Undone by Politics

R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet and Anglican priest, was difficult, especially in his later years, the way John Brown and Isaiah, no doubt, were difficult. Their vision, if not single-minded, was more laser-focused than yours or mine. Thomas, a Welsh nationalist, condoned the burning of English vacation homes in Wales, even at the risk of their owners perishing in the fires. Like many artists, intellectuals and more than a few clergy, he was undone by politics. When writing poetry, he could be an angel; in politics, he seems often to have been a fool. I’m reminded of a lecture the Austrian novelist Robert Musil delivered in Paris in 1935 (reprinted in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, 1990). Musil made the mistake of likening Bolshevism and fascism – not a deft rhetorical strategy at a conference dominated by Stalinists and their sympathizers. Here’s part of what he said, phrased with Musil’s customary gift for irony:

“All my life I have stayed away from politics because I feel I have no talent for it. I cannot understand the objection that politics has a claim on everyone because it is something that concerns everyone. Hygiene too concerns everyone, and yet it is not something I have ever expressed myself about in public, because I have no more talent as a hygienist than I do as an economic leader or geologist.”

Thomas gave an interview titled “Probings” that was first published in the journal Planet and later appeared in Miraculous Simplicity, edited by William V. Davis and published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1993. In his conversation, Thomas displays both sides of his personality. On the subject of Welsh nationalism and politics, he is shrill and often irrational. When he speaks of poetry, he becomes a better man:

“Literature has to do with speech. It is the communication of thought and emotion at the highest and most articulate level. It is the supreme human statement. You remember Wallace Stevens’s stanza in `Chocorua to Its Neighbor’:

“`To say more than human things with human voice,
that cannot be; to say human things with more
than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
to speak humanly from the height or from the depth
of human things, that is acutest speech.’

“We must remain articulate to the end, with all the overtones that articulation may imply from the drama of Sophocles to that of Beckett….I like to think of man, even on his last day on this planet, gazing out into the universe and speaking words of love and of beauty in his native tongue.”

Thomas’ words are so moving, his emphasis on the human impulse to speech and articulation (I thought at once of Lear) and his inspired linkage of Stevens, Sophocles and Beckett. (Who knew Thomas read Beckett?) How can the same man, earlier in the same interview, defend the use of “force,” rationalizing it as an attempt “to provoke a debate.” Politics has a way of compromising and demeaning even the best among us, making us stupid and mean. Here’s Thomas at near his best, “Truly” (from Experimenting with an Amen, 1986):

“No, I was not born
to refute Hume, to write
the first poem with no
noun. My gift was

for evasion, taking
cover at the approach
of greatness, as of
ill-fame. I looked truth

in the eye, and was not
abashed at discovering
it squinted. I fasted
at import’s table, so had

an appetite for the banal,
the twelve baskets full left
over after the turning
of the little into so much.”