Joyce
Cary
was born in 1888, in Londonderry. His father was a civil engineer from an
Anglo-Irish family that had once been wealthy, but Castle Cary and other houses
had already passed on to others by the time that Joyce was born. Joyce’s full
name was Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary. He was related to the Joyces of Galway, which
is why he was given this rather feminine name. Many websites comment on this,
although none of them seem to elaborate on the more interesting question: why
he dump Arthur in favour of Joyce? Perhaps everyone around him preferred to
call him “Joyce”, or maybe it was related to the fact that there was another
more famous writer from Ireland at the time, James Joyce?
With his £300 inheritance, Joyce set of
to study art in Edinburgh and Paris, but discovered that he was a much better
writer than painter. However, life intervened, and his novels are probably all
the better more from the experiences that Joyce was able to relay in them. He
read law at Oxford, and then served as a Red Cross orderly in 2 Balkan wars.
Joyce then joined the Nigerian political service in 1913. During the First
World War, he fought with a Nigerian regiment in the Cameroon. In 1920, he
returned to England, settling in Oxford. He wrote several short stories under a
pseudonym, but it was over a decade before his first novel was published in
1932, “Aissa
Saved”. All of the novels in this period drew on his African experiences: “An
American Visitor” (1933), “The
African Witch” (1936), and his most famous novel, “Mister
Johnson”, was published in 1939. The preceding year saw the publication of
“Castle
Corner”, which sounds akin to “Castle Cary”. Indeed, it drew heavily on
Joyce’s childhood summer holidays in Inishowen, as did “A House of
Children” in 1941, which won the James Tait prize. He then wrote 3 novels
featuring the vivacious artist Gulley Jimpson: “Herself Surprised”
(1941), “To
be a Pilgrim” (1942), and “The
Horse’s Mouth” (1944). “The Horse’s Mouth” was made into a movie in 1958,
with an Academy Award nominated screenplay by Alec Guinness, who played the
role of Gulley. Joyce Cary wrote the screenplay for another film, “Men of Two
Worlds”.
Joyce Cary then wrote another trilogy of novels, this time
with a political theme: “Prisoner
of Grace” (1952), “Except the
Lord” (1953), and “Not Honour
More” (1955). Other Joyce Cary books included “Charley is
my darling” (1940), “The
Moonlight” (1946) and “A Fearful
Joy” (1949). Joyce Cary died of motor neurone disease in 1957, leaving an
incomplete final novel, “The Captive and the Free”, which was published in
1959. The following year saw the publication of a collection of short stories:
“Spring Song and other stories”. He also wrote some factual pieces, published
as “The Case for African Freedom” (1941), “Art and Reality” (1956), and
“Selected Essays” were published in 1976.
The Paris Review –
their lengthy interview with Joyce Cary in pdf format
Colonial and Post-Colonial books contrasted:
“Mister Johnson” by Joyce Cary, “She” by Rider Haggard, and the works of Chinua
Achebe – Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s essay
“The African
Trilogy”: ‘writing back’ to “Mister Johnson” – Katharine Slattery’s essay
Moulding
Identity: Aesthetics and Society in Joyce Cary – Ana Raquel Fernandes’
essay
