Emyr Humphreys. Diane Green
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 review gave me somewhat furiously to think: This book has as little separate identity as the principality from which it came. I told myself that a metropolitan reviewer may believe that what he does not know can hardly be worth knowing; but that this was not yet a truth universally acknowledged: moreover, in the novel any character fully alive and worth his salt is perfectly capable of both deciding for him or herself what is and is not important and for making manifest his or her distinct and separate identity.52
‘THE LAND OF THE LIVING’ SEQUENCE AND THE LATER NOVELS
From 1972 onwards Humphreys has been a full-time writer and in 1974 Flesh and Blood was published and ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence properly begun.53 ‘In the 1980s, when I was in my sixties, I had a very fruitful period when I could concentrate entirely on my own work, and that is when I completed the series called The Land of the Living, published The Taliesin Tradition, and produced short novels like Jones and The Anchor Tree’ (54).54
Humphreys himself has commented on the interrelationship between his work, both in English and Welsh and in fiction, and drama. In an interview at the time of the publication of The Anchor Tree in 1980 he pointed out that the novel owed something to both a television play he wrote around 1963 about ‘a young girl as sacrificial victim’ and a film he worked on in 1975 ‘about the Welsh in Pennsylvania’.55 The role of the writer also features in his work. John Cilydd is arguably the central concern of the sequence and he is a poet as well as a solicitor. Chris in The Italian Wife (1957) wants to write, Morgan in The Anchor Tree wants to write history, as does the rector in Unconditional Surrender. Along with the minister in The Anchor Tree, who dies before his history is written, most of these writers fail to produce. Aled, in The Gift of a Daughter, is an academic, who is researching Boethius and then Amalasuntha, Theodoric’s daughter. His writing, however, mostly consists of copying and/or translating Boethius’s work. He even loses his academic post. Boethius, on the other hand, was supremely successful, as a translator, a critic and an original writer. Clearly, from the depth of detail with which his life and work is used by Humphreys in this novel, Boethius and his writings are a major interest of Humphreys.
As well as being a writer, Boethius is a figure out of history and an examination of Humphreys’s novels indicates how strong an influence history is on him as an artist. Novels like A Toy Epic and A Man’s Estate seek to present a record of life in Wales at a given time and are, therefore, a kind of historical record. A Toy Epic is indeed a fictional but also almost a personal record. Novels like Outside the House of Baal span a wider period of Welsh history and focus more particularly on a specific topic, here Nonconformity and its effect on Welsh society. ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence is even more ambitious, attempting to trace the history of Welsh people in the twentieth century through its characters, which are on one level representative tools. Most of his novels are set in Wales and show the reader,