Humphreys’s first experiment in the use of history and literature to counteract his self-perceived shortcomings in the structuring of plot. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he turned to the recent event which had had such a profound effect on him, the Penyberth bombing of 1936, using an historical event to create a strong plot.5 In selecting this situation he is able, on the one hand, to address ideas which particularly concern him: nationalism, violence as political protest, the personality of the charismatic leader; on the other hand, the plot lends itself to the tragic approach and his text is consequently resonant with Shakespearean echoes. Whereas the Penyberth story is a solid structure that works to control the outline of the whole plot and many of the details, the tragedies of Shakespeare are used more allusively and variously. His characters echo different tragic situations at different times, but particularly Macbeth’s killing of the king and Hamlet’s jealousy of his uncle. Humphreys is giving stature to his characters, who would otherwise be fairly ordinary. At the same time he is creating a sense of patterns of behaviour, or archetypes, back to which all individual situations can be referred. In this first novel Humphreys is already using Celtic myth, particularly the Blodeuwedd situation and the Bible, alongside his main source of prefiguration, the historical event.
Humphreys has at this point in his career a strong interest in history, as was indicated by his reading history at university.6 There is no direct evidence of his youthful interest in myth, apart from his childhood belief in the legend that a princess was buried on The Gop, above Trelawnyd. This is a concept which connects history with myth, in the sense in which myths are sometimes archetypal stories culled from ‘history’, and certainly also suggests that Humphreys may have identified both history and myth as ways of commenting upon the Welsh past. However, as a young novelist he was heavily influenced by James Joyce, whilst the writer he admired most was T. S. Eliot, and these writers, along with other modernists, had established the contemporary use of myth in literature. Humphreys was particularly influenced by Eliot’s verse dramas, from which he learned that ‘a structure derived from classical myth’ was an important consideration.7 He writes of that time:
To someone with a sense of vocation drawn towards forms of artistic creation I suppose you could say myth had an even deeper function. That is to say whatever the individual’s personal circumstance, the ramifications of myth present what appear to be consistent elements in the human condition. Whether you are born in fifth century Greece … or in the backwoods of Flintshire, the structures of myth would somehow reveal what such disparate situations had in common. The world of Wales in 1939 contained all the elements necessary for large or small scale tragedy. In my own case I belonged to a generation born in the aftermath of one war and brought up to be confronted with the inevitability of another. And along it came.
This extract clearly explains how myth, history and tragedy came to be combined in the young novelist’s mind, and why at that particular moment he felt impelled to create a tragedy set in a Welsh situation.
In The Taliesin Tradition Humphreys writes that ‘fiction can of course catch closer glimpses of ultimate truth than mere recorded fact’.8 It would, therefore, be reasonable to suggest that he perhaps wanted in his novel to present a ‘truth’ which might be absent from a historical account. Nevertheless, he did also write such an account in 1980, titled ‘The night of the fire’,9 in which many details coincide with The Little Kingdom, suggesting that the fictional account was based by the author on the historical event in a fairly transparent way. Officially, there were three men involved on 8 September 1936: Saunders Lewis, a university lecturer; Lewis E. Valentine, a minister; and D. J. Williams, a schoolmaster. In the novel six characters go to the aerodrome: Owen Richards, a university lecturer; Rhiannon and Rhys, children of the local minister; Captain Picton-Parry, ‘a good man hid in hideous armour’,10 who represents tradition and continuity in Welsh life; Tom Seth, a farmer; and Ifan Jones, a miner.11 Ifan is writing englynion as they wait, just as ‘the bespectacled non-smoker’ (D. J. Williams?) was trying to finish his short story. Both cut their fingers and in the fictional account the three drops of blood are taken as an omen that Geraint will betray them, as the reader knows he has done already.
Penyberth was a fifteenth-century farmhouse, which for the activists stood as a symbol of ‘the very home of Welsh culture’,12 according to Lewis. In parallel with this is Richard Bloyd’s selling of the ‘three hundred acres of unproductive flats’ on the coastal plain of north Wales for the aerodrome. Because the land is unproductive, trapped between old, finished industry and new, growing suburbs, Humphreys adds the schoolhouse of St Beuno’s school,13 home of Miss Tudor, and makes it more equivalent to Penyberth. What Bloyd is going to sell for a quick profit includes Miss Tudor, ‘the very last of the Tudors’,14 signifying Welsh history. It also includes a pile of fleeces (sheep farming), bad apples (rural life) and ancient school textbooks (Welsh culture). Ironically, Miss Tudor tries to give away Longfellow to Nest, and her father ‘loved to read Longfellow’. This could be seen as being as anglicizing a gesture as what Bloyd is doing, but involving culture rather than property. Miss Tudor, and consequently Welsh history, is portrayed as afraid of progress and materialism, that is, afraid of Bloyd. ‘Her eyes clouded with tears of helplessness, impotence, and self pity’.15 She believes in her Welsh past because of what her father has told her, but she finds the family’s genealogical tree too difficult to understand. In other words, she makes no real effort to gain an awareness of the past, but has simply a self-pitying, romantic attitude towards it. When Bloyd, the man she hates, drives off in a cloud of smoke, he seems to her ‘like an evil magician in a tale’.16 The acceptance of such a force is natural to her, because of its occurrence in legends of the past; her romantic and partial awareness of history and culture helps defeat her. Humphreys is, at this very early stage in his career, already using characters representationally.
There are also straightforward correspondences between the fictional and ‘real’ characters. Valentine was ‘a tall handsome figure’ who physically suggests comparison with Owen, although Lewis was the university lecturer. The debating and charismatic skills as leader which are given to Owen also suggest Valentine. D. J. Williams, ‘in his fifty-first year’ at the time of the incident, an ex-miner from a hill farm in Carmarthenshire, acted with ‘the consciousness of the ancient values of my ancestors bound with a feeling for their continuance’, and as such was possibly a model for Captain Picton-Parry of the novel. Saunders Lewis’s father was a Welsh Calvinistic minister, recalling Rhys and Rhiannon’s father.17 Lewis’s early education has much in common with Owen’s experience, when he recalls the victimization he received as a Welsh boy at an English public school, ‘the boy was conscious of being different’.18 Humphreys calls it being ‘made conscious of the dualism of belonging to two worlds’.19 Like Lewis, Owen ‘shone’ at all he did, ‘in everything and in the end he was top, the acknowledged leader’.20 Lewis was a lecturer in Welsh literature at the University College, Swansea and Owen in history at Aber. ‘He got on so well in his department’ (as a student) ‘that they offered him a Lectureship’.21 On the other hand, Humphreys’s fictionalizing of the role of the nightwatchman, whose account at the trial is very different from the account given in the novel, has both an artistic and a political motivation.22
‘There is a simple sense in which History can be interpreted as the continuing interplay between premeditated acts and a surge of uncontrollable events.’23 Given that he holds this opinion, it is easy to see why Humphreys connects the central political act of The Little Kingdom with classical tragedy and makes so many allusions to tragedies in his text. The novel may be based on the firing of the Penyberth Bombing School, but Humphreys chooses to present his novel as a tragedy centred on one character. He involves the family and friends of this character and the repercussions for them of his character and actions, very much in the style of classical tragedy but without the elevated status of the typical classical cast. In fact, one of his most successful ironic touches is the way Owen continually sees himself as having a greatly increased stature – of being on the point of entering his country’s myth. The author, on the other hand, presents his character far more modestly.
