Parthian - The Withered Root by Rhys Davies.pdf - Inpress Books

The Withered Root
by Rhys Davies
Foreword written by Lewis Davies
It is early February. A blue cold sky but out of the wind the sun is warm. There is a
promise in it – of almond flowers and cypresses.
Rhys Davies knew he was living a dream when he caught the night train from Gare
d’Austerlitz to Marseille in the autumn of 1927. His first novel was a success. It had
been published, reviewed, talked about and bought. In the tight literary coterie of
London he was a young man to watch. On the slim royalties of the first and an
ambitious advance on a second from a group of Oxford graduates trying to start a
publishing company he found he had enough to live on for a winter. He had created a
currency out of his youth – the Rhondda was beginning to pay.
The Withered Root had put a young man, living with only his ideas and some
ambition on the road to a life of writing.
It is a novel of its time. The story of the last great Welsh Revival – a religious thrust
of feeling – chapels and coal mines, righteous fervour and fertile febrile carousment
which swept across South Wales in the year of the Lord 1904. The Revival was led by
a Calvinistic lay preacher Evan Roberts who in The Withered Root becomes Reuben
Daniel but both share the characteristics of being young, charismatic, Welsh-speaking
colliers.
Reuben is a man absorbed – driven – to expound the gospel, seek out the devil,
wherever or whoever that may be from the land in a pilgrimage of conversion. He is a
young man full of life and its desires but still unsure of its meaning. He progresses
from village pulpit at the head of a small band of followers called the Corinthians to
Valley’s saviour, and beyond in a few hectic months of sermons, pilgrimage and
passion.
Rhys Davies didn’t make the classic mistake of putting everything of his life into a
first novel. Reuben Daniel is a fully formed character based on the true story of the
last great revival but he is used by Davies to explore the tensions of a spiritual and
physical life in the Valleys.

Beginning in a valleys’ town, depicted as a den of iniquity in the classic mode of
Victorian moral outrage, the revival takes the lives and souls of the valley as a
battleground – pubs serving miners and chapels serving miners, with strays between
both heightening the tension – drink was a way out – temperance another passion. The
revival spread quickly reaching communities in north Wales and Liverpool but within
a year the fever had passed and its architect Reuben Daniels, wrecked by the stresses,
mentally and physically exhausted, withdraws from public and chapel life.
By the time Rhys Davies was writing The Withered Root – in the mid 1920s – he had
already escaped to a smoky London paved with stories. An escape from an education
he had grown out of. The regime of school at Porth County had held little attraction
for him. It was a long walk and a bus journey away. He usually arrived soaked from
the rain. He simply gave up on formal education at seventeen and it too seemed easily
to let go of him.
Rhys was an outsider then and he knew it. An observer of life – a mystery to his
father but indulged by his mother and sisters – loving this strange, reserved older
brother. In his memoir Print of Hare’s Foot, Rhys Davies recalls offering to visit the
corpse of a recently killed old school acquaintance who was laid out in the best front
room before burial – a popular custom in a valley always looking for diversions.
He was an astute chronicler of the Rhondda that he had left and would periodically
return to in the hard years of the Twenties when funds from his writing ran from a
trickle to a drought.
It was a world he would return to in his fiction all his life, with over forty books
published including essays, novels and short stories. He did use London and the south
of France as settings for his fiction but it was the Rhondda which continued to
fascinate him and which became the setting for much of his best work. It was a place
he had only really lived in as a boy and young man and he knew it could be a
restrictive place to someone who was at heart an outsider. He knew he could get sent
to prison for being part of what he was. To be a gay man in 1920s Rhondda was not
easy but London offered an escape. Rhys was fortunate enough to make a way out,
becoming part of the Welsh diaspora in London in the first decades of the twentieth
century. He supported himself with a string of odd menial jobs, while observing and
writing, and he found early success with a string of short stories in small magazines.
He was fortunate to meet the Soho bookseller and publisher Charles Lahr who
encouraged his work and even helped him to type the manuscript of The Withered
Root.

Rhys Davies was strongly influenced by the major writer of his time – D.H.Lawrence
– with whom he shared a mining background. They also both had mothers who had
been teachers and who had harboured intellectual aspirations for their sons. Lawrence
seeps into The Withered Root in the form of the hero, the descriptions of striving for a
life in the blood and the search for something beyond the industrial capitalist society
enveloping them.
Although searching for a fusion of the spiritual and the physical – the sex is missing
from The Withered Root – Rhys shies away from any physical descriptions, content to
talk on the margins of frustration which were perhaps his experience of being a young
man in the Rhondda. Sex of the mind.
But London gave him more freedom and by the time he had enough money to embark
on the second step of escape into the warm winter of the Cote d’Azur – the cambio
was good to English pounds – he is already anticipating further freedoms which he
chronicled in his playful memoir Print of a Hare’s Foot. A freedom of catching crabs
in the brothels of Marseille and living with a new manuscript and new lovers.
It was at Nice that a letter arrived from D. H. Lawrence, who was also wintering on
the Cote d’Azur. Lawrence had read The Withered Root and enjoyed it. He saw the
disciple in Rhys and always wanting guests to help smooth the passage of his
marriage he invited Rhys to stay with him. ‘Would you care to come here and be my
guest at this small and inexpensive hotel for a few days Bandol is on the Marseille
side of Toulon. My wife and I would both be pleased if you come.’ Rhys caught the
train.
It is raining heavily now. A news stand offers La Provence across a street running
with water. I listen to music in a bar of words and smoke while watching the street
above the Vieux port. A couple of men talk across a table, eyes flirting with each
other, blowing smoke and words into the air. Bandol is only a short train journey
east. Nice a bit further on.
Lewis Davies
"Rhys Davies's characters all walk straight out of the page and hold one with an
almost physical attraction."
— The Times