Books: Blithe Spirit

MISTER JOHNSON (261 pp.)—Joyce Cary—Harper ($3).

Johnson’s big trouble was that so many of the good things in life are not really free. Bamu, for example. She was a real Nigerian beauty, “with a skin as pale and glistening as milk chocolate, high, firm breasts, round, strong arms.” Johnson, “black as a stove,” all floppy arms and legs, and with a body “as narrow as a skinned rabbit’s,” tried to soften up Bamu with sweet talk: “What pretty breasts—God bless you with them.” But Bamu could not be honeyed, she had to be bought. After a full day of hysterical bargaining, Johnson got her on the installment plan. By the time Bamu’s family was through with him, they had his umbrella, his wrist watch, all his clothes except a loincloth, and a promise of £16.

English Novelist Joyce Cary has made a solid, belated U.S. reputation with some of the finest comic novels (e.g., The Horse’s Mouth, Herself Surprised) in several decades. All of them have English settings. But Gary’s own favorite among his books is Mister Johnson, a novel about an imaginative, teen-age native clerk in Nigeria who rollicks through life as if it were improvised African free verse.

Gin on the Cuff. Cary knows what he is writing about. During World War I he fought through the Cameroons campaign as an officer in a Nigerian regiment, later became magistrate of a district deep in the bush. Of the four novels that have come out of his African experience, Mister Johnson is the best, at once humorous and sympathetic, fresh and exuberant as Negro gossip.

Johnson just can’t help acting like a big shot. What he imagines, he believes, and his imagination works overtime. His parties are the biggest in the town of Fada, with plenty of gin and beer bought on the cuff, and clearly audible at two miles. He boasts about his imagined friendship with the British District Officer, and is delighted to hear that that dignitary’s wife is coming from England to join him. Johnson has no idea what the woman looks like, but he has no trouble, on that account, describing her to Bamu: “Her cheeks are as white as your teeth and her breasts are as big as pumpkins . . . The King himself wanted to marry her.”

Bamu, a practical type, replied, “My brother Aliu has a bad toe.” Bamu is contemptuous of her husband’s pretensions, and apt to trot back to Mama’s hut when he runs out of money. But Johnson loves her dearly. Even the thought of her makes him break into song:

She fat like de corn, she smell like de new grass She dance like de tree, she shake like de new leaves

With the gin working, he has another song:

What, who dare say Mister Johnson ‘fraid? Johnson say, what dat mean dat word ‘fraid? What dat mean ‘fraid? Is it good to eat?

Poor Johnson, he is engagingly blithe and brave, but just too big for his britches. He is not even a good clerk. Almost daily, his debts and love of swagger drive him to shaky deeds. He takes graft and kickbacks from payrolls, sells secret government information to the natives. When he is fired from his government job, he gets another in the town store. He is soon fired again, and when he sneaks back to dip into the till, his ex-boss traps him. In the scuffle, the storekeeper is killed and Johnson is sentenced to hang. Bamu deserts him, of course. But Johnson’s last request is granted. Rather than hang, he asks the District Officer to shoot him.

Portrait Plus. Novelist Cary makes the sudden tragic ending seem inevitable. Johnson, he seems to say, is too original and impulsive a poet of life to endure life’s limitations, and Cary leads poor Johnson to his doom with sympathy that never threatens to become maudlin.

But Mister Johnson is considerably more than the portrait of a picaresque primitive. In a short novel, Cary has managed to convey the squalor of African village existence, the frustrations of English officials and the enormous volatility and friendliness of the Nigerian native. Novelist Cary, unlike most of his fellow practitioners, always seems to write as if he enjoyed it. In Mister Johnson his pleasure edges every sentence.