The Horse's Mouth.

£500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Signed by Cary on the title page, and with his unsigned presentation inscription on the front free endpaper “Gerald Wilde from his most grateful admirer the author. March 1950.” With an additional note by Cary that “This is much the best edition with the last corrections.” and with Wilde’s bold ownership inscription below. A first rate association copy, albeit a complicated one. The Horse’s Mouth , by a long way Cary’s most successful novel, is the first-person account of the life of Gulley Jimson, a drunken charismatic profligate genius of an artist. The character of Jimson is usually believed to be based on Gerald Wilde, notorious at the time as, well, a drunken charismatic profligate genius of an artist. However, if anything the real artist Wilde appears to have been, if not created in the image of the fictional Jimson, at least modified by it in something of a creative feedback loop. In 1955 Cary told the story of their first meeting, in 1949 “Wilde seemed like a spectre. His long, dead-white face with its hollow cheeks was like a mask of bleached skin on a skull, his arms seemed but bones, hanging loosely in the sleeves of an enormous coat whose crumpled folds gave no room for flesh. The arms, too, were extremely long, so that the bony hands almost touched the floor … All this figure was in violent and continuous agitation, and with a movement that seemed by itself preternatural … It was this shivering, shaking which, more than anything, gave, at the moment, the sense of

• Year: 1944

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