by Saunders Lewis, the idea that Wales is the real heir to the traditions and culture of Rome, an alternative, perhaps postcolonial, position to take, in view of the traditional British sense that English culture stems from Rome.
I think Italy is in many respects the home of European culture as a whole – the source of Latin, the source of medieval civilization, is Italy … Writers like Primo Levi and Italo Calvino remind us that the Italians are a defeated nation, who experienced a terrible war and have recovered…. They haven’t got the pretensions of the French, who are much more like the English in being imperialistic and convinced of their own superiority. The Italians haven’t got that at all, and neither do the Germans: these two great defeated nations seem to me to be the two most civilized European nations of our days. (134)
Whilst these observations may have been made from real experience of different nationalities, it is unfortunate that Humphreys’s detailed discussions of Welsh nationality should be illustrated by such sweeping and simplistic stereotyping of other nations. It is difficult not to conclude that the overriding feature of Welsh nationality as far as Humphreys is concerned is that of defeat at the hands of the English, which leads to Welsh identification with England’s other ‘enemies’ and the conclusion that imperialistic defines the English and French, and that only defeated nations can be civilized.
THE EARLY CAREER
The year 1946 was a key time for Emyr Humphreys. He completed his work in Italy, began training as a teacher at the University College of Wales, Bangor, and married Elinor Jones, the daughter of a Nonconformist minister. He also published his first novel, The Little Kingdom.
If you were born in 1919, as I was, the entire period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War was the time you needed for growing up. Nothing really resolved itself, for me, until the end of the Second War; it was then, really, that you had your compass bearings. (127)
At this time Humphreys was able to combine his political ideals and his creative talents. Although he would continue to write poetry, he had realized that fiction was to be his principal métier: ‘I found my form when I found fiction and I could have jumped up and down for joy at discovering this, because I had the other problem as well: I wanted to write in Welsh, but I didn’t have enough Welsh for that purpose’ (128). Humphreys’s language dilemma was to continue throughout his career but to an extent it may have not only created the particular tension that would lead to his best work, but also facilitated his desire to write fiction:
One of the escape routes is fiction, because story is a language of its own, a music of its own, a supranational language which is detached from the cultural problem. And that may be one reason why, culturally situated as I am, I find fiction such a very attractive form. (131)
The immediate post-war period is important in his work. Open Secrets (1989) closes with the end of the war and the death of Nanw. Unconditional Surrender (1996) is set in the same period. The action of Outside the House of Baal (1965) in the past as opposed to the present leads up to that point. The influence of his father-in-law’s Nonconformity and his own turning to that denomination is also evident in many novels.36 In all the novels set in Wales religion is an important issue: the male narrator of Unconditional Surrender and Michael’s father in A Toy Epic are clergymen; Idris Powell in A Man’s Estate, J.T. in Outside the House of Baal and, amongst others, the evangelical Tasker Thomas in ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence (hitherto referred to as the sequence) are ministers. Education and the role of the teacher is also important. Geraint is teaching in the first novel, the protagonist of A Change of Heart (1951) is a university lecturer and that of Hear and Forgive another teacher. The latter novel, published in 1952, is centred more than any other on school teaching, which Humphreys himself did from 1947 at Wimbledon Technical College and then from 1951 at Pwllheli Grammar School. David Flint, the first-person narrator, is particularly like the author in that he is a novelist, is supporting himself by teaching and was a conscientious objector during the recent war, doing war work in the Fens, in London and abroad.37 On the other hand, Flint is a married man, who is having an affair. He married in haste in 1939 (having just graduated – exactly like Humphreys). In a reversal of Humphreys’s own methods, Flint is writing a historical novel, in which he uses as a pattern people he knows. Humphreys places Flint’s family in Shropshire (although the name makes connection with Humphreys’s Flintshire), makes his father a shopkeeper, his mother dead, the family Congregational chapel. He thus mixes his own experience with invented details, or details based on an unknown source. Perhaps some of Flint’s crises of conscience are Humphreys’s own, but the protagonist in this novel is a good example of Humphreys’s development since writing the early version of A Toy Epic and the chapters on the student Michael. Michael is much closer to the author’s personal experience. By Hear and Forgive Humphreys has learnt to mix his own experience with extraneous details. In the future teachers/lecturers will be even further distanced from the author.38 What is clear, however, is that Humphreys is able to create scenes in his novels in which these characters are at work, something he is loath to do in the case of a character, such as John Cilydd (a solicitor), in whose career the author has little experience. In this sense Humphreys’s personal experience dictates to some extent possible areas of content in the novels.
In 1955 having published five novels, the latest being A Man’s Estate (1955),39 his most extensive exploration so far of the polar differences between rural Wales and the British Establishment, Humphreys finished teaching and joined the BBC as a drama producer, working first in radio and later in television. Humphreys enjoyed London and felt that his period there was the most conventionally successful of his career.40 It was because of his young family and the belief that they should be brought up in Wales in a certain way that he made the move from London to north Wales in 1951, and yet this has indubitably had a great effect on his output as a novelist. The Welsh as a people and Wales as a nation rather than as a place have become a dominant factor in his work. Humphreys has summarized this early stage of his career as follows:
The natural ability for literary expression continued to flow far more easily through my first language. Developing as a writer in wartime brought mixed blessings; first, a view of rural societies in Wales that had remained solidly monoglot; then a taste of, and for, Mediterranean culture and the excitement of the Italienische Reise by courtesy of Allied Forces. Subsequently, living in London meant concentrating on the novel, mastering a craft and developing a proficiency in that form along with an ambition to earn a living as a writer. I have to confess that it was only when I returned to Wales to work in the BBC that I was able to resume the missionary ardour of my youth.41
However, a comment made in his lecture ‘The empty space – creating a novel’, given in America in 2000, suggests some disenchantment at this time with the role of the novel in society:
The serious novel to which I had been prepared to dedicate my energies was in danger of becoming as obsolete as the myths which I had found so inspiring. The novel was bourgeois in origin and had flourished best in a high bourgeois society which no longer existed. The mass media had delivered the art of storytelling into the hands of those best qualified to manipulate the masses…. I had a distinct impression of ice cracking under my feet and the best thing I could do was to jump, at the very last moment, on a passing raft. I joined the BBC. (218)
In ‘Men of letters’ (1999) he describes the post as ‘a satisfactory halfway house between two worlds: the attraction of the cosmopolitan and the need to be close to the source’ (9). Clearly, Humphreys was well aware, even early in his writing career, of the importance to his writing of Wales, the place and the society into which he had been born. A prime motivation was to bring European drama to Wales (135) and during his career in radio he ‘met very interesting writers and thinkers and producers who must have had a considerable influence on me’ (135); in particular, he remembers the influences of Brecht and Pinter, established by way of his contact with
