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‘A serious Welsh novelist’: Redressing the Balance

The main function of the novelist remains to celebrate: and by one means or another to perpetuate the language of the tribe.¹

Emyr Humphreys’s views on his fiction writing and postcoloniality will be the subject of this chapter As we have seen, there are a variety of attitudes towards the consideration of Wales as a postcolonial nation. What is of paramount concern here is the attitude of the novelist himself, and the possible reasons for that vision: the personal connections with Wales, the education and career, the important influences, the conjunction of artistic and political aims. An understanding of these issues throws light upon the fiction itself and the reasons for considering it to be postcolonial work. Indeed, one way of regarding his fiction is as an explication of his life: ‘In a curious way, my writing is quite autobiographical, much more so than I thought at the time’ (53). Over the course of the last half-century Humphreys has given a number of interviews and this personal comment has been consolidated in Conversations and Reflections, in which previously published non-fiction is interspersed with conversations between the author and M. Wynn Thomas. This chapter will make extensive use of Humphreys’s own words, as the clearest explication of him as ‘subject’.

Emyr Humphreys – a Welsh writer writing in English. It is a simple enough fact but it explains a great deal. Humphreys taught himself Welsh as a young man and he speaks and writes in Welsh fluently. From the point in the 1970s when he became a full-time writer, he provided for his family by writing for TV in Welsh and he has published poetry in Welsh, yet increasingly the content of his fiction has become inextricably interconnected with the fact that he writes his fiction in English – ‘the language of the oppressor’.

when you adopt the language of the oppressor, the imperial power or whatever it may be, you are taking part in the oppression. You yourself become guilty. You therefore have this terrible nightmarish conflict, which has been with me all my life in the form of an inner tension. (131)

This comment of Humphreys is key to understanding his position as a postcolonial writer. Equally important is his desire to contribute to the preservation of Welsh identity through the subject matter of his work. Most of his fiction, particularly the later work, is concerned with Wales and what it means to be Welsh; it is not just set in Wales. His best-known works both analyse and educate the reader in matters Welsh: the diversity within Wales, the effect of the approach of war, Wales in the war, Wales in the twentieth century, Nonconformity in Wales. Alongside the historical details he uses Celtic myths to reinforce the separateness and uniqueness of the nation in the minds of readers who may be ignorant of, may have forgotten, or may have been reared and educated with no connection with their Welsh heritage. So why did he take this role – of ‘People’s Remembrancer’² – upon himself? What turned the English-speaking boy from north Wales, almost on the border with England, into the committed Welsh nationalist he became?

CHILDHOOD AND ROOTS IN NORTH-EAST WALES

It began with his childhood: ‘in many ways I had an idyllic childhood’ (124). The mature Humphreys’s ability and desire to express notions of the ambiguity and marginality of ‘the Welsh condition’ stem from his upbringing in ‘one of the four corners of Wales’,³ where he was reared and educated in the English tongue with perhaps the same kind of ‘good intentions’ that other leading Welsh writers in English experienced during the first half of the twentieth century. Humphreys himself has drawn attention to similarities in detail between his own childhood and the vision of childhood expressed in A Toy Epic, much of which comprised his first unsuccessful attempt to be published.⁴ The character of Michael, in particular, and his family background appear to have many similarities with that of the author, without denying any of their fictionality.⁵ In A Toy Epic, finally published as his seventh novel in 1958, Humphreys uses the three boys, in whose words the story is told, to represent aspects of the social and circumstantial differences amongst Welsh people and simultaneously to indicate the differences within Wales between one area and another – to stress that Wales is a diverse nation and that stereotyping its people as having a certain character is not only unjust in the obvious way but also inaccurate and misleading.

One of the points made in several interviews is the importance of the effect of the local landscape on the young Humphreys, and the instinctive connections it instilled in him with the past, mythic and historical. Much is made of ‘The Gop’, the hill behind his parents’ house in Trelawnyd: ‘Local legend had it that it was Boadicea’s grave’ (4). This vantage point gave the young Humphreys the impetus to see himself as marginalized: ‘it was in a sense the view from the border’ (2). However, there were other ways in which the author’s early life impacted upon his later ideas of nationality, and of his own marginality, brought up on the border between two nations and with English as his mother tongue, whilst his roots were Welsh. In ‘Conversation 1’ Humphreys makes the point that ‘the structures of the fiction very much reflect the structures of the family’ (7). This is intriguing for more than one reason. First, it leads us into the importance of Humphreys’s own family in his fiction, and secondly it marks a clear way in which novels can reverberate the individual’s own experience, even when the background of a reader, for example, is very different from that of the author. Chiefly, however, it led to a variety of families being used over the span of novels as a tool by which to reflect Welsh society.

This use of the family is closely intertwined with that of the local community, and further entangled with the young Humphreys’s perception of the First World War as a thoroughly damaging enterprise due to its effect on his father, whom Humphreys remembers as being in and out of hospital, affected long term by the damaged ribs and gassing he had sustained.⁶

The whole trauma of the experience affected my father very deeply: he came out of the war a very different person from what he had been when he went in … I always remember him as an invalid, a wounded man in every sense … A lot of them had been gassed, and if they survived then they survived as a damaged generation. (124)

This perception, originally very personal, has had a clear effect on Humphreys’s fictional male characters, and not only those whose timescale within a given novel means that they would have experienced that war, causing his presentation of the male to be frequently that of weak, ineffectual, dispirited and cynical characters, fitting the syndrome explained by Ato Quayson as the trope of disability, a feature he has found prominent in postcolonial literature.⁷ This is particularly significant for Humphreys’s presentation of Wales as a nation given that in a number of his most significant novels he uses the protagonists as characters who are representative of the Welsh nation, or elements of it. John Cilydd, in the sequence, is an obvious example, and it is no coincidence that in the final novel of ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence Cilydd’s traumatic experience in the trenches of the First World War is explored and found to be key to his later life. Humphreys is well aware of the war’s effect on himself and for Wales as a nation:

it was a huge event that had taken place and marked off a way of life that was totally different. That was when a new, modern world began, … It was a huge watershed really. But it was only later – much later – that I came to understand its implications for Welsh culture, although I think I held it responsible for the fact that I was not brought up Welsh-speaking. When he was in the Army, my father turned away from the Nonconformist religion in which he had been raised and became an Anglican. (123)

Simultaneously, the relationship between Humphreys’s parents – ‘My mother was much younger, and much stronger physically, and a very headstrong, impulsive woman’ (124) – has had a corresponding effect upon the presentation of female protagonists in his fiction, not least the feisty Amy Price Parry, and equally on his use of female representation of both elements of and on occasion the whole Welsh nation, a particularly effective tool in its convenient linking with the essence of Welsh rather than English character through connotations of the Celtic mother goddess as opposed to the English tradition of male Protestant Christianity and patriarchy.⁸

I think she [Amy] is the central character, the dominant female, and John Cilydd a weak male, and this correspondence between the sexes seems to be a fair reproduction of Welsh experience in the twentieth century. Everything flows from that. She’s like a mirror walking down the street, but not the only mirror, so you have a multi-perspective portrait. Many of the characters are marching down the street of history, the march of time, and each one reflects something of the times. (138)

The small community in which Humphreys grew up has also made an impact on his work. In an interview Humphreys mentions the fact that ‘the man I based Albie on is still alive. We were great friends as children …’⁹ and ‘We had a maid, and she used to read in exactly the way I depict in A Toy Epic’ (124), which gives an indication that he does, at least in A Toy Epic, use real people as the basis for fictional characters. Humphreys himself comments on this use of autobiography:

In the process of hammering out a work of fiction you do tend to mix things that actually did happen with things that might have happened and things you’ve imagined … A Toy Epic looks as if it might be autobiographical, but if you look closely there are three distinct characters and there is a sense in which I must be all of them because every author is the father and the mother of the thing that he produces.¹⁰

It is clear from this that, whoever the friend was, Albie is not a direct representation of him, but was used extensively in the fictional creation. Humphreys has also explained that a lot of autobiographical material was used in A Toy Epic, although the character of Michael, for example, is a work of fiction.¹¹ The Rector James Joel Morgan lived opposite Humphreys’s father, who was headmaster of the church school. Humphreys transferred Michael (the character closest to the author’s real self) to be the son of the rector in the fictional parish rather than the headmaster.¹² Similarly, Iorwerth was based upon his cousin Maldwyn, who did, however, live a considerable distance away.¹³ Parts of this novel were of course Humphreys’s first attempt at fiction, and it would seem that throughout his career he has used real people as models to some extent. Humphreys has explained that the character Goronwy Jones, in the novel Jones, was also ‘based on someone I knew, a very close friend actually who wasn’t Welsh at all. He lived an entirely hedonistic existence and I thought his end was sad really, though he wouldn’t have agreed!’¹⁴ R. Tudur Jones was a lifelong friend of the author and an examination of his career indicates that he may have been a strong influence on the writing of Outside the House of Baal. This is not to suggest in this case that J.T. is based on him but that the knowledge and understanding that he would have brought to Humphreys about the life of a minister, the workings of a university college (in particular Bangor) and the history of Nonconformity in Wales would have been invaluable.

Humphreys has used family as well as friends. His introduction to the 1996 edition of Outside the House of Baal explains clearly that the novel stemmed from his realization that a gift had been presented to him.

My mother and father-in-law were living with us in our farmhouse oddly marooned in the middle of Penarth … They had that wealth of recollection and the more piercing awareness of reality that comes with old age. They had emerged from monoglot Welsh societies and in spite of wars, revolution, famine, mass unemployment and mass communications, their existences and concerns had continued to revolve around chapels. (7)

So he would use their memories and details of their pasts. But for Humphreys his relatives were not to be directly identified with Kate and Lydia or J.T. who, he argues, ‘might have attended my father-in-law’s theological college and it was equally possible that his sister-in-law would have been in school with my mother’.¹⁵ They are influences and inspirations but not exact counterparts; they are nevertheless grounded in Humphreys’s experience of Welsh life.

Thomas shows in his article on Outside the House of Baal that Pa in the novel is in part based upon Humphreys’s maternal grandfather, ‘an old-style, philoprogenitive patriarch, puritanically stern and somewhat of an autocrat’¹⁶ and that Humphreys, wanting to show through a character’s family how Welsh society had changed during the twentieth century, was able to make extensive use of his own mother’s family. Thomas also draws connections between Lydia and the author’s mother, and consequently between Ronnie and Humphreys himself. On the other hand, the opening of the article with its suggestion that Humphreys drew his basic inspiration for the contrast between past and present in a character’s memory, which led to the construction of the novel in two time periods, from a conversation he had with his elderly mother suggests that his mother may in some ways have also inspired his creation of Kate. Thomas draws more direct parallels between J.T. and Humphreys’s father-in-law, the Revd Jones, who had been living with Humphreys and his family for several years before the novel was written, but there are ways (his experience in the trenches of the First World War, for example) in which J.T. may be connected with Humphreys’s father. Humphreys by this time has become expert at creating realistic fictional characters from conglomerations of people whom he knows personally, ‘famous’ people and his own imagination.¹⁷ He also does this throughout his sequence of novels, in order to make the novels historically representative and ‘truthful’ in distinctively fictive terms to what he believes happened in history.

THE PENYBERTH INCIDENT AND SAUNDERS LEWIS

Other childhood contacts had a strong influence on the young Humphreys – ‘I did have a couple of very stimulating teachers – Moses Jones, and Silvan Evans, who was the English teacher’ (125) – but nothing equalled the resounding impact made on him by the Penyberth incident in 1936, when he was seventeen.

That was a kind of explosion in my mind, and I became a nationalist before I had learnt Welsh. Then, having acquired that point of view, I realized that the language was the essential piece of equipment in order to make this commitment a real, substantial thing. (125)

There was strong Welsh opposition to the British government’s decision to site a bombing school at Penyberth, a farmhouse near Pwllheli on the Llªn peninsula. In spite of the house’s having cultural significance, the campaign against the siting was unsuccessful, which led to three members of Plaid Cymru – Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams – setting fire to some of the bombing school property (not the original farmhouse). Immediately afterwards the three protestors reported what they had done to police but were arrested and tried at Caernarfon, where they were freed by the jury. When this happened the judge ordered a retrial at the Old Bailey, and there the three men were given prison sentences. Saunders Lewis was punished further by the loss of his lectureship at the University College of Wales at Swansea. Issues of political inequalities and government from London were important in this case but the language question was also paramount, including not only the differences between the English-speaking judge and Welsh-speaking jury, but also the right for Welsh people to be tried in Welsh and by Welsh speakers. The whole incident and its repercussions affected a range of individuals, not least amongst whom was the teenaged Emyr Humphreys, to whom it meant:

[The] Reassertion of a national identity. It made you feel that after all there was something important in being Welsh – there was a value attached to it: it wasn’t something to turn your back on, it was something to adopt and to cherish and to defend. (126)

Humphreys explains the effect this realization had:

I was committed only to Welsh nationalism, and not to any other; and for me this related to the recovery of a Welsh identity that had been lost in my family. I had no intellectual preconceptions about nationalism: it was just an awakening to being Welsh, as it were. Because in the general tone of the thirties, the political outlook was, of course, anything but sympathetic to nationalism in general. (125–6)

This meant a rejection of the politics of his parents, who were Liberals, although his elder brother was at the time more fashionably left wing,¹⁸ as well as a linguistic rebellion in his decision to learn Welsh, given that he had been brought up as monoglot English speaking and to regard speaking Welsh as conveying an inferior status; in an interview he says: ‘I think the maid in A Toy Epic was very like the maid we had when I was a boy: she looked down on Welsh as only being spoken by old Methodists.’¹⁹ Humphreys’s Welsh nationalism became a lifelong commitment and this personal conviction has clearly affected his novels’ themes, content and style. Its more specific influence can be seen in two separate works: his first novel, The Little Kingdom (1946), and his article ‘The night of the fire’, published in 1980.²⁰ An additional, important effect of this incident was the long-term influence Saunders Lewis was to have on Humphreys.²¹

Later in his career Humphreys had a close working connection with Saunders Lewis.²² As well as being influenced by Lewis’s principles and views, Humphreys may also have been influenced by his literary use of myth and his use of history.²³ This relationship was to occur after the writing of the first novel. Before it, however, Humphreys had met Lewis at Plaid Cymru summer schools and had also avidly read during the war Lewis’s influential and controversial column of political commentary in Y Faner. It might well be argued that the fictional conspirators in The Little Kingdom are based upon the three real-life activists: Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams. The protagonist, Owen Richards, combines the charisma and looks of Valentine with the principles and position (university lecturer) of Saunders Lewis, and his death is perhaps the author’s comment on the treatment of Lewis by the University College of Wales, Swansea. What is clear, however, is that many details of the characters, positions and lives of the three real-life conspirators are spread amongst the six fictional ones, giving the novel a kind of ‘fictional accuracy’. In his 1980 account, ‘The night of the fire’, Humphreys makes very clear his sympathy with the way in which Lewis represents Wales as opposed to another famous Welshman, Lloyd George. Humphreys’s sympathy and admiration is even more evident in his essay ‘Outline of a necessary figure’. It is interesting that Lewis’s own pamphlet, ‘Why we burnt the bombing school’ (1937), was very influential among young people in Wales whilst Humphreys was still at school and the Welsh teacher at the school, Moses Jones, remembers Humphreys’s selling the pamphlet, causing the chairman of governors to complain that the school was a hotbed of Welsh nationalism.²⁴ Humphreys would have seen the whole incident, the action, the pamphlet and the trial, as having an enormous impact on Wales and giving a new confidence and pride to many people. It is not surprising then that he used similar subject matter when writing his first published novel. When Humphreys came to write the early novels of his ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence in the 1970s he used the composite method of constructing character in his creation of Val Gwyn, the Welsh nationalist political activist and librarian at Aberystwyth. The name, the charisma and place suggest Lewis Valentine but the influence of Saunders Lewis is also apparent,²⁵ as indeed is that of Ambrose Bebb. Again the character dies young as a result of his political activities and Humphreys’s anger at the treatment meted out to Saunders Lewis by the University of Wales may be one of the reasons behind his cynical treatment of universities and academic life in his novels, culminating in the disenchantment obvious in National Winner and Bonds of Attachment and the bitter disillusion in the recent The Gift of a Daughter.

Because Humphreys has written an article about the Penyberth incident,²⁶ a mixture of fact and opinion, it is possible to examine how differently he treats the subject in a ‘historical’ account and in fiction. The account is a very sympathetic treatment. It deliberately avoids the actual incident, beginning with the three activists anxiously waiting in their car. It then concentrates on their handing themselves over to justice, including a quotation of their eloquent and persuasive letter of admission. The description of their discussing poetry in the police cells totally negates any sense of the dangerousness of activists, emphasizing instead the bonds which exist between the captors and their criminals, a unity created by the Welsh language and its poetry. This is in direct contrast to the novel which deals with events leading up to the incident and virtually ends with the death of Owen. The article switches dramatically from its supportive stance concerning the three activists, portraying them as acting under threat, in the face of a ‘tidal wave’, and comparing the position of Wales with that of the Jews threatened by Haman the Agagite,²⁷ and becomes a scathing attack on the superficiality and sentimentality of Lloyd George’s attachment to Wales. Lloyd George is presented, in direct contrast to Saunders Lewis, as a manipulative, two-faced figure, ‘the prototype of a twentieth-century dictator, associating with Hitler, and putting his English political career ahead of his responsibility to Wales’ (77). Humphreys is also free to state his own opinion on the incident: ‘Over this sensitive issue we are witnessing exceptional men operating within the limits of a strictly Welsh context’ (77). Finally, he sets the incident in the context of Welsh history, using the opportunity to indict English law as the destroyer of Welsh law. He does this explicitly but also metaphorically, presenting the Caernarfon court house, where the trial took place, as ‘in the shadow of the mediaeval castle’ and the painting, hanging on the courtroom wall, of Edward I with the first prince of Wales ‘a baby on his shield’, again emphasizing the military domination of Wales by England. Against this backdrop of English control Humphreys describes the lives of the three men with the effect that they are seen as heroes fighting for the survival of Welsh culture and the Welsh language, rather than arsonists or lawbreakers. The whole is a skilfully written essay in admiration of the deed which contrasts it positively with the kind of political action adopted by Lloyd George, the choosing of British rather than Welsh responsibility, which is in turn viewed from the Welsh point of view as a traitorous adoption of the English rather than the Welsh cause.

The differences between the article and the novel are instructive in that they illustrate the different parameters with which a novelist has to deal. Although there are striking similarities between the activists and the six characters involved in action in the novel, the differences are perhaps more important. One main protagonist is chosen for the novel, where three worked together in 1936. The ages are altered from middle age to youth, and a girl becomes central, introducing a romantic/sexual liaison, which is entirely absent from the ‘real’ event.²⁸ Other characters are produced as romantic rival, friend etc., their necessity built out of the dynamics necessary in the creation of a fictional life around the protagonist, to produce the events and the dialogue, through which the author wishes to convey his story. Some details stand out: the night-watchman, for example. Humphreys, writing his personal view in the article, suggests the man must be lying, because the three activists each deny his testimony, and they are all three presented as truthful men. In the novel, however, Tom Siôn is a significant character; he represents the working man, displaced and out of work because of the power and arrogance of the young capitalist, Owen, who publicly insults him and behaves offensively to his girlfriend. Rather than having the English/Welsh dichotomy of the article, the novel explores the different Welsh attitudes to the aerodrome. Tom Siôn is given a background which explains why he cannot see anything wrong with taking work at the aerodrome, whilst Owen’s supporters have cultural and material reasons for fighting against it. The whole incident is made more dramatic by its resulting in the death and consequent martyrdom of the ringleader; and simultaneously it is made more complex by that ringleader’s being also a murderer, and the whole plot’s being a political thriller and simultaneously a tragedy.

Ultimately, the work of fiction stands on its own. The reader who knows about Penyberth can see the connections, where the idea for the novel came from and how many of the details came to exist; but the novel has to exist independently of Penyberth and of the author’s own life and influences. If the novel relied on its reader’s awareness of a special historical context, it would be a failure as fiction. This particular novel would be greatly weakened if it had been presented in the partisan way in which the author writes his article. The dilemma Humphreys creates in his fiction adds a dimension missing from the Penyberth history, if not from contemporary international history which occurred shortly afterwards; the situation in the novel indicates that dynamic political action requires a ruthlessness and lack of conventional morality in a leader, which would be completely unacceptable to the majority on either side of the question. It raises the difficult question of whether force is ever justifiable, but also of whether anything but force could ever be successful against a controlling power – a question in the minds of politically active Welsh nationalists on a variety of occasions during Humphreys’s lifetime, but one which is of particular concern to the pacifist Humphreys.

EDUCATION AND WAR

The Penyberth incident happened when Emyr Humphreys was a grammar school boy at Rhyl, living in Trelawnyd, Flintshire, a village a few miles south of Prestatyn in north-east Wales. Attendance at the village school, where his father was headmaster, was followed by Rhyl Grammar School. This background is clearly very similar to that of Michael in A Toy Epic, the first draft of which was his first attempt at getting a novel published, although the final published version did not appear until 1958. A substantial part of it was written immediately after he left university during the early years of the Second World War. The conflicts within the novel, between the Anglican church in Wales and Nonconformity, between being English or Welsh speaking, middle or working class, town or country dwellers, are all issues with which the young Humphreys would have been faced. It may also be argued that even seemingly insignificant details of a writer’s life emerge as important. Humphreys points out that he started to write poetry after writing limericks and lampoons in class, because he had been ill and consequently had failed an exam and had been ‘put into a class called the Remove’.²⁹ Poetry led him into writing as a career.

From 1937 to 1939 Humphreys studied history at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he enjoyed medieval history most of all (130). It is important too that he chose a Welsh university and was perhaps stimulated to read history by his recently awakened awareness of Welsh history and culture. He came into contact with contemporary Welsh-language literature and politics, learned Welsh and became a Welsh nationalist. Student life, often at a college closely resembling the University of Wales College of Aberystwyth, features in many of his novels, from the early The Little Kingdom and A Change of Heart (1951) through to ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence (1979–91). The emphasis on students as being both very politically aware and also politically active perhaps stems from his own experience there. Many contemporaries of Humphreys have made their names in the fields of history and literature. Glanmor Williams, for example, recalls the debate for newcomers at which he first saw Emyr and opposed him in the debate,³⁰ the kind of occasion that no doubt contributed to the debating scene in ‘Michael Edwards: the Nationalist at College’.³¹ By the time of writing The Best of Friends (1978), the author had become adept at diffusing personal experience and observation throughout his characters, yet the same mixture of political naivety, fervour and energy for action may be observed in many of the scenes. The language issue, of course, is almost always one of the subjects of Humphreys’s discourse and much of ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence is concerned with characters dealing with the issues of language, nationalism and politics as students and then intermittently throughout the rest of their lives. Glanmor Williams also recalls the atmosphere of fear and sombre expectation leading up to 1939 for that whole generation of students, aware that they might never complete their courses and that their careers might never happen. A Toy Epic, in particular, is redolent of such an atmosphere of foreboding.

At the outbreak of war, Humphreys registered as a conscientious objector and did farm work, first in Pembrokeshire and then in Llanfaglan, near Caernarfon. Humphreys describes the situation in a way that connects his personal rejection of a religious career with his desire to embrace a Welsh identity, which was so strong it literally drove him to the land, the two furthest corners from England:

They were appalled later by the fact that I was a conscientious objector; then they thought I’d gone completely off the rails. But they were very kind. My father – who hated to travel – came by train all the way to Aberystwyth to try to persuade me to continue with my course of study there. I was intending at that time to be an ordinand in the Church in Wales, but then I decided to go off, with Robin Richards, to live on this farm in Pembrokeshire. We thought that the world was going to come to an end, but that there would remain remnants of Welsh affiliation on the land…. I left university, to my father’s dismay, before ever I was called before a tribunal as a conscientious objector. I felt, by then, that I hadn’t the vocation to become a clergyman, although I’d been offered a place in St Stephen’s Hall, at Oxford. That had pleased my father no end, but I thought that was all wrong – I was a bit confused, really. I do remember the feeling that the only thing to do was to get back to the land, and I was already working on this farm when I was given the exemption to stay there by the tribunal – and later I had to get another tribunal to get off it, because the traditional exemption was for working on the land, so when I wanted to go to London to work for the Save the Children Fund I had to have the permission of a tribunal to be allowed to change. I don’t regret it – it was a huge education to do these things. I didn’t grow up until this started. (127)

This experience of agricultural work is used in Outside the House of Baal (1965) and in Unconditional Surrender (1996). Frank, in A Change of Heart (1951), has a graphically unpleasant time working on a farm too. It was a particularly important period for Humphreys because he consolidated his learning of Welsh and worked on the early version of A Toy Epic.

I acquired a bilingual brain by dint of effort. I am still reluctant to look too closely into why exactly I made the effort. It leaves me with a multiple burden of guilt – on my own behalf, on behalf of my parents, and on behalf of Welshness and the nation we belong to. It seems more than any other factor in my life to have dominated my faltering creative steps. (196–7)

Before the end of the war he joined the Save the Children Fund and moved into a house in Chelsea, which he remembers as full of books in several languages. It was there he became friendly with Basil McTaggart, who would later become an expert on the Etruscan civilization, awakening an interest in Humphreys.³² ‘I do of course, have a particular interest in the Etruscans, in part because of the parallel between their history and that of another vanished civilization, the Celts’ (135). The two years he subsequently spent as a war relief worker in the Middle East and Italy as an official of the Save the Children Fund were used in detail in The Voice of a Stranger (1949). He found this experience particularly exciting and rewarding: ‘there was a feeling that the world was going to change. For boys of only 24 or 25 we had a lot of power … we tried to do good of course’.³³ This is echoed in the foregrounding in The Voice of a Stranger of the three war-workers to the detriment sometimes of the focus on the love story and intrigues played out amongst the Italian characters.

Well before the novel appeared, Humphreys published an article in Wales in 1946, titled ‘A season in Florence: 1945’. This is presented as diary extracts made during the summer of 1945 describing Humphreys’s work in Italy with refugees. Both the setting and several incidents in The Voice of a Stranger can be seen to derive from the ‘real’ experience, if the diary is factual. Humphreys details the overcrowded refugee camp in Italy. The camp is badly – that is, both inefficiently and corruptly – run by the National Liberation Movement. It is possible to establish in unusual detail how close the link is between life and fiction in this early novel, in the sense of factual detail being repeated from personal experience. Much of the diary comprises jottings rather than structured sentences and Humphreys uses these as details to create the setting in an Italian camp immediately post war, upon which he superimposes the central action of the novel, the triangular relationship of Guido, Riccardo and Marcella, which culminates in the death of all three. Italy, in fact, seems to have been a particularly significant experience for him and appears as a location frequently in his work. It is a place to which he has returned numerous times; M. Wynn Thomas describes Italy as Humphreys’s ‘second home’.³⁴ The Italian Wife (1957) is mainly set in Italy but in other novels the country is used as a ‘time-out’ from the main action of the novel. In ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence Gwydion escapes to Italy, as does Sam Halkin in the Intermezzi of The Gift (1963). The most recent novel, The Gift of a Daughter (1998), is substantially set in Italy and, more explicitly than the previous novels, deals with ways in which the history and culture of northern Italy, particularly Tuscany, link with that of Wales for the author, becoming a metaphor, because of its lost language, for the fate of Wales. Indeed, it is possibly through his personal connections with Italy alongside his love of Italian literature³⁵ that Humphreys has formulated, under the influence of the historiography developed by Saunders Lewis, the idea that Wales is the real heir to the traditions and culture of Rome, an alternative, perhaps postcolonial, position to take, in view of the traditional British sense that English culture stems from Rome.

I think Italy is in many respects the home of European culture as a whole – the source of Latin, the source of medieval civilization, is Italy … Writers like Primo Levi and Italo Calvino remind us that the Italians are a defeated nation, who experienced a terrible war and have recovered…. They haven’t got the pretensions of the French, who are much more like the English in being imperialistic and convinced of their own superiority. The Italians haven’t got that at all, and neither do the Germans: these two great defeated nations seem to me to be the two most civilized European nations of our days. (134)

Whilst these observations may have been made from real experience of different nationalities, it is unfortunate that Humphreys’s detailed discussions of Welsh nationality should be illustrated by such sweeping and simplistic stereotyping of other nations. It is difficult not to conclude that the overriding feature of Welsh nationality as far as Humphreys is concerned is that of defeat at the hands of the English, which leads to Welsh identification with England’s other ‘enemies’ and the conclusion that imperialistic defines the English and French, and that only defeated nations can be civilized.

THE EARLY CAREER

The year 1946 was a key time for Emyr Humphreys. He completed his work in Italy, began training as a teacher at the University College of Wales, Bangor, and married Elinor Jones, the daughter of a Nonconformist minister. He also published his first novel, The Little Kingdom.

If you were born in 1919, as I was, the entire period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War was the time you needed for growing up. Nothing really resolved itself, for me, until the end of the Second War; it was then, really, that you had your compass bearings. (127)

At this time Humphreys was able to combine his political ideals and his creative talents. Although he would continue to write poetry, he had realized that fiction was to be his principal métier: ‘I found my form when I found fiction and I could have jumped up and down for joy at discovering this, because I had the other problem as well: I wanted to write in Welsh, but I didn’t have enough Welsh for that purpose’ (128). Humphreys’s language dilemma was to continue throughout his career but to an extent it may have not only created the particular tension that would lead to his best work, but also facilitated his desire to write fiction:

One of the escape routes is fiction, because story is a language of its own, a music of its own, a supranational language which is detached from the cultural problem. And that may be one reason why, culturally situated as I am, I find fiction such a very attractive form. (131)

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:

The natural ability for literary expression continued to flow far more easily through my first language. Developing as a writer in wartime brought mixed blessings; first, a view of rural societies in Wales that had remained solidly monoglot; then a taste of, and for, Mediterranean culture and the excitement of the Italienische Reise by courtesy of Allied Forces. Subsequently, living in London meant concentrating on the novel, mastering a craft and developing a proficiency in that form along with an ambition to earn a living as a writer. I have to confess that it was only when I returned to Wales to work in the BBC that I was able to resume the missionary ardour of my youth.⁴¹

However, a comment made in his lecture ‘The empty space – creating a novel’, given in America in 2000, suggests some disenchantment at this time with the role of the novel in society:

The serious novel to which I had been prepared to dedicate my energies was in danger of becoming as obsolete as the myths which I had found so inspiring. The novel was bourgeois in origin and had flourished best in a high bourgeois society which no longer existed. The mass media had delivered the art of storytelling into the hands of those best qualified to manipulate the masses…. I had a distinct impression of ice cracking under my feet and the best thing I could do was to jump, at the very last moment, on a passing raft. I joined the BBC. (218)

In ‘Men of letters’ (1999) he describes the post as ‘a satisfactory halfway house between two worlds: the attraction of the cosmopolitan and the need to be close to the source’ (9). Clearly, Humphreys was well aware, even early in his writing career, of the importance to his writing of Wales, the place and the society into which he had been born. A prime motivation was to bring European drama to Wales (135) and during his career in radio he ‘met very interesting writers and thinkers and producers who must have had a considerable influence on me’ (135); in particular, he remembers the influences of Brecht and Pinter, established by way of his contact with Martin Esslin.⁴² Elsewhere Humphreys has expanded on his aims as a drama producer in radio with the BBC: first, an emphasis on encouraging new writing in both English and Welsh; secondly, the need for translation into Welsh of a variety of European drama; and, thirdly, the duty he felt to make Welsh writing known outside Wales.⁴³ Interestingly, he found that when he began working in television his priorities reversed and ‘making Welsh writing known to a wider world became my chief occupation’ (197).

Humphreys’s career in the media and as a novelist writing in English about Wales, combined with the tensions, already described, which he felt about that issue, were inextricably connected with the wider political struggles which were ongoing: ‘In cultural terms most of the 1960s and all of the 1970s in Wales were taken up by the struggle to secure a Welsh-language television channel’ (199). For Humphreys this was to culminate in 1973 in a prison sentence for refusing to pay his television licence fee as a protest.⁴⁴ His priority, in spite of writing his fiction in Welsh, has always been the preservation of the Welsh language. His reasons for its importance in maintaining a separate Welsh identity rather than being subsumed with England into one British identity follow:

A bilingual nation, like a bilingual brain, is, in the cultural sense, a society of societies. For it to remain bilingual and function creatively on this basis, all the device of translation should be mobilized to give the older and the weaker partner the strength to persist. It is the older language after all that has access to those primitive powers with which a people struggles to understand the world and celebrate its own precarious existence. (199)

Humphreys was head of Radio Drama for the BBC in Cardiff until 1958, when he became a drama producer for BBC television and spent the summer in London being trained in television production skills.⁴⁵ This experience is used in The Gift (1963), which is centred on the acting world, of film rather than television, and set in London. Gwydion, one of the central characters of the sequence, also works in television and film and the notebooks from the writing of Outside the House of Baal (1965) show how Humphreys constructed the character of Thea using aspects of the personalities of actors and actresses with whom he had worked. The ten years Humphreys spent at the BBC ‘was an important period for me’ (136); he particularly recalls the influences of John Ormond’s film-making on his literary style and Walter Todds’s interest in philosophy, which led Humphreys to another important influence, Wittgenstein.

BBC Wales in those years was the best possible place for an aspiring chronicler of Welsh life to be. This happy period of eight years experimenting in radio, television and film not only taught me a great deal, and I was always a slow learner: it tied me that much closer to my proper subject … My ambition was not merely to be a serious novelist: I had to be a serious Welsh novelist. (218)

Nevertheless, Humphreys’s principal desire, to write novels concerned with Wales, was not profitable enough for him to support his family at this juncture. ‘It became clear to me by about the middle fifties that the subject that interested me [that is, Wales] that gave me a reason for writing, was not a subject that interested the reading public outside Wales to any meaningful extent’ (133–4). From 1962 until 1965 Humphreys was a freelance writer and director. During the 1960s he lived in Penarth, close to Cardiff (132), making a conscious commitment to remain in Wales. ‘I was once asked to move to London, which would have been a more profitable life, and in some ways a more interesting one. But given my family commitments, Wales was a much more suitable field for working in’ (61). In 1965 he again made a fateful decision, this time to leave the BBC in Cardiff and take a lectureship in drama at Bangor, where he remained until 1972. He has explained the latter as a conscious choice, due to the desire to raise his children in that kind of community: ‘we had a large family so I was really torn between the responsibility for bringing up four children and doing what I wanted to do’.⁴⁶ Humphreys appears to have transferred something of his dilemma to his fiction.⁴⁷ By the time of writing A Man’s Estate, however, Humphreys appears much more able to see Wales completely and with a sense of detachment, which allows him to present both the positive and negative elements of Welsh life, religion and geography.⁴⁸ It could perhaps be argued that his greatest work has been produced at the moment of tension at crossroads of his life. Humphreys has commented that at the time of writing Outside the House of Baal he

had to make a choice about carrying on with a career in television or being a novelist: and a parallel decision about being based in London or living in Wales. The book shows I made off with some professional secrets and settled for chipping away at the novel on my native heath.⁴⁹

Perhaps part of the novel’s success stems not only from the tension of choice, but from the combination of skills stemming from the tension.

CONSOLIDATION – THE MIDDLE YEARS

Humphreys wrote The Gift (1963) during unpaid leave from work, and similarly Outside the House of Baal (1965). This was a particularly fervent time for committed Welsh nationalists. Saunders Lewis’s radio broadcast in 1963, ‘Tynged yr Iaith’, moved young Welsh people to ‘a kind of anti-colonial insurrection. They worked for the rejuvenation of their culture and their country.’⁵⁰ Both Thomas and Humphreys agree that this urgency was not reflected in the short story collection Natives, which appeared in 1968, a text that Thomas finds comparable with Joyce’s Dubliners in its presentation of Wales as a paralysed colonial society:

if I could think of any work of English fiction by a Welsh writer that could qualify as an example of what is nowadays called post-colonial fiction, I would immediately nominate Natives. The very title suggests as much – ‘natives’ being so evidently the pejorative term used by the colonizers of the colonized, but also being the term then reclaimed by the colonized to affirm their own aboriginal status. (189)

Although both writer and critic are agreed that Humphreys would need time to digest the political experiences in which he was engaged during the 1960s before they would transform into fiction, their discussion of Wales’s postcoloniality is important for an understanding of Humphreys’s thinking on this issue. He refers to the title Natives as ‘stemming from the Latin natus – meaning, of course, a person born in that particular place’ (189) and his reasoning that ‘these stories were about what was happening to people at that time born and bred in Wales – and living in what you call the post-colonial situation’ suggests that for Humphreys, at least, Wales’s situation was indubitably postcolonial, both in the 1960s and in the present day.

That situation still exists, of course. A great deal of the post-colonial situation – that is, the consolidation of colonial ‘occupation’ into a settled state of affairs – depended on the willing subservience of the natives. And this involved breeding in them an admiration of the colonial power. And now that, in Wales, the coercive power of the colonizing nation has been removed, and England is experiencing its own distinctive set of difficulties that are also post-imperial, these are not of much help to the very different post-colonial problems of Wales … It means going back to your earliest roots – in some way redefining yourself – and thus regaining the confidence to face this new world. That is the only way for us in Wales to work through the trauma of our present lack of confidence. (189)

Humphreys’s university post at Bangor left him little time for writing, although he published a considerable amount of poetry during this time⁵¹ and worked on the first novel to be published in what would become ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence, National Winner (1971). He left full-time employment in order to concentrate on his writing; however, his fiction was not a commercial success and his interest in working in the Welsh language led him back to TV work: ‘because I had to earn a living – I’d left the university and re-entered the world of television, and the trick was to earn enough in that medium and carry on the series’ (137).

In the early seventies I became involved in Welsh language campaigns and protests so that the first volume of the sequence did not appear until 1974. This was reasonably well received but the concluding sentence of one not otherwise unfriendly review gave me somewhat furiously to think: This book has as little separate identity as the principality from which it came. I told myself that a metropolitan reviewer may believe that what he does not know can hardly be worth knowing; but that this was not yet a truth universally acknowledged: moreover, in the novel any character fully alive and worth his salt is perfectly capable of both deciding for him or herself what is and is not important and for making manifest his or her distinct and separate identity.⁵²

‘THE LAND OF THE LIVING’ SEQUENCE AND THE LATER NOVELS

From 1972 onwards Humphreys has been a full-time writer and in 1974 Flesh and Blood was published and ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence properly begun.⁵³ ‘In the 1980s, when I was in my sixties, I had a very fruitful period when I could concentrate entirely on my own work, and that is when I completed the series called The Land of the Living, published The Taliesin Tradition, and produced short novels like Jones and The Anchor Tree’ (54).⁵⁴

Humphreys himself has commented on the interrelationship between his work, both in English and Welsh and in fiction, and drama. In an interview at the time of the publication of The Anchor Tree in 1980 he pointed out that the novel owed something to both a television play he wrote around 1963 about ‘a young girl as sacrificial victim’ and a film he worked on in 1975 ‘about the Welsh in Pennsylvania’.⁵⁵ The role of the writer also features in his work. John Cilydd is arguably the central concern of the sequence and he is a poet as well as a solicitor. Chris in The Italian Wife (1957) wants to write, Morgan in The Anchor Tree wants to write history, as does the rector in Unconditional Surrender. Along with the minister in The Anchor Tree, who dies before his history is written, most of these writers fail to produce. Aled, in The Gift of a Daughter, is an academic, who is researching Boethius and then Amalasuntha, Theodoric’s daughter. His writing, however, mostly consists of copying and/or translating Boethius’s work. He even loses his academic post. Boethius, on the other hand, was supremely successful, as a translator, a critic and an original writer. Clearly, from the depth of detail with which his life and work is used by Humphreys in this novel, Boethius and his writings are a major interest of Humphreys.

As well as being a writer, Boethius is a figure out of history and an examination of Humphreys’s novels indicates how strong an influence history is on him as an artist. Novels like A Toy Epic and A Man’s Estate seek to present a record of life in Wales at a given time and are, therefore, a kind of historical record. A Toy Epic is indeed a fictional but also almost a personal record. Novels like Outside the House of Baal span a wider period of Welsh history and focus more particularly on a specific topic, here Nonconformity and its effect on Welsh society. ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence is even more ambitious, attempting to trace the history of Welsh people in the twentieth century through its characters, which are on one level representative tools. Most of his novels are set in Wales and show the reader, through glimpses of the kinds of worlds which the author himself has entered, as shown above, how Humphreys believes certain people in certain parts of Wales at certain times came to be what they were. These are fictional worlds but they are formed from an author’s idea of what actually was, that is, they are a kind of history. Contrasting with the sequence of novels, Humphreys’s independent novels published after 1970 are much more theoretically aware, particularly of current theories concerning history and its connection with literature and the diversification of history which has allowed formerly hidden histories to be uncovered: the history of women, of colonized peoples, of underclasses and various sections of societies. So The Anchor Tree (1980), for example, deals with the lost history of the Welsh colonizers of North America, the hidden history of a possibly Jewish orphan from Auschwitz and the politically incorrect history of a German aristocrat. Although Humphreys is best known as a novelist, nearly all of his fiction is an attempt to construct history of a kind.

In The Gift of a Daughter, Humphreys makes use of his personal knowledge of life in Wales. The protagonist, Aled, lives with his family on Anglesey, where Humphreys has lived at Llanfairpwll with family nearby since the mid-1980s. Aled also works at a nearby university, which transposed to real life would have to be Bangor, where Humphreys worked from 1965 to 1972. Not only is much of the novel set in northern Italy, with which Humphreys is very familiar (as outlined above), but Muzio, Aled’s friend, is, according to M. Wynn Thomas, based on Humphreys’s closest friend, Basil McTaggart who was a specialist in the culture of the ancient Etruscans. On a much more light-hearted note the author names the new vice-chancellor of Aled’s university Sir Kingsley Jenkins and his wife, Lady Shirley, suggesting a parodic combination of Welsh names, left-wing politicians and literary figures: Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Kingsley Amis. Kingsley Amis was an acquaintance of Humphreys during his period in London, and is well known in turn for his use of Welsh friends and university acquaintances in his novels. Humphreys commits him to destroying the departments of philosophy and classics and inserting tourism and business studies in their stead.

Virtually all of the settings in Humphreys’s novels are either Wales, London or Italy, places where Humphreys has lived. Specific places used in Wales are also usually the areas in which he has lived: the north-east coast, Aberystwyth, Cardiff, the Llªn peninsula and Anglesey. Indeed, the reader of Humphreys’s novels will notice that landscape is important to the author, particularly when the novel is set in Wales and deals with Welsh issues. Humphreys has recently explained the connection he feels exists between the Welsh language and the landscape of Wales: ‘The true source of our being is in a language and a tradition so old that it shapes the landscape in which we live and move. It is this landscape that sustains and inspires us.’⁵⁶ A Toy Epic illustrates how important landscape is to Humphreys in the formation of character. Michael’s ‘broad valley’, Albie’s ‘cul-de-sac’ and Iorwerth’s ‘heart of ninety acres, at the end of a broad valley, at the headquarters of Noah, in an anchored ark’⁵⁷ all define aspects of their personality and, more importantly, their future prospects. It would have been relatively easy for the anglicized young Humphreys to have grown up without seeing his home patch as ‘one of the four corners of Wales’, and it is extremely important to his development as a novelist that he did so.⁵⁸ His identification with Wales and politicization were least strong during the periods when he lived in London and later Cardiff (working frequently in London). He has remarked that working for the BBC was ‘a wicked temptation’ in that it was obligatory not to be actively involved in politics.⁵⁹ He sets the urbane actor, Sam Halkin, in The Gift, and the lonely, disaffected Jones (Jones) in London and Bedwyr, the successful architect, in Cardiff; but London is more commonly seen in his work as the place where successful Welsh people go and forget their roots, becoming submerged in the desire to be successful in British terms. What Cardiff, London and, of course, Italy do in effect is express ‘difference’; they indicate what by comparison Humphreys’s north-east corner of Wales really is.

It is perhaps significant that Amy Parry, the character who most shoulders the burden of representing Welsh society in his work, was born in Humphreys’s own north-east corner in a rural area of tiny smallholdings, coastal coal-mine quarries, autocratic landowners and small seaside towns. John Cilydd, in contrast, the representative of Welsh nationalism and culture, comes from the north-west, possibly the Llªn peninsula, but certainly the area north of Aberystwyth and stretching along the southern coast of Llªn, which Humphreys considers to be the crucible of Welsh myth. Amy in her role of politician and humanitarian, like Humphreys himself, is drawn to London at one period but is brought back to north Wales by Cilydd, the writer and nationalist, to be dissatisfied in Pendraw.⁶⁰ It is Peredur who, believing there to be another side to the (hi)story as told by his mother, researches his father’s life by touring through the landscape around his birthplace. He finds ‘a tilted outcrop of rock … shot through with mysterious veins of white quartz’⁶¹ which he links with the legend of Blodeuwedd, and Amy, as Thomas has pointed out, is amongst other things ‘a modern redaction of Blodeuwedd’.⁶² It also connects with the mound known as The Gop on the outskirts of Trelawnyd, mentioned earlier. According to Thomas it is a mound Humphreys has been excavating in imagination all his life.⁶³

THE CELTIC GODDESS

Humphreys’s interest in the female character can be discussed on a variety of levels. There are personal reasons, but it can also be understood in postcolonial terms as a way of both connecting with Wales and forging separation from England, if England is seen as a bastion of patriarchy and control. Humphreys himself has remarked that women have become more and more central to his work.

I’m a great admirer of women I must say. Especially in the combination of the mythological and the historical, which is something I’m always very much engaged with – there the woman is absolutely vital, the ‘Great White Goddess’, and men are peripheral. As far as the Welsh experience is concerned woman is very, very important: she’s central, she’s continuity, she’s survival.⁶⁴

What is slightly surprising then is the fact that his protagonists are usually men. Amy Parry may be the central figure of the sequence but Cilydd is the more important character by the end and certainly appears to have more of the values of which the author would approve and which are positively Welsh. In the more recent independent novels, Jones, Unconditional Surrender and The Gift of a Daughter, it is true that the more dynamic characters are female. The females take action, are enigmas, break with tradition. The experience being described, however, is that of the male: Jones, the rector, Aled Morgan. They are misfits, outsiders in some way, disillusioned and generally redundant, examples of the (emotionally) disabled colonial figures mentioned earlier. Cilydd would have identified with them had he survived. One must ask what if any connection this has with Humphreys himself.

Humphreys’s attitude towards women, or rather female characters, is more unusual than the perspective taken in the remark quoted above. The female character most typical in his work is not only ‘vital’ and ‘central’; she is usually young, beautiful, rebellious and sexually experienced. In a novel set in the 1980s or 1990s this is arguably modern, liberated or typical behaviour, but it is more surprising in novels written in the 1940s and 1950s. From The Little Kingdom onwards the pattern has been consistent. Rhiannon Morgan is the daughter of a minister.⁶⁵ She has sex with Owen Richards, who does not love her, but not with Geraint, who does. Lucy, in A Change of Heart, connects the male characters together; she is Howell’s wife, Frank’s sister and Alcuin’s lover. In The Italian Wife Paola desires her husband’s son and in The Gift Polly has more than one sexual partner. In A Man’s Estate the chaste Hannah is balanced by her half-sister, the promiscuous Ada, as Kate and Lydia are balanced in Outside the House of Baal. By the later novels Humphreys is portraying more than one generation, but in each novel there is a ‘vital’ young girl who either has sex with men she believes she loves⁶⁶ or who behaves suggestively with older men to control them.⁶⁷ What is interesting is the reason for the author’s fascination with this character type. Part of the reason may be the interest in Blodeuwedd, the woman made to fulfil one man’s desires but who dares to have desires of her own and is drastically punished. Another possibility is that the mother figure with which Humphreys grew up was a Lydia more than a Kate. Thomas suggests this when he describes Humphreys’s mother as ‘in her youth a free spirit, lively, strong-willed and unconventional, who eagerly embraced marriage to a schoolmaster as a convenient escape from a claustrophobic home background’.⁶⁸ Whatever the reason Humphreys has for seeing the dynamic force in both family and social politics as the extrovert, unconventional woman, it has been a strongly motivating force behind much of his fiction.

One of the likely reasons for Humphreys’s persistent use of this character type is his perennial desire to discuss the Welsh condition. His female protagonists are frequently representative characters, at one level at least symbolic of Wales or the Welsh experience. His view, therefore, of Wales as being (over a period of centuries and due to its colonial subordination) a passive, possibly even an emasculated, country, combined with his desire to see Wales develop more independence, leads him to reuse this character type. What a great deal of recent criticism on a variety of writers has asserted is a strong connection between the feminist and the postcolonial position, between feminist reaction to patriarchal systems and postcolonial resistance to imperialism. In Humphreys’s case his concern to address Wales’s colonial situation results in an implicit endorsement of (Welsh) patriarchal society, rather than in the formation of a solid front between a colonized culture and a subordinated gender, ‘colonized’ by the male. His dilemma may be usefully compared with that of Conrad in his novella, Heart of Darkness. Only two women in the novella speak: the conventional aunt and Kurtz’s Intended, who, like the aunt, is not named except in relation to the male; both are enamoured of their own subservience to patriarchy. Humphreys’s presentation of women is much less clear cut than this. His women are complex and often the focus of his story, frequently rebelling against male domination. However, just as Conrad has been accused of writing in the language of imperialism and thus negating his critique of imperialist activities,⁶⁹ so Humphreys’s use of the English language may be accused of subtly reinforcing the patriarchal situation which his female characters question. In Heart of Darkness the females are doubly distanced from the author by the story’s being doubly narrated by male, seafaring, bourgeois, white, British characters. We know that a male teller is portraying these women for a male audience but we may not safely assume his point of view is also the author’s. Usually, however, Humphreys’s presentation is direct and authorial, although it is dramatic and lacks (in the later work) much explicit authorial interpretation. Nevertheless, men are, for the most part, presented as the controlling element in the family and in society at large, locally, regionally and nationally.

This shows how difficult it is for an author (who wishes to portray the female position in an enlightened way or criticize the treatment of women in the historical past in his fiction) to criticize his own society, when he is simultaneously trying to criticize his nation’s treatment at the hands of another nation. Thus Humphreys’s instinct to present Welsh life as idyllic in the past, because it is Welsh,⁷⁰ conflicts with his desire to present the female as wrongly treated. So we see Amy Parry thwarted by the unnaturally unattractive uncle’s overbearing male domination of his niece and his wife, but simultaneously we see society as a whole working well in the same patriarchal way and Amy as a ‘harridan’ in her demands for control in her married relationship with John Cilydd. On the one hand, the author is trying to show how Welsh society existed, in history, and is thus constricted by what he believes it was really like, that is, patriarchal. On the other hand, he wishes to assert that Welsh is different from and better than English. And, through the use of Celtic myth, the emphasis on the goddess as the source of power, and the stereotype of the Welsh Mam as the linchpin of Welsh society, he wishes to show woman as central.

THE LANGUAGE QUESTION

Humphreys’s use of the English language in novels in which he is concerned to express and explore the condition of Wales, in particular the ways in which it might be seen as ‘different’ from England rather than subsumed into a unified identity, is a further dilemma for the author and one which merits brief mention here. By 1990 he had decided: ‘the language, absent or present, remains the key to the Welsh condition’.⁷¹ However, he himself had learnt the language in his years at Aberystwyth as a student and whilst doing farm work during the war. A central dilemma for a politically conscious Welshman, brought up with English as his first language, has to be in what language he should write and for what audience. It is perhaps inevitable that Humphreys’s fiction should be exclusively in English, the language in which he had been both raised and educated.⁷² And, writing in English, it is understandable that he should aim to be published in London and to reach as wide an audience as possible in order to forge a successful career as a writer. Nevertheless, this remains a dilemma for the author throughout his career and is, perhaps, a contributory factor to the author’s choices of subject matter in his novels, many of which are very deliberately and self-consciously Welsh in setting and theme. The early novels, in particular, swing from Wales and back again,⁷³ each arguably unbalanced either by the excessively emotional charge of Wales as an issue or by its absence.⁷⁴ They also demonstrate an increasing awareness of the importance of Wales to the author and a development in ways of portraying Wales through fiction. The importance of inheritance and personal responsibility to the plot of these novels appears to have led the author to the use of classical myth as a means of exploring man’s relationship with his society and his culture, which in turn will lead in the later novels to the author’s extensive use of Celtic myth to explore the condition of Wales.

This chapter has not tried to argue that Humphreys’s fiction is autobiographical but that the place of his birth, the place in which, and the people amongst whom, he resides and not least the ancestors both specific and general who peopled his past, are all ingredients of his fiction and part of the reason for its existence. Additionally, a brief overview of Humphreys’s life suggests that he has been deeply affected by a series of historical events: the First World War overshadowed his early life; Penyberth profoundly affected his sense of Welsh identity; the Second World War was of immense significance, including the war work in the immediate aftermath which opened up his sense of European identity; and the Welsh language and devolution issues of the 1960s and 1970s have been of great importance to him. The events themselves and the issues they raise all recur in his fiction, even in those novels written most recently. And on a personal level the contemporaries and teachers with whom he mixed at school and university helped foster a lifelong obsession with history, whilst with his marriage he was inducted into an extremely important affinity with Nonconformist culture, which, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, had been (along with industrialization) the great formative influence on the making of modern Wales. In fact the urge to educate his audience has increased with the later fiction, perhaps coinciding with the Welsh population’s rejection of devolution. And, as later chapters will attempt to show, Humphreys has consistently woven Welsh history and Celtic myth into his novels, in part with the possible aim of altering the consciousness of the English-speaking Welsh population.

It should not be forgotten that he was first of all a student of history and that Humphreys himself explained in 1984: ‘I am constantly aware of the necessary restraints imposed on my inventions by the discipline of history … Fiction makes its contribution to History not so much by keeping the record straight as by making reference to it an abiding necessity.’⁷⁵ This belief is close to Barthes’s argument in Writing Degree Zero that: ‘Writing, free in its beginnings, is finally the bond which links the writer to a History which is itself in chains: society stamps upon him the unmistakable signs of art so as to draw him along the more inescapably in its own process of alienation.’⁷⁶ Humphreys’s commitment to Wales, to the past, and to the society in which he lives is well documented, not least in his own words in the interviews he has given. It marks his difference in one significant way from the modernist movement which was such a formative influence upon him and which promoted the idea of the writer in exile. ‘The torch of creativity is in the hands of the natives now, rather than the exiles, because exile has become meaningless in a world that has shrunk to a parish.’⁷⁷ Humphreys’s conscious choice is to be a native, to stand ‘in the one spot, exploring in depth what you have within the square mile’. This choice has clearly had a profound effect upon the construction of his novels and has led to their connection, in some cases, with a type of realism, which to the modern critic might appear outdated or naive. In the same interview Humphreys argues: ‘What you have to fall back on, if you have lost this connection with a given society or a given past, is a world of fantasy, and hallucinatory self-centred writing does not appeal to me very much’ (29).

Alongside the works of fiction that have been discussed here, throughout his career Humphreys has produced factual articles and books that are both important cultural texts and also throw interesting light onto his own creative work.⁷⁸ The Taliesin Tradition (1989) is particularly important in an understanding of Humphreys’s attitude to Wales, delineating as it does Welsh culture, history and literature over the past two millennia. It celebrates and explores Welsh difference and character forged in ‘a history of unending resistance and unexpected survival’ (1), qualities that ‘create the invincible and yet indissoluble bonds of attachment that bind a Welshman to his inheritance and test his character from the cradle to the grave’. It is also a poetic identity, which has developed from the sixth-century praise poetry of Taliesin, providing ‘the resilient core of Welsh identity in all its manifestations’.⁷⁹ The patterns of the events charted in this text are re-created by Humphreys time and again in his fiction, in both characters and events, his use of the phrase ‘bonds of attachment’ for the title of the final volume in his sequence merely underlining the fact. His connection of the proliferation of myth in the lives of a marginalized people to their survival as a nation, and its consequent continual reappearance in a range of techniques from important underpinning structural device to casual allusion in his novels will be dealt with in a later chapter, but it marks his understanding decades ago of what would now be termed postcolonial strategies of appropriation. In discussing Welsh reaction to Offa of Mercia in the eighth century Humphreys describes the Welsh psyche developing ‘under siege conditions’ (10) and it is his insight that those siege conditions have continued to the present time, shifting from the real to the metaphorical image of Wales as the besieged fortress. From Taliesin and Merlin onwards he finds a great deal of shape-shifting, but he never loses sight of that separate identity and the necessity for keeping alive the native myths and stories to preserve it, particularly in the face of the loss of the indigenous language for part of the population.

Humphreys’s own ability to use the Welsh language has clearly increased year by year as evidenced by his not only producing television scripts and translating but also writing poetry in Welsh. It is not surprising then, that given the importance to him of Saunders Lewis’s ideas⁸⁰ and having consolidated his own in The Taliesin Tradition, he should have then considered

the next logical step would have been to continue with my novel sequence in Welsh, turning The Land of the Living into Tir y Rhai Byw. Since it was, in any event teetering on the brink of the uncommercial, there would not have been all that many royalties to lose.⁸¹

Lewis, when consulted, advised Humphreys to continue what he had started. What Humphreys has done, however, is to turn even more deliberately to Europe in reaction against what he sees as ‘the mighty current of Anglo-American culture’ (182).

I certainly believe in the benefits of the European Union for Wales and Welshness and the Welsh language … If an idea of the oneness of Europe was already beginning to develop in the sixties, partly as a result of the ever increasing ease of travel to the Continent, then that idea has grown enormously in strength and complexity over the last couple of decades. (182–3)

His belief is that American English along with Chinese is set to dominate the world (133) and that all European nations will eventually have to deal with this issue, not merely the ones whose language is under threat internally. He feels that Wales will have to choose between being European or American and: ‘If it’s going to be an American Wales then it’s going to be in even greater danger than it is in being a minor part of Britain’ (133). Ironically, it is the emergent postcolonial writing that, Humphreys believes, is strengthening the dominance of Anglo-American English:

My material is basically drawn from the Welsh experience, and that experience becomes more intelligible, in my opinion, if it is viewed in a European context. If you’re concerned with Welsh-language culture, as in part I am, you’re not dealing with a great world language, like English; you’re dealing with a language under siege … it benefits us in Wales to see ourselves in this context, and not to be swept away by the mighty current of Anglo-American culture. And this current is particularly strong and growing stronger. It is being fed by the extraordinary, brilliant outburst of post-imperial fiction in English from India and Africa and black America. In the last decade the economic power of Anglo-American publishing has created a vogue for what might be called ‘cosmopolitan fiction’. This has little room for a cottage industry like mine. (182–3)

In spite of the self-deprecation, the reasoning is somewhat specious, attributing imperial connotations to English (the language) rather than to the English (the nation) – a problem outlined by Ashcroft et al. in the early days of postcolonial studies in his suggestion of using english to distinguish this difference⁸² – whilst simultaneously regarding that language as recently empowered by work from former colonies. It is certainly possible to argue national distinctions as existing between Chinua Achebe and V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, in spite of their each using a version of English. Indeed, the argument that English is an imperially tainted language that subsumes all other identities is counteracted by arguing the current prevalence of American English.

The language issue is further complicated for Humphreys by the fact that he speaks sometimes, as immediately above, on behalf of the Welsh-language culture of Wales, and at others, as when discussing his fiction, on behalf of English-language Welsh culture. His decision to continue writing fiction in English, his first language, does not have the personal necessity it had for the young author immediately post-war, whose early version of A Toy Epic was written in English and later converted into Welsh for radio. Whilst Humphreys would probably like to contribute to literature written in Welsh, by writing in English, and for many of his novels using London-based publishers, he reaches all of the inhabitants of Wales, alongside the rest of Britain and many countries abroad. Whilst his educational purpose of (re)familiarizing Welsh natives with their indigenous history and myths is possibly paramount, individuals of at least part-Welsh descent are situated in many other parts of Britain, as well as abroad, and neither does it work contrary to his purposes to present a Welsh point of view to non-Welsh readers.⁸³ Humphreys remains concerned about all aspects of Welsh literature:

Both of our linguistic cultures are suffering from the same vitamin deficiencies, so to speak, and so their growth is stunted. Our bilingual society is no healthier in this respect than is our monolingual society – which is a very serious problem, because we are all of us so readily recruited to the service of the British media and communications industry which is currently struggling to perpetuate what is left of the English imperial mentality: despising the European Union and grudgingly admiring the United States for commandeering their role and language. (190)

Early in his career Humphreys aspired to become the voice of the tribe, the People’s Remembrancer, to present the dissident perspective; his recent Conversations with M. Wynn Thomas indicate little has changed:

given that the colonial mentality is actually being perpetuated, through the media and other ‘opinion-forming’ institutions, in present-day post-imperial Wales, it is the duty and function of the creative artist to redress the balance, because the relationship between established power and communication is too close. A writer can therefore use the form of fiction to reveal hidden truths – which is, of course, a paradox, since in one sense any work of fiction is necessarily a tissue of lies. (191)

This chapter has attempted to show the reasons why Emyr Humphreys became committed to Welsh nationalist politics and the ways in which his political views are reflected in and influence his fiction. His interest in Wales, however, is far deeper than merely political. It coincides with a deep, what Humphreys calls ‘abiding’, interest in the past: the history, culture, literature and perhaps especially the myths – and, because he is Welsh, of Wales in particular. The ways in which he has contrived to use myth and history in his fiction will be examined in detail in later chapters. Because he has consistently used his own and his ancestors’ lived experience in Wales as the raw material of his novels, continually reinforcing the idea of Wales as a separate nation through the content of his fiction, and because he holds in his mind the concept of Wales as marginalized, its people as subsumed into a colonial mentality and the language of the majority as one of cultural supremacy, it seems reasonable to regard Emyr Humphreys as a postcolonial writer.