E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
Cary Mister Johnson
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28735-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-28735-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
In the words of his biographer, Alan Bishop, Joyce Cary (1888-1957) was 'a prolific, independent, wide-ranging writer with a place in three literatures (English, Irish, Nigerian) difficult to categorize because his writing integrates the traditional and experimental.' He was difficult to categorize which probably explains why his reputation is not more secure. However he was undoubtedly a major novelist of the twentieth century, and in acknowledgement of that Faber Finds is reissuing twelve of his works - Mister Johnson, Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, The Horse's Mouth, A Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, Not Honour More, Castle Corner, Charley is My Darling, A House of Children, The Moonlight and A Fearful Joy. The Horse's Mouth remains Joyce Cary's most famous novel but this extensive reissue programme will demonstrate to readers this is only one of many equally successful, challenging but entertaining works in his canon. Although never fashionable, Joyce Cary has always had his admirers: 'This novelist has exemplified the rule that when a writer dies, he or she may suffer a lapse in attention. You say to someone ''Joyce Cary'' and they say ''Who?''. Amazing! He was a marvellous writer, fresh, funny and popping with life.' Doris Lessing 'A splendid writer' John Updike 'Whenever I am idle I choose a Cary novel in the way that I might seek a friend's company, and it is not long before I am encouraged, inspired to write.' Paul Theroux 'To find a novelist who saw more deeply and conveyed more truly you have to go back to Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, Balzac and Goethe, Mann and Hesse . . . What makes him a life enhancer is the overwhelming sense the reader gets from him that the universe, for all its horrors and inexplicabilities, makes sense - obvious and glorious sense.' Bernard Levin
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MR. JOHNSON
MR. JOHNSON is a young clerk who turns his life into a romance, he is a poet who creates for himself a glorious destiny. I have been asked if he is from life. None of my characters is from life, but all of them are derived from some intuition of a person, often somebody I do not know, a man seen in a bus, a woman on a railway platform gathering her family for the train. And I remember the letters of some unknown African clerk, which passed through my hands for censorship during the war, and which were full of the most wonderful yarns for his people on the coast. He was always in danger from the Germans (who were at that moment two hundred miles away); he was pursued by wild elephants (who were even further away from our station); he subdued raging mobs of ‘this savage people’ with a word. In his letters he was a hero on the frontier; actually he was a junior clerk in one of the most peaceful and sleepy stations to be found in the whole country. That was one recollection. Another was of a clerk sent to me in a station in remote Borgu who once spent all night copying a report, which he had done so badly in the first place that it could not go with the mail. I had not asked him to do the work again, for I saw that it was beyond him. I meant to do my own corrections. But at six o’clock in the morning, as I sat down to the letters, he appeared suddenly and uncalled (much to the indignation of the sleepy orderly at the door) and offered me the sheaf of papers, written in his school copperplate (we did not own a typewriter) which looked so reassuringly firm, and was so delusive. I saw at once that this second copy was worse even than the first. A whole line was missing on the first page; whole paragraphs were repeated.
This clerk had been a disappointment; he was stupid, and he could not be trusted with the files. He seemed also, a rare thing in an African, unapproachable. He did not always respond even to good morning. His shyness had a sullen grieved air. What he now suddenly and unexpectedly disclosed was not only a power of devotion but the imaginative enterprise to show it.
Affection, self-sacrifice, are very common things in this world. You find them in any family, school, regiment, service, factory or business. But so is daylight, and yet we do feel a special moment of recognition (perhaps descended from times when every return of the lost sun seemed a miracle of grace) at every sunrise, we remember certain days, not merely summer days, but all kinds of days which have struck us for some reason with special force of enjoyment, so that they stay with us for a long time, for years. Everyone of us has pictures in his brain of some sparkling day among boats; a frozen lake with skaters, and a sky like tarnished silver, full of snow; as we have memory of some special act of generosity.
So the clerk’s effort stayed with me. I can still see his very look as he shambled into the office (he was a shambling person in every way, with limbs too big for his flimsy body, and features too big for his face), brought out the new copy and explained that he had been working at it all night. What struck me so forcibly I suppose was that this unhappy boy who was a failure at his job, who felt much more of an exile in Borgu, among the pagans whom he both feared and despised, than I did; who seemed so feeble and lost, was capable of this dramatic gesture. I say gesture because all he could say (unlike Johnson, he was very inarticulate) was that he had not wanted me to ‘catch trouble’; that is, to get a reprimand for being late with my quarterly report.
This poor clerk was nothing like Johnson, but I remembered him when I drew Johnson. He reminded me too of something I had noticed as a general thing, the warmheartedness of the African; his readiness for friendship on the smallest encouragement. I remember an occasion when I was riding over a parade ground towards the end of the Kaiser war, when a sergeant drilling his men in the distance suddenly dismissed them, and the whole half company came running to surround me. I could not even recognize the men. We had come together for one night in the midst of a very confused and noisy battle (Banyo) when some lost units had attached themselves to mine.
No officer who has ever commanded a Nigerian company can forget the Hausa Farewell, that tune upon the bugles played as he rides away for the last time. But I don’t know why, having met and greeted plenty of veterans, I remember so vividly that scene on the parade ground—perhaps only because I was taken by surprise, I can still see the sergeant’s face, the men running; I can’t forget their grins (and laughter—an African will laugh loudly with pleasure at any surprise), the hands stretched out, the shouts of greeting from the back where some young and short soldier felt excluded. It is not true that Africans are eager but fickle. They remember friendship quite as long as they strongly feel it.
As for the style of the book, critics complained of the present tense. And when I answered that it was chosen because Johnson lives in the present, from hour to hour, they found this reason naïve and superficial. It is true that any analogy between the style and the cast of a hero’s mind appears false. Style, it is said, gives the atmosphere in which a hero acts; it is related to him only as a house, a period, is related to a living person.
But this, I think, is a view answering to a critical attitude which necessarily overlooks the actual situation of the reader. For a critic, no doubt, style is the atmosphere in which the action takes place. For a reader (who may have as much critical acumen as you please, but is not reading in order to criticize), the whole work is a single continuous experience. He does not distinguish style from action or character.
This is not to pretend that reading is a passive act. On the contrary, it is highly creative, or recreative; itself an art. It must be so. For all the reader has before him is a lot of crooked marks on a piece of paper. From those marks he constructs the work of art which conveys idea and feeling. But this creative act is largely in the subconscious. The reader’s mind and feelings are intensely active, but though he himself is fully aware of the activity (it is part of his pleasure) he is absorbed, or should be absorbed, in the tale. A subconscious creative act may be a strange notion, but how else can one describe the passage from printer’s ink into active complex experience. After all, a great deal of rational and constructive activity goes on in the subconscious. We hear of people who dream solutions of difficult mathematical problems. What is called intuitive flair is nothing but subconscious logic, where the brain works with the speed and short cuts of a calculating machine, upon material that no machine can deal with. In short, though talk about the mental machine, the mechanical brain, etc., is highly misleading, for no brain is in the least like a machine, yet it is useful because that organism does tend to work automatically. Having been taught certain reactions, it will repeat them, on the same stimulus, till further orders; that is, until the intelligence steps in again to ask what exactly that reaction is worth.
But until the moment of criticism (which also arises from the subconscious. It, so to speak, rings a bell for the managing director to warn him that there is trouble in the factory which can’t be solved by any routine operation) the reader’s conscious self is at liberty to feel with the people of the book; he is at one with them. So if they are in the past tense he is in the past, he takes part in events that have happened, in history, over there. This is a true taking-part, whether the history is actual history or a novel. A reader can tremble still at the crisis of Waterloo; or rage at the fate of Huss. He has in War and Peace a concentrated and lasting experience. But it is still a special, an historical experience; it derives much of its quality from the recognition of general causes, it is charged with reflection (such as a man among actual events may use even at a crisis, and in the middle of distress, but first withdrawing himself from among them), with comparison and judgment.
But with a story in the present tense, when he too is in the present, he is carried unreflecting on the stream of events; his mood is not contemplative but agitated.
This makes the present tense unsuitable for large pictures ‘over there’; it illuminates only a very narrow scene with a moving ray not much more comprehensive than a hand-torch. It can give to a reader that sudden feeling of insecurity (as if the very ground were made only of a deeper kind of darkness) which comes to a traveller who is bushed in unmapped country, when he feels all at once that not only has he utterly lost his way, but also his own identity. He is, as they say, no longer sure of himself, or what he is good for; he is all adrift like sailors from some wreck, who go mad, not because of the privations inside, but outside, because they have nothing firm to rest their minds on, because everything round them is in everlasting motion.
This restless movement irritates many readers with the same feeling, that events are rushing them along before they have...
