All That is Wales
Page 20
Emyr Humphreys’s altogether more complex approach to this whole subject may be due in part to his being that rarity in twentieth-century Wales, a convert (of sorts) to Nonconformity – although in his case the ‘conversion’ had a cultural as well as a spiritual provenance. He was raised an Anglican, his upwardly mobile parents having moved away from a Nonconformist background they associated primarily with the social backwardness of Welsh-language culture. It was therefore perhaps inevitable that when the young Humphreys, inspired by the militant cultural and political nationalism of leading Welsh intellectuals during the 1930s, began to learn the Welsh language, he should also begin to follow in reverse the path his parents had taken. This process was no doubt accelerated when, in 1946, he married the daughter of a minister with the Annibynwyr (the Welsh Congregationalists, or Independents). It was many years, however, before he was able to translate his growing understanding of and qualified sympathy with Welsh Nonconformity into fully effective fictional terms. The eight novels he published before Outside the House of Baal include occasional examples of a fairly superficial treatment of the subject, and the new complexity of approach that is one of the most outstanding features of this novel may be due in no small part to the fact that for several years before it was written Humphreys’s father-in-law had been living permanently with him and his family.
The period spent apprenticed to a blacksmith before entering the ministry; the eventful journeys from north Wales to preach in the strange and turbulent mining valleys of the south; these and other episodes in J.T.’s fictional life had their origin in the facts of the Revd Jones’s actual career. Much more importantly, however, Emyr Humphreys encountered in his father-in-law’s principled mildness of character those aspects of the Nonconformist heritage that were to him most attractive and most admirable. They were also, it should be noted, the antithesis not only of the stereotyped picture but also of what Nonconformity had largely, in actual historical fact, become by the time – around the last quarter of the nineteenth century – it had indisputably developed into the established religion of Wales. By then the chapels had become the Liberal Party at prayer, social institutions that facilitated the triumphant rise of the Welsh bourgeoisie. Pa’s fear, in the novel, of the foundry workers; his elder daughter Kate’s scorning of her ardent wooer, Maldwyn Birch, a mere carpenter; the irritation of Lydia and her avaricious brother Dan Llew with the striking miners; all these are signs of the difficulties many of the chapel-bred had in coming to terms with the experiences of the new working class, particularly in the industrial areas.5 When Lloyd George, the darling of the chapels, became the great war-leader in 1914, many of the leading ministers used their awesome cultic power to mobilise their congregations, and proved to be deadly effective recruiting sergeants.6 Both the jingoistic atmosphere of the time and the ‘Christian’ arguments used to justify the war are captured by the novel, in scenes that include J.T.’s argument with the principal of his theological college and his courageous (or foolhardy – one has to double one’s terms, it seems, whenever one assesses his actions) protest in the eisteddfod against the pro-war rhetoric spouted by the Lloyd George-like figure on the stage.
There was, though, another strain of nonconformity that shows in J.T.’s character, as to some extent it did in the case of Emyr Humphreys’s father-in-law. Broadly speaking, it can be described as Nonconformist in the root sense of that term: radically dissenting, both in spirit and in actual social practice, from the comfortably established order of things. In the case of some major nineteenth-century issues, like parliamentary reform, the land question, the anti-tithe campaign and education, this progressivist brand of Nonconformity quickly blended into mainstream political activity. But this was not so in other cases that most famously included Samuel Roberts (S.R.)’s concern with ‘public witness by the individual conscience, with peace, free trade and the limitation of the state’; Michael D. Jones’s attempt to set up a new Welsh homeland in Patagonia; and of course Henry Richard’s tireless work to ease international tension, which earned for him the sobriquet of the ‘Apostle of Peace’.7
After the First World War, Nonconformity, its moral authority virtually destroyed by its indirect participation in the carnage, tried to regroup spiritually on the ground of its radical first principles, and at least one of the fascinating leaders that then emerged later influenced Emyr Humphreys’s portrayal, in Outside the House of Baal, both of the central figure J.T. and of the minor character Bayley Lewis.8 George M. Ll. Davies was a charismatic, if controversial, personality during the inter-war period. A strikingly handsome man of impeccable integrity, he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War, thus embarking on what he was later to call a lifetime’s ‘pilgrimage of peace’. His denomination, the Calvinistic Methodists, disapproved of him as much as they did of the fictional J.T., refusing to let him be ordained until his pacifism had become socially acceptable. He went on to play a leading part in the work of the Peace Pledge Union – an organisation Emyr Humphreys himself joined in the late 1930s. Davies was as opposed to class war as he was to actual war, and in 1932 he joined the settlement of Maes-yr-Haf which the Quakers opened in the Rhondda in an effort to improve the plight of the mass unemployed by other than militant political means. A gentle, other-worldly reconciler both by instinct and by conviction, he turned his outrage at the social dereliction in the south Wales valleys during the 1930s into an exhausting labour of non-denominational Christian love for the people, but in the process laid himself open to the very charges – of naivety, presumption, self-deception and ineffectuality – that the seasoned political agitator Bill Mabon wittily levels in the novel against Bayley Lewis.
In the opening sentences of his autobiography, George M. Ll. Davies quoted Emerson’s remark: ‘we are always hoping to get settled down. There is only hope for us so long as we are unsettled.’9 It is precisely this ‘selfish’ and ‘irresponsible’ spirit of unsettledness that irritates both his wife Lydia and his sister-in-law Kate, in their different ways, about J.T. He, in his turn, is made restless by Davies’s vision of the way in which ‘the ancient paganisms, the worship of Mammon, Mars, Demos and Eros still survive under highly modern names, while persons become workers, or conscripts, voters, or film addicts’ (Pilgrimage, 14). In short, modern society lives all too cosily, J.T. believes, in the House of Baal. As for the novel, it refuses to take sides, preferring to dwell in what E. M. Forster once called ‘the twilight of the double vision’. In so doing, it is true to the creative spirit of uncertainty that informs one of the jottings in Emyr Humphreys’s working notebook: ‘Geo M LL D – an idiot busy body – or a saint?’
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The drafts and working notes for Outside the House of Baal throw interesting light on the development of the novel from its inception in early summer, 1963, to its completion almost exactly a year later.10 Most of the main characters, spanning three generations, are there from the beginning and the network of relationships that connects them is already fairly clearly defined. Governing the whole enterprise from the outset is what one note calls the ‘thesis’ of the novel: ‘view of life of two – J.T. and Kate – in their seventies – the life of the last 70 years – the feel of human effort struggling to be trapped in that semi-detached house’. The sympathetic, yet unsparing, depiction of old age in all its crabbiness of spirit and its painstaking, often laboured, physical movements, is there in the original opening, which concerns Kate rather than J.T. Also recorded early is the intention to ensure that the novel covers four distinct historical periods – ‘before War 1; between wars; War II; after War’ – the difference between them being summed up as follows: ‘What will you die for – c.f. 1914, your country; 1930s the workers and Spain; 1941, civilisation versus Hitler; 1960, Wales.’ But although the main features of many of the leading characters are established from the beginning, the exact course of several of their lives remains to be fixed. There are plans, for example, to allow Lydia to have affairs; and to let
her leave J.T. and settle in London. In particular, the fates of their children Ronnie, Vernon and Thea remain undetermined – and remain in the balance, since the death of both brothers is canvassed as a serious possibility – until quite late in the process of composition, although a socially significant contrast between the characters of the two brothers is planned from very early in the writing.
Indeed, the elaboration of contrasts is consciously adopted by Emyr Humphreys as a fundamental method of construction. Sometimes he scribbles down antitheses that are, one feels, to be operative throughout the whole novel: ‘It’s sin that makes the world go round. It’s love that makes the world go round.’ ‘All is meaningful: all is meaningless.’ At other times, he has his central pair of opposites – Kate and J.T. – specifically in mind: ‘she can’t believe, he can’; ‘J.T.M. – failure and fear: Kate – no faith and [is] content. Purpose – survival’; ‘In action she is useful. In repose his spirit moves – he is the useful one – balance.’ This last contrast is later translated from idea into motif, with J.T. associated primarily with the head (as in the opening phrase of the first paragraph in the published novel) and Kate with the hands (as in the second section). Such open identification by the author of one of the secret motifs – whether they be physical gestures, or objects such as J.T.’s collar, his Gladstone bag, or the photograph of Ma – that provide the novel with its texture as well as its infrastructure, is however a rare occurrence in the manuscripts.
‘Events every time – ideas in background’, says one of the memos Emyr Humphreys wrote to himself. It is partly a reminder of the importance, to him, of story, a point he underlines elsewhere in his notes: ‘story animates, therefore events, it is true, must be described in detail, but the story must hook you compulsively and animate the entire functions of the … imagination. This is essential.’ At the same time, however, he suggestively speaks of his wish ‘to hold the story like a face that turns slowly to keep in the sun’. Although the metaphor mentions one face only, it actually highlights, and in a sense explains, the multifaceted structure of a novel in which attention seems to fall upon different objects, different locations, different characters, different events, almost as impartially as light (so Whitman puts it) ‘falls about a helpless thing’.
The effect of serene, lucid impartiality is, the notes show, one that Emyr Humphreys consciously aimed (and strove) to produce. ‘I am absent and I do not pass myself on to you’, he reminds himself, addressing an imaginary reader, in one entry. Another time he admonishes himself sharply: ‘don’t presume to know what they [i.e. the characters] think. The intimacy of their own thoughts.’ Write, he instructs himself, ‘without claiming infinite knowledge’, and in one striking manuscript passage he seems acutely aware of having evolved what is for him a new kind of writing, whose ‘grace of accuracy’ (to borrow Robert Lowell’s phrase) marks it off from the style of his previous novels:
Late in life I took upon myself the burden: to say what is true. That is wrong. I always knew that the primary element of the beauty of a saying was the ‘yes indeed that is so element.’ What I had not reckoned with until now was the discipline involved in sustaining ‘the saying’ over a book of 100,000 words. So it is that I wake up compelled by the spirit of dedication, living as this book lives, and my dreams are dominated by physical effort.
As the very earliest drafts show, however, Humphreys did at first find it difficult to resist the temptation to trespass on the consciousness of his main characters. In its original form, the opening section describing J.T.’s slow awakening to the day included passages like the following, which register his mental reactions to the sound of Kate’s busyness downstairs:
It was always necessary to keep in touch with the woman’s movements … The fall of the lavatory seat after the chain pulling. And the ultimate sweet but final warning of the tinkling of tea cups. Whether he could or he couldn’t, that was the time to start moving.
The very next paragraph cuts, without warning, back to the time, half a century earlier, when J.T. was a youngster apprenticed to Isaac Dafydd the blacksmith (see chapter 4, section 3 of the published novel). It therefore seems that Emyr Humphreys did not start out with the clear intention of setting up a twin-track narrative, one devoted to the past and the other to the present, and each proceeding at a different pace.
The notes also allow us to pinpoint one of the sources of his new spare style of writing. In 1958 he had been introduced, by his friend Walter Todds, to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, some of whose familiar gnomic utterances are recorded in the notebooks for Outside the House of Baal. ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ was one ascetic remark that motivated Emyr Humphreys to aim at a chaste integrity of expression.11 At the same time he was fascinated by the wealth of meaning which Wittgenstein had stressed every word, however humble, possessed. ‘To utter a word’, the Austrian had written, ‘is as if a note were struck on the keyboard of the imagination’; and Emyr Humphreys briefly entertained the idea of entitling his novel ‘The keyboard’. In fact, the final title emerged quite late in the day. Much of the writing was done under the working title of ‘Of the event’, and among other ideas entertained were ‘Where is now?’ and ‘A Welsh dream’.
Two more of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms are to be found in the notebooks. ‘Not how the world is, is the mystery, but that it is’, he wrote in the Tractatus (6.44),12 and, particularly in relation to the laboured, painfully deliberate movements of J.T. and Kate in their old age, Emyr Humphreys is able to bring out the power and the pathos of the sheer mute existence of objects – what one writer has called ‘the terse epiphany of the things in themselves, which already results from the poetry of their names’.13 Central to Wittgenstein’s philosophy was the realisation that ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Tractatus, 115), and central in turn to the novel is the perception that profound historical changes are accompanied by fundamental shifts in the language of people’s understanding. J.T.’s religious language of sin and forgiveness is virtually unintelligible, for instance, to the self-made man Dan Llew and his miserably cuckolded son Norman, as to members of the younger generation in general, whether they live in Wales or America. Even the importance to J.T. of the Welsh language itself is something which is essentially incomprehensible to someone like his son Ronnie, who is intent on social advancement. But virtually from the beginning of his ministry J.T. himself, of course, speaks a language of faith which is scandalously different from that traditionally used by his theologically conservative denomination. Hence his reluctant emergence, in the novel, as the leader of the ‘new’, and politically progressive, wing of Calvinistic Methodism in opposition to the reactionary views of Machno Jones and his followers. As the notes for the novel remind us, this liberal outlook continued to gain ground within Nonconformity after the Second World War, up to the very time when Outside the House of Baal was being written, thanks partly to the impact of the posthumously published writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who advocated a ‘religionless Christianity’ of the kind that manifestly appeals to the ageing J.T.14
‘Time after all is the chief character in a novel’ is one of the observations Emyr Humphreys makes in the notes, and the way in which time is managed is one of the outstanding features of Outside the House of Baal. Of its twenty-six chapters, ten are set in the present and sixteen in the past, but the latter are given four pages, on average, to every one of the former. In the first quarter of the novel there is a regular pattern of alternation between past and present, but thereafter the arrangement is irregular, with the maximum disparity occurring after chapter 18, when there are four chapters in succession dealing with past events. Most striking of all, perhaps, is Emyr Humphreys’s success in devising techniques for distinguishing between the pace of living during youth and vigorous prime, and the slowing down, not only of physical movement, but of the very metabolism (so to speak) of consciousness itself, that is part of the ageing process. Life, and a
ll the contents of living, seem to take on a greater specific gravity in those chapters that deal with the period that Kate and J.T. spend together in their old age in 8 Gorse Avenue.
As one would have expected, the manuscripts show that some of the original sections and chapters had to be rearranged in a different order before the present convincing pattern emerged. For example chapter 1 was at first followed by a chapter (now chapter 8, section 2) describing how Kate was most embarrassingly up to her elbows in soapsuds when the young auburn-haired J.T. first called at Argoed. Dramatically effective though this juxtaposition was in one way, it had the disadvantage of forcing the author from the very beginning into a non-chronological treatment of such events, which is presumably one reason why it was abandoned. And when this episode was eventually transferred to chapter 8 it took its place alongside other sections, scattered through chapters 7 to 10, which had previously been tried in different locations and in different permutations.