Miles Jupp on JL Carr, author of A Month in the Country

0:00Today's guest is Miles Jupp, actor, comedian, writer, a man who believed for much of his life that he was descended from Belgian Huguenots, to which we may return. But first, whom have you picked, Miles, and why? I have selected the novelist J.L. Carr, really because I find his novels extraordinarily beautiful. A friend of mine, we sort of overlap in tastes and we sort of send each other recommendations and he said, you must read A Month in the Country, and I'd never heard of it, never read it, and then I came across a copy in Hay, Not So Far From Where I Live, and I just completely adored it.

0:34I didn't know anything at all about him, the writer. Yes. The novels, I think, are beautiful, and every now and then there'll be a sentence that makes you put your bookmark in and just stop and have a good old think for a while. At the end of a month in the country where he says you can ask and ask but you can never have again those things which you once thought you would have forever, I just think it's remarkable. Was it a month in the country that turned you on to him then? Yeah, that was the first one. And I've found since, you know, I've read a lot of them. They're an excellent length, his books.

1:02A writer and a man. What do you think of him as a man? Genuinely unusual, I suppose. I was quite drawn to many aspects of his, from North Riding, where my own mother is from, and then spent much of his life in Kettering, which wasn't all that far from where I spent my teenage years. But I think it's extraordinary, someone having a proper job, and yet being able to, on the side, produce novels of this quality is amazing. But I guess he was a teacher headmaster, and that's a very vocational sort of job. So he might say in interviews, oh, well, I couldn't afford to just be a writer. but also he was doing something that was a genuine calling.

1:38I imagine he did it in a rather unconventional way. It's almost as if he writes of another planet that is strangely like our own, but not quite. Yes. J. Elkar was born in 1912 in Yorkshire in the village of Carlton Miniot. It sounds like the name of a little-known Lib Dem backbench MP. Carlton Miniot. He was a teacher, as you say, he was a novelist, he was a mapmaker, and he was an eccentric. How much do you know about his life? I don't know an enormous amount about him, partly because he himself was deliberately enigmatic. He would, you know, when asked to supply his own biog for publication abroad, he would put as little information as possible.

2:19And he had a kind of... Really, it seemed to me, more for amusement than out of modesty. He would just be deliberately misleading about his own achievements. Teasing people, in a way. Yeah, I think he was sort of able... Maybe that's because of the confidence that having already a job that you can rely on elsewhere. means you don't have to play the game. You never had the chance to meet him? No, by no means. He was shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize, the second time for the Battle of Pollock's Crossing in 1985, and he also won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1980. So he's a notable author. But there's more to him than his books.

2:54Take a listen to this. I was brought up in a Methodist household where we had to entertain the preacher on Sundays. We're talking about the days now when preachers came by foot or bicycle before they had motor cars and they had to stay in the village. And there was a Selby, Yorkshire, headmaster who was a preacher. I remember his great bushy eyebrows when I was a boy. And he said solemnly at dinner time, you should always stop eating when you can eat a little more. And my poor little mind worked out when does that delicate point come. most of us never discover it till the day we die. Sounds rather like a bleak remark.

3:37I remember Mrs Thatcher once saying, one should always be a little bit hungry and a little bit cold. Miles, does he sound like you'd expect? Is that voice what you would have expected? Well, I'm delighted that he sounds like that, to be honest. I'm always envious of people that really sound like where they're from, that their geographical upbringing is part of their identity. identity. And also struck by him talking about that kind of religious upbringing. My own father is a clergyman and not sort of fire and brimstone-y by any stretch, but I do remember we used to go downstairs in the morning when we'd pass underneath a plate that had a quote from the Book of Amos which just said, prepare to meet thy God, which seemed a strange thing to walk past on the way to a bowl of Frosties or whatever it might be.

4:22We were instantly listening to J.L. Carr talking to Sue McGregor back in 1988. And there's a fair bit of archive of him, so hopefully we'll get to hear more. I'm intrigued by this man, who it's best to point out now was known to some as Jim, to some as James, to some as Joseph, and to his friends as Lloyd. He's a riddle, really. But luckily, we have someone who did know Carr, the writer DJ Taylor, or David Taylor. I think you knew him, David, for the last ten years of his life. Is that right? Yes, I did. I knew him from the time when, as a very apprentice literary critic, I was asked to write something about his books.

5:04And at this point, although he'd been shortlisted for the book, as you say, already once by that time, some of the books were so obscure and so difficult to get hold of that I had to apply to Carr himself. Not always like the Harpole Report and things like that, his great school teaching one, but he was very important to me, not only as we've already begun to hear about his idiosyncrasies and his foibles, but he was very important to me personally because I remember at a very early stage in our relationship giving a copy of the Harpole report to the woman who became my wife and she rang me up to say that she'd been convulsed on the tube by reading a single sentence where Mr Harpole rebukes an elderly teacher on the grounds that she's not up to snuff.

5:44And she said, I'll have you know, Mr Harpole, I have 20 years' experience. And he looks at her and says, no, you don't. You have one year of experience 20 times. And Rachel thought this was so... And I then took her to... I rang Jim up and said, can we come and see you? And he said, is she charming? I said, well, absolutely, yes. You got to know him pretty well, then. I suppose I did, yes. He used to quote Samuel Johnson. He would say, a man should keep his friendships in repair. And so he would send you little copies of the booklet that the Quinstree Press published. That was one of his sidelines.

6:16And he would sometimes write the messages actually in the back so that this booklet would appear through the post and you'd think, very interesting, you know, selections from Herrick. I've got one in front of me. You never knew quite what to expect. I remember the first time I went to interview him, this was for The Independent in the days when we had a print independent. And he confused me with the motoring correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, which is one of the reasons I call myself DJ Taylor rather than David. After a whole hour and a half of him asking me, what do you think of Datsuns, Mr.

6:46Taylor? And at the end, he turned to me on the step and said, you're not the motoring correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, are you? But it was also an example, that very first visit was an example of what I've always thought was his, I won't call it devious, but that kind of mischievous, playful side, because he took me to an ancient church out in the Northamptonshire countryside. And he was secretary of the Northamptonshire Church's Preservation Trust. And then all around the side of the church was sort of stoneware and sort of statuary, which had clearly been faked. You know, it wasn't 15th century leftovers.

7:18They'd been polished up and put there. and he admitted to having ceded the churchyard of this church with this fake statue. So I said, do you mind asking me why you've done this? He says, hey, I'll give him something to think about. He was expecting some future archaeologist to come around and think, what's happened here? Do you know, I just wondered when you were telling that story about him thinking you were the motoring correspondent, I just wondered whether he actually knew you weren't and turned the whole thing into a joke. It wouldn't surprise me at all. I was curious about what he looked like and I've got this photograph, Miles.

7:52Take a look. He's not a young man here, but you can see he has character. There's a sort of wary glance that he's giving. There is a sort of guardedness, isn't there? But to me, he looks sort of mischievous. He's in this quite sort of thick-knit cable sweater, isn't he? He looks like a man who knows how to lay and light his own fire. Yes. I have to say he's got an enviable head of hair. Yeah, he's got the arms folded, but to me, he looks sort of mischievous and naughtier, almost like the person, if you were at a party, thinking, crikey, look at these people. He'd be the man you'd look over in the corner thinking, he thinks what I think about these people.

8:27He has that. So, yeah, I'd hope we'd feel a certain kinship with him. He was a great person to interview. I mean, newspaper arts editors knew they would get good copy if you went to interview Jim Carr in Cattergote. And I think he made quite a lot of friends that way, too, with whom he kept up. Let's start with his early life, born in 1912 in Yorkshire, near a railway station. His father worked on the railways. Either of you, what else do we know about the young man? He wanted to be a schoolteacher. He applied to Goldsmiths, a teacher training college as it was in those days, and they said, why do you want to be a schoolmaster, Mr Carr?

9:02To which he airily replied, well, there's quite a lot of free time, isn't there? I can make good use of my holidays. So that was a no-no. He had to take an alternative route. But he started what one would call, I suppose, supply teaching in a very small way, not at all well paid. and took the opportunity. He was very adventurous, you know, for the son of a Methodist lay preacher in the north of England. He was very adventurous. In the 1930s, he went off and taught for a year in South Dakota. South Dakota? Either North or South Dakota, one of the ones, and wrote a very interesting account of this later on and then travelled back to Britain the other way, through the West.

9:39So he was travelling back through India and the Far East in the late 1930s and got back to England just at the time the Second World War was coming out, which was quite an adventurous thing. That was really his life up until 1939, when he joined the RAF. His middle name was Lloyd, and lots of his friends called him Lloyd. Apparently, he was named after David Lloyd George. His parents were great admirers of the Liberal Prime Minister. It sounds like he had not a constrained or even necessarily rigorous childhood, but a very strong family with very strong beliefs and convictions. Yeah, and I think that holding so sort of steadfastly to that contributes to that great sort of fish-out-of-water sense that you get.

10:21You know, his book about South Dakota is about an Englishman going to South Dakota. The further away he goes, in a way, the more the books are about the sort of small world that he came from, I find. Any parallels with your own life? How did you get to where you are? Well, my sort of comic persona, I guess, has an element of that about it. There's sort of, as a young person, I was, what, sort of fogeyish and then would lean into that a bit. Now that I'm middle-aged, that's a harder thing to do because it gets fixed in more naturally. But, yeah, in the past, I mean, I wrote a book once about going...

10:57I went to India pretending to be a cricket journalist and I was lying to everyone, but I travelled around with the press corps and, you know, told people that I was the BBC Scotland cricket correspondent and what have you, and that, yeah, in 2006. and that was a real sort of deliberate, deliberately putting myself as the fish out of the water. Did you get away with it? I got away with it in the sense that I went there and it happened, but I got rumbled by people while I was there, not unreasonably, and I didn't get away with it in the sense of actually getting any work out of it, which I thought was what happened, is that I would, by just being in the right place at the right time, become...

11:26Become what you were pretending to be. Yes, exactly, which it turns out is how a lot of people do it. But I think it's a particularly English or maybe British style of comedy, that being the odd one out, There's a very good description of Stephen Fry of a sequence in the film Animal House, where John Belushi at a party grabs someone's guitar and smashes it to bits. And he says an American comic wants to be John Belushi smashing up the guitar, whereas a British comedian wants to be the person whose guitar is being smashed. And that sort of sense of being on the receiving end of what happens, even your protagonist, quite often in these novels, the protagonist is the person to whom things happen rather than...

12:03I absolutely agree. I mean, Anthony Pohl famously divided the world up into agents and patients. And many of the people in Carr's novels who think they have agency are actually patients. Yes. They're always sort of slightly flawed in some way. I mean, Mr Gidner, who's the narrator of Steeble-Syndaby, you know, it all begins with... After I'd had this trouble and left the theological college... Yes. This trouble, I love that. Fantastically vague. Yeah, yeah. Tell me, Miles, about your Flemish antecedents. I must hear this story. oh well it became a program on this same station but yeah a friend of mine david stenhouse and i made a number of documentaries for radio four and he was saying what else could we do one about and at one point i said oh he was asking about family and he said like where does your name come from i said not much to tell i think my understanding is it's a belgian name it's a huguenot name and he goes oh well that's fantastic why don't we do a thing where um we go back to where your family was from and you do a show there so forth and so we got this commissioned and uh at which point the sort of budget arrived for research to be done and the first person who spoke to it was sort of genealogist saying, well this is completely this doesn't quite sound right and so he rang me and said, can you ask your dad whereabouts it was that you came from so I rang my dad and he said, I don't know I'll ring some cousins and my dad rang me about 20 minutes later and said I'm afraid nobody else believes this and it was complete nonsense there were no Huguenots in Belgium the whole thing was imagined or misunderstood so we ended up writing a documentary about not being Belgian but it turns out, having thought one would.

13:33Back to car. Oh, fair enough. Miles, is the character who is emerging the character that you expected? I had no idea what to expect. I mean, on the one hand, you know, a novel like A Month in the Country, although it's got lots of jokes, and it's serious in terms of a sort of sense of regret, of longing, the sort of slow, crushing effect it has on you. You'd think he could be... We're going to be mentioning A Month in the Country quite a bit, So why don't you just give us a very, very quick thumbnail resume of what A Month in the Country is about? A Month in the Country is a chap sort of damaged after the First World War.

14:12You must correct me, Dave, if I'm getting any of this wrong, because you're absolutely across the details. But he's quite damaged a little bit physically and mentally after the First World War and takes a job restoring murals in a country churchyard. And there he falls in love with the vicar's wife, which sounds like territory for a gentle English farce, but it's not. It's much more than that. It's a very beautiful account of someone slowly repairing themselves on the one hand and the other becoming slightly more damaged and undergoing an experience that will live with them forever. So the idea that he was playful and silly and deliberately mischievous things, I find that very attractive.

14:48For all the humour, and there are some straightforwardly comic novels that he wrote too, that even in the comic novels, the dominating note is elegiac. Elegiac, yes. At the end of how Steeple, Sindaby, Wanderers won the FA Cup, which is the brilliant, you know, the fantasy football thing where the little village side gets to... It's a lovely story. Perhaps if you're a football fan, it's the greatest football novel ever written, probably. And at the very end, the chairman of the club meets the narrator of the novel, the club secretary, and says, it's all gone, Mr Gedner, and it'll never come back.

15:15The team moves on. It'll never happen again. There's just this tiny little moment where everything goes right and happens and then everything explodes. So it's all differentiated. It's not nostalgic, it's elegiac. You mentioned the story of the village football team who make it to the top. Here he is talking to Alan Titchmarsh on daytime TV about one of his books. Mr Carr, I have to ask you first of all, as a Yorkshireman and a lifelong cricket fanatic, what led you to write a book about football team? Well, one has to write books to make a living anyway. And it always struck me that football appears to be the national religion now.

15:54and therefore such a novel might have a lot of readers. It turned out that it didn't. How many did read it? How many did you sell? I sold 2 ,000, which isn't many in a population of 55 million. A moment ago, David, you were waving one of his very slim-looking books, but he also made little tiny books, 16-page books. Is that one of them? This is one of them. This is a selection from Robert Herrick. Yeah, 16 pages, single staple or two. I suppose what you've reminded me by what he was just sort of saying there in the archive is how absolutely precarious for so long a time his position was because he'd been the headmaster of the primary school in Kettering.

16:39He and his wife, he retired at age 55 in 1967, and he and his wife Sally thought they could keep their business of doing the little booklets and the maps as well, which is another thing, and him writing his novels. and he thought that they could survive. They had£1 ,600 worth of capital. Within two years, they had£400 worth of capital and they were wondering what to do. In fact, some remainder copies of the Harpole Report went to pay his butcher's bill in 1972. That I do know. And so it was very much hand-to-mouth. And then he published two little small pamphlet books that did extremely well. One was Karl's Dictionary of Extraordinary English Cricketers, which sold thousands of copies.

17:17Then he wrote another one, which was a guide to kings, queens and something like celebrated hand-fast spouses. And people said to him, you'd made a lot more money if you'd said concubines. And Jim said, no, I revere the memory of my father. That would have been a step too far. But he really was, you know, he was a one-man band. It was all done in the upstairs room of the House of Kettering. I think he had one part-time assistant, but not until, I think, the 1980s was the business ever really on a secure footing. Miles, I was about to ask why he chose to make tiny little books, but I don't think why is ever a useful question in respect to Carr, is it?

17:55Yeah. I mean, can you... Why do you think he did it? I think there is... I mean, he's quite sort of blunt about that in interviews, isn't he? Well, the need to make a living, you know, is sort of almost disarming. But actually, yes, as you say, the sort of sense of desperation of it, being a novelist, but then also wrapping up those novels yourself in brown paper and carrying them down to the post office and sending them off, that's an absolute hand-to-mouth living, isn't it? Well, I went to interview him the first time in 1988 when he just self-published what Hattie did, his seventh novel, because he'd given up on London Publishing.

18:22He couldn't do what he wanted it to do. And the entire print run was sitting in the hall. So one walked through the front door, and there were 2 ,000 paperbacks all piled up. And, in fact, it was very funny, because when we were having lunch, some branch of WH Smith rang up to ask for half a dozen. And Jim was very cagey, very suspicious, didn't really want to let them have them. I think he wanted to sort of vet his customers before he handed them over. He is again explaining his little books, beginning with the poetry versions that he published first. There are lots of people in England, out of the 55 million, that can only put up with a certain amount of poetry.

19:00And 16 small pages is enough for most of them, something they can carry around with them with a handbag. Like most good ideas, it came by accident, and I've kept it going ever since. And you print them yourself? No, I don't print them, but I do put them out to work to printers in Kettering, who like it as a change from printing invoices. But you do sell them yourself? I sell them myself. I sell about 50 ,000 a year. And over the years, I've sold half a million. You're mad about cricket, and that's obvious, because there are at least two delightful collections of cricketing lore and cricketing characters in the series.

19:39That was the big seller. That sold about 35 ,000. and it's been reprinted seven or eight times, that's done very well for me. The Dictionary of Extraordinary English Cricketers, yes, which includes, I think, two dogs, a horse and several women. Who were the women? W.G. Grace's mother, for one person, and another person who used to run races before cricket matches, in her bloomers. In a nice way, you said before, he was very devious. What do you mean by that? Well, I think the story about the fake bits of the 15th century church is one thing. There was a kind of... I suppose what I mean by that is a kind of disinclination to be drawn.

20:26You know, if you went down to interview him, you played by his rules. It's worth saying that he loved Kettering, where he lived with his wife. He once told A.N. Wilson to move there because property was cheap and there were no literary parties. That sounds a very typical J.O. Karamah. Here is Xanadu, he said. Here is Xanadu, which brings us to his writing. Two Booker shortlisted novels, for example. Would you say, David, that it was the film that made A Month in the Country famous? The film came out in 1987. I asked him what he thought of it, and he said rather peremptorily, it looked nice, which I took to mean that he didn't think that they'd done it justice.

21:07But I think the thing... It made various actors reputations. Firth and Branagh made their careers, didn't it? Was that not another country? There doesn't seem to be any film in the early 1980s that didn't have Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth in it. No, I think that's a fair point. In a way, I suppose it brought him to the attention of a wider readership, but there's always been... The Carl Cognacenti were always there. Had there not been a film, the Cognacenti would always have been there. One of his advantages, as well as appealing to ordinary people, he's simultaneously a writer's writer. He had literary friends who admired him, who always made sure that they referred to him and wrote about him, people like the late Penelope Fitzgerald, people like that.

21:45So there was always this little clique of people pushing him because they thought he was so wonderful that his memories should be perpetuated. I get the sense that he had to work hard to remain an outsider. It must have been one of his stated aims. Because also the other thing, him mocking the literary world in old literary London, his novels would definitely come under the category of literary fiction. I mean, it's properly beautifully crafted writing. So he's working hard to make that a sort of point of difference that, oh, I'm not like the rest of you. And yet you think, well, you know. Yes, I mean, there is a...

22:16I agree with you about sometimes it's necessary to cultivate your outsider status. I remember just not long before he died, Chateau and Windus offered him money for an autobiography and he just turned them down because he didn't think there was any... You know, I think he thought he'd written about aspects of his life in his novels. He was a very private person who never revealed that much, I think, when it came to interviews, and he was always very deft, as I've said, at replying to interviewers' questions. I think he just thought that the ideal position was the one that he found himself in, rather than taking money from big London publishers.

22:48What was the biog that he provided for an American publisher? It, again, was a single sentence. J.L. Carr lives in England. That is glorious. You mentioned that Kenneth Branagh helped make his reputation on A Month in the Country. Here he is reading from a biography of Carr. The title, The Last Englishman, was written by Byron Rogers. 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, who had informed them that his was a business venture based on logic, people being unable to take more than 16 pages of poetry at a time.

23:36Those who read books mourned a novelist, graduate students remembering A Month in the Country, schoolteachers' The Harpo Report. Most had forgotten his grumble that novel writing had brought him 17 pence an hour. He claimed to have costed this. One of the things that I really love and admire about him is that he doesn't remind me of anyone else. Yes. He would really write only about an experience which he himself had had. So every single one of his novels is based on a period of his life or an era, a geographical era to which he is well acquainted. So that's partly how the book seemed so different because when he's wondering what to write about, he goes into a particular experience.

24:19You think of life, a lot of it, they're on plateaus, isn't it? So you're going, where are those moments of my life where I wasn't on a plateau? What was the thing that I went through that made me feel very differently about life? differently enough for it to still haunt me or for it to still make me happy. And those are the places he goes to, the ones where he's gone slightly off the beaten path to an experience that was, to him, was life-changing. The obituaries, commented one newspaper profile, were long and appreciative, without ever quite getting beyond the bank of fortifications that the deceased had erected before his highly enigmatic personality and the faint air of concealment that hung over nearly every aspect of his life.

24:58Is that right, David? I fear that it is. In fact, this was a topic of conversation at the funeral about all the people saying how well they thought they'd known him and then suspecting that they hadn't perhaps known him. I suppose the thing I remember best about him, once the tide of ripe anecdote has disappeared, and he was a man who attracted anecdote, as we've just proved, But what I remember is acts of kindness, really. And you've got to remember that he was 50 years older than me. And I was extremely impressed that Jim Carle wanted to be my friend when I was in my 20s. Because I thought, what am I to him?