Caradoc Evans

"A farrago of filth and debased verbal coinage": this was Welsh reaction to a burst of short stories from an obscure Fleet Street journalist during World War 1. In what will be the definitive biography, John Harris investigates the background to these stories and how they made Caradoc Evans the most reviled of Welsh authors. His rural community is explored, and the family circumstances that forced him into drapery at just fourteen. H detested the work and in London made his escape into journalism. He thrived in Fleet Street, becoming by the mid-1920s an influential literary editor. An earlier editorship had revealed his genial way with readers and his trenchant views on issues like the conduct of the war, workers' rights and the status of women. He relished a fight; he needed opponents. Simultaneously Evans established himself as a master of short fiction, wrote "a play of Welsh village life" (it caused a riot), and in 1930 placed a first novel with Faber. But his personal life was in shreds. A married man, about to lose his job and drinking heavily, he had met a woman who would change his life, the exotic Marguerite Barclay, a writer of popular romance under the pen names "Countess Barcynska" and "Oliver Sandys". Together they left for Gloucestershire: Aberystwyth followed-where Marguerite's passion for theatre took root-then London again and Broadstairs before the war brought them back to Wales. A war that "broke his health & his brain", so Marguerite believed, and whose and her husband would not see. Their tempestuous marriage is described in some detail, one strand in a compelling narrative of Evans as writer and journalist, public polemicist and private man. Extensively researched and brilliantly written, Caradoc Evans: The Devil in Eden is a revelatory and necessary insight into a paradoxical character, his country and his times. Book jacket.