Emyr Humphreys. Diane Green
it becomes clear that there are several common areas: they are set in areas and landscapes that are familiar to the author; the main characters are relatively young; the novels are based on areas of his experience with regard to careers; and their common theme is that of individual responsibility and choice, and of Christian conscience – the ideas explored in Humphreys’s articles published around this time.43 However, when Humphreys uses texts of any kind to bolster his own material, whether they are Welsh or not appears to be immaterial. Wales is present, because it is part of Humphreys’s background, not because it is the subject of discussion. However, this was about to change.
A MAN’S ESTATE AND THE ITALIAN WIFE
In The Taliesin Tradition Humphreys writes that: ‘The manufacture and proliferation of myth must always be a major creative activity among a people with unnaturally high expectations reduced by historic necessity, or at least history, forced into what is often described as a marginal condition.’44 This could well explain why Humphreys turned to myth as his desire to write about Wales increased. There is little obvious connection between the fourth novel and the fifth, A Man’s Estate (1955), in which Humphreys returns to heavy prefiguration, this time using the Orestes–Electra myth. Perhaps Humphreys was able to see the weaknesses in his fourth novel in spite of its success. A Man’s Estate marks a return to the detailed prefiguring which occurred in The Little Kingdom, and like that novel it is also chiefly set in Wales, with a strong discussion within the text of the differences between Wales and England, which are symbolized by the differences between Hannah and Philip Elis, a brother and sister brought up separately, one Welsh, the other a Welsh exile in England. Humphreys uses the debate inherent within the classical dramatizations of the myth to stimulate and give resonance to his own examination of the dichotomy between the die-hard traditionalist Welsh stance and that of the anglicized Welshman.
It might be assumed that Humphreys used drama rather than myth for his prefiguring device, since the Orestes myth is best known through the plays of Greek dramatists. It might also be assumed that he used Aeschylus’s Oresteia, which is the most comprehensive treatment of the myth.45 However, Humphreys focuses strongly on Hannah Elis and, whereas Electra is an important character in The Choephori of Aeschylus, she is certainly more prominent in Sophocles’ and Euripides’ plays bearing her name. Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra also focuses on Electra and, alongside T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion, would undoubtedly have been familiar to the author.46 We know of Eliot’s importance to Humphreys, since he has himself written of his early career: ‘From Eliot particularly I learned that poetic drama was the ultimate form all poets should aspire to, and that in most cases these efforts would need a structure derived from classical myth.’47 It is not surprising then that Humphreys turned to classical myth, particularly if he had arrived at a point of realization that, although his novels were well received, they lacked a strong storyline. He could hardly have chosen a story with more significance or one better equipped to deal with cultural divisions or change and gender difference. The importance of myth to the leading modernists so admired by Humphreys also meant that any use of myth, especially a myth well established in contemporary literature, would mean that the audience would be aware of any ‘difference’ in an author’s focus, whether the focus was psychological, political or gender based.
Humphreys, unlike any of the Greek dramatists, opens with Orestes’ point of view. Philip Esmor-Elis is motivated by the need for money and family background with which to impress his girlfriend’s father (the epitome of English materialism and snobbery) rather than by revenge. Humphreys is claiming from the beginning a vast difference between his society and that of classical drama. Philip has grown up like Orestes in exile, but with his father’s mistress rather than a family retainer. Rather than longing for reunion with his sister and the deaths of his parents, Philip is almost oblivious of their existence until his treacherous friend (unlike Pylades) sends him off to Wales to obtain his patrimony. However, as the plot unfolds the reader is very aware that the family structure and past events are based closely on the myth. Clytemnestra, Aegisthus and Agamemnon are clear patterns for the older generation, with the difference that Elis has not sacrificed a daughter but has fathered an illegitimate one. Hannah, too, is Electra but also unlike Electra in her ill health. Updated, she suffers from chronic asthma, and is a faded spinster of thirty-five, but like Electra she is aware of being trapped in time: ‘for me, the crisis is still to come, a revelation that will explain the present, bury the past, and redeem what is left of the future.’48 The language Humphreys uses makes the reader constantly aware of mythic echoes, of the archetypal pattern, and possibly that his character would actually have been speaking in Welsh. It is not then a modern idiom. The differences embodied in Mrs Elis are an even more striking comment on modern society. There was no great passion for Vavasor, only a desire to be matriarch, to manipulate and control through a new heir. In fact, the classical reasons for Agamemnon’s absence from home – the male conspiracy and the pursuit of a beautiful adultress – are a metaphorical comment by the author on British politics, for Elis is another of those Welsh politicians with the Lloyd George syndrome. Mary Elis’s hypocrisy is indicated by her keeping the hated husband’s name to increase her status in the area, where she controls the farm, the local chapel and justice, as JP. By the novel’s end Philip has exposed her as the murderer of her first husband and Humphreys presents her in classically tragic mode, splattered with the blood of the cockerels she has decapitated.49
The action of the novel follows the myth: Philip returns home and brings about the revelation of the truth and consequent punishment; Hannah’s wait for her brother is rewarded; the murderers are punished by the disclosure. It is, however, a far more psychological presentation. The reader learns about Elis’s murder and that the repression of their guilty secret has been the root cause of their behaviour for the last thirty years. Hannah’s awareness is very different from Electra’s; in spite of bad treatment by her mother, she does not hate her and is unaware of her father’s murder. Also by the end of the novel she, not Philip, will have the farm, their father’s inheritance. Philip will choose to go abroad and follow his career, whereas Orestes’ exile was forced punishment. One positive factor which emerges is their love for each other. However, there is an added effect of using myth. For the reader aware of the mythic pattern, Hannah’s character is underpinned by the original Electra, so that the Electra emotions emerge as unconscious motivation and Hannah appears to be repressing her real feelings, the desire to punish her parents, for example. A different effect of using myth is the degree of pre-knowledge of the novel’s outcome. So, on one level, the novel works almost as detective story, with the murder a complete surprise to the reader unaware of the myth. The knowing reader, however, will expect this, along with the lack of conflict between brother and sister. Humphreys’s comment that the whole pleasure in traditional storytelling was ‘how you got there’ rather than what happens, that ‘you must begin every story at the end’,50 indicates a strong reason he may have had for using myth in this depth.
Whereas The Eumenides develops an argument between the old and new law of Athens, coming down in favour of the new patriarchal tradition of Apollo rather than the old of the Furies, Humphreys translates this into a discussion of English and Welsh laws of inheritance. Philip arrives espousing the English right of primogeniture, but then uncovers his father’s financial interest in the farm, which gave him ownership and logically means either or both of his two children should inherit, rather than Dick, Mary’s favoured youngest child. By the conclusion Hannah accepts the farm from Philip, finding a solution that is not typically English in that she is a female heir, but which favours Elis over Mary. In a sense the brother and sister share the farm, which is the ‘Welsh’ solution.51 This relates back to the passage from Humphreys’s letter quoted above; he has found in myth/tragedy an archetype which he can relate to ‘the backwoods of Flintshire’, a way of arriving at a just inheritance, for inheriting is one of the commonalities of the human condition.
There are strong similarities between the novel and Sophocles’ Electra, which also focuses on the adult siblings. However, Orestes’ love for his father underlines Philip’s complete lack of interest in his. Electra, on the other hand, is a clear pattern for Hannah, weeping, unmarried, childless and bearing the endless burden of woe. An even stronger reason for suspecting