J. L. Carr
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joseph Lloyd Carr (May 20, 1912–February 26, 1994), who often called himself "Jim" or even "James," was an English novelist, publisher, teacher, and eccentric.
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[edit] Biography
Carr was born in Yorkshire, into a family of Wesleyan Methodists. His father Joseph was the eleventh son of a farmer, who rejected farming as a career and went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master for the North Eastern Railway Co. Carr's early life was shaped by failure. Having attended the village school, he failed the Eleven plus exam, and on finishing his school career he also failed to gain admission to teacher training college.
He worked for a year as an unqualified teacher--one of the lowest of the low in English education--at South Milford Primary School, where he became involved in a local amateur football team which was startlingly successful that year. He then successfully applied to a teacher training college in Dudley. In 1938 he took a year out from his teaching career to work as an exchange teacher in Huron, South Dakota in the Great Plains. Much of the year was a struggle to survive in what was a strangely different culture to him, in which his British salary converted into dollars was pitifully inadequate to meet American costs of living.
At the end of the year Carr continued his journey westward, and found himself travelling through the Middle East and the Mediterranean as the Second World War loomed. He arrived in France in September 1939 and reached England where he volunteered for service in the Royal Air Force. He was trained as an RAF photographer and stationed in West Africa, later serving in Britain as an intelligence officer.
At the end of the War he married Sally (Hilda Gladys Sexton) and returned to teaching. He was appointed headmaster of Highfields School in Kettering, a post he filled from 1952 to 1967 in a typically idiosyncratic way which earned the devotion of staff and pupils alike. He returned to Huron, South Dakota in 1957 to teach again on an exchange visit, when he wrote a social history of the Old Timers of Beadle County.
In 1967, having written two novels, he retired from teaching to devote himself to writing. He produced a series of 'small books' designed to fit into a pocket: some of them selections from English poets, others brief monographs about historical events, or works of reference. When larger publishers rejected or remaindered his own novels, he also published them himself. In 1980, he finally won critical acclaim for his novel, A Month in the Country.
In order to encourage children to read, each of the "small books" was given two prices, the lower of which applied only to children. As a result, Carr received several letters from adults in deliberately childish writing in an attempt to secure the discount.
He also carried on a single-handed campaign to preserve and restore the parish church of St Faith at Newton in the Willows, which had been vandalised and was threatened with redundancy. Carr, who appointed himself its guardian, came into conflict with the vicar of the benefice, and higher church authorities, in his attempts to save the church. The building was saved, but his crusade was also a failure in that redundancy was not averted and the building is now a scientific study centre.
[edit] Works
In order to gain some income he began to work as a publisher, producing first a series of maps of English counties, which were designed to be read, rather than to provide navigational information. The original printing plates from several of these maps were mounted on sheets of plywood and used by Carr as "stepping stones" in his garden. The garden also contained statues he had carved himself, many of which had mirrors set into the stone, set at such an angle that the sun would shine through the windows on his birthday.
Carr wrote eight short novels, which contain elements of comedy and fantasy, as well as darker passages, based on his varied experiences of life as teacher, traveller, cricketer, footballer, publisher and restorer of English heritage. All eight were published by different publishers, apart from the last two, which he published himself. Though many of the characters and incidents, and even much of the dialogue, are drawn from life, he always takes them just a little further into the comic. He is widely regarded as a master of the novella form, and his masterpiece A Month in the Country was nominated for the Booker prize in 1980, when it won the Guardian Fiction Prize. He was nominated again for the Booker Prize in 1985 for The Battle of Pollocks Crossing.
Carr wrote several non-fiction works which he published himself at his Quince Tree Press, including a dictionary of cricketers, a dictionary of eponymists, and dictionaries of English Kings and Queens. He also provided the text for several children's textbooks designed to develop English language skills.
[edit] Bibliography
- 1957 The Old Timers. A social history of the home-steading pioneers in the prairie states during the first few years of settlement, as shown by a typical community, the "Old-Timers" of Beadle County in South Dakota. Huron, South Dakota: Privately Printed.
- 1964 A Day in Summer. London: Barrie and Rockliff
- 1967 A Season in Sinji. London: Alan Ross
- 1972 The Harpole Report. London: Secker & Warburg
- 1975 How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup. London: London Magazine Editions
- 1980 A Month in the Country. Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press
- 1985 The Battle of Pollocks Crossing. London: Viking
- 1988 What Hetty Did. Kettering: The Quince Tree Press
- 1992 Harpole and Foxberrow, General Publishers. Kettering: The Quince Tree Press
- 2004 The Last Englishman: a Biography of J. L. Carr by Byron Rogers. London: Aurum Press.
