(Marie, a well-meaning but naive American anthropologist, ...)
Marie, a well-meaning but naive American anthropologist, believes she has found Heaven in the forests of Nigeria; but her belief is challenged as white prospectors stake claims within the territory of the Birri tribespeople, who become increasingly enraged by the colonists' betrayal.
(Herself Surprised, the first volume of Joyce Cary's remar...)
Herself Surprised, the first volume of Joyce Cary's remarkable First Trilogy, introduces Sara Monday, a woman at once dissolute and devout, passionate and sly.
(To Be a Pilgrim is a study in contradictions, the confess...)
To Be a Pilgrim is a study in contradictions, the confession of a political radical turned reactionary, of a religious man and sometime sexual offender, of a miserly landowner who is also a passionate defender of the beauties of an English countryside threatened by economic development.
(The richest comic novel of the last ten years. Horse's Mo...)
The richest comic novel of the last ten years. Horse's Mouth, famously filmed with Alec Guinness in the central role, is a portrait of an artistic temperament.
(Despite her love for Jim Latter, a young adventurer, Nina...)
Despite her love for Jim Latter, a young adventurer, Nina Woodville feels obliged to remain the wife of Chester Nimmo, an ambitious British politician.
Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary is primarily known as a novelist whose varied works—which include comic novels, historical novels, and family sagas—portray complex and memorable characters embodying his personal philosophy. Most notably in the six volumes of his two trilogies, Cary’s vividly realized protagonists illustrate his conviction that life, though profoundly unfair and arbitrary, can be a magnificent adventure for resourceful individuals.
Background
Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was born in Londonderry, United Kingdom on December 7, 1888. He was the son of Arthur Pitt Chambers Cary, a consulting engineer, and Charlotte Louisa (Joyce) Cary, and was raised in England. A shy and sickly child who suffered from pleurisy, asthma, rheumatism, and near blindness in one eye, he showed a precocious talent for writing and drawing.
Education
After completing secondary school, Cary pursued his artistic studies at the Board of Manufacturers School of Art (later renamed the Edinburgh College of Art) from 1907 to 1909. However, he abandoned his studies after two years, convinced that he did not have the talent to be a successful artist. Redirecting his energies to writing, Cary sought financial support from his father by dedicating to him a collection of poetry, Cary’s first published work, and by studying to become a lawyer, which was Arthur Cary’s choice of a career for his son.
Cary was an undistinguished law student at Trinity College, Oxford from 1909, and an indifferent writer of poetry. He graduated in 1912 with the lowest possible degree.
Cary served with the British Red Cross during the Balkan War against Turkey, both because he supported the cause and because he was seeking experience for a novel. In 1913 Cary entered the Nigerian Service and for the next seven years served as an assistant district officer, a post that encompassed the duties of colonial administrator, tax collector, judge, census taker and road builder, as well as a troop leader in the West Africa Frontier Force during World War I.
Cary wrote prolifically during his years in Nigeria, but destroyed most of his attempted novels as failures. He found success, however, with his short stories, which were accepted by the lucrative Saturday Evening Post. Assured of a profitable outlet for his fiction, Cary retired from colonial service in 1920 and resolved to write short stories for income and novels to satisfy his ambitions as a literary artist; however, his simple formula for commercial stories—“a little sentiment, a little incident, and a surprise”—became complicated by an increasing stylistic and thematic sophistication. By 1921 the Post found his stories too literary and he was able to publish very little of his work until 1932, when his first novel, Aissa Saved, appeared. During these years, Cary supported himself in a variety of ways and read widely, seeking a comprehensive vision of life that would lend unity to his fiction.
Aissa Saved was the first of four novels set in Africa that dramatize the clash of European and African cultures during the British colonization, economic exploitation, and modernization of that continent. The third volume of the first trilogy, The Horse’s Mouth, was a bestseller that finally brought Cary financial security. Although they had limited commercial success, the fourth of these novels, Mister Johnson, did gain critical recognition for its powerful portrayal of Africans corrupted by European values.
Cary’s early African novels—Amo Saved, An American Visitor, The African Witch and Mister Johnson— are based on his experiences in the colonial service and depict cultural and individual conflicts arising from the imposition of colonial rule on Africa. Emphasizing the dilemmas of Africans caught between two cultures, these works display a number of traits that remained typical of Cary’s fiction: narrative inventiveness, copious action, and an objective portrayal of a wide variety of characters. Critics complained that the first three of these early works are so densely packed with characters that none emerges with great force or clarity.
By contrast, Mister Johnson, which is the most highly regarded of the African novels, focuses on a single and highly memorable character. Cary thereby avoided the diffuseness and confusion of his earlier books; furthermore, by writing in the present tense he imparted a sense of immediacy that critics have compared to the stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.
In Cary’s own estimation, the novels of the first trilogy “were not sufficiently interlocked to give the richness and depth of actuality that I had hoped for”. The novels of this trilogy are loosely connected by the subjects of art, Protestantism in English history, and the struggle between freedom and authority.
The three novels of Cary’s second trilogy—Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, and Not Honour More— are closely interrelated by the immersion of all the principal characters in the complex world of politics. Unlike the expansive and life-affirming characters of the first trilogy, those of the second are desperate, tense, and uncertain, and the strong individualism of the protagonists isolates them rather than bring them into contact with others. Because Cary does not promote one point of view over another, the contradictions in the narratives remain unresolved, and it is impossible for the reader to ascertain the credibility of each narrator.
Following the completion of his second trilogy in 1955, Cary learned that he suffered from a form of fatal paralysis. During his last years, he continued to produce a variety of works, the most important of which was Art and Reality, a respected collection of essays examining the creative process. Then Cary issued A House of Children. Based on Cary’s childhood, this work was the first in which Cary utilized first-person narrative, a form he thereafter used in all of his major fiction and developed to great acclaim in the novels comprising his two trilogies.
Although Cary suffered some critical neglect for several years after his death, extensive critical studies in the late 1950s and the 1960s by Robert Bloom, M. M. Mahood, Malcolm Foster, and Jack Wolkenfeld sought to establish Cary’s place in twentieth-century British letters. Such retrospective appraisals have examined Cary’s treatment of philosophy, politics, society, religion, and above all his portrayal of the character. Acknowledged to have dealt with such crucial themes as human relationships, freedom of choice, and personal values, Cary is particularly esteemed for his exploration of these themes, not abstractly, but through the medium of masterfully depicted characters. Many of Cary’s novels explore the conflict between the forces of creation and those of established order.
Personality
Cary is known for his humor and skill as a storyteller, but he claimed that his message was religious and urgently needed in our time.
Connections
Cary was married to Gertrude Margaret Ogilvie in 1916 till her death in 1949. The marriage produced four children - Arthur Lucius Michael, Peter Joyce, George Anthony and Tristram Ogilvie.
Joyce Cary: Liberal Principles
With the aid of a vast body of Cary's manuscript drafts, notebooks and letters, this book fully charts the development of Cary's fiction, and establishes the consistency and importance of his liberal principles in shaping that fiction.
1981
Joyce Cary: The Writer and His Theme
The study of an important author, widely regarded at the time of his death in 1957 as one of the major novelists of this century.