Recent Reading, 17th May 2023

It’s a bit of a commonplace that writers recycle their lives into their fiction, some more obviously than others. Over recent weeks I have, without deliberate intention to do so, read three novels of the early twentieth century whose authors were explicit about drawing on their early lives in writing the respective books.

The three books in question were Clayhanger (Arnold Bennett; 1910), The Furys (James Hanley; 1935) and How Green Was My Valley? (Richard Llewellyn; 1939). It should be said from the start that while Bennett and Hanley drew directly, and chronologically, from their life stories, Llewellyn’s book was presented as autobiographical, but drew from conversations he had with other people, as well his experiences as a young adult.

Clayhanger is set in a small Potteries town, Bursley. The protagonist, Edwin Clayhanger, shares a number of characteristics and life events with Bennett, but perhaps more importantly, Edwin’s father Darius is a direct analogue to Bennett’s father. The novel is set in late Victorian England, perhaps twenty or thirty years prior to its publication.

The Furys is set in a thinly fictionalised version of Liverpool called Gelton, and again features a father who is very close to the author’s father. Some elements of the protagonist’s life differ from the author’s, but tend to follow quite closely the somewhat romanticised biography he presented to his readers. This is set around 1910, a similar gap to publication to Clayhanger.

How Green Was My Valley? is set in a small mining village in south Wales. The time interval between the setting (late Victorian, pre-1900) and the writing is much greater than the other two. Although the novel is much more focused on the protagonist’s story, and its (supposed) parallels with the author’s, the father is still a significant presence.

Clayhanger has the most homogenous background in cultural terms, almost stultifyingly so at times, whereas the cultural divides provide at least some of the spark in the other two – Catholic-Protestant, Irish-English in The Furys, Welsh-English, Chapel-Church, village-metropolitan in How Green Was My Valley?.

Each of the three provide a detailed and full picture of how it was to live at that time, and in that place, but as a remembered narrative, they give more solidity to that picture than a historical novel written in modern times can do: remembered experience is more powerful and believable than researched knowledge.

It is interesting to note that both Hanley and Llewellyn fictionalised, to different degrees, the biographies they presented to their readers: even before beginning the novel, we’re in a slightly ambiguous ‘reality’.

Of the three, How Green Was My Valley? is probably the most successful as a novel. The first two hew closely to their source material, which often means that the structure is rather rigid: more historical than dramatic. Episodes and events are included not because they drive a narrative, or illuminate a character (although they often do), but because that is what happened. In How Green Was My Valley?, the events serve the narrative, not the other way around.

Each has their moments, but Llewellyn has more freedom to pick and choose, to reorder or edit.  It could be said that this saves him from having the smallest canvas to paint on, but a small canvass can often make the colours more vivid. And strikingly, whereas in the other books the passion that is there is passion for a woman, Llewellyn gives us, glancingly but lyrically, passion for music: the singing of the Welsh miners, and indeed the whole village, is powerfully evoked as praise, as community, and as joy.