A Protean Imagination

...Dalloway is discernible in To the Lighthouse...

...Goronwy's search leads him to a "Saturday town," where he drinks with Sir Flook, the retired teacher who said Rhys, born to be a tramp, "read well and with some feeling," but let the knowledge "tumble out at the day's end...

...The two novels of his just released in this country The Welsh Sonata (first published in 1954) and A Kingdom (a new work), have admittedly that much in common...

...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Author, "After the Trauma" With the possible exception of William Faulkner, no writer of fiction in English has written more variously about more varied subjects than James Hanley...

...Most important, there is much pleasure to be derived from reading him...

...Nevertheless, it is Lucy, married and financially secure yet without inner resources, whom we see as far from contentment—despite the fact that she knows the world outside, the world of seaside resorts and mean town living...

...From The Welsh Sonata: "Missing since bell-ringing time on Sundays...

...Parry, whose son Olfyr was Rhys' rival for the love of Olwen...

...Musician's ears...

...A few sentences from the beginning of each will illustrate...

...Once or twice his eye took in the woman's hands, anchored in her lap...

...And the living hair...

...From conversations with these two people, he pieces together the relationship between Rhys, Olwen and Olfyr, although it is not clear what this has to do with Rhys' disappearance...

...All of six foot two inches and more stretched...

...Joyce's Portrait of the A rtist as a Young Man is a recognizable ancestor of Finnegans Wake...

...the Virginia Woolf of Mrs...

...They were red hands, blotched, and seeming all muscle, and to him they had a worn and tired look and he told himself that they were a man's hands...

...Cadi, the one with the "man's hands," finds her father fallen with a stroke far from their rural home...

...Scholar's brow...

...And then the golden chest...

...We also get to know the people who feel Rhys' absence more than they did his presence—for he had always been on hand to gather the hay in harvest time, to baby-sit when mothers went to the market, to mend things, sit with the bed-ridden, clean "God's House" for nothing when the cleaner was ill, and to talk "beautifully to all the children as though he were one of them—as perhaps he was...

...exaggerates the exclusiveness of his presenting men who go to sea and women who live in a slum very like Liverpool...

...But at least a dozen are of major importance and display remarkable versatility...

...Of course, I could be exaggerating, just as Edward Stokes, an Australian who has written the only book about Hanley (unpublished in the U.S...

...As for subject, The Welsh Sonata is a poetic detective story...

...The Furys (1935), moderately Marxist in its naturalism, is a better representative of that genre than James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy...

...In the end Rhys is found dead...

...The Closed Harbour (1952) has been accurately termed by one critic a "naturalistic nightmare...

...Goronwy also meets Mrs...

...In these and his other superior efforts, Hanley appears to have what Keats called "negative capability," the knack of completely becoming the characters he creates and adjusting his style accordingly...

...being deserted by the man she loves because as a missionary "he's married to God Almighty...

...and the chapel at the other...

...We get a three-dimensional picture of Cilgyn, a small community with "the pub at the corner of [the] street...

...Some of his books may have been written more out of need than necessity, Hanley being a writer who supports himself by his writing...

...Roman nose...

...From a bare summary of the facts of her life —eschewing Manchester as a young woman to stay with her demanding father...

...Poor child,' Pugh Williams said, 'that's all he ever was.' "And then the face and the head...

...He is pulled out of the frozen snow: "First the feet as bare and clean as bone...

...Its thin narrative thread concerns the search of Go-ronwy Jones?the Policeman and retired bard"—for Rhys, the tramp "with the cloud upon his head...

...But they are otherwise dissimilar in style and theme...

...Particularly since 1964 when Stokes' study appeared, Hanley has become increasingly preoccupied with the people living in isolated Welsh villages such as the one where he now lives...

...These two novels in their variety of theme and style, along with the best of his earlier fiction, show again why Hanley has been called a major novelist by critics as disparate as Edwin Muir, E. M. Forster, Walter Allen, Granville Hicks, C. P. Snow, Herbert Read, and J. C. Powys...

...Yet who, but for the author's name on the front covers, could tell that the 50 books Hanley has so far produced?aside perhaps for A Dream Journey and No Directions (see "Hanley's Palimpsest," NL, January 3,1977)—were the work of the same man...

...Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises resembles For Whom the Bell Tolls (without duplicating it) both in style and in rhythm...

...Eyes Rosetti might have liked on the end of his brush...

...The story line is as simple as the language, yet the book is rich in the complexities of character and philosophy it suggests...

...Cadi, by contrast, knows it is "too late to cry" and accepts her alone-ness—indeed, sometimes feels blessed by it as few of Hanley's city or sea dwellers ever did...

...Not only those men but many others of stature would reject Hanley's description of himself as a "clumsy realist and flounderer in off-Dreiserian prose, naive, and touchy about style...

...The remarkable thing about this story is the way it makes meaningful and plausible Cadi's resolve to stay within the confines of her spinsterhood and her sheltered world...

...having to tend the two cows and the pig and the small garden herself, far from any neighbors save Mervyn and Mari, three miles away—one would think her pitiable...

...Boy (1932), a stark and effective account of a boy's homosexual rape, was one of the first novels to win English authors the right to ignore the then oppressive laws against obscenity...

...A Kingdom does not have the occasional cloudiness that mars the beauty of The Welsh Sonata...

...From A Kingdom: "The man sat in his overcoat, and his hat lay on the side of the bed...

...There is, however, much more to the book than that...

...Rhys, the Wound with the cloud upon his head...

...She carries him back, cares for him until he dies, goes with her sister and brother-in-law, Lucy and David, to the burying ground 60 miles away, refuses an offer to live with them in town and remains in her kingdom, which Lucy thinks of as a prison...

...An End and a Beginning (1958), the last book about the Furys, has been described as a novel "presented with dream-like fuzziness, for the characters are seen through eyes that do not dare to face sharp outlines...