Showing posts with label Wales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wales. Show all posts

Friday, October 28, 2016

Idylls and Loss

I spent this last week reading Richard Llewellyn's novel, How Green Was My Valley. I seem to remember it being included on a reading list in one of my high school English classes, but I was never drawn to it. The title seemed to suggest a certain degree of sentimentality, and indeed "sentimentalizing" is one of the charges laid against it, along with misrepresentation of Welsh life and an insular outlook on certain topics. What I think it does most memorably is present a portrait of a close-knit family, and that was what sustained my interest. Regardless of any of its shortcomings, I wanted to find out what would happen to the people.

This is an instance of a book that doesn't deal overtly with mythological characters but has at its center a mythic theme, the loss of paradise. The narrator mentions Adam and Eve and the expulsion from the garden several times, seeing in that story the source and foreshadowing of his own early experiences with sexuality. This narrator, Huw Morgan, the youngest son in a family of nine children, recognizes the loss of innocence that comes with the first fumbling knowledge of adulthood, but the entire novel is preoccupied with the archetype of loss.

From repeated descriptions of the ways in which the valley's beauty is being eroded by growing slag heaps to the narrator's experience of adulthood not being quite what he had bargained for to the eventual parting of the ways of family members, the novel is full of reminders of an original state of grace that can't be sustained. Early in the story, various family members, particularly the boys, leave home only to return, or if they go for good, don't go far, perhaps to the next valley or the farm over the mountain. When several of the boys, at odds with their father over their views on unionizing, leave the house to take lodgings down the road (followed by their younger sister), the episode becomes a poignant illustration of the mother's role in holding the family together. Eventually, though, forces of change in the valley, along with the characters' own inner callings, break up the idyllic home life.

Much of the novel is taken up with accounts of Huw's education, both at home and at school. The family has high hopes for the future of their intellectually gifted youngest son, and there is an assumption that he will eventually win a scholarship and go off to university. I have to admit to feeling disappointed in Huw when he decided to follow his father into the colliery. While various family members and friends try to dissuade Huw from becoming a miner, his mother is all in favor of keeping him at home. At that point, I confess, the warm family life started to feel a bit claustrophobic, despite my liking for the characters. My assumption (which would be shared by most readers, I think) was that Huw would leave home to become something else and return as a teacher, a doctor, or a man of letters. But even his fateful decision does not stave off the changes that economic forces, disappointed love, and death eventually bring to the family.

Is the novel a tragedy? Yes, probably, but only in the same way all family stories are. The novel made me think about a conversation I had with my aunt about how connected our family used to seem when my grandparents were still alive and how far apart everyone has grown since then (I'm not talking about an idyllic family, just one that got together regularly). She told me that the death of parents had the power to change relationships among even the closest siblings, something I wasn't quite sure I agreed with. The story of the Morgans, however, illustrates ways in which separation is inevitable and possibly even desirable. Whether the Morgan children leave the valley to pursue their dreams, find their fortunes, or merely to flee thwarted hopes, they're now in a position to begin new stories of their own.

Huw acknowledges that his brothers were right to leave the valley before tensions among the miners intensified, tensions in which they would undoubtedly have been caught up had they remained. Perhaps the breaking of family ties provides some insulation for those who have begun to build new lives elsewhere. Or perhaps not--for a family as close as the Morgans, there would be no forgetting their early happiness, especially if their later lives proved disappointing. About individual fates, however, the end of the novel is largely silent.

I have wondered sometimes whether or not an idyllic family life, if there is such a thing, is an advantage or a disadvantage. Sometimes it seems to me that having a less-than-ideal home life might actually be helpful in some ways, making the inevitable break with home easier. Perhaps most people, regardless of the kind of family life they've had, are happy to leave home when their time comes, and the Morgans are an exception. I've never known a family quite like them, though certain aspects of their story seemed familiar. I remember big family meals, with everyone crowded around the table, and good food.

Aside from that, I'd still like to see Wales, regardless of whether there are any Morgans there or not. Apparently, it is still quite green and is still fertile ground for myths and legends of all kinds, as it has been for centuries.