Words May Fly Abroad: The Unique Career of J.L. Carr

Born at Thirsk, educated at Carlton Miniott village school in the North Riding and at Castleford Secondary School. Teacher. RAF Officer, Headmaster, Publisher and Novelist. Author of Carr’s County Maps, over ninety Pocket Books and eight novels.
                                       —From the Pocket Book on J.L. Carr 

It was that excellent, lisping dandy, Frank Muir, the one who co-wrote Take It from Here, the 1950s radio show, with Denis Norden—I listened to it from the age of ten, on my crystal set—who introduced me to Jim Carr. He told us all to read The Harpole Report, Carr’s novel based very loosely on his experience as a primary school headmaster in Kettering. (That thing about the crystal set is a dramatic truth but not true in any other way, something Carr himself went in for rather.)

Let us start with his name. His Sunday Best name was Joseph Lloyd Carr, the Joseph of which he soon got rid of. Joseph for Joseph Chamberlain and Lloyd for Lloyd George. Carr was quirky, like them. “Jim” he invented. James is on the spine of his penultimate novel, What Hetty Did. The real Carr remains elusive.

Schoolmaster and novelist. But also a poet with a Housman flavour:

A Deserted Cricket Field near Clifton

Ah far off is that country

And distant is that shire

And long’s the road to Purbeck Isle

The land that I desire

The land I most admire.

When I return to Purbeck

I think I know a tree

Where bells from seven churches

And three across the sea

Can all be heard by me.

But if I never come there

And far away must die

Oh bear me back to Purbeck

And ever let me lie

Where bells from ten tall belfries

Sound faintly down the sky.

He was also a sculptor (his garden was full of their spiky presence), footballer and cricketer—a neat, dapper batsman of good club standard—map-maker (I’ll come to the maps later) and publisher. When he gave up teaching suddenly and for ever, he needed an income. And the publishing supplied that.

What did he publish? The ninety small books were mostly English poetry—Blake and Marvell went well, but he said he could not sell Pope or Dryden to his countrymen at any price—but also English Kings and Queens, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary and, best of all to my mind, Extraordinary English Cricketers, containing entries like these:

PERCY HOLMES, Yorks, d. 1971, an unusually straight-backed opening bat who, in 1925, scored 2,453 runs. As he made his jaunty way from pavilion to wicket, discerning spectators received the impression that he was off for a day at the races, whilst his partner, Herbert Sutcliffe, had been called upon to lay an Aldermanic stone. He once described an innings on a broken, dusty pitch as like batting on Blackpool sands.

HORACE, c. 1890, a horse of such exquisite sensibility that, when Fred Morley, the invariable Notts last man, left the Trent Bridge pavilion, he sidled unobtrusively towards the roller.

D.R. JARDINE, Surrey, d. 1958, sailed to Australia in 1932 to bring back the Ashes. And he did.

We can see from these entries that Carr had an exquisite style and the driest of wits.

Now for the novels. He wrote eight, none of them very long. The first two are rather stark, containing violence and death. The later books tend to be more benign.

A Day in Summer, his first, was published in 1964 by Barrie and Rockliff, then by Quartet, then Hogarth Press, and lastly by Jim himself. This pattern tends to be followed, which argues that the first publishers printed very short print runs, not having much confidence in the books, and were later proved wrong. Carr didn’t help himself by never producing a similar book to his last, which is what publishers like, forty Poirot books and forty Miss Marple books. Carr thought that would be boring.

Here is a paragraph from the middle of the book:

Faces turned towards the afternoon. The face of Edward Bellenger, still as soon it would be in death, a blind drawn over a mind groping deeper and deeper into memories of a past summer, Herbert Ruskin’s face, like the face on a Roman coin, lip trembling, eyelid twitching and, sometimes, passing across it like a shadow, the face of another man.

This is fine writing, writing designed to impress, by a new writer feeling his way. And he does impress D.J. Taylor, a critic of distinction who speaks of “soured sweetness”. Good, but in my opinion no cigar.

A Season in Sinji (1967) is the real thing, perhaps partly because Carr draws on his experiences in the RAF in West Africa during the Second World War. He knew the Catalina flying boat, which would take off with “the ghastly scraping din under her keel, like a rake being dragged across a corrugated iron roof”.

The first-person narration is more trenchant:

Perhaps I’ve given the impression that RAF Sinji was a cross between a Butlin’s and Pentonville. Most of the time it was. But, for the record, sometimes there was a moment—like the deep roar of a kite overhead flying low as she comes in to glide down to the creek—when you felt a sudden thrill to be there, with but an obscure part, in this great catalogue of war.

This is plain speaking. So, when at the end of the book, the narrator speaks out in despair at the death of Caroline, the girl he loves, we feel keenly his pain and his anger:

Plan! There was no plan. You could organize the little things and kid yourself there was some system, but the big thing, Life itself, was a sprawling, shapeless, disgusting mess. It had about as much plan as a sow’s litter.

I remember shivering in the baffling heat. Then sobbing on and off until darkness fell, bringing the rain.

At such moments the author disappears, becomes invisible, as I think Joyce says (though God knows, he does not follow his own precept).

And now we come to The Harpole Report (1972), Secker, Quartet, Penguin and Carr’s own Quince Tree Press, whose book I hold in my hand. It contains wonderful photographs of Carr’s own school—Carr batting in the playground, children dancing round a maypole, all redolent of my own primary school in the early 1950s; I am sure there is raffia work somewhere and the smell of plasticine.

It is here Carr begins his practice of reintroducing characters from old novels. Croser, the useless and idle young teacher, comes from A Day in Summer. The novel is told through letters and journals, a practice hallowed by time from the eighteenth century. But it is difficult. Carr succeeds triumphantly.

The extract here tells part of the tale of Titus Fawcett, a clever and independent-minded boy, who finds a different solution to an arithmetic problem from the one at the back of the book, thus bringing down the wrath of his teacher, Mr Pintle, for whom authority is sacrosanct. You will doubtless guess that Titus is proved right; the book’s author later confesses that he made a mistake. One of the teachers, Emma Foxberrow, describes the events in a letter to her sister:

… roaring noise from Jas. Pintle’s (One of the Old School!) room, so went into my stockroom and pinned an ear to the party-wall.

“IF I SAY IT IS WRONG IT IS WRONG,” Pintle is bellowing, plainly beside himself with rage.

“But sir,” some boy replies in calm and reasonable tones, “I have gone through my working three times and carefully checked each process …”

“BE STILL! I’LL HAVE NO MORE OF YOUR CONFOUNDED IMPERTINENCE. ANOTHER WORD AND BACK INTO THE CORRIDOR YOU GO. IF I SAY IT IS WRONG, IT IS WRONG.” Silence … Mutiny quelled.

Ten minutes. More cries of rage. Hurry back to pin ear. Pintle bending slightly. “My answer- book says it is wrong. So it is wrong. NO, YOU MUST NOT DO IT AGAIN. It is plain your poor little brain cannot cope with it. Go on at No. 47.”

An extract from Harpole’s journal follows:

Found Titus Fawcett sitting in solitary state at a desk in the upper corridor, looking surprisingly calm in mind. He acknowledged my approach with a mild smile and continued working.

“What is all this argy-bargy about?” I demanded.

“Mr Pintle and I had a disagreement,” he replied simply.

Mr Pintle here appears in a ridiculous light, but elsewhere he is treated with respect. Emma Foxberrow, the young Cambridge graduate who upsets the apple cart whenever she can, and George have an affair and turn up in two more books.

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup (1975) is only just over a hundred pages long. It is autobiographical inasmuch as Carr did play for a local side which won against the odds. “I dredged up memories of 1930 when I was an unqualified teacher eighteen years old and playing for South Milford White Rose when we won a final which never ended.” This was due to fighting among the spectators and pitch invasion, so football violence is no new thing.

Now we come to the book which made him famous, A Month in the Country (1980), which is the same length as Steeple Sinderby, more of a novella.

The fame is mainly because it was made into a film in 1987 with Natasha Richardson and Colin Firth, which boosted Carr’s pay rate for fiction which, he said, “formerly stood at 17 p an hour”. I had always thought Carr’s fiction to be essentially unfilmable, but it is a remarkably good film. The tale is not really one of love, which is what films are usually about, but a painting which Birkin, the protagonist, discovers under whitewash in the local church:

It was the most extraordinary detail of a medieval painting that I had ever seen, anticipating the Breughels by a hundred years …

It was breathtaking. (Anyway, it took my breath.) A tremendous waterfall of colour, the blues of the apex falling then seething into a turbulence of red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts.

In the film the rendering of the painting is particularly fine. Firth, who was then relatively unknown, is superb as the shellshocked veteran Birkin.

The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (1985) is set in South Dakota, where Carr taught on exchange in the 1930s. We can note in passing that each book takes three or four years, even though they are all short, so we can say that Carr, like the medieval artist, was a meticulous worker. This book gave him particular trouble, probably because it is untransmuted autobiography. George Gidner is Jim Carr or Jimmy as his pupils at Palisades called him. There is a photograph of Carr with his wife Sally and his son Bob in front of The Little School on the Prairie on Jim’s second visit in 1987 to what, in Bob’s case, was The Land of Ice Cream.

What Hetty Did (1988) is probably my second favourite of the novels. The character of Hetty, a teenage girl, is so attractive, so dauntless, and George and Emma are back again, as well as seventeen others. Old Emma cries in the night because she has lost George for ever, but fear not, gentle reader. He is there to sweep her off her feet.

Harpole and Foxberrow General Publishers (1992) is Jim’s Tempest, the calm after the storm, and his last word. He is back in the printing office, where he began. George says to Hetty:

Hetty dear, you ask what brought things to a finish. Well … I’m not sure. Anyway, not absolutely sure. You see one thing seemed to spring from another as though, in its ups and downs, our little business had a mind of its own. As often as not, we didn’t need to agonize over decisions: inevitably there was no other course but to hang on and hope all would be well. Then, without breast-beating, heart-burning, it came to a full stop. And no one seemed to mind.

Anyhow, that’s how I saw it. Of course I can’t answer for Emma. Who could? Emma was Emma. Need I say more?

And that is that. Except that it isn’t. There is still the matter of those wonderful maps. I possess the one of Kent. It is not exactly a map, covered as it is with people and places, all drawn meticulously by Jim Carr himself. There is the Cathedral. And there is Alfred Mynn, the Lion of Kent, twenty stone of bone and muscle who could bat better than any man in England and bowl too at a terrific pace. Buy one of those. And buy the books. And anything else from Quince Tree Press that may take your fancy.

All the Quince Tree Press books carry this reassuring inscription:

This is a Printing Office,

Cross-roads of Civilisation,

Refuge of all the Arts against the Ravages of Time.

From this place Words may fly abroad

Not to perish as Waves of Sound but fix’d in Time,

Not corrupted by the hurrying Hand but verified in Proof.

Friend, you are on safe ground:

This is a Printing Office.