Is the Valley Still Green?

Last month marked the 75th anniversary theatrical release of the movie classic How Green Was My Valley. Though “classic” is one of those terms all too liberally assigned these days, the word is surely appropriate in this case. The story of a family’s love, trials, and ultimate dissolution struck a chord with American movie goers at a time of social upheaval due to a nation gearing up for war. Directed by the legendary John Ford, the film was both a box office and critical success, garnering a total of five Oscars that included Best Picture and Director. The day after the movie’s premier, the inveterate New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote that it was “a motion picture of great poetic charm and dignity, a picture rich in visual fabrication and in the vigor of its imagery, and one which may truly be regarded as an outstanding film of the year.”

Yet in spite of all the accolades, How Green Was My Valley has not uniformly worn well down through the years. In retrospect, some viewers in a more jaded age complain of its unabashed sentimentality. It has also comparatively suffered due to some highbrow critics who will simply not forgive the motion picture academy in 1941 for withholding the coveted Oscar from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, a maverick piece of cinema that has perennially placed atop the ubiquitous lists of greatest movies. And even in his mostly glowing review, the Times’ Crowther demurred that the movie “fails to achieve a clear dramatic definition” and “forceful impact.” He attributed the film’s weaknesses to the fact that the screenplay adhered too rigidly to its source.

The source is a novel of the same name by Anglo-Welsh author Richard Llewellyn. Though the book has not subsequently enjoyed inclusion in any recognized canons of great literature, it did at the time achieve status as the winner of the National Book Award in 1940. The movie, therefore, chose to follow the episodic narrative employed by Llewellyn, and it is this lack of a plot that might be off-putting to viewers of today.

The locale for the story is “the valley,” a coal-mining region in south Wales during the waning years of the Victorian era. The black slag from the mines, which covers the beauty of the once green landscape, serves as metaphor for the ever darkening lives of the valley’s inhabitants and the broken and displaced families caused by the changing economic conditions in the coal industry.

The novel contains much that is respectful of that tradition which G.K. Chesterton referred to as the “democracy of the dead.” When we learn that the protagonist Huw Morgan is a reader—“O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book,” he tells us, “firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise”—we find his list of authors brimming with English classics: King James Bible, Spencer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Bunyan, and Dickens. Huw balks at the opportunity to attend the university, however, in order to remain close to his family and follow his father and brothers into the mines. We may surmise, therefore, that his lyrical and poetic reflections were born of the wisdom gained from the community and family he was a part of, and especially from his father: “respect for chapel was the first thing my father taught me.”

The novel’s depiction of the valley reads like the Principle of Subsidiarity in action. The village has no police department, so many incidents that today would elicit calls to 911 are handled by the men themselves, albeit sometimes with a literal right cross to the jaw. The valley is also without a bank, so the Morgan’s keep their money—precious coins, not paper—in a box on the mantel. Thanks to the fact that Huw’s mother and the other local women were good savers in better days, the valley’s families have the means to help each other during hard times without a notion of notifying the central governing authority for disaster relief.

On the macro political level, the village was just fine with London keeping its distance. This preference for localism did not, however, translate into contempt of all things English. Huw not only voraciously devours the great British authors, but directly praises the language itself, “the rich taste of magnificent English” that “may come to the ears and go to the head, like the perfumes of the Magi, or like the best of beer, home brewed and long in the cask.” The villagers for their part respect and pray for the queen as their mother, and even will drink a beer to her from afar, as long as her officials stay out of their neighborhood: “to hell with the English law” Huw’s father Gwillym declares after forcefully settling a dispute with a fellow villager, “you have had a bit of Welsh law tonight.”

But alas, there were economic laws beyond the control of Gwillym Morgan and his companions. The price of coal was dropping even as the men were digging up ever-greater amounts. The resultant depressed wages and loss of jobs caused many of the men to abandon their local customs and traditions, a fact lamented by Huw: “It was greater pain to know that my brothers … and the brave ones of early days, had all been forgotten in a craziness of thought that made more of the notion of foreigners [e.g., Marx] than the principles of our fathers.”

Further, the depressed economic situation altered the very look of the valley. As displaced workers from the neighboring village poured in after the closing there of the ironworks, a veritable Levittown of identical new homes was put up quickly with “not a brick of difference and jammed tight together.” Familial unity was strained over disagreements between fathers and sons regarding the proper approach to the labor issues. Unfortunately, Gwillym Morgan’s passionate plea for calm to his sons and the other men was to no avail:
You are right in what you want, but you are wrong in your ways of getting it. Force is no good to you until you have tried reason. And reason wants patience. And if patience wants a tight belt, then a tight belt it should have. You cannot ask the help of God with hate in your hearts and without that help you will get nothing … reason and civilized dealing are your best weapons. And if your cause is just, and your consciences are clear, God is always with you. And no man will go far without Him.
One of Huw’s brothers dies in a mine explosion; four others were forced overseas to find gainful employment. Yet all this does not completely tarnish Huw’s memories of life in the valley. For example, he offers an ode to the craftsmanship of a simple pencil box, destroyed by ruffian fellow students when Huw started attending the national school over the next valley:
A hundred years before, a craftsman in wood had put love into his job for all men to see in that little pattern of grained woods on the lid and round the sides. There was no need for him to spend those hours, for the box was made, but that pattern was his kiss of love, and I could see his hands passing over its smoothness, feeling its weight, having joy from the look and feel of it, and slow to let it pass into the hands of a buyer… Solomon never felt for his storehouse as I felt for that little box … to have pens, and pencils, and the tools of writing all your own, to see them and feel them in your fingers ready to do anything you tell them, to have them in a little house fit for them as good friends of yours, such is sweet pleasure, indeed, and never ending. For you open gently and take what you want, and careful in closing again, and you look at it before you start your work, and all the time a happy fullness inside you that sometimes will make you put out your hand to touch it as though to bless, so good you feel with it. God bless the craftsmen who give their fellow men such feelings even out of pieces of wood.
Or there was Huw’s first visit to the local haberdashery:
To have a suit to your measure, with tape and chalk, eh, dear, there is a good feeling indeed … to take a bolt of cloth and work with such simple tools as chalk, needle and thread, scissors and hot iron, and bring from them a suit to fit every little bump and crevice of the body, without ugliness, is a royal mystery indeed, and ancient beyond the knowledge of man.
Then there was the task of instructing Huw about the generation of new life. This was delegated to the preacher Mr. Gruyffydd, who could teach something to “sophisticates” of the present day on the proper approach to this delicate topic. The instruction is wisely given as the two are simultaneously engaged in the physical labor of working on a mechanical engine in the garage. Using a Socratic approach, Mr. Gruyffydd carefully determines through a series of questions just the proper amount of knowledge to be imparted at the present time: “Now,” asks Gruyffydd, “would you put seed to earth in snow?”
No, or you would be clapped in the madhouse, quick. There is a time and a season for all things. And the time of sowing the seed of man is at the time of marriage, not before. Never mind how impatient the farmer is to have a field of growing corn; he must wait for the season to sow it.
Though such little gems of wisdom appear sporadically throughout the novel, this is not to deny that there are problematic opinions and ideas expressed here and there. One egregious example reveals Huw’s erroneous Christology. Elsewhere, the deacons at the local Presbyterian chapel publicly call out a woman with child for adultery, a tactic that gives one a fresh appreciation of the Irish monks during the Patristic Era for their role in promoting the wider practice of auricular confession into the sacramental life of the Church.

Thus, after reading the book you find yourself walking away not entirely satisfied. The feeling is not exactly dismissive, but rather a pensive one of truly wanting to like it more. To borrow some horse-racing lingo, there is grace in the book’s gait, and the author takes the reader on a nice pace around the backstretch, but she can’t quite cover the distance and pulls up short of the finish line. More succinctly, and with apologies to Aristotle, it is a case of the whole not quite being equal to the sum of its parts.

Yet one hesitates to say he is any the worse for having invested the time in the book. Like Huw’s memories, the reader may take from it what he wishes: “It is very strange to think back like this, although come to think of it, there is no fence or hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.” So Huw Morgan concludes with thoughts even the black slag from the coal mines cannot cover, memories of his loved ones, all deceased,
Yet not gone, for you are still a living truth inside my mind…shall we say that good Dr. Johnson is dead, when his dear friend Mr. Boswell brings him to thunder and thump before your very eyes? Is Socrates dead, then, when I hear the gold of his voice? Are my friends all dead, then, and their voices a glory in my ears? No, and I will stand to say no, and no, again … for if [they are], then I am dead… How green was my valley, then, and the valley of them that have gone.