All That is Wales
Page 18
* * *
Revisiting ‘A Protestant View of the Novel’ some fifty years after its publication, Emyr Humphreys concluded he would still stand by the insights and commitments in that text but would now prefer to substitute the term ‘Dissident’ for ‘Protestant’. It’s an interesting substitution because when writing during the 1950s about the contemporary novel Kenneth Allsop suggested that, whereas it had become common practice to speak of the fiction of ‘angry young men’ as a phenomenon of the period, ‘a more accurate word for this new spirit that has surged in during the fifties is dissentience’ (Pelican, 485). Room at the Top (1957), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) – and even Lucky Jim (1954) – all feature rebellious young male characters. These novels remain familiar landmarks of the period, and continue to be accepted as symptomatic of the social revolution afoot in Britain at the time. It was the coming of age of the social outsider. The war had effectively marked the end of Imperial Britain, and some of the scarce resources and energies of a weakened and exhausted country had to be devoted to the (frequently bloody) dismantling of Empire from India to Africa. Along with the implementing of the Welfare State and the social impact of the grammar schools, decolonisation accelerated the erosion of traditional respect for the authority of the middle class.
During the 1950s, the novels of Braine, Sillitoe and Barstow were primarily (and rightly) understood as demonstrating the right of the largely neglected English working-class to serious social and fictional attention. But in retrospect, they may also be regarded as instances of a new decentralising process at work within a post-war British state that, under the pressures of wartime, had reverted to its authoritarian centralist instincts. These northern ‘working-class’ novels were unmistakeably ‘regional’ in character, and as such they may now be usefully re-viewed in the light of other fiction of this period. The two decades immediately following the war saw the appearance of such classic texts as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1968). Emanating from Africa and the Caribbean, they were the forerunners of what later, following the landmark publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children (1981), came to be classed as post-colonial fiction. This was the exhilarating result of the appropriation of the English-language novel by natives of the erstwhile ‘colonies’ who thus gave expression to their own, distinctively non-English, experiences and concerns. English backlash took the form of the ‘Little Englandism’ exemplified in the fiction and poetry of Kingsley Amis and John Wain and in the ‘Movement’ poetry most powerfully instanced by Philip Larkin.
Given Emyr Humphreys’s early tutelage under Saunders Lewis, and his resultant sensitivity to the colonial aspects of the Welsh condition, A Man’s Estate may also reasonably be regarded as broadly anticipating the Welsh ‘post-colonial’ fiction Humphreys went on to write. It was an early product of his identification (implicit in his turning of his back on the metropolis) with a Welsh nation acquiring a consciousness in English, during a decade of rapid decolonisation, of its long cultural and political subordination by England. In looking to Philip for salvation, Hannah is also looking to England, as the servile Welsh had repeatedly done ever since the Act of Union. She busily weaves her self-protective fantasies out of materials from the Bible and from fairy tales.
In my thirty-sixth year I wait and I am skilled in waiting. But it is dangerous. It is easy to confuse the coming of a knight errant with the coming of the Saviour, and I sometimes see myself among the idolators throwing palms before the short nervous steps of the frightened ass. (ME, 54)
Needless to say, her callow dreams of rescue are rudely dashed, and at the end she is left to her own resources, however impoverished and dubious they may be. Recognising himself to be an outsider, disqualified on many different grounds from intervening, her anglicised and alienated brother returns ‘Y Glyn’ to Hannah’s care. She is left to make what she can of her personal and cultural inheritance. The idiom of the novel likewise refuses to compromise with any respected English discourse of its day. A Man’s Estate respects the rural religious society with which it is dealing sufficiently to judge it by its own best light and not by those of any supposedly more advanced cultural ‘centre’.
* * *
One significant sign of Humphreys’s mental orientation at this time was his adoption as role model not of any of the leading fiction writers of the British and Irish modernist tradition but of a confirmed American decentralist: William Faulkner was the great novelist of the defeated, subordinated culture of the southern states of the USA.10 Cleanth Brooks opens his classic study, William Faulkner: The Yoknatawpha Country with the following paragraph:
Most writers associate William Faulkner with the South quite as automatically as they associate Thomas Hardy with Wessex, Robert Frost with northern New England, and William Butler Yeats with Ireland, and perhaps more naturally than they associate Dylan Thomas with Wales. The regions and cultures to which these writers are linked differ in character, but they all stand in sharp contrast to the culture of the great world cities of the twentieth century. They have in common a basically agricultural economy, a life of farms, villages, and small towns, an old-fashioned set of values, and a still vital religion with its cult, creed, and basic norms … for all their differences, each provides its author with a vantage point from which to criticize, directly or perhaps merely by implication, the powerful metropolitan culture.11
Replace the name of Dylan Thomas with that of Emyr Humphreys in this paragraph and one begins to understand why he was so powerfully impressed during the 1950s by the fiction of the great Southerner.
Faulkner was first fully ‘discovered’ in his own country with the publication in 1949 of Malcolm Cowley’s anthology The Portable Faulkner, but he came to worldwide attention the following year when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Exactly when Humphreys became aware of his work cannot be established, but he has testified to an intensification of his appreciation of Faulkner’s work during the period he spent in Salzburg in 1954 in the company of the great American critic, Edmund Wilson. A recent recipient of the Somerset Maugham Prize, Humphreys had repaired to Austria with his family to spend a year there working on what was to become A Man’s Estate. But a number of factors – including serious concern about the condition of his eldest son, who developed peritonitis during this period – meant he was unable to embark on the novel until he had returned to Wales. Nevertheless, the work had been incubating throughout his stay in Austria and therefore his discussions with Wilson about Faulkner’s novels must have been directly influencing the development of his ideas.
Humphreys seems in part to have encountered in Faulkner a like-minded writer whose singular, and signature, modernist innovations of style and expression were driven, like Humphreys’s own much more modest experimentations in A Man’s Estate, by a compulsion to access the deep truths of his own culture. Robert Penn Warren, another great critic of Southern literature, like Cleanth Brooks, feelingfully noted:
as a technician, Faulkner, except for his peers, Melville and James, is the most profound experimenter in the novel that America has produced. But the experiments were developed out of – that is, were not merely applied to – an anguishing research into the Southern past and the continuing implications of that past.12
For instance, the stylised, poeticised, internal monologues that characterise such classic novels as The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) convey the weight, complexity and intensity of the characters’ embeddedness in a stiflingly conservative society. In A Man’s Estate Humphreys uses a similar device, most conspicuously when probing the state of mind of Hannah. By such means he is able to resolve one of the most pressing difficulties facing a writer seeking to fashion a modern tragedy out of lives lived in a democratic, egalitarian, levelling society – how to imbue the characters with the density, gravity and high seriousness that would effectively heighten the tone of their lives
in the manner necessary for producing the rich, resonant tragic effect. Conscious of this problem, the great American dramatist Arthur Miller first attempted to solve it in Death of a Salesman (1949) by staying faithful to a naturalist, demotic style, but went on to draw memorably on scriptural speech when writing The Crucible (1953), which appeared just two years before A Man’s Estate. Both Faulkner and Humphreys similarly drew extensively in their fiction on the cadences of the Bible – the sacred ‘founding’ text of their respective, originally biblical, societies. And in the cases of both writers, accessing this resource helped make possible their central achievement – what André Malraux described, with reference to Faulkner, as ‘the renewal of tragedy’ (F, 205–6).
Critics likewise spoke approvingly of the ‘primal’ quality of Faulkner’s writing and, as has already been noted, this is a feature of A Man’s Estate. The novel is concerned to demonstrate that human life tends to approximate to ‘archetypal’ patterns, a characteristic underlined by the way we make our lives intelligible both to ourselves and to others by shaping them into the form of familiar narratives. So Idris Powell images the abortive relationship between himself and Enid, his friend Lambert’s wife, in terms of a medieval chivalric romance:
Like legendary lovers, woven on the edge of a medieval wood, too poor to trouble about time or place, we walked in the garden of the hotel at night as if it were a rich man’s castle that would admit only our most innocent dreams. (ME, 89)
And when the virtuous Powell begins to consort oddly with the far-from-virtuous Frankie (Ada’s brother), village tongues begin to wag: ‘Housewives wondered to see Frankie’s turned out steps alongside my untidy strides, their myth-making minds having more to make of so untoward an alliance’ (ME, 95).
Humphreys actually causes his novel to reflect on this storytelling and myth-making propensity of the human mind, and in the process causes it to reflect on its own narrative strategies, by including a story within his story. Owen Owens is a traditional Welsh cyfarwydd, an enthralling rural storyteller who acts as communal remembrancer. He holds his audience spellbound as he weaves his narrative, while ‘the wind rushed through the cobbled yard outside the long window and the flames of the wide fire stretched into the cavernous mouth of the chimney’ (ME, 65). Owen’s story feeds the mind of his listeners as surely as the table laid for the morning’s breakfast promises to satisfy their stomachs. He tells of a treacherous young farmer’s wife whose unfaithfulness drives her innocent husband to suicide but who lives on to enjoy a prosperous life with her lover, a cowman. The tale has been repeated by him many times, and honed to a gratifyingly familiar shape. The episode ends with a comic reprise of Owen’s story when Dick, Hannah’s unruly half-brother, and his friend Willie, frighten Hannah by persuading her that, like the cowman, Dick has hanged himself from a beam in the barn. But then Owen Owens’s story is later reprised in an entirely different key. His tale echoes that of Vavasor and Mary Elis, while the cowman’s suicide foreshadows that of Vavasor, who poisons himself. He is discovered by Hannah collapsed over the sink he had been struggling to reach in an effort to alleviate his pain with a drink of the water he had, of course, murderously denied Elis Felix Elis. Story, like history, has an uncanny, unnerving, habit of repeating itself in human experience.
Also significant for Humphreys was Faulkner’s genius for devising stylistic means of conveying the omnipresent, suffocating pressure of the past – felt too in the oppressive heat of the South – on the lives of his characters. Such a sense of the inescapable burden of cultural history corresponded to Humphreys’s ambivalent sense of the significance for Wales of its inheritance: its Nonconformist ‘estate’. Faulkner’s achievement is of course different from that of Humphreys, and as the past of Southern history is immeasurably more terrible than that of Wales, so is its sinfulness and guilt proportionately more massive. But the felt parallels between Humphreys and his Wales and Faulkner and his South are nevertheless an important strand in the dense weave of A Man’s Estate.
Humphreys attributed his recognition of himself in Faulkner to the fact that both the Southern states and Wales were defeated ‘nations’, subsequently incorporated into the victorious alien state (DPR, 85–6). The values and practices of that nation-state were fundamentally different from, and inimical to, those of the cultures it had so comprehensively defeated. It was natural for the victorious to espouse a confident ideology of progress and of self-fulfilment that it was difficult for the defeated to share.
The consequences of the defeat of the Confederate cause are everywhere, and obsessively, explored by Faulkner. One recurrent structural feature of his fiction is the contrast between relics of the ‘old order’ – the impoverished, socially disempowered, and impressively flawed members of the cultivated classes that had traditionally sustained the ethos, the elaborate courtesies and the ethical codes of the antebellum South – and the creatures of the new order. The latter consisted not only of those carriers of Northern commercial values, the original ‘carpetbaggers’ who entered the former Confederacy as entrepreneurial interlopers to dismantle a semi-feudal society and to open the South up to the modern, thrusting world of capitalist competition, but also of their native allies, the lower-class Southerners who profited by allying themselves with this new ‘foreign’ culture of enterprise. Prominent instances of such creatures of the new post-bellum South in Faulkner’s fiction are the semi-literate and nakedly opportunistic members of the large Snopes family. They roughly correspond to the members of Wally Francis’s clan and their associates who occupy a not dissimilar position within the structure of A Man’s Estate. Their relationship to those decadent representatives of the old Nonconformist ‘aristocracy’, the Elis family, is broadly similar to that of the grossly fecund Snopes family to the decaying leadership of the old antebellum South. Hannah Elis disdainfully dismisses Winnie Cwm, Wally Francis and their promiscuously intertwined families as ‘a low family scheming to rise’ (ME, 196). How, she asks herself, can she ‘allow our family pride to be fouled by gutter people like Winnie Cwm and Frankie Cwm?’ (ME, 197). She consequently refuses to acknowledge Ada as her half-sister, and so fails to grasp the social implications of the fact that they both actually have the same father.
* * *
These, then, are some of the matters with which Emyr Humphreys was concerned when writing A Man’s Estate. But they can matter to us as readers, of course, only if they are fully grounded in the fiction; in other words, if they are fully inscribed in the text, are discursively constructed, and are thus rendered convincing in fictional terms. Take the dominant figure of Vavasor Elis, a candidate for tragic stature. That there are repellent aspects to his character is evident enough. Yet he remains a compelling, if forbidding, figure because virtually alone among the main characters he is afforded the dignity of reticence. Whereas we are made privy to the inner feelings of Hannah, Philip and Ada, any insight into Vavasor Elis’s state of mind is denied us until the late, and therefore memorable, scene, when he voices his inner torment through the heightened, measured, biblical rhetoric of public confessional prayer.
Elis’ lips trembled as they always did before he began. His eyebrows twitched rapidly. But tonight I noticed his head moving slowly from side to side as if he were rocking some crying sleepless grief within himself.
‘Almighty and … Almighty … O Lord in the words of Cain, my punishment is greater than I can bear… year after year … from the day my eyes grew dim to this thou hast visited me with these afflictions … Must I speak O Lord … Must I confess as a criminal still when I have accepted each affliction as a just punishment?’ (ME, 393)
Even this climactic scene is carefully counterbalanced by an emphasis on the bathos of Vavasor’s punctilious observation of the rituals of the prayer-meeting and on his affectingly uncoordinated, ungainly physical presence: ‘He pushed open the door and sat down on the nearest seat exhausted, slowly removing the black hat he always wore to come to chapel. It was too big for him and almost re
sted on his large ears’ (ME, 391). And in his electrifying confession before the Lord, Vavasor demonstrates an impressive indifference to any effect he may have on the solitary adult listener, Idris Powell: ‘I was an aider and abettor in his untimely death: the waters of succour trickled away between my opening fingers as they approached his mouth’ (ME, 393). The weighty authority of the judgement he unsentimentally passes on himself is palpable: he is speaking not just of ‘murder’ but of mortal sin. There is a terrible fatalistic composure about him to the end. ‘He hurried off towards the door as he always did as if he had endless business affairs waiting for his attention. “Good night now then,” he said, as he always did leaving chapel’ (ME, 396).
That obliviousness to the impression he is making is, in fact, one of Vavasor’s most impressive characteristics. His semi-blindness emphasises his unconcern with social interaction, and, in its way, figures his bleak self-arraignment. There is a permanent unconscious helplessness about him, and he is unnerving because his obliviousness to anyone’s gaze seems to prompt the observer (and thus vicariously the reader) to subject him to bold, guilty scrutiny. Yet for all this Vavasor baffles one’s understanding. This is evident in Hannah’s obsessively focused evocation of his gawky, helpless appearance:
He is very thin, but the tweed suits he wears are so thick that you do not at first notice this, until you observe the loose skin of his neck is untouched by the stiff white wing-tipped collar that encircles it. His head is large and bald enough to appear flat along the top. The eyebrows above his deep-set staring blue eyes are thick and red, and seem to blink themselves when he exposes his old false teeth – beneath a broad moustache that my mother trims, after shaving him – in a constant nervous smile that is meant to disguise the hopeless intensity of his stare. (ME, 33)