Himself Surprised

JOYCE GARY by Malcolm Foster. 555 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $10.

Joyce Gary saw the novel as Truth, and his prodigious labors in fiction were called forth by a lonely conviction of its high importance. He subscribed to Cardinal Newman's celebrated notion that what the autobiography does for the life of a particular man, the novel must do for mankind. Gary needed every certitude of dedication to sustain a creative career that began late and even so, suffered from early neglect. When he published his first novel in 1932 (at the age of 43), he had already been struggling at his writing for nearly 20 years.

Fame did not come for almost another 20 years--mainly for his hilarious, linked tragicomedies, The Horse's Mouth and Herself Surprised. It is only now, a decade after Gary's death, that his continuing reputation has resulted in the first full-scale biography.

Gary was a writer of imagination whose life had only an oblique relation to his works. The admirable research by Malcolm Foster, a Canadian professor of literature, consequently does not illuminate many hidden corners. But by telling what Gary was, he helps define the flights of imagination the author had to make when he created his gallery of characters. Though Gary was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat by birth (the Carys of Cary Castle, Donegal), his brief training as a painter helped him get inside the skin of his most famous creature, the artist-bum Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth. Experience as a British colonial official (from 1914 to 1920 in Nigeria) lent nuances to one of the best portraits of an emergent African in fiction, the black-skinned hero of Gary's fifth book, Mister Johnson.

But pure imagination must have been responsible for Gary's artistic ease in inhabiting the soft purlieus of the feminine psyche otherwise occupied by Jimson's earthy early love, Sara Monday. Nor did any known experience equip Cary to see the world through the eyes of a displaced Cockney lad in Charley Is My Darling.

After a lonely Irish boyhood, and a top British school (Clifton), Cary had a futile three years' fling as an art student in Paris and Edinburgh before entering Oxford. Once there, he gamely tried to disguise his bohemian artist's vocation beneath a carapace of casual tweed, but only succeeded in proving that academies are not sound judges of literary talent. He got an almost unheard-of fourth-class honors in law.

At 19, resolved to break the mold in which family and education had cast him --not, with paint brush but with pencil --he privately published a book of verse. Then, after a bout as a medical corpsman in the Turkish-Montenegrin skirmish before World War I, and marriage to the sister of an Oxford friend, he served the Empire as an assistant district officer in Nigeria. That Empire in its heyday has been described as a "system of outdoor relief for the upper classes." Cary needed the relief; his money had all but run out.

Hostile Milieu. He proved an able administrator. Yet the dramatic impulse of his life in Nigeria was the struggle to write, which he undertook entirely alone. His young wife had to remain behind in England. Plagued by chronic asthma, malarial mosquitoes and the tasks of directing 19 native police and supervising roads and drains, Cary would sit down each night by a kerosene lamp and turn out 2,000 to 3,000 words of fiction that he had no confidence would ever see the light of print. He tore up much of it ("I hadn't yet decided what I meant") and worked and reworked one novel, Cock Jarvis, which he never did complete. Eventually, he caught on with some stories for the Saturday Evening Post and made a little money. Eventually, too, he got back to England, settling in Oxford.

Biographer Foster naturally dwells upon the anguish of the long Nigerian period as the turning point of Cary's life. He etches in the hostile social and literary milieu in which Cary's vocation stubbornly flourished--where a stronger talent in a weaker man might never have come to fruition. In the long run, isolation proved a blessing. For Cary had to sweat over his craft far from the corrupting literary ambience that often sustains but modishly distorts young talent. London was full of Weltschmerz and fashionable reliance on canned Freud and Frazer. Cary was unaffected. Literary myth seekers and archetype spotters will look in vain through Cary's fiction. "My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions," he wrote. Persistently, he saw the world as a struggle between creative man and organized authority, with no quarter given or expected. To tell of human life in terms of anything but spiritual adventure would have seemed to him not far from blasphemy against both life and art.

Shrewdly, Foster places Cary in the nonconformist English tradition of Bunyan, Defoe and Blake, with its preoccupation with individual responsibility and the morality of action. He gives to Cary's friend, the critic Lord David Cecil, the first and last words on Cary the man: "Something at once heroic and debonair in his whole personality suggested a gentleman rider in the race for life, [but] the gentleman rider was also a sage and a saint." Alas, biographies of less sterling gentlemen than Gary have made far livelier reading.

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