Books: Cheerful Protestant

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PRISONER OF GRACE (301 pp.)—Joyce Cary—Harper ($3).

Dickens is dead—and who cares? Dickens was an old-fashioned sentimentalist who roared with laughter at his own comic caricatures and wept buckets over his pathetic children and heroines whiter (and frailer) than the driven snow. But Dickens had gusto. So did Mark Twain; so did Kipling; so did H. G. Wells.

Gusto is not a common characteristic of present-day writers. Their most notable common trait is resignation—a resignation that sometimes dresses itself up in a splendid refusal to surrender, a defiant rejection of the unconditional terms that life demands. Hemingway, Faulkner, Graham Greene, J. P. Marquand, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh—they all record, in their various manners, the hopeless valor, the quiet desperation of a rearguard action, a doomed though indomitable next-to-last stand.

Among this stoic crew, there is one novelist who stands out—or rather, leaps like a joyful trout, or a hungry protestant. His name is Joyce Cary, and he has something very different to say. What an extraordinary thing, he cries, life is! What a piece of work is man! It has not been said with such exuberance, or noted with such a roving, unblinking and delighted eye, since Dickens did it. (For a sample, see his short story on the next page, here published for the first time.)

Nobody has yet successfully defined a novel. The best anyone can do is point to a good one, and say, “This is it.” A good many people these days are thus remarking the novels of Joyce Cary. For his books are haunted houses, inhabited by very lively ghosts. To say that a novelist “creates” characters is a metaphorical way of saying that he contrives portraits of people that live, move & have their being convincingly, and stay alive in the memory after their book is shut. It is not an easy trick, especially when it has to be repeated. In general, modern novelists are notable for a feebleness, sinking sometimes almost to impotence, in this kind of creative invention. Even Hemingway has created only a type, the Hemingway hero (his women, also a type, hardly vary from pin-up girl to succuba).

Some of Dickens’ people—Sam Weller, Sairey Gamp, Bill Sikes, Barkis, Mrs. Gummidge, for a few—though they have been in a century’s deep freeze, are still succulent with life. Though literary immortality is as chancy as other sorts, it looks as though Joyce Cary has already added his quota to fiction’s Valhalla: Gulley Jimson, Sara Monday. Mister Johnson, Tom Wilcher. Last week he added two more: Chester Nimmo and Nina.

The Chameleon. Britain’s best contemporary critic, V. S. Pritchett, who likes more delicately flavored cups of tea than the ones Joyce Cary pours, nevertheless admits Gary’s sturdy authenticity. Pritchett calls him “the chameleon among contemporary novelists. Put him down in any environment or any class, rich, middling or poor, English, Irish or foreign, and he changes color and becomes whatever his subject is, from an English cook to an African delinquent, from a ten-year-old Irish hoyden to an English army wife or an evangelical lawyer. The assimilation is quick, delectable, sometimes profound. Many novelists have a wide range of characters, but it is often merely a range of conscientious guesses; Mr.Cary goes further and becomes the person.”

The person he becomes in his latest book, Prisoner of Grace, is a woman, Nina. A young orphan girl in a declining family in England of the 1890s, she is in love all her life with her cousin and childhood friend Jim Latter. When she is still in her teens, not yet mistress of her mind or her emotions, he gets her pregnant. To prevent scandal, her strong-minded guardian, Aunt Latter, marries her off to Chester Nimmo, a bright but poor local chap. Chester, twice Nina’s age, is aware of her condition but considers the marriage a bargain. It means a tie-up with a family still socially important, and Nina’s small fortune is a windfall. Chester is a Protestant evangelist, almost a mystic, and also burning with radical political ambitions.

Nina decides to make the best of it and be a good wife to Chester. As she watches him fight and connive his way to political power, she is disgusted, fascinated, finally enlisted. But she is still helplessly in love with Jim. Whenever that selfish, arrogant, incoherent gentleman reappears, he has only to crook his finger or whistle.

She bears Jim a second child—and Chester has little doubt who the father is. Nevertheless, Nina stays with Chester. He makes her feel that his religious faith and political destiny give him the greater claims on her loyalty. He reaches Parliament, enters the cabinet, finally becomes Lord Nimmo. Nina, through the years, is the target of his suspicions (well founded), the constant victim of his spite. But even when she hates him, which is not often, Chester’s needy love for her keeps her in his debt, and makes it impossible for her to leave him. When Chester finally attains the top of the ladder, and she and Jim are middleaged, she gets a divorce and marries Jim at last. But now the shoe is on the other foot: old Nimmo, under the pretext of getting Nina’s help with his memoirs, lays siege to her and carries the fort again & again. Even with Jim in a simmer of jealousy, she can’t turn Chester away. At novel’s end all three are living precariously together.

In the Round. Nina’s conduct is outrageous; there is no other word for it. So is Chester Nimmo’s, so is Jim’s. There is hardly a character in the book, in fact, whose actions do not leave a good deal to be desired. And yet, though every one of them arouses the reader’s occasional exasperation, each one is so believable, so deplorably human, that they also levy the kind of irritated tolerance that points in the direction of suspended judgment, if not of compassion and understanding. Knowing them as old friends are known, attired in all their mitigating handicaps and crotchets, seeing them thus in the round, the reader can neither dismiss them as frivolously immoral nor condemn them as incurable sinners. Incurable they obviously are—incurably human; but not damnable by any human verdict. That is the triumph of Joyce Gary’s method.

His people are recognizably, undeniably a part of life as it is, not as it should be.

And life (Gary says through his characters) is tremendous: a most complicated, mysterious, messy, marvelous business—which is nevertheless indescribably beautiful, funny, pathetic and of indestructible wonder. It is full of joy (a word he often uses and must often feel, from eyes to fingertips): “To sail on a fine day . . . even now seems to me a special bliss. There is no sound but the popple of water against the bow and a deeper gurgle under the bilge; the boat slides forward with a motion which is not like any other . . . You feel all the time the lovely touch of the water, bearing you up with its enormous mild strength.”

He can reduce a painter’s eye to simple words, as in this night scene on the Thames embankment in London: “And we would lean together over the wall and look at the river with its great snakes of lemon yellow light wriggling slowly under the lamps on the bridge (and snapping off their tails every moment and then growing new ones) . . .” Or a woman’s soliloquy: “A pretty woman knows she’s pretty, but she still goes to her glass sometimes only to look at herself, and each time she discovers for the first time how remarkably pretty she is.”

Spin the Lady. Not many months ago, in a Manhattan restaurant whence all but two customers had departed, one of the two, a middle-aged man, left his lady companion to go to the phone. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks and cocked an ear: the Muzak had begun a waltz. He danced smilingly back to his table and bowed low to the middle-aged lady who sat there. In & out among the tables 63-year-old Joyce Gary spun his startled partner. What a pity, they agreed as they finished the dance, that the place was deserted. Only the unastonished waiters had witnessed their fine performance.

None of Joyce Gary’s friends, least of all his four grown-up sons, would have been surprised at this waltzing fit. To seize the moment and make the most of it comes naturally to him, as it naturally does to his favorite characters. If waiters must be the only witnesses, he is used to that too. His first five books, among them Mister Johnson, the best novel ever written about Africa, averaged sales of less than 4,000 copies. Not until five novels later, with The Horse’s Mouth, did the public begin to back up the critics who were saying that Gary was one of the best novelists going.

In the U.S. he got off to an even slower start. Mister Johnson was, incredibly enough, turned down by eleven publishers, The Horse’s Mouth by 15. But The Horse’s Mouth was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, sold 182,000 copies and blew away the notion that Gary was “too big a mouthful for the average reader.”

The novels of Joyce Gary are too big a mouthful only for people who get their sustenance at cocktail parties or soda fountains. He is no darling of the intellectuals. He owes no debt to Freud, is not held in escrow by any church, cultivates no fashionable patch of perversion or despair. Though he himself regards his masters as Hardy, Conrad, James and the great Russians, the best guess at his literary ancestry might be Defoe-Fielding-Dickens. But the likeness to them lies mainly in a common vitality, an unfailing gusto for life’s beer and beef.

Irish Princeling. Arthur Joyce Lunel Gary has led a gusty life of his own. He was born (Dec. 7, 1888) in Londonderry, Ireland, into an Anglo-Irish family that had been lords of the manor in Ireland since 1603. The Irish rent strikes of the 1880s almost ruined the Carys. Joyce’s father actually had to go to work as a consulting engineer, in London.

But the Carys were broke only by old Gary standards. When little Joyce came from his father’s small London house to visit his Irish relatives he “was treated like a little prince.” A flag went up, a gun was fired as he entered the house; the whole village made a loyal fuss. His mother died when he was eight and he spent more & more time in Ireland, shuttling from house to house and living in a tumble of relatives.

His early schooling (Tunbridge Wells, Clifton) battered him about but left him tough. Small and ailing (a bad right eye, rheumatism, fainting spells), he was a failure at sports. He hated boxing, “but one was rather expected to do it.” Still, “the great thing was to have lots of blood, and I was a good bleeder.” Apparently he took religion in the same sporting spirit. He had been brought up Church of England, but while preparing for his confirmation at Clifton, “I couldn’t swallow the miracles and my science lessons at once. So I lost all my faith.”

At 16, Gary had an independent income, £300 a year, in a time when a good suit cost only £5; and “none of the family thought I should have a profession.” When a painter admired some watercolors Joyce had done on a vacation in France, “I thought, this is a damn good show. I was fed up with school and thought that the life of an artist would be a good life.” Off he went to Edinburgh to study art. He “can still draw a section through almost any part of a body,” but after three years of Edinburgh and Paris he “got sick of drawing. I couldn’t express myself.” At 20 he went to Oxford to get a gentleman’s education.

By all accounts, including his own, Gary was “extremely idle” at Oxford’s Trinity College. He barely got his degree. While others studied, Gary talked, bought first editions and wondered if his income would stay steady. His college friend John Middleton Murry (later a literary critic and the husband of Katherine Mansfield) “never saw him do a spot of work.” Gary’s pals (most of whom did all right in later life) were a hard-drinking lot. Says Murry: “I mean you would see them sozzled three times a week. Joyce drank about like the rest of us. But he was the chap that would see you home.” On one such late evening, just outside the college, Gary was sure he had suddenly gone lame. His friends, leaning out the window, roaring with laughter, shouted: “You’ve got one foot in the gutter, you fool!”

For Fun & Valor. In 1912, a few months after Gary finished Oxford, the first Balkan war broke out in Montenegro. Gary felt he had to get into it. “I didn’t think there were going to be any more wars and I didn’t want to miss it. And of course I did have some idea about this sort of freedom stuff.” Gary went to the front with a Red Cross unit. He was also the cook. Sometimes a room 40 by 20 was crowded with 200 dead & wounded. “We were using the dead for mattresses, we had to, and the blood was a foot deep on the floor.” Cooking the wretched rations of goat meat and lugging the wounded back from the lines were hard on the nerves. But the King of Montenegro himself decorated Gary for valor.

Back in London again and restless, he put in for the colonial service. He drew a job in Nigeria, and in April 1914 headed for Africa. But World War I came to Africa soon after Gary did; he left the colonial service for combat.

The Cameroons campaign was a weird hide & seek, where parties of armed men wandered around looking for the enemy, all of them concealed in elephant grass that towered over their heads. At the battle of Mora, Lieut. Gary was ordered to lead his 25 men in a charge up a hill. He got his objective, but lost half his men in the first minute and a half. It was there that he was wounded—”a beautiful shot” that pierced his helmet, chipped the mastoid bone and went through his right ear. Says Gary: “I remember thinking only ‘this is it, and it’s easy.’ ”

Later he was invalided home and in 1916 got married—to Gertrude Ogilvie, the sister of a college classmate. The Ogilvies weren’t too happy about it. Gary had recurrent attacks of malaria and was down to 112 pounds. Besides, says an Ogilvie, “we thought he was rather harum-scarum.” When he recovered his health he went back to Africa, to an area where wives were forbidden. For a year, acting District Officer Gary was the only white man in the rebellious district of Borgu. The natives were largely pagan, and Gary had no wire communication with his superiors. He headed a twelve-man native police force, was judge, prime minister, prosecutor and adviser. “I never had to hang a man,” he says, “and it’s lucky I didn’t. I would have had to hang him myself because I was also sheriff.”

“Do I Mean This?” In his bungalow beside the Niger River he read a lot, thought a lot, tried to write a Conrad-like novel. But his old wound was acting up, and he had asthma, insomnia and malaria. His wife and family begged him to leave the service. He still had his £300 a year, his wife had £600, and his father-in-law promised: “I’ll see you through.” Gary decided to settle down in Oxford and be a writer.

Novel writing wasn’t as easy as it looked, and besides, Gary was a hard man to please. Looking at his first book he asked himself, “Do I mean this?” He decided he didn’t. He started another called Cock Jarvis—”some of the best stuff I ever wrote. The man was alive, my God he was alive. But I couldn’t control it. I had immense invention, but I hadn’t decided what I meant.” Not until ten years later, after six abortive novels, did Gary decide what he meant. By that time even he was getting worried; he had four sons and he was going into debt. “I got rather nervy.” And his wife’s family “would come to her and say, ‘What is that husband of yours doing?’ ” One thing that kept Gary going was his wife’s reply: “This is my man. He knows what he wants to do and he’s damned well going to do it.”

When Gary wrote Aissa Saved (published in 1932), he thought he had done it. A too-weedy clearing in the same bush out of which he later hacked Mister Johnson, it was the story of an African girl bursting with savage life who tried her pagan best to be a Christian; the inevitable friction burnt her alive. In spite of its authentic glare and beat, the book sold badly and Gary “got no bean of royalty.” The next year, a second book about Africa, An American Visitor, fared even worse. His first break came in 1936 when The African Witch was made a Book Society choice and earned him about £700. In 1938 came Castle Corner, a long, slow-paced novel of Anglo-Irish life, which some critics praised warmly. But it sold less than 3,000 copies.

Next year he published Mister Johnson, probably his finest novel. Johnson is a young Negro, a poor but almost preposterously happy government clerk who lives each day (including his last one) as inventively as though it were the first day of creation. The critical reception was good, but the book sold just over 5,000 copies. Charley Is My Darling, a novel about juvenile delinquents in wartime England, did much better.

In 1941 Gary published Herself Surprised, the first book of a trilogy that should make his place in English literature secure. Each of the three novels, Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim and The Horse’s Mouth, is written in the first person; each, therefore, is written in a different style. The attempt sounds like a stunt or a forlorn hope; the extraordinary thing is that it was successful. Herself Surprised is Sara Monday, her book. Sara is Every woman (as much as or more than James Joyce’s Molly Bloom) but very much herself as well: a maddeningly complaisant, maddeningly wise, maddeningly female creature. The second volume is the record of Tom Wilcher, one of Sara’s employers and lovers, an uncomfortable, comfortably off lawyer with a lust for life and an itch for salvation. The last word, The Horse’s Mouth, is Gulley Jimson’s, a rascally painter, an immoral man of character. Jimson is the only one who has ever been a real match for Sara: at times, in his roaring picaresque progress downhill, he seems an even bigger figure. The really last word, however, is an echo of Sara—as Pritchett calls her, this “genial, boozing, humbugging and thieving old tart, lost in the raucous mythology of her memories and affections.”

At Work in the Attic. At 63, Gary is a thin, lively, garrulous man with a richly seamed face, a sharp, inquisitive nose and a thin cirrus of unruly grey hair. Since the death of his wife in 1949 he has been a lonely man who sometimes eats pork pie for breakfast, lunch & dinner in the kitchen of his Oxford house where (his sons off on their own) he now lives alone. With all his ailments, Gary is tough and wiry, and likes to take long walks every day. During a lengthy conversation he is as apt as not to chin himself on a door. As a talker, he is occasionally overwhelming. His mind is crowded with stored-up memories, like the attic of an old house; there is no telling what will turn up. Says Humorist A. P. Herbert: “He rather terrifies me. There is nothing he is not prepared to discuss. He even talks at breakfast.” Almost any day he may be seen in the park opposite his house churning along at a rapid pace, his lips moving as he tries out a new bit of dialogue. But England, and especially Oxford, is used to mad people.

Gary’s house is packed with books, furniture, works of art, musical instruments —the accumulated treasures of a full life. His tousled study on the top floor under the eaves is lined with bookcases and filing boxes. Clamp boards holding notes and exhortations to himself are braced against the wall, and specially built slots in his old-fashioned desk hold sections of whatever book he is working on, folders with scraps of dialogue and random ideas. He writes his books in bits & pieces, may drop one section to tackle another, and sometimes drops the whole thing to work on something else. It is a seemingly wasteful method (he always throws away thousands of words), but it is one that suits him. By the time he is ready to write, he has dossiers on each of his characters, the looks of the locale, studies of the historical background, even plans of houses. He has schemes for at least eight more novels.

The Best God Can Do. To hear him talk, each of those novels is an illustration of his cheerful philosophy—a belief whose statement has faint overtones of Jimmy Durante, faint undertones of the incorrigible schoolboy. The world, he says, “may not look so good, but it is the best God can do at the time, with conditions as they exist.” He also likens the world to an old sow, which would lie down lazily in the muck and never move, if it were not for the gadflies—the rebels, artists and other eccentrics—that buzz and bite in her somnolent ear.

He is the very antithesis of Graham Greene, the guilt-ridden Catholic who keeps pecking away at the problem of personal salvation. Prisoner of Grace (though Gary says it wasn’t) might have been written as an answer to Greene’s End of the Affair. Personal salvation, Gary would say, is too selfish a business to bother about: his heroine is more concerned with her two dependent men than with her own rescue. Moral law? Justice? As far as human beings should concern themselves, “the world consists entirely of exceptions.”

But Gary’s singular explanation of what he thinks he is doing is drowned and swept away in the torrent of what he actually does. From the pregnant chaos of his books something better and more beautiful emerges than a neat pseudo-world of ideas: he has “created” human’ beings, men, women & children, alive and kicking.