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The Emergence of Humphreys as a Postcolonial Writer

For all serious purposes in modern literature … the language of a Welshman is and must be English; … the moment he has anything of real importance to say, anything the world will the least care to hear, he must speak English.¹

This chapter is concerned with Humphreys’s early fiction: the first six novels published between 1946 and 1957 and particularly the seventh, A Toy Epic, which was finally published in 1958. The main postcolonial strategies that Humphreys has used throughout his career emerged and were refined during this period: the use of Wales as the location of the plot, the use of Welsh history and myth, the discussion of the variety of Welsh life. The focus of the discussion will be on the ways in which these techniques evolved and the reasons behind their use – the extent to which those reasons are due to personal, postcolonial or literary considerations.²

Humphreys’s first six novels are all prefigured by or patterned on existing text/s from the realms of history, literature and mythology. The first two novels are heavily dependent on such sources, the second two much less so, with the third pair more heavily prefigured again. One possible reason for this may be these novels’ relationship to the publication of A Toy Epic, which was first mooted for publication in 1943 and finally appeared in 1958, by which time the first six novels had appeared. The Gift then followed A Toy Epic’s success, and that novel is possibly the least prefigured or patterned by other texts. If the author was encouraged to create a wholly original plot by the reception given to A Toy Epic in 1958,³ it is equally possible that the rejection of his first attempt at a novel caused or contributed to an early insecurity about his own ability to plot a novel without the help of structural patterning from other texts.

As M. Wynn Thomas recounts in the ‘Introduction’ to A Toy Epic, Humphreys began writing the work in the form of a verse novel in 1940. His contact with Graham Greene as the literary editor of the Spectator, which had already published some of Humphreys’s poetry, encouraged him to send his manuscript to Greene at Eyre and Spottiswoode. The ‘Introduction’ details the early progress of this work and the reception it received from critical advisers, including T. S. Eliot and Kate Roberts as well as Greene himself. The consensus was that the work was structurally faulty. Humphreys would appear to have accepted this at that time and begun work on The Little Kingdom instead. It is possible that Greene’s comments on the second half of the work (the part which would have formed the continuation of the present novel), Eliot’s criticism of the work’s ‘architectural design’ and Kate Roberts’s argument that the plot followed an unbalanced or asymmetrical pattern together convinced Humphreys that his weakness as a writer was in the construction of plot. Aristotle, of course, saw plot as absolutely essential to the construction of tragedy and Humphreys, who has many times mentioned Aristotle when discussing fiction, may have chosen to use Shakespearean and mythological prefigurations in order to underpin his story and bolster his confidence. Alternatively, he may have been drawn to use these plots by his interest in Shakespearean and classical tragedy. His interest in this drama would certainly have made him aware that great writers have in the past used already existing material, even if this was not used in the prefigurative but rather in the retelling sense. Certainly, in an interview with M. Wynn Thomas he described plotting a novel as something he found difficult in his early career.⁴

THE FIRST FOUR NOVELS

We have seen that Humphreys had cause to doubt his own ability in the construction of plot. Certainly, in his first six novels he uses various texts both to form a plotline and to create prefigurative suspense and suggestion, and it is the use of some of these texts that can be called a strategy of appropriation. However, the use of other texts with no relationship to Wales – indeed, the use of Shakespearean tragedy can be seen as exactly the opposite technique, reinforcing the master language – would indicate that at this stage the author’s purpose is actually literary (a structuring technique) rather than deliberately postcolonial. A brief examination of the types of text used by Humphreys to bolster the plots of his early novels alongside the movement to and from the backdrop of Wales should indicate the extent to which Wales is important at this stage, and whether the use of Welsh history and myth is for postcolonial purposes or merely in its effect.

The Little Kingdom (1946) was Humphreys’s first experiment in the use of history and literature to counteract his self-perceived shortcomings in the structuring of plot. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he turned to the recent event which had had such a profound effect on him, the Penyberth bombing of 1936, using an historical event to create a strong plot.⁵ In selecting this situation he is able, on the one hand, to address ideas which particularly concern him: nationalism, violence as political protest, the personality of the charismatic leader; on the other hand, the plot lends itself to the tragic approach and his text is consequently resonant with Shakespearean echoes. Whereas the Penyberth story is a solid structure that works to control the outline of the whole plot and many of the details, the tragedies of Shakespeare are used more allusively and variously. His characters echo different tragic situations at different times, but particularly Macbeth’s killing of the king and Hamlet’s jealousy of his uncle. Humphreys is giving stature to his characters, who would otherwise be fairly ordinary. At the same time he is creating a sense of patterns of behaviour, or archetypes, back to which all individual situations can be referred. In this first novel Humphreys is already using Celtic myth, particularly the Blodeuwedd situation and the Bible, alongside his main source of prefiguration, the historical event.

Humphreys has at this point in his career a strong interest in history, as was indicated by his reading history at university.⁶ There is no direct evidence of his youthful interest in myth, apart from his childhood belief in the legend that a princess was buried on The Gop, above Trelawnyd. This is a concept which connects history with myth, in the sense in which myths are sometimes archetypal stories culled from ‘history’, and certainly also suggests that Humphreys may have identified both history and myth as ways of commenting upon the Welsh past. However, as a young novelist he was heavily influenced by James Joyce, whilst the writer he admired most was T. S. Eliot, and these writers, along with other modernists, had established the contemporary use of myth in literature. Humphreys was particularly influenced by Eliot’s verse dramas, from which he learned that ‘a structure derived from classical myth’ was an important consideration.⁷ He writes of that time:

To someone with a sense of vocation drawn towards forms of artistic creation I suppose you could say myth had an even deeper function. That is to say whatever the individual’s personal circumstance, the ramifications of myth present what appear to be consistent elements in the human condition. Whether you are born in fifth century Greece … or in the backwoods of Flintshire, the structures of myth would somehow reveal what such disparate situations had in common. The world of Wales in 1939 contained all the elements necessary for large or small scale tragedy. In my own case I belonged to a generation born in the aftermath of one war and brought up to be confronted with the inevitability of another. And along it came.

This extract clearly explains how myth, history and tragedy came to be combined in the young novelist’s mind, and why at that particular moment he felt impelled to create a tragedy set in a Welsh situation.

In The Taliesin Tradition Humphreys writes that ‘fiction can of course catch closer glimpses of ultimate truth than mere recorded fact’.⁸ It would, therefore, be reasonable to suggest that he perhaps wanted in his novel to present a ‘truth’ which might be absent from a historical account. Nevertheless, he did also write such an account in 1980, titled ‘The night of the fire’,⁹ in which many details coincide with The Little Kingdom, suggesting that the fictional account was based by the author on the historical event in a fairly transparent way. Officially, there were three men involved on 8 September 1936: Saunders Lewis, a university lecturer; Lewis E. Valentine, a minister; and D. J. Williams, a schoolmaster. In the novel six characters go to the aerodrome: Owen Richards, a university lecturer; Rhiannon and Rhys, children of the local minister; Captain Picton-Parry, ‘a good man hid in hideous armour’,¹⁰ who represents tradition and continuity in Welsh life; Tom Seth, a farmer; and Ifan Jones, a miner.¹¹ Ifan is writing englynion as they wait, just as ‘the bespectacled non-smoker’ (D. J. Williams?) was trying to finish his short story. Both cut their fingers and in the fictional account the three drops of blood are taken as an omen that Geraint will betray them, as the reader knows he has done already.

Penyberth was a fifteenth-century farmhouse, which for the activists stood as a symbol of ‘the very home of Welsh culture’,¹² according to Lewis. In parallel with this is Richard Bloyd’s selling of the ‘three hundred acres of unproductive flats’ on the coastal plain of north Wales for the aerodrome. Because the land is unproductive, trapped between old, finished industry and new, growing suburbs, Humphreys adds the schoolhouse of St Beuno’s school,¹³ home of Miss Tudor, and makes it more equivalent to Penyberth. What Bloyd is going to sell for a quick profit includes Miss Tudor, ‘the very last of the Tudors’,¹⁴ signifying Welsh history. It also includes a pile of fleeces (sheep farming), bad apples (rural life) and ancient school textbooks (Welsh culture). Ironically, Miss Tudor tries to give away Longfellow to Nest, and her father ‘loved to read Longfellow’. This could be seen as being as anglicizing a gesture as what Bloyd is doing, but involving culture rather than property. Miss Tudor, and consequently Welsh history, is portrayed as afraid of progress and materialism, that is, afraid of Bloyd. ‘Her eyes clouded with tears of helplessness, impotence, and self pity’.¹⁵ She believes in her Welsh past because of what her father has told her, but she finds the family’s genealogical tree too difficult to understand. In other words, she makes no real effort to gain an awareness of the past, but has simply a self-pitying, romantic attitude towards it. When Bloyd, the man she hates, drives off in a cloud of smoke, he seems to her ‘like an evil magician in a tale’.¹⁶ The acceptance of such a force is natural to her, because of its occurrence in legends of the past; her romantic and partial awareness of history and culture helps defeat her. Humphreys is, at this very early stage in his career, already using characters representationally.

There are also straightforward correspondences between the fictional and ‘real’ characters. Valentine was ‘a tall handsome figure’ who physically suggests comparison with Owen, although Lewis was the university lecturer. The debating and charismatic skills as leader which are given to Owen also suggest Valentine. D. J. Williams, ‘in his fifty-first year’ at the time of the incident, an ex-miner from a hill farm in Carmarthenshire, acted with ‘the consciousness of the ancient values of my ancestors bound with a feeling for their continuance’, and as such was possibly a model for Captain Picton-Parry of the novel. Saunders Lewis’s father was a Welsh Calvinistic minister, recalling Rhys and Rhiannon’s father.¹⁷ Lewis’s early education has much in common with Owen’s experience, when he recalls the victimization he received as a Welsh boy at an English public school, ‘the boy was conscious of being different’.¹⁸ Humphreys calls it being ‘made conscious of the dualism of belonging to two worlds’.¹⁹ Like Lewis, Owen ‘shone’ at all he did, ‘in everything and in the end he was top, the acknowledged leader’.²⁰ Lewis was a lecturer in Welsh literature at the University College, Swansea and Owen in history at Aber. ‘He got on so well in his department’ (as a student) ‘that they offered him a Lectureship’.²¹ On the other hand, Humphreys’s fictionalizing of the role of the nightwatchman, whose account at the trial is very different from the account given in the novel, has both an artistic and a political motivation.²²

‘There is a simple sense in which History can be interpreted as the continuing interplay between premeditated acts and a surge of uncontrollable events.’²³ Given that he holds this opinion, it is easy to see why Humphreys connects the central political act of The Little Kingdom with classical tragedy and makes so many allusions to tragedies in his text. The novel may be based on the firing of the Penyberth Bombing School, but Humphreys chooses to present his novel as a tragedy centred on one character. He involves the family and friends of this character and the repercussions for them of his character and actions, very much in the style of classical tragedy but without the elevated status of the typical classical cast. In fact, one of his most successful ironic touches is the way Owen continually sees himself as having a greatly increased stature – of being on the point of entering his country’s myth. The author, on the other hand, presents his character far more modestly. The fact that Owen dies at the conclusion of the novel also indicates the novelist’s intention of creating a tragedy, given the closeness already mentioned between the historical facts and situation and those presented here. In real life the three men endured a gaol sentence and Saunders Lewis lost his university career, but Shakespearean tragedy in particular and theories of tragedy in general suggest the death of the protagonist.

Humphreys is perhaps suggesting that martyr deaths transform historical accounts and create myths; that the Penyberth fire produced its (relatively short-term) heroes, but this fictional account in having a sacrificial victim might have had a different (ultimate) outcome.²⁴ The immediate consequences, however, are very similar. Ironically, the basic myth here is strongly evident of the influence of a patriarchal society. G. R. Manton attributes to patriarchy the numerous myths which concern the clashes between father and son, characteristic of a society ‘where the son succeeds to the position of the father’.²⁵ This description of patriarchal society is more typical of England than of Wales, which is of concern here.²⁶ Manton points out that Freud would argue many of the father–son conflicts are psychological ones (for example, the sexual interpretation of the Oedipus myth) but that in some the sexual element is ‘absent or barely noticeable’, as it is here. The question becomes, then, whether Humphreys is omitting to distinguish between English and Welsh patterns of social behaviour (the importance of primogeniture, for example) or whether, in fact, these have merged and there is no reason to distinguish between them; or whether he is deliberately suggesting that the evil element in Owen’s character stems from his schooling in English society, as opposed to his Welsh parentage.

Humphreys’s first published novel, then, shows strong evidence of a variety of kinds of deliberate patterning in its plot and structure, which were not used in the rejected first version of A Toy Epic.²⁷ Perhaps in consequence, the plot of The Little Kingdom is strong, dramatic and structured. The basic outline and many details are taken from the historical event. This not only adds structure, it adds political, Welsh and contemporary historical significance to the fiction, and producing a heightened awareness of this, to Humphreys, key episode in Welsh history would have been a welcome outcome. The uses of Celtic myth contribute to the Welsh identity of the novel and also to the sense of recurring archetypes, which is achieved by the numerous Shakespearean allusions. However, it is impossible to argue that the author was using myth as a strategy of appropriation given that Greek myth and Shakespearean allusions are more in evidence. It is unclear whether the author intended to increase the stature of his work or undermine his protagonist by the connections he makes between Owen and various tragic heroes. What is very clear is that this work indicates the author’s interest in drama and his skill at dramatic characterization, at ‘scenes’, which later in his career will both dominate the narrative technique of novels such as Outside the House of Baal and lead to an alternative career as a dramatist. Humphreys has found a way of writing successful fiction but there are drawbacks. Only in the Penyberth fire could he perhaps find a situation which could justify the high sense of tragedy his allusions inject into the text. And only in the contemporary situation of the writing of the novel in the aftermath of a world war would this intensely emotional approach seem justified by the heightened drama surrounding political leaders, such as Hitler and Mussolini, and the evil attributed to them.

This first novel is using an incident which was overpoweringly important to the author and using a place about which he knew, rather than being a novel which sets out to explore the Welsh condition. In his second novel, The Voice of a Stranger (1949), Humphreys again chose to use his own experience, this time of Italy’s confusion in the aftermath of war, in the setting of his novel and also in many of the plot details, particularly those concerning the three war workers. The use of three individuals here rather than one may even have stemmed from his use of three voices in the original A Toy Epic, characters who can all be seen as facets of the author as well as individuals. For the central action of the novel, however, Humphreys uses a Shakespearean plot. This work benefits from there being fewer allusions to Shakespearean tragedy than in The Little Kingdom, but the situation of the protagonists, Guido and Marcella, is clearly based on Romeo and Juliet, which works as before to give tragic stature to the work and to prefigure the plot, giving a sense of destiny to the outcome.

The situation observed by Humphreys in Italy immediately after the war, particularly the conflict between surviving partisans and fascists, clearly suggested to him the feuding Capulets and Montagues. Given the familiarity to most readers of the Romeo and Juliet story, this patterning device achieves the same effect as the chorus which opens that play and the sense of fate which permeates it. Again it would seem the author was intent on making his fiction tragedy. Indeed, in his diary mentioned above Humphreys wrote that ‘it needs an Elizabethan to do justice to Europe to-day, another Webster’,²⁸ presumably referring to the corruption and Machiavellian manipulation he found existing in the administration of the camps, but suggesting too why he felt the situation needed the tragic approach. There are numerous ways in which Guido and Marcella echo Romeo and Juliet: the way they fall in love, the opposition to their marriage, Marcella’s fond father and cold mother, Guido’s friend Riccardo, who combines the Mercutio and Tybalt roles, the mix up of messages, Sorella Crispi as nurse and Morrell as Friar, causing plot complications which result in the tragic death of Marcella. Humphreys adds to the sense of repeated patterns by authorial comment: ‘he [Guido] had an uneasy vision of all the past as a long plain of existence along which an unnamed power had guided them towards each other, and already they had both spoken of the draught of destiny they had felt in the instant of their meeting’.²⁹ On the other hand, Marcella emphasizes their uniqueness: ‘we are come together as only lovers come together, and from our first contact we are the warp and woof of a new pattern weaving’,³⁰ showing how the author is balancing in his text his concept of history not repeating itself against the Welsh condition that does.³¹

The sexual triangle in this novel is closer to that in Othello than in the myth of Blodeuwedd. Marcella has the innocence of Desdemona, whilst Riccardo combines the role of Iago and Cassio, increasing for the reader both the evilness of Riccardo and the sense of the inescapable conclusion. Marcella’s death, when she is depicted as a sacrificial victim in white, echoes Desdemona’s and simultaneously Guido begins a kind of anagnorisis in his comprehension of his own decreasing morality:

He was an idiot wandering through life with indelible bloodstains disfiguring his hands – a killer dwelling among killers, a crude inaccurate instrument of destruction. The contempt he felt for himself made him press his hands against his face, ready to dig in his nails and gouge out his own eyes.³²

This passage is typical of Humphreys’s method of multiple allusion, emphasizing his character’s archetypal qualities. However, it could equally be argued that the text is overloaded, and made significant to an extent not justified by the actual situation.

Humphreys uses many references to classical myth, their numerousness being possibly due to the Italian setting, but they tend to be a momentary connection rather than revealing underlying patterns, as when Williams’s wife is named Helen.³³ Fairy-tale references are used similarly, particularly the symbol of the rose, which so often indicates female sexuality or repressed sexuality between father and daughter.³⁴ On occasion, however, myth is used to suggest the basic human dilemma in which a character can be trapped, making the character representational rather than individual. So Marcella’s dream indicates the way in which the female is destined to be a victim; either raped Leda or seductive Eve, she is always to be seen in relation to the male.³⁵ Humphreys also plays with myth, reversing it, as in the use of Daphne when Marcella wants Guido to chase her,³⁶ and using it mock-heroically.³⁷ This novel, in fact, seems to be working as an exploration of different uses of myth simultaneously, or even indiscriminately, as though any myth use is going to enlarge and reinforce the stature of the novel. The Bible is brought in to make reference to archetypal relationships and types of behaviour. For example, David and Jonathan are used to explain the relationship between Guido and Riccardo, ‘bound by bonds of experience more lasting, more mystical than marriage’,³⁸ whilst there are several references to Judas Iscariot,³⁹ which have the function of preparing the reader for Riccardo’s betrayal. The author also uses reference to historical characters which suggests a cyclical view of history as producing situations that repeat, although the human race is unable to learn from past mistakes. Whether the reference is to Julius Caesar, Mussolini, or Aeneas and Dido from literature, the effect is ambiguous. For one reader it might enlarge the character’s stature, for another underline its non-existence. Another way of defending Humphreys’s practice is to suppose that he is showing how the unknown are as significant as the famous; that an ordinary character can be the subject of tragedy.

The title of the third novel, A Change of Heart (1951), is followed by the description ‘A Comedy’, and this marks an obvious difference from the first two novels. On the other hand, it is still reliant on Shakespeare for its plot. The central action bears strong similarity to Hamlet. Simultaneously, the author is using the Oedipus complex as part-explanation of the psychology of the protagonist, and for the first time Humphreys is drawing a definite link between myth and psychoanalysis. The central Oedipal relationship is the damaging connection between Howell Morris and his mother, but this is emphasized by all of the younger generation being damaged by their relationship with their mothers. Celtic myth is again introduced, this time the story of Geraint and Enid, which is used as a counter-pattern to the romantic relationships, emphasizing the fallibility of Lucy and Gwen and the lack of heroic qualities in Howell and Frank. Both Lucy and Gwen may also be seen as modern versions of Blodeuwedd, dissatisfied with their original choice of partner and becoming unfaithful women. Hamlet is used both by direct quotation in the text, for example, the linking of Sir Goronwy Annwyl with Polonius by ‘nothing he would more willingly part withal’,⁴⁰ and by the basic plot situation, which also reveals the basic weakness of the novel. Frank’s sister, Lucy, is dead and he blames Howell, his brother-in-law. It is the basic Laertes – Ophelia – Hamlet situation but centred on Frank’s search for the truth about his sister’s death. The language also elevates Frank to the position of tragic protagonist: ‘He was profoundly disturbed by an awareness of the pressure of Fate closing in upon him’.⁴¹ The problem is that the novel began by centring on Howell, the Hamlet figure, and it is unbalanced by this switch.

Alongside this use of Hamlet Humphreys portrays Howell as rendered sexually impotent by his domineering, possessive but cold mother. This is not then a Hamlet–Gertrude relationship, but the kind of overpowering domination exerted by Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers, the Oedipus complex which affects the dominated son’s ability to form successful heterosexual relationships. The puzzle at the heart of the novel is never solved: at the conclusion Howell does not know what really happened with Lucy and the reader remains ignorant about his sexual orientation. The novel does not work as a puzzle because there is no solution; nor does it constitute ‘A Comedy’, as the title claims, simply because the protagonists do not die at the end. The use of the Oedipus complex works against the use of Hamlet to confuse the reader as to whether the novelist is writing a sociological, psychological or detective-style novel. This third novel is extremely problematic in its convoluted patterns and allusions, which appear to have no overall purpose but, rather, are selected on a ‘the more the better’ approach. Neither does the setting in Wales contribute to the idea of Humphreys as a promoter of Wales or as an explorer of Wales’s variety. It is much closer to a portrayal of Wales by an outsider or an exile, which indeed Humphreys was when the novel was written, in its cynical portrayal of a bigoted, narrow-minded society.

The fourth novel, Hear and Forgive (1952), moves back to England for its setting and is less dependent than the previous novels on any prefiguration or structural patterning. However, the result is a novel which is a detailed character study with very little plot; a novel in which nothing much happens. This suggests that Humphreys, as a young novelist, did in fact need a strongly plotted ‘story’, whether from history, myth or literature, in order to aid his own construction of a dynamic plot but had not yet found the right balance, either over- or under-loading each plot. This novel, then, has the least plot action of any of Humphreys’s novels, and in critical terms might be considered one of his least successful.⁴² When the four novels are viewed together, it becomes clear that there are several common areas: they are set in areas and landscapes that are familiar to the author; the main characters are relatively young; the novels are based on areas of his experience with regard to careers; and their common theme is that of individual responsibility and choice, and of Christian conscience – the ideas explored in Humphreys’s articles published around this time.⁴³ However, when Humphreys uses texts of any kind to bolster his own material, whether they are Welsh or not appears to be immaterial. Wales is present, because it is part of Humphreys’s background, not because it is the subject of discussion. However, this was about to change.

A MAN’S ESTATE AND THE ITALIAN WIFE

In The Taliesin Tradition Humphreys writes that: ‘The manufacture and proliferation of myth must always be a major creative activity among a people with unnaturally high expectations reduced by historic necessity, or at least history, forced into what is often described as a marginal condition.’⁴⁴ This could well explain why Humphreys turned to myth as his desire to write about Wales increased. There is little obvious connection between the fourth novel and the fifth, A Man’s Estate (1955), in which Humphreys returns to heavy prefiguration, this time using the Orestes–Electra myth. Perhaps Humphreys was able to see the weaknesses in his fourth novel in spite of its success. A Man’s Estate marks a return to the detailed prefiguring which occurred in The Little Kingdom, and like that novel it is also chiefly set in Wales, with a strong discussion within the text of the differences between Wales and England, which are symbolized by the differences between Hannah and Philip Elis, a brother and sister brought up separately, one Welsh, the other a Welsh exile in England. Humphreys uses the debate inherent within the classical dramatizations of the myth to stimulate and give resonance to his own examination of the dichotomy between the die-hard traditionalist Welsh stance and that of the anglicized Welshman.

It might be assumed that Humphreys used drama rather than myth for his prefiguring device, since the Orestes myth is best known through the plays of Greek dramatists. It might also be assumed that he used Aeschylus’s Oresteia, which is the most comprehensive treatment of the myth.⁴⁵ However, Humphreys focuses strongly on Hannah Elis and, whereas Electra is an important character in The Choephori of Aeschylus, she is certainly more prominent in Sophocles’ and Euripides’ plays bearing her name. Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra also focuses on Electra and, alongside T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion, would undoubtedly have been familiar to the author.⁴⁶ We know of Eliot’s importance to Humphreys, since he has himself written of his early career: ‘From Eliot particularly I learned that poetic drama was the ultimate form all poets should aspire to, and that in most cases these efforts would need a structure derived from classical myth.’⁴⁷ It is not surprising then that Humphreys turned to classical myth, particularly if he had arrived at a point of realization that, although his novels were well received, they lacked a strong storyline. He could hardly have chosen a story with more significance or one better equipped to deal with cultural divisions or change and gender difference. The importance of myth to the leading modernists so admired by Humphreys also meant that any use of myth, especially a myth well established in contemporary literature, would mean that the audience would be aware of any ‘difference’ in an author’s focus, whether the focus was psychological, political or gender based.

Humphreys, unlike any of the Greek dramatists, opens with Orestes’ point of view. Philip Esmor-Elis is motivated by the need for money and family background with which to impress his girlfriend’s father (the epitome of English materialism and snobbery) rather than by revenge. Humphreys is claiming from the beginning a vast difference between his society and that of classical drama. Philip has grown up like Orestes in exile, but with his father’s mistress rather than a family retainer. Rather than longing for reunion with his sister and the deaths of his parents, Philip is almost oblivious of their existence until his treacherous friend (unlike Pylades) sends him off to Wales to obtain his patrimony. However, as the plot unfolds the reader is very aware that the family structure and past events are based closely on the myth. Clytemnestra, Aegisthus and Agamemnon are clear patterns for the older generation, with the difference that Elis has not sacrificed a daughter but has fathered an illegitimate one. Hannah, too, is Electra but also unlike Electra in her ill health. Updated, she suffers from chronic asthma, and is a faded spinster of thirty-five, but like Electra she is aware of being trapped in time: ‘for me, the crisis is still to come, a revelation that will explain the present, bury the past, and redeem what is left of the future.’⁴⁸ The language Humphreys uses makes the reader constantly aware of mythic echoes, of the archetypal pattern, and possibly that his character would actually have been speaking in Welsh. It is not then a modern idiom. The differences embodied in Mrs Elis are an even more striking comment on modern society. There was no great passion for Vavasor, only a desire to be matriarch, to manipulate and control through a new heir. In fact, the classical reasons for Agamemnon’s absence from home – the male conspiracy and the pursuit of a beautiful adultress – are a metaphorical comment by the author on British politics, for Elis is another of those Welsh politicians with the Lloyd George syndrome. Mary Elis’s hypocrisy is indicated by her keeping the hated husband’s name to increase her status in the area, where she controls the farm, the local chapel and justice, as JP. By the novel’s end Philip has exposed her as the murderer of her first husband and Humphreys presents her in classically tragic mode, splattered with the blood of the cockerels she has decapitated.⁴⁹

The action of the novel follows the myth: Philip returns home and brings about the revelation of the truth and consequent punishment; Hannah’s wait for her brother is rewarded; the murderers are punished by the disclosure. It is, however, a far more psychological presentation. The reader learns about Elis’s murder and that the repression of their guilty secret has been the root cause of their behaviour for the last thirty years. Hannah’s awareness is very different from Electra’s; in spite of bad treatment by her mother, she does not hate her and is unaware of her father’s murder. Also by the end of the novel she, not Philip, will have the farm, their father’s inheritance. Philip will choose to go abroad and follow his career, whereas Orestes’ exile was forced punishment. One positive factor which emerges is their love for each other. However, there is an added effect of using myth. For the reader aware of the mythic pattern, Hannah’s character is underpinned by the original Electra, so that the Electra emotions emerge as unconscious motivation and Hannah appears to be repressing her real feelings, the desire to punish her parents, for example. A different effect of using myth is the degree of pre-knowledge of the novel’s outcome. So, on one level, the novel works almost as detective story, with the murder a complete surprise to the reader unaware of the myth. The knowing reader, however, will expect this, along with the lack of conflict between brother and sister. Humphreys’s comment that the whole pleasure in traditional storytelling was ‘how you got there’ rather than what happens, that ‘you must begin every story at the end’,⁵⁰ indicates a strong reason he may have had for using myth in this depth.

Whereas The Eumenides develops an argument between the old and new law of Athens, coming down in favour of the new patriarchal tradition of Apollo rather than the old of the Furies, Humphreys translates this into a discussion of English and Welsh laws of inheritance. Philip arrives espousing the English right of primogeniture, but then uncovers his father’s financial interest in the farm, which gave him ownership and logically means either or both of his two children should inherit, rather than Dick, Mary’s favoured youngest child. By the conclusion Hannah accepts the farm from Philip, finding a solution that is not typically English in that she is a female heir, but which favours Elis over Mary. In a sense the brother and sister share the farm, which is the ‘Welsh’ solution.⁵¹ This relates back to the passage from Humphreys’s letter quoted above; he has found in myth/tragedy an archetype which he can relate to ‘the backwoods of Flintshire’, a way of arriving at a just inheritance, for inheriting is one of the commonalities of the human condition.

There are strong similarities between the novel and Sophocles’ Electra, which also focuses on the adult siblings. However, Orestes’ love for his father underlines Philip’s complete lack of interest in his. Electra, on the other hand, is a clear pattern for Hannah, weeping, unmarried, childless and bearing the endless burden of woe. An even stronger reason for suspecting that this version was clear in Humphreys’s mind is that Electra’s sister, Chrysothemis, might have suggested the role of Ada, the half-sister. Sophocles emphasizes the cruel treatment of Electra but Humphreys has Hannah being quite fond of Vavasor, and emulating his career as chemist. Humphreys’s novel then is a study of a daughter’s antipathy towards her mother and vice versa, which may well stem from an interest in psychology and the Electra complex rather than a particular play.

If Humphreys used the Aeschylus version, then the existence of Idris Powell is problematic, unless he is seen as a presentation of the current religious view in the way that the word of God might equate with the message of Zeus. However, in Euripides’ version Electra has a poor husband who has strong moral values but is despised by the court. This possibly suggested the role of Idris, whom Hannah would like to marry. In Euripides’ play the husband acts like a guardian not a lover, paralleling Idris who wants to be Hannah’s friend. On the other hand, in this play Electra loathes her stepfather and was saved by her mother from the death he planned. Euripides has also altered Electra’s character, presenting her as a permanent moaner, as rude, egocentric and arrogant, very different from Hannah’s long-suffering Christian attitude, although Hannah, too, is prone to moan. Euripides’ play is very anti-women, blaming Electra for planning the murder and Clytemnestra for not accepting her husband’s judgement; it strongly advocates patriarchy. Humphreys too appears interested in gender differences in 1950s society. If the lifestyles and achievements of the brother and sister are analysed, social factors have produced a male remarkably successful compared with his sister. Even at the end Hannah is running the farm because her brother allows it.

A consistent pattern in the novels so far is that of the destructive mother. This portrayal of a mother by Humphreys, alongside other mothers in his fiction, fits into the monster of the angel/monster dichotomy, outlined by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who argue that: ‘the female monster is a striking illustration of Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis that woman has been made to represent all of man’s ambivalent feelings about his own inability to control his own physical existence, his own birth and death’.⁵² This particular myth lends itself to an analysis of this character type, but Humphreys has produced a particularly unattractive, damaging mother in Mary Ellis. Given the emphasis on the culpability of Aegisthus and Agamemnon in all of the Greek dramatic versions, it is noticeable that neither Elis nor Vavasor is essentially at fault. Indeed, it could be argued their faults stem from marriage to Mary Elis. She is a type of woman prevalent in Humphreys’s fiction: controlling, manipulative, strong and destructive, a woman who can operate in a man’s world. Such mothers damage their offspring, restricting their emotional development. However, traditionally dutiful mothers, passive, homebound and loving do greater damage in that they produce weak children, who are failures or spoilt, selfish and destructive, such as Ada and Dick. Clytemnestra is consistently portrayed as sexually voracious but Humphreys removes every trace of this sexuality from Mary, giving her not only the active qualities traditionally associated with the stereotypical male in a patriarchal presentation, but physical qualities too. Indeed, his sympathetic presentation of Vavasor Elis (Aegisthus), his passivity, piety, the scientific ability which links him with Philip and Hannah, and the blindness which is real and symbolic and stresses his role as witness to murder rather than accomplice all work to engage the reader’s sympathy and increase hostility towards Mary. In a feminist text the anti-stereotypical presentations of Mary and Vavasor might be seen as deconstructing the norm, as presenting a positive female role. However, in this novel Hannah is possibly more important a character and is stereotypically passive, sickly and subservient to the male. Also, the angel/monster dichotomy here is between virginal Hannah and sexually active Ada. The portrayal of Mary is a male portrayal of a hideous mother, of the type mentioned by Gilbert and Gubar above. The novel is not anti-female; it frequently shows great empathy towards Hannah and Ada, for example. However, the domineering wife/mother is definitely the villain of the piece.

Humphreys repeats the technique of strong mythological prefiguration with his use of the Hippolytus myth in his sixth novel, The Italian Wife, but in this case he focuses on the wife/mother as victim, the bullied not the bullier. John J. White has pointed out that myth is often used as a loose analogy rather than ‘a scaffold upon which the modern story has been erected’,⁵³ which can make the novel too deterministic but, whereas Humphreys absorbed the deterministic element into both the characterization and the Nonconformist background in A Man’s Estate, the plot of this sixth novel is very rigidly determined. Ioan Williams has indicated the ‘deficiencies of structure and problems of focus’ and an ‘uncomfortable tension between the moral subject and the pattern of action’.⁵⁴ Because Humphreys structures much of the plot around Richard (the Theseus character) rather than Paola (Phaedra) and develops the sexual side of Chris (Hippolytus) in a way not prefigured by the myth, there is a blurring of focus and an uncomfortable lack of sympathy for all three modern characters. The rural Welsh Nonconformist society evoked in A Man’s Estate features a nexus of tensions between the power of the Bible, hidden murder and English and Welsh cultures, and these internal conflicts sustain comparison with those in great tragedy, whether by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. However, the glimpses of wealthy existence in Switzerland, Italy and England in The Italian Wife and the suggestion of a media empire are unconvincing in comparison.

In his article ‘The “Protestant” Novelist’, which appeared in the Spectator in 1952, Humphreys made a comment which throws more light onto his reasons for using myth:

If some novelist wishes to extract the Aeschylean conclusion – that man learns wisdom only through suffering – out of a contemporary setting, the ring of truth about the plot, the characters, the situations, the scenes, must be clearly and immediately audible to the sympathetic reader; both story and theme wholly integrated into the circumstances of our time.⁵⁵

Unfortunately, The Italian Wife lacks the ring of truth which A Man’s Estate has, and this is partly to do with Humphreys’s ability to convey convincingly a portrayal of rural Welsh life. One of the reasons Humphreys may have been drawn to Greek myth is its commonality as a European experience with a set of fixed symbols understood across Europe. Using such myths may have seemed to Humphreys a way of both asserting the position of Wales as a nation within Europe rather than Britain, and simultaneously subverting the English canon. A more important reason may, however, be suggested by the above quotation; the idea of learning wisdom through suffering and in a contemporary context indicates that using myth in this way may have been due to the profound effect the Second World War had on the novelist. It is a way of controlling and ordering experience, whilst imbuing an individual character with the symbolic value of Everyman.

An examination of Humphreys’s first six published novels reveals that he is already using the majority of the techniques which will later become the strategies of liberation he will use to explore Wales’s post-colonial condition. However, the tendency here is to use them either too heavily, producing an overly prescriptive plot, or too lightly with an original plot that does not sufficiently support the novel. He has yet to harness the prefiguring techniques of myth and/or history to a dynamic original plot or to use them with an integral purpose. He appears to have moved away from history towards the use of myth and has demonstrated great skill in transferring suggestively the details from myths to the novel. However, this method brings with it a heavily predestined and dated effect. This works well with the presentation of a particularly tragic situation in a past generation of quite dated characters living in an out-of-touch location – Wales is very much the cultural backwater in A Man’s Estate – but it is clearly not going to succeed in most contemporary novels, and does not in The Italian Wife. When he stops using myth to provide a successful plot, and uses it instead to provide either interest, depth or suggestion, Humphreys moves to a second, more successful stage in his career. Fortuitously, perhaps, a different kind of plot strengthening occurs, simultaneously with a desire to feature Wales as more than a setting for the fiction.

A TOY EPIC

The publication of A Toy Epic in 1958 was a major landmark in the career of Emyr Humphreys for several reasons.⁵⁶ First, it allowed him to put behind him the failure of the first draft and the insecurity which that had caused. Because it used so much of that early draft and received so much critical acclaim in the revised form,⁵⁷ it was bound to increase the author’s confidence in his ability to create plot. Secondly, it made use of the author’s Welsh identity in several ways, not least the fact that the Welsh version Y Tri Llais had the first success and was then ‘translated’ into English for the published novel, A Toy Epic. It was important at this stage of Humphreys’s career that his Welshness became a recognized part of his identity; he had at this point ‘reinvented’ himself to an extent as an heir of Welsh-language culture. Thirdly, it introduced new methods of patterning, which were to be further refined in the writing of Outside the House of Baal (1965). These two novels, it might be argued, are the author’s major achievements. The later novel is cited by critics as Humphreys’s best⁵⁸ and A Toy Epic is frequently the reader’s introduction to Humphreys’s work and a popular text for students.

In A Toy Epic the three boys are on one level representative characters, the author’s way of showing different aspects of Welsh society between the wars. A Man’s Estate initiated the use of narration through a variety of voices but A Toy Epic develops the use of frequently changing voices in the first person. The action of A Toy Epic is a way of presenting Welsh history in the interwar years, showing how the events of the history textbook affected the lives of ordinary people in north Wales. The myths dealt with in Ovid’s Metamorphoses are used as a theme which connects the various experiences of the three adolescents, and as a way of making individual experience general and of showing how archetypal patterns recur throughout time. This is achieved in two ways: through explicit references to Ovid as an author being studied during the boys’ education in the novel and through allusions in the text to various mythological characters. Simultaneously, metamorphosis, or transformation of character through sexual experience, is the underlying theme and connects the boys and their individual experiences together to form a unified whole. This is both a more complex and a less controlling use of myth than Humphreys had achieved before; it allows the author more freedom with his text and the reader does not feel the eventual outcome of the narrative is heavily predestined, as it could be argued is the case with the previous two novels. An examination of the author’s notebooks containing the early version shows that none of this mythological material was there;⁵⁹ it was clearly superimposed on the original alongside other changes made by Humphreys before the 1958 publication. Having written six novels, with varying success, in which myth is used as a patterning device in a variety of ways, from mere allusion to complete replication, Humphreys finds a way in this novel to use myth without being over-constrained by it. He makes use of its allusive power and its significance, whilst still allowing himself the freedom of inventing the plot. In the first six novels the attempts to add structural patterning by outside means were all too much or too little. In this novel the author begins to get it right. However, the myths used are dominantly classical; Humphreys is keen to discuss Wales as ‘subject’ but has not yet developed the desire to educate or refresh Welsh people in their native myths.

Presenting Wales

Wales is the subject of the novel, and is presented in several complementary ways. The principal way is through the three boys, the voices of the text: Albie, Michael and Iorwerth.⁶⁰ The three boys stand as independent characters but they are also representative of aspects of Welsh life. Simultaneously, they represent three different family circumstances, three social backgrounds, three geographical areas and three attitudes to Welsh political concerns. Together they present a picture of Welsh society between the wars. Humphreys isolates the north-east corner of Wales for his presentation, but it could be argued that the novel looks at north Wales in general, or even Wales as a whole.⁶¹ These boys are all Welsh with differing attitudes to Wales. Humphreys looks at their influence upon each other, the ways they interact and the way the passing of time and the imminent war lead to their separation rather than integration.