The Last Englishman

The Life of J.L. Carr

Byron Rogers

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781845138134
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito letterario

'A fine biography… Rogers has done a wonderful job' Daily Telegraph

J. L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: headmaster of a Northamptonshire school, cricket enthusiast and campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen utterly unique novels, including his masterpiece, A Month in the Country, and a publisher of some of the most eccentric – and smallest – books ever printed.

Byron Roger's acclaimed biography reveals an elusive, quixotic and civic-minded individual with an unswerving sympathy for the underdog, who led his schoolchildren through the streets to hymn the beauty of the cherry trees and paved his garden path with the printing plates for his hand-drawn maps, and whose fiction is quite remarkably autobiographical. Much more than the life of a thoroughly decent man, The Last Englishman is a comic and touching anatomy of the best kind of Englishness.

'Conveying the significance of the author of Carr's Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers to anyone unfamiliar with his books, or what may now fairly be called his myth, was always going to be difficult. Somehow, Roger's has managed it' D. J. Taylor, Sunday Times

'A great success, and more life-affirming than F. R. Leavis's entire output' Independent on Sunday

CHAPTER ONE

The Return

I ALWAYS FOUND IT hard to find the street…

The Northamptonshire town of Kettering is on a ridge, and if you approach this from the west, there is a moment on the A43 when, ignoring the wrecked cars in a scrapyard ‘Open Only to the Trade’, you see the towers of what seems to be a Golden City against the sky. This, from a distance.

Once in the town, roads hustle you round a centre energetically wrecked by its own council (against which, placard in hand, he marched in protest for the one time in his life), past canyons of supermarkets and urban sheds, and over the ridge, to where terraces of 1950s housing fall away. These roads do not allow you to make mistakes; you end up either too far north or south, or you just sail by in a relentless stream of traffic. Each time I came I had to ask directions from passers-by, which in its way was appropriate.

‘I’d walk down the road with him, and there’d be all these people saying “Hello, Mr Carr”, and smiling, as though they’d met an old friend. They’d perk up, and he’d perk up, for that was how he liked people, in short, sharp bursts. But I used to wonder which Mr Carr they knew. I often didn’t, and I was his son.’ Robert Carr.

When J.L. Carr died in 1994, those journalists who thought themselves his friends, having initially been sent to interview him, mourned a card. This was the publisher of tiny editions of the great poets (‘mind-enhancing micro-tomelets’, the Times Literary Supplement ponderously called them), who had informed them that his was a business venture based on logic, people being unable to take more than sixteen pages of poetry at a time.

Those who still read books mourned a novelist, graduate students remembering A Month in the Country, schoolteachers The Harpole Report. Most had forgotten his grumble that novel writing had brought him 17p an hour; he claimed to have costed this.

Some at his funeral service at Kettering parish church walked through the churchyard, remembering other churchyards through which an antiquarian had walked with them. A few would have looked up and grinned at the weathered stone figures of St Peter and St Paul over the North door, knowing it was no anonymous stone mason of the Middle Ages but J.L. Carr who had carved them to replace the originals destroyed at the Reformation. They would have known that their angularity had been forced upon him, the stone coming from window-sills and kerb stones demolished by the council, but a Mrs Pulley, who didn’t, wrote to complain about St Paul’s mouth, which, she said, portrayed ‘a miserable, sulky character’. She appealed to him to straighten the mouth and to add colouring.

Cricketers in the congregation remembered a batsman of near Minor Counties standard who had scored his last century at the age of fifty-seven. His ageing former pupils recalled, as in a dream, the headmaster who every year had the whole primary school march through a housing estate, past trees in blossom, all 200 of them reciting the Housman poem, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now…’. Forty years on, to their surprise, they realised they still had the poem by heart.

But journalists, reading public, pupils, the people he had nodded to cheerily in the streets of Kettering, the men who had sat with him on committees advising on church architecture, they mourned different men. There had been so many Jim Carrs, and each had had his own circle of acquaintances who knew nothing about the others. This was how he had kept things. What I remember most about his funeral service was the fidgeting, as people kept squinting sideways to speculate about their neighbours. It could have been the passing of a spymaster.

And then at the very last minute there was the clatter of high heels, and she came, very young, very beautiful, in fashionable black. She came alone and at the end was gone, just as abruptly, into the March afternoon, so I never did find out who she was – ex-pupil, ex-mistress, protégé, fan or cricketer. It was like one of those wistful little moments in the novels, to which nothing leads up and nothing comes of it, just the moment passing. Jim would have liked that.

EXCEPT THAT WASN’T his name. It was only when he died that I found out it had been Joseph Lloyd Carr, the Joseph of which he jettisoned, though in their many letters to each other he and his mother still used it. The Jim he invented for himself at some point, either at training college or during the War, nobody knows why or when, but it still came as a shock to his sisters and brother; also, much later, to someone who had named her first son Jim in his honour. A very old friend was startled to be told, just a few minutes before she was due to meet his Yorkshire relatives for the first time, ‘I think you should know my name’s Lloyd up here.’ To his reading public there were just the initials, J.L. Carr.

By the time he decided to publish his last two novels himself, he seems to have shared in the confusion, and while on the cover of What Hetty Did he was J.L. Carr, on the book’s spine he had become James Carr. To complicate things, he allowed himself the rare luxury of an autobiographical note: ‘James Lloyd Carr attended the village school at Carlton Miniott in the North Riding and Castleford Secondary School. He lives in Northamptonshire.’

But he was at Carlton Miniott for only three years, and there is no mention of the village school at Sherburn in Elmet where he went for five years and where he failed his II-plus twice. Still, the note does represent an advance over an earlier attempt at autobiography: ‘J.L. Carr was born and brought up in North Riding villages…’. This, again, in spite of the fact that he left the North for the West Riding at the age of eight. ‘And now runs a small business in Northamptonshire.’ He did not enlarge on the nature of that business, leaving the reader to speculate on whether it might have been ironmongery or the used car trade. When A Month in the Country was published in America, there was just this: ‘J.L. Carr lives in England.’ Having lived in what had been the Wild West, he was nervous of Americans.

After his death, those who had known him least felt they had lost a friend. Those who had known him best, the more they thought about it, were suddenly struck by how little they had known. A very old friend remembered that Sally, his wife, had said that after many years of marriage, she felt she still didn’t know her husband. But then this was a man who had invented and reinvented himself as he went along.

The Yorkshire Methodist had become the Northamptonshire Anglican, largely, according to his son, on grounds of architecture, although Heulwen Cox, an old family friend, said it was because of the ritual, which, he claimed, made him feel as though he was going to the opera. But he kept what he would once have called ‘a defection’ from his brother Ray until they were both old men, when Ray, as he admitted, was dumbfounded (‘Father wouldn’t have liked that. Or his father either’).

Then there was the headmaster who resigned at fifty-five,when, in that time before early retirement, headmasters quietly dreamt of pensions, resigning to become a full-time writer. Only the writer then became a one-man publisher and founder of the Quince Tree Press (he liked to think of himself as a businessman, and the tree did grow in his front garden), who not only wrote but illustrated his own books and maps, then hawked these round booksellers.

‘… Initial sales expeditions left him shaken. For he discovered the reversal of roles from buyer to seller startlingly diminished his standing. Even the shops themselves presented a disheartening face. As a purchaser, he had rejoiced in book-laden shelves; as a seller, such a sight appalled him.’

Harpole and Foxberrow, General Publishers.

At which point, he told me, the iron had entered a soul already sand-blasted by Methodism. Every man, he went on, should at some time in his life try to sell something.

All this … in Kettering, a large, sad Midlands town where shoes once got made. When the writer A.N. Wilson published his Penfriends from Porlock, a collection of the journalism which, in Wilson’s opinion, had prevented him fulfilling his destiny as a novelist and biographer, Carr in a book review advised him to move to Kettering, where property was cheap and there were no literary parties. ‘Here is his Xanadu. Here, only Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on your doors.’

To the best of my knowledge, Carr only ever went to two literary parties, and then because he had to, as he was on the short list for prizes which were being announced there. At one, he told me, the novelist Beryl Bainbridge had sat under a piano and refused to come out. At the other, according to the biographer Michael Holroyd, Carr’s face was ‘contorted in mild agony’.

For, by then, to all those other Carrs, he had added in his sixties the novelist who won the Guardian Fiction Award, was short-listed twice for the Booker, and had also made the nation laugh with his tiny Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary English Cricketers.

SEVEN YEARS HAD PASSED, and I was almost at his house, for having turned at Wicksteed Park, the landmark so often missed in the past, I was turning left for Mill Dale Road. ‘A conventional sort of detached house, 1950s good taste,’ said Chris Fiddes, a painter with a penchant for darkness and violence. ‘At least it was once. By the end it was so crammed with my paintings, he couldn’t fit any more in. The first one he bought was of bodies I’d seen left behind after a riot in Hong Kong with labels attached to them.’ No. 27 Mill Dale Road.

That address, like Calais, is engraved upon the heart, except that Calais was engraved on just the one. 27 Mill Dale Road, Kettering is engraved on many, for visits to it became a rite of passage for young feature writers. Here they came, at first to meet a one-man publisher who had caught the public imagination.

In 1977 Carr brought out his Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary Cricketers. Like his editions of poetry, this was sixteen pages long, 5 inches by 3¾ inches, only this time it was a series of facts about cricketers, most of them long dead. Also about five women, two dogs and a horse; he liked to add with a headmaster’s attention to detail. Readers found it difficult to forget the horse. ‘Horace, c.1890, a horse of such exquisite sensibility that when Fred Morley, the invariable Notts last man, left the Trent Bridge pavilion, it sidled unobtrusively towards the roller.’

But it turned out that he had not only published it, he had written and illustrated it and packed it and sent off review copies and then sold it himself to bookshops on what he airily described as his trade routes. And there was more. It turned out that he had been a primary school head who, resigning to write novels, had saved himself from ruin by producing maps of the English counties, then by these little books.

The maps he had also drawn, adding curious facts to them, such as that on a map of Westmorland, dedicated to ‘a Mrs Bell of Appleby, who in 1814 took her son John, of the Westmorland Militia, by coach to Portsmouth, only to find that the Fleet had sailed. Hearing that the Fleet was becalmed off the Isle of Wight, she rowed him there. A wind sprang up and she could not return, so with true Westmorland spirit she went to war with her boy.’ Shakespeare appears in a corner of Warwickshire as ‘a man so satisfied with his native land, even its climate, that there is no evidence he ever left it – even for the weekend’.

Then there were the little books of poetry, which, being the size they were, enabled them to be sent in an envelope with the minimum stamp, to fit into the pocket of a jacket and become a prompt in after-dinner speaking. He had published the first of these in 1964 to celebrate the centenary of poet John Clare’s death, after learning that his milkman was the poet’s great great grandson. Or so he said. He had come to know a lot about public taste, he went on, Blake being his bestseller, followed by Shakespeare, Clare and Donne, but Milton and Dryden he could not give away to their countrymen. However, it had allowed him to publish his own favourite, Flecker, and to add in his introduction, ‘He wrote one memorable line, “Their bosoms shame the roses; their behinds / Impel the astonished nightingales to sing”, but then struck it out.’

Entranced, the feature writers listened to all this, knowing their articles were being written for them, for this was Arnold Bennett’s Denry Machin, the Card, alive and well and living in Kettering. Echoing the Borough Librarian, they pondered what this retired headmaster would do next?

Well, he did something Cards don’t do. In 1980 he wrote the novel he called A Month in the Country, though Turgenev had already used the title (his book, said Carr, was better). This was made into the film that launched the careers of Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth, and must have boosted one man’s hourly rate for fiction, but it also added a puzzling Mr Carr to the others around whom he had taken journalists on guided tours.

There were other Mr Carrs they had not met, like the cricketer, and the Anglican committee man who sat in judgement on church repairs, and the ex-Methodist, the son and grandson of lay-preachers, who, like them, sat in judgement on everybody and everything. You had to know him well before you glimpsed this last Mr Carr who sometimes alarmingly stepped through the others as though they did not exist.

As for the journalists, long after they had written their articles, they remembered him, though they were used to meeting people whose names in a few weeks they needed their notebooks to remember. Some of them were summoned to his deathbed; many attended his funeral. They did not forget 27 Mill Dale Road, Kettering either.

There: I have written it out again, for old habits die hard. Journalists who in their articles mentioned that address in full got by return of post a card of congratulation. He did not comment on what they had written, though his approval would have been important; he just wanted his address in full in the paper, which was how perfectly respectable young men and women entered a world of chicanery, the custom on newspapers being to mention the street and the town, but never the house number, presumably so the public could not call on adulterers or absconding solicitors. The result was that no private address, with the exception of 10 Rillington Place, ever appeared in full so often in so many columns of newsprint, which was a great help to J.L. Carr, who, unable to afford the cost of advertising in national newspapers, operated his publishing empire from the back bedroom of 27 Mill Dale Road.

I was turning to go down the hill now, and as I did so, I found myself remembering the choreography involved in meeting Mr Carr if you were on a paper where the features editor had suddenly discovered him. Like America, Mr Carr was discovered many times.

IN THE LATE 1970s and the 1980s those who got off the London train at Kettering were met at the station entrance by a short dapper man, his hair slicked down, wearing a cravat and a striped shirt that usually clashed with the cravat. His bottom lip jutted, distantly suggesting it might not be that good an idea to fall out with Mr Carr. Once a sportsman, his movements were quick, and in his sixties he would walk you up through Kettering, pointing out the church and the old grammar school and any other building which took his fancy. In his seventies there was a car.

The novelist David Taylor, writing for The Independent, was shown a waiting Datsun, not in its first youth, in the station carpark. ‘What d’you think of Datsuns?’ Taylor said he knew nothing about them, but Carr pointed to his dashboard, ‘Very good make. 59,000 miles on the clock’, and for the rest of the journey he talked petrol consumption and the cost of servicing to a baffled David Taylor, who afterwards wrote as D.J. Taylor in case anyone should ever again mistake him for the motoring jour...