Jan Morris wrote a foreword to the 2009 edition of One Moonlit Night.
Long ago in a Fleet Street wine bar Caradog Prichard was pointed out to me as a curiosity. He was a well-respected Welsh journalist on the Daily Telegraph, I was told, but also an eminent poet in the Welsh language. He had left his traditional village in the mountains when he was no more than a boy, he had lived in London for many years, and his widowed mother, they said, had long been immured in a Welsh lunatic asylum. They certainly sounded curious circumstances, but Prichard looked ordinary enough to me, middle-aged, amiable and gregarious, and so far as I can remember I never thought of him again until years later when I read Un Nos Ola Leuad, One Moonlit Night, his esoteric masterpiece.
I happen to agree with those French theorists who used to maintain that authorship was irrelevant to a book, that a work of art stood existentially on its own, liberated from its creator and unneedful of audience. I believe One Moonlit Night should ideally be read without commentary or critical apparatus. However, more than most novels it is so impregnated with its author's profoundest experiences of real life - the curious circumstances I had first learnt about in that wine bar - that for once, I think, explanations are necessary.
Prichard's 'traditional village in the mountains', where he was born in 1904, was the substantial slate quarrying town of Bethesda in Caernarfonshire. His quarryman father was accidentally killed there when Caradog was five months old, leaving his mother to raise him and two elder brothers in conditions of harsh poverty. Physically Bethesda is much the same today, and it is easy enough to follow the novel's winding trails through the grey streets and up the mountain flanks. Metaphysically it is very different, for the quarries are dead, the church and chapel life of the people is mostly moribund, many more English settlers have arrived and the sense of homogenous community which gives ironic power to One Moonlit Night is fast becoming nostalgic memory.
Prichard did indeed leave Bethesda when he was an adolescent, first to work as a journalist on local papers, later to go to London where he became a pillar of the London Welsh community and remained a faithful (and highly successful) competitor in national eisteddfods in Wales. And since the early 1920s his mother really had been a patient in a mental hospital at Denbigh, dying there in 1954.
Throw in two years of army and government service during and after the Second World War, and there you have a lifetime of embittering sadness, enough to make a neurotic misanthrope of a saint. Despite his kindly and gregarious character, despite a happy marriage and success both as a journalist and as a poet, Prichard was tragically scarred within. He became obsessed by the notion of suicide, and once tried to kill himself; he was tormented by the thought of his poor mad mother struggling to keep her family clothed and fed; and he was undoubtedly afflicted, like so many Welsh people who have chosen to live in exile, by pangs of homesickness and perhaps of guilt.
Yet the miracle is that One Moonlit Night is, to my mind, essentially a sweet-natured book, seldom bitter, often funny, and in the end ambiguously serene. It was first published in 1961. That was a time when established literary sensibilities in Wales had been knocked askew by the debunking of old assumptions - Prichard's near-contemporary Caradog Evans was said to be the most hated man in Wales because of the rural hypocrisies and corruptions he exposed in his stories. It is notable that although One Moonlit Night records suicides, sexual perversions, insanity, adulteries and murder in that village in the mountains, the book was an instant success among Welsh readers of all kinds. It was essentially a kind book, and perhaps that was why.
In my view One Moonlit Night is beyond rational analysis. It is a sort of dream. Prichard himself described it as 'an unreal picture, seen in the twilight and in the light of the moon', and it is illuminated throughout by a light which, like moonlight itself, seems disorienting, casting too many shadows, throwing too many structures into sudden relief. De Chirico might have illustrated it, with figures by the elder Bruegel.
On the face of it the one logical thread of the book is provided by its narrative structure, outlined in the opening chapter. It tells the story of one day and a night, and it is told by a single, unnamed voice. But it turns out to be far from simple, because although the voice is that of a boy, sometimes it evidently speaks with the experience of a grown man, and three times in the course of the book it is superseded by mysteriously vatic pronouncements of no explicable origin, as though some deus ex machina has intervened.
These eerie interruptions, couched in loftily poetical language, are all the more unsettling because at all other times the narrative voice is touchingly naïve. It expresses itself throughout not merely in a broad north Walian vernacular, the lingua franca of the Bethesda quarry country, but also in the vocabulary and intonation of a small boy. He is a particularly engaging boy, too, innocently ready for fun and harmless mischief but precociously tender in his sympathies. He is grateful for small kindnesses. He is devoted - perhaps over-devoted - to his widowed mother. There is something wistful about him, one feels, which sets him apart from his fellows, and gives to those Olympian interjections a fateful suggestion of premonition.
And it presently becomes clear that the premonition is of madness. The very first paragraph of the book suggests it, indeed, with its incongruous touch of the liturgical, its lack of punctuation and something strange about its tone of voice:
I'll go and ask Huw's Mam if he can come out to play. Can Huw come out to play, O Queen of the Black Lake? No, he can't, he's in bed and that's where you should be, you little monkey, instead of going round causing a riot at this time of night. Where were you two yesterday making mischief and driving village folk out of their minds?
Where the two were yesterday is to be the ostensible plot of the book, but the Black Lake and the village folk out of their minds will remain with us to its last pages. In the first thirty-five pages of One Moonlit Night we come across a sadistic schoolmaster, a half-wit flasher in a street, an epileptic having a fit, a man with a knife at his wife's throat, a corpse brought home from a lunatic asylum, a woman committed to a lunatic asylum, an eviction, rumours of sexual deviation, a woman locked in a coal shed, violent fisticuffs outside The Blue Bell, a couple fornicating in a wood, a horse dropping dead in its stable and somebody hanging himself in the lavatory. All this we witness through the sensibility of a small boy, more puzzled than aghast at what he sees, and when on page thirty-five he goes to bed on a bright moonlit night, tucked up with his Mam for comfort, God knows what we can expect in the morning.
There's a full moon tonight. Why won't you let Huw come out to play, O Queen of the Black Lake?
As the boy wanders the town that day he remembers events of his life; but as he wanders he grows older too, and although he still speaks as a child he seems to see as an adult. Sometimes he is one age, sometimes another, and it is both as boy and as man that he recalls the tragic circumstances of his childhood - the deaths of his two best friends, the loss of his mother when she is taken away to mental hospital, the grotesqueries of village life, the poverty and the presence somewhere of that ominous Black Lake. Death and madness are themes of the book, and as we peer through the moonlight we gradually realise that we are witnessing a slow descent into insanity. How much is real in the narrative, and how much is hallucinatory, we never discover. When we set foot on the banks of the Black Lake at last, we know we are in the company of a murderer, but how old he is, whether he is free or incarcerated, whether is mad or sane, just about to enter an abyss or recently escaped from one - all these questions are left so mistily unresolved that we wonder whether the author himself, in his unnamed persona as the Bethesda boy, or as that ordinary-looking Fleet Street character of the wine bar, ever knew the answers.
And yet . . . I speak only for myself, of course, but I have come back to One Moonlit Night time and again not for the tragedy of it, or even the haunting strangeness, but for the sweet pity of it all.
Jan Morris CBE is a British historian, author and travel writer. Her novel, Hav, was shortlisted in 2007 for the Arthur C. Clarke award.
