographic reading of ‘In Two Fields’. A mixture of inheritance and personal experience went into the making of Williams’s pacifism, ­anti-­imperialism, ‘necessary anarchism’ and nationalism.21 The seeds were sown early in a radicalized home. The

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basic tenets of the Quakerism he would formally embrace in the 1950s – pacifism foremost among them – were part of his Baptist heritage, as he gratefully acknowledged in his Quaker declaration of faith in 1956. From his father, J. Edwal Williams, and his uncle, William Williams (‘Gwilamus’), he inherited a pathological hatred of militarism and imperialism. His principles were also moulded in significant ways by his mother, Angharad, and by his sisters (the death of his sister Morvydd in 1915 provides us with another context for the instressed vision at the heart of ‘In Two Fields’). The poem bearing his mother’s name in Dail Pren ascribes to her the very characteristics and values evident in Williams’s mature poetry and acts of protest: the capacity imaginatively to apprehend, and empathize with, the disenfranchised and displaced across time and space; a willingness to privilege actions over mere words; and a conception of interpersonal relationships and literary creativity as redemptive and healing. Conran has (rightly) identified in Williams’s poetry a strong affiliation with the feminine: ‘His mother, his sisters and his wife are quite crucially involved both in his greatness as a poet, and in the political reality he represents.’22 That identification functions as a mode of opposition to masculine violence and imperialist aggression, and conditions the redemptive cartography offered by ‘In Two Fields’. Williams’s experience in the liminal, littoral, thalassian space (‘These two fields a green ­sea-­shore …’, as Rowan Williams launches his translation of the opening line) between two ordinary fields on the outskirts of a Welsh village (divided in two by the county line) during the Great War confirmed these intuitions, and was to serve as a lifelong touchstone. The wartime context of that initial vision is telling.23 Detaching that sudden apprehension of fundamental unity from its historical moment (as critics have insisted on doing) detracts from its full significance as a revelation motivated in part by conflict and issuing ultimately in social and political action. (A corollary of this, and the ground of this final chapter, is that ‘In Two Fields’, which recalls that experience and reimagines it in the context of another war, represents a fertile field for a particular kind of historicist cartography.) Though that vision had to wait forty years to achieve literary form, the fields served as a site of dissent throughout Williams’s career. They became an oppositional ­frontier-­land topography, representing a furiously pacifist alternative to the innumerable killing fields of the twentieth century.24 From 1923 to 1927, Williams’s moral and political allegiances took on intellectual vigour and gained a social dimension at the University

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College of Wales, Aberystwyth. The nature and scope of his pacifist radicalism were crystallized by the violence of the Second World War, which also laid bare for him the insidious means by which the state (nominally democratic as well as overtly totalitarian) violated the sacrosanct freedom of the individual – conscription being for Williams one of the most pernicious examples. His first public, political poem, ‘Y Tŵr a’r Graig’ – ‘The Tower and the Rock’ (1938), in which the primeval and medieval are invested with contemporary political resonance – was motivated by the recommendation in November 1938 that ‘some measures of compulsory service’ in the armed forces be introduced as conflict with Germany loomed.25 The Second World War was in part responsible for a phobic vision of poisoned soil and ­ultra-­violent Darwinian nature that paralysed the poet for sixth months from 1939 to 1940 and which he dramatized in the nightmarish surreality of the poem ‘O Bridd’ (‘Oh Soil of the Earth’): ‘your red flowers are / pox, your yellow flowers, pus. / I won’t, can’t, walk. There’s no out there. Your fever stole // into my blood.’26 To be grounded and located at this time was to be wholly incapacitated. Williams’s recovery and reconciliation with the soil yielded – indeed, made possible – war poems of astringent clarity: ‘Look: bodies of children. Dead at nightfall / … White and black and yellow. A multitude’ (‘Y Plant Marw’/‘The Dead Children’; DP, p. 81).27 (Waldo Williams is Welsh literature’s most ruthless plotter of periods and deployer of staccato28 notation; his punctuation is a precision instrument of his cartography.) Williams’s uncompromising pacifist stance, articulated in a series of letters to the Pembrokeshire weekly, the Western Telegraph, in 1939 and 1940, resulted in tension with the county’s director of education that made his position as headmaster of Puncheston primary school untenable.29 Summoned before a conscientious object­ors’ tribunal in Carmarthen in February 1942, Williams the absolutist delivered his remarkable pacifist ‘Statement’: war, which ‘starves to death the innocence of the world’, is a ‘monstrous violation’ of ‘the Divine Imagination which brought forth the world’ (Rh, pp. 282–3). The idiom, of course, invokes the witness of that ­arch-­dissenter and ‘prophet against empire’, William Blake. The death of his wife Linda in 1943 after barely two years of marriage deepened his personal trauma at a time of international crisis, and he embarked on a voluntary ­five-­year ‘exile’ in England that both sharpened his sense of dislocation and afforded him a salutary new perspective on a Wales threatened by increasing anglicization and by the depredations of a War Office ever eager to redraw the map of his native Pembrokeshire.30

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But if it was the Second World War that motivated Williams to clarify and conceptualize his pacifism, it was the Korean War that defined and mobilized it. Williams returned to Wales in 1949. That partial regrounding meant that he would insist on locating and formulating his opposition to war and military conscription in the context of Wales’s relation to Britain and to the international community. A politics of home intersected with an internationalist vision.31 The Korean War compelled him to privilege actions over words, protest over poetry. Only then could he allow himself the luxury (as he saw it) of protest poetry. Indeed, to speak of Williams’s verbal interventions in the 1950s runs the risk of missing the point entirely. As he explained in June 1956 to his friends J. Gwyn Griffiths and Kate ­Bosse-­Griffiths (the former, in response to Williams’s perceived inertia regarding the publication of his poems, having assembled a collection that actually reached proof stage before the poet himself intervened): ‘I must say that it is not shyness that has kept me from publishing, but my criticism of this age, this civilization, and this country in particular. Too many words, not enough actions.’ And to D. J. Williams in October of that year: ‘when the Korean War came, you know how I felt about my peace poems. I felt that to bring them together in a book would be awful, hypocritical, unbearable, if I did not try to do something other than merely write about this thing’ (Rh, pp. 83, 85). It was an example of what one commentator has termed Williams’s ‘terrifying sincerity’.32 He resigned his teaching post and began a ­decade-­long campaign of civil disobedience by withholding his income tax. In the circumstances of the early 1950s, then, action was the primary, obligatory idiom of protest. Each subsequent utterance in poetry and polemical prose is to be understood as performative. KOREA AND CYPRUS, CONSCRIPTION AND DIVISION What issues, then, did the Korean War throw into relief for Waldo Williams? Korea plays a central, illustrative role in his two great prose polemics of the summer of 1956, ‘Sovereignty and Brotherhood’ and ‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’, which hinge on ‘In Two Fields’ to form a remarkable summer triptych of protest. These two pieces help establish the political ground of ‘In Two Fields’. (The July 1956 radio broadcast, ‘Paham yr Wyf yn Grynwr’ – ‘Why I am a Quaker’ – can be considered a pendant to these.) The concerns of the prose pieces are emphatically those of ‘In Two Fields’; Ned Thomas is right to say that

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‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’ functions as ‘an extended gloss’ on ‘In Two Fields’, while Dafydd ­Elis-­Thomas recognizes that, by the same token, ‘In Two Fields’ can be read as ‘a pacifist ­anti-­conscription pamphlet’.33 I would add: ‘with a gatefold map’. ‘Sovereignty and Brotherhood’, initially delivered as an address to the Peace Society at the Welsh Baptist Union conference in May 1956, is Williams’s great anarchist critique. It bears the unmistakable influence of the Russian political philosopher and Christian existentialist, Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), particularly in its assessment of the unthinking acceptance of the authority of the modern state and the internalization of the ‘compulsory element’ sustaining state hegemony. Korea is invoked as a prime illustration of the argument. Williams begins by emphasizing the division of Korea at the end of the Second World War, which ‘laid her open to recrimination on both sides’, and goes on to lament the way in which ‘the United Nations was rushed to war by the United States in a paroxysm lest the chance be lost’. Citing reports detailing war atrocities, Williams confronts the effects of violence both on human bodies – the hideous deformities caused by napalm bombs, the herding together and burning alive of civilians in a barn – and on the very ground of fractured Korea: ‘The countryside was made desolate, the cities reduced to rubble and millions made homeless.’ Taking to task his generation’s apathy and lack of collective responsibility regarding Korea and the acts of violence perpetrated ‘in our name and on our behalf’, Williams asks: Was it because Korea was so distant? … Because the cruelty of our age had weakened our capacity to feel – or worse, had bred in us an unacknowledged craving for excitement? … Or because we felt that the complexity of international politics had become too great for us to solve? (Rh, pp. 307–8)

The result, he contends, was a heightened, enervating dependence on the state, or rather on a false ‘image’ of it, constructed out of weakness and ignorance. Williams concludes with an impassioned attack on the ‘acme of Sovereignty’s violence and the most perfect expression of the illogic­ ality of the tradition that has perverted our nature and dimmed our sight’: military conscription. ‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’, published in Baner ac Amserau Cymru on 20 June 1956 – exactly a week after ‘In Two Fields’ had appeared in the same newspaper – opens with the division of Korea. The contention that the United States ‘got their way in the United Nations Conference – through deception’ and ‘rushed the United Nations to war’ is reiterated (Rh, p. 312)34 and the holocaustal horrors detailed in ‘Sovereignty and Brotherhood’ are revisited: ‘I felt

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that Korea was our own Belsen. The Belsen of America and England and Wales.’ A section headed ‘Conscription’ boldly configures a pacifist, nationalist and republican argument along a Wales–Korea axis, emphasizing Wales’s enforced complicity in the state’s imperial projects in Korea from 1950 to 1953, and, at the moment of writing, in Cyprus. Refusing to allow distance (geographical, chronological) to blur unignorable adjacency (a project in which the map of ‘In Two Fields’ is also involved, as we shall see), Williams reminded his readers that ‘some of our young lads were being compelled to go over to assist in the wickedness’ in Korea, and challenged them with a radical foreshortening of contemporary geopolitical perspectives, a startling folding over of the map that brings Korea ‘home’ to Wales. The Conscription Act meant that the Korean War ‘in its worst, executive aspect’ had ‘taken over the homes of Wales’ (Rh, p. 313). Williams’s formulation functions as a pacifist, nationalist subversion of Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s famous statement in a broadcast of 31 July 1950 justifying British involvement in Korea through an alarmist telescoping: If the aggressor gets away with it, aggressors all over the world will be encouraged. The same results which led to the second world war will follow … The fire that has been started in distant Korea may burn down your house.35

Williams’s pacifist, transnationalist, ­anti-­imperialist logic insistently maps a divided Korea onto Wales, a compromised Wales onto Korea, just as it seeks to replace a sense of what he called ‘vicarious guilt’ regarding ‘the horrors of Korea’ with an awareness of ‘personal guilt’ so incapacitating that he found ‘going out into the street’ an ordeal. ‘Military conscription imprisons me completely’, he said (Rh, pp. 90, 100, 317). Williams’s 1958 gloss on ‘In Two Fields’ unequivocally signals the poem’s historical embeddedness and political agenda. The ‘Exiled King’ of the poem (indebted to the ‘outlawed majesty’ of the Irish poet and theosophist, ‘Æ’, George William Russell), walking ‘through some crisis in history’, is revealed to be the opponent of ‘the powers that possess the world’. Towards the end of the gloss, Williams quotes one of his own short poems in which the two fields, through the suggestive logic of apposition, become the grounding geography of pacifist opposition: ‘Weun Parc y Blawd and Parc y Blawd / Summer’s long song will return. / Pledge my hand to the cruel sword / I never did, and never will.’ The gloss concludes with an unambiguous statement of the poem’s political meaning: For me, the main message of this poem, ‘In Two Fields’, in terms of the contemporary moment, is that the Welch Regiment is in Cyprus still, and so

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long as we tolerate military conscription, they are our slaves. What shall we do? That is why I wanted to explain the poem. (Rh, pp. 87–9)

That position was echoed in private correspondence. ‘If my nephew Dafydd, for example, were in the army and in Cyprus or some other place’, he told J. Gwyn Griffiths and Kate ­Bosse-­Griffiths in 1956, six days after the publication of ‘In Two Fields’ and a day before the appearance of ‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’, ‘seeing all my propaganda collected in a book, and that book praised by people, would just increase the bitterness’ (Rh, p. 84). ‘Propaganda’ is interesting here: a troubled acknowledgement that words are not to be trusted unless legitimized by correlative action on the ground. Significantly, Williams’s wider critique of the modern state is articulated in terms of the division at the heart of modern Korea’s historical narrative. In ‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’, he cites a moment of anarchist clarity when the state’s ‘awful dualism’ – its internal structural ‘order’ and the ‘chaos’ subsisting between it and the world – was laid bare. For Williams, the split was replicated in the moral fracture forced on subjects who accept the evils of the state in return for the benefits of citizenship. It was from this psychological rift and ethical paradox that Williams sought to free himself by refusing to pay his income tax. The cartography of ‘In Two Fields’ to which we are now coming was a means of liberating himself from this ­double-­bind. ‘In Two Fields’ is painfully alive to such dualities. Its map of Welsh ground, both demarcated and imaginatively unified, was drawn from contemporary history. Since the late nineteenth century, Korea had been the victim of the shifting dynamics of imperial rivalry between China, Russia and Japan. From 1910 to 1945, it was subject to often draconian Japanese colonial rule, unsuccessfully resisted by various Korean nationalist factions. The defeat of Japan in 1945 resulted not in the independence of a unified Korea but in the division of the country (superpower trusteeship and ‘murderous’ Korean political factionalism both playing a part)36 along the 38th Parallel (the 38 degrees north parallel of latitude), demarcating the North, where the defeated Japanese surrendered to Soviet forces, from the South, where Japan surrendered to the United States. The 38th Parallel – a ‘rough and ready division’37 chosen in half an hour by two young colonels, Charles Hartwell Bonesteel III and Dean Rusk in August 1945, using the only chart they had to hand, the 1942 National Geographic map, Asia and Adjacent Areas (figure 1) – was very quickly sealed by the communist North, and the two occupation zones, under American military authority and Korean communist control, swiftly

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1  Asia and Adjacent Areas: detail of the 1942 National Geographic map used by Colonels Bonesteel and Rusk in August 1945 as part of General Order Number 1, formulated by the US Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. © National Geographic

hardened into ideological opposition. A map functions not merely as a ‘scientific abstraction of reality’ but also as an agent that ‘anticipate[s] spatial reality’, ‘a model for, rather than a model of, what it purport[s] to represent … a real instrument to concretize projections on the earth’s surface’.38 The simple (post- or sub-)cartographic act of Bonesteel and Rusk provides a particularly raw example of the ‘performative utterance’ and ‘propositional logic’ that historians and cartographic theorists such as Thongchai Winichakul and Denis Wood see as characterizing all maps.39 As we have seen in the previous chapter, the hardening of borders on the Korean peninsula would be repeated at the heart of Germany in 1952 – in the middle of the Korean War. Attempts by the US and the United Nations to initiate ­Korea-­wide elections failed; by 1948, the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea confronted each other over a tense, arbitrary line of latitude (figure 2). On 25 June 1950, following guerrilla activity on both sides, ­Soviet-­sponsored North Korean troops launched an offensive across the 38th Parallel, precipitating a war (officially and euphemistically designated a ‘police action’ by the West) that resulted in around four million

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casualties; two million of these were civilian deaths. The international community – Britain included – was drawn into the conflict after the United Nations Security Council ratified President Truman’s call to resist communist belligerence in the peninsula.40 For Williams, the

2  The Korean Theater, from James A. Field, Jr., ‘History of United States naval operations: Korea’, http://www.history.navy.mil/books/field/ch5a.htm. The 38th Parallel is clearly seen, splitting the Korean Peninsula in two. By courtesy of The Naval History and Heritage Command

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British state, faced with a chronic dearth of available troops, was visiting that belligerence on its Welsh citizens by means of the ‘compulsory element’ – delaying the release of regular soldiers ‘whose contractual term of active duty had expired’; recalling reservists to ­full-­time duty in the first rotation of battalions sent out with the 29th Brigade; and compelling national servicemen (whose obligatory service was increased from eighteen months to two years in 1950 in direct response to the Korean War) to fight in Korea.41 By 1952, ­‘two-­thirds at least of battalions were composed of National Servicemen’.42 Throughout the war, and especially from spring 1951 to the armistice of July 1953, when UN–US forces fought a holding action around it, the deadly rubicon of the 38th Parallel served as a potent symbol of political difference resulting in the horrors of modern war. The armistice (without reunification) realigned and fortified the border along a military demarcation line (MDL) buffered by a ­‘no-­man’s-­land’ demilitarized zone (DMZ) intersecting the 38th Parallel roughly ­south-­west to ­north-­east, along what had been the stalemate, ­‘ground-­contact’ ­battle-­line. As we shall see, ‘In Two Fields’ asks to be read as a map of that conflict. Colonial superintendence, thwarted unity, partition and violence: these are also the ­master-­themes of the contemporary conflict in Cyprus, which, as Williams’s gloss makes clear, is at the heart of the anti-­ conscription agenda of ‘In Two Fields’. Frustration with British colonial rule in the aftermath of the Second World War led in the early 1950s to an intensification of Greek Cypriot aspiration for enosis (union) with Greece. Such a campaign naturally increased tensions between the majority Greek Cypriot community and Turkish Cypriots. The formation of the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) heralded in 1955 a campaign of guerrilla terrorist violence against British troops (a significant number of them conscripts) aimed at securing enosis. The year of ‘In Two Fields’, 1956, saw a massive increase in the number of British troops in Cyprus (HQ Middle East Command had already been moved there from Egypt in 1954); the Welch Regiment arrived in 1957 and did not leave until 1961. Partition was mooted by the Turkish community in 1958, the year of the gloss on ‘In Two Fields’, and violence (intercommunal as well as ­anti-­British) continued throughout the 1950s until an independent Republic of Cyprus with a ‘bicommunal’ constitution came into being in 1960 (the year conscription was abolished in the UK). Practically speaking, such ­power-­sharing-­by-­ethnic-­quota manifested itself in tense division rather than in ­plurality-­within-­unity. During the 1960s, Turkish Cypriot nationalism and continued Greek Cypriot

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demands for enosis, whose energies Brenda Chamberlain felt on Ídhra, resulted in further violence and segregation: along the ‘green line’ in Nicosia – drawn and therefore immediately reified by Major General Peter Young in dark green crayon on a map of the city – and in actual partition in 1974, following the Turkish invasion, along the ‘Attila line’ with its UN ­buffer-­zone. The accompanying brutality and human displacement, together with the ‘verbal toponymic warfare’ involved in the ‘political renaming’43 of places, were the inevitable legacy of the discord of the 1950s.44 The drama of ‘In Two Fields’ is played out against these two 1950s narratives of divided Korean and Cypriot fields, with the poem’s cartographic particularism mediating a fraught awareness of Wales’s enforced participation in these two international conflicts. Shadowing the modern meaning of ‘conscription’ are the older senses of ‘putting in writing’, ‘writing down together’, ‘a conjoint signature’. Waldo Williams’s aversion to war and to the tyranny of the ­call-­up in the summer of 1956 is an act of literary and cartographic inscription in which personal and public history, Wales, Korea and Cyprus, make a fascinating conjoint signature. ‘IN TWO FIELDS’: TRANSLATION AND CARTOGRAPHIC PROJECTION Locating the ­co-­texts and contexts of ‘In Two Fields’ enables us to recognize the poem as a layered utterance in which a celebratory vision is haunted by ‘tremor[s] of anxiety’ – a term used by Nicholas Roe to describe comparable sites of disturbance in Romantic lyrics (in whose line of descent ‘In Two Fields’ stands) that seem on the surface to be untroubled by the pressures of history.45 ‘In Two Fields’ evinces what one might call a textual ­post-­traumatic stress disorder. The ­poem-­video of ‘In Two Fields’ included in Marc Evans’s film, Dal: Yma/Nawr (2004), suggests this ‘layering’ by choosing as its visual field the 2002 National Eisteddfod and its surrounding site – the disused airfield at St Davids, Pembrokeshire, built in 1943 for the Halifax bombers of Royal Air Force Coastal Command. The video offers a sense of the poem as geographical, cartographical, chronological and conceptual palimpsest. Shots of the eisteddfod field are interspersed with images of the wider airfield, where the concrete runways are returning to grassland and heathland. The eisteddfod’s ‘fair field full of folk’ (a phrase from Langland’s

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3  Detail of the Ordnance Survey ­six-­inch county series, 1905–6, showing the two fields, Weun Parc y Blawd and Parc y Blawd, ­south-­east of Llandysilio. By permission of the Royal Geographical Society

thoroughly politicized Piers Plowman that is evoked by Rowan Williams at the end of his rendering of ‘In Two Fields’) is disturbed by traces of past violence. Referring to the Castlemartin tank range in the poem adjacent to ‘In Two Fields’ in Dail Pren, Waldo Williams declares that ‘war has come / To rip the field of Crug y Mêl.’ In more indirect and nuanced ways, ‘In Two Fields’, with its interest in palimpsestic mapping, presents Weun Parc y Blawd and Parc y Blawd as also ‘ripped’ by war. The literal borderland status of Williams’s two fields (figure 3) should be emphasized, since the poem is concerned with problems of adjacency, gaps, boundary conditions and disputable space. Indeed, it functions as the poetic inscription of a global boundary review. Williams would have been aware that the ground of his teenage vision (a year or so after the Somme) was ­frontier-­land, literal and imaginative. A house and plot of land nearby still bear the name ­‘Bwlch-­y-­ddwysir’ – ‘Two counties’ breach’. Until the recent realignment of the county boundaries, the parish of Llandysilio was divided in two by the Pembrokeshire–Carmarthenshire border, with the two fields in the latter county, a matter of yards from the boundary (figure 4). The ‘Landsker’ line – that unseen linguistic border dividing the Pembrokeshire Welshry and Englishry – is also close by, exerting its own pressures, reminding Williams of his own geographical

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and cultural trajectory from his roots in a suburb of Haverfordwest in the anglicized south of the county.46 The canonization in Welsh literature of ‘In Two Fields’ as the ultimate inscription of Waldo Williams-­as-­and-­in-­ Pembrokeshire is a choice example of the way we can mistake a poem’s locations of culture. To read a poem generically as pastoral, rather than geographically or – with still greater precision – cartographically, is to elide the material prompts that make a poem this utterance about this particular terrain, rather than any other. It was only in 2002 that a Local Government Boundary Commission ceded the two fields (peacefully) to Pembrokeshire, announcing its decision in the form of a map that uncannily replicates the effects of Williams’s poem by making ­inter-­provincial contemporary Wales look like a land of agonistic division – which it emphatically was for the poet in the summer of 1956 (figure 5).47 The very title of Williams’s poem announces a desire to underscore the virtuality of all ‘enforced’ borders, and to reconfigure received geographies. By asking us to entertain a paradox, it invites us to inflect our sense

4  Detail of the ‘Popular Edition’ Ordnance Survey map of 1922–3, showing the Pembrokeshire–Carmarthenshire county boundary as Waldo Williams knew it. The two fields lie in Carmarthenshire. By permission of the Royal Geographical Society

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5  Ceding ground: Boundary Commission for Wales map of the area transferred from Carmarthenshire to Pembrokeshire in 2002 – land that includes Waldo Williams’s ‘two fields’. © Crown Copyright Local Government Boundary Commission for Wales

of how ground might be inhabited, territory occupied, dividing ‘parallels’ imposed, patrolled and textually represented. How, precisely, can one be in two fields simultaneously? The title suggests a dissolution of separateness into oneness (‘in’ works hard here), but the idea of doubleness and its dark reflex – disconnection – cannot be dispelled. Indeed, the poem is a space in which an imaginative, unificatory tenancy of the fields contends with an awareness of geographical demarcation and limit – a territory in which erased frontiers threaten to materialize back into Attila lines, and ‘mass hypnosis’ (Williams’s term, via Berdyaev (Rh, p. 305)) threatens to shut down dissenting, ­counter-­intuitive thought. Eight published translations of ‘In Two Fields’ – by Anthony Conran, R. M. Jones, R. Gerallt Jones, Gwyn Jones, Joseph Clancy, R. S. Thomas, Rowan Williams and Alan Llwyd – are known to me.48 Only one translator dissents from the title ‘In Two Fields’. Rowan Williams’s fine rendering of the poem – a creative negotiation or ‘free translation’ rather than ‘a crib to the Welsh’ – carries the title ‘Between Two Fields’.49 It is an interesting inflection which, I suggest, registers the translator’s

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awareness of the disturbances and cartographic sensitivities of the poem. As a title, ‘Between Two Fields’ hints at notions of division, liminality, border habitation and threshold possibility at which the poem itself worries away, whereas ‘In Two Fields’, though troubled, more confidently asserts a desire for synthesis. (Here, one might say of all good translations that they resist ‘conscription’ – that they conscientiously object to being slavishly ‘drafted’, in all senses, by the original.) Traversing the gaps between the poem’s six ­stanza-­fields involves crossing borders. The boundary space between the first and second stanzas is a particularly important one. In Conran’s translation: ‘The great quiet he brought me. // Excitement he gave me.’ With no verbal checkpoint, no preparatory briefing, the reader crosses ­no-­man’s-­land, moving abruptly from one state/State into another very different one, to find that they are part of one whole. Two truths straddle perimeter space; difference is celebrated and paradox naturalized at the moment a boundary is negotiated (and therefore, for a moment, negated). Such formal effects are part of the poem’s cartographic prompts. By enjambing the final line of stanza one (the only example of such a move in his, or any other, translation), Rowan Williams dispenses altogether with ­end-­stopped demarcation lines (as at Korea’s 38th Parallel), radically opening the stanza border and shepherding us through the buffer zone, carrying a portion of one field into the next: One and the same the lightning hunter across the field … … who from the vaults above the ­bright-­voiced whistlers, the keen darting plovers, brought down on me such quiet, such Quiet, enough to rouse me.

To enjamb is to ‘stride’, to ‘encroach’ – peaceably, here, into unknown territory. What emerges in different ways from the original and the translation is a sense of the permeability of the textual border and thus the contingent, constructed reality of all national borders. The poem is shot through with the discourse and imagery of war, conscripted here in the service of pacifist dissent. Williams’s agent of unification and reconciliation, the ‘Exiled King’, appears in martial guise throughout, waging guerrilla war against those ‘powers that possess the world’. He appears in the first stanza as a saethwr and heliwr. Translators of the poem have used either ‘hunter’ or ‘huntsman’ for the latter. The rendering of saethwr is more interesting since different

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translations create markedly different effects. While Gwyn Jones, R. Gerallt Jones, Joseph Clancy and Alan Llwyd have ‘archer’, and R. S. Thomas has ‘bowman’, Anthony Conran, R. M. Jones and Rowan Williams choose ‘marksman’ – a term more attuned to the poem’s contemporary resonance than the other phrases, which run the risk of momentarily archaizing a poem that is painfully aware of the obscenity of total war and of the effects of atom and napalm bombs. Anthony Conran and Alan Llwyd both respond to the militarized topography on which Williams insists in the next stanza. For Yr eithin aeddfed ar y cloddiau’n clecian, Conran has ‘Crackle of gorse that was ripe on escarpments’; Llwyd has ‘The yellowing gorse bushes crackling on the stone boundaries’. Both translators could easily have opted for ‘hedges’ or ‘hedgerows’ for cloddiau; motivated by the image of gorse exploding with tiny ­seed-­pod detonations in the heat (as it emphatically does), both translators succeed in registering the militarization of Welsh ground: ‘escarpments’ and ‘boundaries’ suggest topographical fortification and cartographic demarcation. Further, Rowan Williams brings out the material violence haunting Williams’s mystical pastoral in the next line of stanza two: Y brwyn lu yn breuddwydio’r wybren las – ‘the many rushes dreaming the blue sky’ (R. Gerallt Jones and R. S. Thomas). No one could fault Jones or Thomas for their translations of llu here, but Rowan Williams’s version works harder, bringing out the darker contours of llu (‘battle force’, ‘military host’) by opting for ‘the army of dozy rushes’. (‘You are always looking or listening for what these particular words in one language make possible, for their range and echoes’, Rowan Williams remarks; ‘you are feeling around them, sensing the alternatives they hint at and deny’.50) Other translators choose the middle ground of ‘host of rushes’ or ‘hosting of rushes’, where ‘host’ manages – just – to register the idea of military intervention, even as the poeticism attenuates the contemporary force of the poem’s discourse. The next lines in stanza two – Pwy sydd yn galw pan fo’r dychymyg yn dihuno? / Cyfod, cerdd, dawnsia, wele’r bydysawd (as Conran has it, ‘When the imagination wakens, who calls / Rise up and walk, dance, look at the world?’) – are clearly a reference to the exiled unifier. But here, the poem’s ­co-­texts ask us to tune into another call – that of the state – whose ­‘Call-­up’ in the 1950s compelled 18-­year-­olds to ‘Rise up’ at the very moment the imagination ‘wakened’ into maturity, and to engage in combat, if necessary, at nineteen. Once again, ‘In Two Fields’ deprecates all state interpellation, all institutionalized ‘hailing’. The distressed nature of the pastoral of ‘In Two Fields’ is again indicated at the beginning of stanza three by the image of the cymylau mawr

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ffoadur a phererin – ‘the big clouds, the fugitive pilgrims’ (Conran), ‘the great fugitive and pilgrim clouds’ (Clancy). Ffoadur here is the word to watch, the concept to map. In the context of the poem’s cumulative cartography of war and partition, ‘fugitive’ (chosen by seven out of eight translators) seems to me a romanticization, a demobilization of the poem’s oppositional politics and an occlusion of the crisis map that is building up. Rowan Williams foregrounds the meaning that was surely foremost in the poet’s mind here: ‘Clouds: big clouds, pilgrims, refugees’ (my emphasis). Foremost, I suggest, since in ‘Sovereignty and Brotherhood’, Waldo Williams makes a point of referring to the 5 million refugees of the Korean War who experienced what the United Nations now terms ‘the trauma of flight’.51 He would also have known that the conflict in Cyprus made ­one-­third of the population homeless.52 For Williams in 1956, ‘DP’ stood not only for Dail Pren but also for ‘displaced persons’. Moreover, the import of the ­fugitive-­refugee-­pilgrim clouds – tinged in Alan Llwyd’s translation by ‘the late sunlight of stormy November’s violence’ (in which Ned Thomas sees the ‘blood of the Somme’) – is strengthened by allusion.53 Gwyn Thomas has suggested that ffoadur a phererin echoes a line from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth section of Four Quartets – a war poem Williams knew very well: ‘the spirit unappeased and peregrine / Between two worlds become much like each other’.54 One can see how ‘unappeased and peregrine’ (and indeed the spatial orientation, ‘Between two worlds’) might have suggested ffoadur a phererin – ‘peregrine’ itself containing a sense of both Welsh words (and indeed typographically containing pererin). In cartographic terms, allusion may be understood as a map of other territory, a mark of a poem’s conceptual and cultural field. The invocation of ‘Little Gidding’ deserves further exploration. Eliot’s line occurs in the middle of the famous passage describing the speaker’s meeting with the ‘familiar compound ghost’ at ‘the uncertain hour before morning’ in uncanny metropolitan threshold space during the Blitz. Smoke from bombed buildings rises into the sky ‘After the dark dove with the flickering tongue / Had passed below the horizon of his homing.’ The allusion carries into ‘In Two Fields’ not only the violence of a previous war but also the strangeness of a liminal encounter in which compound identities meet on the same ground and ‘compel’ a ‘recognition’ (compare Williams’s later formulation in ‘In Two Fields’, adnabod nes bod adnabod – in Gwyn Jones’s translation, ‘recognition that asks recognition’). At the centre of stanza three is this territory’s physical 38th Parallel: the hedge of ash and maple trees separating Weun Parc y Blawd from its

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brother field, Parc y Blawd: Lawr yn yr ynn a’r masarn a rannai’r meysydd – ‘Down where the ashtrees and maples divided the fields’ (Conran). It is the ­poem-­map’s central image of division; in translation, the 38th line actually offers ‘map’ at the heart of the delimiting ‘maple’. Ned Thomas hears in the Welsh line ‘an iron tone’, remarking: ‘If it was in a gap between two fields that Waldo experienced a sense that men were brothers, shouldn’t we read “divide” as a negative term?’55 It is here that the borderland Carmarthenshire fields map North and South Korea and proleptically chart a divided Cyprus; it is here that the ash trees and maple map Korea’s military demarcation line and anticipate the green and Attila lines of Cyprus. Conran’s and Clancy’s translation of ynn as ‘ash trees’ foregoes the full registration of violence and its aftermath that other translations succeed in evoking with the simple ‘ash’ or, more powerfully, its plural: ‘down in the ashes … dividing the meadows’ (R. S. Thomas). Despite its commitment to a cartographic rendering of the brutality of modern war and the despotism of the modern state, the poem also works hard to erase military demarcation lines, conceiving of the two fields as a single, debordered space in which the Exiled King’s ‘people’ will walk in the ground of the next stanza, bound together by a current running ‘through them, among them, about them’ (Clancy). The famous bwlch – ‘gap’, ‘breach’ – of the penultimate line of the poem is part of the same agenda, as is the poem’s title. The ideal towards which the poem strives is the borderless map. As already suggested, the ­field-­names mirror each other in such a way as to dissolve the sense that they are immutably separate territories. Stanza four, then, offers a ­sketch-­map of a Korea-­ made-­whole, not through military intervention and surprise attacks over the 38th Parallel, but through cooperative work on the same ground ­(Wales-­as-­Korea, ­Korea-­as-­Wales). ‘And on the two fields his people walked’ is Conran’s straightforward translation of Ac ar y ddau barc fe gerddai ei bobl. R. S. Thomas remaps the original – ‘and his people were abroad in both fields’ (my emphasis) – with a pun that reminds us of the internationalist vision of ‘In Two Fields’, its insistence on seeing the local in a global context, and its love of paradox. The pun gives us a double map, a palimpsest: ‘here’ is emphatically ‘abroad’; OS SN 126 203 is at once Wales, Korea and Cyprus. Imaginatively apprehended, a map may inscribe not a single, circumscribed and unchanging reality, a political given, but rather relational terrain, in apposition with other ground the world over. ‘In Two Fields’ asks us whether cartography might function as something other than an act of territorialization.

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Despite the sense of division overcome in stanza four and the resonance of that phrase from Revelation, dail pren, ‘leaves of a tree’, in stanza five, the final three stanzas do not offer a bright blueprint for some millenarian ‘healing of the nations’. If that were so, the poem would be a fractured poem of two sectors. As it is, those ‘tremors of anxiety’ continue to be registered, even as an aspirational map of unified ground is projected. The Welsh original troubles translators with the prospect of semantic transgression and permeability at their own ­(English-­language) borders. Of the end of stanza three – Tawel ostegwr helbul hunan, ‘Quiet calmer of the troubled self’ (Conran) – Rowan Williams remarks: ‘The final line defies a straightforward rendering because we have no English word that will do for gostegwr: ‘silencer’ makes you think of guns, which is exactly what you don’t want to be evoking just here.’56 Williams is right to acknowledge that the context is a positive one in that the subject of the line is the Exiled King. He opts for ‘who with a quiet word / calms the red storms of self’. However, it is typical of ‘In Two Fields’ that, in transit over the linguistic limit, gostegwr briefly has to confront a dark antagonist in the word ‘silencer’, thrown up by the troubled process of translation. And, of course, there’s ground to disagree with Rowan Williams: ‘guns’ is precisely what one might wish to evoke here. ‘Silencer’ would be perfectly in tune with the fraught idiom of the poem. As Waldo Williams would have known, gostegwr in its technical sense means ‘silentiary’: a court sergeant, ‘the ninth of the officers of the court whose duty it was to call for silence and keep peace in the hall, one who commands silence … proclaimer, crier’ (Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru). The Exiled King is thus a gentle enforcer, a tender sergeant, a silent proclaimer. The paradoxes seek to heal rifts and dissolve conceptual borders; at the same time, they work to trouble the unificatory ending towards which the poem now seems to be pitched with reminders of social stratification, political power and the suppression of speech. Gerwyn Wiliams’s reference to Waldo Williams and the kingly unifier of ‘In Two Fields’ in his 1994 poem ‘Dolenni’ (‘Links’) is even disturbed by the presence of a bullet lodged at the centre of the image: y cyfannwr mawr ei hun / yn taenu bwletinau brawdgarwch – in the poet’s own translation, published in the same journal as R. S. Thomas’s rendering of ‘In Two Fields’, ‘the great unifier himself / broadcasts bulletins of brotherhood’.57 The new cartography the poem is working hard to project still bears traces of boundaries we thought we could map over. The image of harvest cooperation in the two fields in stanza four – an activity in which Williams actually participated on numerous occasions

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– encodes its opposite: military attack. In the lines Fel gyda ni’r ychydig pan fyddai’r cyrch picwerchi / Neu’r tynnu to deir draw ar y weun drom, the harvest field becomes a theatre of war. Cyrch – ‘attack’, ‘invasion’ – suggests more than mere agricultural effort. The translations reveal three levels of engagement with the word. Joseph Clancy’s alliterative ‘As it was with the few of us once, in the plying of pitchforks / Or the tedious tugging of thatch out on the heavy moor’ (which seeks to communicate the correspondences of Williams’s touches of cynghanedd) neutralizes cyrch into a mere mechanical act. So, too, does Gwyn Jones’s ‘As it was for us few, when wielding our pitchforks / Or culling reluctant thatch from the heavy rushland’ (though ‘culling’ might be taken as nicely multivalent). R. S. Thomas’s collapsing of the image into a single verb, ‘pitchforking’, evacuates the disturbance, as do R. Gerallt Jones’s ‘when we were at it with our pitchforks’ and Alan Llwyd’s ‘working as one with our pitchforks’. Anthony Conran and R. M. Jones choose a stronger verb in their ‘forrayed [sic] with pitchforks’, given that the primary sense of ‘foray’ is ‘a hostile or predatory incursion or inroad, a raid’. However, modern usage has diluted that meaning, rendering ‘foray’ more inoffensive. So it is left to Rowan Williams to suggest the force of cyrch and thus project the Wales–Korea cartography anew: ‘as it was for some of us, the little group / who’d been all day mounting assault / against the harvest with our forks’. (‘An attack of pitchforks’, the translator notes in his gloss on his translation, would have been too ‘abrupt’.58) But is there not also an instability of tone in Williams’s translation, a hint of playfulness, a gesture at ­mock-­epic? ‘[L]ittle group’, the informality of the abbreviated ‘who’d’, and the ‘forks’ that briefly (don’t they?) suggest something more domestic that ‘pitchforks’, produce a dislocating effect that works against the disturbance generated by ‘assault’. The border space between stanzas four and five asks us to cross a boundary of time into a tense, and briefly tenseless, new field: Yr oedd yr heliwr distaw yn bwrw ei rwyd amdanom. // O, trwy oesoedd y gwaed ar y gwellt a thrwy’r goleuni y galar – ‘The silent hunter was drawing his net about us. // O through the ages of blood on the straw and through the light the lamenting’ (Gwyn Jones). Commentators have drawn attention to the echo here of the famous poem in the ­ninth-­century saga cycle, Canu Heledd, about the effects of endless war on Y Dref Wen – the ‘White/Blessed Town’: Ar wyneb y gwellt y gwaet (‘On the surface of its straw, the blood’). Ned Thomas comments: ‘The use of a phrase from a poem of the Welsh Dark Ages emphasises the point that is being made about the long centuries of bloodshed.’59 What has not been fleshed out

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is the appropriateness of the echo to the ground of ‘In Two Fields’. Jenny Rowland reminds us that the subject of Canu Heledd is ‘border history’: the events portrayed … fit the picture most commonly held concerning the formation of the Welsh border … [it is] a reflection of the state of Powys in the ninth century when the region had suffered from severe border warfare and repeated conquest for over half a century.60

The geography of the White Town is ambiguous, but it has been taken to be a ‘border town’ – a settlement in contested territory harried by frontier depredation.61 Thus the allusion works to supplement the border cartography and boundary politics of ‘In Two Fields’ with a Dark Age map of conflict. Through the centuries of violence, however, the ‘Exiled King’ of the poem has made himself ‘heard by the heart’ (Llwyd). He is a presence who is also an absence, a dihangwr o’r byddinoedd – in R. S. Thomas’s translation, a ‘deserter from the world’s armies’ (as was Waldo Williams himself in the eyes of the state throughout the 1950s). Thomas’s translation appropriately suggests that this deserter is a fugitive from ‘multinational’ UN ‘police action’ forces as well as from all sovereign armies. Rowan Williams opts for a more expansive rendering: ‘Who was it then … / … slipping past all our recruiting sergeants?’ The figure of the recruiting sergeant – introduced, Williams explains, as a divisive ‘shadowy counterforce … who tries to seduce in an opposite direction, or tries to “conscript” the transcendent liberator into human service’ – is an inspired choice since it works to assert the poem’s primary ­anti-­conscription campaign.62 ‘I think that’s just about defensible licence’, Williams continues (‘defensible’ itself being an interesting choice here), ‘given that we do speak of “conscripting” ideas for our purposes’. Mawr oedd cydnaid calonnau wedi eu rhew rhyn – ‘Great was the leaping together of hearts after the deadening ice’ (R. Gerallt Jones): line 38, and therefore formally the poem’s 38th Parallel. Significantly, it is another culturally replete line. ‘Waldo is the only person, so far as I know’, says Ned Thomas, ‘to use the word cydnaid.’63 The only poet to use it in modern Welsh literature, perhaps, but Williams would have been familiar with the word from various ­pre-­modern Welsh texts in which, significantly, its context is almost always military or violent. ­Pre-­eminent among those texts, I suggest, is that foundational ‘Welsh’ poem, Y Gododdin: the heroic elegy recording the disastrous attack by ‘a sort of commando force’64 of the Gododdin tribe (whose territories were located in the Brythonic ‘Old North’, now southern Scotland and northern England) against the Angles of Deira and Bernicia in around

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600, probably at what is now Catterick, north Yorkshire.65 Gwyr a gryssyassant buant gytneit, the ­poet-­warrior Aneirin sings in Y Gododdin: ‘warriors charged, leaping forward together’. In the spring of 1953, as the United Nations and Chinese and North Korean soldiers fought a bloody struggle for the tactically worthless Pork Chop Hill, Williams described the clash at Catterick as ‘the Welsh Thermopylae’ (Rh, p. 161). Tellingly, he did so in a review of Gwyn Williams’s study, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry (1953), in which the lines cited above are quoted.66 The ‘leaping’ attack described in The Gododdin thus fatally compromises the ostensibly positive image of hearts leaping together in ‘In Two Fields’ (a figure Williams glossed as signifying ‘the joy of the heart released’ (Rh, pp. 88–9)). Contemporary ‘joy’ is marked by traces of ­age-­old aggression. In addition, hostilities on the Korean peninsula are mapped back onto the Brythonic tribal territories of the Old North. The historical and archaeological narrative current in scholarly circles in Williams’s day was that the tribes of Wales were separated from their fellow Celts in the Old North around ad 616 by Northumbrian expansionism. In the light of that received narrative, Williams’s revivification of cydnaid in a contemporary, redemptive context collapses time and imaginatively repairs what William Rees in his highly influential Historical Atlas of Wales (published at the time of the Korean War in 1951) represented cartographically as ‘The Isolation of Wales’ (figure 6). Contemporary Wales is once again in dialogue with its ‘Old North’. ‘In Two Fields’ becomes a transhistorical, variorum map of ­Anglo-­Welsh relations; moreover, in an ­anarcho-­archipelagic move, that one word cydnaid also collapses the borders and disturbs the geographies of contemporary British state power. It is from rhew rhyn that the hearts are released – a debilitating ‘ice age’ (Conran, R. M. Jones and Rowan Williams), a ‘cruel freezing’ (Gwyn Jones), a ‘hard frost’ (R. S. Thomas), ‘hard ice’ (Clancy). Rhew rhyn, however, signifies more than emotional incapacity, a locking up of our ability to love. It is an image of disempowerment and paralysis central to Waldo Williams’s pacifist, anarchist response to the domination of the state and its ideological apparatus. As Williams remarks at the end of that 1956 ‘extended gloss’ on ‘In Two Fields’, ‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’: ‘the State’s authority over us is becoming monstrous. There is talk of moving twelve million of us to shelter from these islands. This is one of the great Ice Ages – a government’s ordinance can freeze us when the time comes’ (Rh, p. 318). Rhew rhyn is the Cold War within and between individuals and nations. Alan Llwyd

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6  The Isolation of Wales, from William Rees, An Historical Atlas of Wales: From Early to Modern Times (London: Faber and Faber, 1951). A cartographic representation of the historical narrative in which the Brythonic peoples of Wales were separated from the Brythonic tribes of the ‘Old North’ in the early seventh century AD – a separation imaginatively repaired in ‘In Two Fields’

explicitly invokes incarceration: ‘Hearts once imprisoned by frost were now leaping free’. This is a political ‘killing frost’ whose operations are also registered, as Judith Thompson has persuasively argued in a bravura

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new historicist analysis, by Coleridge (a formative influence on Williams) in his unsettled and unsettling ­cradle-­poem, ‘Frost at Midnight’, written during a period of state repression and surveillance in the 1790s: ‘The frost performs its secret ministry / … the secret ministry of cold.’67 In response to this big freeze, Williams dares to chart an ideological and imaginative thaw, and we cross the 38th line into the famous image of ‘fountains bursting towards the heavens / And falling back, their tears like the leaves of a tree’ (Clancy). (Translators have offered ‘bursting’, ‘bursting up’, ‘breaking out’, ‘reaching up’, ‘crashed up’ and ‘gushing’ for the action of Williams’s restorative waters, where ‘shooting up’ would have been an interesting choice, albeit rather a hostage to fortune.) ‘Tears’ is actually a printer’s error, as the poet explained: ‘When the poem appeared in Y Faner, dafnau [‘drops’] had become dagrau [‘tears’]. I thought this enriched the poem, and that the reader would recognize that they were tears of emotional release. I let the word be’ (Rh, p. 89). Conscripted into print on 13 June 1956, dafnau crosses a typographic border, undergoing, like the fountains themselves, a metamorphosis into dagrau. Williams chose to accept ‘tears’ as a kind of felix culpa when the poem appeared in Dail Pren at the end of 1956, no doubt recognizing that it was also more in tune with the stressed utterance of ‘In Two Fields’. Williams himself acknowledged that the most singular line in the whole poem – A’r nos trwy’r celloedd i’w mawrfrig ymennydd (Conran: ‘And Night through the cells of her ­wide-­branching brain’) in the last stanza – carries an allusion to George Meredith’s ‘Lucifer in Starlight’: ‘the stars, / Which are the brain of heaven’ (Rh, p. 97).68 One might also suggest an allusion here to two poems by Keats – already a presence in the poem in the phrase dail pren, two lines back across the poem’s 38th Parallel. (Williams himself acknowledged the Keatsian heritage of the phrase, citing the poet’s axiom: ‘if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’.69) The two Keats poems are ‘Ode to Psyche’ (‘branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain’) and ‘The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream’: I ached to see what things the hollow brain Behind enwombèd; what high tragedy In the dark secret chambers of her skull Was acting.70

The echo of ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ further boosts the political frequencies of ‘In Two Fields’. Dramatizing a ­post-­war universe in which the

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Titans have been violently overthrown by the Olympians, the poem articulates a ‘transcendental cosmopolitics’ (Leigh Hunt’s phrase) that commented directly on historical change and violence in revolutionary and ­post-­revolutionary Europe.71 And in the ­dream-­vision ‘portal’ to the poem, Keats sought explicitly to work through the poet’s responsibilities in a brutal age: from what position, and in what idiom, he asks, should the poet engage with a world he described elsewhere as ‘full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression’?72 The political climax of ‘In Two Fields’ is achieved in the final two lines in the image of the Exiled King walking ‘through some crisis in history’, as Williams put it in his gloss, to occupy the bwlch – the gap, breach or plenary absence – between the two fields. It is the moment all 38th Parallels are breached and dissolved. While the Korean demilitarized zone has ironically always been thoroughly militarized, the gap between the two fields becomes an authentic DMZ, a site of entente (a word that appropriately tries to meet itself halfway, a frustrated palindrome) and of positive contravention – a space that hints again at the arbitrariness and ephemerality of borders. Anthony Conran, R. M. Jones and R. S. Thomas offer ‘breach’ for bwlch; Clancy and Llwyd choose ‘gap’ and Gwyn Jones the more prosaic ‘gap in the hedge’; R. Gerallt Jones’s ‘void’ renders the aperture a vacuum rather than a space replete with possibility. Rowan Williams’s freer rendering again succeeds in registering the poem’s war ground: ‘He will arrive, the outlaw, / the huntsman, the lost heir making good his claim / to no man’s land.’ It is a bold choice: the breach here is that scarred, contested ground that has come to define the absurdity of fruitless ­face-­offs between entrenched forces – as Williams remarks, ‘the frontier, the place of terror between the battling armies’.73 But it is about to be transformed into a place of rapprochement by the presence that has accessed it. Rowan Williams’s gloss draws attention to the pun in his translation: the gap is also ‘“no man’s land”, which only the divine huntsman can claim as his own’.74 One should add that it is also no one man’s land and, in tune with the gender politics of Waldo Williams’s oeuvre, emphatically woman’s land, too. Embedding a work of imaginative literature in its material culture runs certain risks, one of which is a serious blunting of our capacity sensitively to distinguish a poem from a political tract. A thoroughgoing historicist analysis can easily traduce a poem by presenting it as a mere aspect or adjunct of history (witness various ­bloody-­minded readings of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, the poem with which I began this book’s

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atlas of culturally embedded maps, and a work that bequeathes its concern with borders and shifting waters to Waldo Williams). However, scrutinizing the ‘cosmopolitical’ cartography of ‘In Two Fields’, together with its investment in rescaling concepts of ground, territory and space, assists us in focusing the nuances of its literary representations and the multivocality of its protest. Maps are detailed inscriptions of particular histories; so, too, is a critical methodology that reveals the cartographic rubrics and entanglements of literary texts. Thus my discussion of ‘In Two Fields’ has sought to highlight the ways in which a ­Welsh-­language lyric pastoral, rooted in a topographical tradition more English than Welsh, functioned and continues to function as political intervention. Reading the poem through and across the borders of translation, I have argued that ‘In Two Fields’ is configured as a ­multi-­layered map of global ground – one that resists ‘hardening’ into a single, delimited configuration. Aware of the ways in which cartography constructs our world and is complicit in ‘the territorialisation of diverse forms of political domination and everyday violence’, Waldo Williams asks us to scrutinize the power relations inscribed – and naturalized – by maps.75 ‘Mewn Dau Gae’/‘In Two Fields’ enacts a historicized ordnance survey, a physical and psychic ‘debordering’, an imaginative obliteration of 38th Parallels.

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Conclusion: The Digital Literary Atlas of Wales

At the end of A History of Spaces (2004), John Pickles dared to imagine ‘new cartographies of geographies unhinged, plastic space and sliding signs’ that would be attuned to ‘new notions of nationhood, citizenship, state and territory’.1 He envisaged mappings characterized by a ‘new openness’, creative cartographies that would produce ‘dialectical, dynamic and metaphorical images’, and chartings of lived space ‘attentive to the serious consequences of the lines we draw and the borders we inscribe’. Such mappings, which act beyond a Cartesian plane, have always existed in the form of imaginative writing. However, the precise material and conceptual tools that a critical literary geography might enlist to explore how literary works creatively ‘unhinge’ geography remain to be identified. Charles Travis encodes an apt Beckettian equivocation in the title of an essay that considers the ‘shift’ in Samuel Beckett’s literary style and perception ‘from a latent Cartesian verisimilitude to a more phenomenological, fragmented and dissolute impression of place’: ‘Beyond the Cartesian pale’.2 The pun is itself a site of ­geographical-­linguistic restructuring (or folding) where plane becomes Dublin’s colonial pale. For Beckett, moving physically, culturally and conceptually beyond that pale involved rejecting ‘the scaffolding of space erected by Descartes in the seventeenth century’, together with the dualisms of a (post-)colonial Ireland, ‘through the embodied practices of travel and writing’.3 It is Travis who is responsible for directing Irish literary geography beyond both the Cartesian plane and the urban pale, in the form of the Digital

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Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949 (DLAI), based at Trinity College Dublin’s Arts and Humanities Research Institute, The Trinity Long Room Hub (http://www.tcd.ie/longroomhub­/digital-­atlas/). The stated aim of the DLAI is to provide ‘literary, historical and cartographic perspectives on Ireland … drawn from the works of fourteen Irish writers’ (not including Yeats). It is aimed at ‘academics and the public at large interested in the intersection of Irish culture, history and geography’. The site offers two main content areas: ‘Authors’ and ‘Maps’. The latter comprises four maps with 3-D ­terrain-­rendering capability that embody critical interpretations of groups of anglophone Irish texts. The platform is Google Maps, which hosts digital map data from companies such as Tele Atlas, Europa Technologies, TerraMetrics and GN France. Each map is accompanied by a discursive ‘essay’ with illustrative quotations relating to the ‘social, cultural and natural landscape[s]’ identified on the map in the form of coloured tabs; clicking the tabs calls up further quotations, various other maps and graphic images. The four main maps are as follows: 1. An ‘Emigration map’, tracing a ‘symbolic path’ of eastward emigration from Donegal to Derry, plotted from – that is, the result of a critical encounter with – Peadar O’Donnell’s first three novels. 2. A ­‘House-­island and provincial town map’, triangulating the terrain of the ‘disintegrating lifeworlds’ of the ­Anglo-­Irish ascendancy and ‘the rise of the Catholic bourgeoisie’ in the provincial contexts of the young Irish state, plotted from the ‘Big House’ novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane and Kate O’Brien. 3. A ‘Dublin bricolage map’ or a ‘composite Beckettian bricolage map’, whose tabs call up calligrams (reminiscent of the ‘weighted lists’ of ­‘word-­clouds’) that render Beckett’s early prose and verse spatially to convey his ‘phenomenological and fragmented, existential impression’ of modernity’s dislocating environments. 4. A ‘Northern impressions map’, which asks us to compare the representations of the rural and urban spaces, and the mythological and sectarian cultural landscapes, of Ulster in the work of Forrest Reid and Michael McLaverty. The ‘Writers’ area of the site allows the user to encounter the work and lives of the fourteen featured writers within various cartographic and spatial frames. Various critical ‘embeddings’ are prompted in each case

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by the inclusion of a discursive ‘Lifepath’, a brief critical essay and a timeline featuring four ‘Event types’ (‘History’, ‘Place/Biography’, ‘Place/Literary’ and ‘Publication/Composition’). Three examples of the dynamics of the ‘Authors’ area will suffice: Louis MacNeice Appearing as a curving line of tabs from Iceland to Barcelona, MacNeice’s various cultural ‘livings’ are plotted on a Google Earth projection. The visitor is also conducted on a 3-D ‘tour’ of a cartographic projection of Carrickfergus, on the shore of Belfast Lough, which is offered as the ­starting-­point of an exploration of a ‘literary geography … marked by a constellation of places linked by journeys which impart a sense of ­in-­betweeness, longing and desire’. Patrick Kavanagh An Ordnance Survey map, whose 3-D terrain we traverse at the intimate scalar level of individual field boundaries, enables a brief affective and critical inhabitation of ‘the lifeworlds of small farmers living amongst the rounded drumlin hills and fields of south County Monaghan’ as they are imagined in Kavanagh’s poetry (see figure 1).

1  Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949, http://www.tcd.ie/ longroomhub/digital-atlas. With thanks to Charles Travis, Trinity Long Room hub, Trinity College, Dublin

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Flann O’Brien O’Brien’s Dublin dérives are plotted on a digitized 1931 Ordnance Survey map (the hidden pun embedded in the map is Flann/flâneur) in what the DLAI calls a ‘cartographic bricolage’, ‘a kind of multidimensional emplotment’. ‘This type of mapping’, the accompanying essay states, ‘illustrates the ability of Geographical Information Systems to perform and tell “a single story organized from multiple and heterogeneous elements”’ – that is, to offer a critical synthesis of literary texts’ spatiality. To conclude Cartographies of Culture, I want to look not back over the contours of the book, but forward, to imagine an enterprise that would enable – and itself perform – a critical literary geography of Welsh writing in English: a Digital Literary Atlas of Wales (DLAW). Such a resource would be predicated on the principle that, as the new cartography has it, ‘everything is mappable’. At the same time, it would resist simply ‘imposing’ cartographic templates on literary works, and merely extracting various kinds of mappable data from them. Rather, by offering the user/reader an interactive platform on which to explore a variety of cartographic and geographical ‘contexts’ in relation to which a given author and literary work can meaningfully be located, the proposed Geographical Information System (GIS) would prompt a critical and affective inhabitation of the cultural dimensionality of a literary work.4 In addition, the various cartographic applications of the atlas would stimulate an identification with the structural and semiotic forms in which the literary text ­self-­consciously maps its own mappings. A Morettian quantitative extraction, and subsequent plotting, of ‘elements’ of the literary text would certainly be part of such a digital atlas, but such a move would always be part of a holistic critical intervention, not merely an exercise in ­literary-­historical ­census-­taking. Moreover, the atlas would be intent on visualizing difference. A palimpsest of charts (Ordnance Survey maps, census and cadastral maps, maps that inscribe community ‘knowledges’, psychogeographical sketches and local ‘resistance’ maps), graphic images, and 2- and 3-dimensional cartographic modelling and animation would be used to relativize (spatially and chronologically) the apparent geographical and cultural emplacements of the literary text. Thus the text would emerge energized by ‘deterritorializing lines of flight’ and by its own systems of ‘centrifugal displacements’.5 At the same time, the DLAW would assist us in seeing how a work of imaginative literature, and language itself,

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hanker after precise ‘livings’, cultural spaces (broadly understood) of embodied action. Thus, the maps and other graphic mappings invoked by the atlas would play critical methodologies off against each other: cartography as a trigger for historicist ‘embedding’ would contend with cartography as formalist provocation. The DLAW’s ‘raw’ archive of cartographic data would also include data sets relating to Wales in its physical, social, demographic, economic, religious and political aspects – an archive harnessing some of the capabilities of the American resource, Social Explorer, and some of the work of the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD).6 In addition, the DLAW would have a visual art archive, comprising examples of various ‘cartographic’ representations of Wales. Functioning also as a ‘cultural networking’ site, it would follow the example of The Culture Colony/Y Wladfa Newydd project (whose roots are in the activities of Paul Davies and the Beca Group) in having its archives populated by, and therefore ‘growing and evolving’ with, a community of readers.7 Fredric Jameson’s call for a ‘cognitive mapping’ that would enable us to ‘grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial and social confusion’ is as relevant and necessary now as it was when first articulated, almost thirty years ago. Enabling such cognitive and material acts – ‘the practical reconquest of a sense of place’ that could then be ‘projected outward onto larger national and global spaces’ – would constitute DLAW’s politics.8 The DLAW’s ‘users’ would emphatically be ‘readers’. The primary aim of the site would be to offer cartography as an innovative, culturally nuanced and critically ‘responsible’ heuristic through which to encounter Welsh writing in English. Like the DLAI, it would select a group of Welsh writers in English with an eye to coverage of gender, period, genre and cultural location (the last three creatively interpreted). It would go beyond the DLAI, however, in the range of cartographic and other visual material offered. And now, rather than further wishful statements, a question. What precise constellations of interactive cartographic and other visual material would facilitate new perspectives on, say, the following critical/ theoretical issues, and on their ‘place’ in the literary history of Welsh writing in English? 1. The gendered Cardiganshire;

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2. Margiad Evans’s concern with precise recursive transborder movements in Country Dance (1932); 3. The politics of music in the work of Dorothy Edwards;9 4. Alun Lewis’s fixation with maps lost or laid away;10 5. How the geographical imagination shapes the narrative forms of the Bildungroman that is Glyn Jones’s The Island of Apples (1965); 6. The ways in which the ‘kind of oval’ that R. S. Thomas identified as the geographical shape and space of his cultural and spiritual ‘pilgrimage’ might be used as a cartographic heuristic to map individual Thomas poems: ‘If one took a map of Wales, it would be easy enough to trace [a] geographical journey from being a child in Anglesey to being an old man in the Llŷn Peninsula’;11 7. The ways in which various characters ‘watch history’ in the ­post-­industrial spaces of Christopher Meredith’s Shifts (1988);12 8. The means by which Aberystwyth is transvalued (both parochialized and globalized) into parodic noir in the Louie Knight mysteries of Malcolm Pryce (2001–); 9. The structural effect and relation to narrative style of the vengeful Liverpudlians’ journey south through Wales in Niall Griffiths’s Stump (2003): ‘Where the fuck do I go now? … above the shrinking lake a cloud as wide as that lake and as dark fails to burst and begins to drift south. The sign reads: ABERYSTWYTH 62’);13 10. How the Radnorshire ­anti-­pastoral of Tom Bullough’s The Claude Glass (2007) prompts the reader to embrace a radical emotional cartography and think about ‘the ­world-­not-­as-­picture and the ­world-­not-­as-­exhibition’ (in defiance of the optical effects of the instrument that gives the novel its title);14 11. The significance of the fact that three of the literary ­re-­mappings in Seren’s New Stories from the Mabinogion series (2009–) were written in a shed in Wicklow, at the ­window-­table of the Petal Belle Café on New York’s Sullivan Street and in an internet cafe ‘off the Magnificent Mile in central Chicago’;15 12. How all the mappings identified above are located ­vis-­à-­vis the shared cartographies of ­Welsh-­language writing. To end with further, more general questions, and a challenge. How might a critical literary geography of Welsh writing in English equip itself to read (and thus deconstruct) what Alun Lewis called ‘the map of

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the spirit’s geography’?16 And how will it position itself in relation to what Tim Robinson describes as ‘that mysterious and neglected fourth dimension of cartography which extends deep into the self of the cartographer’?17 Literary studies should deploy the full methodological armoury of the social sciences, such as quantitative analysis (which would reveal the global spaces in which Welsh writing in English has taken place and been consumed, for example). But let us at the same time ensure that our goal is to analyse critically the cartographic ‘gene’ of the literary imagination. Moreover, a literary theory and criticism attentive to the complex modalities of the ‘folding landscapes’ of literary cartography must remain, again in the words of Tim Robinson, ‘faithful to more than the measurable’.18

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Notes

Notes to Introduction Wystan Curnow, ‘Mapping and the expanded field of contemporary art’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 254.  2 David Matless, ‘The English outlook: a mapping of leisure, 1918–1939’, in Nicholas Alfrey and Stephen Daniels (eds), Mapping the Landscape: Essays on Art and Cartography (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, Department of Art History, 1990), p. 29.  3 John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the ­Geo-­coded World (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 192.  4 See Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), pp. 111–55.  5 Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik, The Nature of Maps: Essays toward Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 86.  6 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 79, 120.  7 Stephen Daniels, ‘Maps of making’, Cultural Geographies, 17, 2 (2010), 181.  8 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald ­Nicholson-­Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 33.  9 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 11–27, and Graham Huggan, ‘Decolonizing the map: ­post-­colonialism, ­post-­structuralism and the cartographic connection’, Ariel, 20, 4 (October 1989), 125. 10 Jon May and Nigel Thrift (eds), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 1; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 222, 226; and see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 51–4.  1

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J. Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 5. 12 See Huggan, ‘Decolonizing the map’, 115–31, and Barbara Bender, ‘Subverting the Western gaze: mapping alternative worlds’, in Peter J. Ucko and Robert Layton (eds), The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 31–45. 13 Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers (eds), Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 1. 14 Ibid. 15 Quoted in Pickles, A History of Spaces, p. 11. 16 J. Brian Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica, 26, 2 (summer 1989), 7, 3. 17 Ibid., 4, 6, and Pickles, A History of Spaces, pp. 48, 107. 18 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 31. 19 William J. Smyth, ­Map-­making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006), p. 35. 20 Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, 13, 7. 21 See Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (San Antonio, Tex: Trinity University Press, 2009), p. 167; Mark S. Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 26–9; Daniel Dorling and David Fairbairn, Mapping: Ways of Representing the World (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 1997), pp. 40–1; John Pickles, ‘Texts, hermeneutics and propaganda maps’, in Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (eds), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 221. 22 Smyth, ­Map-­making, Landscapes and Memory, p. 63. 23 J. S. Keates, Understanding Maps, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1996), p. 167. 24 Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, trans. Tom Conley, ed. Edward H. Dahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 2; Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: mapping meaning’, in Mappings, p. 2. 25 See Pickles, ‘Texts, hermeneutics and propaganda maps’, p. 221. 26 Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 79; Keates, Understanding Maps, p. 86. 27 Jacob, The Sovereign Map, p. 6. 28 J. Brian Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in The New Nature of Maps, p. 53. 29 Michael P. Brown, Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 4. 30 Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds), Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 3. 31 Ibid. 11

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See, for example, David Buisseret (ed.), Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland; Gordon and Klein (eds), Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain; D. K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literature, Culture, Spaces (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005); and Eric Bulson, Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2007). 33 See May and Thrift (eds), Timespace, p. 1. See also Brown, Closet Space, p. 4. 34 Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: mapping meaning’, pp. 2–3. 35 Marc Brosseau, ‘Geography’s literature’, Progress in Human Geography, 18, 3 (1994), 335, 334. 36 See ibid., 342–7. 37 See Angharad Saunders, ‘Literary geography: reforging the connections’, Progress in Human Geography, 34, 4 (2010), 437–47. 38 Brosseau, ‘Geography’s literature’, 349. 39 Brooker and Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism, p. 4. 40 Andrew Thacker, ‘The idea of a critical literary geography’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics (‘The spatial imaginary’), 57 (winter 2005–6), 56. 41 Ibid., 63, 64, 73. 42 Pickles, A History of Spaces, p. 48. 43 See, for example, Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). One might suggest that Ian Davidson’s Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), which deals with contemporary US and UK poetry, is an example of a book by a Welsh and ­Wales-­based critic (and poet) that implicitly challenges the undertheorization of place and space in the context of Welsh writing in English. 44 Curnow, ‘Mapping and the expanded field of contemporary art’, p. 258. 45 See Francesca Rhydderch, ‘New pastoral’, New Welsh Review, 69 (autumn 2005), 3, and Duncan Campbell, ‘Walking the line’, in the same issue, p. 14. 46 http://www.literaturewales.org/xnew-2011-­literary-­tourism-­programme/, accessed 12 September 2010. 47 See Shelagh Hourahane, ‘Maps, myths and the politics of art’, in Iwan Bala (ed.), Certain Welsh Artists: Custodial Aesthetics in Contemporary Welsh Art (Bridgend: Seren, 1999), p. 70. 48 Ibid. 49 Tony Conran, All Hallows: Symphony in Three Movements. A Poem (Llandysul: Gomer, 1995), p. 46. 50 Pickles, A History of Spaces, p. 43. See also Jacob, The Sovereign Map, pp. 76–7, 103, 302. 51 Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: mapping meaning’, p. 2. 32

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For a salutary corrective that draws attention to the poem’s complex discursivity and its various locations of culture, see Alan Jones, ‘Modalities of cultural identity in the writings of Idris Davies and Alun Lewis’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2010), chapter 3. 53 See Idris Davies, The Angry Summer: A Poem of 1926, ed. Anthony Conran (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), p. xxxi. 54 Iwan Bala et al., Hon, Ynys y Galon: Delweddu Ynys Gwales (Llandysul: Gomer, 2007), p. 124. My translation. 55 See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article490766.ece and http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3715512.stm, accessed 26 August 2010. 56 See also Iwan Bala, ‘Horizon Wales: visual art and the postcolonial’, in Jane Aaron and Chris Williams (eds), Postcolonial Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), p. 248. 57 See Smyth, ­Map-­making, Landscapes and Memory, p. 21, and Pickles, A History of Spaces, p. 19. 58 Pickles, A History of Spaces, p. 15. 59 Jacob, The Sovereign Map, p. 189. 60 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 6. 61 Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 7. 62 See Pickles, ‘Texts, hermeneutics and propaganda maps’, pp. 193, 223, and Jacob, The Sovereign Map, p. 175. 63 Brosseau, ‘Geography’s literature’, 349. 64 Bulson, Novels, Maps, Modernity, p. 45. 65 Curnow, ‘Mapping and the expanded field of contemporary art’, p. 256. 66 P. D. A. Harvey’s term, quoted in Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England, p. 8. 67 Curnow, ‘Mapping and the expanded field of contemporary art’, p. 268. See also Katharine Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), and Katharine Harmon (ed.), The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). 68 See Chris Philo, ‘Foucault’s geographies’, in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 227. 69 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 3. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., pp. 115, 124, 5. 72 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), p. 54. 73 Ibid., p. 56. 74 Ibid., p. 38. 75 Ibid., p. 1. 76 Robert T. Tally, review of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, 68, 1 (March 2007), 134. 77 See the responses to Moretti’s work at http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/ book_notes_franco_morettis_graphs_maps_trees/#6594, accessed 2 September 52

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78

81 82 79 80



83



84



85 86



87

90 88 89

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2010. For the full debate, see Jonathan Goodwin and John Holbo (eds), Reading Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Responses to Franco Moretti (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2011). See Jonathan Arac, ­‘Anglo-­globalism?’, New Left Review, 16 (July/August 2002), 35–45. Tally, review of Franco Moretti, 134. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, p. 5 n. Ibid., p. 4. Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 113. See Ogborn and Withers (eds), Georgian Geographies, p. 1; David C. Harvey et al. (eds), Celtic Geographies: Old Cultures, New Times (London: Routledge, 2002); and Joyce Davidson et al. (eds), Emotional Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), in particular the chapter by Owain Jones, ‘An ecology of emotion, memory, self and landscape’, pp. 205–18. See Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–2. See Saunders, ‘Literary geography: reforging the connections’, 445. Bobi Jones, ­‘Anglo-­Welsh: more definition’, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, 16 (February/March 1973), 11–12. Conran and others have already made their own case on this score: see Tony Conran, ‘Gerard Hopkins as an ­Anglo-­Welsh poet’, in Frontiers in ­Anglo-­Welsh Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 74–91. Quoted in Pickles, A History of Spaces, p. 47. Bender, ‘Subverting the Western gaze’, p. 42. See Pickles, A History of Spaces, p. 192, where the author invokes Etienne Balibar.

Notes to Chapter 1 Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 32.  2 Ibid., pp. 55, 39, 41.  3 See, for example, Thomas McFarland, William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 1–33, and Charles J. Rzepka, ‘Pictures of the mind: iron and charcoal, “ouzy” tides and “vagrant dwellers” at Tintern, 1798’, Studies in Romanticism, 42, 2 (summer 2003), 155–85.  4 See J. Brian Harley, ‘Text and contexts in the interpretation of early maps’, in J. Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore, Mass.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 45.  5 ll. 9–10: William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 116. All quotations from ‘Tintern Abbey’ are taken from this edition, hereafter LB.  1

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Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and ­Anglo-­European Spaces (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 70.  7 David Miall, ‘Locating Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” and the community with nature’, Romanticism on the Net, 20 (November 2000), http://www.erudit.org/ revue/ron/2000/v/n20/005949ar.html, accessed 16 January 2009.  8 James M. Garrett, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 159.  9 One exception is Andrew Bennett’s thoughtful discussion of the tensions in ‘Tintern Abbey’ between ‘composition’ (associated with rural perambulation) and ‘writing’ (as grounding ‘urban’ condition); see Wordsworth’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 42–57. 10 Compare William Gilpin’s remarks in 1770 with those of Richard Colt Hoare in 1797: William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 2nd edn (London: R. Blamire, 1789), p. 47: ‘were the building ever so beautiful, incompassed as it is with shabby houses, it could make no appearance from the river. From a stand near the road, it is seen to more advantage’; M. W. Thompson (ed.), The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare through Wales and England, 1793–1810 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), p. 83: ‘It looks very well from the opposite side of the river.’ 11 See Robert Stradling, ‘England’s glory: sensibilities of place in English music, 1900–1950’, in Andrew Leyshon et al., The Place of Music (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), p. 177. 12 See Duncan Campbell, ‘Walking the line’, New Welsh Review, 69 (autumn 2005), 13–18. 13 See Rachel Hewitt, ‘“Eyes to the blind”: telescopes, theodolites and failing vision in William Wordsworth’s landscape poetry’, Journal of Literature and Science, 1, 1 (2007), 5–23; eadem, ‘Wordsworth and the Ordnance Survey in Ireland: “dreaming o’er the map of things”’, The Wordsworth Circle, 37, 2 (2006), 80–5; Ron Broglio, ‘Mapping British earth and sky’, The Wordsworth Circle, 33, 2 (2002), 70–6; and Wiley, Romantic Geography, pp. 143–76. 14 See http://www.canfoh.org/Intro&Hist/history_of_hydrography.htm, accessed 16 January 2009, and Andrew S. Cook’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Dalrymple, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7044, accessed 16 January 2009. 15 See Simon Whitehead, ‘A complex experiential map: 22 tormentil’, New Welsh Review, 69 (autumn 2005), 77–80. 16 See Paul van der Brink, ‘River landscapes: the origin and development of the printed river map in the Netherlands, 1725–1795’, Imago Mundi, 52 (2000), 66–78. 17 See Olwen Caradoc Evans, Marine Plans and Charts of Wales (London: Map Collectors’ Circle, 1969), and A. H. W. Robinson, Marine Cartography in Britain: A History of the Sea Chart to 1855 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1962). 18 Carolyn Cartier and Alan Lew, ‘Touristed landscapes/seductions of place’, in Carolyn Cartier and Alan Lew (eds), Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), pp. 4, 5.  6

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Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 6. 21 See Donald E. Hayden, Wordsworth’s Travels in Wales and Ireland (Tulsa: University of Tulsa, 1985), p. 27. 22 Jared Curtis (ed.), The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), p. 15. 23 Quoted in LB, p. 357. 24 Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1851), I, p. 117. 25 John Bard McNulty, ‘Wordsworth’s tour of the Wye: 1798’, Modern Language Notes, 60, 5 (1945), 293. 26 See Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography. The Early Years, 1770– 1803 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 402, and Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770–1799 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 243. Donald E. Hayden remarks that ‘As to questions about the actual date of composition, I think we cannot do better than to follow Reed’s suggestions … This scheme balances Wordsworth’s comment that he began the poem as he left Tintern on 13 July with his other comment that he took four days to compose it’: Wordsworth’s Travels, p. 32. The one unresolved issue seems to be how far Wordsworth and Dorothy sailed up the River Avon on 13 July before disembarking and walking down the hill from Clifton to Bristol; see McNulty, ‘Wordsworth’s tour of the Wye’, 291, and Hayden, Wordsworth’s Travels, p. 30. 27 Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe (eds), Border Poetics ­De-­limited (Hamburg: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2007), p. 13. 28 Border crossings and the ‘debatability’ of geographical, historical and discip­ linary boundaries in the Romantic period are at present very much at the forefront of an increasingly devolved Romanticism. See Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington (eds), Romanticism’s Debatable Lands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Jeffrey Cass and Larry Peer (eds), Romantic Border Crossings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 29 William Coxe, An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, Illustrated with Views by Sir R. C. Hoare, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1801), I, p. 1. 30 David Williams, The History of Monmouthshire (London: H. Baldwin, 1796), p. 9. A number of tours remark on the ­cross-­border, ­trans-­county vistas afforded by elevated spots along the Wye Valley and Severn Estuary – for example, T. H. Fielding’s A Picturesque Description of the River Wye (London: Ackermann & Co., 1841), p. 32: ‘the eye wanders to the distant horizon, as it follows the retiring lines of the blue lands of Somersetshire’. 31 Coxe, An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, II, pp. 401–2. 32 Charles Heath, The Excursion Down the Wye from Ross to Monmouth (Monmouth: C. Heath, 1808), n.p. 33 The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, p. 83. 34 For the concept of ‘timespace’ or ­‘time-­geography’, see Martin Gren, ‘Time-­ geography matters’, in Jon May and Nigel Thrift (eds), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 208–25. See also Karen Davies, 19 20

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‘Responsibility and daily life: reflections over timespace’ in the same volume, pp. 133–48. For a suggestive discussion of the operations of a ‘tidal chronotope’ in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, see Schimanski and Wolfe (eds), Border Poetics ­De-­limited, pp. 217–34. Heath, The Excursion Down the Wye, n.p. Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, p. 25. A. M. Culyer, Recollections of a Visit to Llanbeder [sic] in the County of Brecon with Remarks on an Excursion down the River Wye from Ross to Chepstow (1807), unpublished manuscript tour, National Library of Wales, MS 784A, 125. Henry Skrine, Two Successive Tours throughout the Whole of Wales, with Several of the Adjacent English Counties (London: J. Turner, 1812), pp. 5–6. See R. J. Fertel, ‘The Wye’s “sweet inland murmur”’, The Wordsworth Circle, 16, 3 (1985), 134–5. Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, p. 46. McFarland, Intensity and Achievement, p. 40. Wordsworth’s note on the poem’s formal pulse was added to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads; LB, p. 357. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 76–7. Pamela Woof’s ‘Introductory essay’, in Robert Woof and Stephen Hebron, Towards Tintern Abbey: A Bicentenary Celebration of ‘Lyrical Ballads’, 1798 (Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 1998), pp. 53, 52. See McFarland, Intensity and Achievement, pp. 38–40, 47, 51–2, 55. Angharad Saunders, ‘Literary geography: reforging the connections’, Progress in Human Geography, 34, 4 (2010), 444, 447. Ibid., 444, 450. Ibid., 445. Gren, ­‘Time-­geography matters’, p. 210. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 5. Ibid., p. 46. For this set of data and many stimulating discussions, I am extremely grateful to Dr Robert Barber, associate director of the Centre for Microfluidics and Microsystems Modelling in the Computational Science and Engineering Department at Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington, UK. Regarding the choice of Avonmouth (rather than, say, Beachley) as the data source, Barber notes that ‘Avonmouth constants’ provide ‘a better chance of predicting “historical tides” since the longer data sets used to compute the Avonmouth harmonic constituents [“the harmonic elements in a mathematical expression for the ­tide-­producing force, and in corresponding formulae for the tide or tidal current; each constituent represents a periodic change or variation in the relative positions of the Earth, Sun and Moon”] will probably lead to more stable harmonic constants [“The amplitudes and epochs of the harmonic constituents of the tide, or tidal current at any place”] and therefore better predictions … XTide predictions for Avonmouth have used c.14.9 years of input data and the subsequent analysis extracted 82 constituents, and the 40 constituents of highest amplitude were then retained for tidal

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55 56 57 58 53 54

61 59 60



62



63

66 67 64 65



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prediction’ (personal correspondence). The definitions in square brackets are taken from http://www.waterlevels.gc.ca/english/glossary/H.shtml, accessed 16 January 2009. It should be noted that metereological ‘forcing’ has an effect on tides; no unusual weather events were recorded, however, for 10–13 July 1798. Schimanski and Wolfe (eds), Border Poetics ­De-­limited, p. 13. Lamont and Rossington (eds), Romanticism’s Debatable Lands, p. 5. Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, pp. 7, 125–47. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, p. 46. See ibid., pp. 43–4. See, for example, The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, p. 82 (at Goodrich): ‘Division of the two counties a hedge running in a straight direction up the hill; on the Hereford side fern and wild ground, on the Monmouth side copse wood and timber. A little further on the left the counties of Hereford and Gloucester are divided by a little brook’; and p. 97: ‘Follow the road to Crickhowell for about four miles and enter Brecknockshire, the crossing marked by a boundary stone near the roadside’; and Culyer, Recollections of a Visit to Llanbeder, p. 104 (near Welsh Bicknor, ­south-­east of Goodrich): ‘Having passed the Church, the Boatmen shewed us a Rock lying in the bed of the river called the County rock, as marking the boundaries of the three Counties of Monmouth, Hereford & Gloucester – from this Point, the right bank lies in Herefordshire & the left in Gloucestershire.’ Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, p. 44. Woof, ‘Introductory essay’, Towards Tintern Abbey, p. 52. See Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 121. See Philip Cox, Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 55–6. See J. Bard McNulty, ­‘Self-­awareness in the making of “Tintern Abbey”’, The Wordsworth Circle, 12, 2 (1981), 97–100. Woof, ‘Introductory essay’, Towards Tintern Abbey, p. 54. Fielding, A Picturesque Description of the River Wye, p. 32. The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, p. 96. In Gipin’s Observations, Wordsworth would have read the story of an ‘adventurous fellow’ who ‘for a wager, once navigated a coricle [sic] as far as the isle of Lundy, at the mouth of the ­Bristol-­channel. A full fortnight, or more, he spent in this dangerous voyage; and it was happy for him, that it was a fortnight of serene weather. Many a current, and many an eddy; many a flowing tide, and many an ebbing one, afforded him occasion to exert all his skill, and dexterity. Sometimes his little bark was carried far to leeward; and sometimes as far to windward: but still he recovered his course; persevered in his undertaking; and at length happily atchieved [sic] it. When he returned to the ­New-­Weir, report says, the account of his expedition was received like a voyage round the world’: Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, p. 40. Woof, ‘Introductory essay’, Towards Tintern Abbey, p. 55. ll. 94–103. David Miall remarks that Wordsworth’s ‘sense of a “motion” or “spirit” that “rolls through all things”’ is ‘reminiscent of the rolling Wye’: ‘Locating Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” and the community with nature’. My

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contention is that we are dealing with physical sensation rather than with a more abstract ‘sense’ – fundamentally motivated by, not merely figurally ‘reminiscent of’, moving (estuarine, not riverine) water. For an interpretation of the offing as a ‘figure of the border’, see Schimanski and Wolfe (eds), Border Poetics ­De-­limited, pp. 217–34. On 20 October 1800, the young Humphry Davy wrote from the ‘Pneumatic Institution’ in Hotwells, Bristol to his mathematician friend Davies Giddy, describing a recent trip ‘to see Tintern Abbey by moonlight’. His account gives some sense of how difficult the ­Severn-­and-­Wye water journey the Wordsworths took could be, given unfavourable conditions: ‘After viewing for three hours all the varieties of light & shade which a bright full moon & a blue sky could exibit [sic] in this magnificent ruin; and wandering for three days among the colored woods & rocks surrounding the river between Monmouth & Chepstow we arrived on the fourth day at Bristol having undergone (to balance against the pleasures of the tour) the fatigues of a stormy voyage down the Wye, across the mouth of the Severn & up the Avon.’ I am grateful to Tim Fulford for the reference. The Avonmouth gibbets may also be said to ghost the ‘mouldering’ ­‘gibbet-­mast’ that Wordsworth was to describe the following year in one of the famous ‘spots of time’ in the ­two-­part Prelude; see part 1, ll. 288–327. See Richard Warner, A Walk through Wales, in August 1797 (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1798), pp. 9–10. As Duncan Wu notes, ‘When [Wordsworth] and Dorothy were in Bath during July [1798], just before setting off on their Wye tour, they ate several meals in Warner’s company’: Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 143.

Notes to Chapter 2 Paul L. Mariani, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (London: Viking, 2008), p. 167. See C. C. Abbott (ed.), Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, including his Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 143.  3 See Walter J. Ong, Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), pp. 11, 17.  4 Robert Bernard Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 265.  5 Ong, Hopkins, the Self, and God, p. 69.  6 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 200, 205, 212, 220, 221.  7 Christopher Devlin, SJ (ed.), The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 173 (see also pp. 132 and 196). Hereafter S. For further examples of prescribed visualizations, see Halcyon Backhouse (ed.), The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), pp. 15, 20, 27, 45. Hopkins’s own account of the Composition of Place is reported in the records of the Essay Society at St Beuno’s: the object was ‘to make the Exercitant present in spirit at the scenes,  1  2

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 8



 9 10



11



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15 16



17

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persons, etc. so that they may really act on him and he on them’: see Alfred Thomas, Hopkins the Jesuit: The Years of Training (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 178 n. Norman White, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Wales (Bridgend: Seren, 1998), p. 82. Gladys Mary Coles has remarked that ‘Hopkins’s love of the Vale of Clwyd’ is ‘expressed indirectly’ in the Dominical: see New Welsh Review, II, 3 (winter 1989–90), 39 n. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 197. ll. 49–50; Norman H. Mackenzie (ed.), The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 120. Hereafter PW. See Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli, Body Symbolism in the Bible, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2001), pp. 128ff. See Catherine Phillips (ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 335, and C. C. Abbott (ed.), The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, 2nd imp. rev. (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 79. See Ong, Hopkins, the Self, and God, pp. 71, 72. See S, p. 186, in which Hopkins meditates on the act of constructing the ‘scape’ of the Last Supper. Letters to Robert Bridges, p. 46. See Jackie Feldman, ‘Constructing a shared Bible land: Jewish Israeli guiding performances for Protestant pilgrims’, American Ethnologist, 34, 2 (2007), 351, 354. Norman White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 272. Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 266. Ibid. White, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Wales, p. 83. Ibid., and see White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography, p. 272. Mariani, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, p. 168. Joseph J. Feeney, The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 164, 169. Burke O. Long, Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models and Fantasy Travels (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 174; Feldman, ‘Construct­ing a shared Bible land’, 353. See John Kirtland Wright, ‘Notes on early American geopiety’, in John Kirkland Wright, Human Nature in Geography: Fourteen Papers, 1925–1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 250–85. See Long, Imagining the Holy Land, pp. 1, 171, 175. See Timothy K. Beal, Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), pp. 27–8. Long, Imagining the Holy Land, pp. 163, 168, 41. See Catherine Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. xi. See also R. K. R. Thornton, All My Eyes See: The Visual World of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Sunderland: Ceolfrith Press, 1975).

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White, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Wales, pp. 18–19. See ibid., p. 111. 32 See Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 9. Hereafter J. See also Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World, p. 123. 33 Quoted in Ong, Hopkins, the Self, and God, pp. 8–9. 34 On holiday on the Isle of Man in 1872, he had described the landscape as ‘plotted and painted with the squares of the fields’: see J, p. 222. 35 White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography, p. 233. 36 Abbott (ed.), Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, pp. 124–5. 37 J, pp. 257–8. See also White, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Wales, pp. 26, 29, 40, 128–9. 38 J, p. 261. 39 D. K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), p. 20. 40 J, p. 261. For other ascents and vistas that autumn, see J, p. 260 (Moel Maenefa) and p. 263 (Moel y Parc). On the summit of Moel Famau, Hopkins encountered the Egyptian ‘Jubilee Tower erected in honour of George III’s 50th year of royalty’, which had fallen in a storm in 1862. It ‘cumbers the hilltop and interrupts the view’, said Hopkins: Abbott (ed.), Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 137. 41 See J. Brian Harley, The Historian’s Guide to Ordnance Survey Maps (London: National Council of Social Service, 1964), p. 20. 42 Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), p. 159. 43 See John Pickles, ‘Texts, hermeneutics and propaganda maps’, in Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (eds), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 221. 44 Ibid. 45 Harley, The Historian’s Guide to Ordnance Survey Maps, p. 25. 46 W. A. Seymour (ed.), A History of the Ordnance Survey (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), p. 169. 47 See J. Brian Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica, 26, 2 (summer 1989), 12, 7. 48 Kathleen Stewart Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography: photographic surveys by the royal engineers in the Holy Land, 1864–68’, in Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan (eds), Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), p. 227. 49 Eitan ­Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 17. 50 See John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in ­Nineteenth-­century American Art and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 7–8. 51 Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 228. 52 See H. V. Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands during the 19th Century (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1903), pp. 561–2. 30 31

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See Dov Gavish, A Survey of Palestine under the British Mandate, 1920–1948 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), pp. 5–12. 54 Quoted in Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 236. 55 See Long, Imagining the Holy Land, pp. 180, 195, 199. 56 Ibid., p. 179. 57 Ibid., p. 183. 58 Gavish, A Survey of Palestine under the British Mandate, p. 3. 59 Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 89. 60 See Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 230. As Eitan ­Bar-­Yosef reminds us: ‘with the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, Palestine’s strategic significance was considerably enhanced’: The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 3. 61 John James Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), p. 1. 62 Quoted in Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 226. 63 See Davis, The Landscape of Belief, pp. 45, 48. 64 Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 226. 65 Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem, p. 83. 66 Ibid., p. 3. 67 Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 228. 68 See Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem, pp. 68, 75. 69 Ibid., p. 71. 70 See ibid., pp. 84, 104. 71 Ibid., p. 117. See also C. R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener, The Survey of Western Palestine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archae­ ology, 3 vols (London: The Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1881), I (Sheets I–VI), p. 28. 72 ­Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 73. 73 See Gavish, A Survey of Palestine under the British Mandate, p. 21. 74 Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land, 1839–1899 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 106. 75 Charles William Wilson and Charles Warren, The Recovery of Jerusalem: A Narrative of Exploration and Discovery in the City and the Holy Land, ed. Walter Morrison (London: R. Bentley, 1871). Arthur Penrhyn Stanley wrote in the Introduction: ‘It is hoped … that the adoption for its title of the old Crusading watchword, the “Recovery of Jerusalem”, will be thought germane to the general object of the Society [the PEF] under whose auspices it is put forth’ (p. vii). 76 See Thomas, Hopkins the Jesuit, pp. 228, 229, 242. 77 Wilson and Warren, The Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 340. 78 Ibid., p. 339. 79 William McClure Thomson in The Land and the Book (1858) similarly popularized the idea of the Holy Land as textual revelation; see Davis, The Landscape of Belief, p. 47. 80 Davis, The Landscape of Belief, p. 3.   81 Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 41. 53

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For a lively analysis of a variety of ­twenty-­first-­century cartographic representations of Palestine as the ­wished-­for ­‘geo-­body’ of the State, together with the ­counter-­cartographies they call forth, see Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), pp. 240–55.   83 Quoted in ­Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 107.   84 Quoted in Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 229.   85 My thanks to Catherine Phillips for alerting me to the presence of Stanley’s volume in the Oxford Union Library, to which Hopkins would have turned for books as a student.   86 Joan R. Branham, ‘The temple that won’t quit: constructing sacred space in Orlando’s Holy Land experience theme park’, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 36, 3 (autumn 2008), 24.   87 ­Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 72.   88 Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 239.   89 Zur Shalev, ‘Mapping the Holy Land, mapping sacred scholarship’, SBL Forum, available online at http:­//sbl-­site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=107, accessed 10 March 2010.   90 See ­Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 127.   91 See ibid., p. 128.   92 Ibid., p. 13.   93 Ibid., p. 107.   94 See Long, Imagining the Holy Land, pp. 36, 40, 44. See also Beal, Roadside Religion, passim.   95 See Nir, The Bible and the Image, pp. 5, 6, 48, 57. See also Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, p. 231.   96 Nir, The Bible and the Image, p. 97.   97 Davis, The Landscape of Belief, p. 77.   98 See Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, pp. 240–1, and Davis, The Landscape of Belief, p. 75.   99 Long, Imagining the Holy Land, p. 128. 100 Davis, The Landscape of Belief, p. 75. 101 Ibid. 102 See Long, Imagining the Holy Land, pp. 2, 5, 6. 103 Beal, Roadside Religion, p. 26. 104 See Howe, ‘Mapping a sacred geography’, pp. 228, 241. 105 ­Yi-­Fu Tuan, ‘Sacred space: explorations of an idea’, in M. P. Conzen and Karl W. Butzer (eds), Dimensions of Human Geography: Essays on Some Familiar and Neglected Themes (Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper 186, 1978), p. 90; Yi-fu Tuan, ‘Geopiety: a theme in man’s attachment to nature and to place’, in David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (eds), Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John Kirtland White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 13. 106 ­Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 8. 107 See ibid., pp. 10, 90. 108 Ibid., p. 16. 109 See ibid., p. 85.   82

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Wilson and Warren, Recovering Jerusalem, p. 337. ­Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 10. 112 Dorian Llywelyn, Sacred Place, Chosen People: Land and National Identity in Welsh Spirituality (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), p. 8. See also Grahame Davies (ed.), The Chosen People: Wales and the Jews (Bridgend: Seren, 2002). 113 See chapter 1 of Jasmine Donahaye’s forthcoming study, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). 114 Llywelyn, Sacred Place, Chosen People, p. 8. 115 Obenzinger, American Palestine, p. xx. 116 Llywelyn, Sacred Place, Chosen People, p. 77. 117 See John Mills, Palestina: Sef Hanes Taith i Ymweld ag Iuddewon Gwlad Canaan [Palestine: Or An Account of a Journey to Visit the Jews of The Land of Canaan] (Llanidloes: Richard Mills, 1858), pp. 504, 505. Mills is obsessed with the cartographic and geopolitical consequences of establishing a successful, independent Welsh settlement in the Holy Land. See also Jasmine Donahaye, ‘How are the mighty fallen’, Planet, 183 (June/July 2007), 41–9. 118 Llywelyn, Sacred Place, Chosen People, p. 106. 119 See ibid., p. 112. 120 See John Mills, Daearyddiaeth Ysgrythyrol [Scriptural Geography] (Llanidloes: Richard Mills, 1861), p. 57; Derec Llwyd Morgan, ‘Canys Bechan Yw’: Y Genedl Etholedig yn ein Llenyddiaeth [‘For She is Small’: The Chosen People in Our Literature] (Aberystwyth: University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1994), p. 9; and Long, Imagining the Holy Land, p. 2. 121 Jasmine Donahaye, ‘“By whom shall she arise? For she is small”: the ­Wales-­Israel tradition in the Edwardian period’, in Eitan ­Bar-­Yosef and Nadia Valman (eds), ‘The Jew’ in ­Late-­Victorian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 164. 122 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, in Connection with their History, 4th edn (London: John Murray, 1856), pp. 101, 102, 123. See also pp. 137–8. 123 See John Harvey, Image of the Invisible: The Visualization of Religion in the Welsh Nonconformist Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 97–102. 124 The map is reproduced and discussed by Harvey in ibid., pp. 97–8. 125 Ibid., p. 97. 126 Ibid. 127 See Feldman, ‘Constructing a shared Bible land’, 367. 128 Long, Imagining the Holy Land, p. 180. See also p. 5. 129 See Jeffrey B. Loomis, Dayspring in Darkness: Sacrament in Hopkins (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1988), passim. 130 Ibid., p. 22. 131 Wilson and Warren, The Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 359. See also Christopher Devlin’s reactionary note, supporting Hopkins’s geography: S, p. 314. 132 Wilson and Warren, The Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 382. 133 For the debate surrounding the various locations of the miracle, see William McClure Thomson, The Land and the Book, Or, Biblical Illustrations drawn 110 111

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from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1864), pp. 372, 398; Wilson and Warren, The Recovery of Jerusalem, pp. 359, 380–1; Jerome ­Murphy-­O’Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide, 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 314, 316; and Yohanan Aharoni and Michael ­Avi-­Yonah, The Macmillan Bible Atlas (London: Macmillan, 1968), map 23. 134 See Feldman, ‘Constructing a shared Bible land’, 361–2. 135 J, p. 258. 136 White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography, p. 234. 137 J, p. 261. 138 Tony Conran, Frontiers in ­Anglo-­Welsh Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), p. 79. 139 See Feldman, ‘Constructing a shared Bible land’, 355. 140 Jill Muller, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 38. 141 Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 8. 142 ­Bar-­Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, p. 299. 143 Here I inflect a concept discussed by Talissa J. Ford in ‘“Jerusalem is scattered abroad”: Blake’s Ottoman geographies’, Studies in Romanticism, 47, 4 (winter 2008), 532. 144 Ibid., 548. 145 Long, Imagining the Holy Land, p. 200. 146 Ibid., p. 108. 147 J, p. 258. 148 Abbott (ed.), Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 126. 149 See White, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Wales, p. 154. 150 See White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography, p. 234. 151 Ibid., p. 246. 152 Muller, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism, p. 67. 153 Ibid., pp. 65–6. 154 Elisabeth W. Schneider, The Dragon in the Gate: Studies in the Poetry of G. M. Hopkins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 16. See also White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography, p. 253. 155 Manley Hopkins, The Port of Refuge, or Advice and Instructions to the ­Master-­mariner in Situations of Doubt, Difficulty, and Danger (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1873), p. 73. 156 Ibid., p. 88. 157 Ibid., p. 218. 158 White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography, p. 272. 159 See Long, Imagining the Holy Land, p. 176. 160 Ibid., p. 177.

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Notes to Chapter 3 National Library of Wales, Brenda Chamberlain Manuscripts, Joan Rhys Collection (Size B, Box 2; Picture Store 3); 020030384/1 and 2. See also NLW MS 21501E/68.  2 Brenda Chamberlain, ­Tide-­race (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962), p. 220–1. Hereafter TR.  3 Brenda Chamberlain, A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), p. 14. Hereafter RoV.  4 See Godfrey Baldacchino, ‘The coming of age of island studies’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 95, 3 (2004), 272.  5 Linda Adams, ‘“Fieldwork”: the Caseg Broadsheets and the Welsh anthropologist’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 5 (1999), 53.  6 Ibid., 63.  7 See Jill Piercy, ‘Between two arts’, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, 68 (April/ May 1988), 77–86.  8 See Pete Hay, ‘A phenomenology of islands’, Island Studies Journal, 1, 1 (2006), 24, and Godfrey Baldacchino, ‘Islands, island studies, island studies journal’, Island Studies Journal, 1, 1 (2006), 5.  9 The poem would become part II, ii of Chamberlain’s only poetry collection, The Green Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). 10 Alan Twelves, quoting Chamberlain; cited in Katherine Elizabeth Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’ (unpublished MA thesis, University College of Swansea, 1976), 245. 11 Brenda Chamberlain, ­Tide-­race (Bridgend: Seren, 1987), p. 225. 12 R. M. Lockley, I Know an Island, ­‘Country-­Lover’s Library’ edn (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1947), p. 95. 13 The mention of ‘Jane & Eddie’ on this second map gives a terminus post quem of 1958, the date of their marriage. Both maps were certainly drawn on Bardsey, which Chamberlain left in 1962. I am very grateful to Christine Evans for information regarding the Bardsey families. 14 Anne L. ­Price-­Owen, ‘Portrait of the artist: a review of Chamberlain’s retrospective exhibition of 1988/9’, Poetry Wales, 24, 4 (spring 1989), 24. 15 Quoted in Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 270. 16 R. M. Lockley, Islands Round Britain (London: Collins, 1945), p. 25. 17 See Hay, ‘A phenomenology of islands’, 21. 18 See Alwyn D. Rees, Life in a Welsh Countryside: A Social Study of Llanfihangel yng Ngwynfa (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1950), pp. 73–7 and 91. 19 Anthony Conran, ‘The writings of Brenda Chamberlain’, The ­Anglo-­Welsh Review, 20, 46 (spring 1972), 21. 20 See Piercy, ‘Between two arts’, 85. 21 Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet: A ­Self-­study in Literature and Political Ideas, ed. Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. 310. 22 Brenda Chamberlain and John Petts, ‘From Other Hills’, The Welsh Review, 2, 4 (November 1939), 197–205. 23 MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, pp. 309–10.  1

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David Mellor et al., Recording Britain: A Pictorial Domesday of ­Pre-­war Britain (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1990), p. 7. 25 Ibid. For a stimulating reading of the ways in which the early poems of R. S. Thomas respond to the ‘colonial’ aesthetics of the Recording Britain project, see M. Wynn Thomas, ‘For Wales, see landscape: early R. S. Thomas and the English topographical tradition’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 10 (2005), 1–31. 26 Alison Smith, John Petts and the Caseg Press (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2000), p. 18. 27 See the following – all of which, apart from ‘Poem for Five Airmen’, appeared in The Green Heart: ‘Dead Ponies’ (first published in The Dublin Magazine, 1941); ‘Shrove Tuesday’ (first published in Life and Letters, 1941); ‘To Dafydd Coed Mourning his ­Mountain-­broken Dog’ (first published in The Dublin Magazine, 1942); ‘I Took No Vows’ (first published, in part, as Caseg Broadsheet 4, 1942); ‘Dead Climber’ (first published in M. J. Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime, (London: Faber, 1942)); ‘You, Who in April Laughed’ (first published in Poetry Quarterly, 1943); and ‘Poem for Five Airmen’ (The Welsh Review, 1944). ‘Christmas Eve’ (first published in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1949) is a later addition to this ‘mountain’ map. 28 See Suzanne Bosman, The National Gallery in Wartime (London: The National Gallery, 2008), pp. 73–89. 29 Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 266. 30 Adams, ‘“Fieldwork”: the Caseg Broadsheets and the Welsh anthropologist’, 66; David Mellor (ed.), A Paradise Lost: The ­Neo-­Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935–55 (London: Lund Humphries, 1987), p. 35. 31 Iwan Bala, ‘Horizon Wales: visual art and the postcolonial’, in Jane Aaron and Chris Williams (eds), Postcolonial Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), p. 244. 32 See Spalding, John Piper, pp. 266–79, and David Fraser Jenkins, John Piper: The Forties (London: Philip Watson Publishers/ Imperial War Museum, 2000), pp. 45, 48. 33 David Fraser Jenkins et al., John Piper (London: The Tate Gallery, 1983), p. 107. 34 See Malcolm Yorke, The Spirit of Place: Nine ­Neo-­Romantic Artists and their Times (London: Tauris Parke, 2001), p. 98. 35 Piper’s phrase: see Spalding, John Piper, p. 270. 36 Tom Cross’s introduction to the catalogue John Piper in Wales: An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Arranged by the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council (Arts Council of Great Britain, Welsh Committee, 1964), n.p. 37 Jenkins et al., John Piper, p. 107. 38 Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, 1927–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 199. See also pp. 151–99. 39 Mellor (ed.), A Paradise Lost, p. 38. 40 Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010), p. 26. 24

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Mellor (ed.), A Paradise Lost, p. 46. Jenkins et al., John Piper, p. 107. Spalding, John Piper, p. 271. Yorke, The Spirit of Place, p. 98. William J. Smyth, ­Map-­making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006), p. 25; J. Brian Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica, 26, 2 (summer 1989), 3, 12; Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), p. 78. Denis Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: mapping meaning’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 9. Ibid., p. 2. The Welsh Review, 3, 1 (March 1944), 18–20. Perhaps not quite ‘unaccountably’, since Chamberlain did not choose to collect the poem in The Green Heart (itself an unaccountable decision), thus diminishing its visibility after its journal publication. Jenkins et al., John Piper, p. 144. In the late 1940s, Piper planned to produce a ‘guide’ to Snowdonia, illustrated with engravings by Reynolds Stone deriving from Piper’s paintings; the belated result was The Mountains (Rampant Lions Press, 1968) which featured R. S. Thomas’s essay of the same name. See http://geotopoi.wordpress.com/tag/wellington, accessed 21 July 2010. Referring to ‘similar techniques’ in ‘Poem for Five Airmen’ and The Wreck of the Deutschland, Katherine Holman reads Chamberlain’s poem as a ‘statement of faith drawn out by an external event which had a deep impact on her’: ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 329. Quoted in Yorke, The Spirit of Place, p. 97. See also two nightmares Chamberlain described in 1945 – the first of German ‘silver machine[s]’, each ‘shaped like a zeppelin’ and carrying ‘helmeted and goggled airmen’; the second of the silent ‘airmen’ in a balloon that crashes in a ‘steaming, tropical’ valley: ‘From a journal’, Life and Letters ­To-­day, 45, 93 (May 1945), 104–6. The Welsh Review, 4, 3 (September 1945), 190–7. The farm, Dyffryn, was made famous by Thomas Firbank’s wartime ­best-­seller, I Bought a Mountain (1940). Its mountain ground is mapped onto Bardsey in TR, pp. 148–9. Kenneth Rexroth (ed.), The New British Poets: An Anthology (New York: New Directions, 1949), p. xxxi. For the company Chamberlain keeps in this anthology, see also p. xviii: ‘poets like Anne Ridler, Kathleen Raine, Lynette Roberts, Brenda Chamberlain, Eithne Wilkins, Denise Levertov, Alison Boodson all share an intense femininity, if nothing else’. Chamberlain, who is thanked in the anthology for her ‘advice and correspondence’ (p. xxxvi), would feature in the Welsh section of Rexroth’s long poem, the philosophical travelogue, The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952): ‘No sign of the wind letting up, / So I leave Brenda Chamberlain / To her island of ten thousand birds.’ See Brenda Chamberlain, review of J. E. Q. Barford’s Climbing in Britain, Life and Letters, 52, 113 (January 1947), 62–4. Kate Holman, Brenda Chamberlain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), p. 7.

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TR (1987 reissue), p. 225. ‘From a journal: silkie and tide race’, Life and letters, 50, 109 (September 1946), 138. Interestingly, the passage quoted did not appear in ­Tide-­race. 60 See Iwan Bala et al., Hon, Ynys y Galon: Delweddu Ynys Gwales (Llandysul: Gomer, 2007), pp. 35, 124–35. See also the discussion of Iwan Bala’s work in the Introduction. 61 Ronald Lockley saw a copy of O’Flaherty’s The Black Soul in Cristin (‘Clogwyn’ in ­Tide-­race) on Bardsey during the 1930s; see I Know an Island, p. 95. Gwyn Jones and Cecil Price have suggested that Chamberlain’s poetry and ­Tide-­race can usefully be compared with the work of Synge, O’Sullivan, Flower and O’Crohan. Holman suggests that Chamberlain had read Flower and O’Crohan before visiting Bardsey; see Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 37, 91, 100. 62 Conran, ‘The writings of Brenda Chamberlain’, 22. 63 See Piers Beirne and Ian O’Donnell, ‘Gallous stories or dirty deeds? Representing parricide in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World’, Crime Media Culture, 6, 1 (April 2010), 35. 64 See Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 110. 65 See Brenda Chamberlain’s autobiographical essay in Meic Stephens (ed.), Artists in Wales (Llandysul: Gomer, 1971), pp. 51–2. 66 See P. J. Mathews, ­‘Re-­thinking Synge’, in P. J. Mathews (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 7–9. 67 Ibid., pp. 10, 12. 68 J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands, ed. Robin Skelton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 40, 78. See also pp. 14, 41. 69 See Eugene Benson, J. M. Synge (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 30, 133. 70 Oona Frawley, ‘The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea’, in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge, pp. 16, 19. 71 Bonnie Kime Scott, ‘Synge’s language of women’, in Edward A. Kopper, Jr (ed.), A J. M. Synge Literary Companion (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 185, 182. 72 Synge, The Aran Islands, p. 111. 73 Frawley, ‘The Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea’, p. 19. 74 Elaine Sisson, ‘The Aran Islands and the travel essays’, in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge, p. 53. 75 Ibid. 76 Robin Skelton, The Writings of J. M. Synge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), pp. 29, 30, 123, 35. 77 See Sisson, ‘The Aran Islands and the travel essays’, p. 60. 78 Skelton, The Writings of J. M. Synge, p. 52. 79 See Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 92, 101, 109. 80 See T. R. Henn (ed.), The Plays and Poems of J. M. Synge (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 38. 81 Synge, The Aran Islands, p. 38. 58 59

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Tony Brown and M. Wynn Thomas, ‘The problems of belonging’, in M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Welsh Writing in English: A Guide (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), p. 188. 83 See Wystan Curnow, ‘Mapping and the expanded field of contemporary art’, in Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, pp. 253–68. See also Katharine Harmon (ed.), The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); eadem, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003); and Alexander J. Kent, ‘Aesthetics: a lost cause in cartographic theory?’, The Cartographic Journal, 42, 4 (September 2005), 182–8. 84 Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 116. 85 Anthony Conran, Frontiers in ­Anglo-­Welsh Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), p. 166. As Jill Piercy reminds us, ‘the community she wrote about was predominantly ­Welsh-­speaking … few of Brenda Chamberlain’s friends spoke English and often their conversations were stilted and punctuated with gesture, mime and long pauses’ (a characteristically ­‘multi-­media’ performance): Piercy, ‘Between two arts’, 86. For traces of the linguistic geography of the island, however, see TR, pp. 172 and 191 (the macaronic ­English-­Welsh on the side of the boat). 86 These are Fisherman Resting, The Island Children (The Cristin Children) and Man with a John Dory. 87 Wales, 6, 24 (winter 1946), 19–21. 88 See for example TR, pp. 41–2. 89 See Brown and Thomas, ‘The problems of belonging’, p. 189. 90 New Zealand Woman’s Weekly; Arts Review: see Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 31. 91 Reproduced on the back cover of Chamberlain’s The ­Water-­castle. 92 See TR, p. 141; Dilys Cadwaladr et al., Atgofion: Cyfrol 2 (Caernarfon: Tŷ ar y Graig, 1972), pp. 21–2 (where she is ­tight-­lipped about the ‘great tale’ behind her departure from the island); and Eigra Lewis Roberts (ed.), Merch yr Oriau Mawr: Dilys Cadwaladr (Caernarfon: Tŷ ar y Graig, 1981), p. 39. In Gwynedd Archives at the Caernarfon Record Office is a harrowing letter of 25–6 October 1948 from Dilys Cadwaladr to Mansel Williams. The catalogue description runs as follows ‘XM/7891/44. Letter: from Mrs Dilys C. Scheltinga, who was teacher on Bardsey Island from 1946–c.1948, to Mansel Williams, complaining in detail about what she saw as persecution by some of the residents of the island. There are details of life on the island and it finishes with an appeal for help.’ 93 See R. Gerallt Jones and Christopher J. Arnold (eds), Enlli (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1996), p. 97. 94 See Conran, ‘The writings of Brenda Chamberlain’, 23. 95 ‘From a journal: silkie and tide race’ (September 1946), 140. Chamberlain did not keep this revealingly frank sentence in the corresponding section of ­Tide-­race. 96 See TR, pp. 95, 203, 222. The Guardian reviewer of ­Tide-­race noted that Chamberlain ‘has an ­Ariel-­like delight in wind and wave and wing. Reading Miss Chamberlain is the next best thing to being shipwrecked’ (an arch and ambiguous comment, quoted on the back cover of The ­Water-­castle). 82

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R. M. Lockley’s 1939 portrait of Bardsey is worth quoting at some length here. Lockley draws the nationalist/pacifist act of firing the Penyberth bombing school into the orbit of Bardsey’s ‘republic’: ‘Opposite the island is Hell’s Mouth (Porth Nigel) [sic], the scene of the aerodrome fire started by our Nationalists. I mention our Nationalists solely because it is worth noting that Bardsey is ­to-­day a little republic of its own, run by a group of Welshmen … When I stayed on Bardsey one winter I became aware of the delightful way in which this happy autonomy was managed by a cabinet of landholders whose wives were not behindhand in prompting advice at the weekly meeting in the ­school-­house … In so small a republic each individual is important and can assert himself to some effect … Bardsey used to have a king, who was crowned with a tin coronet. But one day patriarchal Love Pritchard, the reigning monarch, with the crown jewels and all his subjects … deserted the island for the fleshpots of the mainland. A colonisation by younger blood followed, and in the absence of the tin crown a presidency was declared’: ‘The islands of Wales’, The Welsh Review, 1, 3 (April 1939), 145. By 1958, Lockley’s profile of island cooperation was very different indeed: ‘The two farms are tenanted by the last two Welsh families to ranch the island between themselves, but not ­co-­operatively (in fact, the[y] never speak to each other I am told, nor help each other by land or sea’): Wales, new series 4 (December 1958), 27. See also Lockley, Islands Round Britain, p. 26.   98 See ‘From a journal’, 101–2. (To ensure clarity – since more than one magazine contribution bears the title ‘From a journal’ – this is the Life and Letters ­To-­day text of May 1945 cited in n. 53 above).   99 Anthony Conran, The Cost of Strangeness: Essays on the English Poets of Wales (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1982), p. 207. 100 Brown and Thomas, ‘The problems of belonging’, p. 188. 101 Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 290. 102 For the debate about islands and ‘hard edges’, see Hay, ‘A phenomenology of islands’, 22–3. 103 For a list of Chamberlain’s published poems, many of which were revised and renamed, see Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 303–18. Chamberlain recalled, not wholly accurately: ‘I wrote most of the poetry with ­sea-­connections whilst living in the mountains’: Stephens (ed.), Artists in Wales, p. 52. 104 For the ‘sentry motif’ in the broadsheets, see Adams, ‘“Fieldwork”: the Caseg Broadsheets and the Welsh anthropologist’, 67. 105 See TR, pp. 48, 94, 180. 106 See, for example, TR, pp. 197–200 for Chamberlain’s (multiform) account of her obsession with ‘a woman’s archaic bronze head having been found by chance and raised from the seabed to strong southern light … Aegean tears still wet upon her cheeks’. 107 Quoted in Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 35 and 91. 108 See H. J. Fleure, ‘The Welsh people’, Wales, 10 (October 1939), 265, 266, 268. 109 Adams, ‘“Fieldwork”: the Caseg Broadsheets and the Welsh anthropologist’, 55. 110 Skelton, The Writings of J. M. Synge, p. 48.   97

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cartographies of culture ‘The Return’, Life and Letters, 54, 121 (September 1947), 215–27. Personal information from Christine Evans. See TR, pp. 182–3 and 198–200. Holman speaks of Chamberlain’s poems as existing ‘in a constant state of reassessment’ and as undergoing ‘a process of progressive distillation’: ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 30, 69.

Notes to Chapter 4 Brenda Chamberlain, The ­Water-­castle: A Novel (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), p. 15. Hereafter TWC.  2 Pete Hay, ‘A phenomenology of islands’, Island Studies Journal, 1, 1 (2006), 23.  3 Ibid.  4 Godfrey Baldacchino, ‘The coming of age of island studies’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 95, 3 (2004), 280.  5 Kate Holman, Brenda Chamberlain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 39–40.  6 Hay, ‘A phenomenology of islands’, 23.  7 See Katherine Elizabeth Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’ (unpublished MA thesis, University College of Swansea, 1976), 153–4, 159, 160–1, 188. This conception of the flawed confessionality of Chamberlain’s work extends to her painting. Speaking of ‘the figures and compositions of 1946–54’, Rhys Gwyn noted in 1957: ‘the sitter was all too often no more than a lay vehicle for the depiction of her own mood’. He went on to identify Chamberlain’s trips to Germany as triggering a ‘transition period’ (in early 1955) which led to the work of 1957, which he sees as ‘break[ing] free of the restrictions of representationalism’: ‘The art of Brenda Chamberlain’, Dock Leaves, 8, 22 (autumn 1957), 39–40.  8 Holman remarks: ‘Having chosen the journal form, the author fails to keep within the boundaries this sets for a novel and cannot resist including obtrusive passages of exposition’: ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 131a.  9 The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (13 February 1964) was of the opinion that, with the exception of Klaus, the novel’s characters exist ‘in a vacuum peopled by shades’; the Observer found the novel ‘static’; and the Irish Independent (14 March 1964) saw The ­Water-­castle as ‘hardly a novel’, more a ‘theme stated’. Other reviewers, however, such as Robert Nye in the Guardian, described the novel as a series of ‘memorable, ­well-­focused pictures’: see Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 131–3. 10 Anthony Conran, The Cost of Strangeness: Essays on the English Poets of Wales (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1982), p. 208. 11 The term is that of the reviewer in Punch; quoted in Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 129. 12 P. T. Hughes’s term, in a review in the Sunday Independent; quoted in Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 130. 13 Anthony Conran, ‘The writings of Brenda Chamberlain’, ­Anglo-­Welsh Review, 20, 46 (spring 1972), 21.  1

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See TWC, p. 18. See the typescript draft of The ­Water-­castle, with autograph revisions: NLW MS 22493C, ff. 4, 6 (ff. 5, 7 of catalogued MS). 16 See Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 154: ‘Catrin Daniel … suspected that the name which Brenda Chamberlain selected for her heroine … (drawn from English and Latin, rex meaning “king”), was some reflection of her image of herself.’ If that is the case, the name is part of Chamberlain’s ironic metacommentary on the fantasies of her ‘heroine’. 17 Quoted in ibid., 298, and Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, pp. 88–9. 18 For images of the actual ­water-­castle – Gut Oberbehme, near Löhne, North ­Rhine-­Westphalia – see http://www.­burgen-­und-­schloesser.net/nordrhein-­west falen/gut-­oberbehme/fotos.html, accessed 31 July 2010. 19 Brenda Chamberlain, The Green Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 52. Hereafter GH. 20 See Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 138. 21 Quoted in ibid., 130. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 See also GH, p. 66, in which a poem’s genesis is rooted in ‘past time’, which is enshrined in a letter from von Laer about his experiences fighting on the Russian front: ‘Having drunk wine / And visited past time / With its bivouacks, / Sorties, ambushes, / And dawn attacks, / I think I could / Write a poem about you.’ 25 See Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, p. 25. 26 See ibid., p. 23. 27 See also GH, p. 51: ‘At Schlotheim, peacocks roosted in branches / No peacocks sit in the Oberbehme willows.’ 28 Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, p. 42. 29 Thomas Nolden, ‘Portrait of the artist as a young soldier: Rainer Maria Rilke’s cornet’, The German Quarterly, 64, 4 (autumn 1991), 450. 30 J. B. Morse’s 1947 English translation was dedicated to Alun Lewis and Lawrence Jones. 31 See Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 363–4: ‘in 1968 on her return [from Greece] to Bangor [Chamberlain] wrote to Meic Stephens about her ambition to write a book about her own experience of the sea. She made a comparison with Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around us [1951] which Antoine was described as reading in The ­Water-­castle … but she intended that her book should exclude the sea’s scientific aspects. It should be an “abstract study”. This intention was never made concrete.’ 32 Brenda Chamberlain, ­Tide-­race (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962), p. 148. 33 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 225: ‘If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of ­anti-­imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical in it.’ 34 J. S. Keates, Understanding Maps, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1996), p. 139. 35 Denis Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: mapping meaning’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 11. For a discussion of ‘cartographic silence’, in particular ‘unintentional epistemological silence’ and ‘the 14 15

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play of rules which determines within a culture the appearance and disappearance of statements’ on a map, see J. Brian Harley, ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe’, in J. Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore, Md: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 84–107. See http://www.italica.rai.it/eng/principal/multimedia/dvd/doncamillo.htm, acces­sed 29 July 2010. See http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1831/1293.full, accessed 3 August 2010. In an early draft of the novel, Elizabeth’s return ‘with her husband’ is rendered fatal: sensationally, she drowns in Bardsey Sound ‘on the crossing to their island home in a small motorboat’. Typescript draft of The ­Water-­castle, NLW MS 22493C, f. 4 (f. 5 of catalogued MS). See also NLW MS 29799B, known as ‘The green notebook’. Brenda Chamberlain’s autobiographical essay in Meic Stephens (ed.), Artists in Wales (Llandysul: Gomer, 1971), p. 52. Conran, ‘The writings of Brenda Chamberlain’, 21. Stephens (ed.), Artists in Wales, p. 52. Brenda Chamberlain, A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), p. 14. Hereafter RoV. A Rope of Vines draws on material in Chamberlain’s notebooks, ‘written in Ydra between May 1963 and May 1964’: Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, p. 49. See also Brenda Chamberlain, ‘Abstract of a journey 1962’, Mabon, 1, 3 (summer 1970), 24, 26. Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra (1945; London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 1. Ibid., p. 13. See RoV, p. 138. See also David Lloyd, ‘Against “journalese”: form and style in Brenda Chamberlain’s A Rope of Vines (1965)’, in Katie Gramich (ed.), Mapping the Territory: Critical Approaches to Welsh Fiction in English (Cardigan: Parthian, 2010), pp. 260–1. Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 229. See, for example, RoV, p. 85. David Wills, ‘British accounts of residency in Greece, 1945–2004’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 23, 1 (2005), 189. See Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 167. Chamber­ lain mentions Thomas, author of Ask at the Unicorn (1963) in her journal entry for 13 January 1966, published in ‘A total eclipse of the sun’, Mabon, 1, 5 (spring 1972), 8: ‘Warm: spring airs. Norman Thomas … with broc môr, memories of Bardsey.’ Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 230. Quoted in ibid., 166. The phrase is Alec Reid’s in the Guardian review of A Rope of Vines. See Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 191–2. Quoted in ibid., 171–2.

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The Protagonists, p. 58. The text I quote is that held in the North Wales Arts Association Archive at Caernarfon Record Office (Gwynedd Archives and Museum Service), XD90/3/11 Brenda Chamberlain. Subsequent references are given as P. The Brenda Chamberlain Papers in the National Library of Wales contain four versions of The Protagonists: NLW MSS 21491D, 21492D, 21493D and 21494E. It is clear from textual evidence that the Caernarfon Record Office text represents a later, fuller, revised version of the play. For a discussion of the texts, see my forthcoming critical edition of The Protagonists (Cardigan: Parthian, 2012). 58 See Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, p. 65. 59 Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 209. 60 Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, p. 62. 61 Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 209. 62 The punning possibilities of the island’s name are still seized on, it seems, by inhabitants of the Greek mainland today: Léros resonates with lerá (‘dirt’, ­‘ill-­breeding’, ‘unsavouriness’). 63 Included in the play’s programme, as is the comment by Jeremy Brooks. 64 See Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, pp. 63–4. 65 Ibid., p. 65. 66 The lines quoted also recall Klaus’s strange letter to Elizabeth Greatorex from Goslar, in which he enclosed a map but emphasized the absence of a human ‘guide’. 67 Holman, Brenda Chamberlain, p. 66. 68 See Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 235–6. 69 See Alison Smith, John Petts and the Caseg Press (Farnham: Ashgate: 2000), p. 52. 70 Five drafts of an unfinished play/film script entitled ‘A ­one-­legged man takes a walk’, together with drafts of another, also unfinished, play of exile that takes as its subject the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (who opposed the generals and was imprisoned by the junta) exist in the National Library of Wales: NLW MSS 21495C, 21496E, 21497E and 21498E. Chamberlain was clearly working on these scripts at the very end of her life. They are beyond the scope of the present chapter, but see the discussion in my forthcoming edition of The Protagonists. 71 Maurice Cooke, ‘The painting of Brenda Chamberlain’, ­Anglo-­Welsh Review, 20, 46 (spring 1972), 15. 72 Jill Piercy refers to the lines as a ‘geometric grid’: see ‘Between two arts’, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, 68 (April/May 1988), 85. 73 Denis Cosgrove, ­‘Carto-­city’, in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (eds), Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006), p. 151. 74 This is how Alan McPherson, who played the guard in the 1968 performances of The Protagonists, describes the geographical space and human networks of Upper Bangor in which Chamberlain circulated after her return from Greece. I am grateful to him for the insight. 75 J. Brian Harley, ‘Historical geography of the cartographic illusion’, Journal of Historical Geography, 15, 1 (January 1989), 86; De Certeau quoted in Robert 57

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76

79 77 78



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Hampson, ‘Spatial stories: Joseph Conrad and James Joyce’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literature, Culture, Spaces (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), p. 58. M. Wynn Thomas views Abse as engaged in a project of ‘playing off’ identities against one another in an attempt ‘to create a living space for [the] imagination’: see ‘Prints of Wales: contemporary Welsh poetry in English’, in ­Hans-­Werner Ludwig and Lothar Fietz (eds), Poetry in the British Isles: ­Non-­metropolitan Perspectives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 101. Dannie Abse, Selected Poems (London: Hutchinson, 1970), pp. 27–8. Holman, ‘The literary achievement of Brenda Chamberlain’, 228. Brenda Chamberlain, Poems with Drawings (London: Enitharmon Press, 1969), pp. 6–7. Hereafter PD. See http://www.islandstudies.ca/node/149, accessed 5 August 2010.

Notes to Chapter 5 Rowan Williams, Remembering Jerusalem (Oxford: The Perpetua Press, 2001), pp. 50–2, and The Poems of Rowan Williams (Oxford: The Perpetua Press, 2002), pp. 91–3.  2 Damian Walford Davies (ed.), Waldo Williams: Rhyddiaith (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), p. 87. Hereafter Rh. All translations from Welsh texts other than ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ are my own.  3 See Robert Rhys, ‘Poetry 1939–70’, in Dafydd Johnston (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature, 1900–1996 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), p. 99; Ned Thomas, ‘Waldo Williams – “In Two Fields”’, in ­Hans-­Werner Ludwig and Lothar Fietz (eds), Poetry in the British Isles: ­Non-­metropolitan Perspectives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 262.  4 Michael Cronin, ‘Global questions and local visions’, in Alyce von Rothkirch and Daniel Williams (eds), Beyond the Difference: Welsh Literature in Comparative Contexts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), p. 197.  5 Rowan Williams, ‘Translating Waldo’, in Damian Walford Davies and Jason Walford Davies (eds), Cof ac Arwydd: Ysgrifau Newydd ar Waldo Williams (Abertawe: Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, 2006), p. 216.  6 Anthony Conran translates the names as ‘Flower Meadow Field’ and ‘Flower Field’ in Poetry Wales, 2, 3 (1966), 12–13, and in The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 258–60. Blawd can certainly mean blodyn – ‘bloom’ – but the owner of the fields, Vernon Beynon, confirms that the reference here is to ‘flour’. Conran’s ‘Flower’ is queried by Katie Gramich in New Welsh Review, 40 (spring 1998), 84. The most recent translation of ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ – Alan Llwyd’s – opts for the accurate ‘Flour Meadow Field and Flour Field’. See n. 48.  7 See Gerwyn Wiliams, Tir Newydd: Rhai Agweddau ar Lenyddiaeth Gymraeg a’r Ail Ryfel Byd (Caerdydd: University of Wales Press, 2005), p. 135.  8 Anthony Conran in The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, p. 258, glosses the title of his translation thus: ‘two fields in Pembrokeshire’. It should be emphasized that  1

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10



11



12 13



14



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16

19 17 18



20



21



22 23



24



25 26



27

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Conran – one of Williams’s sharpest critics – is certainly not guilty of subscribing to ‘the myth of the man’. See Neil Brenner et al. (eds), State/Space: A Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 5, 1, 21. Waldo Williams, Dail Pren (Aberystwyth: Gwasg Aberystwyth, 1956), pp. 24–9. Hereafter DP. W. D. Erhart and Philip K. Jason (eds), Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), p. xx. Ibid., p. xxii. As well as the anthology cited in n. 11, which contains a useful introduction, along with biographies and bibliographies, see the special issue of War, Literature and the Arts, 9, 2 (fall/winter 1997), entitled ‘I remember: ­soldier-­poets of the Korean War’. See for example Thomas, ‘Waldo Williams – “In Two Fields”’, pp. 253–66; the essays by Bedwyr Lewis Jones and Dafydd ­Elis-­Thomas in Robert Rhys (ed.), Waldo Williams: Cyfres y Meistri 2 (Abertawe: Christopher Davies, 1981), pp. 149–59, 160–7; and Tony Bianchi’s ‘Waldo and apocalypse’, Planet, 44 (August 1978), 5–12. The allusion is identified by Williams himself in the ‘Notes’ to the poem at the end of Dail Pren. See Pennar Davies, ‘A’r brwyn yn hollti’, in Rhys (ed.), Waldo Williams, p. 188, and Hugh Bevan, ‘Barddoniaeth y cae agored’, in the same volume, p. 256. Williams, ‘Translating Waldo’, pp. 220–1. See Thomas, ‘Waldo Williams – “In Two Fields”’, p. 253. The pun on ‘two fields’ is also suggested in the title of Ned Thomas’s 1995 reading of the poem ‘from the point of view of comparative cultural criticism’. Tony Conran (trans.), Waldo Williams: The Peacemakers (Llandysul: Gomer, 1997), p. 17. In ‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’, Williams refers to the moral right to judge the state as ‘the necessary anarchism at the heart of republicanism’ (Rh, p. 317). Conran (trans.), The Peacemakers, p. 21. Ned Thomas has recognized the importance of the wartime context: see Waldo (Caernarfon: Gwasg Pantycelyn, 1985), pp. 23–7, and ‘Waldo Williams – “In Two Fields”’, p. 262. Ned Thomas rightly remarks that subsequent conflicts awakened in Williams ‘deep and early levels’ of his experience, yielding poems that ‘respond to present events’, but which at the same time echo the initial experience, investing it with a ‘philosophical frame’: see Thomas, Waldo, p. 24. See Rh, p. 343. See my rendering at http://www.saltpublishing.com/saltmagazine/issues/03. See also my ‘“Cymodi â’r pridd”: Wordsworth, Coleridge, a Phasg gwaredol Waldo Williams’ (Reconciliation with the soil: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Waldo Williams’s Easter deliverance), in Cof ac Arwydd, pp. 83–107. See my rendering of the poem in Modern Poetry in Translation, 3, 6 (2006), 118–19.

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Saunders Lewis’s phrase, describing ‘The Dead Children’: see ‘Dail Pren’, in Rhys (ed.), Waldo Williams, p. 266. 29 See Rh, pp. 279–90. 30 See Janet Davies, ‘The fight for Preseli, 1946’, Planet, 58 (August/September 1986), 3–9. 31 For thoughtful comments on Williams and the ‘political life … of home’, see Conran (trans.), The Peacemakers, p. 23. 32 R. Gerallt Jones (ed.), Poetry of Wales, 1930–1970 (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1974), p. xxi. 33 Thomas, ‘Waldo Williams – “In Two Fields”’, p. 264, and Dafydd ­Elis-­Thomas, ‘Mewn Dau Gae’, in Rhys (ed.), Waldo Williams, p. 166. 34 Ned Thomas’s translation, published in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, 37/38 (May 1977), 9–13 under the title ‘War and the state’, misconstrues the subject of Williams’s sentence at this point, making the United Nations (rather than the US, as intended) seem the hasty aggressor. This is confirmed by Williams’s formulation in ‘Sovereignty and Brotherhood’: see Rh, p. 307. 35 Quoted in Anthony ­Farrar-­Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War: A Distant Obligation (London: HMSO, 1990), p. 113. 36 See Jeffrey Grey, The Commonwealth Armies and the Korean War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 22. 37 Peter Lowe, The Origins of the Korean War (London: Longman, 1986), p. 14. 38 Thongchai Winichakul, quoted in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new edn (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 177–8. 39 See Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), pp. 8, 52. 40 Waldo Williams’s censure of the US as manipulative antagonist in his 1956 prose texts is curious. That the Korean War was in many ways a superpower ­‘proxy-­war’ (and the first major engagement of the Cold War after the Berlin Blockade) is not in doubt; however, the absence of any mention of North Korean aggression and the role of the USSR is puzzling. 41 For an account of ‘the contortions of British manpower policy’ at this time, see Grey, The Commonwealth Armies and the Korean War, pp. 36–45, 193, and ­Farrar-­Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War, pp. 111–22. 42 Ashley ­Cunningham-­Boothe and Peter Farrar (eds), British Forces in the Korean War (Leamington Spa: British Korean Veterans’ Association, 1988), p. 5. See also Tom Hickman, The ­Call-­up: A History of National Service (London: Headline, 2004), pp. 75, 100. 43 See Mark S. Monmonier, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 112. 44 See R. F. Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 45 Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 272. 46 See Rh, p. 251. 47 See http://www.hmso.gov.uk/legislation/wales/wsi2002/20023270e.htm. 28

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For Conran’s translation, see n. 6; R. M. Jones’s translation (marked ‘tr. R. M. J. on A. Conran’), is in Highlights in Welsh Literature: Talks with a Prince (Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1969), pp. 119–21. For R. Gerallt Jones’s version, see Jones (ed.), Poetry of Wales, 1930–1970, pp. 219–21. For Gwyn Jones’s translation, see Gwyn Jones (ed.), The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 219–20. For Joseph Clancy’s negotiation, see ­Twentieth-­century Welsh Poems (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982), pp. 135–6. R. S. Thomas’s version appears in Modern Poetry in Translation, new series, 7 (spring 1995), 156–7. Rowan Williams’s rendering is given in full at the beginning of this chapter; see also n. 1. Alan Llwyd’s translation is in Stori Waldo Williams: Bardd Heddwch/The Story of Waldo Williams: Poet of Peace (Abertawe: Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, 2010), pp. 211–15. 49 See Williams, Remembering Jerusalem, p. 7, and The Poems of Rowan Williams, p. 8. 50 Williams, ‘Translating Waldo’, p. 220. 51 UNHCR – The UN Refugee Agency, ‘An introduction to international protection: protecting persons of concern to UNHCR’, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/ docid/4214cb4f2.html, accessed 1 July 2010. 52 See Rh, p. 307, and William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 361. 53 Thomas, Waldo, p. 25, and ‘Waldo Williams – “In Two Fields”’, pp. 261, 262. 54 Gwyn Thomas, ‘Mewn Dau Gae’, in Dadansoddi, 14 (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1984), p. 59; T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 218. My emphasis. 55 Thomas, Waldo, p. 25. 56 Williams, ‘Translating Waldo’, p. 218. 57 See Modern Poetry in Translation, new series, 7 (spring 1995), 162, 164. 58 Williams, ‘Translating Waldo’, p. 218. 59 Thomas, ‘Waldo Williams – “In Two Fields”’, p. 263. 60 Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry: A Study and Edition of the Englynion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), p. 120. 61 Gwyn Thomas describes Y Dref Wen as a ‘border town’ (tref ffin) in his analysis of ‘In Two Fields’, but does not explore the significance of the allusion in the context of Williams’s interest in borders. See Thomas, ‘Mewn Dau Gae’, p. 60. 62 Williams, ‘Translating Waldo’, pp. 218–19. At the end of his gloss, Williams interestingly gives a sense of translation as agon and conflict; the metaphor – and reality – of battle cannot be exorcized: ‘It is entirely appropriate to end with an admission of total defeat. Poetic translation is like that. But my aim has been to show that the process of translating is not just a losing battle … Waldo’s combination of density and luminosity makes him a specially significant partner in the complex engagement of translating.’ 63 Thomas, ‘Waldo Williams – “In Two Fields”’, p. 264. 64 Gwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry: From the Beginnings to the Sixteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), p. 20. 65 See A. O. H. Jarman (ed.), Aneirin: Y Gododdin: Britain’s Oldest Heroic Poem (Llandysul: Gomer, 1988), pp. 24, 25. 48

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Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, p. 23. I quote the first, 1798, version. See Judith Thompson, ‘An autumnal blast, a killing frost: Coleridge’s poetic conversation with John Thelwall’, Studies in Romanticism, 36, 3 (fall 1997), 427–56. 68 Williams mistakenly cites Swinburne as the author. 69 In a letter of 19 June 1956 to J. Gwyn Griffiths and Kate ­Bosse-­Griffiths, Williams wrote: ‘As to the book’s title, Dail Pren is the title I’ve had in my mind for it for years. Do you remember Keats saying that poetry must come as the tree gives forth its leaves?’ See Rh, p. 84. 70 John Barnard (ed.), John Keats: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 342, 442. 71 Quoted in Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 56. Hunt’s comment was on ‘Hyperion’, the earlier incarnation of ‘The Fall of Hyperion’. 72 Hyder E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), I, p. 281. 73 Williams, ‘Translating Waldo’, p. 219. 74 Ibid., pp. 219–20. 75 Brenner et al. (eds), State/Space: A Reader, p. 22. 66 67

Notes to Conclusion See John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the ­Geo-­coded World (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 192–3.  2 See Charles Travis, ‘Beyond the Cartesian pale: travels with Samuel Beckett, 1928–1946’, Historical Geography, 26 (2008), 73–93.  3 Ibid., 90.  4 For GIS, see Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 121, and Jeremy W. Crampton, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to GIS and Cartography (Oxford: ­Wiley-­Blackwell, 2010).  5 See Graham Huggan, ‘Decolonizing the map: ­post-­colonialism, ­post-­structuralism and the cartographic connection’, Ariel, 20, 4 (October 1989), 125–6.  6 See http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/home/home.aspx and http://www.wiserd. ac.uk/, accessed 29 July 2010.  7 See http://www.culturecolony.com/about, accessed 29 July 2010.  8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 54, 51.  9 See Andrew Leyshon et al., ‘Introduction: music, space, and the production of place’, in Andrew Leyshon et al. (eds), The Place of Music (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 2, 9. 10 See the short story ‘The Orange Grove’, in Collected Stories, ed. Cary Archard (Bridgend: Seren, 1990), pp. 213–25, and the poem ‘The Map’, which remained unpublished until it appeared in Alun Lewis, A Cypress Walk: Letters to ‘Frieda’, With a Memoir by Freda Aykroyd (London: Enitharmon Press, 2006), pp. 16–17.  1

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R. S. Thomas, Autobiographies, ed. Jason Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1997), p. 77. 12 Christopher Meredith, Shifts, Seren Classics edn (Bridgend: Seren, 1997), p. 202. 13 Niall Griffiths, Stump (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), p. 83. 14 See Pickles, A History of Spaces, p. 193. 15 Russell Celyn Jones, The Ninth Wave (Bridgend: Seren, 2009); Owen Sheers, White Ravens (Bridgend: Seren, 2009); Niall Griffiths, The Dreams of Max and Ronnie (Bridgend: Seren, 2010). 16 National Library of Wales, Alun Lewis Papers 1, Box 7, red notebook (‘A. Lewis Lt 158 Oct 30–Dec 31 midnight 1942’). I am grateful to Alan Vaughan Jones for this reference. 17 Quoted in J. Brian Harley, ‘Historical geography of the cartographic illusion’, Journal of Historical Geography, 15, 1 (January 1989), 88. 18 Ibid. For ‘folding landscapes’, see http://www.foldinglandscapes.com/?page_ id=14. 11

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Index

Abse, Dannie ‘Looking at a Map’ 168 Adams, Linda 79–80, 91, 119 Anglo-Israel (or British-Israelite) theory 64 Anglo-Welsh 7, 9, 16–17, 19, 23, 25, 34, 35, 45, 159, 198 Ap Dewi Gwlad Canaan; Ar Gynllun Gogledd a Deheudir Cymru i Blant 66–7 Arac, Jonathan 13–14 Argyle, duke of 25 art 8–11 Asia and Adjacent Areas (map) 183, 184 Attlee, Clement 182 Austen, Jane Northanger Abbey 128 Avonmouth Ordnance Survey ‘Old Series’ (map, 1830) 39, 41 tidal prediction 10–13 July 1798 32–42, pl. 5 see also de Suffren, Amelia, From Piercefield Walks; Kitchin, Thomas, Map of the Rivers Severn and Wye; River Severn Old Passage

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Bala, Iwan 9–10, 91, 93, 103 Adlewyrchu Ynys (‘Reflecting an Island’) 11, pl. 4 Byd Bach y Byd (‘The World’s Small World’) 10, pl. 1 Ewropa 10, pl. 2 Hon: Ffurf fy Ngwlad (‘This One: the Shape of my Country’) 97 Hon I (‘This One I’) 11, pl. 3 Walia Dominatrix 97 Baldacchino, Godfrey 80, 125 ‘Ballad of the Grey Silkie of Sule Skerrie, The’ 97 Baner ac Amserau Cymru 181 Bar-Yosef, Eitan 56, 60, 62, 63, 64 Bardsey Island 17, 78–124, 126, 127, 128, 143, 152, 166 Thomas Colby’s first Ordnance Survey (map, 1839) 83 Ynys Enlli (map) 104 see also under Morris, Lewis Beal, Timothy K. 63 ‘Beca’ group 8, 207 Beckett, Samuel 203 Beirne, Piers 99 Benson, Eugene 100 Benzon, Bill 13 Berdyaev, Nikolai 181, 190 Bevan, Hugh 177 Beynon, John, Y Cross 175

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Black Mountains 7 Blake, William 109, 179 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights 34 Bonesteel III, Charles Hartwell 183, 184 Bosse-Griffiths, Kate 180, 183 Botteghe Oscure 95 Branham, Joan R. 60 ‘consumerisation of faith’ 60 ‘Brocken Spectre’ 143 Brooke, Rupert 177 Brooker, Peter 6 Brooks, Jeremy 164 Brosseau, Marc 5, 6 Brown, Tony 102, 110, 115 Bullough, Tom The Claude Glass 208 ‘Bwlch-y-ddwysir’ 188 Cadwaladr, Dilys (Scheltinga) 110 Campbell, Duncan 7, 8, 23 Canaan see Ap Dewi, Gwlad Canaan; Ar Gynllun Gogledd a Deheudir Cymru i Blant Canu Heledd 196–7 Carson, Rachel The Sea Around Us 143 Carter, Paul 33 Chamberlain, Brenda 10, 14, 17, 18, 34, 78–171 ‘Blodeuwedd’ 107, 109, 121 Caseg Broadsheets 80, 90, 94, 116 Children of the Seashore 84 Coire Mhuic Fhearchair 89 ‘Dead Climber’ 90 ‘Dead Ponies’ 95 ‘Fisherman Husband’ 116 ‘From a journal: silkie and tide race’ (September 1946) 96–7 ‘From Other Hills’ (with John Petts) 89 ‘Give No White Flower’ 116 The Green Heart 80, 88–9, 116, 119, 124, 130, 131, 134, 135, 144, 145–64, 167

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index

‘I Think of You in a Time of Storm’ 116 ‘Lament’ 116 ‘Mountains of Rock’ 95 ‘Old Wives Shoregathered’ 116 ‘The Pelican’ (original title of A Rope of Vines) 162 ‘Poem for Five Airmen’ 93–4, 95 Poems with Drawings 84–5, 152, 162, 163, 164, 168–70 pen drawings 169, 170 The Protagonists 134, 152, 159, 162–71 ‘The Return’ 121–4, 151 review of The Buttercup Field, Gwyn Jones 127–8 review of Climbing in Britain, J. E. Q. Barford 96, 114 A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island 101, 152–62, 164, 165, 166 pen drawings 156, 157 ‘Rose of Lima’ 124 ‘Seal Cave’ 115 ‘Shipwrecked Demeter’ 124 ‘Song of a Woman from the Western Island’ 116 ‘Third Woman’s Lament’ 116 Tide-race 78, 80–4, 85–8, 95, 96, 97–8, 100, 101, 102–24, 125, 133, 143, 151, 154, 155, 163, 164, 165, 167 early draft manuscript 105 pen drawings 108, 111, 112, 117, 118, 120, 121 title-page of part one, ‘The cave of seals’ 106 ‘To Dafydd Coed Mourning his Broken Mountain-Dog’ 94 The Water-castle 88, 124, 125–51, 152, 154, 155, 159, 160, 164, 165 ‘Oberharz’ 139–48 pen drawing 149 ‘Tidal wave’ 148–51 ‘The Water-Castle’ 128–39 Winter Rhythms in Island Life (first sketch) 78, 80–4, 85, 86,

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index

87–8, 98, 100, 109–10, 116, 119, 121, 122, 124, 166, pl. 6 Winter Rhythms in Island Life (second sketch) 84, 86–7, 88, 97, 100, 109–10, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124, pl. 7 Word and Image (exhibition) 166 ‘Young Fisher Brought to Land’ 116 Christ, Carol T. 43 Clancy, Joseph 190, 192, 193, 194, 196, 198, 200, 201 Clifford, James 101 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor The Ancient Mariner 75 ‘Frost at Midnight’ 200 Conran, Tony 70 All Hallows: Symphony in Three Movements 8 and Brenda Chamberlain 87, 99, 103, 113, 119, 126, 127, 130, 152 and Waldo Williams 177, 178, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201 ‘Map into Heraldry’ 8–9 ‘Was it So?’ 8 Cosgrove, Denis 5, 9, 24, 25, 33, 93 Cox, Philip 36 Coxe, William An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire 22, 26, 27 Cronin, Michael 174 Culture Colony, The / Y Wladfa Newydd 207 Culyer, A. M. 28 Curnow, Wystan 1 Curran, Stuart 30 Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys 94 Cyprus 161, 176, 177, 182, 186–7, 193, 194 EOKA 160–1, 186 Dalrymple, Alexander 23 Daniels, Stephen 3 Davies, Idris 7 The Angry Summer 9

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265

Davies, Paul 9 and the Beca Group 8, 207 Flag of the Welsh Coast, or Salute the Red, White, Black and Blue 8 Wales Map 8 Davies, Pennar 177 Davis, John 56, 60, 63 De Quincey, Thomas 118, 119 Suspiria de Profundis 118 de Suffren, Amelia From Piercefield Walks 29 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 24 Denbighshire and Flintshire Ordnance Survey ‘First Edition’ (map, 1839–41) 47 Derrida, Jacques 4 Descartes, René 203 Devlin, Christopher 49 Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949 (DLAI) 203–4, 207 website 205 Digital Literary Atlas of Wales (DLAW) 206–9 Donahaye, Jasmine 64–5 Donne, John ‘Elegy XIII: His Parting from Her’ 150 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 34 Dublin Magazine, The 95, 127 Dürer, Albrecht Virgin and Child 137 Durrell, Lawrence Prospero’s Cell 152, 165 Edwards, Dorothy 208 Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets 109, 193 ‘Gerontion’ 134 ‘Little Gidding’ 193 The Waste Land 109 Elis-Thomas, Dafydd 181 Erhart, W. D. 176 Europe, map 79 Eurostat Yearbook (2004) 10 Evans, Caradoc 207 My People 79–80

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Evans, Marc Dal: Yma/Nawr (film, 2004) 187 Evans, Margiad Country Dance 207 Farbotko, Carol 170 Feeney, Joseph J. 49 Feldman, Jackie 69 Fenwick, Isabella 25 Fertel, R. J. 29 Figlio, Karl 18 Finch, Peter Real series 7 Firbank, Esmé 95 Fleure, H. J. 119 Flintshire Ordnance Survey ‘Second Edition’ (map, 1870–85) 53 Ordnance Survey ‘First Edition’ (map, one-inch, 1839–41) 47 Ordnance Survey ‘First Edition’ (map, six-inch, 1870–1) 52 Flower, Robin The Western Island 98 Ford, Talissa J. 71 Foucault, Michel 4 Frawley, Oona 100 Furbank, P. N. 119 Garrett, James M. 21 geodesy see spiritual geodesy geopiety 17, 49, 63–5 Germany: Zones of Occupation (map) 142 Gilpin, William Observations on the River Wye 28 Gododdin, Y 197–8 Greatorex, Eleanor Elizabeth 127 Greatorex, Eliza Pratt 127 Greece 151, 152, 155, 160–1, 164, 165, 186 map 153 Griffiths, J. Gwyn 180, 183 Griffiths, Niall Stump 208

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index

Guareschi, Giovannino Don Camillo and Peppone 150–1 Guattari, Félix 3 Halbwachs, Maurice 44 Harley, J. Brian 4, 5, 20, 53, 168 Harris, Alexandra 92 Harvey, David 3 Harvey, John 66 Hay, Peter 125, 126 Heath, Charles The Excursion Down the Wye from Ross to Monmouth 27, 28 Hemingway, Ernest The Old Man and the Sea 143 Hitt, Jack 4 Hoare, Richard Colt 27 Holman, Katherine 99, 103, 119, 126, 130, 146–7, 155, 160, 164, 166, 169 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 17, 43–77, 84 ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe’ 68–9 Brân Maenefa, bardic nom de plume 51 Dominical sermon 43–77 ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’ 70 ‘Penmaen Pool’ 53 ‘Pied Beauty’ 51 ‘The Sea and the Skylark’ 45 The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins 45, 46 ‘Spring’ 45 ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ 45, 70, 73–5, 76–7, 94 Hopkins, Manley The Port of Refuge, or Advice and Instructions to the Mastermariner in Situations of Doubt, Difficulty, and Danger 75–6 Howe, Kathleen Stewart 56, 58 Howson, Revd T. S. 25 Hughes, Hugh Dame Venodotia, alias Modryb Gwen: A Lady Incog. 97 Hughes, P. T. 128

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index

Ídhra 126, 151–68, 187 islandness 78, 90, 98, 102, 115, 121, 141, 158, 162, 168 Jacob, Christian 11 Jameson, Fredric 3, 207 Jarvis, Brian 15 Jason, Philip K. 176 Jenkins, David Fraser 91, 92 Jones, Bobi 16, 17 see also Jones, R. M. Jones, David 177 The Lord of Venedotia 92 Jones, Jonah 83, 96 Jones, Glyn The Island of Apples 208 Jones, Gwyn 190, 192, 193, 196, 198, 201 The Buttercup Field 127 Jones, R. Gerallt 190, 192, 196, 197, 201 Jones, R. M. 190, 192, 196, 198, 201 see also Jones, Bobi Kavanagh, Patrick 205 Keates, J. S. 148 Keats, John ‘The Fall of Hyperon. A Dream’ 200–1 ‘Ode to Psyche’ 200 Kerr, William 51 Kinglake, Alexander Eothen; or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East 64 Kinnock, Glenys 10 Kitchener, H. H. and C. R. Conder Survey of Western Palestine 58, 62 Kitchin, Thomas Map of the Rivers Severn and Wye 42 see also Avonmouth; de Suffren, Amelia, From Piercefield Walks; River Severn Old Passage Kolokotronis, Theodoros 159, 161

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Korea 19, 175 38th Parallel 183, 185, 186, 191, 193, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202 The Korean Theater (map) 185 Korean War 176, 177, 180–7, 193, 194, 198, 201 see also Asia and Adjacent Areas (map) Labé, Louise 150 Lamont, Claire 33 Landsker 7, 188–9 Langland, William Piers Plowman 187–8 Lefebvre, Henri 3 Levine, Philippa 60 Levinson, Marjorie Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems 20, 21, 27, 29, 41 Lewis, Alun 90, 167, 177, 208 literary geography 5–7, 30, 32 literary hydrography 20–42 literary tourism 7 Llwyd, Alan 190, 192, 193, 196, 197, 198–9, 201 Llywelyn, Dorian 64, 65 Lockley, R. M. 83, 85 Islands Round Britain 85 Long, Burke O. 49, 62, 63, 68, 71–2 Loomis, Jeffrey B. 68 Lyn, David 165 MacDiarmid, Hugh Lucky Poet 89–90 McFarland, Thomas 30 MacLean, Sorley 177 Macmillan, Revd Hugh 62 MacNeice, Louis 205 MacNulty, John Bard 25 Manchester Evening News 119 Mariani, Paul 49 Martin, Ellis Ordnance Survey leaflet (1930s) 1, 2, 3 Martin, Robert Bernard 44 Mathews, P. J. 99 Matless, David 1, 3 May, Jon 5

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Mellor, David 90, 91 Meredith, Christopher Shifts 208 Meredith, George ‘Lucifer in Starlight’ 200 Metaxas, Ioannis 161 Miall, David 21 Michalski, Henry 96 Mills, Revd John 65 Mitchell, Timothy 64 moatedness 125, 126, 130, 148, 158, 163 Monmouthshire county map (1801) 22 Moorman, Mary 25–6 Moretti, Franco 16, 17, 34, 36, 42 Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 12–14, 15, 32, 34 ‘chronotopes’ 12, 13 ‘distant reading’ 13–14 Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History 12–14 Morgan, Derec Llwyd 65 Morris, Lewis 24 Aberdaron Road, the South East Side of Bardsey Sound, in Caernarvon Shire 80, 82 North Entrance of Bardsey Sound and the Roads in Caernarvonshire 80, 81 Moscrop, John 57, 58 Muller, Jill 73 New British Poets, The 96 New Directions in Prose and Poetry 95 New Stories from the Mabinogion 208 New York Times 95 New Yorker, The 95 Newborough, Lord 151 O’Brien, Flann 206 O’Crohan, Tomás The Islandman 98 O’Donnell, Ian 99 O’Donnell, Peader Islanders 98

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O’Flaherty, Liam The Black Soul 98 O’Sullivan, Maurice Twenty Years A-growing 98 Obenzinger, Hilton 59–60 Obernburg 128, 131–9 pen drawing 129 Ogborn, Miles 4 Olchon Valley 7 Ong, Walter J. 43, 45 Owen, Wilfred 177 Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) 56–62, 64, 69, 70 Papandreou, Georgios 164 Parc y Blawd 174, 194 Boundary Commission for Wales (map, 2002) 189, 190 Ordnance Survey (map, 1905–6) 188 Ordnance Survey (map, 1922–3) 189 Pennant, Thomas The Journey to Snowdon 91 Petts, John 89, 90, 91, 109, 114, 122 ‘From Other Hills’ (with Brenda Chamberlain) 89 Petts, Peter 114 Phillips, Catherine 50 Picasso, Pablo Minotauromachia 114 Pickles, John A History of Spaces 203 Piper, John 91, 94, 107 In Llanberis Pass 91, 92–3, 94–5, pl. 9 Snowdonia, North Wales 91–2, 93, pl. 8 Plumtree, E. H. The Bible Educator 61 Poetry Chicago 95 Poetry London 95, 107 Poetry Quarterly 95 Price-Owen, Anne L. 84 Pryce, Malcolm 208 psychocartography 43–77 psychogeography 7, 8, 23, 24, 73, 86 spiritual 62

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Pugh, Edward Cambria Depicta 91 Pynchon, Thomas 11 Ramsay, A. C. The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales 91 Real South Pembrokeshire 7 Recording Britain scheme 90, 92 Reed, Mark L. 26 Rees, Alwyn D. Life in a Welsh Countryside 80, 86 Rees, William Historical Atlas of Wales 198, 199 The Isolation of Wales 199 Renan, Ernest 59 Rexroth, Kenneth 95–6 Rhymney Valley 7 Rilke, Rainer Maria Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke 142 River Severn Old Passage, Surveyed by Captain Beechey 37, 38 see also Avonmouth; de Suffren, Amelia, From Piercefield Walks; Kitchin, Thomas, Map of the Rivers Severn and Wye Robert Leiaf 80 Robinson, Edward Biblical Researches in Palestine 56, 57 Robinson, Tim 208–09 Roe, Nicholas 187, 195 Rossington, Michael 33 Rowland, Jenny 197 Rusk, Dean 183, 184 Ruskin, John 50 Russell, George William (Æ) 182 Said, Edward 3–4, 11 St Beuno’s Ordnance Survey, six-inch ‘First Edition’ (map, 1872) 54 Ordnance Survey, twenty-five inch ‘First Edition’ (map, 1872) 55 Saunders, Angharad 6, 30, 31 Schimanski, Johan 32–3 Schneider, Elisabeth 75, 76

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Scott, Bonnie Kime 100 Scott, Sir Walter 34 Sea of Galilee 44–7, 62, 64, 66, 70, 71, 74–5 map (by the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1877) 61 map (compared with the Clwyd Valley) 46 map (superimposed on the Denbighshire and Flintshire OS map) 47 Severn, river see Avonmouth; de Suffren, Amelia, From Piercefield Walks; Kitchin, Thomas, Map of the Rivers Severn and Wye; River Severn Old Passage Shakespeare, William The Tempest 113 Shalev, Zur 60 Sheers, Owen Resistance 7 Sisson, Elaine 101 Skelton, Robin 101 Skrine, Henry 28 Smith, D. K. 52 Smyth, William J. 5 Soja, Edward 4, 63 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 132 Spalding, Frances 91 spiritual geodesy 53 spiritual psychogeography see psychogeography: spiritual Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius 44, 45, 49, 50, 62, 68 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn Sinai and Palestine in Connection with their History 60, 65–7 stereocartography 47, 62, 63, 66, 67 Stow, David Sabbath School Teachers and Parents 61 Stradling, Robert 23 Sulloway, Alison G. 50 Sunday Independent 128 Synge, J. M. 87, 97–8, 119, 121 The Aran Islands 17, 98, 99–101, 116

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The Playboy of the Western World 87, 97, 98, 100 Riders to the Sea 98, 100, 101 The Shadow of the Glen 98 Tally, Robert 13, 14 Tatler, The 110 Thacker, Andrew 6 Thomas, Dylan ‘The Dress’ 123 ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ 94 ‘In Memory of Ann Jones’ 94 Thomas, Edward 177 Thomas, Gwyn 193 Thomas, M. Wynn 102, 110, 115 Thomas, Ned 180–1, 193, 194, 196, 197 Thomas, Norman 159 Thomas, R. S. 190, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 208 Thompson, Judith 199–200 Thomson, William, archbishop of York 57 Thomson, William McClure 57 Thrift, Nigel 5 Times Literary Supplement 163 Tolkien, J. R. R. 7 Travis, Charles 203 Truman, Harry S. 185 Tuan, Yi-Fu 63 Vale of Clwyd 17, 43, 44–7, 48, 50–6, 63, 66, 68–70, 71, 72, 75, 77 van der Bijl, Jean 85, 96, 109, 122, 123, 125, 127, 136, 151, 152 verbal chorography (or particularist cartography) 1–2, 12, 17, 27, 45, 49, 97 von Laer, Karl 88, 89, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 136–7, 144, 168 Wales 95, 107, 119 Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) 207 Wales-Israel tradition 64–5, 66, 69, 70, 71

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Warner, Richard A Walk through Wales, in August 1797 40 Welsh Drama Studio 165 Welsh Review, The 89, 93, 95, 96 Western Telegraph 179 Weun Parc y Blawd 174, 194 Boundary Commission for Wales (map, 2002) 189, 190 Ordnance Survey (map, 1905–6) 188 Ordnance Survey (map, 1922–3) 189 White, Norman 49, 50, 73, 76 Whitehead, Simon 23 Wiley, Michael 21 Wiliams, Gerwyn ‘Dolenni’ (‘Links’) 195 Wilken, Robert L. 70 Williams, Angharad 178 Williams, D. J. 180 Williams, David The History of Monmouthshire 26 Williams, Revd George 57 Williams, J. Edwal 178 Williams, Linda 179 Williams, Morvydd 178 Williams, Rowan 174, 177, 178, 188, 190–1, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201 Williams, Waldo 7, 172–202 ‘Angharad’ 178 ‘Ar Weun Cas’ Mael’ (‘On Puncheston Common’) 176 Baptist heritage 178, 181 ‘Brenhiniaeth a Brawdoliaeth’ (‘Sovereignty and Brotherhood’) 176, 180, 181 Dail Pren (Leaves of a Tree) 175, 177, 200 ‘Daw’r Wennol yn Ôl i’w Nyth’ (‘The Swallow will Return to its Nest’) 176, 188 ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ (‘In Two Fields’ / ‘Between Two Fields’) 19, 172–202

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‘O Bridd’ (‘O Soil of the Earth’) 179 pacifism 178, 179 ‘Paham yr Wyf yn Grynwr’ (‘Why I am a Quaker’) 180 ‘Pam y Gwrthodais Dalu Treth yr Incwm’ (‘Why I Refused to Pay the Income Tax’) 176, 180–1, 183, 198 ‘Y Plant Marw’ (‘The Dead Children’) 179 Quaker beliefs 178 review of An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, Gwyn Williams 198 ‘Y Tŵr a’r Graig’ (‘The Tower and the Rock’) 179 Williams, William (‘Gwilamus’) 178 Wills, David 155, 158 Wilson, Charles and Charles Warren The Recovery of Jerusalem: A Narrative of Exploration and Discovery in the City and the Holy Land 59, 64, 69 Winichakul, Thongchai 184 Withers, Charles W. J. 4 Wolfe, Stephen 32–3 Wood, Denis 184 Woof, Pamela 30, 35, 36, 38 Wordsworth, Christopher Memoirs of William Wordsworth 25, 26

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Wordsworth, Dorothy 21, 25, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39 Wordsworth, William 20, 21, 25, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39 ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’ 29 The Prelude 140 book VI (1805) 34, 140, 145 book X (1805) 41 ‘Tintern Abbey’ 17, 20–42, 201 tidal prediction 10–13 July 1798 32–42, pl. 5 Wright, John Kirtland 49 Wye Valley 20, 21, 26–41 see also de Suffren, Amelia, From Piercefield Walks Yeats, W. B. ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ 93 Michael Robartes and the Dancer 135 ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ 135 The Tower 135 Yorke, Malcolm 91 Young, Peter 187 Zola, Émile Germinal, 34

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