The Matter of Wales
Morris, Jan
carry death in them; they carry the death in them. When the toughguyness isn't plain awful, it is awful and embarrassingly punk, as when he boasts of getting into a cage with a wolf, which we...
...Perhaps this explains the publisher's pique...
...This is an equivocation because the "ought" in this decision merely is shorthand for "If we want honest accountants then J o n e s . . . "; which is like saying "If you want to go to Brooklyn you must [ought to] take the A train...
...Everything that would, if tolerated, destroy society (e.g., murder) is immoral...
...The Welsh today would understandably like to have a greater share in their self-government...
...Nothing else is...
...Since to begin with she does not acknowledge the appearance of National Romanticism everywhere in the West from the 1870s to World War I, she consequently over-inflates the rise and decline of Welsh consciousness as such in that period...
...Cooney contends that we all share the desire not to have everything (the world, society) destroyed, and that morality derives from this desire...
...Curtis's living history chronicles the life & times of the modern U.S...
...Morris herself concedes that "the Welsh are all too knowledgeable about the English and most of them would probably admit that if they have to live within the shadow of a mighty Power, better the English power than most...
...And he is just wrong on the important matters, although there are some nice incidental insights...
...Cooney is aware of this difficulty, but tries to overcome it by what I regard as an equivocation...
...Brown...
...This is nonsense...
...Shaw or D.H...
...At bookstores or order from: REGNERY GATEWAY, INC...
...Curtis was there for the decline & rise of the Republican Party--always in the minority, always against the tide...
...Fearing (wrongly, as it turned out) that his manuscript had no chance of being read unless recommended by a philosophical heavyweight, Timothy Cooney forged a letter of praise from the philosophical heavyweight, Robert Nozick...
...With The Matter of Wales she is less rewarding than ever before, less succinct, because her sentiment about Wales is insufficiently reconciled with her critical intelligence--or with her respect for limits...
...but they don't passionately want to be "liberated...
...This would have been an appropriate moment for her to explain why Scotland is authentically famous for its medical achievements and why Welsh medicine is a compound of dilettantism and sorcery...
...Synge or W.B...
...Anglicanism was imposed by a writ of law...
...Lawrence...
...The editors at Prometheus Books are to be congratulated on their common sense and their dedication, to publishing books on their merits, rather than following whatever murky principles inspired Random House...
...Glendower's revolt, however, was the terminal event in a specific historical context...
...She has researched and rehearsed every aspect of Wales that she hopes will ingratiate her probably uninformed reader...
...Any man can face death," he says at one point, "but to be committed [as Antonio Ord6fiez was that summer] to bring it as close as possible while performing certain classic movements and do this again and again and again and then deal it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which you love is more complicated than just facing death...
...Now, granted that we all share the desire to continue the world (there are some nihilists, but let that go), why does this make the desire morally good...
...We don't want ever to hear all that any writer knows of his subject...
...Cooney claims that his discoveries are original and correct...
...We don't want to hear everything she knows...
...its like has not been typical and, as she must know, is not likely to be resurrected tomorrow...
...Her greatest critical failure in this book is her indifference to the usefulness, to the inevitability, of comparison...
...The book is informative, no doubt of that...
...Upon coming to the end of The Mat - ter of Wales, gratified as I was to have learned all I hadn't known about the Welsh, what I knew now failed to enlarge my affection for them...
...Why is a faker worse, particularly a comparatively harmless faker like Cooney...
...It deals with the suitability of means, not with the justification 48 THE AMERICAN SPEcTATOR OCTOBER 1985...
...Trying to sell herself, then us, on the grand tradition of Welsh medicine by relaying the practices of the famous (locally) Muddfoi School, she is compelled on second thought to confess that its doctrines were interfused with magic and impeded by ignorance...
...The "ought" here is instrumental...
...on the Welsh propensity for old wives' tales...
...Las Vegas, hoist by its own petard, is Fun City...
...It will come as a surprise to many of us, I feel sure, that in the eighteenth century Wales was radically transformed by Methodism...
...Properly speaking, a travel writer is one whose subject is not merely the place he visits but the adventure--often the ordeal-of getting to it...
...It iswritten in a clear and lively style and the author has something to say...
...Nebraska's "Little Tiger" takes on the Welfare State: Billie Sol Estes . . . Bobbie Baker...labor racketeeri n g . . , big government...
...Cetinje, in Yugoslavia, is Ruritania...
...There can TWO BOOKS THAT REALLY SHOW GOVERNMENT AT ITS WORST FORTY A HST THETIDE Congress & the Welfare State SENATOR CARL T. CURTIS and Rip, is (](~urt(!l)lanch...
...Cad T. Curtis with Regis Courtemanche...
...In England, nonconformism is a synonym for the morality of brick-chapel dissent...
...olOlOlololo !llU,r )il FORTY YEARS AGAINST THE TIDE: Congress & the Welfare State, by Sen...
...If literature is the first Welsh glory, where, during the last hundred years, is their equivalent of, let's say, Thomas Hardy or J.M...
...7-1 TELLING RIGHT FROM WRONG: WHAT IS MORAL, WHAT IS qMMORAL, AND WHAT IS NF~ITHER ONE NOR THE OTHER Timothy J. Cooney/Prometheus Books/S17.95 Ernest van den Haag This book has an interesting history...
...We might think of her as a sociologist enhanced by impressi0taism...
...Indeed Mr...
...he chose to write his poems in English...
...Their habitual diet today consists of chips, potato crisps and miscellaneous convenience foods...
...But it is not morally relevant...
...But the essentials have not been visibly sifted...
...And until someone demonstrates otherwise, we shall presume that he knew better than Jan Morris why he so chose...
...18.95, hardcover...
...After a lifetime of being nominally English (or at least British), serving in the British Army and traveling the world around, exercising upon the places she saw a distinctly English judgment (I believe she may underrate the Tory Within), there is something gratuitous in her resolve now to assert her identity as Welsh and to characterize the inhabitants of Wales as, above all, fey...
...Literature is the first Welsh glory, poetry is its apotheosis and the company of poets is the nobility of this nation...
...Rice Paddy GRUNT: ~ L)r d;it hnt I Memorle~ el V*etnilm at~d Those .,' -" " Who Served BROW...
...Whatever her unconscious motives may be, they clearly conflict with her felt obligation to scholarship...
...For our century, the classics generally agreed upon include H.M...
...There are times in The Dangerous Summer when the reader cringes, as when Hemingway's adulation of Ord~fiez reduces a great writer to a fawning hanger-on...
...or when he boasts of knocking the ashes off cigarettes Ord6fiez held in his mouth with a .22 rifle "seven times" at a portable shooting gallery his wife Mary had hired for his 60th birthday party, with Ord6fiez "puffing the cigarettes down to see how short he could make them...
...He is wrong on both counts...
...she reveals, in this text of 425 pages, an anxiety-ridden compulsion to tell us everything she knows about Wales...
...One of her nost parenthetical summaries is all 1: ut her most damaging...
...RICE PADDY GRUNT chronicles one American soldier's search for America in the hearts and minds of the "lost" generation...
...but the Methodist Revival, Y Diwygiad, hurled everything topsy-turvy, demolishing the social structure, transforming the culture, shifting the self-image and the reputation of the people, and eventually giving rise to a great convulsion of power that was truly a revolution...
...An act is immoral only if it threatens to destroy society...
...ilh all illlrl~lul lio~l I)~, RtJss~'[i Kirk ,~:L ,'\ Rt:I;NI:R~ II()~)~ RICE PADDY GRUNT: Unfading Memories of the Vietnam Generation, by John M.G...
...The name and nature of what constitutes the poetic is confused in Miss Morris's mind...
...Ironically the book was accepted by Random House on its merits before the letter was seen...
...Part of Miss Morris's problem lies in that search for a controlling metaphor which is her customary point of departure...
...950 North Shore Drive Lake Bluff, IL 60044 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985 47be no plausible view of Wales as a suppressed or beleaguered country, like Ireland or Poland...
...Catholicism spread slowly, out of the Celtic church...
...He tells us that when we have a shared desire, "we go from is to ought all the time," and gives as an instance the decision "Jones is the wrong man for the job...
...Perhaps it is not impertinent to suspect that her metamorphosis from James to Jan Morris has much to do with her present desire to express herself in terms of the distaff side (the intuitive side, the fanciful side) of her ancestry...
...What The Dangerous Summer is about is the act of writing...
...To the best-known for this small country an "epic view" Welsh poet of our ~i~ne, "Dylan wasnot, without tedium, feasible, and Thomas, she does not g, ant "nobility...
...they would like (some of them would like) to have their language officially restored...
...Cooney writes well enough to have earned the right to be taken seriously, wherefore I will Ernest van den Haag is the John M. Olin Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham University...
...She tries equally hard to associate the people of Wales with the character of their land-and-seascape---"The substance of Welsh nature is largely rock," being one of her many predications...
...on their ambivalent kinship with and subjection to the English and, of course, their ever-renewed and everfailing attempt to keep alive the native tongue...
...Being half-Welsh herself and anxious to impress us with the unique virtues of her countrymen, she overloads her chronicle...
...Hence a great number of issues that are often considered moral are not...
...he could have learned Welsh, his parents spoke it...
...I proven merits of Alun l_~wis and couldn't help reflecting that perhaps Vernon Watkins...
...And what about this exquisite veronica from a master of English prose...
...A quibble is in order...
...point out his errors rather bluntly...
...She tries, at the outset, to advance Owen Glendower, the border chieftain whose squabble over land rights in the fifteenth century became political insurrection, as her representative hero, "the embodiment of ancient prophecies, foretelling the emergence of a liberator for Wales...
...Fortunately other publishers are not so silly...
...The reader winces...
...A fastidious palate is the first premise of a civilized community...
...should have been confined to the in fact she attributes I~i~, c~:ack-up to his austerity of Paul Wakefield's splendid not having written in Welsh, and she photographs...
...The Christian faith took centuries to root itself in Wales...
...Although she cites a number of poets unknown outside Wales (from her sketchy account of them, justifiably so), she ignores the seems to blame that on the heavy weight of English hegemony...
...it implies, by contrast with the Anglican church, an absence of ritual and poetry...
...If these are taken as exemplary, Jan Morris is not a travel writer...
...Nowhere, on any one of her principal subjects-language, literature, religion, or political insurgence--does she venture a single fruitful comparison with their counterparts in Scotland or Ireland...
...on Welsh religions...
...She does not tell of the physical problem of getting from one place to another, crossing an Empty Quarter, confusing the Congo with the Nile or penetrating Amazonia...
...Yeats or James Joyce or G.B...
...True, the author-murderer didn't murder anyone at Random House, whereas Cooney's faked letter was meant to affect Random House directly...
...She is at her best where she is most foreign, so that she is driven to find a master metaphor to subsume her interpretation...
...One might infer that everything that helps society to survive is morally good, but Cooney does not deal with this inference: He seems interested only in determining what is morally wrong...
...The great Australian desert becomes the cultural desert of the east coast...
...Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle, Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-Two Days, Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps, Freya Starke's The Valley of the Assassins, Peter Fleming's News from Tartary...
...The trick isn't that impressive, the distance being under two yards, so there is nothing to boast about, other than Hemingway's steady hands after a heap of drinking and his and Ord6fiez's stupidity...
...Experience the horror and sacrifice of men in b a t t l e . . , the fear, revulsion, remorse, loss and underlying love shared by fighting men in a desperate and unpopular war...
...Since elsewhere she maintains that the Welsh have survived by something very close to duplicity, by cunning and the adaptable smile, they cannot be notably rock-like...
...There is everything wrong with this...
...If Welsh Methodism so wildly differs from its rational version in England, this is news she might have emphasized...
...Religion is frequently the determining factor in a people's de~tiny and on that score Miss Morris may be a more reliable informant...
...it is certainly no worse than many books published by academics and by professional moralists...
...After all, Random House has unblinkingly published a book, by a convicted murderer, which had no other merit (pace Norman Mailer) than having been written by a convicted murderer...
...Miss Morris pretends to be amused at the compiling of Firsts by Welsh chauvinists, yet she dutifully restates the compilation...
...Congress...
...I am shocked to hear it...
...Is there not something desperate about informing us that in 1890 the Sealyham terrier was first bred by a John Owen Edwards in Dyfed, that it was intended for otter-hunting and was selectively evolved by pitting it against captive polecats...
...When the toughguyness isn't plain awful, it is awful and embarrassingly punk, as when he boasts of getting into a cage with a wolf, which we are given to understand does not harm him because the wolf comprehends that the great Hemingway is an admirer of wolves...
...The Welsh nave seldom been interested in food even when they could afford to be...
...on Welsh arts and sciences...
...It is your performance as a creative artist each day and your necessity to function as a skillful killer...
...She does not distinguish the poetic as an ingredient of temperament from poetry, the craft, written by poets...
...THE MATTER OF WALES: EPIC VIEWS OF A SMALL COUNTRY Jan Morris, with photographs by Paul Wakefield Oxford University Press/S22.50 Vernon Young Jan Morris is usually described by her publishers and accepted by her readers as, par excellence, a writer of travelogues...
...Vernon Young & a writer riving in Philadelphia...
...But we, who have received so many gifts of the imagination from Ernest Hemingway, must sympathize with him in his agony...
...18.95, hurdeover...
...The inside story of eight presidential administrations, from FDR to Jimmy Carter...
...While I lack the authority to dispute this comprehensive assertion, I have the distinct feeling that I am being imposed upon by her rhetoric...
...Anyway, publication of a book ought to depend on its merits, wherefore all the business about the letter, or anything else about the authorwbe he an adulterer, a homosexual, a cannibal, counterfeiter, feminist, sexist, or murderer--should not have led Random House to reverse its decision to publish...
...The exhaustive Study is nearly always tiresome, and hers is no exception...
...fhe publisher's action seems odd...
...He is not original since many others have shared his mistakes, although he seems not to be fully aware of this...
...Does the book have enough merit to warrant publication...
...According to Jan Morris, the Welsh have the highest rate of stomach cancer in the British Isles...
...Cooney here simply confuses the universally desired with the universally desirable (the moral), and thus leaps from "is desired" to "should be desired" (is desii'able...
...However, when it was discovered that Cooney had faked the Nozick letter, Random House refused to publish his book although already in galleys...
...And her preferred field of inquiry is the urban surround...
...With scant subordination, she discourses on Welsh nature and wild life (the pages are among her best), on virtually a thousand years of Welsh history...
...She backs and fills...
...he ought not to be hired" based on a) the empirical knowledge that Jones is an embezzler and b) the shared desire not to have an embezzler as an accountant...
...To be sure, there are few subjects on which most of us are less informed than that of Wales...
...I find it puzzling that she believes a total revolution was wrought by non-conformism, in the light of her previous and subsequent conviction that the Welsh climate is "opaque and bemusing.., better for impressions than for facts...
...Being there, not getting there, is her subject...
...Well, God has punished them...
...Her cup runneth over...
Vol. 18 • October 1985 • No. 10
