The novelist and short-story writer Rhys Davies (1901–78) is one of the most important and interesting Welsh writers of English prose in the twentieth century, and this biography sets his career as a writer, which spanned fifty years, in the context of his life. Davies was notoriously elusive. His Print of a Hare's Foot, the nearest thing he wrote to an autobiography, is deeply unreliable – and while this biography attempts to 'decipher the code' in which he wrote about the things that mattered to him, it also makes clear the biographical problems caused by Davies's deliberate evasions. The story of Davies’s life is remarkable enough in itself: from a childhood as Rees Vivian Davies (known to his family as 'Vivian'), a grocer's son from Clydach in the Rhondda Valley whose formal education ended when he was fourteen, he transformed himself into Rhys Davies, the London-based writer, metropolitan aesthete and dandy who used an English accent when talking to the English, who was a friend of D. H. Lawrence, and who moved in the same literary circles as Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark and Olivia Manning, but who made his name as a writer with stories set in the Rhondda community he had come from. Meic Stephens’s biography brings out the extent to which Davies devoted his life to writing: he maintained a rigorous work-schedule and wrote, ate and slept in the same small room, owning no furniture and keeping all his worldly possessions in one small trunk. It also discusses the degree to which his life and writing were deeply implicated in his sexual identity at a time when homosexuality was still illegal, and the way in which this led to an emotional detachment which allowed him to observe others without becoming closely involved with them. This is an engrossing account of the life and work of an important, enigmatic and remarkable writer.
