Emyr Humphreys

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Diane Green. Emyr Humphreys

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Emyr Humphreys

Writing Wales in English

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The immediate post-war period is important in his work. Open Secrets (1989) closes with the end of the war and the death of Nanw. Unconditional Surrender (1996) is set in the same period. The action of Outside the House of Baal (1965) in the past as opposed to the present leads up to that point. The influence of his father-in-law’s Nonconformity and his own turning to that denomination is also evident in many novels.36 In all the novels set in Wales religion is an important issue: the male narrator of Unconditional Surrender and Michael’s father in A Toy Epic are clergymen; Idris Powell in A Man’s Estate, J.T. in Outside the House of Baal and, amongst others, the evangelical Tasker Thomas in ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence (hitherto referred to as the sequence) are ministers. Education and the role of the teacher is also important. Geraint is teaching in the first novel, the protagonist of A Change of Heart (1951) is a university lecturer and that of Hear and Forgive another teacher. The latter novel, published in 1952, is centred more than any other on school teaching, which Humphreys himself did from 1947 at Wimbledon Technical College and then from 1951 at Pwllheli Grammar School. David Flint, the first-person narrator, is particularly like the author in that he is a novelist, is supporting himself by teaching and was a conscientious objector during the recent war, doing war work in the Fens, in London and abroad.37 On the other hand, Flint is a married man, who is having an affair. He married in haste in 1939 (having just graduated – exactly like Humphreys). In a reversal of Humphreys’s own methods, Flint is writing a historical novel, in which he uses as a pattern people he knows. Humphreys places Flint’s family in Shropshire (although the name makes connection with Humphreys’s Flintshire), makes his father a shopkeeper, his mother dead, the family Congregational chapel. He thus mixes his own experience with invented details, or details based on an unknown source. Perhaps some of Flint’s crises of conscience are Humphreys’s own, but the protagonist in this novel is a good example of Humphreys’s development since writing the early version of A Toy Epic and the chapters on the student Michael. Michael is much closer to the author’s personal experience. By Hear and Forgive Humphreys has learnt to mix his own experience with extraneous details. In the future teachers/lecturers will be even further distanced from the author.38 What is clear, however, is that Humphreys is able to create scenes in his novels in which these characters are at work, something he is loath to do in the case of a character, such as John Cilydd (a solicitor), in whose career the author has little experience. In this sense Humphreys’s personal experience dictates to some extent possible areas of content in the novels.

In 1955 having published five novels, the latest being A Man’s Estate (1955),39 his most extensive exploration so far of the polar differences between rural Wales and the British Establishment, Humphreys finished teaching and joined the BBC as a drama producer, working first in radio and later in television. Humphreys enjoyed London and felt that his period there was the most conventionally successful of his career.40 It was because of his young family and the belief that they should be brought up in Wales in a certain way that he made the move from London to north Wales in 1951, and yet this has indubitably had a great effect on his output as a novelist. The Welsh as a people and Wales as a nation rather than as a place have become a dominant factor in his work. Humphreys has summarized this early stage of his career as follows:

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