The Substance of Life

A FEARFUL JOY (343 pp.)--Joyce Gary--Harper ($3).

The best of the living English novelists (E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green) write with intelligence, wit and moral purpose. They are deeply concerned with the world and its fate. But they can seldom dig into the insides of ordinary human experience, reveling in its meat and marrow, the way the old boys did. By comparison with the comic expansiveness of a Dickens or the moody intensity of a Hardy, they seem merely to be giving life a quick, light-fingered skim.

There is one exception: 61-year-old Joyce Gary, an immensely fertile and gifted English writer whose juicy novels are beginning to win the applause they deserve. While Gary's subject is 20th Century life, his work carries the rich old tone of the 18th Century English novel: the satiric shrewdness of a Fielding, the burly gusto of a Smollett, the finely cut detail of a Defoe. To undernourished imaginations, Gary offers a fat literary pudding, steaming with the odors of traditional England.

Of the slices of Gary's pudding that have been served in the U.S. since 1936, the best have been his trilogy novels, Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim and The Horse's Mouth (TIME, Sept. 20, 1948 et seq.). In these books Gary shows himself a master of the novelist's true business: creating characters who stick in the memory. No one who has once met that latter-day Moll Flanders, Sara Monday, and that loudmouthed old horsethief and painter, Gulley Jimson, is likely to forget them.

Unworried Tabitha. Gary's new novel, A Fearful Joy, is centered about another of his extravagant characters: Tabitha Baskett, a woman with an easygoing moral sense, but with enough common sense to know that the best thing to do with life is to live it. A Fearful Joy is not topflight Gary; sometimes it reads like a fast imitation of his best writing. But there is still a rich ration of fun in it, and the old Gary feel for the texture and grain of people.

Tabitha first appears as a young girl in a small English town, orphaned and stuck with a dull, painfully married elder brother. Thirsty for adventure, she runs off with Bonser, a jovial fast-talking bounder who peddles worthless shares in country pubs. Bonser juggles her on his knee and cuddles her in bed, but he runs out when her money does.

To support Bonser's baby, Tabitha becomes the mistress of an art-mad millionaire. Soon Tabitha is reigning as queen of the millionaire's crazy bohemian circle, passing esthetic judgments with unworried ignorance and editing a highbrow magazine.

This wild burlesque of English literary life is the best thing in A Fearful Joy. Gary trots out a weird but wholly likable crew of eccentrics and fakes: the rich "angel" who is afraid of being taken in and afraid of being left out; the lazy sponger with an uncanny eye for the latest thing in letters who privately believes that modern writing is "so rotten that it may be good, in a rotten way"; the scraggly poet with "a thin virgin beard" who preaches that "the true decadent has no modesty."

Once the literary racket collapses, Tabitha turns, in not nearly so lively a set of chapters, to new worlds. She marries a wealthy ironmaster, gets religion, tries to enliven her flat-spirited son, and finally finds her warmest happiness with Bonser --old, bruised and irresponsible, but still her own fearful joy.

Undaunted Author. Much of the sense of abundant reality and deep experience in Gary's novels comes from the vivacity of his own life. He was born in northern Ireland of an aristocratic English family, studied art in Paris and later went to Oxford. Then he went off "to live and see life" (as a cook with a Red Cross outfit) in the Balkan War of 1912-13. During the first World War, he fought against German colonial troops in Africa, suffered a head wound which has resulted in intermittent insomnia--a spur to sitting up late writing novels.

Since 1920, he has lived in Oxford because "the intellectual sincerity of this place is pretty high . . . Living among philosophers has kept me from turning out a lot of tripe."

In one respect Gary has been luckier than a lot of his contemporaries. Blessed with a private income, he could write away, and postpone publication, until he was completely satisfied with his work. He started half a dozen, novels, one of them 750,000 words long, finished three, discarded all of them. Finally, in 1932, after "three years of frightful agony," he published his first book, Aissa Saved. Critics compared him to Conrad and Tolstoy, but it sold less than 1,000 copies.

Since Aissa, Gary has plugged away with ferocious energy, often beginning work at 4 or 5 a.m., revising endlessly. He is now at work on a novel called Prisoners of Grace, a story about a radical politician, "a spellbinder, an artist of the imagination." Undaunted by his 61 years, he has outlines of 30 more novels sketched out for him for the next 20 years, good news to a growing audience of Gary fans who have found in his work neither fatuous optimism nor fashionable pessimism, but a rich, old-fashioned recreation of the substance of life.

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