12-22-08, 9:24 am
Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Tale by Dai Smith Cardigan, UK, Parthian, 2008
Original source: Morning Star
What do you, the reader, want from a biography? A meticulously assembled heap of information, a clear chronology, a summary of a life – or is it the ideas that are paramount? Or maybe you're looking for a gripping narrative rather than a drier, reflective viewpoint.
Raymond Williams himself said: 'Biographies always lie, because they impose a clear pattern of development, whereas, in fact, to any man who watches himself, development goes this way and that, back and forward, almost every day. The biography of one hour of a man's life might have some point – it is always the sweeping line that betrays us.'
I certainly want to be enthused about the person depicted. I want it to be about someone I would like to know personally, whose life is a reflection of the times that they have lived through. I want them to be brought alive and to be persuaded that this particular person deserves to be remembered by history.
With that said, I find it difficult to be enthusiastic about Dai Smith's new biography of Williams. There is no doubt that Smith's subject is a fascinating character and his ideas are perhaps even more so. He was a man of the left who left his stamp on the post-war literary world as an ardent socialist and critic in the Marxist tradition. He viewed literature as a product of society and sought to tease out the dialectics between them.
Despite his academic status, he never allowed himself to become divorced from working class struggles and ideological debates on the left. He was an active participant in New Left Review and supported the big miners' strikes.
He was born the son of a railwayman from the small village of Pandy in South Wales and made local history by winning a scholarship to Cambridge, going on to become one of Britain's leading literary critics.
He was also a novelist, seeking inspiration and material in his own Welsh working class roots, giving these works a strong autobiographical character.
The problem with Smith's biography is that he packs too much in and the developmental pattern gets lost.
Do we really need pages of shopping-list-like descriptive details of Abergavenny, where Williams only went to secondary school, or an account of its history going back to Roman times? Williams tends to get lost in the mountain of material that Smith has accumulated. And, in 500 pages, he only takes us up to 1961 and Williams was productive until he died in 1988, so we can expect another volume at least.
