Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary (7 December 1888 – 29 March 1957), known as Joyce Cary, was a writer and government worker from Ireland and Britain. He is best known for writing the books Mister Johnson and The Horse's Mouth.
Early life and education
Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was born in 1888 in his grandparents’ home, which was located above the Belfast Bank on Shipquay Street in Derry, a city in Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. His family had been landowners in Inishowen, a peninsula on the north coast of County Donegal, also in Ulster, since the early 1600s during the Plantation of Ulster. However, the family lost most of its property in Inishowen on the western side of Lough Foyle after the Irish Land Act of 1882. The family scattered, and some of Cary’s uncles worked in the U.S. Cavalry on the frontier and the Canadian North-West Mounted Police. Most of the Cary family moved to Great Britain. Arthur Cary, his father, moved to London in 1884 and became an engineer. In August 1887, he married Charlotte Joyce, the older daughter of James John Joyce, who was the manager of the Belfast Bank in Derry. They settled in London. His mother died of pneumonia in October 1898.
During his childhood, Cary spent summers at his grandmother’s home in northern Ireland and at Cromwell House in England, which was owned by a great-uncle and served as a gathering place for the Cary family. Some of Cary’s early life is described in the fictionalized memoir A House of Children (1941) and the novel Castle Corner (1938), which references Cary Castle, one of his family’s lost properties in Inishowen. Although Cary remembered his childhood in western Ulster with affection and wrote about it with emotion, he lived in England for the rest of his life. He often felt disconnected from his roots, and this sense of instability influenced his writing. Cary had poor health as a child, suffering from asthma, which continued throughout his life, and he was nearly blind in one eye, requiring him to wear a monocle in his twenties. He was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, England, where he lived in Dakyns House. His mother died during this time, leaving him a small inheritance that supported him financially until the 1930s.
In 1906, Cary decided to become an artist and traveled to Paris. He later studied art in Edinburgh but realized he could not become a great painter and shifted his focus to literature. He published a collection of poems, which he later described as "pretty bad," and then enrolled at Trinity College, Oxford. There, he became friends with fellow student John Middleton Murry and introduced Murry to Paris during a vacation. He did not focus on his studies and graduated with a fourth-class degree.
Nigeria and early writing
In 1912, Cary traveled to the Kingdom of Montenegro and worked as a Red Cross helper during the Balkan Wars. He kept a detailed and illustrated record of his time there, titled Memoir of the Bobotes (1964), which was published after his death.
After returning to Britain in 1913, Cary tried to join an Irish agricultural project but it did not work out. Feeling he needed more education to find a good job in the United Kingdom, he joined the Nigerian political service. During the First World War, he worked with a Nigerian army group fighting in the German colony of Kamerun. The short story Umaru (1921) describes an event from this time, in which a British officer recognizes the shared humanity between himself and his African sergeant.
Cary was injured during the battle of Mount Mora in 1916. He returned to England on leave and proposed marriage to Gertrude Ogilvie, the sister of a friend he had been close to for many years. Three months later, he returned to service as a colonial officer, leaving a pregnant Gertrude in England. In Nigeria, Cary held several roles, including magistrate and executive officer in Borgu. He began his African work as a typical district officer, determined to bring order to local people, but by the end of his service, he saw Nigerians as individuals facing difficult lives.
By 1920, Cary focused on improving access to clean water and roads to connect remote villages to the wider world. A second leave left Gertrude pregnant with their second child. She asked Cary to retire from the colonial service so they could live together in Britain. Cary had believed this was impossible due to financial reasons, but in 1920, he found a literary agent and sold some stories he had written in Africa to The Saturday Evening Post. He published ten early stories under the name Thomas Joyce. This success gave him the motivation to resign from the Nigerian service. Cary and Gertrude moved to a house in Oxford on Parks Road, opposite the University Parks (now marked with a blue plaque), to raise their growing family. They had four sons, including the composer Tristram Cary and the civil servant Sir Michael Cary.
As a novelist in the 1930s
Cary worked hard to become a better writer, but his short period of financial success ended when the Post magazine decided his stories were too "literary." He tried writing novels and a play, but none of them sold. His family had to take in tenants to help with money. Their situation got worse when the Great Depression caused their investments to fail, and for a time, the family rented out their home and lived with relatives. In 1932, Cary published a novel called Aissa Saved, which was based on his experiences in Nigeria. The book sold more than his next novel, An American Visitor (1933), even though that book received some praise from critics. The African Witch (1936) sold better than the first two, and the Cary family was able to move back into their home.
Although none of Cary’s first three novels was very successful in terms of money or praise, they became more complex and ambitious over time. The African Witch (1936) had many events, characters, and themes, but it became too complicated for the story. Cary realized he needed new ways to express his ideas through writing. After returning from Spain, George Orwell recommended Cary to the Liberal Book Club, which asked him to write a book about freedom and liberty, a theme in his work. The book was published as Power in Men (1939), but the publisher made many changes to the manuscript without Cary’s approval, which upset him. Cary then planned a trilogy of novels about his Irish background, but Castle Corner (1938) did not sell well, and he gave up the idea. His next African-themed novel, Mister Johnson (1939), was written entirely in the present tense. Though it is now considered one of Cary’s best works, it sold poorly at the time. However, Charley Is My Darling (1940), which focused on young people during the start of World War II, reached more readers. His memoir A House of Children (1941) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best novel.
Final years
Cary began working on important projects that studied changes in England's history and society during his lifetime. The First Trilogy (Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse's Mouth) eventually gave Cary a steady income, and The Horse's Mouth remains his most well-known novel. Cary's pamphlet The Case for African Freedom (1941), published by Orwell's Searchlight Books series, gained some attention. The film director Thorold Dickinson asked Cary to help create a wartime movie set partly in Africa. In 1943, while writing The Horse's Mouth, Cary traveled to Africa with a film crew to work on the movie Men of Two Worlds. In 1946, Cary went to India for a second film project with Dickinson. However, the movement for India's independence from Britain made filming impossible, and the project was canceled. The Moonlight (1946), a novel about the challenges women face, marked the end of a long period of high productivity for Cary. Gertrude was battling cancer, and Cary's writing slowed for a time. Gertrude passed away while A Fearful Joy (1949) was being published. At this point, Cary was at the peak of his fame and wealth. He started preparing notes for the re-publication of all his works in a standard edition published by Michael Joseph. He visited the United States, worked on a stage version of Mister Johnson, and was offered a CBE, which he declined. At the same time, he continued writing the three novels that make up the Second Trilogy (Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, and Not Honour More). In 1952, Cary experienced muscle problems initially diagnosed as bursitis. However, as more symptoms appeared over the next two years, doctors changed the diagnosis to motor neuron disease, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) in North America. This illness causes muscles to weaken and eventually leads to paralysis. As his physical abilities declined, Cary needed a pen tied to his hand and a rope to support his arm to write. Eventually, he had to dictate his work until he could no longer speak, after which he stopped writing for the first time since 1912. His final work, The Captive and the Free (1959), the first volume of a planned trilogy on religion, was left unfinished when he died on 29 March 1957 at the age of 68.
Legacy
He chose his close friend Winnie Davin to be his literary executor. She managed the move of his library to the Bodleian Library, published some of his unfinished works after his death, and helped scholars who studied his papers. She also wrote an entry about Cary in the Dictionary of National Biography.