Candle to the Insect Mind

The late Joyce Cary did not publish his first novel until 1932, when he was in his forty-fourth year. This would be interesting but not remarkable until we consider that in the remaining twenty-five years of his life, a fifth of which were anxious years of war, he published fourteen more novels (and much else) and these, in their entirety, constitute one of the enduring achievements of literature.

It is Cary’s early silence to which we must turn for the key to his posthumously published inquiry, Art and Reality (Harper, $3.00). These years of silence were not, like Conrad’s, years of adventure and preparation. They were years of active literary effort, in which thousands of pages of manuscript were turned out, only to be rejected by the author himself. Why? Cary’s answer is decisive. “I had not yet found an idea of life satisfying to myself.”

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Edward Case

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The late Joyce Cary did not publish his first novel until 1932, when he was in his forty-fourth year. This would be interesting but not remarkable until we consider that in the remaining twenty-five years of his life, a fifth of which were anxious years of war, he published fourteen more novels (and much else) and these, in their entirety, constitute one of the enduring achievements of literature.

It is Cary’s early silence to which we must turn for the key to his posthumously published inquiry, Art and Reality (Harper, $3.00). These years of silence were not, like Conrad’s, years of adventure and preparation. They were years of active literary effort, in which thousands of pages of manuscript were turned out, only to be rejected by the author himself. Why? Cary’s answer is decisive. “I had not yet found an idea of life satisfying to myself.”