Pritchett on Cary's Irish irony

V.S. Pritchett, from his 1981 (?) introduction to the Time Reading Program Special Edition of Mister Johnson:

"One of the great contributions of the Irish to our enlightenment is their tenderness for rogues.  It enlivens all the Irish novels from Lever to Beckett.  It runs through the novels of the Anglo-Irish Joyce Cary.  And in the best of Cary's novels, Mister Johnson, it attains those heights at which the rogue turns into the poet and takes on a sort of sublimity.  A novel which is as breathlessly comic and endlessly ingenious as anything Cary ever wrote ends by making us weep and look at Africa with new eyes.  Or so it did when it was first published shortly after World War II.  The question is, after all that has happened to Africa since then, do we still feel the same about Clerk Johnson? [...] Is he a white colonial fancy -- "the natives are children" -- or has he more solid roots?

"Cary was not a boring talker.  He did not inform.  He did not lose himself in anecdotes.  His talk created an alternative world.  It was a form of life for the moment -- light, but serious.  This seriousness has its bearing on Mister Johnson and on all his novels.  He had lived a serious life.  Cary represented the dutiful strain in the Anglo-Irish character: low church Protestantism, intellectuality, social responsibility.  Before 1914, as a young man he had joined Sir Horace Plunkett's co-operative movement to raise the standards of Irish agriculture.  Afterward he turned to painting.

The man who eventually went out to Nigeria as an official was an artist at heart.  He not only brought with him the artist's insights into the minds of native peoples, but -- with Ireland's history and irony behind him -- he perceived that the whites were just as much 'natives' as the Africans, with superstitions, tribal customs, fantasies and delinquencies matching the African's, item by item.

"To the young Nigerian, one can well imagine, Mister Johnson will seem out of date and a distortion, just as in the doctrinaire days of Sinn Fein the critics accused the authors of Reminiscences of an Irish R.M. of perpetuating the idea of the stage Irishman.

We must grant that Cary's novel is set in the peace of 40 years ago and that, even for that time, the scene is placed in a remote and even derelict part of the country. [...]

But Cary did not set out to write an historical or problem novel.  He had his own mania: timelessness."  (xi-xv)

Achebe takes on Cary

Even as Nigerians were not inclined to be unanimous about anything, this colonial classroom was as one in their negative reaction to the book [Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson]. By providing two extracts from Mister Johnson, Achebe illustrates what he describes as "the contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery" that permeates the description of Africa and Africans and betrays Cary's strong aversion to the people and places he is presenting to the reader.

Quoted from "Home and Exile" by Chinua Achebe, published in the magazine The African Business, June, 2003 (in an interview with Michael Thelwell Achebe is also quoted as writing Things Fall Apart in response to Cary -- his novel went on to be perhaps the most widely read of all 20th century African literature).

Double-Distilled Melancholia

James Cousins may be a poet and playwright rather than a fiction writer, but he's a fantastic letter writer and letters are most certainly prose. Maybe we could do something with letter-writing as a genre? That might be a good way to include cool manuscript material and show what terrible penmanship most of these crazy people had. I'm sure we have other letters like this one that uses such vivid and fantastic imagery to describe the process of inspiration and creation.

Letter from James Henry Cousins to ? 4.27.1899:

• “Did not I tell you I’d go raving mad after the (2) ecstasy of that ramble. I promptly developed a fit of thoroughbred double-distilled melancholia! This is dear mother nature’s usual plan of making me pay up for excess of enjoyment; but, like laughing, it’s nothing when one’s accustomed to it. And it is usually in such periods of gloom that some idea gets into my cranium, like the pain of sand in the oyster, around which the succulent bivalve casts a garb of pulp that only becomes a pearl to shine on my lady’s brow." (1-2)

• "Ah! how happy this poor old world would be if only people followed a star; a real, substantial, honest star, instead of the wills-o’-the-wisp that are so plentiful! That star has got into my imagination: I am still following it: I hope I (and the person who glorified its shining by (4) an apt thought) may find like the shepherd’s of old, if not the young child, at least the spirit of purity, truth, and wisdom which he came to show forth." (3-4)

• "I want to scale Killiney on Saturday, if weather permits. You know the way: will you act as my 'guide, philosopher, and friend'—chum, purely platinum!" (4)

Bowen's Christmas card

This passage from Bowen's short essay "The Light in the Dark" describes her ideal Christmas card, which to me is striking in its strange combination of nostalgia and forboding. Although its image of a woodman's cottage is wholly at odds with the Big House with which we associate her, Bowen's description nonetheless captures the same haunting loneliness that I associate with The Last September--despite its idealism and nostalgia, her picture nonetheless seems to see the cottage as a symbol of the isolation towards which that other, bigger world always moves.

I'm not entirely sure where this could be included--it's from a lovely gift edition of the essay--but if we do something about Christmas, or Anglo-Irish views of the "simple life," or simply something about the imagination, it could be useful.

• "Each of us, probably, has in mind one ideal and absolute of the Christmas card, as received in childhood. My own taste (date around 1910) is this—I behold a cottage gable in deep, dusky silhouette against an inspiring gleam of sunset, one window lit; smoke goes up from the chimney. To this, a woodman returning, footprint by footprint, across the foreground snow; all around stretch white wastes, the bare trees are dark. How it glows and glows through that one small window—core of the world, magnet to man, the home! Towards it, the coach lurches among the drifts, the cravatted rider whips up his horse, the red-mittened children drag their laden sledge, the spotted dog lollops, the cat leads her train of kittens, the crinolined lady picks her delicate way. All Christmas-card-land creatures have the same destination. My woodman’s cottage, crouched in smouldering evening, remains for me forever the symbol-scene—no better picture, before or since, has so fixed for me that light in the falling dark; or, by contrast, the elemental and daunting loneliness of Elsewhere. That sense of the Elsewhere, and of those straying in it, can but encircle Christmas, if one has any heart."
  

Elizabeth Bowen Goes to London

Elizabeth Bowen has a fantastic short essay in a 1957 collection called Coming to London (ed. John Lehman) in which she describes her impressions of London as an Anglo-Irish 4-yr-old. She then goes on to describe the way London evolved for her into the place where writers seem to come from. My favorite parts of the essay are at the beginning, but I've also included a lovely quote where Bowen talks about her memory being dominated by visual rather than aural impressions.

• All through my childhood, London had a fictitious existence for me. It loomed darkly somewhere at the other side of the water; I thought of it (when at all) as an entity, at once magnetic and dangerous. It was, from all I heard, a city into which no one ventured alone, and which was to be entered only after preparation and wary forethought. It stood for the adult, and so much so that there should be children in London seemed unimaginable—in fact that there should be people of any kind was only a secondary idea: I pictured the thing as a mass of building, a somehow impious extreme of bulk and height in whose interstices was fog. I first crossed the city when I first crossed the sea, when I was 4: it must have been winter, we arrived after dark and were driven as hurriedly as possible from Euston to some other terminus in a cab. The street lamps, seeming dimmer than Dublin’s, showed us to be in the continuous bottom of the chasm, among movement conveying a sense of trouble, and which one suspected rather than saw. My mother, for a minute put down a window, saying, as though in extenuation, “London has a smell of its own.” But this, like all else given off, was nonhuman (74)

• If I had been an American child instead of an Anglo-Irish one, it is possible that London, from being farther in the distance, would have been more clear-cut as an idea: I should have had some rational notion of it, instead of being infested by it imaginatively. As it was, it was like a hand too near my eyes. Nobody ever told me about London, or explained to me what it was—I was assumed, I suppose, to have been born knowing. This must have come from the Anglo-Irish ambivalence as to all things English, a blend of impatience and evasiveness, a reluctance to be pinned down to a relationship—one which, all the same, nobody could have conceived of a life without. So for what seems a long time London remained partly a not quite convincing fiction, partly a symbol of ambiguity, partly an overcast physical fact. (75)

• I found myself in the same room as Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley; and I know there were others. I remember almost unearthly electric light broken on brocade-angular folds of one poet’s dress, and her benevolence (she was talking about something lost under a sofa) and the graven face and shining cavern eyes of the other. Of Aldous Huxley I was most nearly frightened, through no fault of his. But alas these images, and se many since, cast themselves on the screen as a silent film: I have a wonderful visual memory but a poor verbal one. I recall little or anything that has been at any time said—the sense and atmosphere of a conversation, yes, but the words, no. And all things considered, this is a tragedy. (79)

Mirrors open up a room

To be printed on a mirror in the gallery?:

"If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduciton of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man.  De Selby's explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple.  Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel.  Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object -- to the eyes of man, for instance.  There is therefore an appreciable and calcuable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye."

-- Flann O'Brien.  The Third Policeman.  p. 64.  --> a novel that is plotted like a trip to the science museum.  Much of the book is taken up with a series of episodes in which the police exhibit various physical phenomena to the narrator's growing wonder and fear.

More Moore, briefly noted

Some great blog posts on Brian Moore at Asylum.

Moore wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's film Torn Curtain (1966).