Too Much Welsh

Before the rise of Welsh and Scottish nationalism in the Sixties, Wales and Scotland were provinces of England. In the 1950s we thus see the same provincial angst when would-be sophisticates meet the local folk. In That Uncertain Feeling Kingsley Amis gives it his own metropolitan spin.

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A chip on his shoulder? It’s two great ruddy blocks of wood. Oak and mahogany. The oak: the demotic, democratic Welsh working-class of the Valleys. The mahogany: a good education, rising one a class or two, but leaving us without the social depth and sophistication of the higher bourgeoisie. Oh, he talks like an educated man, and the sheen of that education is all over him, it is why Mrs Watkin - born, raised and educated in Oxford - fancies John at a glance; so obviously civilised, not like these Welsh, who always have too much to say. We like to get close, you see, we want to be friendly like, you know. Always wanting to stare into your soul. Always being nosey, see, to sum you up, to put you in your place: you’re not too good for these Valleys, are you love?

Carrying all this wood around on your shoulders can make life difficult. It gets in the way of a good time.

I turned away and surveyed the room. What was going on in it was the same as what had been going on in it when I arrived. If the R.A.F.-moustached man on my left wasn’t telling me the same story for the tenth time, his listeners were doing the same sort of laughing; the drink the dentist’s mistress was lifting erratically to her mouth surely couldn’t still be her first; the prices of second-hand sports cars were still being discussed behind me, droningly and in slow motion; they all held a replica of the glass and olive and cigarette they’d had from the word go. Should I break in in a renewed effort to be marked down as ‘impossible’, bawl a defence for the Welfare State, start undressing myself or the dentist’s mistress, give  the dentist a lovely piggy-back round the room, call for a toast to the North Korean Foreign Minister or Comrade Malenkov?

No. Like everything else, all that, now I’d failed so badly over the tail-twisting, was much too boring. How could these people so much as move about, weighted down as they were in their Field Service Marching Order of boredom? But that wasn’t quite fair, was it? No: if you actually had a sports car or a cabin-cruiser or fifty table lighters, if you had the money, in short, to invite all these craps home, or to take a half-share in the dentist’s mistress or perhaps even buy him out altogether, then you were alright. No: then it was all right. Because if you were all right—rubbish: if it was all right…

Losing my thread, I looked around for Jean. Probert was talking hard to her, with Elizabeth listening rather inattentively. She caught my glance and mouthed some phrase at me, pointing at Probert. No thanks, I thought; whatever it is, no thanks. I smiled and waived to her, then hurried out.

John has arrived in first class with only a few possessions. An impoverished newcomer just on ship, he’s insecure, and thus defensive. His personality full of bristles, they defend him against any slight and mockery. It is the parvenu, prone to reveal his social origin through little slips of phrase and action. Go on the attack! Hit these bastards hard. Bah. It is only play acting. A tame pussycat pretending to be a wild dog. You’ve gotta learn, you fool. In a few years no-one will ever know you are a miner’s son. But he is immature. Thus the mock aggression, which reveals itself in weak satire: he is too intimate with these people to reject them altogether; while he lacks the intellectual resources to forge an independent life. So much is showing off. Trying to protect the thin culture he has acquired - and how thin we are made aware - John pretends to belong to a class he left behind when he entered university. Your life’s on the top of the valley now boy, not down here in the valley’s terraces. But no, he won’t have it. Instead, he idealises the past to which he cannot return, and which he uses as a weapon to attack those who are better than him. Better! Well of course, they are naturals to his milieu, having been raised from it from birth. Professionals in a class were he is still an amateur.

Oh he can see through the phoney art, for sure. But he misunderstands what it’s about. The reason why the untalented Gareth Probert can get away with his pretentious nonsense is that literature holds no interest for these people. It exists merely as a social event and a salve for bad consciences…the local elite is cut off from the local class not only by manners and ideas but by language and accent; as John recognises they are Anglo-Welsh, with an emphasis on the Anglo. More English than Welsh, they thus strive after authenticity; this fetish with Welsh culture and the Welsh language. But why put you finger on somebody’s wound and press it hard? It shows the lack of sensitivity and the selfishness of the insecure teenager.

He faces similar problems in the library: few of the punters are interested in the serious stuff. It makes him supercilious, to which he has no right: since leaving behind the discipline of university he no longer reads literature. It is the typical snobbery of the phoney. Those who look down on others because they share the same weakness and pretension. Grow up, man. Except you are philistine, and don’t worry about what others read and watch. You’re no better than them. Oh yes, you have your certificates. But now, see, when you’re on your own, and must cultivate yourself, they are worthless. Just like everybody else, yet you persist in thinking yourself a cut above; as if a degree guarantees a permanent place on an intellectual plinth. Silly billy.

John’s voluntary self-exile from the local elite and his resignation from the library is an attempt at growing up; yet these actions don’t feel quite real to me. But then is that the point? That even at novel’s end he hasn’t matured. To remain the little boy for the rest of his life; always to run away from the conflicts and hard decisions of existence. But if you don’t face them, see, you’ll never be a proper adult. Poor dab.

Was Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams born into the upper crust? Her school the same as Jean’s, yet Elizabeth has both the accent and the demeanour of the Welsh upper-class to which she so obviously belongs. Did she start from a higher social base - Welsh schools, except for the elite, tended to be more socially inclusive than in England - or she is a natural chameleon, easily acquiring - or better: imitating - the mores of this world? How explain this ease, her distinction? There’s something of the actress about Elizabeth. Think of that control; the ability to create effects, to stir another’s emotions while keeping cool herself; then the letting go, that mad rush into the moment; though her self-consciousness never leaves her; even in the wildest passion, she knows what she’s doing. This is no ordinary woman. Closer to an artist than the Aberdarcy bourgeoisie; a bit like Kingsley Amis himself, we imagine.

As with many novels of the time we watch the loose sexual morals of the upper classes, where infidelity is a way of life; and no-one worries about homosexuals, who decorate the scene. Elizabeth’s husband is gay, we are sure; one reason for her serial love affairs. It is only the moralistic hero who worries about such matters. His past won’t leave him be. For the workers have a stricter moral code, tied closely to their emotions, which doesn't allow for the same freedoms: Jean is badly hurt when she realises John prefers Elizabeth. The lower classes yet to be educated to separate conduct and ideas from their being. John is negotiating this tricky state, as he struggles with the complexities of this new social scene. Which way to fall: towards the indifference and fragmentation of the upper or to the integrated claustrophobia of the lower? His educated mind pushing him up, his feelings and his upbringing pulls him down.

To the outsider, removed from the pains of social adjustment, it is a farce.1 No doubt why sex plays such a role here: the small tragedies of social strife become the stuff of bedroom comedy.

The problem of using sex as the symbol of class seduction is that the sex overwhelms the symbol, making the latter ridiculous: an overgrown schoolboy fumbling around inside a woman’s bedroom. And of course John jumps out the window in the Welsh national costume - he found it in Elizabeth’s wardrobe and decided to try it on - when he is disturbed by the other guests. Yet we are not laughing very loudly: it feels overdone, and satirically obvious. Amis has a great ear and writes marvellous scenes, but there is a hollowness about these characters; they are more poses than people; Amis dangling his mannequins above the page.

Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams is a femme fatale who wants to catch a young and attractive man. It’s not just about sex; her aim to master him, turning him into a servant. She enjoys the excitement of the chase, the thrills of passion and the simulacrum of love. However, she wants more than this. Power is her desire; to control, to humiliate, to put the collar on men, and lead them through the local streets; everyone to know of her triumphs. A man on her arm, the stag’s head on the baronial wall, the tiger-skin on the castle floor. Elizabeth. Gruffydd. The queen of England. A prince of Wales. A beautiful body and the feminine ability to make it soft and yielding; the masculine will to dominate. John Edwards hasn’t a chance.

“Now listen to me, John. Get this straight. In your position you can’t afford to look a gift horse in the mouth. I can tell you, I’ve seen a good bit of this sort of thing since I’ve been married to Vernon. You can take it from me that nobody gets any kind of job or position in this world completely on his merits. There’s always something else that enters into it. It may be politics, it may be having the right kind of face or education or background or whatever you like to call it, it may be, well, doing someone a personal favour. Now I can quite see how you’d feel happier if you could feel you’d got the job simply by being the best bloke to do it. But you’ve got to be sensible about it as well.”

John doesn’t want to be caught. Stuck between two classes, he retains the simplicity and the honesty of his class and childhood ways. The sophistication of Elizabeth and her circle, with their contempt for the simple integrities of the innocent, is beyond him. He cannot separate out his feelings from his actions and ideas; while he has been educated to believe in individual effort and individual talent: collectives don't past exams. School has instilled a moral code that he needs to lose to be a social success…. Coming from a class where education has been the means of his rise, he has yet to learn that he must ditch that education if he wants to get on. Intellectual attainment has forced him to be independent, but it hasn’t taught him to play the flunkey; nor trained him in social gymnastics, the flexing of our moral limbs, that elasticity to twist into any shape demanded of group or scene. Poor sap. He exists in a no-man’s land between his parents’ past and an Elizabethan future, with only his intellect as a guide. It is not enough. Because of his emotional attachment to his past, he tries to defend himself against the ‘corrupting’ influence of his new surroundings; his insecurities feeding his boorishness. And he is right to be nervous. If he gives in to Elizabeth, he will join her class, and there will be an irreparable break with his own; which in turn will make him vulnerable and dependent. But John is no hero. He can’t handle the psychic stress of such a break, though his social rise is pushing him towards it. Too close to that past; he is too gauche to outgrow his sentimentalities. Unless as cooly clever as Elizabeth, with the detachment of the actress or artist, it is not easy to dismantle a life history; the alienation, the distance from one’s parents and friends, is too much; you cannot cope with the loneliness, are undone by the isolation. Thus John’s tendency, when in the company of the local elite, to exaggerate his origins, and to self-consciously act the working-class smart aleck; another kind of fakery: the workers are more civilised and subtle than that. A smarter more confident man accepts the reality of his social position, and allows himself to be absorbed into this new milieu, giving up his independence - which, in truth, is mere truculence and a fear of the new - to acquire the veneer of these superior souls. Jean, witness to John’s split persona, agrees.

“I knew it, because I know you, see? No need to tell me anything more. You couldn't just do it and forget about it, not you, you had to make a bloody fuss, so you told her what to do with the job she’d landed you. Don’t talk to me about Ieuan, you don’t care what happens to Ieuan, or his wife. You forgot you were married to me, though, that’s what makes me so mad. If it’d just been your job you were turning down, fair enough, you could do as you liked. But it wasn’t just your job, it was my job as well, and the kids’ too. But you didn't care about that, you’d got to make your stand and be bloody sensitive. Well, I hope you are satisfied.”

Once you’ve lost your innocence, left one’s past behind, you can’t have it back. You must follow through the logic of your choices and live with the consequences. John is too weak, too young, too simple, to do this. A teenage mind in a man’s body. The target of Amis’s comedy. Having lived such a life myself I don’t find it that funny - too close to the bone you see. But let me be fair: if I were the Devil I’d be laughing like my own true self, as I spin the human hamster round and round his working-class-wheel. Poor boy, running faster and faster yet stuck to the old same place.

The novel ends in a fantasy, which we don’t believe. 

After the sexual act John breaks with Elizabeth; for he is unable to deal with the emotional fall out of the affair, that need to play the role of the conscientious husband. This whole palaver about the job is, as Jean rightly says, really about his relations with his lover. John isn’t mature enough to manage the guilt of illicit love. This is naturalism, and we believe it. As is Elizabeth’s response: a reckless drive back to Aberdarcy. In the midst of passion, and denied her slave, she plays with death and suicide. For although she is a professional seducer the passion is real, until it dies a natural death, fades with time and routine. This one hasn’t had time to fade.  Each love affair is a role on the stage, this play closing after the first night…. 

The scene that follows with Jean is true too: she hates him.

But then there’s the epilogue. It feels tacked-on. The author wants a happy ending. And he gets one: Jean and John are reconciled. John to deal with cross-class migration by leaving the library to work at the pit: in the office: a clever compromise. So easy. He has learned his lesson, and he will be a good boy from here on in; he knows he doesn't belong with the fast set. He’s right. He doesn’t belong; not clever nor flexible, nor sophisticated enough to learn the mores and merge into the lifestyle.2 But it doesn't follow that he can return to the old class or live a comfortable compromise. Some can for sure. Perhaps he is one. This is possible. To slip back into the habits of his past, and be happy there. It is a comforting theme; but other novels of the time tell different, harsher stories about such class clashes. Educated above one’s level of sophistication it can be bloody hard work joining a new world. Most of us suffer, and end up flailing around in the interstices of two classes; forever on the outside looking in. Kingsley Amis has found the one individual who avoids all of that. Good luck to him!

Review: That Uncertain Feeling

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1. Not so for those who live with this struggle. Contrast this novel with Emyr Humphrey's Toy Epic.

2. In his last minutes with Elizabeth, when her husband comes to rescue her, John realises there is far more below the surface insouciance: Mr Gruffydd-Williams clearly cares about his wife, even though he knows of her promiscuity. He has mistaken surface for depth.