Books: Modern Moll Flanders

HERSELF SURPRISED (275 pp.)—Joyce Cary—Harper ($3).

Joyce Gary is an Irish-born and English-educated novelist whose work deserves to be more widely read than it is. Unlike so many of his contemporaries who mount the novel as if it were a rostrum, Cary works in the major tradition of English novel writing. He tells a vivid story, creates characters as credible as if they were stepping on one’s toes, and uses the English language with beauty and wit. Why he is not therefore a favorite on this side of the Atlantic is something of a mystery.

Lady to Lockup. Of Cary’s novels, Herself Surprised, first issued in 1941, is the third to be published in the U.S. Each of these three shows him to advantage in a different vein. The Moonlight is a darkly limned, Hardyesque story of conflicting generations in modern England; The African Witch is an authentic description of life in an African town. Herself Surprised is written in what is probably Cary’s most congenial mode: the humorous picaresque in which a roguish heroine recalls, with tongue-in-cheek moralizing, the dubious deeds of her past.

The book purports to be the sobered recollections of Sara Monday, a kitchen maid who rises to country lady, only to sink at last to thievery and the lockup. “An ordinary country girl, neither pretty or plain” who takes a free & easy view of human foibles, including her own, she is obviously a 20th Century descendant of Moll Flanders. Like Moll, Sara discovers that when she lets her sentiment rule her shrewdness, she usually suffers.

As a maid in the Monday family’s home, Sara pitied the “hampered and hagged” master of the house, Matt Monday, who though in his 40s wasstill “like a child, and kept from his rights as a man” by “his good mamma and his older sister.” When the timid Matt proposed, Sara accepted him. Then, aflame with youth and cocky in her new social position, she began to notice other men.

“False & Unfriendly.” When the Mondays’ house was invaded by Gulley Jimson, a ne’er-do-well painter, Sara’s troubles came to a head. A family friend, whose conclusions were “false, and what was worse, unfriendly,” tattled to Matt, and domestic peace was destroyed. Matt wasted away and Sara ran off with Gulley. Sara was happy, for Gulley “was the most of a man I ever knew.” And even after he ran off with another woman and destitute Sara became a cook for eccentric old Mr. Wilcher, she was willing to steal for Gulley when he turned up one day begging for money.

Three years after Herself Surprised appeared in England, Cary published a sequel, The Horse’s Mouth. The story of Gulley and Sara in their old age, it is a wonderfully comic and roisterous novel, tougher and more brilliant than Herself Surprised. Taken together, the two novels form one of the most impressive pieces of English writing in the past decade.