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.
The Emergence of Humphreys as a Postcolonial Writer
For all serious purposes in modern literature … the language of a Welshman is and must be English; … the moment he has anything of real importance to say, anything the world will the least care to hear, he must speak English.1
This chapter is concerned with Humphreys’s early fiction: the first six novels published between 1946 and 1957 and particularly the seventh, A Toy Epic, which was finally published in 1958. The main postcolonial strategies that Humphreys has used throughout his career emerged and were refined during this period: the use of Wales as the location of the plot, the use of Welsh history and myth, the discussion of the variety of Welsh life. The focus of the discussion will be on the ways in which these techniques evolved and the reasons behind their use – the extent to which those reasons are due to personal, postcolonial or literary considerations.2
Humphreys’s first six novels are all prefigured by or patterned on existing text/s from the realms of history, literature and mythology. The first two novels are heavily dependent on such sources, the second two much less so, with the third pair more heavily prefigured again. One possible reason for this may be these novels’ relationship to the publication of A Toy Epic, which was first mooted for publication in 1943 and finally appeared in 1958, by which time the first six novels had appeared. The Gift then followed A Toy Epic’s success, and that novel is possibly the least prefigured or patterned by other texts. If the author was encouraged to create a wholly original plot by the reception given to A Toy Epic in 1958,3 it is equally possible that the rejection of his first attempt at a novel caused or contributed to an early insecurity about his own ability to plot a novel without the help of structural patterning from other texts.
As M. Wynn Thomas recounts in the ‘Introduction’ to A Toy Epic, Humphreys began writing the work in the form of a verse novel in 1940. His contact with Graham Greene as the literary editor of the Spectator, which had already published some of Humphreys’s poetry, encouraged him to send his manuscript to Greene at Eyre and Spottiswoode. The ‘Introduction’ details the early progress of this work and the reception it received from critical advisers, including T. S. Eliot and Kate Roberts as well as Greene himself. The consensus was that the work was structurally faulty. Humphreys would appear to have accepted this at that time and begun work on The Little Kingdom instead. It is possible that Greene’s comments on the second half of the work (the part which would have formed the continuation of the present novel), Eliot’s criticism of the work’s ‘architectural design’ and Kate Roberts’s argument that the plot followed an unbalanced or asymmetrical pattern together convinced Humphreys that his weakness as a writer was in the construction of plot. Aristotle, of course, saw plot as absolutely essential to the construction of tragedy and Humphreys, who has many times mentioned Aristotle when discussing fiction, may have chosen to use Shakespearean and mythological prefigurations in order to underpin his story and bolster his confidence. Alternatively, he may have been drawn to use these plots by his interest in Shakespearean and classical tragedy. His interest in this drama would certainly have made him aware that great writers have in the past used already existing material, even if this was not used in the prefigurative but rather in the retelling sense. Certainly, in an interview with M. Wynn Thomas he described plotting a novel as something he found difficult in his early career.4
THE FIRST FOUR NOVELS
We have seen that Humphreys had cause to doubt his own ability in the construction of plot. Certainly, in his first six novels he uses various texts both to form a plotline and to create prefigurative suspense and suggestion, and it is the use of some of these texts that can be called a strategy of appropriation. However, the use of other texts with no relationship to Wales – indeed, the use of Shakespearean tragedy can be seen as exactly the opposite technique, reinforcing the master language – would indicate that at this stage the author’s purpose is actually literary (a structuring technique) rather than deliberately postcolonial. A brief examination of the types of text used by Humphreys to bolster the plots of his early novels alongside the movement to and from the backdrop of Wales should indicate the extent to which Wales is important at this stage, and whether the use of Welsh history and myth is for postcolonial purposes or
