Biography Essay

Joyce Cary begins Art and Reality (1958), his fine collection of essays on the creative process, with this sentence: "This is an attempt to examine the relation of the artist with the world as it seems to him, and to see what he does with it." This notion is central not only to aesthetic judgment, as discussed in the book, but also to Cary's perception and depiction of the world in which each man is "trying to create a universe which suits his feelings." For Cary, we are all artists struggling with inadequate raw materials to produce something coherent and meaningful in and of our lives. If one's social, political, and moral values are in harmony, then a pattern susceptible to being evaluated and admired in aesthetic terms will emerge; to maintain such a view is not, as it might at first seem, to trivialize our lives...