Books: Cheerful Protestant

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"Do I Mean This?" In his bungalow beside the Niger River he read a lot, thought a lot, tried to write a Conrad-like novel. But his old wound was acting up, and he had asthma, insomnia and malaria. His wife and family begged him to leave the service. He still had his £300 a year, his wife had £600, and his father-in-law promised: "I'll see you through." Gary decided to settle down in Oxford and be a writer.

Novel writing wasn't as easy as it looked, and besides, Gary was a hard man to please. Looking at his first book he asked himself, "Do I mean this?" He decided he didn't. He started another called Cock Jarvis—"some of the best stuff I ever wrote. The man was alive, my God he was alive. But I couldn't control it. I had immense invention, but I hadn't decided what I meant." Not until ten years later, after six abortive novels, did Gary decide what he meant. By that time even he was getting worried; he had four sons and he was going into debt. "I got rather nervy." And his wife's family "would come to her and say, 'What is that husband of yours doing?' " One thing that kept Gary going was his wife's reply: "This is my man. He knows what he wants to do and he's damned well going to do it."

When Gary wrote Aissa Saved (published in 1932), he thought he had done it. A too-weedy clearing in the same bush out of which he later hacked Mister Johnson, it was the story of an African girl bursting with savage life who tried her pagan best to be a Christian; the inevitable friction burnt her alive. In spite of its authentic glare and beat, the book sold badly and Gary "got no bean of royalty." The next year, a second book about Africa, An American Visitor, fared even worse. His first break came in 1936 when The African Witch was made a Book Society choice and earned him about £700. In 1938 came Castle Corner, a long, slow-paced novel of Anglo-Irish life, which some critics praised warmly. But it sold less than 3,000 copies.

Next year he published Mister Johnson, probably his finest novel. Johnson is a young Negro, a poor but almost preposterously happy government clerk who lives each day (including his last one) as inventively as though it were the first day of creation. The critical reception was good, but the book sold just over 5,000 copies. Charley Is My Darling, a novel about juvenile delinquents in wartime England, did much better.