Books: Cheerful Protestant

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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.