Throughout the book equally vivid snatches of description are worked in which not only visually heighten the novel, and provide background, but open the reader to Gully's eye for color and form, and to his flair for resounding analogies and fresh phraseology; in short, we experience the way Gully's mind works even as we are situated in the weather and geography that he is reacting to. It is the same with the many esthetic, political and sociological opinions which are scattered through the book.

My favorite occurs about halfway through when Gully maintains that it is impossible for original artists to get encouragement in their own lifetimes, but that you got an encouraging atmosphere for original art after the artists are dead. "When Van Gogh was painting his masterpieces," he says, "lithe clever ones were beginning to admire Manet-- that was very encouraging to Van Gogh." He goes on to say that Van Gogh's celebrity, after his death, was similarly encouraging to Matisse and Braque and Picasso.

Nearly always the opinions expressed in The Horse's Mouth such as the one just alluded to are interesting in themselves. More important, they--again--show us Gully's mind, show us its authentically art-pervaded, provocative, cynical temper. Even the insights into human character the book is full of act not only to bring characters other than Gully to life, butfurther ring him true and large. For example, when he is after a picture he believes his former mistress Sara Monday has and asks her about it, then cuts in, talking fast, before she can answer, because, as he puts it, he knew his Sara: "Never to let her tell any lies until she understood the position," he says. "Because afterwards she might feel obliged to stick to them, even when she didn't want to. Sara was a woman all through. She had a sense of honour even in drink, and she was always particular not to change her mind or admit to a lie, on the same day." Thus we not only find out about Sara, and--perhaps--women in general, we grow in understanding of Gully: of his coarse directness, his complete absence of euphemism, his willingness to consider Sara "in drink." The result is so facetted and sharp a portrait of the man that it is impossible not wholly to believe in him.

I cannot resist quoting one more example of Gully's peculiar and totally unsentimental outlook here. He is talking to a sculptor about the sculptor's wife: "Lolie's changed a lot in the year," says Gully. "When I used to know her she looked like a pig, but now she looks like a dog-faced baboon."

"Yes," the sculptor agrees. And then Gully goes on matter-of-factly to analyze precisely in what ways she has changed. This kind of Pinteresque unexpectedness of response regarding subjects as generally sacred as the appearance of a man's wife is frequent in the novel, and typical, of course, of its narrator.

By now it should be clear that The Horse's Mouth is a portrait of an artist which is humorous, wise and deep. But in my view it is more than that--it is a study of a tragic hero which is as stirring (to me, at any rate) as Sophocles' study of Oedipus or Shakespeare's of Hamlet.

It must be admitted, though, that Gully Jimson seldom acts like a traditional tragic hero. Such a hero should be a virtuous man of high status with one flaw which proves to be his downfall. Gully, however, is not only of low apparent status, but is almost 100% unvirtuous. He steals from shopkeepers, from patrons--even from Sara Monday. He swindles people by, among other things, taking up collections for bogus causes or selling for great amounts of money post cards he falsely implies to be salacious. He harasses his long-suffering former patron Fickson over the telephone, and tries to steal, then smashes some of his precious objects of art.

Almost always he is rude, too--as when he denigrates the water-colors the unflinchingly well-bred Lady Beeder has painted to her face and invites her, in her equally unflinchingly well-bred husband's presence, to enjoy a bout of adultery with him. A terrible temper is another of his defects: at the end of the book he causes Sara's death when he pushes her down the stairs in an attempt to get a picture from her. But he is a weakling--the fight with Sara is about the only one of the many he gets into that he wins, even against women. To top it off, Gully is small, unclean and physically unattractive.

Finally, he is incredibly self-centered: the Germany/Poland prelude to World War, for example, means almost nothing to him; and Hitler interests him only as an opponent of modern art. The center of his self-centeredness, however, is his art, his painting, and it is his unwavering dedication to this that redeems him, that qualifies him, in my view, to be considered a true tragic hero. Moreover, as an artist he has a culture-defining potential at least equal to that of the customary political or military centers of tragedy.

And though his situation is almost always comic, it contains all the elements of tragedy, as well. It ends, for instance, with him on his death bed following the recent deaths of his greatest love, Sara, and his greatest patron, Hickson. And on the way to that end it had included his spending a Learlike night in a storm with his thick-headed, ncompromisingly worshipful young disciple Nosy Barbon, a night full of raving and anger, mostly against the government ("The only good government is a bad one in a hell of a fright," he says then.) It had also included two jail terms, and the destruction of his last two masterpieces, the first having been cut into pieces and used to patch a roof, the second going down when the government demolished the wall he was painting it on--as he was painting on it.

Despite the many setbacks he endures, however, Gully never gives up--his cheerfulness is irrepressible. Even after finding out the fate of "The Fall", the painting which had become part of a tarred-over roof, he is able to say, "Certainly an artist has no right to complain of his fate," and go on to rhapsodize about the miracle of putting the first stroke of paint on a painting, or a chicken-house. "Yes," he says, "the beginning, the first stroke on a picture, or a back fence, must be one of the keenest pleasures open to mankind." In this way, and in the end when near death he feels the urge to laugh at the absurdity of existence and is advised by the nun in attendance that prayer would be better, and he says, "Same thing, mother," that he arrestingly shows himself triumphant over life and death the way the greatest tragic heroes should, and inspires the reader to new dedication against his own troubles.

Gully's triumph, incidentally, is not in the final analysis' merely personal, for his pictures start coming into their own as he departs the scene: the Tate has three or four of them, students are beginning to copy them, and a critic is about to do a biography of their creator. Gully has perhaps not transformed society to the degree he would have liked during his moments of euphoria, when a picture was going well, but he has had a beneficial effect on it. In conclusion, Joyce Gary has, with The Horse's Mouth, achieved a brilliantly authentic portrait of the artist, and shown how inevitable must be society's opposition to what he does, and how equally inevitable must be the artist's eventual victory over, and transformation of, that society. Whether one agrees with me that The Horse's Mouth is a tragedy, or considers it a comedy, one thing is certain: it is a toweringly fine novel.

                                                                                                               10 September 1981