Fifty years ago, Alun Weaver published his second collection of poetry, The Man in the Mask. Hatchets sharpened, most Welsh commentators considered it a betrayal of his early promise, a hack-job comprising pseudo-quaint images of Wales and the Welsh, composed with a cynical eye on the English and American market, like an Irish pub in London or New York. Thereafter, Weaver was either ignored or impugned by the Welsh literati. Nevertheless, The Man in the Mask was celebrated outside Wales as one of the definitive volumes in modern Anglo-Welsh poetry, and in 1981 he made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).
Shortly after his death in 1989, Weaver’s poetry took up residence is that well-populated district of literary history called Obscurity. Buying his work today proves a difficult undertaking: he has virtually no internet presence, and even the endevourous of bookshops have trouble ordering his poetry. I first learnt of Weaver’s existence in Andrew Lycett’s biography of Dylan Thomas, a poet behind whom Weaver constantly (and consciously) lingered. The Times once named him “Wales’s greatest poet since Thomas”, a title more notable its implicit judgement: not as good than Dylan Thomas. It wasn’t until two years after I’d read Lycett’s biography that I found a battered old copy of The Man in the Mask, Weaver’s most popularly acclaimed work, in a second-hand bookshop in London, beside which I found ‘The Masked Man’ by Miles Kainis, one of only two biographers of Weaver.
Weaver’s Welsh critics certainly had a point. Sure, his work is sometimes poignant and busily allusive. But it is never far from collapsing into sentimentality, while his allusions are notable more often than not for their complete imprudence. Take, for example, these two lines, from the poem ‘Coming Home’: “Many things grave and gay and multi-coloured /But one above all: I’m coming home.” Now compare it to the poem from which it borrows, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’: “Glory be to God for dappled things— / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” Beside ‘Pied Beauty’, Coming Home reads like a concluding line from a wordier version of Castaway, that film starring a volley-ball and its friend, Tom Hanks.
But it gets worse. Whereas Hopkins bounces his syllables at speed for eight more lines before breathlessly concluding, “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: / Praise him”, Weaver stumbles into the sunset, completely exposed but for the ragged Welsh flag draped around his person: “The short rich resounding word means / One simple thing to a Welshman / Such as I, born and bred in this land of river / And hill. And that thing, that miraculous thing is – Wales.” The reader might think it unfair to compare two works of evidently different standards, but by alluding to ‘Pied Beauty’, it is Weaver himself who demands the two poems be considered together.
“Write about your own people by all means,” the Welsh critic Charles Norris once wrote regarding Weaver, “don’t be soft on them, turn them into figures of fun if you must, but don’t patronize them, don’t sell them short and above all don’t lay them out on display like quaint objects in a souvenir shop.”
In this context, it is with a curious mixture of amazement and apprehension that one reads Weaver’s earlier work, Notes from the Undergrowth, a profoundly skilled portrait of the Welsh countryside, which found critical acclaim, but only a tiny audience. Shortly before he literally drank himself to death, Dylan Thomas had offered a few admiring words on the poet and his poetry, which publishers attached to the dust-jacket of every subsequent collection by Weaver.
The imagery of Notes from the Undergrowth – “the ground parched and cracked is like over-baked bread” – seems so far removed from the decidedly under-baked verse he was to serve up later in the century. There is the so-called “man in the iron street”, as well as his sometime friend, sometime foe, “the man in mask”, after whom the collection in question is named. Here, again, Weaver has at least on eye on the American dollar. He juggled two infantile phrases and, eager for a successor to Thomas, the other side of the ocean lapped the act up a supreme instance of childlike Welsh vision.
It’s hard to know whether to label Weaver a cynical writer of poor poetry or simply a poor writer of poor poetry. Talented charlatanry or deeply flawed work of sincerity? Was Weaver destined to write terrible poetry, or did he ignore his talent in favour of the trappings afforded by fame and a considerable fortune? Perhaps, like many writers, he simply lost his way. Kingsley Amis, who in the late 1940s lectured an undergraduate Alun Weaver at the University of Wales, famously forgot how to write well in the early eighties.
Unlike Amis, who famously rediscovered his form with The Old Devils, Weaver continued in the same varicose vein until 1985, when he died of an alcohol-induced stroke. Even as he gave up his own, he couldn’t shake the ghost of Dylan Thomas. Lauded and loved in his lifetime, Alun Weaver is the one posterity forgot.
