Books: Cheerful Protestant

• Share

(4 of 8)

In the U.S. he got off to an even slower start. Mister Johnson was, incredibly enough, turned down by eleven publishers, The Horse's Mouth by 15. But The Horse's Mouth was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, sold 182,000 copies and blew away the notion that Gary was "too big a mouthful for the average reader."

The novels of Joyce Gary are too big a mouthful only for people who get their sustenance at cocktail parties or soda fountains. He is no darling of the intellectuals. He owes no debt to Freud, is not held in escrow by any church, cultivates no fashionable patch of perversion or despair. Though he himself regards his masters as Hardy, Conrad, James and the great Russians, the best guess at his literary ancestry might be Defoe-Fielding-Dickens. But the likeness to them lies mainly in a common vitality, an unfailing gusto for life's beer and beef.

Irish Princeling. Arthur Joyce Lunel Gary has led a gusty life of his own. He was born (Dec. 7, 1888) in Londonderry, Ireland, into an Anglo-Irish family that had been lords of the manor in Ireland since 1603. The Irish rent strikes of the 1880s almost ruined the Carys. Joyce's father actually had to go to work as a consulting engineer, in London.

But the Carys were broke only by old Gary standards. When little Joyce came from his father's small London house to visit his Irish relatives he "was treated like a little prince." A flag went up, a gun was fired as he entered the house; the whole village made a loyal fuss. His mother died when he was eight and he spent more & more time in Ireland, shuttling from house to house and living in a tumble of relatives.

His early schooling (Tunbridge Wells, Clifton) battered him about but left him tough. Small and ailing (a bad right eye, rheumatism, fainting spells), he was a failure at sports. He hated boxing, "but one was rather expected to do it." Still, "the great thing was to have lots of blood, and I was a good bleeder." Apparently he took religion in the same sporting spirit. He had been brought up Church of England, but while preparing for his confirmation at Clifton, "I couldn't swallow the miracles and my science lessons at once. So I lost all my faith."

At 16, Gary had an independent income, £300 a year, in a time when a good suit cost only £5; and "none of the family thought I should have a profession." When a painter admired some watercolors Joyce had done on a vacation in France, "I thought, this is a damn good show. I was fed up with school and thought that the life of an artist would be a good life." Off he went to Edinburgh to study art. He "can still draw a section through almost any part of a body," but after three years of Edinburgh and Paris he "got sick of drawing. I couldn't express myself." At 20 he went to Oxford to get a gentleman's education.