Welsh Sonata: Variations on a Theme. Reprint of the 1954 Ed

by James Hanley

Bound in the publisher's original orange cloth with the spine stamped in gilt

205 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Born in Kirkdale, Liverpool, in 1897 (not Dublin, nor 1901 as he generally implied) to a working-class family, Hanley probably left school in 1911 and worked as a clerk, before going to sea in 1915 at the age of 17 (not 13 as he again implied). Thus life at sea was a formative influence and much of his early writing is about seamen.
Then, in April 1917, Hanley jumped ship in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, and shortly thereafter joined the Canadian Army in Fredericton, NB. Hanley fought in France in the summer of 1918, but was invalided out shortly thereafter. He then went to Toronto, Canada, for two months, in the winter of 1919, to be demobbed, before returning to Liverpool on 28 March 1919. He may have taken one final voyage before working as a railway porter in Bootle. In addition to working as a railway porter, he devoted himself "to a prodiguous range of autodidactic, high cultural activities – learning the piano ...attending ... concerts ... reading voraciously and, above all, writing." It is also probable that he later worked at a number of other jobs, while writing fiction in his spare time. However, it was not until 1929 that his novel Drift was accepted, and this was published in March, 1930.

Reviews

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting. Beautiful cadences. Bardic - and incidentally written before Under Milkwood.

[Erich C · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up to 4. I enjoyed the unique voices and characterizations, but the narrative was somewhat unfocused.

p 30: 'Why this place called Cilgyn is so close and tight and welded together that I think the only thing anybody doesn't know in Cilgyn is what doesn't happen.'

p 44: 'He was a country child, mister Jones, and they say he first saw the light of day through a rabbit's ear.'

pp 44-45: 'When his fists weren't close to the stones, then they were generally hard up against another's flesh. That kind of man, and taken with the drink that was his God, fiery and dangerous, and hard, mister, hard, and I mean it. In the fire of drink or out of it his nature was the same, a man with no feelings at all. Flesh and bone and no more, and the one as damned as the other.'

p 62: 'Seen that Huw Ellis here, too. Used to come here often, mister, that was before a fall of roof had my man at Llay and murdered the life out of him. And in them days you daren't call the place Welsh, so full it was of the English and the Lancashire lot. And many a whore from Chester town too. What's earned hard is earned well, and it shines like light at the entrance to any of these places, and the women like moths. This is no fancy town. And no Chapel door locked spite of that, even that Meirion went Sundays, though God Almighty he had no more love or mercy for his own that the length of this hard arm.'

p 184: And wherever I walked this day I saw the thing that I hated most.

In every hole and corner of this place, Hope lies flat on its back.

Like one tree after another, down by the axe.

And soon the snows to cover all of it.