Written and ©1999 by Billie R. McNamara.   All rights reserved.

I knew of Professor Jon Manchip White and his writing as a result of my own research into Wales and the Welsh and because I am an alumnus of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where Professor White retired as the Lindsay Young Chair of English.  He has authored more than 30 books of fiction and non-fiction with major publishers, in addition to anthologies of his poetry and service as editor of several non-fiction works.  Professor White has also written movie, television, and radio scripts.  At 76, he shows no signs of slowing down.  I have often thought it would be both fascinating and a bit fearsome to spend some time inside the creative thoughts of this extraordinarily gifted and exceptionally intelligent man.

With that as my basis, I picked up a copy of The Journeying Boy because it is the first of Professor White's works with Wales as its topic.  The back cover contains this quote, from a review by Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post:

The Journeying Boy is a touching and evocative book, part autobiography, part family chronicle, part Welsh history, part travelogue.  This is as it should be, for White is clearly a man of parts: novelist, historian, biographer, teacher, traveler.  He does all of it very well indeed...He brings Wales palpably alive and arouses in the distant reader a hot yearning to visit it.

OK, those are pretty strong statements, I thought.  We'll just see if this book can live up to the writings of Jan Morris and other Welsh authors who've mesmerized me and fueled my own hiraeth for years.  To my pleasant surprise, this book did that much and more.

The Journeying Boy grew out of Professor White's first visit to his birthplace after half a lifetime of essentially trying to run away from his heritage and the memories he had invested in Wales.  Professor White writes from the perspective of a man who, at his chronological prime, embarks on a period of introspection common to most everyone who reaches that station in life.

As he rediscovers his Welsh roots, weaving legends and history among rich descriptions of Wales' people and scenery, Professor White draws readers into his idyllic native land.  Professor White describes for readers the struggles he and his family faced during several generations in Wales.  However, he does not focus on maudlin reminiscences or weigh the book down with potentially snobbish personal details.  Rather, Professor White takes readers by the hand and invites them to join him from the first tenuous moments after he arrives in Cardiff until the end of his trip when he emerges as a different man, one who has stitched together several rent pieces of his soul.

Professor White's style is extremely easy to read, and his descriptions of people and places make them literally come alive.  Enchanted by Professor White's descriptions of his train trip from London to Cardiff, then his walks around the Cathedral Road, Cardiff Castle, the City Centre, Cardiff Arms Park, and other sites, I found myself remembering those very episodes in my own visits to Wales.  The magnificent detail, coupled with an astounding ability to weave together the perfect words in his descriptions, give Professor White's prose incredible impact.  For example, he describes his kinsmen thus:  "The Welsh, in addition to being loquacious, are incurably gregarious ... [t]he Welsh appetite for personal information is unconcealed, unashamed, and bottomless" -- traits Professor White undoubtedly immediately recognized among the Celtic-descended natives of his adopted home in East Tennessee.

The book's title, taken from a segment of Thomas Hardy's poem, Midnight on the Great Western, aptly describes Professor White's physical and spiritual journey on this short, but seminal trip.  He writes,

"...I feel a sense of pride and exhilaration.  The citizens of Cardiff look so much more healthy and prosperous than they did when I was last among them...  There have been moments in the past few days when I have felt as if I were disembodied, a ghost, a wraith, drifting through the scenes and settings to which I once belonged...  There were times when I felt like a stranger, an outsider, even an intruder.  This afternoon, my sense of malaise has vanished.  It has come home to me that I have never really ceased to belong.

"I remember wishing...that I had something substantial to bequeath to Cardiff, something significant in the way of a memorial. ...  What have I got to offer?  A row of books on the shelves of the public library.  The ships of the Whites have sailed off into the night.  Yet all of those people down there, together with the middle-aged man on the castle wall and his stricken wife in Tennessee, possess a common share in the castle, the books, the departed ships.  Wales is us, and we are Wales, forever."

Regardless of how many years -- or even generations -- one is removed from Wales, for those of us who know, there is no truer statement.

To learn more about Professor Jon Manchip White and his writings, visit his biography on-line.