I’ve picked out another novel to re-read from my shelves. It’s Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, which I bought in (according to my inscription) ‘Sep 1963’ – perhaps I’ll get round later to what I remember of that month. But let’s start with the opening lines of the novel:
I’ve picked out another novel to re-read from my shelves. It’s Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, which I bought in (according to my inscription) ‘Sep 1963’. Perhaps I’ll get round later to my memories of that month, but let’s start with the opening lines of the novel:
I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud …
Quite some opening, one that gives you a good idea of what’s to come – a first-person narrative by the artist Gulley Jimson, described somewhat primly in my Penguin blurb as ‘an impoverished painter who bothers little about the customary obligations and decencies’ – and also of where the novel is mainly located, namely the upper reaches of the tidal Thames. Despite forgetting much of what followed, I’ve always remembered that opening.
Cary (full name Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary) seems to be good at grabbing the readers’ attention from the start: here’s how he opens Herself Surprised, the first novel in the trilogy of which The Horse’s Mouth is the third:
The judge, when he sent me to prison, said that I had behaved like a woman without any moral sense.
The narrator there is Sara Monday, who tells her story in much plainer prose, but who features quite extensively in The Horse’s Mouth (THM), both in the novel’s present, as the owner of some of Jimson’s paintings that he wants to recover, and in the painter’s past recollections of a time when they were married. I have read all three novels in that trilogy, and a second-hand copy of Herself Surprised is also still on my shelves; the middle volume, To Be a Pilgrim, is narrated by Wilcher, who engages Sara as a servant and who gets just a short chapter to himself in THM (‘a rich lawyer, with a face like a bad orange. Yellow and blue. A little grasshopper of a man’ – p.226 in my Penguin edition).
So did I enjoy this re-reading? Yes, for the most part. There’s no doubting Cary’s skill at ventriloquising the voice of the self-absorbed but exuberant Jimson, a prime example of the unreliable narrator (but like most first-person narrators in novels, with an apparently fantastic ability to recall the minutiae of conversations). I’m not sure we’re even expected to believe it when we’re told that he is ‘dictating this memoir to my honorary secretary, who has got the afternoon off from the cheese counter’ (p.69). And is he responsible for Sara’s death? That is a question that can’t be answered, it seems, from what we’re told in the novel.
Cary does his utmost to demonstrate Jimpson’s visual imagination, in passages such as the opening quoted above and this, where he is contemplating a wall where he can create the ‘finest job of my life’, an ambitious new Creation mural:
… as far as I could tell in the sketch, the shapes would fill the surface. But that, as every mural painter knows, is not very far. For the line that is as lively as spring steel in the miniature, may go as dead as apron string on the wall. And what is the living whole on the back of an envelope can look as flat and tedious as a holiday poster, when you draw it out full-size. (p.304)
Cary had at one time aspired to be an artist, and my Penguin edition has a not very impressive illustration facing the title page ‘specially drawn for this edition by the author’. I prefer the drawing on the cover, by David Gentleman (still alive aged 90, at the time of writing).
The novel was published in 1944 and is set in the late 1930s, moving forwards and backwards in artful confusion. Gulley’s continual search for financial backing and somewhere to paint, combined with the misadventures that land him in jail for six months and in hospital for a few weeks, are juxtaposed with his reminiscences from his earlier days. Some of them are maddeningly vague – there are scattered references to Gulley’s sister and her unsuccessful inventor husband, which might have made a separate story altogether – but I was carried along by force of his narrative; it’s the sort of voice one would back away from if buttonholed in (say) a pub but afterwards regret not listening to. (His obsession with William Blake is a bit off-putting, too.) Jimson is in his sixties, so has plenty to look back on, as when he visits Sara in an attempt to reclaim one of his paintings from her:
Sara smiled and the pink came into her cheeks, under the purple. She shook her head. ‘Ah, Gulley, you could always get what you wanted. But my figure wasn’t so terribly bad, was it?’
‘And they’re not so bad now, I daresay,’ I said.
‘Not so bad as you might think,’ said Sara with such a look as made me burst out laughing. She still had youth in her old bones.
‘The model wife.’
‘And you never saw me as I was, Gulley. I’d had five children before you painted me like that.’ (p.234)
Talking of pubs, Cary is good at capturing pub-customers’ conversation: here’s a scene in the ‘Feathers’ towards the end of the novel that’s perhaps more typical of ordinary people’s reactions to the start of the war than later fictions:
The news had started again. We were having it every hour. And Bert said, ‘Another raid on Warsaw, poor old Warsaw.’ ‘They say it’s a nice town,’ said Madgie. ‘Got a famous gallery,’ said Muster, ‘but I suppose that’s gone up already.’ ‘Not the pictures,’ said Bert, shocked. … (p.361)
Elsewhere, there are plenty of quotable remarks from the narrator. I see that the Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations has no fewer than 16 quotes from THM, including ‘It was as dark as the inside of a Cabinet Minister’ – but does not feature one of my favourites: ‘What did he care about breaking his mother’s heart. No more than a runaway horse cares for a shop window.’ (p200)
The novel was made into a film in 1958 starring Alec Guinness (who also wrote the script, and was nominated for a screen adaptation Oscar). I haven’t seen it, but stills from the production are evidence that at least some of it was filmed in London streets and by the Thames. I suppose the film adaptation is one reason why Cary is remembered for this novel, if he is remembered at all. Otherwise this Anglo-Irish writer – who was born in Derry and is commemorated by a plaque just inside the city’s walls – seems not to be much celebrated these days, though my copy of his A House of Children (a 1989 reissue by Belfast’s Blackstaff Press) states that ‘at the time of his death in 1957 he was recognised as one of the leading novelists in the world’.
Finally – and because I like to track down odd facts – I note that the novel is dedicated ‘to Heneage Ogilvie’. Thanks to a bit of internet research, I’ve found that Ogilvie was a surgeon who spent most of his career in the British army, ‘attaining the rank of Major-General and KBE’ and wrote extensively on medical matters. Like Cary, he served in the 1912-13 Balkan wars – which presumably is how they knew each other. The Ogilvie syndrome (which I won’t attempt to describe here) is named after him.
Old geezer re-reading 