zebeline
The Robert-Rhys menage was never going to be without incident, and her first diary entry, less than a month into their marriage, sets the tone:
Keidrych enjoyed is lunch; he looks very unpleasant today. Debauched, with his four-day beard, he is busy scratching behind me writing to Kilham Roberts asking if the Literary Society will grant us some money to live on …. Today Keidrych frequently found cinders or grit in his stewed apples. I told him poets must always expect pieces of chimney in their dishes, that is their fate. He laughed and said what he usually does, “You ought to be filmed.” His ears are scarlet and I hate him, he is always chewing humbugs.
[…] After divorcing Rhys in 1948, she lived in a caravan with her two children, Angharad and Prydein, first in Laugharne (where her address was “The Caravan. The Graveyard. Laugharne") […]
[T.S.] Eliot asked her to send some of her own work, and his editorship was patient, tactful, supportive and occasionally baffled, as when he responded to her variegated diction with this masterpiece of graceful understatement: “The words plimsole, cuprite, zebeline, and neumes seem to exist, but I think that bringing them all into one short poem is a mistake (letter of November 24, 1943)
P. McGuinness, "Machine-age Mabinogion", TLS, November 6 2009, pp.14-15
posted by Geist @ 2:11 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home