Books: Cheerful Protestant

(See Cover)

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.