An Interview With Author Meurig Williams

Meurig was born and raised in Wales, and attended Oxford University in England where he received BA (first-class honors), MA and DPhil degrees in chemistry. As part of what was then referred to as the “brain drain”, he accepted a post-doctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley and became an American citizen. He is the holder of 15 US patents, and his multidisciplinary interests have resulted in publications in a wide range of journals across chemistry and physics. In retirement, he has continued the research he initiated at the Xerox Webster Research Center in New York into the triboelectric charging of insulating materials, which is one of the sciences underlying copier and laser printer technology. An overview of this was published as the cover page article in the July-August 2012 issue of The American Scientist entitled: What Creates Static Electricity? AmeriCymru spoke to Meurig about his latest book: What is wrong with the Welsh? Why are they mocked by the English?

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AmeriCymru: Care to introduce your new book “What is wrong with the Welsh? Why are they mocked by the English?”. And what inspired you to write this book?

Meurig: The subject of how the Welsh relate to the English has come up many times in discussions with a friend who was born in Wales and now lives in both England and the US; it was those discussions that provided inspiration for this book. I like to think that I have some perspective on this subject because I was born and raised in Wales, educated at Oxford University and then moved permanently to the US and became an American citizen. My friend is also an artist of renown, and she went to my home town Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire in order to capture its essence in a drawing, which is included in the book.

I focused on mockery of the Welsh by the English for two reasons. It encapsulates so much that is different between the two peoples. And it is a subject that is still considered so disturbing that the Welsh Assembly recently called for “an end to persistent anti-Welsh racism in the UK media”. In addition, this subject merited a serious article in The Spectator in 2009: “Mocking the Welsh is the last permitted bigotry”, by no less an authority on every aspect of Welsh life than Jan Morris. Who, incidentally, is described in the October 31, 2016 issue of The Spectator as “the greatest descriptive writer of her time”.

AmeriCymru: How did history help you understand this issue?

Meurig: In order to understand this issue, I delved into areas where the histories of Wales and England intersect. For a thousand years, the Welsh have been subjected to military and/or political domination by the English, which culminated in Henry VIII’s Act of Union, whose purpose was to totally annihilate Welsh culture, language and laws, and to covert Welsh people into English people in every way. It was a major act of attempted genocide. Henry VIII is now considered to have demonstrated behavioural characteristics of a psychopath according to modern psychiatric concepts.

But the English failed to destroy the Welsh. In spite of many major military defeats and extraordinary degrees of humiliation, Welsh culture, language and national identity have survived. Morris attributed that survival to Wales’ inextinguishable national spirit. And she suggested that it was English feelings of inferiority compared to that Welsh spirit that resulted in their mockery of the Welsh.

AmeriCymru: You argue that English mockery of the Welsh is a classic example of “psychological projection”. Care to tell us more?

Meurig: Projection is a concept in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. In my analysis, I interpret the mockery in terms of such projection. That is, the English project their own feelings of inferiority onto the Welsh, as opposed to a simple comparison of the two countries that was suggested by Morris. But in both interpretations, it is English feelings of inferiority that caused their mockery of the Welsh.

How can it be explained that the mockery continued unabated from the Tudor era (which was documented by Shakespeare), through the mighty days of Empire, to England’s current loss of power and identity crisis? Shakespeare wrote his plays half a century after the Act of Union, so he was aware of how the Welsh had survived its harsh impositions - equal rights were denied to the Welsh if they continued to speak Welsh, which was their only language in most cases.

At the height of Empire, English national identity was defined by its power, but that of Wales was not, because centuries of military defeats and humiliations had eliminated any vestige of power from the Welsh psyche. The fact that the mockery continued throughout the height of Empire indicates that even the riches and power of the English were not sufficient to alleviate feelings of inferiority relative to that Welsh spirit.

AmeriCymru: Do you feel that more should be done to counter this kind of mockery?

Meurig: After its loss of Empire, Britain has struggled to determine its role in the world and establish its national identity, and that has been confounded by the recent decision to leave the European Union (Brexit), not to mention Scotland’s ongoing threat to leave the United Kingdom. So if the mockery can be attributed to the inferior national identity of the English compared to the Welsh, it cannot be expected to improve any time soon.

AmeriCymru: Shouldn’t the book’s title have been WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE ENGLISH?

Meurig: A good question indeed considering that the mockery has been attributed to shortcomings of the English. And that led to a consideration of whether other characteristics of the English may also have contributed to the mockery. It turns out that some of the most prominent English writers have expressed the opinion that hypocrisy is central to the English character. These include Jeremy Paxman and Alan Bennett. And David Hare wrote in his 2015 book The Blue Touch Paper: “The only response any halfway sensitive person could have to British life in the 1950s was to laugh at it….Britons were petty, posturing and ridiculous.” The book clearly reveals that he is referring to the English, not more generally to the British.

I indicate that there are suggestions that the Church of England may be coming to terms with its barely disguised hypocrisy through the ages. In the mid 20th century, religion mattered deeply in British society, but since then church attendance has declined steeply. That has been traced to the social revolution of the 1960s. I discuss an example where the Church, so accustomed to marketing blind faith in the irrational, is finally beginning to replace hypocrisy with truth, which has always been a more difficult concept to embrace.

AmeriCymru: Has Welsh ‘confidence’ increased at all as a result of the Devolution votes in your opinion? If so, would further devolution or even full independence increase that trend?

Meurig: Welsh ‘confidence’ is certainly on the rise. After the second world war, Gwynfor Evans (1912-2005) assumed a leading role which slowly infused a renewed confidence in the Welsh national psyche, and a greater presence for Wales in British politics. He was also a lawyer and historian of note. He felt strongly that Henry VIII’s Act of Union had a major negative impact on Wales and personally made contributions to correct that. He was President of the Welsh political party Plaid Cymru for 36 years and was the first Member of Parliament to represent it at Westminster, where he was instrumental in passing the first Welsh Language Act, 1967, which gave some rights to the use of the Welsh language in legal proceedings in Wales. That was followed by creation of the Welsh Assembly in 1998 which provided limited power to make legislation independently of the British Parliament. That it required the use of the Welsh language in teaching and government jobs, as well as street signs, etc., provided a significant boost to Welsh confidence.

Perhaps the most significant indicator of the resurgence of Welsh pride is he emergence of young people who are able to express themselves fluently in both Welsh and English. The Welsh TV station S4C is central to enabling such advances.

But these developments do not seem to be reducing mockery by the English. And we can now understand that in view of our conclusion that the mockery results purely from shortcomings of the English.

AmeriCymru: What’s next for Meurig Williams? Any new works in the pipeline?

Meurig: Yes. After retirement 16 years ago, my main interest was to enjoy the beach life in Florida. But after a few years of such unapologetic indulgences that was not enough, and I hankered for a more meaningful existence. So a period of personal reinvention was called for. I had worked at the Xerox Research Center in Webster, New York for many years where I had the opportunity to conduct basic research into one of the little understood sciences upon which copier and laser printer technologies are based. I made some experimental observations which I considered to be of unusual importance, but they were not well received in that competitive community. So, here was my new retirement opportunity, a return to the world of scientific research after an absence of several decades. Thanks to the online availability of scientific journals, I brought myself up to date on the recent developments in the field, and integrated them with my early work.

This resulted in a series of successes - several publications in peer-reviewed journals, presentations at scientific conferences, and a cover page article in The American Scientist in 2012: “What Creates Static Electricity? Traditionally considered a physics problem, the answer is beginning to emerge from chemistry and other sciences.” My contributions became recognized by the scientific community to the extent that I was invited to be keynote speaker at a major conference hosted by NASA in 2013, and received a job offer by a California startup. That was as far as I could take my research without access to a laboratory for further experimentation. An opportunity to collaborate with a university department arose but that became unrealistic on account of the travel that would be required. So a second reinvention was called for. I decided to write about my re entry into the scientific world and extended that to include a variety of life experiences.

And that has led to my current book. But it is not the last. I have started a novel, part fiction, part truth based on a panoply of ambition, intrigue, betrayal, high drama and tragedy both among friends and a few notable personalities.

AmeriCymru: Any final messages for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?

Meurig: For anyone who has a deep interest in Wales the country, Welsh life and Welsh people, there can be no better reading than Jan Morris’ 1984 landmark book THE MATTER OF WALES. EPIC VIEWS OF A SMALL COUNTRY. I consider it to provide the deepest and most sensitive insights into what being Welsh is all about. This is taken from that book:

Often hated and generally scorned by the English, the Welsh have fluctuated down the centuries from arrogance to self-doubt, from quiescence to rebellion, and today only a minority of them actively fight for their national identity, or even speak their native language; yet despite the overwhelming proximity of the English presence, a force which has affected the manners, thoughts and systems of half the world, for better or for worse Wales has not lost its Welshness.

Their brief years of triumph (referring to Owain Glyndwr’s uprising against the English in 15th century) represented a climax in the history of Wales, but changed nothing in the end: for the Welsh always were, and perhaps always will be, in a condition of resistance against the present, yearning sometimes for a more magnificent past, sometimes for a future more rewarding. It is the nature of the people: very likely the genius too.

Wales, a History by Gwynfor Evans, 1996. This book presents an important analysis of the critical junctures in Welsh history which determined its current state.

Wild Wales: its People, Language and Scenery, by George Borrow, 1862. Borrow was an English author who wrote novels and travelogues based on his experiences traveling around Europe:

But it is not for its scenery alone that Wales is deserving of being visited; scenes soon palls unless it is associated with remarkable events, and the names of remarkable men. Perhaps there is no country in the whole world which has been the scene of events more stirring and remarkable than those recorded in the history of Wales. What other country has been the scene of a struggle so deadly, so embittered, and protracted as that between the Welsh and the English – a struggle that did not terminate at Caernarvon, when Edward Longshanks foisted his young son upon the Welsh chieftains as Prince of Wales; but was kept up till the Battle of Bosworth Field, when a prince of Cumric blood won the crown of fair Britain.

"Mocking the Welsh is the last permitted bigotry” - The Spectator, 2009. It is entrenched in British lore, well documented by Shakespeare, and considered so disturbing that the Welsh Assembly has recently called for “an end to persistent anti-Welsh racism in the UK media”. Here, we explore reasons for this behavior, and trace its origin by delving into areas where the histories of Wales and England intersect. Both unfortunate and intrinsically unsavory characteristics of the English are identified, which are responsible for the mockery and other aspects of their culture.

Cover page

Shakespeare, in several plays, mocked the Welsh for their manners, language, temperament and outmoded attitudes. In Henry V, Fluellen is a Welsh captain in Henry V’s army. He is a comic figure, whose characterization draws on stereotypes of the Welsh at that time. He is shown here (left) intimidating the soldier Pistol while on campaign in France during the Hundred Years' War. Pistol had mocked Fluellen for wearing a leek in his cap on St. David’s Day, but Fluellen, in his flamboyant way, makes Pistol eat the raw leek. The name Fluellen is the anglicised version of the Welsh surname Llywelyn, the English finding it difficult to render the Welsh sound ‘Ll’. ...

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The first Welsh colouring book for adults is published this week by Y Lolfa publishers. 

Lliwio Cymru / Colouring Wales is the first adult colouring book for adults with a Welsh theme running throughout the pictures. It contains 21 beautiful hand-drawn Welsh pictures by the artist from Llanrug, Dawn Williams, including pictures of Branwen, Saint David, Blodeuwedd, the Red Dragon, ‘Cariad’, and Calon Lân and the Welsh national anthem, Hen Wlad fy Nhadau.

There has been a recent growth in the sales of colouring books for adults and psychologists claim that focusing on colouring can remove or hinder negative thoughts or encourage relaxation. 

According to the Mental Health Foundation 59% of adults in Britain say they are under more stressed today than they were five years ago. Although colouring is an activity for children it is now being used as a form of alternative theraphy to help adults relieve stress and anxiety. 

‘This is a unqiue and innovative book within the Welsh publishing industry,’ said Fflur Arwel, Head of Marketing for Y Lolfa, ‘Hundreds of colouring books for adults have been published in recent years but this is the only one with a Welsh dimension to it.’ 

‘Research has shown that colouring can alleviate conditions such as stress or transport people back to the easier days of childhood,’ Fflur added. 

The professional artist Dawn Williams was born in Bangor and raised in Ynys Môn. She now lives in Llanrug and is married with three sons. 

‘From the moment I used my pencils for the first time I became hooked on art!’ explained Dawn, ‘I was very young – a child in a children’s home in Llandudno and loved to sit at the desk in the playing room and show the other children how to draw.’ 

‘It was a way of escaping to another world the second the pencil would touch the paper,’ said Dawn, ‘and I am encouraged by the need to escape to my own kingdom of colours and inspired by nature and people and all the world around me!’

‘I jumped at the chance to create a Welsh colouring book – art is important to me and I am very grateful for the opportunity. Its theraputic and a chance to escape to somewhere if I feel down,’ added Dawn.

Lliwio Cymru / Colouring Wales by Dawn Williams (£4.99, Y Lolfa) is available now.

When Dragons Dare To Dream

Players from the Wales football team have sung the praises of a new book that details the incredible success story of the team during the summer of 2016. 

Published this week, When Dragons Dare to Dream  is the follow-up to Jamie Thomas’ successful The Dragon Roars Again and starts where that left off, charting the amazing progress of the Welsh football team through the Euro 2016 finals. 

‘Qualification for Euro 2016 meant absolutely everything to us, as a team, as a nation of people who have waited our whole lives to see Wales competing at a a major tournament,’ said Joe Ledley. ‘That feeling of qualifying was just amazing, and we couldn’t wait to get to France to put our country on the map and make a nation proud of us once more.’ 

‘We players had the time of our lives – every single day was a pleasure, and I like to think the fans enjoyed it just as much as we did; we just didn’t want it to end!’ said Joe, ‘To try and tell our nation’s incredible story over the summer is no easy task, but Jamie’s done a brilliant job of it with this new book. It’s a must-read for any football fan!’ he added. 

Euro 2016 was the first major tournament for the national team since 1958. The success of the team was a dream come true for many fans and culminated with the team reaching the Euro 2016 semi-finals.

The book includes in-depth analysis of and insight into the journey taken during the summer of 2016, including an exclusive interview with Mark Evans of the FAW which offers a glimpse into the  preparations for and events in the team base during the tournament. Players and team staff also offer their exclusive comments, including Joe Ledley and Chris Gunter. 

‘I’m very pleased to say that this is another very good book that tells Wales’ incredible story from the perspective of so many people who were involved: players, coaches, fans, journalists, everyone!’ said Chris Gunter. 

Raised on Anglesey, author Jamie Thomas is a 23-year-old Media Masters graduate and lifelong Wales fan who writes on many aspects of Welsh football for various media outlets. 

‘I was ecstatic with the reception my first book received from everyone – whether that be people involved with the Wales squad on a day-to-day basis, fellow Wales fans or other journalists,’ said Jamie.

 When Dragons Dare to Dream by Jamie Thomas (£9.99, Y Lolfa) is published on November 1 ^st .

The Morgan Hopkin Gallery presents work from four generations of one family. Llew E Morgan, through his own art, inspired his family and descendents to create art and literature from a love of their country. Original paintings, prints and books all available from www.morganhopkin.co.uk

Llew E Morgan was a renaissance man, an innovator in education and photography, the latter a hobby which brought him national recognition. He was the winner of fourteen ‘Firsts’ for his photography at the National Eisteddfod of Wales from his first entry in Treorchy in 1928.

Llew was born in 1885 in Tirwaun, a hamlet outside Ystradgynlais in the Swansea Valley. At the age of ten he was given a camera by his grandmother, a present for passing the scholarship to the local grammar school, and this began a lifelong obsession with photography.

After two near-death experiences as a teenager in the colliery, Llew’s parents encouraged him to try for a university place. He succeeded, and chose Exeter where he excelled at chemistry, biology and no less at rugby. He returned home to marry Blodwen, his long-time sweetheart, who was happy to leave the valley for the more affluent Oxford when Llew was offered a teaching post there. However, the Oxfordshire countryside did not give him the joy he felt when he walked the Brecon Beacons and the Gower peninsular and this hiraeth for Wales brought the family back to Ystradgynlais in 1925.

Llew began teaching in Ynyscedwyn School and spent his evenings writing articles for the local paper , Y Llais , on his skills as a gardener and rearer of chickens, ducks, geese and pigs.

Each article was accompanied by notes from Blodwen on preserving, pickling and cooking the bountiful harvest of their plot. It read like the Good Life but most miners were excellent gardeners and with houses built on the roadside, working class Welsh houses had extremely long gardens with plenty of potential.

Newspapers began to run photographic competitions and Llew became a regular winner with his unique-angle snaps and comic scenes of children at play. Daughter Betty and her friends were always ready to pile into the Ford and enjoy an outing to the seaside with Blodwen supplying a generous picnic.

Llew’s main focus was nature and landscape and he would spend hours in the remote areas of Brecon and Radnor waiting for a Peregrine Falcon to emerge from its nest or a fox to appear at its lair. These two images were his initial prizes at the National Eisteddfod. Hours after supper would be spent in his darkroom, developing and printing the photographs to his very high standards.

During WW2, while still teaching full-time, Llew became an Adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture. Evenings were now spent making slides of pertinent livestock, even making clay models of the innards of rabbits showing how disease can affect an animal, so that he could lecture to communities on how to ‘dig for victory’. His trusty Ford took him often as far as Aberystwyth, almost a three hour journey in those days, to lecture for a few hours and then drive home by the early hours to grab some sleep before leaving for school. These years also saw him as Air Raid Warden as German bombers would fly up the valley after their assault on Swansea, dropping bombs as they made their way back to the Continent.

Llew’s images live on at the St. Fagin’s Museum, Cardiff, through the biography, Full Circle, and through the family archive and website.

Llew's daughter, Betty, had watched her father compose his photographs and had inherited his talent for composition and the same interest in the documentary element in art. When she began to paint it was the story behind the subject which she wished to express. Wartime in Cardiff brought her home to Ystradgynlais. She was now married to the architect, Howel Hopkin, whose father, Will, was the proprietor of the newspaper, The West Wales Observer. Her idea was to train as an interior decorator and to work with Howel in designing ‘ideal’ homes, but motherhood took over and with three children to care for her artistic aspirations were put on hold. She did, however, write children’s stories and continued to draw, encouraging the children in both art forms.

In the 1970s she began to paint pictures depicting life in the valley during her childhood – the carnivals, eisteddfods, Whitsun parades, cinema queues and domestic scenes such as ‘Pig Killing’, ‘Dadcu’s Funeral’, and community events like the 1936 ‘Coronation Street Party’. Betty, now signing herself Elizabeth Hopkin, took sample paintings to the Portal Gallery in Bond Street, and was immediately accepted as one of their stable of artists by the owner, Eric Lister. He was enthralled by her imaginative colours and poetic expression and later wrote in his book on British Naïve and Primitive Artists:

Her paintings are a chronicle of life within the Welsh valley community seen through the eyes of an innocent child, but executed with the formal composition of an adult.

For twenty years Elizabeth exhibited successfully at the Portal, then at galleries across America and now shows exclusively at the Albany Gallery in Cardiff. She was encouraged by Tom Maschler, then head of Jonathan Cape publishers, to write a book on the stories behind her paintings. This she did in Then the Sirens Sounded followed by Butterflies of the Valley . Both books show how life changed from the rural idyll of the very early 1900s to the mining community of the 1950s.

What Eric Lister and collectors have loved is the humour that is expressed in her work. A typical series of paintings is of Dai Romantic, a miner, who stops to pick wild roses for his wife as he walks home from a shift with his companions, and who paints their terrace house pink which pleases his wife but shocks the neighbours.

Elizabeth painted an era long-gone but never to be forgotten. Her three daughters are all artistic, though Wendy was drawn to the sciences, while Mary followed her love of music, and Carole pursued acting, writing and painting.

Trained at Cardiff College of Art and with an M.A. in Literature from Cardiff University, Carole has travelled widely always carrying with her a sketchbook and notebook. After appearing in The Mousetrap, Dr. Who , and several television dramas she moved to New York and spent five happy years working at the British Trade Office.

On weekends she painted and had her first American Exhibition in Greenwich, Connecticut. A feature on her work in Vogue magazine advertised her talent for portraits of homes and gardens and this set off a chain of commissions from L.A., Palm Beach, and ultimately to portray the home of Ambassador and Mrs. Biddle-Duke in New York.

Family circumstances brought her back to Wales and she began to teach Art and Creative Writing for the University of Wales, Swansea. She became an Associate Tutor in Cultural Studies and now lectures on Llew’s life and work, her mother’s paintings, and the work of Josef Herman, the Polish artist who settled in Ystradgynlais from 1944 to 1955 and became a close family friend.

Carole is a Trustee of the Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru and also of the Llangiwg Community Association having helped save the ancient parish church of Llangiwg high on the hills above the town of Pontardawe in the Swansea Valley.

After writing, Full Circle, the life of her grandfather, Carole set up Merton Press and published her novel, The Sensualist , three autobiographies illustrated with her paintings – French Adventures, Beatles, Before and Beyond and Aaaah America . This year she wrote and illustrated her first collection of prose-poems in Fantasia.

Creativity runs in everyone’s blood but only with encouragement and inspiration will it flourish. The family website is run by Carole’s niece, Jessica Lee Morgan, who follows her mother’s love of music and singing. As well as work by Llew, Elizabeth and Carole, the website includes drawings and paintings by Mary Hopkin and photographs by her son Morgan Visconti.

Original paintings, prints and books all available from www.morganhopkin.co.uk

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Alan Bilton is the author of two novels, The Known and Unknown Sea (2014), variously compared to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the 1902 movie, A Trip to the Moon, and Dante’s Inferno, and The Sleepwalkers’ Ball (2009) which one critic described as “Franz Kafka meets Mary Poppins”.

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Alan Bilton never disappoints and he never fails to fascinate. His latest work, an anthology of short stories titled 'Anywhere Out Of The World' is no exception. Billed as 'a collection of short stories of the deeply mysterious and the utterly absurd', these grimly comical tales will transport you from Venice to Walla Walla, Washington and simultaneously to places with no known geographical co ordinates.

In 'The Honeymoon Suite' a young couple arrive at a luxury hotel in Venice only to become separated and lost in a labyrinth of twisting corridors and interconnected stairways. In this tale of mystery and alternate endings one of the honeymooners is left musing:-

"Who was to say what was the end and what was the beginning? Perhaps life didn't travel from A to Z but constantly traded and changed; from here it was Venice which seemed like a dream and the island of tombs which chimed the one true hour."

Superbly constructed and broodingly atmospheric throughout, 'The Honeymoon Suite' is one of the longer tales in this collection as is the title story.

Mr Urbino is a postman attempting to deliver a letter to a non existent address. He is also an amateur artist. His attempts to locate the address and its tenant result in a series of bizarre encounters and ultimately to an unexpected journey or 'escape'. His predicament at the end of this tale invites speculation. As the author put it in a recent interview:- "Has the artist in the title story escaped from the everyday through his art, or stumbled into some kind of metaphysical trap?"

Anywhere Out Of The World is also the title of a poem by Charles Baudelaire. It can be read online here and provides considerable insight into the thematic material of this collection.

Many of the shorter stories in this collection are equally intriguing. In 'The Bridge To Mitte Kuskil' a Tsarist auditor makes a journey to inspect progress at a bridge construction site. What he finds is not at all what he expected and the ultimate fate of his 'report' is not at all what the reader might expect.

In 'Flea Theatre' a womans husband disappears and she begins to receive mysterious parcels each one containing a dead stuffed flea dressed in human clothing. Her attempts to locate her missing husband leave her feeling 'lost and uneasy, a trespasser in somebody else's book.'

Literary references/comparisons? In reading this collection I am constantly reminded of Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Unconsoled', Steve Erickson and Wales' very own Rhys Hughes. All powerful recommendations in my opinion. 

This book is unreservedly recommended to anyone with a taste for the bizarre or an interest in exploring the boundaries (and beyond) of contemporary fiction.

Review by Ceri Shaw

Alan Bilton is the author of two novels, The Known and Unknown Sea (2014), variously compared to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the 1902 movie, A Trip to the Moon, and Dante’s Inferno, and The Sleepwalkers’ Ball (2009) which one critic described as “Franz Kafka meets Mary Poppins”. As a writer, he is obviously a hard man to pin down. He is also the author of books on Silent Film Comedy, Contemporary Fiction, and America in the 1920s. He teaches Creative Writing, Contemporary Literature, and Film at Swansea University in Wales.

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AmeriCymru: Hi Alan and many thanks for agreeing to this interview. Care to tell us a little about your latest book:- 'Anywhere Out Of The World'?

Alan: I wanted to come up with a collection of short stories poised somewhere between horror and comedy – odd bedfellows, I know, but that was part of the attraction. Conventional wisdom says that the comic comforts rather than unsettles, and that humour stops dread in its tracks. At the same time though both are linked by a sense of anxiety and surprise: comedy and horror bypass the rational, logical parts of the brain to generate an immediate physical response – whether a laugh or a shudder.

I also wanted to write a series of stories which played with the Surrealist idea of the marvellous. The Surrealists believed – and they’re probably right – that we’re essentially conservative creatures who travel the same paths and perform the same tasks day in, day out – what the Surrealists called ‘the habitual’. Crucially however, they also suggested that reality isn’t as stable or solid as such routines might suggest. One false move, one random slip, and we stumble headfirst into a strange space outside of the familiar – the twilight zone of ‘the marvellous’.

Now the marvellous sounds marvellous, but the experience of the marvellous is profoundly unsettling – Breton called it ‘convulsive’ - in the sense that we’ve fallen through a trap door into a wholly alien realm. Or if not alien, then the familiar rendered strange – as in a dream.

I wanted to write a collection of short stories which functioned as a kind of crooked house with secret passages between stories, mysterious port-holes and hidden staircases and abandoned lift shafts, which take one both from one story to another and from the everyday world to the kingdom of the uncanny. The stories are set in all sorts of places – Wales, Russia, Paris, Venice – but a sense of estrangement is central to all of them – the sense that characters are somehow in the wrong place.

AmeriCymru: One of the stories in this collection is set in Walla Walla, Washington. What inspired this tale?

Alan: Although the story involves the ghost of Princess Diana and a hungry bear, much of it did really happen to me – more or less. I was invited to give a lecture on silent film comedy at Walla Walla while on a University recruitment trip. I really was picked up at the airport by a Native American guy who asked me whether I thought that Princess Di was beautiful, and in the next breath why I (by which I guess he meant, the British) killed her. He really did give me his card and say ‘Wherever you are, I will come and get you” in a strangely menacing tone of voice. And then when I got there, there were posters advertising my talk everywhere – somebody had done a really terrific job in terms of promotion. The night of my lecture, the campus was full of crowds of students and locals, all of them discussing some talk a visiting speaker was due to give. Anyway, I went to the bath room, and when I emerged, everybody was gone: I went to my lecture theatre and there was only one old lady sitting there, waiting rather grumpily. It turned out that all the crowds were heading to a talk on climate change – as if global warming is more important than Buster Keaton, I know! – and I ended up playing my movie clips in a vast darkened auditorium to an audience of one. So there you go, all those bits were true. The bear, I made up.  

AmeriCymru: In your first novel 'The Sleepwalkers Ball' we find the following passage:-"Or is it that alongside this track runs other lines - repetitions, variations, contradictions - echoes of all those lives we failed to live and the things we failed to do?" To what extent are the stories in this anthology an exploration of the profound disconnect between peoples real lives and their possibilities and potential.

Alan: Well, the default position for all my writing is the subjunctive – what is wished for, or feared, or what might have been. I’m not a realist. My fiction is all about how the imagination rebels against the real – whether for good or ill. The unspoken question in The Sleepwalkers Ball is whether one’s fantasy life is more meaningful than mundane life, or merely a kind of infantile escape from it. The same notion pops up in several of the stories too. Has the artist in the title story escaped from the everyday through his art, or stumbled into some kind of metaphysical trap? It’s also there in the dual endings of ‘The Honeymoon Suite’ – the notion that the question of what happened is more of a labyrinth than a straight line.

AmeriCymru: In your online interview with Jon Gower re: 'The Known and Unknown Sea' you talk about things being taken in the wrong context and 'fever dreams'. How much of that applies to the stories in this collection? Are there thematic  parallells between these stories and your earlier novels?

Alan: I actually don’t have any problem with readers taking things in the wrong context – the beauty of mystery is that you’re free to decide to what extent you want to interpret or ‘solve’ it. Much of what I’ve written so far can be seen as a fever dream or an extended anxiety attack: the short stories perhaps even more so. Short stories often deal with writers’ main concerns in a very direct and undiluted form – which can be good or bad, of course. All my books are slapstick comedies which can be read as uncanny and terrifying or farcical and light hearted – I’m happy for the reader to juggle these two ideas or moods, as they wish.

AmeriCymru: What is your take on the art of short story writing? What, for you, makes a good short story?

Alan: There is a school of thought that the short story and the novel are in fact wholly different disciplines, and that the short story is closer to poetry than prose. I’m afraid that in my philistine way I’ve never felt this, though. A story should be as long as it takes the teller to tell it. And for all the experimental aspects of the stories – their absurdism, irreality and sense of crossed paths – each of the stories is intended to work as a well told tale. They’re not slices of life or impressionistic snapshots: they’re complete entities, with a sense of order, meaning and shape we rarely encounter in real life. I tend to like a sense of structure in fiction – it’s a lie, but a necessary lie, something which we turn to fiction to supply because it’s terribly absent from everyday life.

AmeriCymru: You have a keen appreciation of early silent film comedy. Does this inform or influence your writing? To what extent does what you are currently watching or reading influence your prose?

Alan: Yes, I spent nearly ten years writing a book on silent film comedy, and talking about them with students. As a kid I adored Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin and so on – Buster Keaton came later. It’s amazing to think that such antique films were still being shown on TV when I was a kid – although I guess they weren’t so ancient then. I loved their dreamlike sense that anything could happen, that they were a kind of cartoon occupied by real people, a black and white and soundless universe, cut off from real life, from realism. And I liked the idea that this universe was separate, even if, for me, these films were also full of anxiety: I worried about Stan and Ollie when they screwed things up, anxiously worried about what might happen next. They seemed to me to be both a dream and a nightmare – which is what I’ve tried to translate into fiction.  

For a long time I was an incredible film buff and pretty much watched a film every day – these days family life isn’t so conducive such idleness, alas. Film – from silent comedy to European New Wave cinema – still influences a lot of what I write though. Anywhere Out of the World – which is a Chagall painting as well as a Baudelaire poem – was also very influenced by early 20 ^th Century Modern Art. Visual things tend to be easier to import into fiction than music – or at least that’s how I find it. I still try and read a novel every week – and no doubt whatever I’m reading affects the imaginative weather of whatever I’m scribbling away at.

AmeriCymru: Care to tell us something about your first novel 'Sleepwalkers Ball'?

Alan: Sleepwalker is, I guess, my most dreamlike book – in the original draft none of the characters had names, until my editor put me straight – but I never saw it as a difficult or experimental book, still less as some intellectual puzzle to be solved. It’s a love story set in the same black and white, slapstick comedy universe I talked about earlier. The four stories are all versions of the same romance, and inter-connect, or contradict, or question, each other at will. It was also my first stab at creating a world in which the imagination is allowed to wander where it likes – where what might have happened, or what you wanted to happen, or what you were worried about happening, are all given the same narrative weight. I intended it to be sweet and funny, although one reviewer described it as a grotesque horror show and ended the review with the prediction ‘I’m sure there’ll be more of this unreadable rubbish to come’. They were right too…

AmeriCymru: Your second novel 'The Known and Unknown Sea' has been described as "a beautiful and heartbreaking journey through memory, loss and imagination". How would you describe it?

Alan: It was an attempt – just before my first child was born – to write a novel exploring the imaginative world of a child. It’s about how resilient a child’s imagination is, and how flexible too – how they can accept and process impossible or inexplicable things and yet maintain their own internal buoyancy.

So, on the one hand it’s a book about what children fear most, but also a playful, comic adventure – another juxtaposition of contrary ideas, just like Anywhere Out of the World.

It’s also a book made out of materials you might find a school art room – the sets all sticky with glue, the paint applied with a stick. So the houses are very square and blocky, the figures stick men or scribbled beards. The aesthetic or form of the book came out of this basic idea – crooked lines, primary colours, a distorted perspective where the sky is just a thick blue line above the earth. A child’s point of view is very hard to capture via language alone, so I tried to find the right visual match: readers can let me know whether or not I managed it.

AmeriCymru: What's next for Alan Bilton? Any new titles in the pipeline?

Alan: The next book is my big Russian novel – all Russian novels are big, of course, it’s a contractual obligation. My elevator pitch for the book is ‘the bastard child of Agatha Christie and Mikhail Bulgakov’. It’s a murder mystery set during the Russian Civil War, though the atmosphere and setting are not entirely realistic, you’ll be astonish to hear.

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?

Alan: At a time when countries are either building walls or burning bridges, cross-cultural links have never been more important. Exploring different cultures is always a mix of the known and the unknown, the familiar and the foreign – which is to say, part of the adventure of life. We all need to keep our imaginative doors as wide open as we can. 

Interview by Ceri Shaw

AmeriCymru:  Hi Dan/Laura? and many thanks for agreeing to this interview. Care to tell us a little about your new album 'Overture'?

Dan: The album consists of twenty-five artists from the West End and Broadway who have come together to be part of one of the largest collections of new music to ever be released. The album comes out across the World on October 24 ^th .

The album features; Marc Broussard ( Magnolias and Mistletoe , 2015 album), Earl Carpenter ( Les Miserables , Broadway), Melinda Doolittle (American Idol), Matt Doyle ( Book Of Mormon , Broadway), Hannah Elless ( Bright Star , Broadway), Jason Forbach ( Les Miserables , Broadway), Matthew Ford Gershwin In Hollywood ) Ashleigh Gray ( Wicked , UK Tour), Emma Hatton ( Wicked , West End), Samantha Hill ( Phantom Of The Opera , Broadway), James M Iglehart ( Aladdin , Broadway), Adam Jacobs ( Aladdin , Broadway), Arielle Jacobs ( Aladdin , Australia), Charlotte Jaconelli ( She Loves Me , West End), Rachel John ( The Bodyguard , West End), Adam Kaplan ( Newsies , US Tour), Emmanuel Kojo ( Showboat , West End), Kara Lily-Hayworth ( I See Fire , 2015 single), Rebecca Luker ( Fun Home , Broadway), Jai McDowall ( I Begin Again , 2014 single), Bryce Pinkham ( A Gentleman's Guide To Love and Murder , Broadway), Courtney Reed ( Aladdin , Broadway), Krysta Rodriguez ( Smash , NBC), Will Swenson (Les Miserables , Broadway) and Natalie Weiss (Les Miserables , US Tour).

AmeriCymru:  What can you tell us about the title? Why 'Overture'?

Dan: Our last album title ‘Love on 42 ^nd Street’ was a reflection of the stories and people we interacted with on a trip to New York City. Those stories shaped the music on the album through the ever powerful message of love.

We came up with ‘Overture’ quite quickly as the message of this album is how music connects everyone. It doesn’t matter where you are from you can still enjoy the same piece of music. It is the only true universal language. Within a traditional show’s overture, you hear snippets of songs or themes from the production and we felt it summed up the message that we were trying to put across. Hopefully other people will agree!

AmeriCymru:  The featured performers list reads like a who's who of Musical Theatre. What was it like working with so many talented artists?

Dan: We have certainly been fortunate both on this album and previous projects to work with some of the most celebrated performers of their generation. The amazing thing is that each artist’s voice and style is a completely individual. Even if they have performed the same roles there is still a big difference in how they approach a song. The hardest thing is trying to maintain the electric buzz of a live performance and capture that on a recording.

The recording process for this album has been a little like a working rehearsal that ends up being recorded. During the recording sessions we have had the chance to break down each song and work with the artists on shaping the recording. The vocal performances are truly very special.

AmeriCymru:  What can you tell us about the individual tracks on the album? Are they original compositions or Broadway standards?

Dan: There are twenty-one songs on the album and a further two overtures, all of which are brand new compositions. The majority of the songs were actually written for the artists who have recorded them.

We have though tried to capture the true essence of what makes the West End and Broadway theatre great and we hope the musical styles will familiar even though they are completely new songs. We have been heavily inspired by the great Hollywood musicals and there are a few throwback moments within the album where we get to nod to some of our heroes like the great Fred Astaire.

AmeriCymru:  What can you tell us about your song-writing/compositional style?

Dan: Generally with most songs Dan starts with the basis of the melodic idea and then Laura takes over and throws it all out! Only joking. We have a unique way of working where we are both very in tune with what we are trying to bring across within the song. Laura adds to the melodic idea and then does a piano arrangement. We then work on it together and write the lyrics together.

AmeriCymru:  Where will our readers be able to hear/buy the album online?

Dan: The best place is to go onto www.danandlauracurtis.com where you can currently stream a snippet of every song on the album. The CD is also available to buy on the site. Online stores like iTunes currently have a pre-order option from the download across the World. 

AmeriCymru:  What's next for Dan and Laura Curtis?

Dan: We are currently in the process of writing a musical which is certainly going to take up the rest of the year and the first part of 2017. Once the music is completed there is a long road ahead to get that across to production. We are not able to say that much about the idea at the moment but promise to keep everyone informed.

We are also starting a video series where we will record live videos with Broadway and West End stars singing our songs with Laura at the piano. Along with a few big concerts it promises to be a busy year.

AmeriCymru:  Any final message for the members and readers of AmeriCymru?

Dan: It is always a joy to come and speak with you Ceri. We have been fortunate to have been showered with support and good wishes from the readers of AmeriCymru in the past and we are extremely indebted to you for that. We would like to say a massive thank you for that support and to say that it never goes unappreciated. If anyone would like to connect on social media then on twitter we are @danlauracurtis

BUY THE ALBUM HERE

Overture - An Interview With Welsh Composers, Dan & Laura Curtis https://t.co/ZAXSSABIGU pic.twitter.com/M1ZHXbnMaA

— americymru (@americymru) October 4, 2016

‘The hugely successful 2015 World Cup obscured the reality rugby union has become too dangerous’ according to John Dawes - architect of the historic 1971 Lions triumph in New Zealand.

His views come from the new updated edition of John Dawes: The Man who Changed the World of Rugby by Ross Reyburn in which Dawes and the late Carwyn James cite their views on what could be done to transform the modern game for the better. 

Reyburn’s biography is the only first-hand account of the 1971 Lions in print backtracking the tour’s success to its birthplace at Old Deer Park where Dawes created the  spectacular London Welsh side in the late 1960s. And it also provides as shrewd an analysis of the faults of modern rugby as you will find anywhere in The Legacy of the Dawes Era chapter.   

Carwyn James and the late Daily Telegraph rugby correspondent John Reason in their book  The World of Rugby – A History of Rugby Union Football  published in 1979 with prophetic foresight attacked a new  law allowing tackled players to pass the ball if they kept it off the ground wrote:

‘If the tackler is not rewarded with at least an interruption in the attacking side’s control of  the ball ...he will  stand up and maul for the ball, as they do in rugby league. Is that really what the International Board wants from rugby union football?

The changes in the tackle law ...have introduced the pile-up, as players seek to keep the ball off the ground and opponents  seek to smother it. The solution is obvious. Return to the old law which required a player immediately to release the ball once he had been brought to the ground.’  

John  Dawes, who translated his vision of attacking 15-man rugby perfected at London Welsh to the 1971 Lions in his great partnership  with  James, echoed similar concerns telling Reyburn in 2013:

‘What the game has developed now is physicality. These days the first thing you look at in a player is how big he is, how strong he is.  You don’t see the ball go down the line from set pieces. What you see is a mess. You would be penalized in our day for a pile-up. But now they just dive in jumping on each ther. I can’t  understand how the referee allows it. Playing physically as they do now injuries will increase.’

Dawes’s injuries prediction has proved all too true and in April  2015 Prof Allyson Pollock  argued the game was too dangerous in its existing form for schools. Reyburn argues backing the views of Carwyn James and John Dawes need not be complex. World Rugby needs to return to the old tackle law, ensure existing laws are strictly enforced so the straight scrum feed returns and solo clear-out charges are penalised and return rugby to its traditional role as a 15-man game cutting the substitutes bench to four players available only as blood or injury replacements.

It is now over 30 years since Carwyn James sadly died aged just 53 and John Dawes’s direct involvement in the game has passed. But rugby union’s debt to these two visionaries from the Welsh valleys need not have ended.

The updated edition of Ross Reyburn’s biography, The Man Who Changed the World of Rugby – John Dawes and the Legendary 1971 British Lions (Y Lolfa, paperback £9.99) is available now.  

It includes articles by former Wales and Lions flanker John Taylor, the late Evening Standard sports editor  JL Manning and former Birmingham Post rugby correspondent Michael Blair highlighting the debt the game owes Dawes.