Leading us all a dance

Spectator, The, May 31, 2003 by Gardam, Jane

THE LAST ENGLISHMAN

by Byron Rogers

Aurum, L14.99, pp. 274,

ISBN 1854108387

Ask someone what they think of the works of J. L. Carr and you are met with either a seraphic smile or blankness. Even after being listed for the Booker Prize in 1980, when he was over 70, for his novel A Month in the Country, a title he took shamelessly from Turgenev and which was turned into a famous film that launched the career of Kenneth Branagh, Carr's reputation continued to grow mostly by word of mouth. He had had publishers, one of them Penguin, whom he found 'luke-warm', but early decided to publish his work himself from his modest house in Kettering. Kettering is at the very centre of England, a fact made much of by those who stress Carr's essential 'Englishncss', though when a bishop once sang the praises of the unknown beauties of Northamptonshire, Carr said, 'What balls.'

Kettering is far from the literary world. When A. N. Wilson complained in his Penfriends from Porlock how one's friends intrude upon one's profession, Carr replied in a book review, 'He should come and live in Kettering. This is his Xanadu.'

Carr published from his attic, the size of a small pantry, meticulously ordered, each department in a different shoe-box. He had no money. Kettering, a town that makes shoes, provides shoe-boxes free. From shoe-box to the printers and back again Carr found he could have finished copies of a novel delivered in five weeks. The writing took place in the garden in a greenhouse overgrown with passion flowers. Between 1973 and 1992 (he died in 1994) he produced eight novels, densely illustrated and annotated historical maps of the English counties and quantities of the funny, combative 'Small Books' and 'Inflammatory Evangelical Tracts' like The Poor Man's Guide to the Peasants' Revolt and The Young Woman's Old Testament, books flat as greetings cards and cheaper and still in print.

Carr's garden, only 90 feel long, was wild, with paths disappearing into thickets and classical sculptures (Carr's own work - he often stuck 'mediaeval' carvings unasked upon church walls) peering out of the bushes. Paving stones were his old etching plates and beneath the earth who knows? Certainly the family silver that he buried and forgot and a number of porcelain sinks. He opened the garden for one day every year. Whether anyone from Porlock turned up we don't know.

Garden and house are a metaphor for Carr who seems to have been many different men. Byron Rogers, his old friend, working on this the first biography, discovered that he hardly knew him. Carr from childhood used different names. On one of his hooks he has different names on the jacket and the spine. Rogers met different personalities in Carr the writer and Carr the teacher, headmaster, restorer of churches; the Methodist/Anglican, socialist/Thatcherite. In fact a whole village cricket team and 'village Hampden'.

And not that popular, though 'a special man'. He was persistent, difficult, high and mighty. The photographs show a dapper, confident, short-legged, strutting little person capable of landing a left and a right, with the thrust-forward Yorkshire underlip, every inch the old elementary school headmaster who 'saw everyone as someone to be taught something', and yet sometimes the very greatest fun.

Rogers, who is an entertaining journalist and devotee of Carr, is perhaps not a natural biographer and it's clear that he has been led a bit of a dance by Carr as he struggled with this book. We swing between the generations. There is repetition. There are tiresome italics and words - 'Westmorland' - are spelled differently on different pages. There is a mass of fascinating information but no explanation of Carr himself: the passion behind the reticence, the wariness behind the cockiness and the love behind the misogyny.

Childhood, of course, accounts for all and it is a grim thought that Can said that all his novels are autobiographical. As a child, like his father before him, Carr listened to hell-fire sermons. There were beatings after the service from Carr senior for a laugh during prayers. Carr grew up expecting nothing to be easy. When the pedals of his first bike didn't work he thought they were meant to be like that and arrived home from a family ride in a state of collapse. On another bike-ride he fell off in the road and his father didn't even look round. There were no sweeteners, no fun. Pubs were mentioned in whispers. Alcohol was the demon. When poor Rogers first visited Carr he took him a bottle of whisky which was ceremoniously handed back to him in the ominous garden on a tray. Carr's grandfather, an inebriate pork-butcher, had broken his neck falling downstairs while under the influence. It is all in the novels. 'Genetically, I can't drink,' said Carr. He finished up an Anglican, fighting with bishops over abandoned churches and offering half a bottle of sweet wine at lunch, but thanking God his mother never knew.

All this and a sadistic teacher at his first school probably made Carr unteachable there. He twice failed the eleven-plus, his less clever siblings all going on to grammar school. A private school was found and he did well enough to gain an interview for a place at a teachers' training college, but gave a suicidal answer to the question, 'Why do you want to he a teacher?' (viz. 'Because it leaves me so much time for other pursuits'). Through these years he was gathering the knowledge that was to flower into the historical maps. In time he became a famous headmaster, remembered for running arithmetic races on sports day and leading the whole school around the town shouting poetry. He was a fine cricketer (the Small Book Extraordinary English Cricketers is his bestseller), understood and wrote about football fever and ran his teams like Moses among the tribes.