And the first question to be asked will be whether it ever did exist in any meaningful sense, the sense of leaving a lasting impression, of having produced films which have stood the test of time.
Look at what it must be compared with in the other arts during the same period (say roughly from the end of the first world war and thus mercifully exclude the infantilia). During that time Britain has produced Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in sculpture; Robert Graves, W. H. Auden and Ted Hughes in poetry; Benjamin Britten and Peter Maxwell Davies in music; Samuel Beckett and Graham Greene in the novel; British acting has produced Gielgud and Olivier; British painting has produced Francis Bacon, Ben Nicholson and David Hockney; and British theatre has produced Samuel Beckett (again) and Harold Pinter.
And what has British cinema produced in the same period? Oh! Mr Porter and Carry on Puking. There is not one British film which could scrape into the world’s top one hundred, judged from an artistic point of view, unless the judges were grossly chauvinistic. You know which film the French generally believe to be the only British one worth considering? Brief Encounter! That comically distorted view of what it was like to be here and at war: indeed, the French must like it exactly because it represents a cardboard cutout of what they think Britain and the British are like.
No, there is not one British film which can compare with our high achievements in all the other arts. And the very selective list I have jotted down is only a sample of the top of the cream. These are all world figures, they command respect everywhere for their contributions to international art. It seems probable that British art in general has never been at a higher peak: we have never before had a sculptor of the stature of Henry Moore, for instance, nor a painter like Bacon.
But why has cinema been so poor in this country? Obviously it is not because the acting and writing talent has not been available. Nor is it because British technicians have been inferior to those of other countries, for they have not. But their contribution to a film is one of craft, not art: most British films are full of beautifully lit and shot rubbish. The fault lies with the moneymen, the producers (in the widest sense) who have treated writers, actors and technicians with a disregard amounting to contempt. As a result, none of them have taken the medium seriously enough: writers have accepted large fees for scripts (which were sometimes not even properly read, and often not used for the most arbitrary reasons) and with the money subsidised other more important and more properly appreciated work in the novel and so on; actors took even larger sums for the trivial performances demanded by ignorant producers, while reserving their real work for the theatre; and technicians equally responded to a moneysick situation by laughing or crying, according to their insight, all the way to the piggy bank with as much as they could squeeze out of the conmen.
It was a failure of artistic nerve on a really disastrous scale. After all, artists know more about art than anyone else: and not to give them freedom to exercise their skill and instinct but to make it subject to the barbarism of the counting-house (the anachronistic term is used deliberately) is crass philistinism. Indeed, it might be possible to formulate a Law of Increasing Philistinism: the more money involved in art, the more it is adulterated, and the less real art is produced. At least such a law would explain why as a nation we’re so good at poetry.
And now on television we see the last throw, the final deal of the goldlichened moneylovers: there the British film industry is really shown up (not in quite all its dishonour, for someone in television has had the bright idea of chopping them slotwise and thus making them better, since it is impossible to make them worse), shown up for the stinking crap it is. Displayed are fatuous stories about sexless lovers, quaint old trains, action pictures which move the stomach to retch and not the heart to feel, the classriddled setpieces of a dead culture, desperately unfunny double-entendre comedies, all forming a Victoria Falls of cesspool effluent. Only the purer water of the British documentary tradition prevents complete pollution of the environment.
Whoever does sit down next Wednesday to write this definitive history of British cinema should name these men, the barren producers, describe their criminal irresponsibility (where they have not cunningly covered their webfooted tracks), attempt to discover why it happened, to prevent anything similar happening again. For these men have denied us the opportunity of being able to say ‘This is our cinematic equivalent of a Moore, a Bacon, a Beckett.’
They have thus diminished and impoverished us all, the bastards.
The Gregynog Press and the Gregynog Fellowship
Published in The Private Library, Spring 1973
I had not heard of the Gregynog Press before the poet Zulfikar Ghose rang me up one morning to say that he had been sent some forms from the Welsh Arts Council about a Fellowship to be established at Gregynog; it must have been July or August 1969. Zulf was off to America shortly, to teach at the University of Texas; I had just moved into a senescent London house of which perhaps the best thing that could be said was that it was my wife’s and mine. Next morning, forwarded from my old address and also forwarded by Zulf, came two sets of application forms for the Gregynog Fellowship in the University of Wales. I had had a certain amount of contact with Wales; my first novel Travelling People is set there and partly based on the experiences of three summers working at a country club in Caernarvonshire, and this was what had prompted Zulf to contact me about the Fellowship.
I read the details and I think sent the spare set on in my turn to another writer. Almost totally absorbed in trying to staunch the trauma caused by moving into a ruin, I mentioned the Fellowship to my wife, saying: You don’t want me to apply for this, do you? You don’t fancy another move after this one? They were rhetorical questions expecting, even demanding, the answer No. But Yes, she said, I would enjoy six months in Wales.
So I put the application forms in a pile of correspondence and forgot them. What other business took me through the pile I cannot remember though I can guess it was an unpaid bill; but I did apply, only just in time and so hastily that I did not think it worth giving references: thinking, if they know my work I shall not need references, and if they do not know my work then I have no chance anyway.
But they did indeed know my work, and some time in September I received an invitation from Dr. Glyn Tegai Hughes, Warden of Gregynog, to go for interview in October together with five other candidates on the short list. The interviews were a very civilised affair; we candidates were invited to dinner with the eight or so members of the selection committee on the Friday night, and the interviews took place the next morning. I arrived before daylight ended on the Friday, having been driven from the station at Newton by Ted Walters (who had been chauffeur to the former owners of the Press and house, the Misses Davies) in the Gregynog Volkswagen minibus. As we approached along about a mile and a half of drive, Gregynog itself appeared through the trees, an enormous black-and-white house, finely impressive: so much so that it actually brought the traditional tiny gasp in exclamation from me. As we drew closer it was clear that the house could not really be of timbered construction: it was four storeys high. Shortly afterwards I could see that the black-and-white effect was stucco. But it must have been very early imitation Tudor: the present house dates from the 1830s. And of course Montgomeryshire and the neighbouring counties have many genuine black-and-white buildings. So it was possible very early on for me to forgive the house its deceit, and I shortly became very fond of it; and later, as a sort of compliment it would never be able to appreciate, I included a description of it in the novel I wrote in its Small Library. Gregynog has two possible etymologies: either it may come from grugin, the old form of the Welsh word for heather, or from the personal name Grugyn; but in both cases with the place-name –og added.
So convivial and civilised was it that October evening that I was not sure who the candidates were and who the committee. Certainly Peter Porter I knew and liked, and had been introduced to the sculptors Michael Pennie and Jonah Jones. The g
irl must be the painter Gillian Ayres. By coincidence I also knew the Professor of English at Aberystwyth, Arthur Johnston, who had been at Birkbeck College when I was an undergraduate there for a year. But not long after dinner, when the committee went away to take the opinion of one member who could not stay overnight, Peter Porter and I were joined at the unaccustomed port by the highly-respected and senior novelist Richard Hughes. After perhaps the second glass I asked him, following some writerly chitchat, if he should not be in the Main Library with the committee. No, he replied, he was one of the candidates. This came as a surprise to Peter Porter and to me, and I could not help myself (for the second time that day) exclaiming that this seemed to be unfair competition. But we all took it very well.
As part of the preliminaries that evening Dr. Hughes took the candidates all round the houses and outbuildings. In the stables we saw where the Gregynog Press had been, and, indeed, what was left of it. The machine room still had the original Albion on which the first of the Gregynog Press books had been printed; a great hand-operated guillotine; a proofing press; and rows of wires with pegs on them across the ceiling over long benches. Next to this was the composing room, upper and lower cases displayed, old type, dirty, all largely neglected, disused. Upstairs had been the bindery, and part still contained some of the original equipment since one of the few surviving from those days, Mrs. Gwen Edwards, continued to work there binding books for the library maintained by the University at Gregynog. But most of the machinery had been removed to the National Library at Aberystwyth, together with the tools, dies and stamps used for the bindings. A few whole hides remained, and a symbolic tool or two, to show visitors.
And the smell of the place was entrancing.
The idea of showing the candidates all this was really that one of the upper rooms with a ceiling light could have been converted into a studio for a painter, and one of the lower rooms could have been adapted as a studio for a sculptor.
We were also shown copies of the Gregynog Press books; the university kept complete sets of both special and ordinary bindings on the premises. I had never seen anything like them, printing and binding so fine, as perfect as it was possible for me to imagine. The content, however, in many cases seemed to me to fall short of the standard achieved in the form.
You are not interested in my interview; nor in the reasons (whatever they were) why they chose me as the first Gregynog Arts Fellow; nor in my own writing during those idyllic (not a word I have ever used seriously before, I believe) months, but, this being a learned journal, only in my relationship to that historical Gregynog Press whose books are so highly regarded and which fetch so much today. Suffice it therefore to say (as they say) that they did choose me, and that I moved there for six months the following February, that of 1970. And it is also relevant that they appointed Michael Pennie to follow me as the second Fellow later that year.
Gregynog is now used, and much and usefully used, as a residential study centre for students from both inside and outside the University of Wales. They come, about fifty at a time with their staff, on short courses usually of two or three days’ length, covering most disciplines. The first course that came to Gregynog after I arrived that snowy February was, as it happened, from the College of Librarianship at Aberystwyth, and part of their course was to see and have demonstrated to them how things were actually printed, on the Albion and other bits and pieces. I very much enjoyed talking to them, the students, but even more to the staff, who included Dorothy Harrop: she was then writing the chapter on the Press in the official University history of Gregynog due to be published in 1974.
After that first course, however, I had little to do with the Press, becoming absorbed in my own work; during the time I wrote about a dozen poems, a novel, three short stories, and edited my selected shorter prose, besides talking about writing and film-making to hundreds of students, formally and informally, in the pleasant course of the other part of the reason I was there. The Press was always at the back of my mind, however, as one of the things I could especially do at Gregynog; I have always thought that the way a book looks and feels to the reader is as much my concern as the choice of the actual words, and have almost always had a major say in the design of my own books. The other day I heard a rumour that I had once been a compositor; it was not true, but who am I to discourage the thought? Ever since I was a student, editing the college magazine, I have been seriously interested in typography and book production. Mrs. Edwards bound a book of mine, with a special label indicating her part in it; she and Ted Walters also talked to me about the Press and its relationship to the Agent for the estate, some of which information I used in the novel. For both of these reasons I used to pass the Albion on my way up to see her, hoping to find time to print something; but it was like fishing in the Bechan and the private reservoir Gwgia, and learning Welsh, and taking advantage of the library to fill in some of the acres of gaps in my reading, and finding out what students were really like now; none could be done properly except to the exclusion of most of the others.
It was towards the end of July when I was confronted by the fact that if I did not do something on the Press within the next four weeks then the chances were that I never would. Michael Pennie’s tenure approached. I could either spend the last month of mine typing the fair copy of my novel, or I could postpone it to London for a rather hairy deadline and toy with the Gregynog Albion instead.
Mrs. Edwards showed me how to use the Albion. She had originally, she told me, wanted to be on the printing rather on the binding side, but when she had joined (as a teenage girl from the village) there had been a vacancy only in the bindery; by such things were one’s life determined in a community where there were few alternative sources of employment. But she had retained the interest in printing; and the Albion on which the first book had been printed had been left, not raped by the National Library as a museum piece, because Gwen Edwards needed it to print paper titles for the spines of the books she bound for the University. So she was able to use it to her own satisfaction now, towards the end of her working life, and she only too gladly, it seemed, made me free of it, showed me where everything was, the rules, the chart of a typecase she had made for herself, the shelf of tins of inks from the thirties, the stone, the cracked rubber roller, all that was left there of what the Gregynog Press must have been.
Glyn Tegai also joined me, and together we arrived at various rationalisations of the way the equipment must have worked; though he did have the advantage of a book on the subject. What quickly became obvious was that there was an enormous amount of work involved, work requiring a combination of physical and mental energies which I had come across before only in filming on location. That is, at the same time as one was physically humping heavy metal about one was also having to make aesthetic and formal decisions of an excruciatingly difficult kind as well. The physical labour of it, and the limited amount of time I had available, convinced me that I should not be too ambitious about what I intended to do; and the fewer characters there were to set and print, the less there would be to go wrong. During my Fellowship I had been tinkering with various kinds of the Welsh verse form called englyn, trying to see if it were possible in English. Anyone who wishes to know about the form will find it where I did, in Gwyn Williams’ excellent An Introduction to Welsh Poetry (Faber). The first I chose to print was the first of three I had written:
FERN: englyn penfyr
Hookheaded hairy young fern, springy, curled,
coy greeny thruster set on
its own spread revelation
It was to be, of course, a limited edition. Quite how severely limited became apparent as I went on: four days’ work, perhaps a hundred trial pulls, and much shortness of temper produced an edition of three copies. At the end of was it the third day, late in the evening, I found that the f in the first line had disappeared, presumably broken off somehow. It finished me for the day; I signed the last pull for Glyn Tegai With Greetings from Hairy Young Ern, and went hom
e to watch television; what was I doing bothering with this obsolescent medium anyway?
The paper was difficult, too. I was using (with the permission of Glyn Tegai and the University) some stray quarto sheets of handmade paper that had been there since the thirties, perhaps since the twenties; and the dogma was that these had to be dampened before an acceptable impression could be made. I tried dampened and undampened pulls and was damned if I could see the difference. Nevertheless, I continued to sprinkle as though it were some religious rite.
Then there was the bloody ink; not that I ever used red. It had thickened almost solid, the ink, having been sitting there congealing since the last book was finished in 1940. On the stone next to the Albion there were at the head two conical canisters: one marked P, and the other B. Petrol and Benzole, I thought, sniffing for vaguely related smells. So I went down to Dilwyn at the garage in the village, who had no B but plenty of P, and filled up one of them. This I sprinkled on the stone with a slice of ink and worked them about with a spatula in a curiously satisfying manner until a consistency was reached which stayed on the roller in a state which was neither lumpy nor wishy-washy. Some months later, when I told Asa Benveniste32 of Trigram Press what I had been doing, he told me P stood for paraffin. Was I wrong, then? I asked him. Not wrong, only dangerous, he said, you could have blown yourself up.
The actual setting I enjoyed, for it was like a simple linear crossword puzzle to which I knew every answer in advance. Once I knew which way up each character went, by the nick on one side, it was childsplay; though I would not have liked my living to have depended on my speed. The more I worked with Baskerville the more I appreciated it; I had thought it very ordinary up till then, but physically touching it led me to prefer it to the small choice (Perpetua, Cloister) of other faces available.
Well Done God! Page 38