The Emergence of Humphreys as a Postcolonial Writer
For all serious purposes in modern literature … the language of a Welshman is and must be English; … the moment he has anything of real importance to say, anything the world will the least care to hear, he must speak English.1
This chapter is concerned with Humphreys’s early fiction: the first six novels published between 1946 and 1957 and particularly the seventh, A Toy Epic, which was finally published in 1958. The main postcolonial strategies that Humphreys has used throughout his career emerged and were refined during this period: the use of Wales as the location of the plot, the use of Welsh history and myth, the discussion of the variety of Welsh life. The focus of the discussion will be on the ways in which these techniques evolved and the reasons behind their use – the extent to which those reasons are due to personal, postcolonial or literary considerations.2
Humphreys’s first six novels are all prefigured by or patterned on existing text/s from the realms of history, literature and mythology. The first two novels are heavily dependent on such sources, the second two much less so, with the third pair more heavily prefigured again. One possible reason for this may be these novels’ relationship to the publication of A Toy Epic, which was first mooted for publication in 1943 and finally appeared in 1958, by which time the first six novels had appeared. The Gift then followed A Toy Epic’s success, and that novel is possibly the least prefigured or patterned by other texts. If the author was encouraged to create a wholly original plot by the reception given to A Toy Epic in 1958,3 it is equally possible that the rejection of his first attempt at a novel caused or contributed to an early insecurity about his own ability to plot a novel without the help of structural patterning from other texts.
As M. Wynn Thomas recounts in the ‘Introduction’ to A Toy Epic, Humphreys began writing the work in the form of a verse novel in 1940. His contact with Graham Greene as the literary editor of the Spectator, which had already published some of Humphreys’s poetry, encouraged him to send his manuscript to Greene at Eyre and Spottiswoode. The ‘Introduction’ details the early progress of this work and the reception it received from critical advisers, including T. S. Eliot and Kate Roberts as well as Greene himself. The consensus was that the work was structurally faulty. Humphreys would appear to have accepted this at that time and begun work on The Little Kingdom instead. It is possible that Greene’s comments on the second half of the work (the part which would have formed the continuation of the present novel), Eliot’s criticism of the work’s ‘architectural design’ and Kate Roberts’s argument that the plot followed an unbalanced or asymmetrical pattern together convinced Humphreys that his weakness as a writer was in the construction of plot. Aristotle, of course, saw plot as absolutely essential to the construction of tragedy and Humphreys, who has many times mentioned Aristotle when discussing fiction, may have chosen to use Shakespearean and mythological prefigurations in order to underpin his story and bolster his confidence. Alternatively, he may have been drawn to use these plots by his interest in Shakespearean and classical tragedy. His interest in this drama would certainly have made him aware that great writers have in the past used already existing material, even if this was not used in the prefigurative but rather in the retelling sense. Certainly, in an interview with M. Wynn Thomas he described plotting a novel as something he found difficult in his early career.4
THE FIRST FOUR NOVELS
We have seen that Humphreys had cause to doubt his own ability in the construction of plot. Certainly, in his first six novels he uses various texts both to form a plotline and to create prefigurative suspense and suggestion, and it is the use of some of these texts that can be called a strategy of appropriation. However, the use of other texts with no relationship to Wales – indeed, the use of Shakespearean tragedy can be seen as exactly the opposite technique, reinforcing the master language – would indicate that at this stage the author’s purpose is actually literary (a structuring technique) rather than deliberately postcolonial. A brief examination of the types of text used by Humphreys to bolster the plots of his early novels alongside the movement to and from the backdrop of Wales should indicate the extent to which Wales is important at this stage, and whether the use of Welsh history and myth is for postcolonial purposes or merely in its effect.
The Little Kingdom (1946) was Humphreys’s first experiment in the use of history and literature to counteract his self-perceived shortcomings in the structuring of plot. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he turned to the recent event which had had such a profound effect on him, the Penyberth bombing of 1936, using an historical event to create a strong plot.5 In selecting this situation he is able, on the one hand, to address ideas which particularly concern him: nationalism, violence as political protest, the personality of the charismatic leader; on the other hand, the plot lends itself to the tragic approach and his text is consequently resonant with Shakespearean echoes. Whereas the Penyberth story is a solid structure that works to control the outline of the whole plot and many of the details, the tragedies of Shakespeare are used more allusively and variously. His characters echo different tragic situations at different times, but particularly Macbeth’s killing of the king and Hamlet’s jealousy of his uncle. Humphreys is giving stature to his characters, who would otherwise be fairly ordinary. At the same time he is creating a sense of patterns of behaviour, or archetypes, back to which all individual situations can be referred. In this first novel Humphreys is already using Celtic myth, particularly the Blodeuwedd situation and the Bible, alongside his main source of prefiguration, the historical event.
Humphreys has at this point in his career a strong interest in history, as was indicated by his reading history at university.6 There is no direct evidence of his youthful interest in myth, apart from his childhood belief in the legend that a princess was buried on The Gop, above Trelawnyd. This is a concept which connects history with myth, in the sense in which myths are sometimes archetypal stories culled from ‘history’, and certainly also suggests that Humphreys may have identified both history and myth as ways of commenting upon the Welsh past. However, as a young novelist he was heavily influenced by James Joyce, whilst the writer he admired most was T. S. Eliot, and these writers, along with other modernists, had established the contemporary use of myth in literature. Humphreys was particularly influenced by Eliot’s verse dramas, from which he learned that ‘a structure derived from classical myth’ was an important consideration.7 He writes of that time:
To someone with a sense of vocation drawn towards forms of artistic creation I suppose you could say myth had an even deeper function. That is to say whatever the individual’s personal circumstance, the ramifications of myth present what appear to be consistent elements in the human condition. Whether you are born in fifth century Greece … or in the backwoods of Flintshire, the structures of myth would somehow reveal what such disparate situations had in common. The world of Wales in 1939 contained all the elements necessary for large or small scale tragedy. In my own case I belonged to a generation born in the aftermath of one war and brought up to be confronted with the inevitability of another. And along it came.
This extract clearly explains how myth, history and tragedy came to be combined in the young novelist’s mind, and why at that particular moment he felt impelled to create a tragedy set in a Welsh situation.
In The Taliesin Tradition Humphreys writes that ‘fiction can of course catch closer glimpses of ultimate truth than mere recorded fact’.8 It would, therefore, be reasonable to suggest that he perhaps wanted in his novel to present a ‘truth’ which might be absent from a historical account. Nevertheless, he did also write such an account in 1980, titled ‘The night of the fire’,9 in which many details coincide with The Little Kingdom, suggesting that the fictional account was based by the author on the historical event in a fairly transparent way. Officially, there were three men involved on 8 September 1936: Saunders Lewis, a university lecturer; Lewis E. Valentine, a minister; and D. J. Williams, a schoolmaster. In the novel six characters go to the aerodrome: Owen Richards,