MEIC STEPHENS’S literary output has been prodigious and his industry in the cause of the literature of Wales — of both languages — unequalled.

From modest beginnings in working-class Trefforest, Pontypridd, which he describes with great affection, he eventually became Professor of Welsh Writing in English at Glamorgan University.

From his office he could see the house where he was born — a nicely rounded journey of an eventful career.

Of the Pontypridd grammar school for boys, he says little that is complimentary. The strictly-for-export “clever” boys were told to take French, while Welsh was fine for the lads from the surrounding uplands. French for culture, Welsh for agriculture.

Thankfully his maternal grandfather Charlie Symes was a Cockney electrician who settled in Trefforest. He loved local history and gave Stephens a copy of Idris Davies’s Collected Poems for his 17th birthday, the spark that ignited his awareness of being Welsh.

He read French and English at Aberystwyth University and spent a year in Brittany, while edging closer to the left-wing, republican fringe of Plaid Cymru.

Thus Michael Stephens became Meic Stephens and he was caught up in the activities of Cymdeithas yr Iaith (the Welsh Language Society), learnt Welsh — his third language — and among his writing and publishing activities taught French in Ebbw Vale, followed by a few years as a journalist on the Western Mail.

How someone so anti-establishment became an assistant director at the Arts Council of Wales in 1967, with responsibility for Drama and Poetry, is a mystery.

Someone accused its literature committee of being a front of the Free Wales Army and Stephens of being its commandant!

The eccentricities of the literati in Wales and beyond provide priceless anecdotes, as when the gaffe-prone arts council director Aneurin Thomas was informed that the Savile Row-suited son of the Ghanaian consul was a student at Guy’s Hospital, Thomas’s response was: “Oh, very good, so you are a medicine man.”

Among his own many excellent one-liners is a reference to his brother: “I don’t expect to see him at my funeral.”

On and off, he spent decades in search of his father’s biological parents, channelling that profound experience into some exceptionally good poetry which he wrote in Welsh.

He writes at length of his experiences as visiting professor at Brigham Young University, Utah, but has little sympathy for the Mormons.

Stephens’s book — amiable, generous, often good fun and wonderful company — is like the man himself.

He claims not to suffer fools gladly but appears pretty tolerant of them most of the time.

Review by Gwyn Griffiths