Emyr Humphreys. Diane Green
have not only created the particular tension that would lead to his best work, but also facilitated his desire to write fiction:
One of the escape routes is fiction, because story is a language of its own, a music of its own, a supranational language which is detached from the cultural problem. And that may be one reason why, culturally situated as I am, I find fiction such a very attractive form. (131)
The immediate post-war period is important in his work. Open Secrets (1989) closes with the end of the war and the death of Nanw. Unconditional Surrender (1996) is set in the same period. The action of Outside the House of Baal (1965) in the past as opposed to the present leads up to that point. The influence of his father-in-law’s Nonconformity and his own turning to that denomination is also evident in many novels.36 In all the novels set in Wales religion is an important issue: the male narrator of Unconditional Surrender and Michael’s father in A Toy Epic are clergymen; Idris Powell in A Man’s Estate, J.T. in Outside the House of Baal and, amongst others, the evangelical Tasker Thomas in ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence (hitherto referred to as the sequence) are ministers. Education and the role of the teacher is also important. Geraint is teaching in the first novel, the protagonist of A Change of Heart (1951) is a university lecturer and that of Hear and Forgive another teacher. The latter novel, published in 1952, is centred more than any other on school teaching, which Humphreys himself did from 1947 at Wimbledon Technical College and then from 1951 at Pwllheli Grammar School. David Flint, the first-person narrator, is particularly like the author in that he is a novelist, is supporting himself by teaching and was a conscientious objector during the recent war, doing war work in the Fens, in London and abroad.37 On the other hand, Flint is a married man, who is having an affair. He married in haste in 1939 (having just graduated – exactly like Humphreys). In a reversal of Humphreys’s own methods, Flint is writing a historical novel, in which he uses as a pattern people he knows. Humphreys places Flint’s family in Shropshire (although the name makes connection with Humphreys’s Flintshire), makes his father a shopkeeper, his mother dead, the family Congregational chapel. He thus mixes his own experience with invented details, or details based on an unknown source. Perhaps some of Flint’s crises of conscience are Humphreys’s own, but the protagonist in this novel is a good example of Humphreys’s development since writing the early version of A Toy Epic and the chapters on the student Michael. Michael is much closer to the author’s personal experience. By Hear and Forgive Humphreys has learnt to mix his own experience with extraneous details. In the future teachers/lecturers will be even further distanced from the author.38 What is clear, however, is that Humphreys is able to create scenes in his novels in which these characters are at work, something he is loath to do in the case of a character, such as John Cilydd (a solicitor), in whose career the author has little experience. In this sense Humphreys’s personal experience dictates to some extent possible areas of content in the novels.
In 1955 having published five novels, the latest being A Man’s Estate (1955),39 his most extensive exploration so far of the polar differences between rural Wales and the British Establishment, Humphreys finished teaching and joined the BBC as a drama producer, working first in radio and later in television. Humphreys enjoyed London and felt that his period there was the most conventionally successful of his career.40 It was because of his young family and the belief that they should be brought up in Wales in a certain way that he made the move from London to north Wales in 1951, and yet this has indubitably had a great effect on his output as a novelist. The Welsh as a people and Wales as a nation rather than as a place have become a dominant factor in his work. Humphreys has summarized this early stage of his career as follows:
The natural ability for literary expression continued to flow far more easily through my first language. Developing as a writer in wartime brought mixed blessings; first, a view of rural societies in Wales that had remained solidly monoglot; then a taste of, and for, Mediterranean culture and the excitement of the Italienische Reise by courtesy of Allied Forces. Subsequently, living in London meant concentrating on the novel, mastering a craft and developing a proficiency in that form along with an ambition to earn a living as a writer. I have to confess that it was only when I returned to Wales to work in the BBC that I was able to resume the missionary ardour of my youth.41
However, a comment made in his lecture ‘The empty space – creating a novel’, given in America in 2000, suggests some disenchantment at this time with the role of the novel in society:
The serious novel to which I had been prepared to dedicate my energies was in danger of becoming as obsolete as the myths which I had found so inspiring. The novel was bourgeois in origin and had flourished best in a high bourgeois society which no longer existed. The mass media had delivered the art of storytelling into the hands of those best qualified to manipulate the masses…. I had a distinct impression of ice cracking under my feet and the best thing I could do was to jump, at the very last moment, on a passing raft. I joined the BBC. (218)
In ‘Men of letters’ (1999) he describes the post as ‘a satisfactory halfway house between two worlds: the attraction of the cosmopolitan and the need to be close to the source’ (9). Clearly, Humphreys was well aware, even early in his writing career, of the importance to his writing of Wales, the place and the society into which he had been born. A prime motivation was to bring European drama to Wales (135) and during his career in radio he ‘met very interesting writers and thinkers and producers who must have had a considerable influence on me’ (135); in particular, he remembers the influences of Brecht and Pinter, established by way of his contact with Martin Esslin.42 Elsewhere Humphreys has expanded on his aims as a drama producer in radio with the BBC: first, an emphasis on encouraging new writing in both English and Welsh; secondly, the need for translation into Welsh of a variety of European drama; and, thirdly, the duty he felt to make Welsh writing known outside Wales.43 Interestingly, he found that when he began working in television his priorities reversed and ‘making Welsh writing known to a wider world became my chief occupation’ (197).
Humphreys’s career in the media and as a novelist writing in English about Wales, combined with the tensions, already described, which he felt about that issue, were inextricably connected with the wider political struggles which were ongoing: ‘In cultural terms most of the 1960s and all of the 1970s in Wales were taken up by the struggle to secure a Welsh-language television channel’ (199). For Humphreys this was to culminate in 1973 in a prison sentence for refusing to pay his television licence fee as a protest.44 His priority, in spite of writing his fiction in Welsh, has always been the preservation of the Welsh language. His reasons for its importance in maintaining a separate Welsh identity rather than being subsumed with England into one British identity follow:
A bilingual nation, like a bilingual brain, is, in the cultural sense, a society of societies. For it to remain bilingual and function creatively on this basis, all the device of translation should be mobilized to give the older and the weaker partner the strength to persist. It is the older language after all that has access to those primitive powers with which a people struggles to understand the world and celebrate its own precarious existence. (199)
Humphreys was head of Radio Drama for the BBC in Cardiff until 1958, when he became a drama producer for BBC television and spent the summer in London being trained in television production skills.45 This experience is used in The Gift (1963), which is centred on the acting world, of film rather than television, and set in London. Gwydion, one of the central characters of the sequence, also works in television and film and the notebooks from the writing of Outside the House of Baal (1965) show how Humphreys constructed the character of Thea using aspects of the personalities of actors and actresses with whom he had worked. The ten years Humphreys spent at the BBC ‘was an important period for me’ (136); he particularly recalls the influences of John Ormond’s film-making on his literary style and Walter Todds’s interest in philosophy, which led Humphreys to another important influence, Wittgenstein.
BBC Wales in those years was the best possible place for an aspiring chronicler of Welsh life to be. This happy period of eight years experimenting in radio, television and film not only taught me a great deal, and I was always a slow learner: it tied me that much closer to my proper subject …