Library of Wales: The Heyday in the Blood

Geraint Goodwin was born in Wales in 1903. He started writing at an early age, his first success being at a local eisteddfod. As a young man he made his living as a journalist in London, where he wrote his first book Conversations with George Moore, and followed it with Call by Yesterday. It was not, however, until he reached the age of thirty-two that he published his first work of fiction. The Heyday in the Blood made a considerable impression on the critics, and its author was hailed as a second Thomas Hardy. Three more books, The White Farm, a collection of short stories Watch for the Morning and Come Michaelmas followed, the last of which was written during an increasing struggle against ill-health. His untimely death in 1941 brought to an end a brilliant literary career which had barely time to begin. He was married and had two children, a girl and a boy.

I’m always thrilled to receive a book in the Library of Wales series for review, but to receive one with an introduction by Katie Gramich is a double delight. Gramich provides a concise, considered and informative introduction that genuinely whets your appetite for the work of ‘this fascinating and unjustly neglected writer’, and the novel more than lives up to the expectations she raises. Set in the border village of Tanygraig in the early 1930s, The Heyday in the Blood tells the tale of sixteen-year-old Beti and the choice she has to make between the two young men vying for her affections: her ambitious, wayward cousin, Llew, and the gentle poet-cum-miller, Evan, each of whom holds a powerful appeal to different aspects of her nature. Goodwin’s ability to convey tension and raw emotion both within an individual and between two people is Lawrentian. There are scenes whose sensuousness sends shivers down the spine, yet whose animal ferocity is perfectly balanced by Goodwin’s skill in conveying an atmosphere that embraces warmth and humour.The young people’s story is set firmly within a community whose beautifully conjured array of personalities and sharply portrayed social and political divisions will remain instantly recognisable to anyone living in a similar community today. And it is this, perhaps, that gives the novel its contemporary pertinence and some of its enduring poignancy and power. Goodwin was writing about a dying way of life, about a Wales that was being engulfed by waves of incomers and the onward surge of ‘progress’: ‘the old way of things was ending; she had come at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Wales would be the last to go – but it was going.’ The same might be said seventy years later, yet Wales and the old ways are still very much alive.