Emyr Humphreys. Diane Green
the works of fiction that have been discussed here, throughout his career Humphreys has produced factual articles and books that are both important cultural texts and also throw interesting light onto his own creative work.78 The Taliesin Tradition (1989) is particularly important in an understanding of Humphreys’s attitude to Wales, delineating as it does Welsh culture, history and literature over the past two millennia. It celebrates and explores Welsh difference and character forged in ‘a history of unending resistance and unexpected survival’ (1), qualities that ‘create the invincible and yet indissoluble bonds of attachment that bind a Welshman to his inheritance and test his character from the cradle to the grave’. It is also a poetic identity, which has developed from the sixth-century praise poetry of Taliesin, providing ‘the resilient core of Welsh identity in all its manifestations’.79 The patterns of the events charted in this text are re-created by Humphreys time and again in his fiction, in both characters and events, his use of the phrase ‘bonds of attachment’ for the title of the final volume in his sequence merely underlining the fact. His connection of the proliferation of myth in the lives of a marginalized people to their survival as a nation, and its consequent continual reappearance in a range of techniques from important underpinning structural device to casual allusion in his novels will be dealt with in a later chapter, but it marks his understanding decades ago of what would now be termed postcolonial strategies of appropriation. In discussing Welsh reaction to Offa of Mercia in the eighth century Humphreys describes the Welsh psyche developing ‘under siege conditions’ (10) and it is his insight that those siege conditions have continued to the present time, shifting from the real to the metaphorical image of Wales as the besieged fortress. From Taliesin and Merlin onwards he finds a great deal of shape-shifting, but he never loses sight of that separate identity and the necessity for keeping alive the native myths and stories to preserve it, particularly in the face of the loss of the indigenous language for part of the population.
Humphreys’s own ability to use the Welsh language has clearly increased year by year as evidenced by his not only producing television scripts and translating but also writing poetry in Welsh. It is not surprising then, that given the importance to him of Saunders Lewis’s ideas80 and having consolidated his own in The Taliesin Tradition, he should have then considered
the next logical step would have been to continue with my novel sequence in Welsh, turning The Land of the Living into Tir y Rhai Byw. Since it was, in any event teetering on the brink of the uncommercial, there would not have been all that many royalties to lose.81
Lewis, when consulted, advised Humphreys to continue what he had started. What Humphreys has done, however, is to turn even more deliberately to Europe in reaction against what he sees as ‘the mighty current of Anglo-American culture’ (182).
I certainly believe in the benefits of the European Union for Wales and Welshness and the Welsh language … If an idea of the oneness of Europe was already beginning to develop in the sixties, partly as a result of the ever increasing ease of travel to the Continent, then that idea has grown enormously in strength and complexity over the last couple of decades. (182–3)
His belief is that American English along with Chinese is set to dominate the world (133) and that all European nations will eventually have to deal with this issue, not merely the ones whose language is under threat internally. He feels that Wales will have to choose between being European or American and: ‘If it’s going to be an American Wales then it’s going to be in even greater danger than it is in being a minor part of Britain’ (133). Ironically, it is the emergent postcolonial writing that, Humphreys believes, is strengthening the dominance of Anglo-American English:
My material is basically drawn from the Welsh experience, and that experience becomes more intelligible, in my opinion, if it is viewed in a European context. If you’re concerned with Welsh-language culture, as in part I am, you’re not dealing with a great world language, like English; you’re dealing with a language under siege … it benefits us in Wales to see ourselves in this context, and not to be swept away by the mighty current of Anglo-American culture. And this current is particularly strong and growing stronger. It is being fed by the extraordinary, brilliant outburst of post-imperial fiction in English from India and Africa and black America. In the last decade the economic power of Anglo-American publishing has created a vogue for what might be called ‘cosmopolitan fiction’. This has little room for a cottage industry like mine. (182–3)
In spite of the self-deprecation, the reasoning is somewhat specious, attributing imperial connotations to English (the language) rather than to the English (the nation) – a problem outlined by Ashcroft et al. in the early days of postcolonial studies in his suggestion of using english to distinguish this difference82 – whilst simultaneously regarding that language as recently empowered by work from former colonies. It is certainly possible to argue national distinctions as existing between Chinua Achebe and V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, in spite of their each using a version of English. Indeed, the argument that English is an imperially tainted language that subsumes all other identities is counteracted by arguing the current prevalence of American English.
The language issue is further complicated for Humphreys by the fact that he speaks sometimes, as immediately above, on behalf of the Welsh-language culture of Wales, and at others, as when discussing his fiction, on behalf of English-language Welsh culture. His decision to continue writing fiction in English, his first language, does not have the personal necessity it had for the young author immediately post-war, whose early version of A Toy Epic was written in English and later converted into Welsh for radio. Whilst Humphreys would probably like to contribute to literature written in Welsh, by writing in English, and for many of his novels using London-based publishers, he reaches all of the inhabitants of Wales, alongside the rest of Britain and many countries abroad. Whilst his educational purpose of (re)familiarizing Welsh natives with their indigenous history and myths is possibly paramount, individuals of at least part-Welsh descent are situated in many other parts of Britain, as well as abroad, and neither does it work contrary to his purposes to present a Welsh point of view to non-Welsh readers.83 Humphreys remains concerned about all aspects of Welsh literature:
Both of our linguistic cultures are suffering from the same vitamin deficiencies, so to speak, and so their growth is stunted. Our bilingual society is no healthier in this respect than is our monolingual society – which is a very serious problem, because we are all of us so readily recruited to the service of the British media and communications industry which is currently struggling to perpetuate what is left of the English imperial mentality: despising the European Union and grudgingly admiring the United States for commandeering their role and language. (190)
Early in his career Humphreys aspired to become the voice of the tribe, the People’s Remembrancer, to present the dissident perspective; his recent Conversations with M. Wynn Thomas indicate little has changed:
given that the colonial mentality is actually being perpetuated, through the media and other ‘opinion-forming’ institutions, in present-day post-imperial Wales, it is the duty and function of the creative artist to redress the balance, because the relationship between established power and communication is too close. A writer can therefore use the form of fiction to reveal hidden truths – which is, of course, a paradox, since in one sense any work of fiction is necessarily a tissue of lies. (191)
This chapter has attempted to show the reasons why Emyr Humphreys became committed to Welsh nationalist politics and the ways in which his political views are reflected in and influence his fiction. His interest in Wales, however, is far deeper than merely political. It coincides with a deep, what Humphreys calls ‘abiding’, interest in the past: the history, culture, literature and perhaps especially the myths – and, because he is Welsh, of Wales in particular. The ways in which he has contrived to use myth and history in his fiction will be examined in detail in later chapters. Because he has consistently used his own and his ancestors’ lived experience in Wales as the raw material of his novels, continually reinforcing the idea of Wales as a separate nation through the content of his fiction, and because he holds in his mind the concept of Wales as marginalized, its people as subsumed into a colonial mentality and the language of the majority as one of cultural supremacy,