Emyr Humphreys. Diane Green
would have seen the whole incident, the action, the pamphlet and the trial, as having an enormous impact on Wales and giving a new confidence and pride to many people. It is not surprising then that he used similar subject matter when writing his first published novel. When Humphreys came to write the early novels of his ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence in the 1970s he used the composite method of constructing character in his creation of Val Gwyn, the Welsh nationalist political activist and librarian at Aberystwyth. The name, the charisma and place suggest Lewis Valentine but the influence of Saunders Lewis is also apparent,25 as indeed is that of Ambrose Bebb. Again the character dies young as a result of his political activities and Humphreys’s anger at the treatment meted out to Saunders Lewis by the University of Wales may be one of the reasons behind his cynical treatment of universities and academic life in his novels, culminating in the disenchantment obvious in National Winner and Bonds of Attachment and the bitter disillusion in the recent The Gift of a Daughter.
Because Humphreys has written an article about the Penyberth incident,26 a mixture of fact and opinion, it is possible to examine how differently he treats the subject in a ‘historical’ account and in fiction. The account is a very sympathetic treatment. It deliberately avoids the actual incident, beginning with the three activists anxiously waiting in their car. It then concentrates on their handing themselves over to justice, including a quotation of their eloquent and persuasive letter of admission. The description of their discussing poetry in the police cells totally negates any sense of the dangerousness of activists, emphasizing instead the bonds which exist between the captors and their criminals, a unity created by the Welsh language and its poetry. This is in direct contrast to the novel which deals with events leading up to the incident and virtually ends with the death of Owen. The article switches dramatically from its supportive stance concerning the three activists, portraying them as acting under threat, in the face of a ‘tidal wave’, and comparing the position of Wales with that of the Jews threatened by Haman the Agagite,27 and becomes a scathing attack on the superficiality and sentimentality of Lloyd George’s attachment to Wales. Lloyd George is presented, in direct contrast to Saunders Lewis, as a manipulative, two-faced figure, ‘the prototype of a twentieth-century dictator, associating with Hitler, and putting his English political career ahead of his responsibility to Wales’ (77). Humphreys is also free to state his own opinion on the incident: ‘Over this sensitive issue we are witnessing exceptional men operating within the limits of a strictly Welsh context’ (77). Finally, he sets the incident in the context of Welsh history, using the opportunity to indict English law as the destroyer of Welsh law. He does this explicitly but also metaphorically, presenting the Caernarfon court house, where the trial took place, as ‘in the shadow of the mediaeval castle’ and the painting, hanging on the courtroom wall, of Edward I with the first prince of Wales ‘a baby on his shield’, again emphasizing the military domination of Wales by England. Against this backdrop of English control Humphreys describes the lives of the three men with the effect that they are seen as heroes fighting for the survival of Welsh culture and the Welsh language, rather than arsonists or lawbreakers. The whole is a skilfully written essay in admiration of the deed which contrasts it positively with the kind of political action adopted by Lloyd George, the choosing of British rather than Welsh responsibility, which is in turn viewed from the Welsh point of view as a traitorous adoption of the English rather than the Welsh cause.
The differences between the article and the novel are instructive in that they illustrate the different parameters with which a novelist has to deal. Although there are striking similarities between the activists and the six characters involved in action in the novel, the differences are perhaps more important. One main protagonist is chosen for the novel, where three worked together in 1936. The ages are altered from middle age to youth, and a girl becomes central, introducing a romantic/sexual liaison, which is entirely absent from the ‘real’ event.28 Other characters are produced as romantic rival, friend etc., their necessity built out of the dynamics necessary in the creation of a fictional life around the protagonist, to produce the events and the dialogue, through which the author wishes to convey his story. Some details stand out: the night-watchman, for example. Humphreys, writing his personal view in the article, suggests the man must be lying, because the three activists each deny his testimony, and they are all three presented as truthful men. In the novel, however, Tom Siôn is a significant character; he represents the working man, displaced and out of work because of the power and arrogance of the young capitalist, Owen, who publicly insults him and behaves offensively to his girlfriend. Rather than having the English/Welsh dichotomy of the article, the novel explores the different Welsh attitudes to the aerodrome. Tom Siôn is given a background which explains why he cannot see anything wrong with taking work at the aerodrome, whilst Owen’s supporters have cultural and material reasons for fighting against it. The whole incident is made more dramatic by its resulting in the death and consequent martyrdom of the ringleader; and simultaneously it is made more complex by that ringleader’s being also a murderer, and the whole plot’s being a political thriller and simultaneously a tragedy.
Ultimately, the work of fiction stands on its own. The reader who knows about Penyberth can see the connections, where the idea for the novel came from and how many of the details came to exist; but the novel has to exist independently of Penyberth and of the author’s own life and influences. If the novel relied on its reader’s awareness of a special historical context, it would be a failure as fiction. This particular novel would be greatly weakened if it had been presented in the partisan way in which the author writes his article. The dilemma Humphreys creates in his fiction adds a dimension missing from the Penyberth history, if not from contemporary international history which occurred shortly afterwards; the situation in the novel indicates that dynamic political action requires a ruthlessness and lack of conventional morality in a leader, which would be completely unacceptable to the majority on either side of the question. It raises the difficult question of whether force is ever justifiable, but also of whether anything but force could ever be successful against a controlling power – a question in the minds of politically active Welsh nationalists on a variety of occasions during Humphreys’s lifetime, but one which is of particular concern to the pacifist Humphreys.
EDUCATION AND WAR
The Penyberth incident happened when Emyr Humphreys was a grammar school boy at Rhyl, living in Trelawnyd, Flintshire, a village a few miles south of Prestatyn in north-east Wales. Attendance at the village school, where his father was headmaster, was followed by Rhyl Grammar School. This background is clearly very similar to that of Michael in A Toy Epic, the first draft of which was his first attempt at getting a novel published, although the final published version did not appear until 1958. A substantial part of it was written immediately after he left university during the early years of the Second World War. The conflicts within the novel, between the Anglican church in Wales and Nonconformity, between being English or Welsh speaking, middle or working class, town or country dwellers, are all issues with which the young Humphreys would have been faced. It may also be argued that even seemingly insignificant details of a writer’s life emerge as important. Humphreys points out that he started to write poetry after writing limericks and lampoons in class, because he had been ill and consequently had failed an exam and had been ‘put into a class called the Remove’.29 Poetry led him into writing as a career.
From 1937 to 1939 Humphreys studied history at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he enjoyed medieval history most of all (130). It is important too that he chose a Welsh university and was perhaps stimulated to read history by his recently awakened awareness of Welsh history and culture. He came into contact with contemporary Welsh-language literature and politics, learned Welsh and became a Welsh nationalist. Student life, often at a college closely resembling the University of Wales College of Aberystwyth, features in many of his novels, from the early The Little Kingdom and A Change of Heart (1951) through to ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence (1979–91). The emphasis on students as being both very politically aware and also politically active perhaps stems from his own experience there. Many contemporaries of Humphreys have made their names in the fields of history and literature. Glanmor Williams, for example, recalls the debate for newcomers at which he first saw Emyr and opposed him in the debate,30 the kind of occasion that no doubt contributed to the debating scene in ‘Michael Edwards: the Nationalist