Joyce Cary

Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was an Anglo-Irish novelist and colonial official. Seeking adventure, in 1912, Cary left for the Kingdom of Montenegro and served as a Red Cross orderly during the Balkan Wars. Cary kept and illustrated a record of his experiences there, Memoir of the Bobotes (1964), which was not published until after his death. 

Returning to Britain the next year, Cary sought a post with an Irish agricultural cooperative scheme, but the project fell through. Dissatisfied and believing that he lacked the education to provide him with a good position in the United Kingdom, Cary joined the Nigerian political service. During the First World War, he served with a Nigerian regiment fighting in the German colony of Kamerun. 

The short story "Umaru" (1921) describes an incident from this period in which a British officer recognizes the common humanity that connects him with his African sergeant. Cary was wounded at the battle of Mount Mora in 1916. He returned to England on leave and proposed marriage to Gertrude Ogilvie, a friend's sister, whom he had been courting for years. 

Three months later, Cary returned to service as a colonial officer, leaving a pregnant Gertrude in England. Cary held several posts in Nigeria, including that of the magistrate and executive officer in Borgu. He began his African service as a stereotypical district officer, determined to bring order to the natives. Still, by the end of his service, he had come to see the Nigerians as individuals with hard lives.

By 1920, Cary was concentrating his energies on providing clean water and roads to connect remote villages with the larger world. A second leave-in had left Gertrude pregnant with their second child. She begged Cary to retire from the colonial service so that they could live together in Britain. Cary had thought this impossible for financial reasons. 

Still, in 1920, he obtained a literary agent. Some of the stories he had written while in Africa were sold to The Saturday Evening Post, an American magazine, and published under the name Thomas Joyce. This incentivized Cary to resign from the Nigerian service. He and Gertrude took a house in Oxford on Parks Road opposite the University Parks (now marked with a blue plaque) for their growing family. They had four sons, including the composer Tristram Cary and the civil servant Sir Michael Cary.

Cary worked hard on developing as a writer, but his brief economic success soon ended as the Post decided that his stories had become too "literary." Cary worked on various novels and a play, but nothing sold, and the family soon had to take in tenants. Their plight worsened when the Depression wiped out the investments that provided them with income, and, at one point, the family rented out their house and lived with family members. 

Finally, in 1932, Cary published Aissa Saved, a novel that drew on his Nigerian experience. The book was not particularly successful but sold more than Cary's next novel, An American Visitor (1933), even though that book had some critical success. The African Witch did a little better, and the Carys managed to return to their home.

Although none of Cary's first three novels was particularly successful critically or financially, they are progressively more ambitious and complex. Indeed, The African Witch (1936) is so rich in incident, character, and thematic possibility that it over-burdens its structure. Cary understood that he needed to find new ways to make the narrative form carry his ideas. On his return from Spain, George Orwell recommended Cary to the Liberal Book Club, which requested Cary to put together a work outlining his ideas on freedom and liberty, a basic theme in all his novels. 

It was released as Power in Men (1939) [not Cary's title], but the publisher seriously cut the manuscript without Cary's approval, and he was most unhappy with the book. Now Cary contemplated a trilogy of novels based on his Irish background. Castle Corner (1938) did poorly, and Cary abandoned the idea. After this came one last African novel, Mister Johnson (1939), written entirely in the present tense. 

Although now regarded as one of Cary's best novels, it sold poorly then. But Charley Is My Darling (1940), about displaced young people at the start of World War II, found a wider readership, and the memoir A House of Children (1941) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best novel.