Derry-born Joyce Cary does not often feature in the roll call of 20th-century Irish literary luminaries. His family were major landowners on the Inishowen peninsula, but by the time Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was born in the house of his maternal grandparents in 1888, most of the lands had been sold off in the great unravelling of the Land Acts. The family’s move to London in 1900 meant that Cary’s education and most of his adult life would be spent in England.
Two of his novels were set in Ireland, Castle Corner (1938) and A House of Children (1941), the latter drawing on childhood memories of holidays with his grandparents on his native island. His posthumous reputation rests mainly on a trilogy of novels, Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942) and the Horse’s Mouth (1944), now republished in one volume by Everyman’s Library.
Though ostensibly devoted to the theme of art, the trilogy’s primary purpose appears to be an investigation of Englishness and the twists and turns of English identity in the first half of the 20th century. Tom Wilcher, a landowner and central character in the trilogy, meditates on his inheritance, ‘[f]or the Wilchers are as deep English as Bunyan himself. A Protestant people with revolution in their bones.’
What all of that might mean in the hurly-burly of the modern age is carefully tracked over the course of the three novels as the Big Houses dissolve into the patterned mobility of suburbia and the pieties of another age run aground on the shores of scepticism.
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Cary, in a sense, is part of that tradition of Irish writers—Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Elizabeth Bowen—who set about explaining the English to the English, the remove of birth providing the necessary critical condition for observation. A political Liberal and anti-imperialist (and friend of George Orwell), Cary shows himself in these novels to be particularly sensitive to the blighting of women’s lives by the twin evils of prejudice and powerlessness.
The young, working-class woman, Sara Munday, who narrates Herself Surprised, is constantly having to avoid the unwanted attentions of men who presume on their dominion over her. The tragic tension of the first novel in the trilogy comes from her spirited efforts to lead a life by her own lights and the manoeuvrings of male figures who ultimately prove to be her undoing.
If Sara Munday gives voice to one fraught end of the English class system, Tom Wilcher, in the subsequent novel, To Be a Pilgrim, articulates the growing uncertainties of privilege and possession through the changing fortunes of Tolbrook House. Wilcher’s reluctant reckoning with a complicated past and his shrewd reckoning of a society in flux are a welcome relief from the current recruitment of the stately home motif for indulgence in jubilant flunkeydom, where everyone knows their proper place in the Downton order of things.
Straddling the different social classes and novels is the figure of Gulley Jimson, an artist and general ne’er-do-well, who is particularly prominent in the last novel of the trilogy, A Horse’s Mouth. Cary had studied art in Edinburgh and Paris from 1907 to 1909 and is clearly exercised in the trilogy by the process of how art comes to be and how it comes to be judged.
One of the open questions in the novels is the value of Jimson’s art, and as a result the reader is left wondering whether Jimson is an unscrupulous fraudster or a misunderstood genius. Even Jimson himself, in an attempt to dampen the enthusiasm of an overzealous follower, pays a backhanded compliment to the modern movement in art of which he is a major exponent: ‘All art is bad, but modern art is the worst. Just like the influenza. The newer it is, the more dangerous.’
Though Cary is now—outside the academy—something of a forgotten figure, he was in his time greatly admired by the likes of John Betjeman, Doris Lessing, John Updike, Elizabeth Bowen and Bernard Levin. Part of the difficulty for the contemporary reader is that the adoption of voices from social classes other than his own can at times feel forced, an uneasy form of narrative ventriloquism. The language frequently comes across as too knowing as it chases an artful simplicity that no longer persuades: ‘the Longwater like frosted glass, and the fields on the other side as bright as jellies, strawberry on the new plough, and gooseberry on the swedes and lemon on the barley.’
In the mid-1900s Cary’s contemporaries, such as Bowen, already felt he was like a writer from a much earlier period. It is hard, when reading these novels, to imagine him as writing in the same century as Lawrence, Hemingway and Woolf. Cary’s trilogy will stand as a document of the society that produced it, but the writerly sensibility that informed it may not be so lucky with posterity.
Michael Cronin is Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
