: Nigel Heseltine
: Daniel Hughes
: A Day's Pleasure and Other Tales
: Parthian Books
: 9781913640330
: 1
: CHF 6.40
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 256
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'A restless shape-shifter from the mysterious Welsh Marches, Heseltine was as elusive in his idiosyncratic writing as in his extraordinary globetrotting life. It is good to have his work briefly pinned down in this groundbreaking collection for closer inspection.' - Professor M.Wynn Thomas Cariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesque and the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where the local hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where the town hall burns down as the town cheers, a place haunted by grotesque revenants from the First World War. This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories, fantastic fictions which lampoon and lament the slow decline of the once-powerful squires and landowners of mid-Wales, the very Montgomeryshire of which Heseltine (1916-1995) formed a part.

Nigel Heseltine is a long-neglected member of Wales's 'Golden Generation' of English-language short story writers which included Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and Glyn Jones. His stories appeared alongside theirs in major magazines such as English Story and Penguin New Writing in the 1930s and 1940s. This volume re-prints for the first time since their initial publication the stories published in Heseltine's Tales of the Squirearchy (1946), alongside a substantial number of stories never previously collected. Ranging from the starkly surreal to the subtly moving, these tales reveal Nigel Heseltine as a singularly talented writer, the equal of his better-known contemporaries.

Introduction


Nigel Heseltine crossed the Sahara Desert on foot (three times), trod the boards of Irish theatres such as the Abbey in Dublin, fled a coup in Madagascar and was at the heart of Welsh literary circles in the 1930s. He was hated by Dylan Thomas, employed by Idi Amin, and once used the office of the then Senator John F. Kennedy. Along with a number of short stories set in a fictive rendering of the Montgomeryshire countryside in which Heseltine grew up, he published a novel, two volumes of poetry, memoirs of travels in Albania and Africa, a study of Madagascar, and texts on post-colonial development and administration. In its globe-spanning extremity, Heseltine’s life was larger than fiction.

Heseltine’s short fiction is also fascinating. This is the first time that the stories inTales of the Squirearchy (1946) have been republished and the first time that these have been published alongside Heseltine’s uncollected stories. Cariad County, the imagined, exaggerated setting of Heseltine’s short fiction, features such surreal episodes as soldiers and medieval Welsh poets returning from the dead, a countryside hunt interrupted by the camel-riding Thwaite – a recurring character, who, in another story, takes pot-shots at competing sides of a different hunt – and fictive characters coming to life before their author’s eyes. Cariad is the site of comedy and farce, tragedy and violence; it is a Wales rendered both in realist and surrealist ways. The stories both lampoon and lament the anglicised, rural Welsh gentry from which Heseltine himself hailed, the so-called ‘Squirearchy’. Heseltine’s squires inhabit a declining and disintegrating world, the gentry class clinging desperately to their estates and titles, to their codes of behaviour and ways of life. Heseltine captures all the subtleties and oddities of this world in its dying throes. Yet, today, the globe-trotting Nigel Heseltine remains virtually unknown. Who was Nigel Heseltine?

Even the circumstances of his birth are mysterious. Heseltine was the son of the composer Peter Warlock (real name Phillip Heseltine), and Heseltine’s birth certificate states he was born in Middlesex Hospital, London, on the 3 July 1916, though Warlock only officially registered his son’s birth in January of 1930.1 Initially, baby Nigel was boarded with an Irish family (the Hallidays) in Surrey, but was then retrieved, at the age of around 15 months, by his grandparents: Walter and Edith Buckley-Jones, of Cefnbryntalch Hall, near Llandyssil, Montgomeryshire. Heseltine inherited his surname from Arnold Heseltine