not the bullier. John J. White has pointed out that myth is often used as a loose analogy rather than ‘a scaffold upon which the modern story has been erected’,53 which can make the novel too deterministic but, whereas Humphreys absorbed the deterministic element into both the characterization and the Nonconformist background in A Man’s Estate, the plot of this sixth novel is very rigidly determined. Ioan Williams has indicated the ‘deficiencies of structure and problems of focus’ and an ‘uncomfortable tension between the moral subject and the pattern of action’.54 Because Humphreys structures much of the plot around Richard (the Theseus character) rather than Paola (Phaedra) and develops the sexual side of Chris (Hippolytus) in a way not prefigured by the myth, there is a blurring of focus and an uncomfortable lack of sympathy for all three modern characters. The rural Welsh Nonconformist society evoked in A Man’s Estate features a nexus of tensions between the power of the Bible, hidden murder and English and Welsh cultures, and these internal conflicts sustain comparison with those in great tragedy, whether by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. However, the glimpses of wealthy existence in Switzerland, Italy and England in The Italian Wife and the suggestion of a media empire are unconvincing in comparison.
In his article ‘The “Protestant” Novelist’, which appeared in the Spectator in 1952, Humphreys made a comment which throws more light onto his reasons for using myth:
If some novelist wishes to extract the Aeschylean conclusion – that man learns wisdom only through suffering – out of a contemporary setting, the ring of truth about the plot, the characters, the situations, the scenes, must be clearly and immediately audible to the sympathetic reader; both story and theme wholly integrated into the circumstances of our time.55
Unfortunately, The Italian Wife lacks the ring of truth which A Man’s Estate has, and this is partly to do with Humphreys’s ability to convey convincingly a portrayal of rural Welsh life. One of the reasons Humphreys may have been drawn to Greek myth is its commonality as a European experience with a set of fixed symbols understood across Europe. Using such myths may have seemed to Humphreys a way of both asserting the position of Wales as a nation within Europe rather than Britain, and simultaneously subverting the English canon. A more important reason may, however, be suggested by the above quotation; the idea of learning wisdom through suffering and in a contemporary context indicates that using myth in this way may have been due to the profound effect the Second World War had on the novelist. It is a way of controlling and ordering experience, whilst imbuing an individual character with the symbolic value of Everyman.
An examination of Humphreys’s first six published novels reveals that he is already using the majority of the techniques which will later become the strategies of liberation he will use to explore Wales’s post-colonial condition. However, the tendency here is to use them either too heavily, producing an overly prescriptive plot, or too lightly with an original plot that does not sufficiently support the novel. He has yet to harness the prefiguring techniques of myth and/or history to a dynamic original plot or to use them with an integral purpose. He appears to have moved away from history towards the use of myth and has demonstrated great skill in transferring suggestively the details from myths to the novel. However, this method brings with it a heavily predestined and dated effect. This works well with the presentation of a particularly tragic situation in a past generation of quite dated characters living in an out-of-touch location – Wales is very much the cultural backwater in A Man’s Estate – but it is clearly not going to succeed in most contemporary novels, and does not in The Italian Wife. When he stops using myth to provide a successful plot, and uses it instead to provide either interest, depth or suggestion, Humphreys moves to a second, more successful stage in his career. Fortuitously, perhaps, a different kind of plot strengthening occurs, simultaneously with a desire to feature Wales as more than a setting for the fiction.
A TOY EPIC
The publication of A Toy Epic in 1958 was a major landmark in the career of Emyr Humphreys for several reasons.56 First, it allowed him to put behind him the failure of the first draft and the insecurity which that had caused. Because it used so much of that early draft and received so much critical acclaim in the revised form,57 it was bound to increase the author’s confidence in his ability to create plot. Secondly, it made use of the author’s Welsh identity in several ways, not least the fact that the Welsh version Y Tri Llais had the first success and was then ‘translated’ into English for the published novel, A Toy Epic. It was important at this stage of Humphreys’s career that his Welshness became a recognized part of his identity; he had at this point ‘reinvented’ himself to an extent as an heir of Welsh-language culture. Thirdly, it introduced new methods of patterning, which were to be further refined in the writing of Outside the House of Baal (1965). These two novels, it might be argued, are the author’s major achievements. The later novel is cited by critics as Humphreys’s best58 and A Toy Epic is frequently the reader’s introduction to Humphreys’s work and a popular text for students.
In A Toy Epic the three boys are on one level representative characters, the author’s way of showing different aspects of Welsh society between the wars. A Man’s Estate initiated the use of narration through a variety of voices but A Toy Epic develops the use of frequently changing voices in the first person. The action of A Toy Epic is a way of presenting Welsh history in the interwar years, showing how the events of the history textbook affected the lives of ordinary people in north Wales. The myths dealt with in Ovid’s Metamorphoses are used as a theme which connects the various experiences of the three adolescents, and as a way of making individual experience general and of showing how archetypal patterns recur throughout time. This is achieved in two ways: through explicit references to Ovid as an author being studied during the boys’ education in the novel and through allusions in the text to various mythological characters. Simultaneously, metamorphosis, or transformation of character through sexual experience, is the underlying theme and connects the boys and their individual experiences together to form a unified whole. This is both a more complex and a less controlling use of myth than Humphreys had achieved before; it allows the author more freedom with his text and the reader does not feel the eventual outcome of the narrative is heavily predestined, as it could be argued is the case with the previous two novels. An examination of the author’s notebooks containing the early version shows that none of this mythological material was there;59 it was clearly superimposed on the original alongside other changes made by Humphreys before the 1958 publication. Having written six novels, with varying success, in which myth is used as a patterning device in a variety of ways, from mere allusion to complete replication, Humphreys finds a way in this novel to use myth without being over-constrained by it. He makes use of its allusive power and its significance, whilst still allowing himself the freedom of inventing the plot. In the first six novels the attempts to add structural patterning by outside means were all too much or too little. In this novel the author begins to get it right. However, the myths used are dominantly classical; Humphreys is keen to discuss Wales as ‘subject’ but has not yet developed the desire to educate or refresh Welsh people in their native myths.
Presenting Wales
Wales is the subject of the novel, and is presented in several complementary ways. The principal way is through the three boys, the voices of the text: Albie, Michael and Iorwerth.60 The three boys stand as independent characters but they are also representative of aspects of Welsh life. Simultaneously, they represent three different family circumstances, three social backgrounds, three geographical areas and three attitudes to Welsh political concerns. Together they present a picture of Welsh society between the wars. Humphreys isolates the north-east corner of Wales for his presentation, but it could be argued that the novel looks at north Wales in general, or even Wales as a whole.61 These boys are all Welsh with differing attitudes to Wales. Humphreys looks at their influence upon each other, the ways they interact and the way the passing of time and the imminent war lead to their separation rather than integration.
