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Joyce Cary, Mr Johnson (1939) - Some
extracts
| Preface |
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 remember the letters of some unknown African clerk [which were full of yarns for his people on the coast. He was always in danger from the Germans […; 7]
The style of the book […] was chosen because Johnson lives in the present, form hour to hour […] as Johnson swims gaily on the surface f life, so I wanted the reader to swim, as all of us swim, with more or less courage and skill, for our lives.’ [10]
Dram. Pers: Mr Johnson; Bamu; Sozy [95]; Rudbeck; Celia [101]; ; Bulteel; Tring; Benjamin; Ajali; Waziri, Saleh (‘languid boy’); Emir; ... &c.
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| Text |
The young women of Fada, in Nigeria, are well known for beauty. They have small, neat features and their backs are not too hollow [/ …] The ferryman’s daughter, Bamu, was a local beauty, with a skin as pale and glistening as milk chocolate, high, firm breasts, round, strong arms. [13]
Benjamin: [on marriage service]: ‘it is indeed a very fine service …. It give the noblest though on which marriage can be conducted, but do you think that book-wedding does any good for such ignorant people? Will they not think it some government juju?’ [43]
Bamu: ‘silly bad clothes - they are indecent for a girl.’ ‘You must eat. I shall expect you to be strong. Everyone will be looking. You won’t make me ashamed.’ ‘good broth with plenty of pepper - good for make you lust’. ‘But we are not married yet’. Mr. Johnson: ‘Is that all you think of, you savage girl’.
At midnight Johnson, dressed in nothing but the calico drawers, is performing a bridegroom dance amid the thunder of drums. [50]
Johnson: ‘England is my country, de King of England is my King / De bes’ man in the worl’ - his heart is so big.’
He is loyally determined to complete the filing with extraordinary speed and skill. Besides, he thoroughly enjoys opening the mail - that is, tearing open large, expensive envelopes and throwing them on the floor. This gives him a sense of the wealth and power of the Empire and he becomes part of it. Reading official letters is a pleasure to him, for it makes him feel like part of His Majesty’s Government … [58]
Johnson: ‘I think government ladies make a station more civilised’, Johnson says, repeating a judgement which floats everywhere thought West African conversation.
Benjamin: ‘My experience is that ladies make trouble in all stations.’ [63]
JOHNSON on CELIA [even before her arrival]: ‘She [Celia] has hair like the sun falling on the river and her eyes are like the sky on the far side from that sun - her cheeks are white as your teeth and her breasts are big as pumpkins. She is the most beautiful woman in England and the King himself wanted to marry her. But she preferred my friend, Judge Rudbeck. […] She is a government lady and you are now a government lady and must learn civilised behaviour.’ [64]
[On threatening to rob Rudbeck’s keys and safe:] Johnson suddenly perceives his grandeur. He has, at a stroke, become like one apart, a terror in the world. He feels the wonder and charm of greatness. […/] He becomes gradually accustomed to his surprising power. In half a minute he is used to it. [81]
J to Waziri: ‘You are not civilised, Waziri. You don’t understand that people must have roads for motors.’
‘Why, lord Johnston?’
Because it is civilised. Some everyone will be civilised.’
‘Why so, lord Johnson?’
‘Of course, they must be - they like to be’, Johnson says, ‘‘You will see how they like it. All men like to be civilised.’ [95]
CELIA does not know whether she is a good sort. Sometimes she thinks so; sometimes she thinks that she is a fraud, that she is acting a part; that all her life is acting. She is determined, however, not to be a fraud as Rudbeck’s wife. She is going to be helpful to him, an encouragement and an inspiration. She means to enjoy Africa, to admire his friends and his staff, to understand his work. Above all, she refuses to be a nuisance. [101]
Rudbeck adores his young wife, but is still, like other young married men, the essential bachelor. He cannot do with a woman except for amusement. [102]
[Celia] begins to be critical of his broken nails, is too long hair, his bad shaving, his stoop, his monkey jaw, his rolling walk, his affected bluntness of speech. She remembers that he prefers Edgar Wallace to Jane Austen and cannot distinguish God Save the Kind from The Marriage of Figaro. She thinks calmly that he is rather stupid, obstinate, clumsy, and greedy. She sets him apart for the first time as a distinct and real person and examines him with critical judgement. [103; cf. 169, infra.]
DESCRIPTION OF FADA
Fada is the ordinary native town of the Western Sudan. It has no beauty, convenience, or health. It is a dwelling-place at one stage from the rabbit warren or the badger burrow; and not so cleanly kept as the latter. It is a pioneer settlement five or six hundred years old, built on its own rubbish heaps, without charm even of antiquity. Its squalor and its stinks are all new. Its oldest compounds, except the Emir’s mud box, is not twenty years old. The sun and the ram destroy all its antiquity, even of smell. But neither has it the freshness of the new. All its mud walls are eaten as if by smallpox; half of the mats in any compound are always rotten. Poverty and ignorance, the absolute government of jealous savages, conservative as only the savage can be, have kept it at the first frontier of civilization. Its people would not know the change if time jumped back fifty thousand years. They live like mice or rats in a palace floor; all the magnificence and variety of the arts, the ideas, the learning, and the battles of civilization go on over their heads and they do not even imagine them.
Fada has not been able to achieve its own native arts or the characteristic beauty of its country. There are no flowering trees or irrigated gardens; no painted or moulded courtyard walls.
The young boys, full of curiosity and enterprise, grow quickly into old, anxious men, content with mere existence. Peace has been brought to them, but no glory of living; some elementary court-Justice, but no liberty of mind. An English child in Fada, with eyes that still see what is in front of them, would be terrified by the dirt, the stinks, the great sores on naked bodies, the twisted limbs, the babies with their enormous swollen stomachs and their hernias; the whole place, flattened upon the earth like the scab of a wound, would strike it as something between a prison and a hospital. But to Celia it is simply a native town. It has been labelled for her, in a dozen magazines and snapshots, long before she comes to it. Therefore she does not see it at all. She does not see the truth of its real being, but the romance of her ideas, and it seems to her like the house of the unspoilt primitive, the simple dwelling-place of unsophisticated virtue. /
But since such an idea is only an idea, without depth or novelty, it is quickly boring. Within seven days Celia cannot bear even to look at Fada from the distance. [111] |
[…] Rudbeck, who greatly respects Tring’s brain, looks after Johnson with slight frown, trying to see what deep truth about Johnson his clever wife has discovered and revealed to the clever Tring in the single word “Wog”. [114]
pagan … barbarians … peasant [115]
SERGEANT GOLLUP: 135 ff.
‘... you don’t even know what a drawing-room is’
‘Oh, yas, Sargy, it’s at home in England where you sit when you finish you chop’.
‘Home,. Haw, haw. Scuse me, Wog. - always makes me laugh to ‘ear a nig talk of England as ‘ome w’en he never see so much as a real chimney-pot.’
‘Oh, sah, but I true Englishman for my heart.’
‘You’re quite right, Wog. And never mind what they say.’ [141]
Gollup has the usual hatred of the old soldier for the rich and their women, and in fact for all those who live easy and self-indulgent lives without risk or responsibility, that hatred which has made all countries with conscription inclined to violent revolutions. Gollup regards the rich in some mysterious way, as parasites on the soldiers and especially on his own officers, of whom he speaks, in comparison, with the deepest sympathy. [143]
‘there isn’t a country in the world where w ‘aven’t laid down our lives for the Empire, and that’s for you, Wog, for freedom - the Empire of the free where the sun of justice never sets. Yes and will again wen they’re wanted.’
J: ‘I think some day we English people make freedom for all de worl’ - make dem new roads, make dem good schools for all people - den all de people learn book, learn to ‘gree for each other, make plenty chop.’ [144]
G: ‘I ain’t complaining, But you don’t know wot it costs us, you nigs, to tidy up things for you - you ain’t got the same feelings.’ [145]
G: for all his good nature, ferocious and ready at any moment for any kind of violence.
Party/orgy [147] marriage dance with twelve women of all ages from twelve to sixty. All except the young girls are in a state of possession, blind, deaf, and anaesthetic. [147]
JOHNSON’S SONG: ‘What fool chile stand in the way of Johnson?’ […] ‘This song becomes even more celebrated than the song of Bamu. It is repeated with new variations at many beer parties. Since a Fada man, like most primitives, looks upon the making of free verse as part of ordinary conversation, and, Like an Elizabethan or an Irishman, uses the most poetical expression even in casual talk by the road; since, therefore, songs in Fada are in continual production by every member of the public from two to eighty, they are not carefully recorded. A party which calls upon Johnson for the song of Bamu, or the song of the drum beat, does not expect the same words, but only an improvisation on the same theme. What’s more, almost everyone who hears the song at once begins to improvise variations of his own and apply them to other circumstances. The drum beat which is the idea most catching, becomes part of the popular imagination. (150-51.)
Gallup: ‘I say, you’re too good for a nig, Johnson - ah, it’s a pity - you ought to bin born one of the ‘igher races, wot got the hintelligence too. You got the nature, but you ain’t got the hintelligence.’
TRING (arrival): ‘Native states in Nigeria are accustomed to sudden changes of power and tempo. Each new district officer is likely to have his own tastes and his own policy. The important thing for the native ministers is to know beforehand what his tastes are and to cater for them. Does he like ceremony? Then he must be met with camel drums and royal salutes. Does he like wandering about on the farms and talking crops? Then he must be provided at once with a few reliable farmers primed to tell him the right things. Does he hate sinecures ? A council must be held to decide which of the Emir’s old pensioners is to be sacrificed.’ [161]
Rudbeck and Celia have not had a violent quarrel for ten months, but they have their little differences almost twice a day, and then they are much depressed. For the rest-of the time, they are avoiding the differences by a careful selection of words and tones, adjusted to the other’s comprehension and taste. Thus it seems to them that their life together, apart from the routine satisfaction of various appetites, has become a series of mild depressions and mild deceits. They have no idea that they are in process of constructing a relationship so complete and delightful that, in another year or two, each will be indispensable to the other, that in twenty years, their friends win say of them, ‘What a lucky couple - so exactly suited to each other.’ [169]
[The village gets drunk:] He knows then all, he had played with them from their babyhood, they know each other like brothers and sisters; they are like parts of one being and now every part is mad with the same frenzy, laughing at the same joke; feeling the same ache in their bodies. Their bodies are playing the same tricks, and while they jerk and leap, they burst out laughing at their strange appearance, their lewd inventions, and their serious greedy faces. They fall into each other's arms with the same hungry rage and creep away into the dark bush among the rest; butting their heads angrily at the scrub, which stands in their way, weeping with indignation at the tie-tie which scratches their backs, and swearing at each other when they bump in the dark. In the morning no one-gets up till the sun is high and warm. Everyone has sore eyes, sore feet, sore heads, and many are bruised and cut all over. One has a tom ear, he does not know how he hurt himself. Another has a bite in his cheek, but he does not know what woman has bitten him or why. He lolls in the shade with a group of his friends, all sulky and languid. Some have strings tied round their heads to case their headaches. The girls wander about in groups, with their arms about each other's waists; they too groan, feel their heads, show their cuts and bruises. But they are not so languid. They laugh among themselves and some of them, telling a story of the night, sketch a dancing step. They have not drunk so much as the men and they are not so exhausted by love-making. [172]
The labouring gang: ‘In one afternoon they have taken the first essential step out of the world of the tribe into the world of men. [177]
Rudbeck’s misgivings:
Could it be that dirty old savages like the Emir and the Waziri were right in their detestation of motor roads; that roads upset things, brought confusion, revolution. And wasn’t there confusion enough? Wasn’t everybody complaining that the world was getting into such confusion that civilisation would disappear.
Ideas like these, or rather feelings which cannot take form as ideas for lack of clear definition, are as common to Rudbeck as everyone else who reads the newspapers and can’t distinguish between their sense and their nonsense. Over a thousand lunch tables and camp fires he has discussed them with his friends, and tossed about these words, ‘confusion’, ‘chaos’, ‘breakdown of civilisation’, without offering or reaching any kind of conclusion. He knows only that certain conclusions are not popular with his seniors. He has said to Bulteel, “But sir, if native civilisation does break down, there’ll be a proper mess one day.’ /
Bulteel takes off his hat, lifts it in the air in line with the sun and then at once puts it on again. They are taking their evening walk along the ricer road at Dorua.
‘Ah! That’s a big question.’ Buteel hates talking shop out of office hours. [184-85] |
All African travels have an objection to the first hut that they see. [196] Like all women, she does not care to be near authority. [197]
Nothing is more charming than the voices of people at rest in camp after a long day’s work or a long march. […] It is as if [they had] forgotten during the hard work or anxieties of the day that underneath all the conflict and perplexity in life itself there is an immense common happiness and peace, shared by all creatures in their simplest feelings. [199]
JOHNSON as POET: Johnson cool water into the stew and hums a carrier’s song, half humming, half singing:
‘Now I see far off the smoke of a village.
Like a woman it bends towards me and beckons me,
Saying, Here is rest, here is food and drink.
Headman, blow your pipe now for we are near.
Oh, labourers, your thighs falter like a horse’s wither.
Your necks are breaking with the load pain.
Oh, blind one, running with cast down eyes.
You cannot breathe any more, there is blood in your nose.
Listen, I hear far-off women’s voices.
Headman, blow your pipe now for us coming.
We come, come, fast, the labourers, we run because we are so tired,
We run in case we shall fall down before we come.
Blow, blow, headman, make the pipe sound.’ [201] |
Johnson at the party: Meanwhile he has choice of chairs, fires, and meals at the zungo. He is among the most welcome and honoured guests in all Africa, men of imagination, the story-tellers, the poets. [208]
A little later in the evening Benjamin is found without his tie, dancing among the pagans. The pagans and Ajali are laughing, but he is still serious and his dignity makes their laughter cheap. For though he dances, he has lost not dignity, but only his stiffness, something foreign and pompous. His new dignity is full, strong, and afraid of nothing, like all great art. It accords some reason with the dancer’s melancholy face. He has ceased to be grave and become as proud and mournful, a Greco saint. His forehead wrinkles, his lower lids seem to drop outwards, long cheeks are hollow.
‘Look at the drunk clerk’, the crowd cry.
Benjamin does not notice them. He sings or sighs through nose, ‘He go by himself, no one fit to stop him.’
“He got a heart like a motor-car, prompety, foot, foot,
Full of fire, full of hot, full of strong.” [212]
Benjamin: ‘But, Johnson, if all people did so - there would be robbery on every hand - there would be nothing but bad trouble everywhere. There would be no civilisation possible.’ [213]
He [Ajali] assures Johnson of his friendship and admiration, but points out that crimes of robbery and violence are dangerous to civilisation and that therefore they are wrong and wicked. Moreover, they would be very likely to lead to remorse. ‘I fear you will be sorry, Johnson. It is always dangerous for a Christian to do serious crimes.’ [215]
Rudbeck to Johnson [in court]: ‘You understand, if you plead that the killing was an accident, that’s one thing - but if you say that you lost your head, that’s another. A thief who kills to get himself out of a corner is still guilty of murder in the first degree.’ [232]
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