M. Wynn Thomas - Emyr Humphreys

Writers of Wales

Emyr Humphreys

Editors:

Jane Aaron

M. Wynn Thomas

Andrew Webb

Honorary Series Editor:

R. Brinley Jones

Meic Stephens

Other titles in the Writers of Wales series:

Christopher Meredith (2018), Diana Wallace

B. L. Coombes (2017), Bill Jones and Chris Williams

Owen Rhoscomyl (2016), John S. Ellis

Dylan Thomas (2014), Walford Davies

Gwenlyn Parry (2013), Roger Owen

Welsh Periodicals in English (2013), Malcolm Ballin

Ruth Bidgood (2012), Matthew Jarvis

Dorothy Edwards (2011), Claire Flay

Kate Roberts (2011), Katie Gramich

Geoffrey of Monmouth (2010), Karen Jankulak

Herbert Williams (2010), Phil Carradice

Rhys Davies (2009), Huw Osborne

R. S. Thomas (2006), Tony Brown

Ben Bowen (2003), T. Robin Chapman

James Kitchener Davies (2002), M. Wynn Thomas

Writers of Wales

Emyr Humphreys

M. Wynn Thomas

M. Wynn Thomas, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owners written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-296-2
e-ISBN 978-1-78683-298-6

The right of M. Wynn Thomas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Emyr Humphreys in Llangadwaladr churchyard, Anglesey, 2013. Photograph by Dewi Humphreys.

Some parts of the discussion that follows are heavily revised versions of materials of mine on Emyr Humphreys previously published in the following places:

Emyr Humphreys (Penygroes: Gwasg Pantycelyn, 1989).

Two essays in Internal Difference: Twentieth-Century Writing in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).

Chapter in In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010).

Two essays in All That is Wales: Collected Essays (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017).

Introduction to Conversations and Reflections and interviews in that volume (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002).

Interviews in Arwel Jones (ed.), Dal Pen Rheswm (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1999).

LK The Little Kingdom (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1946)

VS The Voice of a Stranger (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949)

CH A Change of Heart (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951)

HF Hear and Forgive (London: Macdonald, 1952)

MA A Mans Estate (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955)

IW The Italian Wife (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1957)

TE Y Tri Llais (Llandybie: Llyfraur Dryw, 1958); A Toy Epic (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1958)

G The Gift (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1963)

OHB Outside the House of Baal (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965)

N Natives (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968)

NW National Winner (London: Macdonald, 1971)

FB Flesh and Blood (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974)

BF The Best of Friends (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978)

AT The Anchor Tree (London: Dent, 1980)

TT The Taliesin Tradition (London: Black Raven Press, 1983)

J Jones (London: Dent, 1984)

SE Salt of the Earth (London: Dent, 1985)

AH An Absolute Hero (London: Dent, 1986)

OS Open Secrets (London: Dent, 1988)

BA Bonds of Attachment (London: Macdonald, 1991)

US Unconditional Surrender (Bridgend: Seren, 1996)

GD The Gift of a Daughter (Bridgend: Seren, 1998)

CP Collected Poems (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999)

DPR Dal Pen Rheswm (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1999)

GS Ghosts and Strangers (Bridgend: Seren, 2001)

CR Conversations and Reflections (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002)

OPP Old People are a Problem (Bridgend: Seren, 2003)

S The Shop (Bridgend: Seren, 2005)

WW The Woman at the Window (Bridgend: Seren, 2009)

Born in 1919, Emyr Humphreys may be usefully regarded as the last great survivor of the heroic age of twentieth-century Welsh culture. Extending roughly from the First World War to the 1970s, the period was heroic in the sense that it could boast a cohort of writers who dedicated their conspicuous talents to infusing political, as well as cultural, energy into Welsh life sufficient to arouse their country out of the long torpor of its meekly subservient position within a profoundly anglocentric British polity. Humphreys shared with those earlier writers several of whom he came to know the view that the Welsh were as a people lacking that inner conviction that a free nation has of existing for its own sake. (CR, 147) Exploring this psycho-cultural condition became his great undertaking as a creative writer. And his fiction may be also regarded as an attempt to ensure the self-perpetuation of a nation whose future has, virtually since its beginnings in the early post-Roman period, been continuously uncertain. But then, all art, in Humphreyss view, is about survival. (CR, 119)

The heroic age could further be broadly subdivided into two. The heroic aspects of the interwar period were largely confined to the transformative achievements of a generation of Welsh-language writer-activists of a quality unparalleled since the golden age of late medieval times. And among the culturally committed of this remarkable constellation of talents one could number T. Gwynn Jones, Saunders Lewis, Kate Roberts, Ambrose Bebb, E. Tegla Davies, R. Williams Parry, W. J. Gruffydd, Gwenallt and others. While there were, by the late 1930s, some stirrings of like political energy among some of the young anglophone writers of the Dylan Thomas generation centred on the maverick periodical Wales and its editor, the wayward and wilful ringmaster of talent, Keidrych Rhys, it was not until the 1960s that a grouping of English-language writers emerged steadily animated by a liberationist political passion.

As for the heroic politico-cultural commitments of the transitional period between the Second World War and the 1960s, they were almost exclusively the preserve of two giant talents: R. S. Thomas and his friend and companion-in-arms Emyr Humphreys. Anglophone writers both, they nevertheless deliberately identified themselves with the important Welsh-language figures of the previous generation, and took as mentor and guru the greatest of these, Saunders Lewis, remarkable for his creative talents, his controversial ideological genius, his charismatic personality and his fearless political activism. Of all the heroic writers considered above it could be said, in Lewiss words, that