Books: No Snuffling

THE HORSE’S MOUTH (311 pp.)—Joyce Cory—Harper ($3).

The world may be a grim place, but British Novelist Joyce Gary is not the man to learn it from. Most of his favorite characters are as much in need of reformation and social uplift, if not outright restraint behind bars, as the characters of William Hogarth. Nonetheless, give or take the cautionary ends they usually come to, they enjoy themselves tremendously. Gary’s distinction is that, almost alone among contemporary authors, he works in the tradition of Henry Fielding and the old English novel. With The Horse’s Mouth, which completes a trilogy, more U.S readers are due to discover the unexpectedness of Gary’s mutton pie in an age of literary thin men.

Author Gary has given them warning. In Herself Surprised (TIME, Sept. 20, 1948), the first novel of his trilogy, he not only created a fresh and startling heroine in the person of lusty, busty Sara Monday but also planned her amoral meanderings so dexterously that no one could ever guess what quirk or crazy character would show up just around the next corner. In Novel No. 2, To Be a Pilgrim (TIME, April 18), Sara played second fiddle to her sugar daddy, wealthy old Tom Wilcher, who not only gave his version of life with Sara but carried their joint stories a stage farther into the unexpected.

In The Horse’s Mouth it is the turn of Artist Gulley Jimson, one of man-eating Sara’s three ex-husbands, to take the story on its final rounds. Gulley comes prancing out of jail into the middle of the picture on Page One and except for a brief retirement (a six-month stretch for stealing a wealthy patron’s diamond-studded snuffboxes) he holds the center of the stage to the very end.

The Will to Live. Author Gary’s theme is simple. He sees Gulley Jimson as he saw fertile Sara Monday—as the epitome of the will to live and to create at all costs. Starvation, jail and beatings-up mean only one thing to dedicated Artist-Genius Gulley—they tend to interrupt his work. And because his work in middle age must proceed faster than ever, Gulley will stop at nothing to get himself food, money and time.

From his filthy headquarters on the Thames waterfront, a shed where he is vainly struggling with a mural of The Fall, Gulley sallies forth to bleed the rich like an impecunious vampire (“Artists,” he says, “owe a debt to millionaires that can never be repaid, except in cash”). His only lucky break comes when he invades the swank apartment of a holidaying rich man and, after jimmying the food closets and the wine cellar and pawning the silver service, dreamily proceeds to daub The Raising of Lazarus on the wall over the antique sideboard. But in two ticks Gulley himself is invaded by another, equally ruthless genius—a ferocious sculptor who cheerfully hoists a vast block of rock through the studio window and sets to work with a chisel.

“I Should Laugh.” The resulting spectacle of two geniuses at work—demonstrating their “themes” by carving models out of their absent host’s best cheese, and creating their masterpieces in a cloud of stone-chip shrapnel, agonized curses and splinters off the priceless furniture—shows Author Gary at his farcical, Marx Brothers best (“Really, I do so wish we could have known about this sooner,” remarks the rich man’s well-bred lady when they return and confront the wreckage). So do the wisecracks, witticisms and metaphors that pour from Gulley’s horsy mouth in an endless stream: “It was as dark as the inside of a Cabinet minister”; “You’re as God made you, more or less, with some interference from Daddy”; “[A bus is] as good as a Rolls. Better; higher, and not the same responsibility not to run over the poor.”

Gulley kicks the bucket, as a result of a fall from some scaffolding, just in time to avert a less natural fall from another sort of scaffold: he has foolishly interrupted his work to murder poor old Sara Monday. His last words are unrepining: “Get rid of that sense of justice, Nosy, or you’ll feel sorry for yourself, and then you’ll soon be dead—blind and deaf and rotten. Get a job, get that grocery, get a wife and some kids, and spit on that dirty old dog, the world … Go love without the help of anything on earth … I should laugh all round my neck at this minute if my shirt wasn’t a bit on the tight side.” Above all, Author Gary’s characters seem to say, let’s not snuffle.