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
