Insights from an Outsider

During the Second World War and for a few years afterwards, Lynette Roberts was recognised as a gifted and highly original poet. Remarkably, her distinctive voice was not muffled by her marriage to Keidrych Rhys, energetic self-promoter and founding editor of the pioneering journal Wales whom she divorced in 1949. From the mid-1950s until her death in 1994, however, bouts of mental illness and membership of the Jehovah's Witnesses tragically brought an end to her literary career. In studies published over the last twenty years or so critics such as Tony Conran and John Pikoulis have reminded us of the quality of her poetry, but a new edition of her work was long overdue. In this volume Patrick McGuinness presents a comprehensive collection of her published and unpublished poetry together with two related prose pieces.

During the war, Roberts, who had been born into a comfortably-off family in Argentina, found herself transplanted to the Carmarthenshire village of Llan-y-bri, where in stark contrast to the glamorous literary life she sometimes enjoyed in London, she kept house in primitive conditions, with candles and lamps for lighting, no running water, and cooking on solid fuel, often alone while her husband was away in the services. The aspirations and contradictions of mid-century feminism constantly bubble up: 'Poem from Llanybri', addressed to Alun Lewis, while proudly evoking the homely welcome she will offer, makes no bones about the endless labour cottage life entails for the woman:

Then I'll do the lights, fill the lamp with oil,
Get coal from the shed, water from the well;
Pluck and draw pigeon with crop of green foil
[...] offering
you a night's rest and my day's energy.

Yet she produced some of her best work in these conditions, transforming the everyday life in the village into poems where age-old tasks and traditions stand in contrast to modern poetic form. But although her earliest poems reflect experience shared with the local women, there is never total empathy and identification. Class and foreign birth make her very much an outsider, even if one with privileged insights, in so far as women could cross class boundaries more easily than men might, especially in the shared fears and hardships of wartime. But she seems both to relish and regret her status, one foot in the daily life of the village, the other in a privileged, educated, English milieu.

Rootless, she first converts to Welshness, even nationalism. Her parents were Australians who emigrated to Argentina before her birth but were, ultimately, of Welsh extraction, and after marrying into Welsh-speaking Wales, she embraced enthusiastically its language, history, literature and traditions, experimenting with welsh poetic forms and using the patterns of colloquial speech in her writing. But she soon began to hanker nostalgically for the warmth and rich colours of South America, producing in around 1941 a series of poems inspired by the country where she had lived until her mid-teens. Later, she was understandably drawn to the stories of the colony of Patagonia, which allowed her to combine welsh and Argentinean strands. Her 1953 verse radio-play, El Dorado, for example, is based on the well-known incident in which three of the colonists were killed by Indians. Interestingly, she owed her knowledge of this story to a 1936 cutting from the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, rather than to any of the earlier Welsh sources: her research often seems more haphazard than methodical.

Her infectious enthusiasm for encyclopaedic learning, leaping form history and literature to botany, ornithology, geology, whatever took her fancy, makes for extraordinary richness of imagery with striking juxtapositions. But at the same time the self-conscious, sometimes naïve, erudition of the autodidact can make for embarrassing reading. Many of her explanatory notes - their number almost competes with David Jones - are misleading or downright wrong. I was not surprised to learn that it was she who fed Robert graves much of the claptrap of bad translations of texts of dodgy authenticity which lay behind that early New-Agers' bible, The White Goddess.

As McGuinness stresses, she has undoubted affinities with the Modernist school, not least in her penchant for specialised, even abstruse language. One of the characteristics of her poetry is the juxtaposition of scientific terms with those relating to nature, the use of hard-edged modern vocabulary of metals or machinery to convey the essence of natural phenomena, or vice versa.

Inevitably this vocabulary and imagery have made her work seem difficult to many readers, including T.S. Eliot, though for me it's not so much the words but her syntax which takes some unravelling. However, reading aloud usually reveals the sense. It also makes the syntax less important, allowing us to concentrate on her strongly visual imagery - Roberts trained first as a visual artist before becoming a writer - and on the all-important sound of these poems, the rhythms and alliterations which are part of their essence.

Both the diction and very painterly imagery remain extraordinarily fresh, but the choice of words can actually make the poems seem as antiquated as they were then determinedly up-to-date. They reek of post-war optimism in progress through technology before the environment was invented and take me straight back to the 1950s and my mother's Scientific Book Club books, staple reading next to hard toilet-paper on the bathroom shelf. And how many readers can now interpret the mysteries of 'Coats' cotton 48' or still use for machine-sewing a 'Singer's perfect model scrolled with gold'? ('Cwmclyn', page 43; revised version, pp.66-7). The combination of a conventional femininity and modern machinery is again of its time, before the Fifties drove lipsticked women warworkers back from engineering factories to the kitchen sink. Reading Lynette Roberts is like visiting St Fagan's or Ironbridge - the poems are relics of a material culture which I shared with at least two previous generations and whose artefacts museum curators seem no longer to expect anyone outside their profession to recognise. This aspect is reinforced by the explanatory notes: shocking to think that the editor felt the need to explain a Rhode Island Red, a Belisha beacon, or even anthracite. Some of these notes also tend to miss the point, the essential character of the thing which is actually relevant to the meaning in its poetic context: yes, Rimmel (pp. 60, 145) was a cosmetic brand but 'rimmeled' is a French borrowing and means 'wearing mascara.'

These are extraordinary and often moving poems, not easy to approach but rewarding to rediscover. Lynette Roberts fully deserves her restoration into the twin canon of twentieth century English-writing in Wales and of women's writing. That illness brought her career to so untimely a close is tragic.