At the outbreak of war, Humphreys registered as a conscientious objector and did farm work, first in Pembrokeshire and then in Llanfaglan, near Caernarfon. Humphreys describes the situation in a way that connects his personal rejection of a religious career with his desire to embrace a Welsh identity, which was so strong it literally drove him to the land, the two furthest corners from England:
They were appalled later by the fact that I was a conscientious objector; then they thought I’d gone completely off the rails. But they were very kind. My father – who hated to travel – came by train all the way to Aberystwyth to try to persuade me to continue with my course of study there. I was intending at that time to be an ordinand in the Church in Wales, but then I decided to go off, with Robin Richards, to live on this farm in Pembrokeshire. We thought that the world was going to come to an end, but that there would remain remnants of Welsh affiliation on the land…. I left university, to my father’s dismay, before ever I was called before a tribunal as a conscientious objector. I felt, by then, that I hadn’t the vocation to become a clergyman, although I’d been offered a place in St Stephen’s Hall, at Oxford. That had pleased my father no end, but I thought that was all wrong – I was a bit confused, really. I do remember the feeling that the only thing to do was to get back to the land, and I was already working on this farm when I was given the exemption to stay there by the tribunal – and later I had to get another tribunal to get off it, because the traditional exemption was for working on the land, so when I wanted to go to London to work for the Save the Children Fund I had to have the permission of a tribunal to be allowed to change. I don’t regret it – it was a huge education to do these things. I didn’t grow up until this started. (127)
This experience of agricultural work is used in Outside the House of Baal (1965) and in Unconditional Surrender (1996). Frank, in A Change of Heart (1951), has a graphically unpleasant time working on a farm too. It was a particularly important period for Humphreys because he consolidated his learning of Welsh and worked on the early version of A Toy Epic.
I acquired a bilingual brain by dint of effort. I am still reluctant to look too closely into why exactly I made the effort. It leaves me with a multiple burden of guilt – on my own behalf, on behalf of my parents, and on behalf of Welshness and the nation we belong to. It seems more than any other factor in my life to have dominated my faltering creative steps. (196–7)
Before the end of the war he joined the Save the Children Fund and moved into a house in Chelsea, which he remembers as full of books in several languages. It was there he became friendly with Basil McTaggart, who would later become an expert on the Etruscan civilization, awakening an interest in Humphreys.32 ‘I do of course, have a particular interest in the Etruscans, in part because of the parallel between their history and that of another vanished civilization, the Celts’ (135). The two years he subsequently spent as a war relief worker in the Middle East and Italy as an official of the Save the Children Fund were used in detail in The Voice of a Stranger (1949). He found this experience particularly exciting and rewarding: ‘there was a feeling that the world was going to change. For boys of only 24 or 25 we had a lot of power … we tried to do good of course’.33 This is echoed in the foregrounding in The Voice of a Stranger of the three war-workers to the detriment sometimes of the focus on the love story and intrigues played out amongst the Italian characters.
Well before the novel appeared, Humphreys published an article in Wales in 1946, titled ‘A season in Florence: 1945’. This is presented as diary extracts made during the summer of 1945 describing Humphreys’s work in Italy with refugees. Both the setting and several incidents in The Voice of a Stranger can be seen to derive from the ‘real’ experience, if the diary is factual. Humphreys details the overcrowded refugee camp in Italy. The camp is badly – that is, both inefficiently and corruptly – run by the National Liberation Movement. It is possible to establish in unusual detail how close the link is between life and fiction in this early novel, in the sense of factual detail being repeated from personal experience. Much of the diary comprises jottings rather than structured sentences and Humphreys uses these as details to create the setting in an Italian camp immediately post war, upon which he superimposes the central action of the novel, the triangular relationship of Guido, Riccardo and Marcella, which culminates in the death of all three. Italy, in fact, seems to have been a particularly significant experience for him and appears as a location frequently in his work. It is a place to which he has returned numerous times; M. Wynn Thomas describes Italy as Humphreys’s ‘second home’.34 The Italian Wife (1957) is mainly set in Italy but in other novels the country is used as a ‘time-out’ from the main action of the novel. In ‘The Land of the Living’ sequence Gwydion escapes to Italy, as does Sam Halkin in the Intermezzi of The Gift (1963). The most recent novel, The Gift of a Daughter (1998), is substantially set in Italy and, more explicitly than the previous novels, deals with ways in which the history and culture of northern Italy, particularly Tuscany, link with that of Wales for the author, becoming a metaphor, because of its lost language, for the fate of Wales. Indeed, it is possibly through his personal connections with Italy alongside his love of Italian literature35 that Humphreys has formulated, under the influence of the historiography developed by Saunders Lewis, the idea that Wales is the real heir to the traditions and culture of Rome, an alternative, perhaps postcolonial, position to take, in view of the traditional British sense that English culture stems from Rome.
I think Italy is in many respects the home of European culture as a whole – the source of Latin, the source of medieval civilization, is Italy … Writers like Primo Levi and Italo Calvino remind us that the Italians are a defeated nation, who experienced a terrible war and have recovered…. They haven’t got the pretensions of the French, who are much more like the English in being imperialistic and convinced of their own superiority. The Italians haven’t got that at all, and neither do the Germans: these two great defeated nations seem to me to be the two most civilized European nations of our days. (134)
Whilst these observations may have been made from real experience of different nationalities, it is unfortunate that Humphreys’s detailed discussions of Welsh nationality should be illustrated by such sweeping and simplistic stereotyping of other nations. It is difficult not to conclude that the overriding feature of Welsh nationality as far as Humphreys is concerned is that of defeat at the hands of the English, which leads to Welsh identification with England’s other ‘enemies’ and the conclusion that imperialistic defines the English and French, and that only defeated nations can be civilized.
THE EARLY CAREER
The year 1946 was a key time for Emyr Humphreys. He completed his work in Italy, began training as a teacher at the University College of Wales, Bangor, and married Elinor Jones, the daughter of a Nonconformist minister. He also published his first novel, The Little Kingdom.
If you were born in 1919, as I was, the entire period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War was the time you needed for growing up. Nothing really resolved itself, for me, until the end of the Second War; it was then, really, that you had your compass bearings. (127)
At this time Humphreys was able to combine his political ideals and his creative talents. Although he would continue to write poetry, he had realized that fiction was to be his principal métier: ‘I found my form when I found fiction and I could have jumped up and down for joy at discovering this, because I had the other problem as well: I wanted to write in Welsh, but I didn’t have enough Welsh for that purpose’ (128). Humphreys’s language