DIANA TRILLING
21
students. One evening, he tells us, he was invited to play bridge by some
neighbors in his hall. "Very early in the evening," he writes, "I realized
that they had so much in common in the way of social background,
education, mutual friends and shared experiences that they were able to
talk in a kind of conversational shorthand in which a large part of their
meaning was unspoken and suppressed.. . . Later, I learned to recognize
this .. . as a rather topsy-turvy kind of politeness, which assumes that
whatever is known to themselves is known equally to all and has no
need of explanation."
How much the disapprobation which later in life would be directed
to Rees because of the Aberystwyth incident was due to the fact that he
was an outsider, not native to the privileges he acquired through his
Oxford education, is difficult for an American to determine with cer–
tainty.
It
may be that Americans are abnormally sensitive to the class
structure of British society, but I suspect that his treatment would have
been measurably less harsh had Goronwy been writing from within rather
than from outside the magic circle of authenticated birth. To this day, I
note a discomforting social awareness in virtually any public mention of
him. As late as 1994, the British reviewer ofJenny Rees's biography of
her father in the
Times Literary Supplement
found it important to record
that Rees was "the first state-educated Welshman to be elected to All
Souls."
Goronwy's mother died just as he was graduating from Oxford; her
loss considerably reduced the pleasure he would otherwise have taken in
his First. He writes about her with much affection in
A Chapter oj
Accidents,
fondly recalling her domestic dutifulness and her missionary de–
votion to her community. Somewhat more moderately, he also reports
his love and respect for his theologian father. Oxford had been the elder
Rees's university, too, but no one could have made less claim to the
place or been less claimed by it - so far as Goronwy's father can be said
to have been shaped by Oxford, he might have taken his degree by
correspondence . Back in Wales, he became one of its outstanding
churchmen, a passionate preacher, first in Aberystwyth, then in Cardiff,
greatly concerned with the working lives of the Welsh miners. From his
father Goronwy had his early training in the progressive politics which
he took with him to Oxford and which, through most of the Thirties,
announced itself in his commitment to Marxism.
At Oxford, surrounded as he was by the privileged youth of
England, Goronwy never ceased to yearn for the simplicity and warmth
of his boyhood home, the quiet evenings in his Cardiff parlor, alone
with his parents at their books. Inevitably, he took with him into
