All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  There are also one or two other differences worth noting between the first version in manuscript and the text as published. As has already been explained, Emyr Humphreys originally drafted episodes hinting at Lydia’s extra-marital affairs, but the subsequent omission of this material may have necessitated the addition of two scenes which underlined by other means the tensions within the marriage. The first is the opening scene of chapter 19, which concludes with Lydia begging her neighbour Jenny Leyshon not to tell J.T. about the money she has had to borrow in order to make ends meet because her (saintly?) husband has spent all the family’s meagre earnings on alleviating the distress of the miners in the south Wales valleys to whom he is ministering during the Great Depression; and the second is section 2 of chapter 20, in which Lydia shocks the young doctor by tearfully announcing that she cannot stand her husband and that, had she but the money, she would leave him tomorrow. In addition, the manuscripts provide interesting examples of phrases and sentences added, particularly at the conclusion of sections, for incisive effect. So, for instance, chapter 13 originally ended with J.T., nonplussed by Kate’s tart reaction to his sorrow at hearing of his old friend Ifan Cole’s death, limply holding up for inspection the letters that have just been accidentally soaked in sardine oil. In the published form, however, the chapter concludes with a splendidly climactic and combative one-liner: ‘—What if we all just lived for ourselves, Kate said.’ Such changes emphasise the distinctiveness of the ‘scenes’ of which the novel is composed. In their compression of meaning, and with their heightened air of significance, they resemble short stories more than they do casual vignettes.

  The notebooks mention actors and actresses of the post-war period, with whom Emyr Humphreys had worked and aspects of whose personalities helped him construct the character of Thea. There is also abundant evidence of the effort Emyr Humphreys put into historical research for the novel, including references to newspaper articles, to cofiannau (biographies of eminent ministers and the like), and to theologians from Augustine to Bonhoeffer. But one entry puts all this material into perspective, and reminds us, as it was intended to remind the author, where the main burden of interest consistently lies. ‘Y thema yw bywyd J.T. a K.[:] peidio colli golwg ohonyn nhw yn nghoedwig hanes. [‘The theme is the life of J.T. and K.: not to lose sight of them in the forest of history.’] In the dark forest of history I saw two white figures stumbling through the trees.’

  Several versions survive of the opening paragraph of the novel, and they show the way in which it was reworked to produce the present rich ambivalence of tone. Originally the first sentence referred not to ‘venerable’ hair, but to hair that was simply, neutrally, ‘white’. And only in the final text does the printed second sentence appear, with its fine patina of irony: ‘The pillow-case was lightly stained by the halo of white hair.’ At the same time revision saw the removal of simpler, cruder examples of irony, for instance the description of J.T.’s forehead creasing ‘cautiously as if into deep thought’, as he strains to break wind. Mere details though these changes may seem to be, they are in fact examples of the even-handed care Emyr Humphreys takes, from the outset, to present J.T. to us in a double focus that complicates judgement. His character is suspended somehow, somewhere, between vanity and humility, between comedy and dignity; and our judgement of him is in turn suspended between admiration and condemnation. To the very end of the novel his essential identity is as uncertain as, at the beginning, are the letters needed to fill the enigmatic blanks between his ‘initials … stamped at a distance from each other across the front’ of his collar box.

  Also omitted from the printed text was the sentence, ‘If he were to move his head sufficiently, and if he opened his eyes, he would see what time it was.’ This makes the mistake of appearing to impute to the sleepy J.T. a lazy unwillingness to look at the clock – precisely the convenient habit of wilfully selective vision which enables him, according to hostile witnesses as different as Lydia, Isaac Dafydd, and his son Vernon’s wife Sandra, self-indulgently to avoid seeing people and situations as they really are. The novel itself, however, never fully endorses this view – hence the omission of that offending sentence. Instead, the narrative discourse in general carefully allows for the possibility of J.T.’s being selfless rather than selfish, and balances unquestionable disasters like the death of his fellow stretcher-bearer Cynwal at the Front (thanks to J.T.’s insistence on a virtually suicidal mission to help a wounded soldier) against occasions of unalloyed altruism, such as when he gives away his grandmother’s cottage.

  Something of a spiritual Quixote, he seems oblivious to the havoc he creates around him, whether in the comical form of a shattered butter-dish, or in the tragic shape of an embittered wife and an alienated son. The morally equivocal nature of the world J.T. inhabits is delicately suggested by the description of him waking: ‘He saw the haze of light that took the colour of warmth and sunshine from the worn curtains, although it was in fact a dull day outside.’ The indefatigably practical Kate has, of course, long since been downstairs, cleaning the grate, preparing breakfast, and philosophically taking the gloomy August day just as it is. Is she then the very embodiment of the reality principle – a Martha to his Mary, and a Sancho Panza to his Quixote? Dumpy Kate, fishing her glass eye out of the prunes, would seem to be an altogether more robustly sensible character than the elderly J.T. who mouths benedictions, preens himself rather in front of the mirror and pores over his ancient sermons. Like his, her strengths, however, turn out to be inseparable from her weaknesses. Her indomitable matter-of-factness makes her refuse to see the quiet despair behind Mr Hobley’s attempted suicide. And although she is admirably stoical, she has never ceased to be her tyrannical father’s dutiful daughter, able to fulfil herself only through docile service, while irritably resenting the fact. The jealousy (of Lydia’s success in ensnaring the handsome young J.T.) which was the suppressed aspect of her devotion to her rebellious sister is given full expression through her resentment of her niece Thea, Lydia’s daughter.

  In fact, the working notes suggest that Outside the House of Baal has been deliberately provided with a sexual subtext, the subconscious of the novel as it were, since the text rarely acknowledges its presence. ‘When I write’, says Emyr Humphreys in one jotting, ‘I try to be aware of Joyce and Wittgenstein, of Freud and Marx, and even of Bartok and Stravinsky and Roger Hilton’ (Hilton being an artist whose abstract paintings are admired by the author). The diluted influence of Freud is, I believe, particularly evident in the key scene where the love-making of Lydia and J.T. during their courtship is interrupted by the news that Kate’s eye has been scratched out by a thorn. Kate it was, and not Lydia, who should have brought J.T. his food that afternoon, and throughout the novel the preparing and the eating of food is implicitly associated with strong emotions such as love and sexual passion. Indeed, the later scene when his neighbour Jenny Leyshon prepares a meal for J.T. in Lydia’s absence is closely modelled on this earlier scene of sexual encounter where the youthful J.T. returns to his half-derelict cottage, tired, wet and hungry, and finds that Lydia has lit a fire and filled the house with the delightful smell of freshly baked bread. The fact that Lydia has effectively usurped her place and completed the seduction of J.T. may mean that Kate’s simultaneous loss of an eye is an unconscious act of self-mutilation, a gesture both of sexual revenge and of self-punishment, of the kind she perhaps repeats when she later masochistically marries the drunken wastrel Wynne Bannister.

  But Bannister first presents himself to her, of course, in the respectable guise of a father-figure, when he comes to make arrangements for Pa’s funeral. The influence of Pa on Kate’s emotional life, including her sexual preference, is very deep, as can be seen from the terms of her rejection of her various suitors. Appropriately enough, she is washing Pa’s drawers when she first hears J.T.’s voice – he having been brought to Argoed by Griff when Pa is away from home – and the irritable affection with which she treats J.T. in old age re
plicates the relationship between herself and Pa when they two alone are left in the old family farm, Argoed. Lydia, on the other hand, is initially drawn to J.T. in part because Pa disapproves of his supposed levity; but her attachment to him is reinforced not only by the rivalry for his affections that develops between Kate and herself but also by the closeness between J.T. and her favourite brother and fellow rebel, Griff. In these ways, J.T. is from the beginning involved, unawares, in the relatively innocent sexual politics of the Argoed family.

  The intricate system of relationships that binds the family together is brilliantly suggested in the opening section of chapter 2 where scarcely a word is spoken as Ma leaves Argoed to die. As in silent films, meaning is conveyed almost entirely through an eloquent code of movements and gestures. This is a mode of signification sensitively and suggestively used throughout the entire novel – as when Griff, having just confessed to J.T. that he is no longer a Christian believer, puts his arm on his shoulder, as J.T. clambers up the slope to join him, so that as ‘J.T. came level with him … Griff’s arm was lifted upward by the movement’ – but in this particular scene it reaches a height of balletic perfection. The powerful impression given of a close-knit family functioning as an organic feudal unit serves partly to offset the subsequent impression formed of exploitation and dissension, and so lends some colour of credence, at least, to the later nostalgic yearnings of Lydia and Kate for the good times at Argoed. Equally important is the way Emyr Humphreys follows this scene with a picture of young Joe disconsolately sitting alone on the window-sill of the classroom, keeping watch while his father is secretly refilling his whisky flask. The contrast between the two scenes is further pointed up by the way they are made to interlock. At the end of the Argoed scene Ned looks down at his trouser-leg because ‘Ma had reached out to tug his trousers’. At the beginning of the schoolmaster scene, Joe rubs ‘his chin against the darnings on the knees of his stockings’ – in a self-comforting gesture that is thus made poignantly expressive of his motherless state. Later, it is precisely this unselfconscious air of helplessness that makes the adult J.T. so attractive to certain types of women. At the same time, the habit of self-sufficiency, which he has had to learn early, helps him develop into a spiritual loner, an inner-directed character.

  This arrangement of short scenes to chime, contrast, cross-refer and interact is, of course, the primary means by which Emyr Humphreys ‘makes meaning by moulding form’ in Outside the House of Baal. He himself felt the technique was similar in some ways to the exploration of consonances and dissonances in modernist music (hence the references to Stravinsky and Bartok) and in particular to the language of form and colour in abstract art – a feature he specifically discussed, when working on the novel, with his friend the eminent painter Patrick Heron. Undoubtedly, however, the extensive experience he had gained during the 1950s from working in radio and television drama greatly influenced his method of working. Most strikingly, it caused him to revise his opinion of the way in which novels were now being read – and to deduce from this a theory of how they should be composed. He formed the view that the new media were sensitising audiences to certain signs, or signifiers – close-ups, cuts from shot to shot, attitudes, gestures, undertones – and felt a novelist should be taking advantage of the current economy of meaning made available through a sophisticated general awareness of these conventions. At the same time there were older novelistic conventions – of authorial omniscience, dense dialogue, psychological analysis, etc. – which, he believed, were now superannuated.

  Whatever the validity of these theories when regarded as a general principle, they undoubtedly served Emyr Humphreys well as working hypotheses. His scenic structure proved flexible enough to produce a brilliant variety of interpretative effects, as well, of course, as making it easy for him to range over extensive time and space. Note, for instance, the way in which Pa is caught, in an early scene, as his tears are dropping into the clock he is mending. This endears him to us in a way that is never completely cancelled out by all the succeeding episodes in which he almost invariably appears overbearing and mawkishly self-pitying. One of the latter is the scene where Kate mollycoddles him with hot milk and whisky – an incident resonantly juxtaposed to the one in which J.T.’s father is found dead on the mountain, an empty Lysol bottle by his side. A poignant impression of mutability is created by the way Aunt Addy makes her one and only appearance in the novel, in the scene describing Ma’s departure from Argoed, which follows on from the moment when the elderly Kate, startled by the sounds of J.T. flushing the toilet upstairs, clumsily lets slip and breaks the butter-dish that ‘was a present from Aunt Addy of Denbigh, given to her thirty-four years ago’. Water connects the end of one scene in which Ifan Cole, suffering from a hangover, vomits over the small anvil, with the beginning of another in which the romantic adolescent Lydia takes Ma’s picture apart, in her frantic search for Pa’s supposed secret lover. And once this connection is perceived, the reader can reflect that, in their different ways, both Ifan and Lydia are natural rebels. Little Thea, playing on her uncle Ned’s northern farm, where her mother has taken refuge from the south Wales valleys, exclaims that ‘everything is hungry’. She is referring to the pigs and the hens and the cattle, but in context her childish cry serves to underline the difference between this rural region of plenty and the social deprivation in the depressed industrial areas she has just left. Examples could be multiplied endlessly of the ways in which some of the subtlest effects in the novel are the product of the fluid interrelationship of scenes.

  It is, however, equally instructive to notice the gaps in the narrative structure, and precisely where they occur. What is remarkable is that silence falls at several of the most crucial points. Ma’s death, Kate’s reaction to losing her eye, the marriage of Lydia and J.T., the death of Pa, J.T.’s reaction to the death of Lydia – these and other seminal events are bypassed. Considered in conjunction with the scenic structure mentioned above, this practice reminds us that Outside the House of Baal is, in Roland Barthes’s now familiar terms, a ‘writerly’ rather than a ‘readerly’ text. In other words, the reader is called upon to participate very actively in the process of producing meaning – and thus in effect ‘writes’ the interpretative script for himself or herself.

  Barthes was led to this distinction partly through the study of the theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht, and it is worth noting that during the period leading up to the composition of Outside the House of Baal, Emyr Humphreys had himself become very interested in Brecht’s work. The aspects of the plays that most fascinated him were those well described by Catherine Belsey:

  Brecht’s solution [to the reader’s passive, uncritical acceptance of the world as pictured in a text] was to write a new kind of text, foregrounding contradiction rather than effacing it, and distancing the audience from both text and ideology. In … the interrogative text there is no simple hierarchy of discourses such that the reader is offered privileged access to the work’s ‘truth’. Instead the reader constructs meaning out of the contradictory discourses which the text provides. Barthes speaks of the multiplicity of voices of indeterminate origin in the writable text, the polyphony which deprives the implied author of authority so that the truth of any one of the discourses is not guaranteed by a knowledge of its origin or source.15

  Compare this with the full text of a notebook entry by Emyr Humphreys, part of which has already been quoted: ‘The voice that tells the tale colours everything and invalidates each event. Therefore I am absent & I do not press myself on you.’

  It is only by ignoring the polyphony of the text that, it seems to me, readers can, without hesitation or qualification, reach conclusions like the following about Outside the House of Baal:

  The book is a full-length portrait of J. T. Miles – a Calvinistic Methodist minister who is the very type of ‘the good man’ … The unfolded narrative shows him ‘betraying’ Argoed – here the symbol for the older Calvinistic Wales – by marrying the
light-minded Lydia rather than her elder sister, Kate.16

  There is, surely, at the very least, much more to be said for Lydia than this, and moreover the novel, in one of its voices, says it. And if one is interested not in the least that can be said for her but in the most, then a powerful case could be made for regarding Lydia (along with other women from Kate, through Mrs Bayliss and Jenny Leyshon, to Norman’s neglected Marjorie) as the tragic victim of a complacently masculine world. She escapes from servitude with Pa only to become the ‘slave’, as she angrily puts it, of the ineffable J.T. Already a rebel, a generation ahead of her ‘liberated’ daughter Thea, she is allowed no scope for the exercise of her considerable energy; a feminine version of her independently minded brother Griff, she is denied the opportunities he is given to develop in her own way.

  Of course, this is a novel in which every thesis is accompanied by its antithesis, and so a persuasive case counter to the above could be made on behalf, let us say, of J.T. But what is important to realise is that readers are not only openly encouraged (by the way the novel is structured) to enter into the ‘debate’, they are also made to reflect on the terms of their own preference. This, again, is a Brechtian feature of Outside the House of Baal: the novel is designed to bring readers face to face with their own presuppositions and hidden value systems. Moreover, it contextualises these, showing them to be not uniquely personal to its readers, but rather embedded in a specific period and social background. In other words, like Brecht’s plays, the novel not only shows us ‘history’, it leads us to experience ourselves as historical beings. So, for instance, our sneaking preference for J.T. (or, alternately, for Lydia) is represented to us by the noncommittal text in a manner which makes clear the social origins and ramifications of our judgement. The novel deals as equivocally with time as it does with the main characters, refusing to let the past entirely get the better of the present, or the present of the past. The title would seem to endorse J.T.’s view of contemporary Wales as pub-and-club land, but even in the matter of drink the inhabitants of the past seem scarcely more abstemious than those of the present, and J.T.’s fierce hostility to the ‘House of Baal’ is understandable in view of his alcoholic father. When an aged Pa querulously complains about the new maid, Kate reminds him of the sharp practices of Mary Parry Rice in the old days. The advances made in medicine are emphasised, and J.T. himself is impatient with the nostalgic maunderings of Henry Bowen, with his lament for the loss of law and order and his complaint about the disrespect of the young. But at the same time, J.T. cannot suppress a pang when he realises the young photographer with the pigeon on his shoulder has no idea that the dove is the symbol of the Holy Spirit.