A House of Children

by Joyce Cary

A drab, drear-looking house, Dunamara squats on the Donegal coast across the lough from Derry. It is a rough, windswept setting, but for six-year-old Evelyn Corner - brought here each year to holiday with his brothers, sisters and cousins - it is an enchanted place.

Genres: Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Cary now undertook his great works examining historical and social change in England during his own lifetime. The First Trilogy (1941–44) finally provided Cary with a reasonable income, and The Horse's Mouth (1944) remains his most popular novel. Cary's pamphlet "The Case for African Freedom" (1941), published by Orwell's Searchlight Books series, had attracted some interest, and the film director Thorold Dickinson asked for Cary's help in developing a wartime movie set partly in Africa. In 1943, while writing The Horse's Mouth, Cary travelled to Africa with a film crew to work on Men of Two Worlds.

Cary travelled to India in 1946 on a second film project with Dickinson, but the struggle against the British for national independence made movie-making impossible, and the project was abandoned. The Moonlight (1946), a novel about the difficulties of women, ended a long period of intense creativity for Cary. Gertrude was suffering from cancer and his output slowed for a while.

Gertrude died as A Fearful Joy (1949) was being published. Cary was now at the height of his fame and fortune. He began preparing a series of prefatory notes for the re-publication of all his works in a standard edition published by Michael Joseph.

He visited the United States, collaborated on a stage adaptation of Mister Johnson, and was offered a CBE, which he refused. Meanwhile he continued work on the three novels that make up the Second Trilogy (1952–55). In 1952, Cary had some muscle problems which were originally diagnosed as bursitis, but as more symptoms were noted over the next two years, the diagnosis was changed to that of motor neuron disease, a wasting and gradual paralysis that was terminal.

As his physical powers failed, Cary had to have a pen tied to his hand and his arm supported by a rope in order to write. Finally, he resorted to dictation until unable to speak, and then ceased writing for the first time since 1912. His last work, The Captive and the Free (1959), first volume of a projected trilogy on religion, was unfinished at his death on March 29, 1957.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a house by the sea which on all the school holidays filled up with children… A House of Children is fictionalized recollections of childhood and although the story is full of summertime joy Joyce Cary writes very analytically…

Small children are thought happy, but for most of the time they do not even live consciously, they exist; they drift through sensations as a pantomime fairy passes through coloured veils and changing lights.

Children of all ages… Brothers, sisters, cousins… Merriment and mischiefs… Noise and tumult… Curiosity and thirst for knowledge…

We were exploring the world, but only with our nerves. We had no words for classifying our discoveries. We were still like feelers, antennae of some larger being, the leaves of a sensitive plant, put out to examine the world.

Games and fun… Swimming and sailing… Every day brings some new experience and new impressions…

The little animal of mine was but half alive, half formed; his senses, keen and sharp, had few forms of precision and wasted themselves in vague confusion, in perplexity, in mere existing. For often when I was busily engaged on some task, digging waterworks on the shore or prowling the rocks with a bucket and landing-net, I was unconscious of any purpose.

With every year children grow a bit older… New wishes and new interests… Bathing at night and amateur theatre… Desire to penetrate the world of adults…

“See, a whale.”
I gazed across miles of little jumping peaks like circumflexes. Suddenly a thin feather of brightness, like a puff of steam, appeared, all by itself, in the air. It seemed to have no connection with the water below.
“There you are – there he blows off steam – he’s ocean bathing, too.”
“Is it hot?”
“Oh, yes, he’s as hot as you are inside – hotter.” My father laughed, enjoying my look of astonishment.
But it was the phrase, “he’s ocean bathing, too,” which excited me. I felt the magnificence of sharing bathing-places with a whale. We both used an ocean.

Children and grownups, animals and plants – all animate and inanimate things are just a part of the same grand world.

[alexggrandma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, really special. This is autofiction about Joyce Cary’s childhood which he, i believe, (hilariously, to me) tried to pass off as pure fiction previously. I don’t think someone could write something so gorgeous and fully realized without having lived it. So why obscure that fact? I’m not sure. This is a book concerned with the beauty and magic that childhood felt-like. Honestly it spoke to me in such a profound and astounding way. It brought back feelings i didn’t think i’d ever see rendered in (gorgeous) prose. I loved these characters (ha-ha), i loved the evocation of how bizarre and mystical childhood feels (felt), and i loved the prose. Gorgeous perfect blah blah blah

I was sad to leave these characters and this book behind. This book has given me one of the strongest i-must-reread-this-right-now feelings i’ve ever had, but alas; there are so many more authors to look into and so i am moving on to another as i write this.

It even contains a fucking life-changing viewing of The Tempest that alters the course of the main character’s (yet again, ha-ha) life. Come on, why in the world haven’t more people read this book?

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce Cary was a major figure in the mid-twentieth century literary landscape, and his novel Mister Johnson still featured in A Level syllabuses well into the 1980s, but he is little read today. If he is known at all, then it is for the tour de force portrait of the bohemian artistic life in his novel The Horse’s Mouth, which often features in lists of neglected masterpieces. A House of Children, published in 1941, has precious few reviews on Goodreads but is certainly deserving of a wider readership for its remarkable portrayal of childhood and the way children perceive the world around them. It’s a lightly fictionalised account of Cary’s own childhood holidays spent with aunts and cousins on the shores of Lough Swilly in Donegal, a few miles from his home in Derry/Londonderry in the 1890s. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything where the experience and perceptions of childhood are captured as effectively as they are here, from a description of the play of watery light across all the surfaces of the house to the confusion and difficulty in understanding adult behaviour and motivation, reading A House of Children is like seeing the world through six year old eyes again.

[Maria Haag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Joyce Cary book I’ve read is a delight. This moves more slowly than others, but the overarching water and storm imagery, culminating in a beautifully interpreted performance of The Tempest, makes the slow pace rich and rewarding.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the great books about how children experience the world and discover their sense of themselves and others.

[Leo Ratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful, wondrous (somewhat autofictional?) account of a childhood filled with the sea, poetry, family, friendship, naiveté and the true wonder only children seem to know. I do feel it dragged a bit in the middle portion and while it does feel a bit like Little Women in the sense that it is sweet and lovely, at some points I really wished some more stuff should happen. Still, this is written in a gorgeous way and towards the end it really hooked me again. A book that truly does feel like summer and made me remember this hazy wonder and curiosity that filled my childhood, as well.

[Michael Vawser]

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