This is a guest post by the novelist Lissa Evans
I’d never heard of Emlyn Williams before my sister gave me the paperback of his autobiography when I was about thirteen. The cover showed a sepia photograph of a boy of my own age with badly-cut hair and a tentative expression that was almost a smile.
After I read (and re-read) the book, I kept a lookout for his older incarnations: he still popped up in the odd pre-war film on Sunday afternoons, swarthily overacting; his creaky plays – once huge West End hits – were occasionally performed, largely in amateur theatre; his novel Headlong (which, bizarrely, was the basis of the John Goodman film, King Ralph) and a requisitely chilling book about the Moors Murderers, Beyond Belief, were both still in print.
But I’m sure that George, his early autobiography, will outlast the lot. From the opening it has precision, style and wit, as well as a dash and sparkle that is all its own, and it doesn’t matter if future readers know nothing about his relatively fleeting fame, because this book’s not about a famous person – it’s about someone who wants to be famous.
He writes with brilliance about his childhood egotism, of how, after seeing a schoolmate, Kate, lying in an open coffin, dead of pneumonia, he imagines – in heart-wringing detail – his own deathbed, funeral and eulogy: ‘Never another like him…’. The chapter ends: ‘Ten minutes later I was changed into ganssi and courduroys and in the field playing rounders as if I had not died at all. Or Kate either.’
Born in 1905, he grew up, Welsh-speaking, in Flintshire, the oldest son of an (intermittently) drunken publican and his long-suffering wife, but this is emphatically not a misery memoir – the parents’ marriage survived into loving old age, Williams senior pulled himself together and took a steady job in the steelworks, and both parents adored George, their gifted eldest son, who went from village junior school to the local grammar:
‘He has got to pass first’ said Mam, as he lit his pipe, ‘and there’s the trip, five miles, how would he get there every day if he did pass?’
‘In a tank’ said Dad, without a flicker. ‘I shall have one sent over from the works.’
From the grammar school, George won an Oxford scholarship and went on to a career in theatre and film. When (under his stage name Emlyn Williams) he starred in the smash-hit thriller, The Case of the Frightened Lady, the steelworks block-booked the cinema in Connah’s Quay, and Dic Williams had the prime seat at the centre of the balcony.
The narrative trajectory that takes his son to university is fabulous, but then a sort of drift and lassitude take over the story – the last quarter of the book is perhaps less satisfying, but it’s nevertheless intriguing. Williams falls for another undergraduate, loses the ability to study, drops out and follows the siren call of theatre to his first tiny role on stage. (Emlyn, his second autobiography – also enjoyable – takes up the story at exactly this point.)
But my favourite part of George has always been his days at the grammar-school, where he was nurtured by a superb language teacher, Sarah Cooke (later immortalised in his hit play The Corn is Green) and where he started to unleash his extravagant imagination in print. Asked to invent 3 sentences to include ‘inordinate’, ‘vehemence’ and ‘parsimonious’, George, who had just read an article on the Romanovs in The News of the World, went to town: ‘Rasputin, eerie werewolf of all the Russias, staggered up to the Czarina, his filthy locks inordinately matted as he flung a mere kopek to the subservient servant, for he was a parsimonious monster.’
This boy was never, ever going to settle for a job in the steelworks….
George: An Early Autobiography, by Emlyn Williams
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961
Lissa Evans is a former television producer and the author of V for Victory and other novels. You can learn more about her work at LissaEvans.com.