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
