George Emlyn Williams

To come across a beautifully written bit of prose in a day when plenty of quick trash rolls off the presses, is one of the greatest pleasures in the literary field. Reading it several times will help to keep it in your mind and I am talking about something here worth keeping there, for I discovered it years ago and it still charms me. That is, the first forty-three lines of Emlyn Williams’s George, An Early Autobiography.

This short passage gives us the date of the author’s birth, but while we are traveling that distance, we run into everyday life in a rural British setting with chores, animal life, vegetative life, the history of England, utter stillness, with George being the only one to know the sun will not set that night and he will never grow up.

But the silence stops and everything springs to life again. The sun does set and by the next morning the Titanic has sunk. His thought was that if the world had ended yesterday, they would not have sunk. He thought about it for days. Finally in line forty-three he tells us he was born November 26, 1905.

Williams’s style in this first page plus a few lines more, is poetic, so much so that I once typed it up, word for word, to look like a poem. Everyone who read it thought it was a poem. The Welsh author was primarily a playwright but sometimes an actor in his own plays, who died in 1987, but this autobiography proves he could have branched out much farther than the stage. Every would-be writer would do well to read these forty-three lines.