Welsh Travail

How GREEN WAS MY VALLEY--Richard Llewellyn--Macmillan ($2.75).

When Huw Morgan begins his story he is close onto 60, slag heaps have crept close against the house his youth was spent in, and he is about to leave forever his native valley in Wales. Within a page he has sunk back more than 50 years deep into glassily clear reverie, into a time when the valley and life in it were beautiful.

". . . In those days money was easily earnt and plenty of it," and the Welsh coal miners lived a powerful, lyric, godly life without regard for English speech or English law; eating excellently, working hard and steadily. The authority of God and of each family's father dwelt as organic in them as song, and song was as immediate to them "as sight is in the eye." Then paradise was lost: the iron works in the next valley shut down and flooded the collieries with cheap labor.

Huw's elder brother Davy got very busy forming a union more radical than his father would have to do with; later on a terrible five-month strike ended with many children dead, its Pyrrhic victory a minimum wage below what had been paid before. And subtly, implacably, the slag heaps enlarged upon the valley, to that day when the tipping piers were set tall above the dwellings of the miners themselves, and the grim end was plain in sight.

Meanwhile the breeding and breathing and aging and division which make up all family chronicles was in steady process--a half-dozen well-told romances. Huw himself was bright enough for the best schooling in England, but after a few years of it he quit it for mining and mining for carpentry. As times got harder in the Valley, Huw's brothers and sisters scattered to the dominions, to the U. S., to Germany. Only the broken remnants of the family stayed on. It came to its worst when Huw was in his 20s, in an addled, furious, revolutionary strike with which none of the Morgans could hold. The strikers threatened to flood the pits, Huw's father, inspecting them, was crushed to death. There, Morgan breaks off and makes an end of it.

Richard Llewellyn is one more of those writers who love their common native speech and who use it with a sensuous efficiency which, in its verbal splendor, its folksy lilt and whine, approaches literary affectation. Yet in this, his first published novel (he has destroyed five), he has developed a hypnotic ability to do precisely what he pleases. His Morgans, those they live among, the country they inhabit, every incident, every reflection Huw Morgan ventures on the whole matter, have an even radiance and euphony plus a rock-bottom tangibility. If it be only would-be great How Green Was My Valley is still uncommonly rich, able, moving.

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