Word: huw
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...When Huw Morgan begins his story he is close onto 60, slag heaps have crept close against the house his youth was spent in, and he is about to leave forever his native valley in Wales. Within a page he has sunk back more than 50 years deep into glassily clear reverie, into a time when the valley and life in it were beautiful...
...Huw's elder brother Davy got very busy forming a union more radical than his father would have to do with; later on a terrible five-month strike ended with many children dead, its Pyrrhic victory a minimum wage below what had been paid before. And subtly, implacably, the slag heaps enlarged upon the valley, to that day when the tipping piers were set tall above the dwellings of the miners themselves, and the grim end was plain in sight...
Meanwhile the breeding and breathing and aging and division which make up all family chronicles was in steady process-a half-dozen well-told romances. Huw himself was bright enough for the best schooling in England, but after a few years of it he quit it for mining and mining for carpentry. As times got harder in the Valley, Huw's brothers and sisters scattered to the dominions, to the U. S., to Germany. Only the broken remnants of the family stayed on. It came to its worst when Huw was in his 20s, in an addled, furious, revolutionary...
...verbal splendor, its folksy lilt and whine, approaches literary affectation. Yet in this, his first published novel (he has destroyed five), he has developed a hypnotic ability to do precisely what he pleases. His Morgans, those they live among, the country they inhabit, every incident, every reflection Huw Morgan ventures on the whole matter, have an even radiance and euphony plus a rock-bottom tangibility. If it be only would-be great How Green Was My Valley is still uncommonly rich, able, moving...