Emyr Humphreys. Diane Green
armour’,10 who represents tradition and continuity in Welsh life; Tom Seth, a farmer; and Ifan Jones, a miner.11 Ifan is writing englynion as they wait, just as ‘the bespectacled non-smoker’ (D. J. Williams?) was trying to finish his short story. Both cut their fingers and in the fictional account the three drops of blood are taken as an omen that Geraint will betray them, as the reader knows he has done already.
Penyberth was a fifteenth-century farmhouse, which for the activists stood as a symbol of ‘the very home of Welsh culture’,12 according to Lewis. In parallel with this is Richard Bloyd’s selling of the ‘three hundred acres of unproductive flats’ on the coastal plain of north Wales for the aerodrome. Because the land is unproductive, trapped between old, finished industry and new, growing suburbs, Humphreys adds the schoolhouse of St Beuno’s school,13 home of Miss Tudor, and makes it more equivalent to Penyberth. What Bloyd is going to sell for a quick profit includes Miss Tudor, ‘the very last of the Tudors’,14 signifying Welsh history. It also includes a pile of fleeces (sheep farming), bad apples (rural life) and ancient school textbooks (Welsh culture). Ironically, Miss Tudor tries to give away Longfellow to Nest, and her father ‘loved to read Longfellow’. This could be seen as being as anglicizing a gesture as what Bloyd is doing, but involving culture rather than property. Miss Tudor, and consequently Welsh history, is portrayed as afraid of progress and materialism, that is, afraid of Bloyd. ‘Her eyes clouded with tears of helplessness, impotence, and self pity’.15 She believes in her Welsh past because of what her father has told her, but she finds the family’s genealogical tree too difficult to understand. In other words, she makes no real effort to gain an awareness of the past, but has simply a self-pitying, romantic attitude towards it. When Bloyd, the man she hates, drives off in a cloud of smoke, he seems to her ‘like an evil magician in a tale’.16 The acceptance of such a force is natural to her, because of its occurrence in legends of the past; her romantic and partial awareness of history and culture helps defeat her. Humphreys is, at this very early stage in his career, already using characters representationally.
There are also straightforward correspondences between the fictional and ‘real’ characters. Valentine was ‘a tall handsome figure’ who physically suggests comparison with Owen, although Lewis was the university lecturer. The debating and charismatic skills as leader which are given to Owen also suggest Valentine. D. J. Williams, ‘in his fifty-first year’ at the time of the incident, an ex-miner from a hill farm in Carmarthenshire, acted with ‘the consciousness of the ancient values of my ancestors bound with a feeling for their continuance’, and as such was possibly a model for Captain Picton-Parry of the novel. Saunders Lewis’s father was a Welsh Calvinistic minister, recalling Rhys and Rhiannon’s father.17 Lewis’s early education has much in common with Owen’s experience, when he recalls the victimization he received as a Welsh boy at an English public school, ‘the boy was conscious of being different’.18 Humphreys calls it being ‘made conscious of the dualism of belonging to two worlds’.19 Like Lewis, Owen ‘shone’ at all he did, ‘in everything and in the end he was top, the acknowledged leader’.20 Lewis was a lecturer in Welsh literature at the University College, Swansea and Owen in history at Aber. ‘He got on so well in his department’ (as a student) ‘that they offered him a Lectureship’.21 On the other hand, Humphreys’s fictionalizing of the role of the nightwatchman, whose account at the trial is very different from the account given in the novel, has both an artistic and a political motivation.22
‘There is a simple sense in which History can be interpreted as the continuing interplay between premeditated acts and a surge of uncontrollable events.’23 Given that he holds this opinion, it is easy to see why Humphreys connects the central political act of The Little Kingdom with classical tragedy and makes so many allusions to tragedies in his text. The novel may be based on the firing of the Penyberth Bombing School, but Humphreys chooses to present his novel as a tragedy centred on one character. He involves the family and friends of this character and the repercussions for them of his character and actions, very much in the style of classical tragedy but without the elevated status of the typical classical cast. In fact, one of his most successful ironic touches is the way Owen continually sees himself as having a greatly increased stature – of being on the point of entering his country’s myth. The author, on the other hand, presents his character far more modestly. The fact that Owen dies at the conclusion of the novel also indicates the novelist’s intention of creating a tragedy, given the closeness already mentioned between the historical facts and situation and those presented here. In real life the three men endured a gaol sentence and Saunders Lewis lost his university career, but Shakespearean tragedy in particular and theories of tragedy in general suggest the death of the protagonist.
Humphreys is perhaps suggesting that martyr deaths transform historical accounts and create myths; that the Penyberth fire produced its (relatively short-term) heroes, but this fictional account in having a sacrificial victim might have had a different (ultimate) outcome.24 The immediate consequences, however, are very similar. Ironically, the basic myth here is strongly evident of the influence of a patriarchal society. G. R. Manton attributes to patriarchy the numerous myths which concern the clashes between father and son, characteristic of a society ‘where the son succeeds to the position of the father’.25 This description of patriarchal society is more typical of England than of Wales, which is of concern here.26 Manton points out that Freud would argue many of the father–son conflicts are psychological ones (for example, the sexual interpretation of the Oedipus myth) but that in some the sexual element is ‘absent or barely noticeable’, as it is here. The question becomes, then, whether Humphreys is omitting to distinguish between English and Welsh patterns of social behaviour (the importance of primogeniture, for example) or whether, in fact, these have merged and there is no reason to distinguish between them; or whether he is deliberately suggesting that the evil element in Owen’s character stems from his schooling in English society, as opposed to his Welsh parentage.
Humphreys’s first published novel, then, shows strong evidence of a variety of kinds of deliberate patterning in its plot and structure, which were not used in the rejected first version of A Toy Epic.27 Perhaps in consequence, the plot of The Little Kingdom is strong, dramatic and structured. The basic outline and many details are taken from the historical event. This not only adds structure, it adds political, Welsh and contemporary historical significance to the fiction, and producing a heightened awareness of this, to Humphreys, key episode in Welsh history would have been a welcome outcome. The uses of Celtic myth contribute to the Welsh identity of the novel and also to the sense of recurring archetypes, which is achieved by the numerous Shakespearean allusions. However, it is impossible to argue that the author was using myth as a strategy of appropriation given that Greek myth and Shakespearean allusions are more in evidence. It is unclear whether the author intended to increase the stature of his work or undermine his protagonist by the connections he makes between Owen and various tragic heroes. What is very clear is that this work indicates the author’s interest in drama and his skill at dramatic characterization, at ‘scenes’, which later in his career will both dominate the narrative technique of novels such as Outside the House of Baal and lead to an alternative career as a dramatist. Humphreys has found a way of writing successful fiction but there are drawbacks. Only in the Penyberth fire could he perhaps find a situation which could justify the high sense of tragedy his allusions inject into the text. And only in the contemporary situation of the writing of the novel in the aftermath of a world war would this intensely emotional approach seem justified by the heightened drama surrounding political leaders, such as Hitler and Mussolini, and the evil attributed to them.
This first novel is using an incident which was overpoweringly important to the author and using a place about which he knew, rather than being a novel which sets out to explore the Welsh condition. In his second novel, The Voice of a Stranger (1949), Humphreys again chose to use his own experience, this time of Italy’s confusion in the aftermath of war, in the setting of his novel and also in many of the plot details, particularly those concerning the three war workers. The use of three individuals here rather than one may even have stemmed from his use of three voices in the original A Toy Epic, characters who can all be seen as facets of the author as well as