Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems

Everyone who knew my mother, Lynette Roberts, remembers the same qualities in her:
she was warm, loving, positive, incredibly generous,
open-minded
and unconventional, and had a great sense of fun and mischief. They remember her
curiosity and powers of observation, her love of dancing, her energy and zest for
life.

Because she was in and out of mental hospitals for the last twenty-five years of her
life and lost touch with many friends, it was good for me to hear their stories. For
example, the painter and writer Celia Buckmaster, who had been one of her bridesmaids,
and helped Lynette with her flower arranging business, told me how one day Lynette
decided they needed a holiday. Lynette looked through the atlas and was attracted
to Madeira. On research it turned out Madeira was the only place where the Bristle
Footed Worm remained – that, of course, intrigued her so off they went, travelling
cargo. Lynette found a small house high up the hill and a woman called Angelina to
work for them. It was during those long days of freedom that Lynette found her vocation
as a poet. She sent a telegram to London announcing ‘Have found my voice at last’.

The painter Sheila Healey knew Lynette in Buenos Aires and London. ‘Lynette was very
warm and kind,’ she told me. ‘She befriended people and gave them courage. Her flat
in Charlotte Street was completely original – she did amazing things with colour.
She opened the door to colour to me when we looked at Indian miniatures in the V&A.
I also think of her as very enthusiastic. When she was interested in something she
studied it intensely.’

Lynette always longed for a simple home, with a fire and a table – a place to look
after friends in need – but much of her life was unsettled and nomadic, in rented
rooms and a caravan. When she left my father, our address became The Caravan, The
Graveyard, Laugharne. Later in Bells Wood, Hertfordshire, we spent a whole summer
catching butterflies and dragonflies, draping muslin round the caravan to keep them
captive so we could draw them. The caravan’s final resting place was Chislehurst Caves,
where Lynette tried to set up an underground art gallery. While we were there she
bought me and my brother Prydein an old gypsy caravan which we painted red and yellow.

Eventually her lovely sister Win bought us a house. Here Lynette grew old-fashioned
roses and pinks, checking which had the best scent and finding out their history –
reference books were always covered with her notes and sketches. She made spaghetti
and hung it on the clothes airer to dry. Our red wine glasses had been bought with
her Derby winnings: at
33-1 the odds weren’t good but she loved the name Never Say Die – a motto she always
quoted. She was almost always broke, owing money all round: one morning a cheque arrived
and that evening we were on the boat train to Paris.

While she was dying, in rural Wales, she kept reverting to Spanish – though not her
first language it was the language of her childhood. At one point we needed a dictionary
to understand her. Then we read her poems and she was happy. She’d have been delighted
to see her work published again, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. She always
knew her own worth.

Angharad Rhys
2005

The Argentine-born Welsh writer Lynette Roberts published two books of poems as dramatic,
varied, dense, elliptical and inset with verbal novelty as any experimental poetry
in the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, her friend and editor at Faber, praised her
work, complimenting it by that most Eliotic of criteria: that it communicated before
it made sense. Roberts Graves, who drew on her expertise as he researched for
The White Goddess
, wrote: ‘Lynette Roberts is one of the few true poets now writing. Her best is the
best.’ Dylan Thomas was best man at her wedding, Wyndham Lewis drew her portrait,
and she was for a while on the peripheries of bohemian London. Her first collection,
Poems
, appeared in 1944, when she was
thirty-five
. The second,
Gods with Stainless Ears
, subtitled ‘A Heroic Poem’, came out in 1951. By her mid-forties she had stopped
writing, had a severe mental breakdown, and become a Jehovah’s Witness. She took no
further interest in her work or literary reputation. By the time of her death, aged
eighty-six
in 1995, only a few people had heard of her. Her poetry, out of print for nearly
half a century, was unknown beyond a small circle of poets and critics resourceful
or privileged enough to lay hold of first and only editions of her books.
1
Her prose, including a war diary, an autobiography and uncollected or unpublished
articles and memoirs, was forgotten.

The opening of
Poems
, ‘Poem from Llanybri’, is a welcome-poem to soldier and fellow-poet Alun Lewis:

A portal to the book, it imagines the poetic encounter as a hospitality extended and
a hospitality repaid. This is poetry as dialogue, poetry as rooted tradition: a celebration
of community, both in the village, here described for its uniqueness, and within the
circle of poets. It takes pleasure 
in the Welsh words and phrases – ‘cawl’, ‘savori fach’ and place names such as ‘Cwmcelyn’
– but also in the Welsh speech-patterns that make their way into English:
if you come my way that is
…. ‘Poem from Llanybri’ celebrates poetry both as living language and as heightened,
ceremonial language. It is fresh, direct, seemingly artless in its tone; but even
as it is powered by future verbs, it is reaching back, to the ‘old ways’, the old
customs. It asserts continuity of tradition, speech and community: ‘Can you come?
– send an ode or elegy/ In the old way and raise our heritage’.
2
That small word, ‘our’, is revealing too: Roberts was born in Argentina, educated
at art school in London, and had been in Wales, married to a Welshman, less than two
years. Though her parents’ families, Australian for generations, had
originally
come from Wales, she was Welsh by a combination of choice and imaginative will. ‘Poem
from Llanybri’ is a cosmopolitan’s claim to a rooted culture that is also a culture
of rootedness.

The originality and compressed variety of
Poems
emerges when we compare ‘Poem from Llanybri’ with the last poem in the book, ‘Cwmcelyn’.
It opens with an extract in Welsh, from the Book of Revelation, in Bishop Morgan’s
1588 Welsh Bible. The English comes in the notes at the back of Poems, which are grandly
titled ‘Notes on Legend and Form’. By the time of
Gods with Stainless Ears
, the notes will occupy fourteen pages of
translations
and explanatory, scholarly and polemical elucidations (directly useful, as well as
providing an intertextual forcefield beyond the poem). There then follows this, which
surely reads as freshly and surprisingly now as when the 1944 reader first laid eyes
on it:

When it appeared seven years later as the last section of
Gods with Stainless Ears
(and the 1951 reader will have been a very different kind of reader), ‘Cwmcelyn’
is the culmination of a narrative at once mythic and futuristic, a poem as different
from ‘Poem from Llanybri’ as could be written by the same author. The contrast – between
a poem that goes out to meet its reader and invites them into a recognisable, though
gently idealised landscape and community, and ‘Cwmcelyn’, an apparently high modernist
barrage of linguistic special effects, exotic referentiality and futuristic drama
– is between the ‘modernist’ and the ‘traditional’, the ‘elitist’ and the ‘
democratic
’, the ‘obscure’ and the ‘accessible’. With Lynette Roberts, the two can be found
between the covers of one slim first collection.

Lynette Roberts was born on 4 July 1909 in Buenos Aires. Her father, Cecil Arthur
Roberts, came from Welsh-descended family, originally from Ruthin, north-east Wales.
Cecil had gone to Argentina from Australia, where his family had lived since 1840,
after training as a railway engineer. He became head of Western Railways in Argentina
(one of Lynette Roberts’s poems, ‘Argentine Railways’ is about his work), and a prominent
member of the expatriate community. The family lived comfortably, owning yachts and
racehorses, though Dylan Thomas’s initial belief that Lynette had ‘rich Welsh parents
in South America (oil-diving or
train-wrecking
)’
3
, was inaccurate. By the time she settled in Britain, Roberts was far from wealthy
– she was no Nancy Cunard or Edith Sitwell, and her poetry bears little comparison
with that parallel tradition we could call ‘heiress modernism’. Lynette’s mother,
Ruby Garbutt, was also of Welsh origin – her family had come from Pembrokeshire. Lynette
had two sisters, Winifred and Rosemary, and a brother, Dymock. Dymock was sent to
school at Winchester, but after a mental breakdown was in a mental
institution
in Salisbury from the age of sixteen. In
Gods with Stainless Ears
the poem’s speaker poignantly remembers ‘my brother./ His Cathedral mind in Bedlam’.

Lynette Roberts first came to London with her parents during the First World War,
in which her father fought and was wounded, before returning to Argentina, where she
and her sisters attended convent school. On 3 July 1923, the day before Lynette’s
fourteenth birthday, her mother died of typhoid. In an unpublished talk on her South
American poems, Lynette wrote that her mother had become fatally ill after drinking
water from a contaminated well. Soon after this, the girls were sent to Bournemouth
for their schooling. Cecil Roberts later remarried his childhood sweetheart Nora Sloan,
who left her husband in Scotland and obtained a divorce in Uruguay to be free to marry
him. In the 1930s, Lynette moved to London to study at the Central School of Arts
and Crafts. During this period she roomed in Museum Street and Newman Street, in Fitzrovia.
With her friend Celia Buckmaster, she travelled to Madeira; later, soon before the
outbreak of war, she travelled to Hungary and Germany with another friend from Argentina,
Kathleen Bellamy, who wrote reports for the Argentine newspaper
La Nacion
which Lynette illustrated. Roberts trained to be a florist with Constance Spry, and
set up a flower arranging business called Bruska. She was for a while engaged to Merlin
Minshall, intelligence officer, amateur racing driver and the man often claimed to
have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond (Minshall worked for Fleming,
and published his autobiography,
Guilt-Edged
, in 1977). Roberts broke off
the engagement when she met her future husband, the Welsh writer and editor, Keidrych
Rhys, whom she encountered at a
Poetry London
event in London in 1939 organised by Tambimuttu, the magazine’s influential editor.
Rhys, Lynette recalled in her autobiography, ‘was charming and spoke like a prince’.
Dylan Thomas remembered Lynette as ‘A curious girl, a poet, as they say, in her own
right […] with all the symptoms of
hysteria
’.
4
Alun Lewis was less snide: writing to his parents he described ‘a queer girl, very
gifted, [who] wears a red cloak and is unaccountable.’
5
Rhys was the flamboyant and resourceful editor of
Wales
, a journal of poetry and
criticism
that led a hand-to-mouth existence belied by the stature of its contributors and
the energy of its promotion. He published a book of poems,
The Van Pool and Other Poems
, in 1942, and edited
Poems from the Forces
in 1941;
More Poems from the Forces
came two years later, followed by
Modern Welsh Poetry
(Faber,1944).
Modern Welsh Poetry
is a landmark in Welsh writing in English, containing work by Dylan Thomas, Vernon
Watkins, Emyr Humphries, David Jones, Idris Davies, R.S. Thomas and others. Rhys also
founded the short-lived Druid Press, which published R.S. Thomas’s first book,
The Stones of the Field
in 1946. Born to a
Welsh-speaking
farming family near Llangadog in Carmarthenshire in 1913, and christened William
Ronald Rees Jones, he had legally adopted the name ‘Keidrych’ in 1940, calling himself
after a stream that ran near his home. In one of his poems, the grandly titled ‘The
Prodigal Speaks’, Rhys
dramatised
himself as follows:

Lynette may have had this poem in mind when, in Part V of
Gods with Stainless Ears
, she evoked the soldier-hero, based on an idealised Keidrych, as ‘He, of Bethlehem
treading a campaign/ Of clouds, the fleecy cade purring at his side’ (the word ‘cade’
meaning the holy Lamb).

The couple married in Llansteffan (the English version of the name is Llanstephan),
a village on the Tywi estuary, on 4 October 1939. Keidrych’s parents disapproved of
the marriage, and made no secret of it. Dylan Thomas, his best man, mischievously
described the wedding to Vernon Watkins as ‘distinguished mostly by the beauty of
the female attendants, the brown suit of the best man [Thomas had borrowed it from
Watkins],
the savage displeasure of Keidrych’s mother, & Keidrych’s own extremely hangdog look
& red-rimmed eyes’.
7
Lynette’s bridesmaids were Kathleen Bellamy and Celia Buckmaster. Keidrych and Lynette
rented a cottage in the village of Llanybri, a few miles from Llansteffan, where they
lived, with frequent visits to London, throughout the war. After a miscarriage in
March 1940, Lynette gave birth to two children: Angharad, in May 1945 and Prydein,
in November 1946. In July 1940, Keidrych was called up to work on coastal defences,
and his tours of duty included postings to the Orkneys, Yarmouth and Dover.

It was in Llanybri that Lynette Roberts produced her most original and characteristic
work: as well as her two books of poetry, she wrote a novel called
Nesta
which was never published and must now be considered lost. We know from her letters
to Graves that the book was set in medieval Wales (Roberts referred to it in her bibliography
as ‘A Historical Novel on Welsh Medieval History’) and that it was ‘modernistic’ in
punctuation and
narrative
treatment. Graves called it a ‘work of genius in its wild way’, but disapproved of
its disregard for historical accuracy, its experimentalism, and its anachronisms.
Nesta, or Nêst in Welsh, was the grandmother of Gerald of Wales and daughter of Rhys
ap Tewdr, the last independent prince of South Wales. Known as the ‘Helen of Wales’,
she had many lovers, and several children from different fathers, including Henry
I of England. In 1108 she was kidnapped by Owain ap Cadwgan of Cardigan, and the incident
started a war.
8
Judging from Graves’s letters, he found Roberts’s notion of a ‘historical novel’
very different from his own: ‘Lynette is always breaking in with “hoodoo”, “frou-frou”,
“aluminium”, “Knossos”, S. America, modern painters & so on’, he complained. Eliot,
who considered the book for Faber, described it as ‘a quite extraordinary affair’
in a letter of 11 April 1945. Roberts also published, in 1944 with Keidrych’s Druid
Press, a pamphlet called
Village Dialect
, containing stories and an article on country dialect, in which she ranges over a
variety of material (from Elizabethan English to Pierre Loti’s
Pêcheur d’Islande
via Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
), and claims to have ‘arrived at the essence of all languages of the soil’.
9

Throughout her time in Llanybri, Roberts kept a diary – quirky,
observant
, funny, but always deeply engaged in the culture of the place and its people. Characteristic
of her attitude is optimism and toughness of mind, and though she has a complicated
person’s tendency to idealise the simple life, she is free of the kind of pseudo-Celtic
sentimentality to which she, an outsider, might easily have succumbed. After a visit
by Ernest Rhys she complains of his obsession with the Celtic twilight: ‘He was still
caught up in its aura when he met us, and, frankly, this nauseated me.’ Elsewhere
she writes of her belief in traditional crafts, before specifying: ‘I do not mean
the retention of arty crafty work of the past, but rather the modern craft that is
contemporary and is required for practical use in our time.’ She describes air raids,
the arrival of evacuees, the daily grind of village life and its sustaining friendships;
but also uses the diary to keep track of her eclectic researches: on butterflies,
cattle, wild flowers and birds; on coracles, architecture, gravestone lettering and
Renaissance painters. Several of these researches culminated in essays and articles:
on Renaissance painters for
Life and Letters To-Day
or on coracles and Welsh architecture for
The Field
. Whether commenting on culture and politics (‘the word
tradition
is really a substitute for fear’) or sketching her neighbours (‘Mrs Treharne […]
lay or sat in her four-poster bed like a pickled Elizabethan’), the diary is not just
a pleasure to read but an invaluable document on life on the ‘home front’. It is often
poignant too, about the loneliness and quiet extremity of her existence: