December 7, 1888

The Horse's Mouth (1944) is perhaps the most famous novel Joyce Cary (December 7, 1888 to March 29, 1957) wrote, though it was not the only one of his books to be filmed.

The Horse's Mouth is described by the New York Times reviewer, Bosley Crowther, as a:
"rather difficult, humorous novel,....which tells of an English artist who fights for his slightly tattered soul..."

Another summary refers to Cary's artist/scoundrel focusing on a cat at a pub:

'....[the] Feathers, where a cat becomes a metaphor for existential being. She is, "the only individual cat in the world. Universal cat" ..., she is associated with Blake's Tiger, ... and she is seen, like all of physical reality in this book, as one of the paths towards spiritual essence...'

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Cary was born into an old Anglo-Irish family, and at age 16 he studied painting in Edinburgh and then in Paris. From 1909 to 1912 he was at Trinity College, Oxford, where he read law. Having joined the colonial service in 1914, he served in the Nigeria Regiment during World War I. He was wounded while fighting in the Cameroons and returned to civil duty in Nigeria in 1917 as a district officer. West Africa became the locale of his early novels."

The Horses's Mouth was one of a trilogy, each novel written from the viewpoint of a a different character in the story. Britannica sums up Joyce Cary's career:

"Cary’s other trilogy is seen from the vantage of a politician’s wife in A Prisoner of Grace (1952), the politician himself in Except the Lord (1953), and the wife’s second husband in Not Honour More (1955). He planned a third trilogy on religion but was afflicted with muscular atrophy and knew he could not live to complete it. Hence he treated the theme in a single novel, The Captive and the Free (1959). ..."

Joyce Cary is a novelist I should not have forgotten about.