Curtain Going Up

GEORGE (437 pp.)--Emlyn Williams--Random House ($5.95).

Autobiography is a form of exhibitionism that may be made socially acceptable by the exhibitor's eminence or celebrityhood, his talent for self-exploration or the story he has to tell. Good writing is a bonus.

On all counts, George gets high marks. Emlyn Williams' eminence is unquestioned; as a playwright, his hits have included The Corn Is Green and Night Must Fall, as an actor, he has scored international hits with his one-man performances of Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas (and he will soon take over from Paul Scofield the Broadway role of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons). This "early autobiography," as he ambivalently calls it, carries him no farther than age 21. But that handful of years makes a moving story--the precarious flowering of a brilliant talent in a pastoral slum and the transplanting that almost killed it. And, as befits a Welshman, Williams' writing is like singing.

Smuts & Sophistication. "The world was waiting. Waiting for me, to whisper my incantation 'I am George Emlyn Williams and . . .' I was lying with my head on my fist on morning grass, dry of dew and warm with the first heat of the year. Spring smells and earth feelings crept into my seven-year-old body; nine-tenths innocent, one-tenth conscient. it responded. I rolled one cheek up till it closed an eye, and squinted down at the sunlit village."

The village was Glanrafon, in Flintshire, the smallest county in Wales, where lived George Emlyn's parents, Richard and Mary. He was a stoker when they married, she a lady's maid in Liverpool. He failed his way through a variety of tiny enterprises, including--for nine of Emlyn's formative years--the operation of a country pub. Dad was at home on either side of a bar, beery, convivial and feckless. Mam was "conventional to the point of defeatism, shy of strangers and painfully conscious of the immorality of spending one penny unless there was a halfpenny behind it." Neither of them was more than barely literate. Welsh was their language; Emlyn hardly heard an English word until he was six.

He was not known as Emlyn then, but George. When he was ten, his parents made an expedition to the town of Shotton, where he saw his first movie. The town itself was almost as much of an astonishment as the "livin' pictiars." "Not only were the bicycles going quicker and ringing sharper bells, but the people with the preoccupied faces were walking brisker, the smoke from the strange houses blew faster, and even the town clouds, brown at the edges from smuts and sophistication, raced swifter over a man-made sky."

Consonants Left Gasping. George's real awakening began half a year later, when he won a scholarship to Holywell County School. There he met Miss Sarah Grace Cooke, 33, the original of Miss Moffat in The Corn Is Green, and an inspired teacher who discerned the sharp and hungry intelligence in the small, whey-faced boy with dilapidated shoes.

The first time he saw Miss Cooke, George was awestruck. "The few English people I had encountered said what they wished to say with limp decorum, moving the lips as if they were eggshells; this one ... hit every vowel fair and square between the eyes like a boxer smacking a punch ball, every consonant was wrestled with and left gasping. I realized then, before I knew life, that here was a woman larger than it." Eventually, she arranged for him to try for a scholarship to Oxford. When he won it, the school celebrated with a half holiday.

The Crackup. At Oxford the theater snared him once and for all. For one "bewitched and irrevocable week" he was prompter at a Dramatic Society production of Hamlet ("I was at a play, and in it. Fortinbras would stand two feet from me; I could see the pulse beat in his neck, smell the musty scent of the costume, the tang of the spirit gum").

Oxford, too, brought near disaster--a complete breakdown triggered by a homosexual attachment to another boy. Emlyn (he had dropped the George for theatrical purposes) was taken back home to his family and Miss Cooke ("At 20, my boy," she said, "such an occurrence is forgiven by society; if you were 25, it would be disallowed"). The book "closes with Emlyn's recovery, the successful performance of his first play at Oxford, and his first real job--a six-line walk-on in a play about Samuel Pepys.

On April 18, 1927, as he stood in the wings waiting for the curtain to rise on his new life, this first installment of his autobiography ends. The next, if there is one, will be harder to make as good; the warm Welsh landscapes and characters he describes so lovingly and well will have to give way to people and places that have been handled by experts, and often. But on his performance in Act I. Williams should be sure of a big audience for Act II.

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