exploring man’s relationship with his society and his culture, which in turn will lead in the later novels to the author’s extensive use of Celtic myth to explore the condition of Wales.
This chapter has not tried to argue that Humphreys’s fiction is autobiographical but that the place of his birth, the place in which, and the people amongst whom, he resides and not least the ancestors both specific and general who peopled his past, are all ingredients of his fiction and part of the reason for its existence. Additionally, a brief overview of Humphreys’s life suggests that he has been deeply affected by a series of historical events: the First World War overshadowed his early life; Penyberth profoundly affected his sense of Welsh identity; the Second World War was of immense significance, including the war work in the immediate aftermath which opened up his sense of European identity; and the Welsh language and devolution issues of the 1960s and 1970s have been of great importance to him. The events themselves and the issues they raise all recur in his fiction, even in those novels written most recently. And on a personal level the contemporaries and teachers with whom he mixed at school and university helped foster a lifelong obsession with history, whilst with his marriage he was inducted into an extremely important affinity with Nonconformist culture, which, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, had been (along with industrialization) the great formative influence on the making of modern Wales. In fact the urge to educate his audience has increased with the later fiction, perhaps coinciding with the Welsh population’s rejection of devolution. And, as later chapters will attempt to show, Humphreys has consistently woven Welsh history and Celtic myth into his novels, in part with the possible aim of altering the consciousness of the English-speaking Welsh population.
It should not be forgotten that he was first of all a student of history and that Humphreys himself explained in 1984: ‘I am constantly aware of the necessary restraints imposed on my inventions by the discipline of history … Fiction makes its contribution to History not so much by keeping the record straight as by making reference to it an abiding necessity.’75 This belief is close to Barthes’s argument in Writing Degree Zero that: ‘Writing, free in its beginnings, is finally the bond which links the writer to a History which is itself in chains: society stamps upon him the unmistakable signs of art so as to draw him along the more inescapably in its own process of alienation.’76 Humphreys’s commitment to Wales, to the past, and to the society in which he lives is well documented, not least in his own words in the interviews he has given. It marks his difference in one significant way from the modernist movement which was such a formative influence upon him and which promoted the idea of the writer in exile. ‘The torch of creativity is in the hands of the natives now, rather than the exiles, because exile has become meaningless in a world that has shrunk to a parish.’77 Humphreys’s conscious choice is to be a native, to stand ‘in the one spot, exploring in depth what you have within the square mile’. This choice has clearly had a profound effect upon the construction of his novels and has led to their connection, in some cases, with a type of realism, which to the modern critic might appear outdated or naive. In the same interview Humphreys argues: ‘What you have to fall back on, if you have lost this connection with a given society or a given past, is a world of fantasy, and hallucinatory self-centred writing does not appeal to me very much’ (29).
Alongside the works of fiction that have been discussed here, throughout his career Humphreys has produced factual articles and books that are both important cultural texts and also throw interesting light onto his own creative work.78 The Taliesin Tradition (1989) is particularly important in an understanding of Humphreys’s attitude to Wales, delineating as it does Welsh culture, history and literature over the past two millennia. It celebrates and explores Welsh difference and character forged in ‘a history of unending resistance and unexpected survival’ (1), qualities that ‘create the invincible and yet indissoluble bonds of attachment that bind a Welshman to his inheritance and test his character from the cradle to the grave’. It is also a poetic identity, which has developed from the sixth-century praise poetry of Taliesin, providing ‘the resilient core of Welsh identity in all its manifestations’.79 The patterns of the events charted in this text are re-created by Humphreys time and again in his fiction, in both characters and events, his use of the phrase ‘bonds of attachment’ for the title of the final volume in his sequence merely underlining the fact. His connection of the proliferation of myth in the lives of a marginalized people to their survival as a nation, and its consequent continual reappearance in a range of techniques from important underpinning structural device to casual allusion in his novels will be dealt with in a later chapter, but it marks his understanding decades ago of what would now be termed postcolonial strategies of appropriation. In discussing Welsh reaction to Offa of Mercia in the eighth century Humphreys describes the Welsh psyche developing ‘under siege conditions’ (10) and it is his insight that those siege conditions have continued to the present time, shifting from the real to the metaphorical image of Wales as the besieged fortress. From Taliesin and Merlin onwards he finds a great deal of shape-shifting, but he never loses sight of that separate identity and the necessity for keeping alive the native myths and stories to preserve it, particularly in the face of the loss of the indigenous language for part of the population.
Humphreys’s own ability to use the Welsh language has clearly increased year by year as evidenced by his not only producing television scripts and translating but also writing poetry in Welsh. It is not surprising then, that given the importance to him of Saunders Lewis’s ideas80 and having consolidated his own in The Taliesin Tradition, he should have then considered
the next logical step would have been to continue with my novel sequence in Welsh, turning The Land of the Living into Tir y Rhai Byw. Since it was, in any event teetering on the brink of the uncommercial, there would not have been all that many royalties to lose.81
Lewis, when consulted, advised Humphreys to continue what he had started. What Humphreys has done, however, is to turn even more deliberately to Europe in reaction against what he sees as ‘the mighty current of Anglo-American culture’ (182).
I certainly believe in the benefits of the European Union for Wales and Welshness and the Welsh language … If an idea of the oneness of Europe was already beginning to develop in the sixties, partly as a result of the ever increasing ease of travel to the Continent, then that idea has grown enormously in strength and complexity over the last couple of decades. (182–3)
His belief is that American English along with Chinese is set to dominate the world (133) and that all European nations will eventually have to deal with this issue, not merely the ones whose language is under threat internally. He feels that Wales will have to choose between being European or American and: ‘If it’s going to be an American Wales then it’s going to be in even greater danger than it is in being a minor part of Britain’ (133). Ironically, it is the emergent postcolonial writing that, Humphreys believes, is strengthening the dominance of Anglo-American English:
My material is basically drawn from the Welsh experience, and that experience becomes more intelligible, in my opinion, if it is viewed in a European context. If you’re concerned with Welsh-language culture, as in part I am, you’re not dealing with a great world language, like English; you’re dealing with a language under siege … it benefits us in Wales to see ourselves in this context, and not to be swept away by the mighty current of Anglo-American culture. And this current is particularly strong and growing stronger. It is being fed by the extraordinary, brilliant outburst of post-imperial fiction in English from India and Africa and black America. In the last decade the economic power of Anglo-American publishing has created a vogue for what might be called ‘cosmopolitan fiction’. This has little room for a cottage industry like mine. (182–3)
In spite of the self-deprecation, the reasoning is somewhat specious, attributing imperial connotations to English (the language) rather than to the English (the nation) – a problem outlined by Ashcroft et al. in the early days of postcolonial studies in his suggestion of using english to distinguish this difference82 – whilst simultaneously regarding that language
