Book Bound in the Marches

# 53

   Last week the Bus Lane ventured into the Welsh Marches, ultimately reaching the border town of Hay-on-Wye. The Marches is an area where two millennia of turbulent history are written into the landscape in the form of earthworks, place-names and castle ruins. In the summer of 1070, Duke William of Normandy (aka ‘The Conqueror’) sent his best-mate and wing-man, William FitzOsbern, into the Marches with instructions to knock local heads either together or off entirely. Both outcomes usually served the Norman cause equally well. FitzOsbern began the fortification of Hay and there followed five centuries of alternating repression, insurgency, siege and counter-siege. Even on a good day, these headline activities became inseparable from the popular medieval pastimes of savaging, ravaging, pillaging, arson, mayhem and general malarkey. The town of Hay-on-Wye has been mostly peaceful since the late seventeenth century - barring a brief uprising staged on All-Fools’ day, 1977. This saw castle-owner and bookman Richard Coeur de Livre[i] self-proclaimed as King of Hay for purely promotional purposes. Today, the Marcher lords slumber in peace and Powys Council runs an uncontested regime, making cunning use of ‘pay-and-display’ parking to curtail any potential dissent.

   A small town, friendly and compact on its hill beside the Wye, Hay still has edges and has therefore not greatly messed up the adjoining countryside. The town has a remarkable abundance of bookshops and its economy has been further fortified since 1988 by an annual festival of literature and arts. The Hay Festival was described in 2001 as “the Woodstock of the mind” by no less a connoisseur of distinctly borderline malarkey than Baron William de Clinton himself. More recently, with an appropriately Marcher display of sharper elbows and deeper pockets, sponsorship of the festival was switched from the Guardian to the Telegraph.

   The number of bookshops is now declining from a high of over thirty and locals inevitably blame the internet in general and e-publishing in particular. This year the proprietor of the ‘Murder & Mayhem’ bookshop has campaigned to ban the Kindle from both town and festival. Clicking to buy second-hand books on line is no substitute for the joy of days spent shuffling along the shelves of one musty emporium after another. The smells of paper, leather, dust and glue, the reverential silence disturbed only by the creaking of ancient floorboards and whispered enquiries after collectable editions.

   Browsing the tight-packed shelves and tables requires stamina. Visitors need to bend and stretch, to crook their necks to read feint titles on faded spines and remember not to straighten too suddenly when chancing upon an interesting discovery. However specific your original intention of seeking titles rare or out of print, each successive bookshop proves to be the new home of serendipity. See, here’s a mint condition, First Edition, of ‘Biggles Investigates’ – priced at £250 and next to it Larkin’s ‘The Less Deceived’, going for £400. And over there a signed copy of Bruce Chatwin’s – ‘On the Black Hill’- £495. And all securely locked under glass.

   Robotic search engines criss-crossing the web will list all manner of discoveries for your delight and thereby constantly reinforce the grand illusion of the digital age – that information and knowledge are one and the same. In the Poetry Bookshop on Brook Street they start with the ‘A’s behind the door and you have to crouch to get at Auden, uncomfortably near the floor.  Then Auden makes me think of Yeats because I happen to flick through his pages and pause to read In Memory of W.B. Yeats (d. January, 1939)[ii]:

II

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry…

   The works of Yeats will be represented here too - ‘Now he is scattered among a hundred cities’[iii] – and I find him resting on the stairs, displaced forever from Auden by that alphabetical ordering of the shelves. ‘W.B. Yeats. Poems selected by Seamus Heaney’ - £10 – I’ll have that! And what’s this? ‘A Biography with Selected Poems’, hardback, £7. Is it any good? It seems very thin for both biography and poems… let’s look inside: Chapter V, Personal Recollections. Here we find one Joseph Bard, in 1927, walking along the shore at Rapallo between Ezra Pound and Yeats, discussing literature: “Pound was irreverent. Borrowing Yeats’ spectacles he gave them to Joseph to try on, asking him: ‘Do you see fairies?’[iv] Hilarious; I’d buy the book for that alone.

   And something else that online shopping does not provide is the sense of distance and history, of making a journey. You cannot click any known mouse to find yourself approaching Hay along the Golden Valley of the river Dore during harvest with summer coming to an end all around. Last week, from Pontrilas past Peterchurch and on to Dorstone, small fields were being rhythmically cut and combed by tractors big as houses. Further west, closer under the lee of the Black Mountains, the streams of the rivers Olchon, Monnow and the Escley Brook ran cold over time-worn stones. A single, narrow, lane twisted with the contours of the land like an old grey vein, almost forgotten under its broken canopy of hedgerows. And at every field gate, the green verges were freshly strewn with stalks of yellow straw, spilled from passing trailers.

   On arriving in Hay, there were words painted across the road reading ‘SLOW ARAF’. Was this some dyslexic’s warning of the RAF's last low-flying aviator or is there, perhaps, some Armed Revolutionary Anarchistic Front, suddenly active in the Marches? All is explained in the town car park which, incidentally, enjoys a view as good as any car park, anywhere in Europe. This being Wales, all public signage is duplicated in both English and Welsh. The instructions regarding pay & display are reassuringly unintelligible in both. “ARAF”, disappointingly, means only ‘SLOW’, but slow in Welsh. Do they know a different kind of slow or do Welsh-speakers need to have their cultural insecurity relieved a tad by finding instructions on roads and parking meters conveyed in their mother-tongue?

   William Butler Yeats was a passionate nationalist in his time, albeit for the Irish cause, not the Welsh. In many ways he was mad as a hatter with his devotion to mysticism and the occult, attendance at séances and a lifelong belief in fairies. Yeats wrote all his fine lyric poetry only in English. Although he supported the Gaelic revival, he never learned to speak or write in Gaelic. 2016 will bring the centenary of the Easter Rising and if they were to mark it by painting the words  “A terrible beauty is born” (his refrain from the poem ‘Easter 1916’) at every crossroads in Ireland, north and south, would someone still be wanting to see the Gaelic translation given equal prominence and painted by its side? Would the Gaelic convey the exact same tension as that deliberate contradiction between ‘terrible’ and beauty’?

   It’s a risky business flicking through books. Who knows what unexpected connections they may possess?  Hidden joys wait to be unbound in Y Gelli Gandryll.

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[i] Richard Booth

[ii] W.H. Auden, ‘Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944’. Faber & Faber. London 1951

[iii] Ibid. page 65.

[iv] ‘W.B. Yeats. A biography with selected poems’. Andrew Lambirth. London 1999. Page 52