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The Horses Mouth by Joyce Cary Within the first paragraph of The Horse s Mouth Gulley has quoted Blakes Five windows light the covered man... Gulley uses all five windows to the limit imposed by poverty, but, he being an artist, his primary sense is the cheapest: sight- expansible as vision, artists vision. In the sad-beautiful little fifth chapter he goes into the Eagle hoping to cadge some get-going cash from his hard-nosed soft-hearted friend, the barmaid Coker, or from anyone else who may appear. He already owes Coker four pounds fourteen, which she is hell-bent to collect; she gives him a pair of socks (and they arent Woolworths) which she had meant for her chap Willy, who has gone off with a Blondie. Enters little old bandy-legged Captain Jones, master of a tugboat that pushes barges up and down the Thames between London and the Channel. He speaks of his impending argosy: Grace Darling, Florence Nightingale and the Rose...
Thats the fleet. Down on the tide with a fair wind to Gravesend or Burnham, and back by the train. The little man then begins to talk about the hereditary deafness affecting the females in his family- wife stone-deaf at forty, daughter going deaf at twenty. Whereupon Gulley undergoes his emotive artists vision: And I saw all the deaf, blind, ugly, cross-eyed, limp-legged bulge-headed, bald and crooked girls in the world, sitting on little white mountains and weeping tears like sleet.
There was a great clock ticking and every time it ticked the tears all fell together with a noise like broken glass tinkling in a plate. And the ground trembled like a sleeping dog in front of the parlour fire when the bell tolls for a funeral... (Cary) Gulley the besotted artist, mad to outrun the stroke and get on with his work, speaks out of present vision, outer or inner, in idiom that expresses his idiosyncratic way of seeing and will be translatable, God willing, into paint. It is Gulley, who is the true short-spasmodic. His narrative style too is a function of character and situation. When we meet him, so abruptly, he has just emerged from a thirty-days jail sentence for uttering menaces against his old friend and patron Hickson the novels first instance of what Gulley will later call the fall into freedom, a freedom cruelly qualified as always. He is old and ill, with five distinct chronic coughs; in his own breezy-bitter formula: What offers for the celebrated Gulley Jimson?
Sound in wind and limb except for arthritis, conjunctivitis, rheumatics, synovitis, bug bits, colitis, bronchitis, dermatitis, phlebitis, and intermittent retention of the pee. (Cary) He is broke and homeless but for the ramshackle boathouse-studio that the neighborhood boys have been dismantling in his absence. But though his legs shake, his hand remains steady, his eye sharp, his brain restless and clear; he cant wait to get back to the boathouse and resume work on his huge unfinished painting of the Fall: twelve by fifteen... two foot off the floor, which just suited me. I like to keep my pictures above dog level. (Cary) We never see him complete a painting in this late epic phase of his career, after he had turned from easels to walls, the medium that he now sees as the only one that matters. Is Gulley a genius or a colossal bungler?
Cary leaves us to decide, but I think he comes down on the side of genius. Perhaps the epic is inherently unfinishable, a phase of the infinite; or perhaps Cary's answer is to be found in the example of Blake, another artist of grand fragments, who fills Gulley's mind and whom he calls greatest Englishman who ever lived (Id have chosen Johnson). Still one would like to see a genius finish works, even one who like Gulley lives in a state of chronic emergency. The character of Jimson the artist is generally assumed to be modeled to some degree upon the great eccentric English muralist Stanley Spencer; in both cases the vision is at once grand and comic. Genius or not, Gulley is a first-rate critic- or, as he would say scornfully, cricket: a distinguished, describer, and appreciator. But Cary is not primarily interested in questions of genius or cricket: what he cares about most is the character of the artist as a breed, Gulley as a comic-satiric archetype of the artist-obsessive, as an extravagance of a human genus.
The Horses Mouth is packed with such seeing, registered in serial snapshot and recorded in staccato grammar, a kind of shorthand. The process typically moves from stimulus (outer or inner), to register, to response, to (ideally) record in the work of art. Such visions, composed of fragments, express Gulley's energy, his dazzling quickness of mind, and his fluent, sympathetic comic imagination. But they also express the terrible hurry and pressure under which he works, the helter-skelter quality of his life: hence character and situation again. And, whereas the novel offers dozens of these visionary fragments, it offers only one completed mature Gulley Jimson work, and that one is a fraud, a throwback to his lyric period: a sketch of After the Bath, knocked off in a matter of hours to be palmed off on Sir William Better for cash that will let him get on with his great new wall of the Creation, twenty-five by forty, doomed to collapse under the tools of the wreckers in the chaotic tragicomic final scene. Cary apparently intended The Horses Mouth to stand as the crown of his first trilogy, and it does work that way.
With its verbal ingeniousness, its bursting high-farce energy, its clustering concentration upon its absurd-gigantic hero, The Horses Mouth moves in the company of Cervantes and Rabelais. It is the most brilliant work in the trilogy and the best made, the best unified owing to Cary's close control of his anarchic action. It is also the least reminiscent of the three in narrative style, for important reasons. Gulley does reminisce from time to time, almost grudgingly-about his failed conventional-painter father, his sweet sister Jenny and her brutal inventor-husband Range, the history of his own phases as a painter, his love for and use of his women Sara and Rozzie- but his past like his present is recorded in shorthand of sorts.
The half-mad concentration upon the present gives the novel both its energy and its unity, its risky and exhilarating homogeneity. These effects follow from the crammed time-scheme of the novel. We can watch this collecting and supporting process at work in several essential episodes. In chapter 12, quite early in the novel, Gulley is caught in one of his rare comprehensive depressions, centering on the fact that his work is going badly; he has been tinkering hard at the Fall and coming up empty.
Plant blunders in, bringing two tin-roof preachers to whom he wants to show off his captive genius busy with a holy work. Their philistine comments and questions drive Gulley further distracted. Nosy, whose disposition is serious, noble, and interfering, comes in with a glue pot and a piece of canvas, bent on mending a hole that the Exam Street boys have knocked in Eves private parts. I went out, reports Gulley, to get room for my grief. He walks about Greenbank Hard, at first alone, grieving, but his mood constantly invaded by views of a changing sky: Thank God, it was a high sky on Greenbank. (Cary) Gulley then quotes the first of many fragments in this sequence from Blakes The Mental Traveller.
It dawns on one that the mood of the whole sequence has to do with the imagination, what Gulley calls the maiden vision, and its beleaguering. Round red clouds in the sky, beige pink, like Sara's old powder puffs, remind him of powdering her after her bath, and of the blessing and curse her ample body had been to him: I wonder she didnt kill me, the old Aphrodisiac. He recalls his Bath pictures of her, loved and hated, almost his only successful paintings. His mood has lifted, and when he passes a telephone box he thinks What a game to ring up old Hickson again (Cary) and utter a few more menaces. So far it has all been Gulley, his thoughts, and random impingement's. Now Cary slows his movement and begins to shape and fill out his canvas.
Gulley is joined first by Franklin, a young workman who holds his neck awry because he is undergoing a plague of boils, which he suffers and scorns. His note is one of comprehensive but nonspecific aggrievement: Neck, he said, whats wrong with it? Getting up another little fight with something invisible. It isnt necks. Gulley explains: The old woman of the world has got him.
Old mother necessity. (Cary) So Gulley has been adhered to by three benign cockney types, clustering sympathetically about his troubles with the economy and the law. All are heading not only for the Feathers but for a meeting with Mr. Plant, whom Ollier trusts to solve all problems. Plant materializes under a street light: I like little Plant. A regular old King Walrus. Genus, Chapellius.
Species, Blue-suites, Bandy-league. Steady as a burst barometer. Putting one foot in front of the other. On account of the curl in his legs. (Cary) He is in a state of nervous exaltation because he has got a meeting in his own cellar rooms, with a professor to talk.
Now we reach the long hectic final movement, which extends for seventy pages, ten chapters. Gulley has his Idea, the Creation, but of course no money to work with. Back on Greenbank, he is reunited with the steady Ollier, the reconstituted Plant, Coker grousing and glorying in her new little bastard, and, for the last time, with Sara. Poking about an alley, he comes upon an abandoned Dissenting chapel. The building has been condemned by the Borough Council and posted for demolition; but inside is an unobstructed plastered wall, twenty-five by forty feet, a sheer precipice of dirty grey, slightly varied by bird droppings and cobwebs at the top, and spit marks at the bottom, which made my fingers tingle for a No. 24 brush. I could have embraced that wall, more or less. (Cary) Since Gulley's ultimate vision is a Creation, and since As hes got older, hes got younger, it is appropriate that his fellow-craftsmen should be children.
His problem is to get his vision onto the glorious wall before he is stopped by bureaucracy, or the wall is torn down or collapses of its own decrepitude (very impressionist stuff, he calls it). The mad scene is a kind of Childrens Crusade in situ, with Nosy riding high and hard as Clerk of the Works, assisted by schoolboy pals who attend to wiring and rigging. On a makeshift cradle thirty feet in the air, Gulley paints and oversees a dozen girls and boys from the Polytechnic art class knocking in the squares of his immense design. Coker has rallied round, swearing and sweeping, with the basket in his pram. So ends, too, an immortal example of the work of the green, the tender, the humorous imagination. We learn only from a footnote attributed to the scholarly introduction to The Life and Works of Gulley Jimson (1940) by A.
W. Alabaster that Gulley has died. The biographer adheres to his former preference for the artists lyric phase. It is on works in his earlier manner, such as the first Lady in her Bath, that this artist must depend for any permanent niche in the history of art. (Cary) Bibliography: Joyce Cary. The Horses Mouth.
Penguin 1961, 4 th printing.
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