All That is Wales
Page 16
Rooted in his Swansea experiences, then, are Thomas’s great affirmations of language, such as the great magnificat to words he sent to an enquiring obscure Texan postgraduate in 1951. Recalling his early discovery, once more in his Swansea childhood, of ‘such goings-on in the world between the covers of books’ (the sly insinuation of verbal sexual shenanigans is interesting), he wrote of:
such sand-storms and ice-blasts of words, such slashing of humbug, and humbug too, such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, such and so many blinding bright lights breaking across the just-awaking wits and splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces all of which were words, words, words, and each of which was alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light. (EPW, 156)
But Thomas was also ever aware of being ‘Shut, too, in a tower of words’ – a tower that could be phallically creative but could also be humanly imprisoning. It is telling, I think, that at the time of his death, one of the projects Thomas was contemplating undertaking was entitled ‘Where Have the Old Words Got Me?’.17
* * *
As I started this discussion with Return Journey, let me also finish with it, ending with its immensely moving conclusion. It features Thomas, the returnee, wandering Cwmdonkin Park as twilight falls and the park prepares for closure. In one, final attempt at coming face to face with his young self, he asks the lugubrious park keeper, now turned gatekeeper of tenebrous regions, the same plaintively insistent question he’d asked the barmaid earlier: does he remember a curlyhaired youngster? ‘Oh yes, yes I knew him well’, comes the reply: ‘He used to climb the reservoir railings and pelt the old swans. Run like a billygoat over the grass you should keep off of. Cut branches off the trees. Carve words on the benches.’ This seems promising, at last, not least that memory of a boy whose very identity yearned to take the form of words. But even as the park keeper goes on to fill in the rest of the picture – of a boy who used to ‘Climb the elms and moon up the top like a owl. Light fires in the bushes’ – he is, we discover, preparing the way not for a revelatory disclosure but rather for an anticlimax. ‘Oh yes, I knew him well. I think he was happy all the time’, the park keeper poignantly repeats, before fatally adding: ‘I’ve known him by the thousands.’
[Dylan Thomas]: We had reached the last gate. Dusk grew around us and the town. I said: What has become of him now?
Park Keeper: Dead.
[Dylan Thomas]: The Park keeper said: (The park bell rings)
Park Keeper: Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead … Dead. (RJ, 90)
That is indeed the play’s very last word; the last word on the play; the last word on Thomas’s search; the word that marks the end of language itself; the dead end. And behind this concluding passage we are surely meant to hear the ironic echo of yet more words, as memorable as they are ultimately futile; the words of John Donne in the great, famous, prophetic utterance that had ignited the young Swansea Thomas’s imagination and helped turn his entire life into a fateful adventure in language: ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.’18
Notes
1This is the text of a keynote lecture delivered at an International Dylan Thomas Conference held in the University of Bordeaux (Autumn 2014). Published as ‘“There’s Words”: Dylan Thomas, Swansea et la langue’ in Lire et Relire Dylan Thomas, Cycnos 31:2 (2015).
2Quoted in James A. Davies, A Reference Guide to Dylan Thomas (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 24. Hereafter RG.
3‘Return Journey’, in Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning: Poems, Stories, Essays (London: Dent, 1974), p. 76. Hereafter RJ.
4Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (eds), Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934–1953 (London: Dent, 1988), p. 148. Hereafter CP.
5‘Lapis Lazuli’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 338–9.
6Constantine Fitzgibbon, A Life of Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1965), p. 13.
7For the influence of Crompton, see Betty and William Greenway, ‘Just Dylan: Dylan Thomas as Subversive Children’s Writer’, in Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 5 (1999), 42–50.
8Vic Golightly, ‘“Speak on a Finger and Thumb”: Dylan Thomas, Language and the Deaf’, in Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 10 (2005), 73–97.
9Paul Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (London: Dent, 1985), p. 130. Hereafter CL.
10In the discussion that follows, I draw upon two earlier publications of mine: the chapter entitled ‘Marlais: Dylan Thomas and the “Tin Bethels”’, in M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), pp. 226–55; and ‘Marlais’, in Hannah Ellis (ed.), Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 30–41.
11Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings (London: Dent, 1971), p. 156.
12‘The procreant urge of the world’, Francis Murphy (ed.), Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 65.
13Leslie Norris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Stories (London: Dent, 1983). Hereafter CS.
14The Dylan Thomas Omnibus, Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories and Broadcasts (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 242.
15This aspect of his poetry has been highlighted most recently in John Goodby, Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).
16There’s useful information about this period in Colin Edwards and David N. Thomas (eds), Dylan Remembered, Volume One, 1914–1934 (Bridgend: Seren, 2003), pp. 260ff. Hereafter DR.
17Ralph Maud (ed.), Where Have the Old Words Got Me? (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).
18John Hayward (ed.), John Donne: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1972), p. 538.
5
‘A HUGE ASSEMBLING OF UNEASE’: READINGS IN A MAN’S ESTATE
A vengeful wife (Mary Elis) murders her unfaithful husband (Felix Elis) with the tacit complicity of her secret admirer (Vavasor Elis). That gaunt suitor, a cousin of the deceased, subsequently marries her. Their sin is visited upon the children of both her marriages. The son (Dick) born to the grim pair, indulged by his mother, proves wilful and dies in war; his life is a ‘judgement’ on his parents, his story makes for ‘a puny provincial tragedy’.1 Philip, the son of the original union, is separated from his sister Hannah at birth. Growing up scarcely aware of each other’s existence the siblings are nevertheless eventually united. This marks the fateful culmination of the sister’s long-cherished dream of the arrival of a saviour who will release her from the house (‘Y Glyn’) and family that have long held her spirit captive. Reluctantly returning to claim his ‘estate’, her impecunious brother finds himself nightmarishly entangled in a past about which he knows nothing. And when the gruesome truth about the family history finally surfaces, their ageing mother escapes incontinently into madness, while their stepfather commits suicide. The atmosphere throughout is doom-laden; a judgemental God hovers ominously over the scene; gloom seems to pervade every corner of the action.
Reduced to the bare essentials of its plot, A Man’s Estate (1955) proves to be massively built on an ancient substratum of legend – the primal stuff of which Greek tragedy was made, and Shakespearean and Jacobean drama likewise. The dominant stories of the Old Testament – so relevant to this novel about a ‘biblical’ society – are also of the same ‘archetypal’ character. During the period he was writing the novel, Emyr Humphreys was in the grip of a fascination with myth, with classical tragedy, and with plays such as Hamlet.2 ‘A huge assembling of unease’ (ME, 84) – a phrase used by the sentimental young minister, Idris Powell, bewildered by the dark complexities of love – is a fair description of A Man’s Estate as a whole, with its labyrinthine rootedness in human passions. There is something repellent about even the most marginal characters:
Katie is thin and rodent: she scuttles about the house, always too fast to do anything properly, her
small head carrying a flopping flappy cap, and when she speaks, her teeth seem very sharp as she makes her indistinct squeaks and noises (ME, 155).
Not only does this highlight unsavoury physical signs of Katie’s spiritual deformity, it reflects the sour, twisted soul of the neurotic and ‘barren spinster’ who is here viewing the maid through jealous, jaundiced eyes.
Much that was best in modern Welsh literature, Emyr Humphreys’s great friend and exemplar Saunders Lewis once observed, derived from the Calvinist strain in nineteenth-century Nonconformity. Through its insistent recognition of the evil ingrained in human nature, Calvinism nurtured an unillusioned consciousness creatively alive to the moral ugliness of the human condition. War experience refocused attention on the lurking presence of evil within the human soul – William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) was a memorable 1950s fable emphasising this. Likewise indirectly a product of Emyr Humphreys’s wartime experience, A Man’s Estate is a classical Welsh Calvinist tragedy (even a kind of ‘revenger’s tragedy’) in two senses. It deals with the morbid, decaying Calvinist culture of the chapels midway during the first half of the twentieth century; and it views that culture from the standpoint of an author capable of empathising with the tough realism of Calvinist belief in original sin. As such, the novel is the radical Welsh Nonconformist complement to the Catholic novels of sin and guilt written by Humphreys’s early friend and mentor, Graham Greene.3 It may also be revealingly juxtaposed with another important ‘Calvinist’ novel of the 1950s, Robin Jenkins’s The Corn-Gatherers (1955), set in the Calvinistic society of Argyllshire.
One possible consequence of the replacement of a Calvinist vision by a more tolerant post-Calvinist theological outlook is explored in A Man’s Estate through the character of the young idealistic minister Idris Powell. Devotee of a facile liberal theology of universal love, he crushingly discovers that he lacks the moral, psychological and spiritual resources to deal with the harsh realities of devious human existence. Like the spiritually lightweight Merton Densher in Henry James’s great novel The Wings of the Dove, Powell is judged in the sombre light of human tragedy and found wanting. ‘Murderer’ and hypocrite though the morally weathered and withered Vavasor Elis may be, in his daily implicit recognition of the severe Puritan values by which he will eventually be implacably judged he possesses a compelling moral weight; a monstrous integrity.
The very title of the novel bears the heavy burden of its central preoccupations. As the epigraph makes clear, the phrase ‘A Man’s Estate’ alludes to the opening lines of a familiar Welsh Calvinist hymn by Dafydd Jones of Caio: ‘Plant ydym eto dan ein hoed/ Yn disgwyl am ystad’. The translation provided in the novel reads: ‘We are all still children/ waiting for an inheritance’. As modified in Humphreys’s title, the theological meaning is double. A Man’s Estate alludes to the state of sin that is the inheritance of all the sons and daughters of Adam. But the reference is also to that other ‘state’, of Divine Grace, to which spiritually infantile mankind as a whole should aspire, but which can be entered only by the elect; by the few mysteriously chosen as sole beneficiaries of Christ’s self-immolation. In some important respects, the action of the novel oscillates between these two meanings. If the ‘barren spinster’ Hannah, daughter to Mrs Elis and her first (murdered) husband, is in one sense manifestly an innocent victim of her mother’s tyrannical grip on life, she is also (as she recognises) ‘bound’ to her mother and stepfather ‘in the blood-cement of likeness. I have their coldness, their calculation, their trained hypocrisy, their perpetual misery, their unexpiated guilt’ (ME, 156). Recognising her own ‘sinfulness’, Hannah dreams euphorically of a salvatory act of secular grace in the form of the return of her long-lost brother. But in its vengeful aspects, such a messianic expectation in turn evokes uneasy memories of the strong-leader cult of the 1930s. To the domestic fascism of her everyday life on the family farm, ‘Y Glyn’, she secretly opposes her own fascist fantasy of supreme personal empowerment. Finally, having begun as a victim of her circumstances, Hannah ends up guilty of perpetuating the status quo; a ‘feudal’ biblical order grown rotten to its core.
* * *
If, then, A Man’s Estate is modelled on classical tragedy, it is set not in ancient Greece but in the morally decadent chapel culture of rural Wales during the first half of the twentieth century. In this society relationships involve the kind of ruthless power-struggles so nakedly and memorably illustrated in some of the primal stories of the Old Testament. And just as, for all its roots in ‘universal’ human legends, Greek tragedy is actually woven out of the conflicting values of ancient Greek society at a particular historical juncture, so Humphreys’s novel specifically addresses the tensions within the dying ‘Nonconformist nation’, a century after its mid-nineteenth-century prime. In this connection, it is useful to register the pivotal place A Man’s Estate occupies in the development of Emyr Humphreys as a novelist.
The novel was written some three years after Humphreys’s return from London to teach at Pwllheli, on the Llŷn peninsula. A teacher in Wimbledon, but living in Chelsea, and a coming young writer with three novels already to his name, he had spent four years mixing with aspiring, talented young writers, artists and actors in a metropolitan, cosmopolitan, atmosphere heady with the excitement of new beginnings after an exhausting war and the establishing of a welfare state. The return of this native to Wales was prompted by a commitment to the Welsh language and the values it had nurtured. This was the result of the schoolboy Humphreys’s ‘conversion’ to cultural and political nationalism in the 1930s. But his move ‘home’ was at a considerable price – Graham Greene strongly advised against it, forecasting the miscarriage in the ‘provinces’ of Humphreys’s talents as a novelist. The resulting tensions within the ambitious young author found expression in A Man’s Estate, a novel that subjects the concept of ‘rootedness’ (to which Humphreys nevertheless remained tenaciously faithful) to sceptical scrutiny. Cross-examined about his ‘pietas’ by his prospective father-in-law, the odious Master of an Oxford college, the scientifically minded Philip dismisses all discussion of family (as opposed to property) inheritance as nonsensical superstition, ‘unscientific fascism’ (ME, 19). He acknowledges blood groups but not blood lines. The novel, however, calls Philip’s supposedly objective, ‘scientific’, outlook into doubt, exposing it as simplistic by indicating its compromised origins in family and society. Meanwhile his sister, the claustrophobically cloistered Hannah, is aware of how the Elis family farm has remained in stubborn, decaying stasis while life in the surrounding Welsh countryside has been undergoing revolutionary change. Although resentful of her parents’ glowering dominance, she is nevertheless willing prisoner of the ‘old dispensation’. In its apparent immunity to springtime’s infectious revivifications, the rural scene almost completely filling her window, and blocking her ‘view’, resembles a consolingly timeless frieze:
I sit watching through my square bedroom window a man ploughing a field that slopes upwards. If I lean back this field fills all the window space except the top right which gives me a further horizon and a small view of the bay. The white gulls wheel perpetually around the tractor and the plough. (ME, 27)
‘Rootedness’ here appears in the form of the arrested development of a personality fearful of facing up to the challenges of life.
Life at ‘Y Glyn’ acts as a corrective to the younger Humphreys’s weakness for rural idyll. In his teens, he had embraced the conservative social ideology of Plaid Cymru under Saunders Lewis’s leadership, with its anti-industrial bias and alternative valorisation of rural, ‘yeoman’ life. While wartime work on the land, as a conscientious objector, had modified his ideal, it had been reaffirmed by the happy experience of working on the Llanfaglan estate, near Caernarfon (1941–3). Memories of that period were, no doubt, gilded by recollections of his courtship there of his wife-to-be, Elinor Jones. But the family’s return from London to Pwllheli, a small seaside town on the Llŷn peninsula, prompted a more matu
re, and nuanced, estimate of rural, traditional Welsh society. A Man’s Estate is therefore, for Humphreys, what Return of the Native was for Thomas Hardy: an ambivalent affirmation of ‘roots’, of ‘origins’, of ‘belonging’. This takes the form of a fictional balance-sheet scrupulously weighing the advantages of staying against those of leaving; of social memory against forgetting.
Humphreys’s ambivalent meditation on people’s stubborn, complex, compromised, and often problematic allegiance to place was no doubt also informed by his experience, as charity worker, of administering a ‘transit camp’ for displaced peoples in Italy at the close of the war. These were vast encampments – temporary cities of transients housing not just individuals but virtual populations, some desperate to return to (frequently obliterated or forcibly appropriated) ‘homes’, others equally anxious to start anew by making a ‘home’ in any welcoming country. Humphreys’s sensitivity to their refugee condition may have been all the more acute given his own angry discovery, as a sixth-former, that he had hitherto been living as a ‘displaced’ person in his own country. That unwitting displacement had been cultural rather than geographical in character. Humphreys’s exposure to the ‘colonial’ reading of Wales offered by Saunders Lewis and Plaid Cymru had opened his eyes to his own ‘disinherited’ condition as a monoglot English ‘Welshman’. He suddenly saw himself as a subaltern colonial subject, effectively prevented from ‘reading’ the history of his own country inscribed in its (Welsh-language) place names, instanced by its distinctive (Welsh-language) religious history, and tenaciously recorded in its (Welsh-language) literary culture. By setting to and learning Welsh, Humphreys further felt he was equipping himself to counter the enormous centrifugal forces generated by the wartime British state. Even while serving as a Save the Children Fund officer first in Egypt and then in Italy, he was able to continue reading Saunders Lewis’s weekly, Welsh-orientated, commentary on political events in Y Faner. But if Humphreys thus became, as he has remained, a committed nationalist, A Man’s Estate is his dark 1950s reflection on a Welsh nation whose future existence was in real jeopardy, because its only potent sustaining image of its own modern identity (the seminal nineteenth-century concept of the ‘Nonconformist nation’) was in monstrous terminal decline.4 As Humphreys was to make clear in his later fictions, the image of its ‘proletarian’, industrial self adopted by early twentieth-century Wales in preference to its outmoded nineteenth-century religious self-image was, in his view, a destructively Anglocentric one, spuriously masquerading as ‘internationalist’ in character.