Rees The Summer Flood

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917140-84-3
Verlag: Library of Wales
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 191 Seiten

With a foreword by Mike Parker and an afterword by Norena Shopland. 'if he was to love and be loved he must make such open confession of love and receive the assurance of love in return' Owen Morgan, an Oxford undergraduate, returns to his family home on the rural north coast of Wales for the summer. The world has changed for Morgan. He is a man coming to terms with himself. University has offered new experiences, desires he had suspected but never acted upon have become real. It was a crime against both the law and God. He asks for forgiveness each time. A month in the decadence of Weimar Germany has shocked and enthralled him. At home, his cousin Nest waits for him; patient, loving. Matthews will be waiting for him in college; impatient, demanding.

academic, and writer. Born in Aberystwyth as the youngest son of four of Reverend Richard Rees and Apphla James, the family moved to Cardiff in 1923, where Rees gained a scholarship to New College, Oxford. As an undergraduate Rees wrote his first novel, The Summer Flood (1932), the first of ten books he would write during his lifetime. Graduating with a First and as an elected Fellow of All Souls, Rees turned to journalism, spending much of the 1930s reporting from Berlin. In these intellectual circles he met Guy Burgess, Elizabeth Bowen, and Rosamond Lehman. He married Margaret Morris in 1940. On the outbreak of World War Two, Rees was commissioned to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, until 1946 when he returned to the UK to work in the political section at MI6. By 1953, Rees left London for Aberystwyth, becoming principal of the University College of Wales, only to resign in 1957 as suspicions arose around his involvement with Guy Burgess, his friend turned Russian spy. Rees's literary achievements have often been overshadowed by his entanglements with MI6 and the Soviets, yet his work still deserves to be read as a significant Welsh voice in 20th-century literature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rees, Goronwy

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

An Evening Walk

When, in clear weather, you look South across Cardigan Bay from any high point on the arm of the Lleyn peninsula, you may see the whole mountainous coastline of Wales extended along the waters as far as St. David’s Head, at the tip of Pembrokeshire. At such times there is a perfect balance between the two elements of sea and land. But when, with the setting sun, the white strip of sand binding the feet of the hills has as ceased to be visible, that natural equilibrium disappears, and there emerges a combination of mountain and sea which satisfies a romantic taste alone. The only solid and enduring element in the view is the softly breathing half-moon of the sea, which curves towards the darkened sides of the mountains as if into the jaws of a beast whose monstrous purple teeth are vaguely apparent in the fogs and mists of the evening. It was just at that point of day when the clear and determinate beauty of the scene was surrendering to the approaching dusk that a young man walked languidly across the country, half moor and half marsh, which separates the two houses of Brynhyfryd and Penmorfa. He was of more than average stature: a little clumsy in build, and whatever interest his appearance might arouse would attach itself naturally to the large and curiously shaped head. His broad face slanted sharply to a pointed chin that gave to his chubbiness a surprisingly sensual, half faun-like expression, which was accentuated by his full lips and the fluctuating glance of his eyes. Across his forehead fell a few locks of his black curling hair.

But the interest of that youthful face did not lie in the features or in its general form. They were perhaps ill-combined and could have been described at one time or another as handsome, curious or, perhaps, merely ugly. The interest arose from that very momentariness of every expression and play of feature which could make possible such a variety of opinion. When the sun lit up the ruddy face, the dark hair and sensual mouth, he would have been thought of by any passing girl as a young man remarkable only for good looks and a pleasant expression. Such moments gave way to moods when, the mouth relaxing and even pouting a little, the curls of the hair becoming more apparent, the eyes gazing down and half covered by long lashes, the young man, under the influence of meditation or desire, threw off several years of his not very advanced age, and presented an appearance of childish and even feminine beauty. At yet other times, when certain combinations of light and shade, sun and wind, or of various courses of appetite or reflection, brought out the eccentricities of his face, he would have been noticed only to be described as plain ugly, unless it was observed (as few human beings observe in their obsession with physical charm and their distaste, and even fear, of mere intelligence unmasked by the graces) that the ugliness apparent at such times revealed and perhaps symbolised a clear, extremely logical, and even imaginative mind which went often unnoticed amid the physical charm the young man exercised.

But in spite of the youth’s attractions, whether physical or intellectual, it was clear that the contradictions he showed could only result from an inner fluctuation of mood that revealed a deep-seated, perhaps innate, perhaps merely acquired, habit of weakness and indecision. His name was Owen Morgan, and as he walked slowly along, warmed enjoyably by the late sun and the heat still thrown upward from the ground, he pondered that very tendency to weakness, a sense of moral and intellectual insecurity, either revealed or inflicted by experience, which was apparent in the fluctuations of his expression, pointing from one state of mind or feeling to another with the rapidity of a weathercock blown upon successively from every quarter of the globe.

Continuing his way, he walked on between tall ferns, resisting the frequent impulse to throw himself down among them and for a short time sleep away the conflict of antagonistic worlds and lives that engaged interminably in his mind. Soon he reached the top of the small hillock before him, from which he could see the whole extent of the country through which he was walking. Behind him lay his sister’s small house of Brynhyfryd, and the mile or so of flat marshy land he had already traversed. In front, at two miles’ distance, could be seen the tall trees hiding his aunt’s house of Penmorfa. For some time he observed the country sloping down to the marsh which separates Penmorfa from the sea. Then, with a rising excitement in his heart, he descended from the mound on which he stood, and, losing sight of the dark trees which marked the end of his journey, continued his walk across cornfields, marshes and open moorland. In his course he scrambled over innumerable fences and hedges, for there is no direct path from Brynhyfryd to Penmorfa, and to a boy or young man the pains of negotiating bogs, brambles, ditches, are not enough to make it preferable to walk the four miles along the main road which for their elders is the only means of progress. Perhaps, indeed, the exertions of his journey increased rather than diminished the pleasure which Owen took in his evening walk along the marshy fields, where he continually disturbed numberless birds, starlings, peewits and plovers, and was himself disturbed, although inwardly and half-consciously, by the silent and beautiful flight of the wild geese across the darkening sky. Owen, at twenty, was still habituated to trace a ceaseless correspondence between the passage of desire and reflection in his mind and the changing natural scene about him. The bodily and mental exertion, small though it was, demanded for the successful advance of his journey, seemed the sign of at least some positive intrusion of himself upon a world which he found indifferent to human life. But the secretly disturbing emotions that rose concurrently with the sight of the wild geese flapping towards the sea, whether the direct result of their lovely and mysterious motion, or merely the mark of a preordained harmony between the inner and the outer world, afflicted him, once more, with the uneasy consciousness of mere passivity.

It was nearly half-past nine. The gathering gloom, perceived rather in the gradual obscuring of all visual objects than in any positive darkness in the air, did not fail to depress the lights of his mind and his heart. But such depression he was able from long habit to ignore as an involuntary response to the melancholy of dusk, and the sinking of his spirits did not obstruct the process of clear reflection he somehow felt imposed by the meeting which lay before him. At Penmorfa he was to have supper with his aunt and cousins, with whom he, and his brother and sister and her husband, who were already there, were to stay for the night. They had been for a picnic on the beach, but Owen had chosen to go fishing with his uncle from the rocks some miles away, and indeed he felt that their catch of bass and the sight of the smooth, black, incredibly benevolent head of a seal suddenly appearing above the calm waters of the bay had well repaid him for missing the picnic. But the sense also that he had not been wholly free from cowardice in refusing the invitation revived in him the ever-recurrent problem of how he would be affected by meeting once again, after two years, his eighteen-year-old cousin Nest.

There are some people who, however fickle in their affections and changeable in their frequent passions, preserve a peculiar fidelity to the memory of all who have exercised, even for a moment, a power of attraction upon their minds or their bodies. In addition to the throng of mere material bodies with which they inevitably and daily come into contact, they are for ever in conversation with a more ghostly but more familiar company created from the emotions of the past. Its shadowy personages, being bound only by the imagination, are in some sense an outlet for the pressure of the creative faculty. Their lives develop as the circumstances of their birth or the whim of their creator should demand. But they have as it were a double life. While they are growing in the mind of their master, those more real, living persons of whom, or rather, of some incident in whose lives, they are the images, are at the same time pursuing their existence in obedience to the laws that govern human life. It is as if reflections carelessly cast in a mirror should not vanish when their original has walked away, but continue to live, thus severed, in accordance with the logic proper to the looking glass world. But sometimes circumstance, careless as ever of results, demands that the two lives, pursued under such different conditions, should be re-united; then, by some effort of will, some self-deception or self-torture, the unfortunate Pygmalion who has given life to the few scattered intimations of personality which is all he has gathered from friendship or even love is forced to reconcile the image he has created with that which life presents to him, warm, breathing, before his eyes.

It was from some such effort that Owen shrank in his reluctance to meet Nest again. He had learnt that his own ideas of dealing with his friends or his enemies differed strangely from those they obeyed in real life. For a short time, two years ago, he and Nest had known each other well, and for two years he and his memory of her had moved upon a course of increasing intimacy and understanding (for what life-blood had vivified her image was drawn entirely from his veins). But he knew that for them to meet again would be, in reality, not the renewal of an old friendship but the chance meeting of two strangers. She would be as different from what she had been two years ago and what she had become in his mind, as life could...