WHEN English visitors Jo the Welsh-speaking Llyn peninsula ask R.S. Thomas for directions, he likes to reply: "No English"; yet if the tourist but realised, this apparent Welsh monoglot is one of the very few poets writing in English today whose work is certain to be read in future centuries.
His antagonism towards the language in which he writes derives from the triumph of English over the Welsh language and its traditional society, and he is constantly frustrated by the passivity displayed by Welsh speakers not only in the face of Anglicisation but also towards the use of the Llyn peninsula as a practice ground for RAF fighter bombers and as a rest and recreation facility for the English urban masses.
Thomas seldom experiences beauty and worth without accompanying irritation, and he remembers visiting a park as a child: "It is lovely in the park in the summertime too. The breeze is full of the smell of roses. I bend to smell one of the flowers, but poor me! Some bugbear is waiting for me there! In an instant it is up my nose, and I start screaming all over the place . . . it is always with trepidation that I smell a flower."
His years as rector of Manafon induced similar contradictions and while "two-thirds of him was in sympathy with these people who had been out in all weathers tending the land", he contrasted the beauty visible from the hilltops with the horizons of his parishioners which lay "no further than the tar side" of the slope of the valley where they lived. It was here that poems such as "A Peasant" had their genesis.
One of the four autobiographical works included here (all of them translated from the Welsh) is entitled The Creative Writer's Suicide; in this he argues that poetry must be written in the language of one's earliest experiences, and that it would have been a form of suicide for him to have written his poetry in Welsh given that he was 30 when he began to learn the language. The Anglo-Welsh writer, he argues, subsists in no-man's- land between two cultures, yet writing in Welsh, while it might have helped save the language, would have made certain his own death as a creative writer.
Like the Yeatsian autobiographies to which the title of this book offers homage, this is the story of the evolution of a poet's mind rather than the facts of a lived life - his son, Gwydion, for example, is only passingly referred to, and the main work, No one, is written in the third person. The sensibility which was to inform his poetry appears to have been formed prior to his adoption of poetry as the means of its expression and nothing in either his upbringing or his lax education made poetry probable, although his Wordsworthian love of nature - particularly its birds - and his hiraeth, or longing for the sea, made it utterly appropriate.
Religion has been a concern in all his work and the deus absconditus, the God of absences, has been a particular concern in the more abstract poetry of recent decades. A Year in Llyn, a month-by-month diary which forms part of Autobiographies, exemplifies his outlook:
"I have recently been rereading Samuel Beckett. I can see the intricate skill and originality of the man, and realise that he is expressing the contemporary condition of mankind in the large towns of the West but how on earth can I cherish the same ideas of Llyn, of all places? Although there are problems here, and the Welsh language and culture are under pressure, how, surrounded by the beauty of Llyn, can one lose hope and consider life meaningless? That would be blasphemy. Beckett must be true to his vision as a creative writer, but that does not impair my right to my own vision either. The Irish Sea has been polluted, the aeroplanes roar above our heads, preparing for the next war; but this is the work of man. Seeing the dew in the morning and the beauty of the sea at sunset; listening to the silence after the aeroplanes have ceased their tumult, I have just as good a right to my faith as he has to his atheism."