Joyce Cary – författare

Its protagonist, Gulley Gimson, is an impoverished painter who scorns conventional good behaviour. If a bad citizen, he is a good artist, so wholly preoccupied with his art that he is willing to endure any privation. For Gulley there is but one morality: to be a painter.

Joyce Cary (1888-1957) is indisputably one of the finest English novelists of this century. His reputation at his death equaled those of such contemporaries as Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. His exuberant style allowed him to create a vivid array of men and women whose stories embody the conflicts of their day and whose characters are beautifully realized. Written in his last years, his “Second Trilogy” (Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, and Not Honour More) shows the mature Cary at his most brilliant, as he unfolds the tragicomedy of private lives compromised by politics and religion. While in his earlier trilogy (Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse’s Mouth) he pits the visionary artist against an indifferent but by no means dull world, in his masterful “Second Trilogy” he maps that gray landscape between good and evil where life is at its most dangerous. Prisoner of Grace (1952) introduces Nina Woodville and the two men in her troubled life: Chester Nimmo and Jim Latter, each in turn husband and lover. Nimmo is the quintessential hypocrite, a one-time evangelist, labor organizer, and pacifist who accepts the post of Minister of Production in the War Cabinet of 1914-18. Jim, Nina’s cousin, is a dogged army man, forced into the Nigerian service. Nina, orphaned and raised with Jim by a wealthy aunt, is married off to Nimmo, twenty years her senior, though she carries her cousin’s child. Nimmo’s rise to power, Jim’s African exile and return, and the dissolution of Nimmo’s marriage are told in Nina’s own voice. Earthy and full-blooded, both innocent and wise, we find in her a woman as sensual as Emma Bovary, as ravaged as Anna Karenina.

Originally published in 1958, this book by artist Joyce Cary examines 'the relation of the artist with the world as it seems to him, and to see what he does with it'. Cary speaks from practical experience when describing artistic inspiration and the ways in which varying arts present different forms of 'truth'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in art and the psychology of the artist.

From her prison cell, the irrepressible, magnetic Sara Monday looks back on the past half-century of her life in Herself Surprised. Born into a poor family, her employment while still a young girl as a cook in a middle-class household set her on a colourful and picaresque path. In To Be a Pilgrim, Tom Wilcher, a wealthy and disgraced lawyer who has been both Sara’s employer and her lover, has retreated to his estate near the end of his life to wrestle with his tormented conscience. And the centre of The Horse's Mouth, a charming, talented,impoverished artist named Gulley Jimson–also a lover of Sara Monday–is a restless, rebellious, and self-serving scoundrel whose antics verge on the appalling and farcical.Read together, these three vigorous and unforgettable narrative voices offer a sweeping vision of the first half of the twentieth century that is lyrical, profane, tragic, and comic all at once.Published in 1941, 1942, and 1944, the novels in Cary’s trilogy were designed to reveal three complex characters, not only as they see themselves, but as they are seen by one another, resulting in a work of three-dimensional depth and force.'Family life just goes on. Toughest thing in the world. But of course it is also the microcosm of a world. You get everything there—birth, life, death, love and jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and the old. And I always choose the biggest stage possible for my theme...' Joyce Cary