Second Trilogy by Joyce Cary

First published:Prisoner of Grace, 1952; Except the Lord, 1953; Not Honour More, 1955

Type of work: Social chronicle

Time of work:Prisoner of Grace, 1900-1924; Except the Lord, 1860-1879; Not Honour More, 1926

Locale: Tarbiton, the surrounding area of Devonshire, and London, England

Principal Characters:

• Nina Nimmo/Latter (nee Woodville), the narrator of Prisoner of Grace
• Aunt Latter, the aunt who rears Nina
• Chester Nimmo, the narrator of Except the Lord and Nina’s first husband
• Jim Latter, the narrator of Not Honour More, Nina’s second husband, the father of all of her children
• Georgina Nimmo, Chester’s sister
• Tom Nimmo, Chester’s father, a lay preacher

The Novels

Prisoner of Grace is Nina’s reflective account of the lives of her two husbands, Chester Nimmo and Jim Latter. Nina begins her story with the announcement that she is “writing this book” to defend both herself and her first husband, Chester, against certain “revelations” which are soon to be made in the press.

Reared at Palm Cottage, the upper-middle-class home of her Aunt Latter, Nina Woodville is introduced to Chester when she is seventeen. At the time, she is pregnant by her cousin, Jim Latter. Because Jim cannot marry without resigning from his regiment and thereby ending his military career, another candidate for husband must be found. In order to protect the family honor, Aunt Latter encourages a marriage between Nina and Chester, a young clerk in the estate office in Tarbiton. For Chester, the marriage is advantageous because Nina brings him money and social standing; he has political ambitions and, with Nina at his side, he eventually rises above his impoverished rural origins to become War Minister during World War I and, later, a central figure in the British general strike of 1926. For Nina, the marriage is never more than convenient. Although she stays married to Chester for almost thirty years, she never ceases to love Jim, the father of all her children.

Soon after he marries Nina, Chester is elected to a local county council, thus beginning his climb to political power. Jim returns to Tarbiton from India on leave from his regiment and demands to see his infant son Tom. He denounces Nina for “jilting him” and marrying that “dirty little snake.” Ignoring Nina’s assertion that it was he, not she, who fled the country, Jim accuses Chester of marrying Nina to get her money.

At Lilmouth, Chester campaigns against British involvement in the Boer War in South Africa—his aim is to secure for himself a seat in Parliament— and deliberately provokes a violent riot which establishes his fame as a radical politician. At about the same time, Jim is encouraging Nina to leave Chester. Realizing that she still loves Jim, Nina accepts his dare to make love in her garden while Chester is out mailing some letters. This encounter results in Nina’s second child, her daughter Sally.

On several occasions, Nina attempts, unsuccessfully, to leave Chester. When Chester wins the Tarbiton seat in Parliament, they move to London. Following the 1905 Liberal defeat of the Tories, Chester is appointed UnderSecretary for Mines. Desperately unhappy in her marriage and under the constant scrutiny of Bootham, an incompetent secretary Chester keeps solely for the purpose of spying on her, an overwrought Nina takes “six cachets at once” of a sleeping medicine and almost dies. Chester is angry with her. In 1908, he is promoted to the Cabinet.

The year 1922 marks the beginning of the end of Nina’s marriage to Chester. After a distinguished political career, Chester is defeated in the election that year. Nina’s son, Tom, who had been acting in the cabarets before he was forced to flee to Germany to escape the British police, is so unhappy in exile that he shoots himself. Returning from Tom’s funeral in Berlin, Nina resolves to break from Chester. She leaves London and visits Jim in Axwell. At age forty-five, Nina soon discovers that she is pregnant yet again by Jim. After she divorces Chester, Nina marries Jim and moves to Palm Cottage where her third child, a boy, is born. Chester sends a note both to congratulate Nina and to ask permission to quote from her early letters to him in his memoirs. When Chester begins to visit Palm Cottage to discuss matters related to the letters, Jim becomes dangerously jealous and angry, but Nina still feels some loyalty to the “great man” who was her husband for the better part of thirty years. As her narrative draws to a close, Nina is involved in a most desperate situation: Chester is at Palm Cottage, claiming to be writing his memoirs with Nina’s assistance but actually enjoying a sexual relationship with her in a progressively more open fashion while Jim stalks the house suspiciously.

Chester tells his own story in Except the Lord, focusing on his childhood in Devonshire and the origins of his political radicalism in the poverty of his family and the nonconformist religion of his father. The narrative is ostensibly composed during the period when he is staying at Palm Cottage. It begins and ends with Chester visiting the grave of Georgina, a dearly loved sister, some forty years after her death. At twenty-two, Georgina died in Ladd’s house, the damp, crowded Nimmo cottage in Shagbrook, of tuberculosis, the same illness which had killed her mother.

Georgina is with him at a crucial turning point in his life. She accompanies him to the Lilmouth Great Fair, where they see the play Maria Marten, a melodrama in which a wicked landowner forces himself on his tenant’s daughter by threatening to increase her father’s rent and evict him. The girl is then raped and murdered. The monstrous evil depicted on the stage overwhelms Chester and galvanizes his growing desire to right social injustices.

Chester’s narrative turns to his father, Tom Nimmo, a failed farmer who becomes a failed preacher. Because of Tom Nimmo’s confused understanding of the Second Coming, young Chester, Georgina, and their brother Richard must twice go with their father to await the dawn of the end of the world, first at Black Man Tor and then, fifteen days later, at Shaghead Down. The senior Nimmo’s public humiliation (he becomes “a laughing-stock in the village”) confirms Richard’s atheism and undermines Chester’s trust in his father’s wisdom. As Chester recalls, his faith, “the unquestioning faith of the child in what he has been told by his parents—had received a mortal wound.”

Chester turns from religion to politics. The second half of his narrative deals with his apprenticeship as a political activist, culminating in his role in the bitter and violent unionism of the Lilmouth dock strike. At fourteen, he comes under the influence of the radical political theory of Dr. Dolling, the Tarbiton representative of the Proudhon Society. Soon he will meet Pring, the powerful London labor leader, a “convinced and consistent Marxist.” Yet Chester is an inflexible idealist who will not compromise his principles, and his refusal to implement the policy of beating reluctant strikers and destroying their homes causes him to break from Pring. Expelled from the organized labor movement and disillusioned with political action, he returns home where the dying words of Georgina renew his faith in life and God. In the final chapter of the novel, Chester stands at Georgina’s grave, an old man nearing the end of his life, and experiences a renewal of faith. As he remembers the strength of his sister’s love, he muses, “Here . . . the story began and here it shall begin again.”

When Not Honour More opens, Jim is in jail waiting to be hanged for the murder of Nina. The book is his statement “dictated at high speed for shorthand” to “policewoman Martin.” It offers a portrait of Chester in 1926 at the height of his political career; the central public events on which it focuses is the general strike of May, 1926. Two years have passed since Chester moved into Palm Cottage to finish his memoirs, and the tense situation at the end of Prisoner of Grace has not been resolved. Yet Chester has turned to other things. Planning a political comeback, he has secured for himself the chairmanship of the Emergency Committee during this time of national crisis, and he names a reluctant Jim to head the special police which act on behalf of the Emergency Committee.

From the beginning of the general strike, there are difficulties. A crucial episode involves Bill Pincomb, the Communist leader, and John Maufe, a special constable under Jim’s command. In the course of arresting Pincomb, Maufe strikes him on the head with a truncheon and fractures his skull. Maufe himself is arrested for using unnecessary violence, and Jim resigns when Nimmo fails to support the policeman. Maufe is tried, convicted, and sentenced to three years in jail.

Reading Chester’s private letters to Nina, Jim discovers that Chester, with Nina’s help, had been behind the machinations that led to Maufe’s arrest and conviction. Maufe had been sacrificed to the Communists to appease them and prevent further violence. When Chester happens upon him while he is examining the letters at Palm Cottage, Jim’s first impulse is to kill him, but Chester manages to lock himself in the servants’ lavatory, where he dies of a heart attack. Only days before, Jim had caught Chester “interfering” with his wife and had tried to kill him with three shots from his rifle. Chester had survived the attack, and Nina had kept the episode from public notice.

The final chapter of Not Honour More details Jim’s murder of Nina. Driven by his sense of honor, his soldier’s sense of duty to his country, Jim decides to kill Nina as “an example.” Nina must die “because there was no truth or justice anywhere any more. Because of the grabbers and tapeworms who were sucking the soul out of England.”

The Characters

The essential difference between Prisoner of Grace and its parallel novel in the first trilogy (Herself Surprised, 1941; To Be a Pilgrim, 1942; The Horse’s Mouth, 1944) lies in Joyce Cary’s treatment of character. Unlike Sara Monday, the unsophisticated and unreflective narrator of Herself Surprised, Nina is highly sophisticated and reflective, and she is thus able to comment on the social and historical events in the lives of her two husbands, Chester and Jim.

Nina’s role as narrator is a complex one. In the preface to Prisoner of Grace, Cary commented on his intentions with that novel; he wanted “to give the complete political scene” and “to tell the story through the eyes of a wife whose marriage needs a great deal of management.” Nina’s declared purpose is to forestall anticipated critical “revelations” by the newspapers. Yet her function as the narrative’s center of consciousness is more than merely to defend Chester; it is also to offer a dramatized perspective on the political turbulence of an important time in British history. The technical problem which Cary had to overcome was how to present a characterized first-person narrator who was fully capable of understanding another’s point of view. After struggling with various narrative strategies for more than a year, Cary discovered a characteristic form for his heroine: He introduced parentheses into Nina’s story to contain her qualifications and second thoughts. This device, as Cary himself noted, made “Nina a credible witness. . . [and] enabled her, even in the first person, to reveal her own quality of mind.”

Nina’s parenthetical qualification is the major feature of her narrative. Unlike Sara in Herself Surprised, who so often translates her impulses and perceptions into domestic metaphor, Nina employs few characteristic images. Cary’s extensive use of parentheses allows him to develop Nina as a shrewd if sometimes passive observer of the world around her. She is capable of rendering the behavior and the motives of others in empathetic detail: “Then Nimmo wrung my hand (he was too clever to kiss me) and darted away, and I asked (not bothering to say that I wouldn’t marry him) if he knew about my condition.”

Chester is often the object of Nina’s attention, and her parenthetical asides are ideally suited to revealing the complexity of the politician, particularly given that Except the Lord, Chester’s own narrative, is remarkable for its rather unironic presentation of his vision of himself. The entire trilogy is dominated by Chester. While Prisoner of Grace does touch on Jim, it is Chester who is at the center of Nina’s story because Nina, the “prisoner of grace,” is undeniably “in his power.” In Not Honour More, Jim presents a view of both Nina and Chester, but again it is Chester, the object of Jim’s excoriating hatred, who is the center of attention. In Except the Lord, one hears little of Nina and nothing of Jim.

In his own episodic story, Chester paints himself as an idealistic crusader shaped by his childhood experiences of poverty and injustice. The son of a lay preacher, he adopts a style which is richly evangelical; it is this style which is the key to his character, for in Chester’s development, religion and politics are intimately connected. His quest for power, a quest which demands public and private compromises, rationalizations, and inconsistencies, is a product of his evangelical fervor to eliminate social injustice. He has been schooled in both a narrow and an unchanging Christian philosophy and the degrading poverty of his family. That he chose his father’s art, the art of oratory, to realize his political ambitions is not surprising. After his loss of faith, occasioned by the unsuccessful expeditions with his father to await the Second Coming of Christ, Chester finds a new religion in a militant radicalism. He adopts Pring’s brand of Marxism because it promises what he most sincerely desires: social equality for all. When Chester rejects Pring, he is repudiating not politics but rather the abuse of political power by men. The conclusion of Except the Lord brings Chester’s character full circle. The novel ends with Chester, a dying man who is hated by his political enemies, standing by Georgina’s grave many years after his sister’s death, undergoing a renewal of faith in God as he is about to make another start in politics.

Not Honour More offers another view of Chester, and its terse, laconic style is consistent with the shallow soldier’s mind of its narrator, “Latter, James Vandeleur, late Captain 21st Hussars and District Officer Nigerian Political Service, retired.” Jim has neither Chester’s complexity nor Nina’s emotional empathy. He is a fanatic who is convinced of his own honor and honesty. Dictating his version of the events which led to Nina’s murder, he insists on the importance of truth: “My whole case is this, that if a man or country gives up the truth, the absolute truth, they are throwing away the anchor and drifting slowly but surely to destruction.” Yet Jim himself is dishonest. Much of Not Honour More underlines the difference between Jim’s private and public moralities; the gap between the code of ethics he proposes for others (in particular, for those in public life such as Chester) and his own quite different behavior at various points in his life is striking. For example, Jim does not oppose Chester because of a concern for “public interest and decency,” as he claims, but rather because of a passionate and raging jealousy that blinds him to all other human emotions.

The weakness of Not Honour More when compared to the other novels of the trilogy is directly related to the simplicity of Jim as a literary creation. Of the three, this is the novel least able to stand on its own because its narrator is simply not a sufficiently developed character. This flaw is not as much a consequence of any deficiency in Cary’s powers of characterization, however, as it is of the demands of the trilogy form. Jim’s point of view is necessary to demonstrate the tension between two fundamentally opposed political philosophies. The main purpose of Not Honour More is to pose Jim, the uncompromising and autocratic man of action, in dramatic contrast to Nimmo, the quintessentially democratic compromiser. What the trilogy reveals is that there can be no rapprochement between men like Jim and men like Chester.

Critical Context

In the Second Trilogy, his last completed work before his death, Cary dealt with the history and politics of England from the early 1860’s to 1926. The work is significant because of its attempt to render specific British political experiences. Although the political novels of Joseph Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell did touch on British political life, their emphasis was on general tendencies or movements that had implications for contemporary European civilization as a whole. Cary’s Second Trilogy, however, reflects the vagaries of actual British history as it documents the ideals of British Liberalism and the collapse of the Liberal Party. The action of the trilogy is set in a very immediate way against the conflict with the Boers, the social and economic reforms of successive Edwardian governments, World War I, and the sudden prosperity of the mid-1920’s. Chester Nimmo’s career shares much with the biography of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

The appearance of the Second Trilogy also confirmed Cary’s place as a modernist of the first order. His experiments with different prose styles, first-person narration, and multiple points of view contributed to making the trilogy a dynamic fictional form. In Cary’s hands, the trilogy became not merely three different points of view but also three unified and related ways of looking at the same subject, in this case the origins and progress of British Liberalism. Through competing subjectivities, Cary presented the illusion of objective truth.

Bibliography

Adams, Hazard. Joyce Cary’s Trilogies: Pursuit of the Particular Real, 1983.

Cook, Cornelia. Joyce Cary: Liberal Principles, 1981.

Echeruo, Michael. Joyce Cary and the Dimensions of Order, 1979.

Hall, Dennis. Joyce Cary: A Reappraisal, 1983.

Hoffmann, Charles G. Joyce Cary: The Comedy of Freedom, 1964.