Book review: The Summer Flood by Goronwy Rees

Desmond Clifford     

Like most people, Goronwy Rees is familiar to me through his association with the Cambridge University spy ring – aka, Kim Philby and all that. On that basis I approached this 1932 novel, first published when Rees was just 23 years old, half determined that it should be a curiosity and a footnote to the drama of Rees’ own life.

I was wrong. There is much more to it than that and I am left pining for a life in which the undoubtedly brilliant Rees devoted himself whole-heartedly to literature rather than the metropolitan pursuits which distracted and, arguably, ruined him.

Goronwy Rees was among the most extraordinary and controversial Welsh people of the twentieth century. He was born in Aberystwyth which he described in his memoir as “a theocracy”, with possibly the highest number of chapels and churches relative to population anywhere in the world. The theocratic atmosphere was emphasised by his father’s vocation as a forbidding Calvinistic Methodist minister.

The Reverend RJ Rees got embroiled in a furious row among competing Liberal Party factions and was effectively drummed out of town, the first of two dramatic departures from Aberystwyth book-ending Goronwy’s life.

Brilliance

They settled in Roath, Cardiff and Rees attended Cardiff High. An outstanding student, he won a place at New College, Oxford where his brilliance continued uninterrupted.

Graduating with a first he became a fellow of All Souls, the first Welshman to win a prize fellowship there, knocking spots off the recipients of Britain’s most expensive private educations.

Oxford liberated Rees from the constraints of nonconformity. The gods smiled on him. He had high intelligence, good looks, wrote poetry, played rugby, had great social skills and immense charm. In the early 1930s Rees had the world at his feet and decided to write a novel.

There’s a lot going-on in “The Summer Flood”. It expresses a kind of liberation for Rees as he describes the world he had emerged from and the one he was entering. Owen Morgan, his character in the novel, was on the cusp of two worlds; the rural Cambrian coast, with its honesty and solid community, and Oxford with its social circles and sophistication. The novel opens with Owen returning home after a jaunt to Germany – a commonplace now but not in those pre-Erasmus times.

Rees chose very definitely to write in English and equally definitely to abandon Welsh, the language of home and childhood.

In deciding to be a writer, according to his daughter Jenny Rees, he wrote, “…in a sense, and without knowing it, I turned my back on Wales at that moment…”.

Cramped

Literature, he felt, was a relief “from a way of life that had begun to seem cramped and constrained, and the key to some wider world than Wales had to offer.” Emyr Humphreys knew Rees in later life and said his Welsh connections, “caused him more pain than pleasure.”

In fact, The Summer Flood, a-coming-age-novel, reminds me of Emyr Humphreys, especially A Toy Epic (or Y Tri Llais, in its Welsh version).

Rees’ comments on his Welsh background are unlikely to endear him to modern readers but were of their time. There was a strong sensibility about language choice in the period between the world wars which seems, frankly, anachronistic today.

These dilemmas are played out in The Summer Flood. Owen Morgan, returning home from Oxford University, tries to make sense of his feelings for his beautiful neighbour, Nest, based on his emotional experience of a gay crush at Oxford, an unactioned attraction to a German girl on his gap-year and a dalliance with Helen, a sexy rich English arriviste in his home patch of Portmabon.

Mingled with this nuclear fusion of hormones is Owen’s apprehension of wider changes in his life.

Like anyone who leaves for university, home becomes a foreign country. Change comes whether you like it or not. The returning Owen finds the family Sunday visit to chapel awkward and dismal. At first he is mentally dismissive of Nest, feeling he’s over her and that she represents “home”, therefore a backward-looking force in his life compared to the wider world’s offers.

However, hormones kick in and mutual jealousies bring Owen and Nest together with renewed passion. They go sailing off, literally, to the horizon.

Muted

Owen’s home community on the Cambrian coast is a muted Welsh Arcadia; civilised, solid, rooted in values, beautiful, harmonious – and just a touch boring.

An affluent English family, with a sexually forward brother and sister, represent outside influence and modernity; in language, manners, and possession of a gramophone to get the party going. This is around 1930 so there’re tea dances and lemonade. Later generations would have plied alcohol and, eventually, someone would have crashed the coke.

The theme is clear enough; the dynamics and pathos of social change, values verses progress, what’s distinctively “Welsh” and worth preserving under that moniker.

It’s a juvenile work, over-written and too conscious of the author’s cleverness. The dialogue is often stilted, studied, and too cut-and-dried; the dynamic of young lives is confusion and chaos of the mind.

We get some of this, but the action is a little too neatly laid out. Some characters are well-developed while others are ciphers; the unfortunate chapel minister is a two-dimensional stereotype (which can hardly have thrilled Rees’ father?).

Energy

Yet the book is basically well-written and over-flows with energy. The homo-erotic attraction at Oxford – Owen fancies a fellow student called Sasha – was very brave in 1932, though feels slightly under-explored and then somewhat dismissed. Rees captures very accurately the tensions present in the conflict between loyalty to home and destiny in the wider world.

This was a good quality first novel and it’s possible Rees might have become a better novelist if he had applied himself more diligently: early work can foretell promise or else show a peak. Rees wrote a couple more novels and hundreds of thousands of words of journalism, but it’s hard to resist thinking he never fully matched the early promise.

The republication of this novel is very welcome and Goronwy Rees deserves to be known for something more than the spy scandal by which he is usually defined.

That said, Mike Parker in his introduction is surprisingly definite when he refers to “the spy scandals, his role blown up out of all proportion by a hysterical press.” The evidence suggests otherwise and the press which triggered the scandal was, of course, written by Rees himself in a still inexplicable action – but all that’s a matter for another day.!

Goronwy Rees was a brilliant man with multiple talents. I wonder if that wasn’t part of the problem? He was a dilettante, easily distracted and lacking the single-minded application to one thing which is often the hallmark of the creative writer. His memoirs are remarkable and should not be underrated as literary output.

There are two volumes, A Bundle of Sensations and A Chapter of Accidents; they too would merit republishing.

The Summer Flood is published by Parthian, Library of Wales, and can be purchased here and at all good book shops.