CHAPTER FOUR

A Writer’s House in Wales

For a sense of the transcendental is, to my mind, always present at Trefan Morys—as it is in Wales itself. This is an evasive, mercurial slab of the Earth’s surface, now buoyant, now despondent, as though some mood-changing wind is constantly blowing through it. Sometimes when I look out of my window it seems to me that all must be lost, that life is fading, time itself running short, so bleak and loveless does the country seem out there, so enervated do the very sheep appear, listlessly nibbling the grass. But then the cloud passes or the sun comes out, and instantly it is a very prospect of hope outside my window—life can never be subdued!—time is ours to command!—and now that I look more closely, those sheep are not disheartened at all, but are humming with happiness as they eat!

 

Trefan Morys itself is not a place of moods—it is solid of structure and apparently steady of character—but it is attended by a powerful numen. Many people feel it, and its presence is older than even the Welshness of the house, older than the mountains, as old perhaps as nature itself. It would be pleasant to suppose it the result of some perfect balance to the building, a structural equivalent of the human equilibrium that philosophers used to talk about. Many of them thought that the four bodily humors, sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, must be combined in equal measure to fulfill man’s true potential, and I suppose the same criteria might be applied to a house.

Some dissenters used to argue, though, that if all four were equally represented in a man’s character it would make for a dull fellow, and that one or other should be supreme. I am inclined to agree with them, but I cannot say that any particular trait is predominant in the metabolism of Trefan Morys, which is generally cheerful, intermittently sad, bad-tempered occasionally and patient with most of my absurdities. Since it seems to me to be anything but a dullard house, I look for some other humor in it, something less visceral, less definite, and I find it in that indefinable numen of the place. But it is more than a humor really. It is a mixture of wish, idea, memory, illusion and aspiration. The old Polynesians, those most visionary of pagans, would have called it mana.

I am a pagan myself, of agnostic pantheist preferences, and if I had to choose one god to preside over this house, of all the endless divinities that men have devised for their allegiance, it would be the horned and goat-footed Pan, the Great God of the ancient world, patron of fertility and a mischievous synthesis of everything mysterious, merry and fecund in animal and human life. Anything goatish suits the mythology of Wales, and I myself have long been convinced that gafr the goat will one day take over the world, in alliance with left-handed humans; so I particularly honor the combination of the prankish and the formidable, the peculiar and the entertaining, that the Great God represents.

The world stood still, we are told, when Pan died in the haunted days of antiquity, branches drooped in mourning over wine-dark seas and the very oracles ceased their prophecies. But he still lives in the atmosphere of Trefan Morys, and I hear his pipes plaintive on summer evenings, jolly with the plygain singers at Christmastime.

 

I am speaking figuratively, of course—aren’t I? But I really do sense the effect of some imperturbably independent spirit playing around my house. The mana is present even in the yard outside. The most prominent objects there are generally our two cars, parked on the moss-strewn, mud-puddled slate-and-gravel mixture which is the nearest we have got to the grace of a country-house approach. You may think that automobiles have little to do with Pan, numen or transcendence, but there I disagree with you.

I often tell solemn academics or earnest progressive artists that the only things I read are car magazines, and although I do this really just to épater les bourgeois, there is some truth in it. As I go on to tell them, I am intensely interested in cars, because almost every aspect of modern human existence is reflected in them—the state of design, social progress, national confidence, sexual aspiration, human psychology, economic conditions, ecological awareness, engineering ingenuity—all is there, I cry, in those two machines standing in my yard, as expressive of their particular age as any art or architecture. This fluent spiel usually floors the intelligentsia, and I am sure gets the approval of the listening Great God, who has seen a vivid selection of motors come and go from Trefan Morys. We have run the gamut of the marques and nationalities, English, German, Italian, and lately a succession of Japanese. I prefer my cars to be fast and flashy, and so does Pan.

Nor is a love of cars incongruous to the neighborhood, although the general preference is for the simpler makes, without too many electronic gizmos. A century ago most of the men of these parts were, when they not were sailors at sea, vocationally concerned with horses in one way or another, and for many of their descendants the internal combustion engine seems to have replaced the ceffyl as their speciality. In innumerable sheds behind houses men are tinkering with old cars, repainting old motorbikes, cannibalizing them, bartering them or buying them for a song. The automobile sits easily within the Welsh culture. The most prominent playwright of Eifionydd pays an annual visit to the TT motorcycle races in the Isle of Man, and when Twm’s Morris Minor recently needed some attention to its bodywork, he was able to pay for the job with a poem in honor of the mechanic’s wife.

So the cars of Trefan Morys are perfectly at home. Our yard is not large and not at all grand, but it is hedged by tall trees—a sycamore, some ash trees and infant oaks, hollies, hazels, horse chestnuts, a pine or two—and the garden beds around it are themselves meant to suggest the bottom of a wood. Honeysuckle, the Welsh symbol of fidelity, clambers here and there, the ivy traditionally stands for permanence, and I hope there is a rowan somewhere about, to guard us against demons. There is certainly a white quartz stone set in a wall, essential for warding off the Evil Eye. All is deliberately haphazard, in keeping with my taste for mock simplicity—the kind of innocence that masks extreme sophistication. In the spring snowdrops, primroses and daffodils sprout all over the place, among scrambled rhododendrons and azaleas. Here and there blackberry brambles show signs of aggression. Ferns proliferate not in the domesticated way the Victorians loved, but with an almost drunken abundance. Ivy and Virginia creeper threaten to smother the house. There is so much vibrant life here, of plants and insects and small animals, that if I were a poet or philosopher exiled here for my convictions, like Virgil at Constantia, I would be happy enough for the rest of my life contemplating a few square feet of Trefan yard.

It is an untidy yard. Formal gardeners would hate it, and one lady, inquiring with interest the name of a plant I was nurturing in an earthen pot, went quite pale when I told her it was an anonymous weed I happened to like. There are flowerpots on the doorstep, and peat sacks, and there is a clothes dryer and a white iron bench with Ibsen often asleep on it—Ibsen the terror of the local fauna, taking time off from his murderous prowls around the bushes in search of shrews and field mice. A couple of stone sheds in one corner were once dog kennels. In the other corner the disintegrating stone heads of a lion and a unicorn are refugees from the former offices of the Times in the City of London. An acquaintance of mine, passing up Blackfriars Street one day, saw the royal crest, which stood above its doors just about to be demolished by navvies with electric drills, and rescued its supporters for this gentle Welsh retirement: Now above their heads a stunted hawthorn, having seeded itself on a narrow stone shelf, stands in tribute like a flowering bonsai. Two stone plaques are affixed to the house—winged lions of St. Mark, one from Split in Dalmatia, the other from Venice itself. They are modern replicas, but in order to attract a lichenous sense of age to them, for months I regularly doused them in yogurt, and now they look quite venerable.

On the terrace is an image of a symbolic Mayan jaguar, acquired by Twm and Sioned in Mexico and poised there now in sinister sentinel. There are also two sculpted busts, and these are decidedly a jape of old Pan’s. A delightfully generous reader of mine in Chicago wrote to me to say that he would like to commission a bust of me, to be made by an eminent sculptor from New Zealand. He wanted to have one for his own collection, and a second cast he would have made for mine. My collection? It would be my collection! The eminent sculptor from New Zealand turned out to be just as delightful as his patron, and as he worked on the terrace upon my image, which everybody thought just fine, we shared several bottles of white wine. “Well,” said I as he labored away, “since everybody admires your work so much, why don’t you do another portrait bust for me, and thus double my collection at a stroke?” I had in mind Admiral Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, “Jacky” Fisher, about whom I had lately written a capricious biography, and with whom I propose to have an affair in the afterlife. “Until then,” I said, “why can’t I have an image of him up here on my deck, close to the image of me?”

Great idea, the lovely sculptor thought, and he named his standard fee, about as much as the whole of that capricious biography had earned me. “Marvelous!” I bravely cried, taking another gulp of the Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, “we have a deal”—and so it is that up there above the yard, studiously not facing each other across the terrace, “Jacky” and I expectantly stand, listening to the pipes.

 

Through a narrow gate beside the lion and the unicorn, in summer almost impassable because of the honeysuckle that grows over it, and heavily infested by wild ferns—through an unnoticeable gateway we pass into a vegetable garden. It is all that we kept from the walled kitchen gardens of the Plas, a corner of Trefan that I always used to find particularly suggestive because of an insidious herbal scent that seemed to meander all around it. I found it impossible either to isolate or identify this fugitive perfume, the nearest thing I knew to it being the tantalizing sage aroma that sometimes haunts the American West, and in the end I put it down to Pan. I was not surprised when, some time after we had sold the land, I looked down there early one summer morning and saw greedily grazing among the apple trees a large and virile goat.

Nowadays Elizabeth, eccentrically dressed in a kind of linen bonnet, to keep off the flies, grows most of our green victuals here—carrots, artichokes, potatoes, raspberries, gooseberries and salads of all kinds. Sometimes we are self-supporting in these foods, sometimes not. It depends on the slugs. A half-derelict shed is her command post, cluttered with the esoteric paraphernalia of the gardener’s craft, cloches, slug pellets, mouse traps, compost bags, secateurs, things of that kind. Among the growing beds low box hedges are a reminder that the place has seen grander days. Flowers abound here too, all among the workaday edibles, it being a maxim of Elizabeth’s style of gardening that growing plants of all kinds happily coexist (although she can never accept my own sentimental fondness for the Japanese knotweed). Lush patches of grass grow untended, speckled with buttercups in season, and close to the house there is a solitary delicate little tree.

This was given to us long ago, and we had no idea what it was until one day, on the island of Fraueninsel in the Bavarian lake Chiemsee, we chanced to see one just like it in a cottage garden. “It is the Tree of Life,” its owner said, when we asked her what it was, but it really turned out to be a weeping elm. Ours presently grew into a delectable thing, never tall but beautifully shaped, with luxuriant branches falling like a canopy all around it. You could sit on a deck chair in there, cool and dappled. One morning, however, I looked out of my window and saw it had become a Tree of Death. Overnight all its leaves had gone, its branches were withered, and it looked like a sorry skeleton of a tree.

Nobody could tell us why. A virus? Pesticides? Slugs? All we could do was wait, and hope for its recovery. All one summer we waited, all one winter, and only when another spring came did a single shy and leafy young twig appear, the sort of thing the dove brought back to Noah in the ark, to tell us that the Great God Pan had been revisiting the garden, and life was stirring in that little trunk again.

 

Beyond the yard the woods begin, and fall away to the river below. They are not majestic ancient woods, as it happens. Most of the old oaks here were felled during the First World War, to serve as pit props, and the growth since then has been straggly and unkempt. Moss is everywhere, old leaf mold, scattered sticks and snapped branches. Trees are often felled by the wind, and left to molder among the wood anemones, or topple into the river out of the shallow soil at the water’s edge. When the daffodils are blooming everything changes, of course, and the place is luminous with yellow radiance; when the bluebells come it is as though some impossibly extravagant interior decorator has invested our money in acres of new carpeting; but at most times of the year, in the twilight especially, these unkempt glades remind me of the gnarled faery woods that used to appear as frontispieces in the storybooks of my childhood—where goblins might be, or old women living in shoes, and where little people in pointed hats danced beneath the moon.

In our part of Wales the native trees are not generally stately, anyway. The dire conifers introduced by foresters, loathed by patriots, conservationists and aesthetes alike, do possess a certain lugubrious majesty, standing there in their regimented thousands as they wait to be pulped into newsprint for the tabloids; but the wiry sessile oaks that cling to the sides of mountains, as emblematic of the country as the mountains themselves, are rough and springy, like terrier trees. Still, the fourteenth-century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym thought them noble enough to imagine their thickets as natural cathedrals, where the nightingale raised the Heavenly Host, and even our straggly Trefan woods, running along the river’s edge, have inspired many poets in their time. In high summer the bats flicker through them, and if you are still and silent you may sometimes glimpse badgers plodding through the twilight; in the winter their tangled complexity, with slim toppled trunks as diagonals, and frosted pools in mossy gulleys, always suggest to me Japanese gardens in Kyoto. After heavy rain the woods are sometimes mired in deep mud: I remember a cow so helplessly up to her belly in it that she had to be hauled out by a tractor with ropes. Once, in a secret corner among the trees, a donkey of ours gave birth to a magical foal.

For they are magical woods, and their tangle adds to their spell. The Green Man, son of Pan, half vegetable, half human, peers out at us from behind their trunks just as he peers through the carved foliage of church stalls and temple columns across Europe, and after dark especially, when owls hoot and there is a faint phosphorescent glimmer from the Dwyfor, the Trefan woods are like a stage setting—the woods of Windsor in Verdi’s Falstaff, perhaps, or a wood near Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Not so long ago, when the Welsh resistance to English rule was going through one of its bitterest and most dangerous phases, a young activist crept through Trefan woods on a dark night, and hid in one of Zaccheus Hughes’s old pig-houses a stack of explosives, for use in blowing up dams. And one evening I was standing on the riverbank when two middle-age canoeists appeared through the dusk, navigating a way with difficulty among the rocks, small rapids and winding channels of the Dwyfor. I had never seen a canoe on the river before, and in the twilight those boat people seemed to me almost hallucinatory, strenuously and tremulously paddling there in their helmets and goggles. But if they seemed spectral to me, I dare say I seemed equally insubstantial to them: for as it happened the cat Ibsen had followed me through the woods, and so the two of us stood still and bolt upright on the river’s edge, staring out across the water like a couple of woodland sprites ourselves.

These woods have bewitched many people. People really do claim to have seen fairies in them. Lloyd George loved them: When he was a boy he clambered through them to go fishing for eels; when he was one of the world’s great men he brought his colleague Winston Churchill for a picnic in them; when he died he chose to be buried not in Westminster Abbey, but beneath a boulder half a mile downstream from Trefan. Remember that couple of beguiling gays, like visitors from another world, who created such excitement when they turned up here? When one of them was found to be HIV-positive, in the days before antidotes were discovered, he knew himself to be inevitably dying, and sometimes at dusk I used to come across him in the woods, silently sitting against a fallen tree at the water’s edge, or listlessly throwing sticks for his dog to fetch. He reminded me then of a sadder scholar gypsy, there beneath the crippled oak, absorbing the consolation of the woods while the water with the wild fish in it rushed interminably by.

 

I like to think of Trefan woods as a haven for all wild and lonely creatures. In the days when I owned more of the Trefan lands I prevented badger hunters seeking out sets with their ruffianly terriers, and otter hunters from England sweeping their harsh way upstream. So far as I know, foxes have never been hunted with dogs here, and before intensive farming drove them out little hares boxed and jumped over the fields around. Pheasants still find it a convenient refuge from neighboring shooting country. Not long ago a solitary peacock came cockily up the lane, seeking pastures new.

But Pan is horned Pan, no dogmatic conservationist, and sometimes he goes fishing. He is a poacher. After dark I smell his home-rolled cigarettes, and see the faint glow of them on the riverbank, for night fishing is the thing here. The Dwyfor has its salmon, but at night the sea trout run up in the dark, battling their heroic way among the rocks to their spawning grounds in the mountains, and when they lie getting their breath back in one of the deep dark pools down there, psst! that’s when Pan casts his worm or his spinner. Each pool on the river has its ancient Welsh name, marked on no official map, but passed down through the generations among local people, and marvelously romantic even in translation: the Pool of the Horses, the Boiling Pool, the Pool of the Great Stone, the Pool of the Big Hanging Bank or Noddlyn the Sheltering Pool, which perhaps means a pool where the salmon and sea trout can pause for a time to recuperate. Fishing rights from one bank belong to me, but so long as a poacher is a local man I never interfere, and the Great God certainly qualifies for exemption: That is why, when I sniff that pungent tobacco, and see that twinkle of light among the shrubberies, like one of the glowworms we used to have, I whisper a goodnight and walk on.

Until his death a few years ago our local doctor was a famous fisherman. There was a bit of Pan to him, too, and as he was everyone’s friend, so all rivers were open to him. He had a stretch of river himself on a nearby stream, and there he had a telephone attached to a tree, in case patients urgently needed him. He was a salmon man, a dry-fly man, so he generally fished in the daytime: But sometimes I saw him down on our waters, in his waders, snatching half an hour of sport before taking a look at Mrs. Evans’s varicose veins. He had left his car with his dog in it up on the lane, and there amid a neat variety of rods, nets, fly boxes and spare waders, his medical bag nestled too. His name was Prytherch, as Welsh a name as you could find, and I like to think he sometimes haunts our woodlands still.

Because of course there are ghosts around Trefan Morys—ghosts of uchelwyr, ghosts of farmhands, ghosts of poets, of poachers, of birds and wild beasts and cattle hauled from the mire. I often see figures walking down my back lane who are not there at all, like mirages, and who gradually resolve themselves into no more than shadows. The saddest tale of this place is the tale of that poor misused heiress whose removal opened the door, after eight centuries, to the presence of English people at Plas Trefan. Her downfall was her very Welshness, at a time when the England of Queen Victoria looked aghast at free-and-easy Welsh sexual customs. Jane’s story is still remembered around here, and sometimes people see her pale wan face, weeping, at an upstairs window of the Plas. I wish I could persuade her to come down to the woods, for there she would always be welcome, and it is already inhabited by a blithe and not always very respectable gallimaufry of specters, with the goat-foot god as their majordomo.

One day I shall join them too. Elizabeth and I will end up on a little islet I possess in the river down there, beside Llyn Meirch, the Horses’ Pool, close to the steep bank which has immemorially been called Gallt y Widdan, the Witch’s Slope. For thirty years our gravestone, awaiting the day, has stood amidst the almost impenetrable muddle of boxes, papers, duplicate copies and long-discarded children’s toys that is under the library stairs. It has a text on it that I have written myself, in Welsh and in English:

Yma mae dwy ffrind,

Jan & Elizabeth Morris

Ar derfyn un bywyd.

Here are two friends,

Jan & Elizabeth Morris,

At the end of one life.

And if our ashes blow in the wayward wind beside the river, I am sure our spirits will often wander up to Trefan Morys itself, wishing whoever lives here after us, through every generation, happiness if they honor the house and its Welshness, ignominy if they don’t.

A year or two ago I wrote another text for the house itself, again in Welsh and in English. This is what it says:

Rhwng Daear y Testun a Nef y Gwrthrych

Mae T yr Awdures, yn Gwenu, fel Cysylltair.

Between Earth the Subject and Heaven the Object

Stands the House of the Writer, Smiling,

as a Conjunction.

I commissioned a local sculptor to carve it in a slate plaque and place it on the wall of the building, on the lane side where every passerby could see it. So far, however, it has not materialized. He’s a busy fellow, he took a bit of a holiday, he had to finish a job of work for Mrs. Owen, the weather’s been so bad, Mair hasn’t been too well—all in all he hasn’t quite got around to it yet. You know how it is.

Of course we do, I tell him. No hurry. We can wait. At Trefan Morys we have all the time in the world—or out of it.