Cock Jarvis An Unfinished Novel Edited by A. G. Bishop with a foreward by Walter Allen

Octavo, [21cm/8.25inches], full gilt-embossed tweed-coloured cloth w/ mylar-protected dust jacket, pp. xvii, 265 w/ annotations. Blank book plate on ffe. Please feel free to inquire as to particulars and/or additional photographs. ... The Sept. 24th, 1975 number of The Kirkus Review noted: Cary tinkered with Jarvis, when teaching himself how to write, from 1924 to 1935 or '37 (Bishop and Allen seem to disagree but in any case it was approximately from the time he lost his market as a magazine writer till he found himself as a novelist), and he claimed to have run it through thirteen versions and a half a million words before he gave it up as unmanageable. What it had yielded, if not a novel, was a viable character so that the novels could come--Allen marks it as the discovery of the "Cary man"--and Bishop has put together selections from earlier and later drafts so that we can see what he means. Start to finish, Jarvis is an estimable Victorian crank who appears to have realized his delusions as governor of a molecule of West Africa that he had personally added to the Empire over H.M.'s objections and those of his own C.O. Also from inception he is facing his end--the C.O. is easing him out and his lady wants to throw him over. In terms of situation he doesn't get far; the more developed version breaks down into notes and question marks--suicide? murder? neither is plausible; more likely he'd go to the shore and drink. But the later version--older, clearly a fool but keeping his head above it by minute-by-minute efforts of flamboyance--is a quantum leap above his prototype. The initial Jarvis talks too fast, like a writer of the '20s containing his pain, and his affiliations (e.g., a disgraced missionary niece) are strictly from stock. His catholic concerns (natives and their proper government', women's rights and female righteousness) seem only illustrations of a complex sensibility. Later though, they are too capricious to be anything but genuine, and there is a magnificent autism about his actions that puts the best of them in moral twilight. He becomes an old survivalist near the end of his wits--what you'd expect of a Kipling man who was introspective and inches too short.