Emyr Humphreys. Diane Green
certain people in certain parts of Wales at certain times came to be what they were. These are fictional worlds but they are formed from an author’s idea of what actually was, that is, they are a kind of history. Contrasting with the sequence of novels, Humphreys’s independent novels published after 1970 are much more theoretically aware, particularly of current theories concerning history and its connection with literature and the diversification of history which has allowed formerly hidden histories to be uncovered: the history of women, of colonized peoples, of underclasses and various sections of societies. So The Anchor Tree (1980), for example, deals with the lost history of the Welsh colonizers of North America, the hidden history of a possibly Jewish orphan from Auschwitz and the politically incorrect history of a German aristocrat. Although Humphreys is best known as a novelist, nearly all of his fiction is an attempt to construct history of a kind.
In The Gift of a Daughter, Humphreys makes use of his personal knowledge of life in Wales. The protagonist, Aled, lives with his family on Anglesey, where Humphreys has lived at Llanfairpwll with family nearby since the mid-1980s. Aled also works at a nearby university, which transposed to real life would have to be Bangor, where Humphreys worked from 1965 to 1972. Not only is much of the novel set in northern Italy, with which Humphreys is very familiar (as outlined above), but Muzio, Aled’s friend, is, according to M. Wynn Thomas, based on Humphreys’s closest friend, Basil McTaggart who was a specialist in the culture of the ancient Etruscans. On a much more light-hearted note the author names the new vice-chancellor of Aled’s university Sir Kingsley Jenkins and his wife, Lady Shirley, suggesting a parodic combination of Welsh names, left-wing politicians and literary figures: Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Kingsley Amis. Kingsley Amis was an acquaintance of Humphreys during his period in London, and is well known in turn for his use of Welsh friends and university acquaintances in his novels. Humphreys commits him to destroying the departments of philosophy and classics and inserting tourism and business studies in their stead.
Virtually all of the settings in Humphreys’s novels are either Wales, London or Italy, places where Humphreys has lived. Specific places used in Wales are also usually the areas in which he has lived: the north-east coast, Aberystwyth, Cardiff, the Llªn peninsula and Anglesey. Indeed, the reader of Humphreys’s novels will notice that landscape is important to the author, particularly when the novel is set in Wales and deals with Welsh issues. Humphreys has recently explained the connection he feels exists between the Welsh language and the landscape of Wales: ‘The true source of our being is in a language and a tradition so old that it shapes the landscape in which we live and move. It is this landscape that sustains and inspires us.’56 A Toy Epic illustrates how important landscape is to Humphreys in the formation of character. Michael’s ‘broad valley’, Albie’s ‘cul-de-sac’ and Iorwerth’s ‘heart of ninety acres, at the end of a broad valley, at the headquarters of Noah, in an anchored ark’57 all define aspects of their personality and, more importantly, their future prospects. It would have been relatively easy for the anglicized young Humphreys to have grown up without seeing his home patch as ‘one of the four corners of Wales’, and it is extremely important to his development as a novelist that he did so.58 His identification with Wales and politicization were least strong during the periods when he lived in London and later Cardiff (working frequently in London). He has remarked that working for the BBC was ‘a wicked temptation’ in that it was obligatory not to be actively involved in politics.59 He sets the urbane actor, Sam Halkin, in The Gift, and the lonely, disaffected Jones (Jones) in London and Bedwyr, the successful architect, in Cardiff; but London is more commonly seen in his work as the place where successful Welsh people go and forget their roots, becoming submerged in the desire to be successful in British terms. What Cardiff, London and, of course, Italy do in effect is express ‘difference’; they indicate what by comparison Humphreys’s north-east corner of Wales really is.
It is perhaps significant that Amy Parry, the character who most shoulders the burden of representing Welsh society in his work, was born in Humphreys’s own north-east corner in a rural area of tiny smallholdings, coastal coal-mine quarries, autocratic landowners and small seaside towns. John Cilydd, in contrast, the representative of Welsh nationalism and culture, comes from the north-west, possibly the Llªn peninsula, but certainly the area north of Aberystwyth and stretching along the southern coast of Llªn, which Humphreys considers to be the crucible of Welsh myth. Amy in her role of politician and humanitarian, like Humphreys himself, is drawn to London at one period but is brought back to north Wales by Cilydd, the writer and nationalist, to be dissatisfied in Pendraw.60 It is Peredur who, believing there to be another side to the (hi)story as told by his mother, researches his father’s life by touring through the landscape around his birthplace. He finds ‘a tilted outcrop of rock … shot through with mysterious veins of white quartz’61 which he links with the legend of Blodeuwedd, and Amy, as Thomas has pointed out, is amongst other things ‘a modern redaction of Blodeuwedd’.62 It also connects with the mound known as The Gop on the outskirts of Trelawnyd, mentioned earlier. According to Thomas it is a mound Humphreys has been excavating in imagination all his life.63
THE CELTIC GODDESS
Humphreys’s interest in the female character can be discussed on a variety of levels. There are personal reasons, but it can also be understood in postcolonial terms as a way of both connecting with Wales and forging separation from England, if England is seen as a bastion of patriarchy and control. Humphreys himself has remarked that women have become more and more central to his work.
I’m a great admirer of women I must say. Especially in the combination of the mythological and the historical, which is something I’m always very much engaged with – there the woman is absolutely vital, the ‘Great White Goddess’, and men are peripheral. As far as the Welsh experience is concerned woman is very, very important: she’s central, she’s continuity, she’s survival.64
What is slightly surprising then is the fact that his protagonists are usually men. Amy Parry may be the central figure of the sequence but Cilydd is the more important character by the end and certainly appears to have more of the values of which the author would approve and which are positively Welsh. In the more recent independent novels, Jones, Unconditional Surrender and The Gift of a Daughter, it is true that the more dynamic characters are female. The females take action, are enigmas, break with tradition. The experience being described, however, is that of the male: Jones, the rector, Aled Morgan. They are misfits, outsiders in some way, disillusioned and generally redundant, examples of the (emotionally) disabled colonial figures mentioned earlier. Cilydd would have identified with them had he survived. One must ask what if any connection this has with Humphreys himself.
Humphreys’s attitude towards women, or rather female characters, is more unusual than the perspective taken in the remark quoted above. The female character most typical in his work is not only ‘vital’ and ‘central’; she is usually young, beautiful, rebellious and sexually experienced. In a novel set in the 1980s or 1990s this is arguably modern, liberated or typical behaviour, but it is more surprising in novels written in the 1940s and 1950s. From The Little Kingdom onwards the pattern has been consistent. Rhiannon Morgan is the daughter of a minister.65 She has sex with Owen Richards, who does not love her, but not with Geraint, who does. Lucy, in A Change of Heart, connects the male characters together; she is Howell’s wife, Frank’s sister and Alcuin’s lover. In The Italian Wife Paola desires her husband’s son and in The Gift Polly has more than one sexual partner. In A Man’s Estate the chaste Hannah is balanced by her half-sister, the promiscuous Ada, as Kate and Lydia are balanced in Outside the House of Baal. By the later novels Humphreys is portraying more than one generation, but in each novel there is a ‘vital’ young girl who either has sex with men she believes she loves66 or who behaves suggestively with older men to control them.67 What is interesting is the reason for the author’s fascination with this character type. Part of the reason may be the interest in Blodeuwedd, the woman made to fulfil one man’s desires but who dares to have desires of her own and is drastically punished. Another possibility is that the mother figure with which Humphreys grew up was a Lydia more than a Kate. Thomas suggests this when he describes Humphreys’s mother as ‘in her youth a free spirit, lively,