Old People Are a Problem
by Emyr Humphreys
The Alderman's dilemma
A review by Paul Binding
In the opening paragraph of his first novel, The Little Kingdom (l946),
published when he was only twenty-seven, Emyr Humphreys describes a Welsh entrepreneur
confronting the breaking morning:
"Across the water he saw the Wirral emerge from the early morning mist;
become once more a solid and substantial rich-green sea-girt land, speckled
with red roofed houses."
While Humphreys has gone on to write nineteen more novels and numerous short
stories, this image haunts all his fiction. For even the most ambitious and
optimistic Welsh writer there is always — in the clarity of day-light, rather
than the obfuscations of night — the reality of England, their ungainsayable
neighbour, enticing, richer, more populous, more powerful — and foreign too,
often to the point of perverse and unimaginative incomprehension. At the centre
of The Little Kingdom stands the young Welsh Nationalist, Owen Richards,
the entrepreneur's nephew. He is the first of many characters in Humphreys's
fiction who, both through their positions and their temperaments, fail to square
their righteous idealism with proper knowledge of themselves and their kinspeople.
For Humphreys, a faithful observer of society and its mores, as well as of the
conduct and mental processes of individual men and women, it is an article of
faith that ideals should never grow in a vacuum but should have a harmonious
co-existence with other desires.
These interests and this belief made Humphreys well equipped to record adolescence,
and his most famous novel, A Toy Epic (l958), intertwines the progress
towards young manhood of three Welsh boys, one of whom, the clergyman's son,
Michael, becomes a dedicated Nationalist. That novel, with its insight and its
beautiful prose, leaves the reader appropriately divided — between an appreciation
of the need for an inherited culture to be free and thus capable of independent
development, and a recognition that all of us have to face realities which exist
below the level of culture. At the age of eighty, Emyr Humphreys retains the
same freshness and insistence on truth-telling he has always had, and the same
doubleness of vision which he brings to Old People Are a Problem, his
new collection of stories about the elderly.
In the title story, sixty-year-old Alderman Parry-Paylin has to choose between
maintaining the purity of his former Welsh Nationalist ideals — exhorted by
both his ninety-three-year-old aunt by marriage and his only daughter — and
relaxing, now he is getting on, into a more broadly based relation to the diversity
of people all round him.
The variations on the Alderman's dilemma in the other stories are complex
and subtle. In "The Man in the Mist", two clever, high-achieving friends,
Glyn and Gwyn, the one drawn to the media, the other to academe, shift and change
their respective positions during the story, but underneath runs a strong emotional
feeling for the Valley of their boyhood, which is almost too intense to translate
into a way of life. Glyn, who has known the attraction of English metropolitan
glitz, in the end seems to opt for the life of a shepherd, and Gwyn finds himself
unable to meet him. "I knew the treachery of the terrain and I couldn't
take the risk . . . . All I could do was turn back." But apprehension of
his friend's new avatar drives him to a breakdown. Another kind of collapse
will surely come the way of the old minister in "The Arrest", a man
widely respected in his community, who quixotically wants to go to prison rather
than pay his television licence because he fervently disagrees with new policies
on Welsh-language broadcasting. In the police van, cooped up with two truculent
young men, he begins to see that he hasn't a clue about the lives of most of
his fellow human beings.
Strangely, the two stories which have least concern with nationalist issues
are the most powerful. "Looking After Ruthie" is an extraordinarily
attentive story charting the ebbs and flows in the relationship between two
women, longstanding friends. Peris is well off, married to a man of some distinction
(an ambitious composer) and supremely self-confident, Valmai an overweight primary
school teacher whose marriage to a policeman of horribly specious charm has
humiliatingly failed. Peris's unfair and histrionic accusation of jealousy made
to her friend at a moment of crisis rasps the nerves convincingly. "Glasshouses"
beautifully counterpoints the fortunes and feelings of four people: a man and
a woman in old age, and a man and a woman in their early middle years. It shows
great artistic dexterity, disturbing psychological understanding and ironic
humour. The old man declares: "I'm in a permanent state of being deeply
puzzled by everything". If he is speaking for his creator, it would seem
a very good place to be.
Paul Binding's
novel My
Cousin the Writer was published last year, and his study of the first atlas-makers
Imagined Corners appeared earlier this year.
|
|
Don't Miss
