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
