Introduction

Writing the kind of novel in which I was interested was a long process, full of errors, and the delay meant that I became first known as a writer in other fields.

Raymond Williams, 19661

He had not wanted it to be the way he would become known as a writer. From 1946 he had spent more time and expended more energy in writing fiction than anything else. When he retired in 1983 as Professor of Drama at Cambridge University, where he had taught English since 1961 and from where his reputation as an intellectual and academic had been rooted, he was quick to say that he had always considered himself as a writer first and foremost, not an elevated member of a Professoriate he typically disliked and mistrusted. The antipathy was no one-way street. His paradoxes were readily seen as self-willed contradictions.

Here was a man who lived most of his life in England and at the core of a literary establishment but sought to subvert the latter and by-pass the former by thinking of himself as a "Welsh European". His work was inflected with Marxism and its myriad challenges, and though he consistently shied away from being pinned with the label of "Marxist", he never denied its increasing definition of his own direction. He could see no human society of worth that did not cohere to the concept of community; at the same time he welcomed social change as the catalytic agency for a common culture. Undeniably, though, in his own life he lived in a manner which, despite a natural warmth and kindliness, shunned the close company of others, whether as friends, colleagues or students. It was as if the unrelenting pace he set himself in his work needed the self-contained dynamic of a long-distance runner and so the support he needed was that of constancy, not the acclamation for a short burst of success. He said it was a long revolution and he lived it as he meant it.

How he dreamed was another matter. That life of the mind took him ever back to the Black Mountains of his birth near Abergavenny, the crucible of his life and of his fiction. With a late exasperation in 1979, he would insist that in England the holistic effort of his work was not readily appreciated and that only in Wales did he have a sense that there was an appreciation of its unity.2 With a few lone exceptions it has remained true that the fiction - six published novels - has not overtaken his work in "other fields" even for his admirers. That does not alter the significance he gave it both early and late. The tension was there even as he prepared for the belated publication of the first great novel in which he found the form to articulate his case.

He had written to his publishers, Chatto and Windus, in early April 1959 in the wake of the phenomenal reception of his 1958 book Culture and Society, to tell them of his future writing plans and notably of that volume's "natural successor", The Long Revolution, which was to have "three parts - theoretical, historical, and critical - on the development of English culture", and was "not literary criticism, or only very partly so" but rather "essays on the development of the reading public, the press, the educational system and standard speech forms [taking]. certain key ideas - class, mobility, exile -. in both literary and sociological terms, in what amounts to an attempt at a synoptic analysis of contemporary society". With the appearance of The Long Revolution in 1961 his impact on contemporary British life, over the almost three decades that remained of his life's span, was assured. Yet in the 1959 letter, this future is firmly prefaced by a past that was, for him, both adjunct and anticipatory:

To me the first and most important thing is that I have finished a novel that I have been working on for several years. I sent you some time ago a draft of part of this, but the finished work is quite different. It is now being typed, and perhaps the main thing I want to know from you is whether you really want me to submit it to you. In one way all my plans hinge around it, because, having considered the problem very carefully, I am certain that it is the next thing of mine I want to appear, to fit into the development of my writing as I see it. in a way my writing is held up until something is settled about this.3

The draft had been of Border Village, his re-working of 1957, in which the narrative moves chronologically forward from the arrival of the railway signalman, Harry Price, and his new bride, Ellen, to the village of Glynmawr where their son Matthew will be born. From here we follow their lives, through the 1926 General Strike and its fallout, to the son's departure for university as the Second World War begins. This is the linear narrative that would largely hold steady. What was being typed in 1959, however, was the complication of the story that the death of Williams' father in 1958 had impelled him to write: the return of Matthew, now a university lecturer in London, to the village and his father's sick bed. This version had been called A Common Theme and it took the autobiographical traces even further away by building the story of Matthew, and his estranged wife Susan, into a parallel account that was spelled out in such detail that it threatened to overwhelm the primary relationships with its gloss. So it was not "finished work" even yet. In November 1959 he wrote again, this time to his long-term contact at Chatto, Ian Parsons, to say how delighted he was that both Norah Smallwood and Cecil Day Lewis at the firm liked what he now referred to as Border Country: "I shall be very willing to revise. It means too much to me to have any feeling of holding back from all necessary work on it. [and]. it would be preferable. to bring the novel out first".4 The revisions removed lengthy passages of dialogue and the extended Matthew Price story.5 What was left was a family-at-a-distance of wife and children to which Matthew would return and, crucially, a new beginning to the novel, which would place Matthew amongst them, and sketch his intellectual quest as a professional historian. Only then do we plunge into the novel of generations, notably of Sons and Fathers, which Border Country had, at long last, become. The burden of that intricate novel, and of this present book, is that if Raymond Williams' meaning for us is to deepen we will need to be clear about his resolute attempt to keep his work, all of it, both as part of a "whole way of life" and integral to it. It has always been more convenient to do the opposite. But, then, that was another manifestation of the division of "Culture" in society against which he mounted his life-long struggle. He knew the irony of himself being parcelled out and packaged up.

Those "other fields" of literary criticism, cultural theory, social commentary and media analysis - all bundled together as the influential corpus of Cultural Studies for whose origins he was, alternately, as a key figure cursed and blessed - were still the fields for which he was singled out in the heavyweight obituaries that followed on his early death in 1988. Yet as soon as his work had come, from the late 1950s, to receive wider notice he had insisted that his imaginative work, and his novels most notably, were all of a piece with his intellectual intentions. He had already clearly spelled it out in the mid-1960s when his status, middle aged guru of a Cambridge don to a whimsically self-absorbed generation, was already distorting his underlying meaning:

I am mainly interested in the realist tradition in the novel, and especially in the unique combination of that change in experience and in ideas which has been both my personal history and a general history of my generation. I have been glad to be able to write about this change in critical and historical ways, for the cultural tradition I encountered in Cambridge seems to me deeply inadequate and needing challenge in its own terms. At the same time, the whole point of these general arguments was a stress on a new kind of connection between social, personal and intellectual experience (which have all been diminished by being separated), and I am still excited by the challenge of learning to express this connection in novels, difficult as this continues to be. I see this as my main work in the future.6

When he died, unexpectedly and unpreventably, of a ruptured aortic aneurism from a valvular disease of the heart in January 1988 at his home in Saffron Walden, he was only sixty six and, true to his word, was deeply engaged in writing fiction. After his death, Joy Williams collated that episodic novel of time and place and published People of the Black Mountains in two volumes in 1989 and 1990. Although his former student and Cambridge colleague, Terry Eagleton, hailed it in The Observer as "Williams' major literary achievement", and others claimed it for innovation in the style and form of the historical novel, it divided critical opinion in the manner of all his fiction. Its detailed attention to what he...