All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  Vavasor’s old-fashionedness is here painfully obvious and embarrassing, yet his complete indifference to it bespeaks an implicit moral judgement on all those who follow the prevailing currents.

  Vavasor remains a lonely enigma. In taking his own life he leaves no note – that would have been totally out of character. He is answerable only to God. Implicit in everything he is and does is an acceptance that he alone must take responsibility for what he has done and therefore is. His wife breaks down; he does not, not because of any psychological robustness but because of a stubborn moral strength. He is even more isolated in the terrible sanity of his unsparing self-indictment than she in her wild madness. Unlike him, she can take a kind of crazy comfort in the fantasy that hers had been an act of moral retribution, that she had sent her baby son away to protect him from knowing (what? about his father’s sinful adulteries or about her own guilt?), and that she had similarly shielded her daughter by effectively imprisoning her. In killing the chickens that are her favourite ‘children’ she finds symbolic expression for her guilt, and so finds a kind of irrational relief. There is for her a kind of relief in the bloodiness of it – it contrasts with the bloodlessness of her silent, secret murder, just as her melodramatic voicing of the act contrasts with the muteness of that murder. And her killing of the chickens combines a re-enactment of her murder of her husband with a ritualistic punishing of herself for that crime. It is also her symbolic admission that with the killing of Felix she had effectively killed her capacity to love the children born of their union. They had become the innocent scapegoats for her husband’s infidelities. In turn, of course, her frustrated need to love had found an outlet in her doting indulgence of Dick, with eventually disastrous effects.

  Philip, a man who preens himself on his scrupulously ‘scientific’ objectivity, is naively disturbed to realise how slippery a concept ‘truth’ is outside the confines of the laboratory:

  I was thinking about truth. And how maddening to realise the difficulties when by instinct you felt that somewhere absolute truth existed, waiting for your arrival however long you delayed on the journey. There lie waiting your life’s meaning and the secret of your unrest. (ME, 338)

  If only it were as simple as that. While, in detective-story fashion, the novel maintains suspense for much of its course by prolonging uncertainty about whether or not Felix Elis was actually murdered by his wife and her admirer, as local rumour supposed, this ‘mystery’ is, of course, solved well before the end. That is because A Man’s Estate is not centrally interested in soluble mysteries. It is concerned not with the issue of (theoretically) ascertainable ‘facts’ but with the wholly insoluble enigma of judgements – with the enigma, in other words, of any life’s ‘meaning’. Vavasor Elis may, in his prayer and suicide, pass ‘definitive’ judgement on the meaning of his own life, but the novel refuses to pass final judgement on him: it cannot second-guess the verdict of the God in whom Vavasor believes with such terrible, fervent, devotion. Perhaps all tragedy is rooted in enigma; that is, it may be a terrible manifestation of the unfathomable character of human beings and the incalculable implications of their actions.

  Compared with Vavasor and, to a lesser extent, his wife, Hannah Elis and Idris Powell are diminished characters. Their inner tensions and torments may generate pathos, but lack the dignity of tragedy. Ada, however, commands much greater respect, and if the tragedy of Vavasor and Mary Elis is an old-fashioned religious tragedy, hers may be a secular tragedy after the modern fashion. In several important ways she is the mirror image of that of the murderous couple. It is partly because their language of self-understanding is religious that hers is secular. It is in part their hypocritical ethics that fires her ambition to be amorally selfish and opportunistic. Of their self-deception and deceptions is born her own ruthless honesty. But beyond these superficial divergences between her life and theirs lie much deeper convergences. It is from the lives of the Elises quite as much as from the example provided by her mother, Winnie Cwm, that Ada learns the lesson that life is all about survival, and is therefore no more than one long unremitting struggle for power. No wonder that when she breaks the news to Hannah that her mother and stepfather are murderers she seems to be acting the role of one of the avenging Furies of ancient Greek tragedy. Her wailing ‘coiled itself as smoothly as a trained snake into the empty spaces in my knowledge of the past’, admits Hannah. ‘It was very familiar as soon as I heard it in the way that only Truth can be’ (ME, 206).

  Ada enters her half-sister’s world like the Reality Principle itself, exposing not only the ‘Truth’ about Vavasor and his wife, but also Hannah’s long, wilful suppression of any sense of misgiving about her family. In a sense, Ada thus reveals Hannah’s tacit complicity in the concealment of her father’s murder. And if the ‘barrenness’ of which Hannah, the self-styled spinster, bitterly accuses herself is a metaphor for the desiccated moral and emotional state in which she has chosen to live, then Ada’s ‘promiscuity’ is its complement, as well as its opposite, because it, also, is a defence against being trapped in any complex relationships of committed attachment. And in mourning Dick, Ada is harbouring her own fantasy and lie, refusing to acknowledge his chronic selfishness and unreliability.

  It is by rebelling against the patriarchal character of the Elises’ religion that Ada takes on the role of the New Woman. This figure had fascinated Emyr Humphreys ever since childhood. He had grown up in the years immediately following the First World War, a period that saw a dramatic extension of the freedoms, rights and opportunities that women had been granted during wartime when they were allowed into the workforce as replacements for the men who had marched away, never to return. Although the social and political liberation of women had been a subject of fiction ever since the concluding decades of the nineteenth century, Humphreys became fascinated with the figure’s increasing prominence during the period between the two world wars and beyond. A great admirer of independent women, he nevertheless struggled in his fiction to come to terms with them and to calibrate the implications of their growing social power. Time after time, a female figure of this powerful kind is uneasily twinned in his novels with that of a seemingly ineffectual, ‘emasculated’ man. Such, of course, is Idris Powell in part in A Man’s Estate. It is the ambivalence of feeling manifest in such twinning that makes the portrayal of Ada so complex, and therefore so compelling.

  As for Hannah, she takes refuge throughout the novel in loving her ‘place’. She knows her very character has been formed in its image. Of herself and her mother she reflects that ‘Out of our basic landscape our figures lost their recognisable shape and we became foreign to one another’ (ME, 185). Others may treat ‘Y Glyn’ and its acres merely as property, but for her it constitutes identity. It exists sensuously – a displacement of her frustrated sexuality:

  A good year for blackberries. With the aid of a walking stick a quart gathered in a few minutes. The horses free of work galloped around the salt pools in the rough fields near the shore. Smoke from the chimney of Miss Aster’s cottage blown about. Wet sheaves still out sticky to touch. A slow corn harvest. (ME, 197)

  Hers is the kind of passionate identification with territory (‘estate’) that is the product of the Nonconformist emphasis on place as the sacred locale of a people, a notion based on the biblical (and particularly Old Testament) notions of land. But hers is also a decadent and perverted version of that Nonconformist ‘theology’ of place and nation.13

  So what are we to make of the conclusion of the novel, when Hannah inherits ‘Y Glyn’ and ‘A Man’s Estate’ thus becomes ‘A Woman’s Estate’ instead? Does this bode well? Does it indicate that evil has been purged through the storm of tragedy? Does it signify that restoration of sound order that allowed Shakespeare to end his tragedies reassuringly with such firm, quiet conviction? That is difficult to believe. Hannah may have been released from enthralment to her parents, but she remains the prisoner of their world – the only world she has known or has ever w
ished to know. In the end, she can offer only a more humane continuation of the old, exhausted, ‘feudal’ dispensation. As the new mistress of the Glyn, she resumes the ritual of greeting the faithful retainers. ‘My response echoes my uncle’s. The voice is different but the formula must be the same’ (ME, 410). Her earlier comment proves prophetic: ‘Spinsters, it is their function and their fate, are custodians of family history. They knit the temporal net with ropes of their heart’s blood’ (ME, 195). And so the novel seems unable to imagine through Hannah a substantial, vibrant, living new future for the moribund, not to say morbid, Welsh Nonconformist world of which she is the belated representative. For any hint that such might be possible, one must turn instead to Idris Powell and his faithful pursuit of Ada. Such an unconventional pairing might yet augur hope for the future of the chapels. But whereas the minister very evidently needs her, it is far from clear that she needs him – nor is it clear that, even should she accept him, such a union could possibly work and endure.14 In being entirely open-ended, or noncommittal, about the prospects of this relationship the novel also concludes without resolving the question of whether there can be a future for Nonconformity or not. And so, A Man’s Estate offers us no confident reassurance that its Wales has come to terms with its past and is thus well ‘placed’ to face its future.

  (Published in Katie Gramich [ed.], Mapping the Territory: Critical Approaches to Welsh Fiction in English [Cardigan: Parthian, 2010].)

  Notes

  1Emyr Humphreys, A Man’s Estate (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955; repr. Cardigan: Parthian, Library of Wales, 2006), p. 162. References hereafter (ME) to the latter edition.

  2In an interview about his fiction, Humphreys noted that during his London period he was reading Robert Graves, The White Goddess, and that he even took a copy of F. L. Lucas’s study of Greek Drama as ‘light reading’ for his wife who was in hospital preparing for the birth of their child! He also mentions attending Shakespeare productions at the Old Vic featuring Olivier and Richardson: R. Arwel Jones (gol.), Dal Pen Rheswm: Cyfweliadau gydag Emyr Humphreys (Caerdydd: Prifysgol Cymru, 1999), pp. 68–71. Hereafter referred to as DPR.

  3See in particular The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951).

  4For the contribution of literary texts to the construction, and eventual deconstruction, of the ‘Nonconformist nation’ see M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and the Nonconformist Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).

  5My translation of comments made in Dal Pen Rheswm, p. 64.

  6The great example is that of the minister J. T. Miles in Outside the House of Baal (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965; rev. repr. Bridgend: Seren, 1996).

  7See the following: D. J. Taylor, After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945 (London: Flamingo, 1994); Brian W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000 (London: Blackwell, 2005); and Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge (eds), British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). None of these makes any mention of the novel in Wales. This is, however, given cursory attention in Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) in a chapter dealing with ‘National Identity’.

  8Quoted in British Fiction After Modernism, p. 5.

  9M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Emyr Humphreys: Conversations and Reflections (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), pp. 67–76. Hereafter CR.

  10Humphreys acknowledges his debt to Faulkner in Dal Pen Rheswm, pp. 85–6.

  11Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 1.

  12‘Introduction: Faulkner: Past and Present’, in Robert Penn Warren (ed.), Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 5. Hereafter F.

  13Such ideas are discussed with subtlety and penetration in Dorian Llywelyn’s important study, Sacred Place, Chosen People (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999).

  14The not-too-dissimilar union between J. T. Miles and Lydia in Outside the House of Baal ends in sadness.

  6

  OUTSIDE THE HOUSE OF BAAL: THE EVOLUTION OF A MAJOR NOVEL

  One evening in the early 1960s, while driving his elderly mother back to her home after a family visit, Emyr Humphreys was greatly struck by an innocent remark she made as she gazed through the car wind-screen. It was bad luck, she flatly assured her son, to look at the moon through glass. The comment made him realize she was a survivor from an earlier, ‘horse and buggy’ age, whose picture of life had been significantly different from his own. He suddenly saw her as the personification of historical changes and as yesterday’s fragile witness. Out of his consequently urgent impulse to explore aspects of the disappearing past his mother had known, came in due course Outside the House of Baal (1965), Emyr Humphreys’s most impressive attempt not only to describe but also to calibrate the changes that had drastically refashioned Welsh society during the first sixty or so years of the twentieth century. In the novel he skilfully interweaves two distinct timelines. The first is confined to a single day in the early 1960s and concentrates exclusively on the life of an elderly couple; J. T. Miles, a dreamy, mild-mannered, retired minister, and his crabbily practical sister-in-law, Kate. The second spans some six eventful decades, from the closing years of Victoria’s reign to the early 1960s, when the novel was written, and, by tracing the extensive network of events and relationships that have constituted the life-experiences of J.T. and Kate, it succeeds in offering a compelling, ambitiously inclusive portrait of Welsh social, cultural and political history during a period of turbulent changes that included two world wars and a great economic depression.

  Emyr Humphreys’s experience with his mother had alerted him to the fact that important features of these momentous sociocultural transformations in the life of his nation were conveniently focused in the history of his own maternal family. His grandfather, who had been widowed relatively early, owned a prosperous hill-top farm within comfortable cycling distance of Emyr Humphreys’s boyhood home in the village of Trelawnyd (then called Newmarket), a few miles inland from Rhyl.1 Like Pa in the novel, this grandfather was an old-style, philoprogenitive patriarch, puritanically stern and somewhat of an autocrat. In their own adult lives his numerous children found various pragmatic ways of modifying the tenets and practices of his brand of high Nonconformity – which had been heroic and hypocritical by turns – to suit the spirit of a new, secular, and complaisant society. Like Lydia, Pa’s headstrong younger daughter in the novel, Emyr Humphreys’s mother was in her youth a free spirit, lively, strong-willed and unconventional, who eagerly embraced marriage to a schoolmaster as a convenient escape from a claustrophobic home background. The marital tension that predictably ensued may well have given rise to scenes similar to the one in the book when Ronnie, the little son of J.T. and Lydia, returning from school with a friend, is aghast to hear his parents quarrelling loudly, and tries to cover both the noise and his confusion by raising his voice and banging the gate. He ends up – as perhaps did the young Emyr Humphreys himself – wretchedly taking refuge in books.

  In an earlier scene in the novel Ronnie is warned by his mother to hide his war-comic under a cushion before his father returns from chapel. Emyr Humphreys’s own father bore in general very little resemblance to the minister J.T., but he had seen service at the front in the First World War, spent the rest of his life suffering the aftereffects of poison-gas, and was so reluctant to recall his war experience to mind that he absolutely forbade his sons, when they were children, ever to play at being soldiers. Partly in consequence, the First World War has long exercised a powerful fascination over Emyr Humphreys’s imagination. At its simplest, this can be seen in his attempts in Outside the House of Baal to enter this potently secret, forbidden territory of paternal experience by sending the central character, J.T., to the trenches. Then again, at its most complex, this fasc
ination with war – and related forms of violence – is an active element in the creed of pacifism, to which both J.T. and Emyr Humphreys are lifelong adherents. After all, pacifists are, paradoxically, fixated on war because it is the principal evil in terms of which they define themselves morally and because it offers the ultimate challenge to everything in which they believe. Finally, and in a sense most importantly, the First World War marks, for Humphreys, a turning point in recent Welsh history, and it is treated as such in Outside the House of Baal. Born in 1919, he has repeatedly attempted to reconstruct, in his fiction, the conditions of life of his parents’ pre-war generation, as if seeking an explanation, in the very strangeness of that period, for the bewildering historical changes he has himself lived through.

  Outside the House of Baal, unquestionably his major novel, is perhaps most centrally about the decline of Welsh nonconformity, which can be conveniently dated from, and may partly be attributed to, the First World War.2 Indeed, in an interview Humphreys has gone on record as describing this as an unqualified cultural catastrophe, since he believes that, in its spiritual prime, Nonconformity provided the basis in Wales for a distinctive ‘civilisation’, of substantial value.3 The novel, of course, tells a somewhat different story, and is compelling precisely to the extent that it problematises the issue, locating the character of the Calvinistic Methodist minister J.T., for instance, at the exact point where different judgements come most hauntingly into conflict. And it is here, in the complexity of his treatment of one of the central components of Welsh culture, that Emyr Humphreys most significantly, and most successfully, departs from established practice. For upwards of fifty years before his novel was published, Welsh authors writing in English had by and large contented themselves with reproducing a crude identikit picture of the Nonconformist: cunning, lecherous, avaricious and of course invariably hypocritical. Caradoc Evans, a bilious genius, had first devised and patented the picture in 1915, using it to inspired effect in the propaganda war he waged in his fiction to liberate Wales from chapel ‘Prussianism’.4 Later writers, however, from Dylan Thomas to Gwyn Thomas, inherited from him a crude stereotype which made it next to impossible for them to engage meaningfully with one of the most powerful and subtle aspects of their own culture – powerful not only in terms of the institutions it controlled, but also because the moral climate it created affected every aspect of social and political life.