The three novels in this sequence include Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse’s Mouth (1944); Cary’s heirs collected the three titles into one volume in 1957 and christened it First Trilogy.
Joyce Cary had been publishing fiction for several years, drawing on his youth in Ireland and his experience as a colonial bureaucrat in Africa, but with these novels he enjoyed his first popular success while also developing new narrative strategies that made effective use of his excellent talent with voice. Cary’s innovation is to develop one story but to have three narrators relate its events in the first person. Each novel can stand on its own, but collectively they yield more enjoyment than three unrelated novels would.
Cary repeats this strategy even more skillfully in his “Second Trilogy,” primarily known as the Prisoner of Grace trilogy. Since the narrators each have a particular, partial perspective on the action of the story, each of the three versions of the tale is a unique narration that sheds its own peculiar light on the other two. This technique highlights the modern characteristic of indeterminacy: since the narrators do not completely agree with one another, some or all of them must be lying, and consequently it is impossible for the reader to construct a definitive truth from their three renditions of the story.
The narrator of Herself Surprised is Sara Monday, a woman who begins and ends her adult life as a cook but enjoys a period of financial luxury in between through one comfortable marriage and an even better second near-marriage. And if she had not fallen in love with the improvident artist Gulley Jimson, she might have remained in the lap of luxury; however, Sara has surprised herself more than once in a life crammed with unpredictable twists and turns.
As she begins her story, she is writing from jail, where she has landed after doing a sort of wrong thing for a more or less right reason: she claims she has sold unwanted old things—those that her intended second husband had told her to throw away—in order to provide Jimson with the materials he needs to continue serving his muse. From the perspective of her intended’s offended family, however, she has been selling off heirlooms to keep a lover (attitudes revealed by the narrator of To Be a Pilgrim).
Sara purportedly undertakes her narration as a warning to other women. By presenting her own tale of bad judgment, she hopes to save other women from making her mistakes, although eventually she reveals that a newspaper is paying her for her story. Sara is a loving woman who follows her heart and pours out her favors—she poses nude for a series of paintings by Jimson that eventually becomes the sensation of the art world—without regard for consequences. Her ingenuous generosity makes her an easy target for Jimson’s bottomless neediness. She resolves, however, to change her ways when she leaves jail.
In To Be a Pilgrim, the narrative switches to Sara’s intended second husband, the elderly bachelor Tom Wilcher of Tolbrook Manor. Wilcher is the conservative side of the major love triangle in Sara’s life, while the unconventional liberal side belongs to Gulley Jimson.
Wilcher’s narrative is a study of old age and an old man’s love of the disappearing past. While Sara had depicted Wilcher as an insatiable leech, he presents himself as an old fussbudget, happily pottering among his beloved old things (the ones Sara had been selling to provide for Jimson). As the story begins, Wilcher has suffered a heart attack and the family has dispatched Ann, a niece, to keep watch over him and to keep him away from that Sara Monday.
But Ann is soon busy with Robert, a nephew who wants to try out the new scientific methods of farming at Tolbrook Manor. Ann and Robert are married (Robert keeps some of the fancy new farming equipment in the living room, to Wilcher’s distress). When a local farm girl catches Robert’s eye, Wilcher takes advantage of the diversion of attention away from his actions; he totters off to London to find Sara. What he actually finds, however, is that no one can recapture the past or even know for sure what it was really like. A second heart attack forces Wilcher back home, where he soon ends his days without naming an heir for the family property.
The story shifts to the opposite set of personality characteristics in The Horse’s Mouth, narrated by Gulley Jimson. His tale is an oral history delivered to one of his artistic disciples from a hospital bed after his studio—a derelict shack—had been demolished while he was still in it, still painting, on a scaffold.
Jimson’s life is a chronicle of Dionysian excess and shady trickster ploys, all placed in the service of art. Given the socioeconomic arrangement by which most of society governs itself, money is a necessity for everything, but money is the one variable Jimson cannot get under control. He badgers others for money or concocts none-too-savory schemes to get it. Meanwhile, his reputation is growing, some of his paintings are in demand, and he has no way to benefit from this trend since he is already into his next masterpiece.
Jimson is something of a wastrel and a profligate, and he is not above slipping valuables into his pocket should any come within convenient reach, but he is also a dedicated artist.
Although Jimson has loved several women, Sara Monday was special, and the nude paintings she modeled for are highly desired by connoisseurs of art. Unfortunately for Jimson, who has attracted the interest of a biographer and an investor, he does not have any of the Sara paintings. She had kept them all when they had broken up their household (for reasons explained in Herself Surprised), eventually giving most of them to a collector to whom she owed money.
At one point, Jimson actually paints a copy of one of these paintings (it hangs in a public gallery where he can get access to it) and sells the copy as a preparatory study for the original. Jimson’s ethical priorities are entirely suborned by his wholehearted and unquestioning devotion to art. He thinks nothing of pawning the furniture of a collector on vacation (after obtaining the key to the man’s home by devious means) in order to buy paints so he can create a mural that he’s sure the collector will be glad to have immortalized on his plaster walls.
Jimson possesses a single-minded devotion that allows him to serve art, and therefore he lacks the compunction that might restrain him from placing other people’s lives, possessions, and money into the service of art—his art—as well. Concomitant to his devotion is his short temper when anything comes between him and his current obsession—a temper that exercises itself on Sara more than once.
In providing three narrators who address their readers but not one another, Cary creates the perfect circumstances for exploiting indeterminacy: different narrators have different perspectives—different “truths” to tell—and readers have no way to eliminate the dross and arrive at the gold. Was Sara good-hearted or greedy? Was Wilcher lecherous or restrained? Was Jimson brilliant or nutty?
Each narrator presents himself or herself in the special glow of unself-conscious self-reflective appraisal, leaving readers to piece together the reality that lies somewhere in the interstices of their stories, tantalizingly close yet elusively slippery.
Bibliography
Eskine-Hill, Howard. “The Novel Sequences of Joyce Cary.” In The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival. Edited by Rod Mengham and N. H. Reeve. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001.
Gardener, Helen. “The Novels of Joyce Cary.” Essays and Studies 28 (1975): 76–93.
Levitt, Annette Shandler. “Joyce Cary’s Blake: The Intertextuality of The Horse’s Mouth.” Mosaic: A Journal of the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 25, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 47–63.
McCrea, Brian. “The Murder of Sara Monday: Art and Morality in Joyce Cary’s First Trilogy.” Essays in Literature 7 (1980): 45–54.
Categories: British Literature, Irish Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
Analysis of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour 
Analysis of William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune 
Analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake 
Analysis of Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy
You must be logged in to post a comment.