Joyce Carey
Inishowen's connections with famous 20th Century Novelist

One of the finest English novelists of the first half of the 20th century, Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary, better known as Joyce Cary, was born in the house of his maternal grandfather, James John Joyce, in Derry. He belonged to an Anglo-Irish family which was granted lands in Inishowen during the early 17th century and owned estates at Redcastle, Castle Cary and Whitecastle. On his mother's side he was descended from the Joyces of Galway; hence his unusual Christian name. He may not have been from Inishowen, but his connections with the peninsula can't be ignored in his writings.

Although he was raised in London, Cary spent his summer holidays in the Inishowen peninsula. His mother died when he was nine years old, but his father continued the holiday tradition until Joyce was twelve. Joyce and his brother divided their time among two households.

Their grandfather had lost Castle Cary to financiers, but they visited Grandmother Jane Cary at Whitecastle and then Clare Cottage, just half a mile from the family's former estate at Castle Cary. They also stayed with Grandmother Joyce at her summer house, Drumcliffe, in Moville. These childhood holidays in Ireland inspired two of his novels. Castle Corner (1938) and A House of Children (1941), an evocation of summers in Inishowen which won the James Tait Black Prize.

Although Cary thinly disguises place names in both books - Dunville for Moville, Crowcliff for Ravenscliff, North Head for Inishowen head, Sandy Point for Magilligan, Castle Corner for Castle Cary - Inishowen remains easily recognisable; "There is no more beautiful view in the world than that great lough, seventy square miles of salt water, from the mountains of Annish. We had heard my father call it beautiful, and so we enjoyed it with our minds as well as our feelings; keenly with both together. Wherever we went in Annish we were among the mountains and saw the lough or the ocean, often, from some high place, the whole Annish peninsula, between the two great loughs; and the Atlantic, high up in the sky, seeming like a mountain of water higher than the tallest land. So that my memories are full of enormous skies, as bright as water in which clouds sailed bigger than any others; fleets of monsters moving in one vast school up from the horizon and over my head, a million miles up, as it seemed to me, and then down again over the far-off mountains of Derry..... I remember very well the aspect o the lough from the Oldcross road into Dunville, a road over which I must have passed hundreds of times, especially in the spring or summer evenings. From above, the great lough, lying among its ring of mountains, would see in the evening light like a long, low hill of water, following a different curve from the Atlantic beyond. This was because the sun setting behind us, would cast its last greenish light on this side of the lough and leave the far side in a shadow, except where, if the wind was westerly, a silver line marked the surf. At this time, just before sunset, the sky would be full of a green radiance, fading gradually over the Derry mountains towards Belfast, into a dark blue-green transparency. As the car twisted in the winding road, we would come round to see the clouds behind us, like jagged coals in a grate, each surrounded by fire. But their centres, of course, were grey instead of black, and their fiery edges were as cold and lively with little sparks as phosphorescence on water".

After uncertain beginnings - he was an art student in Paris, took a law degree and served with the Red Cross in Montenegro - Joyce Cary joined the Colonial Service in 1913; his years as an Assistant District Officer in Nigeria, and on military service in Cameroon, gave him first, fruitful themes. After the first World War he settled in Oxford to write. His first four novels, culminating in the brilliant Mister Johnson (1939), are set in Africa, but he also expanded his subject matter to include English society as a whole, as well as Donegal. His most celebrated work is the trilogy of novels devoted to the raffish, Blakean artist Gully Jimson and his circle; Herself Surprised (1941), To Be A Pilgrim (1942); but a later trilogy centred on a politician and dealing with the demoralising effect of power (Prisoner Of Grace, Except The Lord, Not Honour More) is also very fine.

Alan Bishop, in his biography says "Cary's childhood was a primary source of his literary creativity.

The loss of his mother and the healing influence of his father and family, the intense happiness and the sharp social and political tensions of Inishowen, the dualistic version promoted by his divided English and Irish 'worlds'; all these urged him into self-expression, and initiated some of his central themes.

Joyce Cary died of motor neurone disease in 1957.

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