Welshness and the human condition: 

interview with Christopher Meredith

Christopher Meredith looked drawn, grey eyes red-rimmed.  When we met in Abergavenny though he was convivial and friendly.  The interview was nearly three hours and he talked for half an hour before and an hour afterwards.

His voice like flutes, brook over light stones, not ballsy like Thomas nor strident like Kinnock.  He laughed frequently.

Shifts is a classic account of de-industrialisation.  Perhaps the novel describing the process in Britain.  But it is more than that.  There is no doubt meeting Christopher Meredith one is in the presence of a great creative intelligence, struggling to make sense of the human condition.

Were he not white and male he would be an obvious candidate to take over from Sir Geoffrey Hill as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, thence fast-track to the Nobel. Something that would change the balance of British literature dramatically.

The first time a former steelworker would have held such posts.

He was born in 1954.  “Never trust Wikipedia!  I don’t know where they got 1955 from.”  The family lived in Tredegar, the archetypal South Wales Valley town, known for steel and coal and Aneurin Bevan.

“The last pit in the town where I lived closed when I was four or five, 1959, and that was the pit my grandfather and my father one time worked in and my uncles - but I didn’t really connect that with contemporary stuff.  I remember playing in the ruins of that pit, but it was really a tide that had gone out by my early childhood and only a minority of the men living in the town were coalminers by then.

“My father was a collier as a young man.  By the time I was born he was a steelworker.  He hated the pit.  He was a railwayman for a while and then a steelworker, briefly worked in a munitions factory.  So that’s his story.  As I remember him he was a steelworker right through, working shifts, days regular at the end of his career, but a shift worker.  So that’s me dad.

“He was a very committed socialist, anti-Fascist.  He was in Burma.  He had a pretty awful war.  He was a left-wing socialist.  I would describe him a Christian socialist in 1939 and a socialist atheist by 1945.  He never actually was a Communist.”

Emrys Meredith served in the Royal Marines, serving in 44 Commando in Burma, 1943-45; returning to Wales in 1946.

He idolised Bevan “in the way many people did”.  “I think he only met him once.”  Saint James’ Hospital where Christopher Meredith was born had been until six years earlier the Ty-Bryn workhouse.  Bevan came to Tredegar to ceremonially reopen the workhouse as a hospital: “I think he shook hands with him.”

Bevan was in ‘nothing is too good for the working class’ mode, very much the swell in a Savile Row suit.

So was there a sense of community in Tredegar when Christopher Meredith was growing up?  “It’s one of those things people reach for as a cliché, working class life, so I’m wary of it.  By the time I was born the myths and the clichés of community were around, in old films - and rather laughable.  

“You compared that with what was going on around you and it didn’t look much like it.  

“By the time I was growing up there were three pits in the valley.  The peak of coal production in South Wales was 1913 and it was in decline from then on.  In the 1930s there were six pits in Tredegar: Ty-Tryst employed like six thousand men.  It was huge, but by my childhood that had actually gone - and it had just gone, I realise now.”

The industrial Klondike in South Wales was “a war and a strike and another war ago”.  The society into which his parents were born, “two atom bombs ago”

By the time of the 1984/85 miners’ strike Chris Meredith was working as a schoolteacher in Brecon, where he has lived ever since.  

The steel and coal industries had been scaling down under Labour.  “In contrast after ‘79 the process was absolutely brutal and it was a different kind of game, it was confrontation all the way.  That was a tough time.”

Strikes first in the steel industry then coal were defeated.  “It was a battle they were never going to win.  [Tebbit on TV recently] ‘This was a war.’  The Tories took class war much more seriously than the class they thought they were at war with did.

“But the coal industry was already down from hundreds of thousands to a few thousands by the early Eighties.  I think there were ten or twelve deep mines, publicly owned, left, and then after the miners’ strike there was one.”

The mood pervading Shifts, set in 1977, is already one of fatalism.  The steelworks is in its final months.  Jack, the central character, is an amoral drifter.  Working class without the solidarity.  Parents dead, pregnant girlfriend left behind.  Living with friend and friend’s wife with inevitable consequences.

“Shifts is not a sociological novel that’s mainly interested in the precise history of a particular place.  The four main points of view in the novel explore different ways of responding to the world.”

Curiously, he sees Jack as being on a quest.

“I remember once in an event someone standing up and saying, ‘Are you Jack?’  Kind of ‘J’Accuse!’ [laughs].  I hope in the novel is in a funny way impartial.”

What is literature trying to crystallise from human experience?  “Blimey!”  Answer briefly.  “I don’t know if you can make a grand statement about that.  When I write I try to write the best I can.  There’s a certain amount that’s given.  I feel like I’m being run down by a horrible creature that’s going to eat me and I am going to have to write this thing in order to get rid of it.”

Chris Meredith is scornful of immense best-sellers such as A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel, set in a thinly-disguised Tredegar, and How Green Was My Valley, written by Richard Llewellyn, a Welshman born in Hendon.

“I never got through it.  I can’t bear it!  The movie was tremendously powerful.  People in South Wales went to see it in droves, people love to see where they’re from on the screen, it doesn’t matter if it’s accurate or not.  People will even start to conform to the stereotypes they’re presented with.”

I tried him out with some key signifiers of Welshness:

“Dylan Thomas is just so well known and if you’re a poet - and I write poetry - he’s somebody from whose shadow you get out from under.  ‘Knobblyfaced Pisshead’ - I wish I’d thought of that, but Jack, the character, thought of it instead.

“Dylan Thomas didn’t know much about Wales.  He knew about Swansea and he knew his own experience, but people who talk about him being influenced by bardic tradition and by Welsh poetry - he didn’t know any of that stuff.  His father deliberately didn’t pass it on to him.

“Approaching greatness, but I don’t think he ever got there.”

What about The Mabinogion?  

“It’s there, like a mountain [laughs].  I think there’s some astonishing stuff in it.  There’s a character called Evnissyen in one of the Branches [Bronwen].  Very early on, especially with North European fiction, there seems to be something to do with motivation and actual thought going on in the character.

“Later on in the story he sacrifices himself to save the situation when he shatters the Cauldron of Regeneration and he’s destroyed in the process.

“But it’s such weird stuff, you sometimes don’t know whether what you are being told is satire.  Would the audience have been laughing at this point?  We really don’t know.”

Did he recognise the narrative involutions of The Mabinogion replicated in Monty Python?  With its central clash between imperial Cleese and colonised Jones?  Did he indeed watch the series?

“Yes, yes!  I watched all that stuff.  That’s a theory I haven’t come across.  That’s very interesting.  I’ve often thought I’d like to talk to Terry Jones because he’s very aware of his Welsh roots.”

He had watched Rob Brydon on television: “His Welshness came up and the audience starts to bleat like sheep - and I’ve heard of that happening to a poet as well - but Rob Brydon was brilliant, he said to the audience, ‘Please, please, you’ll have to stop, I can’t carry on doing my act with an erection!’

“But it’s an ugly moment and shame on the audience for that.”

Has devolution made a difference?  No more John Redwood forgetting the words of the Welsh national anthem.

“I think devolution has been really important, in a quiet way, for cultural confidence in Wales.  For years people have been used to being self-deprecating about being Welsh, you know?  And I think it’s probably quite admirable to be self-deprecating about where you’re from [laughs]  I think devolution, without overplaying it, has been extremely important, symbolically and psychologically.”

Then there is the question of the NHS in Wales.

“I’ve seen a lot of it recently!  I can’t fault it.  As far as my treatment’s been concerned in the last six months.  The attempts by the Tories to be divisive about Wales and the NHS are despicable, absolutely despicable.  Cameron’s crack about Offa’s Dyke being the line between life and death - I mean absolute nonsense.

“I hope he regretted it.”

Shifts lost out narrowly in an online Welsh Arts Review poll for the all-time best Welsh novel to Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night) by Caradog Pritchard.  I pressed him about this rival novel, wondering at his objectivity.

He responded readily:

“It’s a book that’s partly about insanity.

“Parts of the novel are very dreamlike and it’s written in a very startling modernist style, drifting around in the mind of the narrator.  He also wrote a very fine autobiography I would love to see translated or have a go at translating.  I think he was a worthy winner.”

Pritchard, the native speaker, lived most of his life in London, writing for the Daily Telegraph.

“There has to be a tension there.

“I learned Welsh at university.  My Welsh is very good.  I speak Welsh to my sons.  It’s very much a living language.”

Christopher Meredith has reached the level of cultural exchanges, writer-in-residences, visits to France, Slovenia, Finland; a translation workshop in Israel/Palestine.  For the last twenty years he has taught creative writing at university level.

His second novel, Griffri, is set in early medieval Wales.  Land of The Chronicle of the Princes (Brut y Tywysogion) and Giraldus Cambrensis.

Sidereal Time captures with grim accuracy the sense of a comprehensive school like an overcrowded toilet.

Then there are the poetry collections, such as the superlative The Meaning of Flight.  Like Ted Hughes with fewer crags and less wildlife.

There were some other points I wanted to clear up.  Who was the Czech poet in ‘Famous Czech poet in Dinbych y Pysgod’?

“That was Miroslav Holub.  A very fine poet.”

He starts to gag.

“You have to hand it to David Bowie,” I say, “at least his name really is Jones, unlike Tom Jones.”  Something further about shape-changing.

We repaired to the Codfather fish and chip shop.  I cleaned my plate.  Chris Meredith praised my appetite.

“I’m better at eating fish than Miroslav Holub,” I deadpanned. 

Link: http://christophermeredith.webs.com 

Christopher Meredith was interviewed in Abergavenny on 16 February 2015