Emyr Humphreys. Diane Green
a convenient escape from a claustrophobic home background’.68 Whatever the reason Humphreys has for seeing the dynamic force in both family and social politics as the extrovert, unconventional woman, it has been a strongly motivating force behind much of his fiction.
One of the likely reasons for Humphreys’s persistent use of this character type is his perennial desire to discuss the Welsh condition. His female protagonists are frequently representative characters, at one level at least symbolic of Wales or the Welsh experience. His view, therefore, of Wales as being (over a period of centuries and due to its colonial subordination) a passive, possibly even an emasculated, country, combined with his desire to see Wales develop more independence, leads him to reuse this character type. What a great deal of recent criticism on a variety of writers has asserted is a strong connection between the feminist and the postcolonial position, between feminist reaction to patriarchal systems and postcolonial resistance to imperialism. In Humphreys’s case his concern to address Wales’s colonial situation results in an implicit endorsement of (Welsh) patriarchal society, rather than in the formation of a solid front between a colonized culture and a subordinated gender, ‘colonized’ by the male. His dilemma may be usefully compared with that of Conrad in his novella, Heart of Darkness. Only two women in the novella speak: the conventional aunt and Kurtz’s Intended, who, like the aunt, is not named except in relation to the male; both are enamoured of their own subservience to patriarchy. Humphreys’s presentation of women is much less clear cut than this. His women are complex and often the focus of his story, frequently rebelling against male domination. However, just as Conrad has been accused of writing in the language of imperialism and thus negating his critique of imperialist activities,69 so Humphreys’s use of the English language may be accused of subtly reinforcing the patriarchal situation which his female characters question. In Heart of Darkness the females are doubly distanced from the author by the story’s being doubly narrated by male, seafaring, bourgeois, white, British characters. We know that a male teller is portraying these women for a male audience but we may not safely assume his point of view is also the author’s. Usually, however, Humphreys’s presentation is direct and authorial, although it is dramatic and lacks (in the later work) much explicit authorial interpretation. Nevertheless, men are, for the most part, presented as the controlling element in the family and in society at large, locally, regionally and nationally.
This shows how difficult it is for an author (who wishes to portray the female position in an enlightened way or criticize the treatment of women in the historical past in his fiction) to criticize his own society, when he is simultaneously trying to criticize his nation’s treatment at the hands of another nation. Thus Humphreys’s instinct to present Welsh life as idyllic in the past, because it is Welsh,70 conflicts with his desire to present the female as wrongly treated. So we see Amy Parry thwarted by the unnaturally unattractive uncle’s overbearing male domination of his niece and his wife, but simultaneously we see society as a whole working well in the same patriarchal way and Amy as a ‘harridan’ in her demands for control in her married relationship with John Cilydd. On the one hand, the author is trying to show how Welsh society existed, in history, and is thus constricted by what he believes it was really like, that is, patriarchal. On the other hand, he wishes to assert that Welsh is different from and better than English. And, through the use of Celtic myth, the emphasis on the goddess as the source of power, and the stereotype of the Welsh Mam as the linchpin of Welsh society, he wishes to show woman as central.
THE LANGUAGE QUESTION
Humphreys’s use of the English language in novels in which he is concerned to express and explore the condition of Wales, in particular the ways in which it might be seen as ‘different’ from England rather than subsumed into a unified identity, is a further dilemma for the author and one which merits brief mention here. By 1990 he had decided: ‘the language, absent or present, remains the key to the Welsh condition’.71 However, he himself had learnt the language in his years at Aberystwyth as a student and whilst doing farm work during the war. A central dilemma for a politically conscious Welshman, brought up with English as his first language, has to be in what language he should write and for what audience. It is perhaps inevitable that Humphreys’s fiction should be exclusively in English, the language in which he had been both raised and educated.72 And, writing in English, it is understandable that he should aim to be published in London and to reach as wide an audience as possible in order to forge a successful career as a writer. Nevertheless, this remains a dilemma for the author throughout his career and is, perhaps, a contributory factor to the author’s choices of subject matter in his novels, many of which are very deliberately and self-consciously Welsh in setting and theme. The early novels, in particular, swing from Wales and back again,73 each arguably unbalanced either by the excessively emotional charge of Wales as an issue or by its absence.74 They also demonstrate an increasing awareness of the importance of Wales to the author and a development in ways of portraying Wales through fiction. The importance of inheritance and personal responsibility to the plot of these novels appears to have led the author to the use of classical myth as a means of 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