Emyr Humphreys by M. Wynn Thomas

Author:M. Wynn Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Poetry, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2018-09-01T01:19:22.887000+00:00

We are all bound into the same family by the bonds of love. You know I am a preacher so you will not blame me for preaching… Just as the distance between us is annihilated by this device and I am speaking now in your hearing, so it is with the means of salvation that quicken our lives with purpose and with meaning… (OHB, 382)

Words fail him as he is overcome with emotion. But words fail the ageing J.T. in any case, as he repeatedly discovers that his language no longer has any meaning. A brashly importunate seaside photographer armed with a pigeon as a prop, fails to understand J.T.’s allusion to the dove of the Holy Spirit. Yet he struggles to persist in forgiving a morally, culturally and spiritually errant Wales, just as his favourite prophet, Hosea, had forgiven his adulterous wife.

Somehow he survives: the last glimpse we have of him being, appropriately enough, as he sets out to book a mystery tour of north Wales – the very place where he was born. Nor does J.T. provide the only example in the novel of how to survive, to outlast not just one’s generation but the society that has formed, and continues to inform, you. The most powerful example is offered by Kate, with her simple, stubborn, effortful persistence in the labour of mere living. In her grumpily pragmatic way, she exhibits a toughness, a resilience, a resourcefulness and even a degree of adaptability, that is foreign to the unbending J.T. And the novel ends with her preparing for an outing with her niece, Gwyneth, with the characteristic words: ‘Got to have the address or we won’t know where to go.’ (OHB, 398) With his preacher’s eye for an allegory, J.T. would undoubtedly have placed a metaphysical meaning on that sentence, and the novel, too, has primed us for that possibility. But for the practical Kate, whose religious belief has long dwindled away to a mere vague hope that life’s meaninglessness may after all reveal some hidden purpose some day, the sentence means no more than it says.

In its magisterial, challenging, moving and inimitable way, Outside the House of Baal remains the major fictional work of Welsh Nonconformity and it is, perhaps, the most outstanding English-language novel to have come from Wales to date. It is proof that the comment made by Aled in Gift of a Daughter is one that applies to Emyr Humphreys’s heart as a novelist:

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