Two Carps

Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself is one of those legendary books you hear about and add immediately to your wants list. After years of searching I spotted a ‘Carp’ on the shelf of a charity bookshop and purchased it without hesitation. On arriving home, however, I discovered the book was in fact The Journal of Edwin Carp by Richard Haydn. I’d bought the wrong Carp.

But the wrong Carp repays study. The illustrations alone, by Ronald Searle, are worth the admission price. The author, Richard Haydn, was an actor, best known for playing the von Trapps’ impresario in The Sound of Music. Set in the late 1930s, the book purports to be the journal of Edwin Osric Carp, a 42-year-old bachelor who runs a boarding-house with his increasingly deaf and senile mother and an outspoken housekeeper. They have two paying guests: a vulgar male drunk and a female virgin who sleepwalks in the nude. Carp derives further income from the rent of two houses he owns in the same street. One of them is occupied by a blowsy woman who entertains members of the armed forces. Clearly – to all except Carp – she is a prostitute, and he is innocently living off immoral earnings. Meanwhile, he has been engaged for nine years to Maude Phelps, a widow with a 14-year-old son called Harrison, an overweight horror with weak kidneys, an early moustache and a violent girlfriend called Ursula. In his spare time Carp is an amateur poet – ‘Ode to an Empty Bird’s Nest’ – and President of the Society of Health through Sanitation, a post he inherited from his father who died while gathering data in a branch sewer beneath the Town Hall. There were other causes, too: ‘I am willing to admit that my Mother has a dominant personality, but the true cause of my Father’s downfall was intemperance. How dreadful is this disease and how tragic its victims. They resist all attempts at rehabilitation and Reason is a useless weapon with which to combat the demon that rides them.’ Carp is further beset by lazy plumbers, idiot librarians, colourblind plasterers, hysterical piano teachers and an eccentric hairdresser with twelve children who gives him a wig that he doesn’t want and which is later mistaken for a dead rat. Only when his mother dies is he able to marry Maude. If The Journal of Edwin Carp is a sharp satire on the suburbs, then Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself is an even sharper satire on religion. The eponymous hero (if that’s the word) is a humourless 47-year-old Low Church evangelical, grossly overweight, who lives with his equally fervent father (his massive ears have independent motion) and poor put-upon mother. On the first page of the book – subtitled Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man – Carp sets out his creed:

In an age when every standard of decent conduct has been torn down; when every newspaper is reporting scenes of violence, divorce and arson; when young girls smoke cigarettes; when mature women enter the sea in one-piece bathing costumes; and when married men prefer the flicker of the cinematograph to the Athanasian Creed – then it is obviously a task to place some higher example before the world.

And this he does for the next 191 pages. The book is endlessly quotable – as proved by Frank Muir in his Oxford Book of Humorous Prose – and is packed with Dickensian characters. These include fishmonger and poulterer Alexander Carkeek (‘a northern Caledonian of the most offensive type’); the Reverend Eugene Cake, author of Gnashers of Teeth and Without Are Dogs; Mrs O’Flaherty, an Irish cleaning-woman who has ‘the superficial charm of her race’ and an awful son called Desmond; and Ezekiel Stool, a man with a dread of shaving who was once mistaken, by small boys on Bonfire Night, for a Guy Fawkes. Most of them suffer from various physical afflictions (the author was a doctor). Simeon and Silas Whey have speech impediments; Emily Smith, Carp’s playmate, is an albino; Mr Beerthorpe is a shortsighted and alcoholic German teacher; and Mrs Septimus Lorton is described as ‘a heavily constructed woman of immense height with a bovine chin’. Ezekiel Stool’s father Abraham (later removed to an asylum), the inventor of Adult Gripe Water, believes that he is the reincarnation of a Hebrew patriarch and ‘several times insisted on my approaching him and placing my hand under his left thigh, after which he would offer me, in addition to Mrs Stool, a varying number of rams and goats. Needless to say, I declined to accept these . . .’ Carp himself is afflicted with gluttony, indigestion, a skin complaint called erythema and ‘several forms of neurasthenia, a marked tendency to eczema, occipital headaches, sour eructations, and flatulent distension of the abdomen’. For much of the novel Carp, despite poor health and an increasing girth, gets his own way. He blackmails his headmaster into getting him a job in a religious publishing house, where he has a drunken workmate sacked and sues the local doctor for misdiagnosing his ringworm and prescribing an ointment which gives him ‘cranial nudity’. It’s only towards the end that his world closes in. The sacked man’s daughter gets him drunk on port-wine and he loses his job. His father dies and his mother runs off to France with the housekeeping money. Carp is forced to approach Ezekiel Stool for the hand of one of his rich but ugly sisters. There are five to choose from: Faith, Hope, Charity, Tact and Understanding. The first three are triplets marked by smallpox; the last two are twins, one of whom, Tact, has webbed feet. As you may have guessed, Carp has to marry Tact, and they have an ugly baby. The book has a strange history. Published anonymously in 1924, it then fell out of print and was not reissued until 1954. Eleven years after that Anthony Burgess and Robert Robinson met on a TV quiz show called Take It or Leave It. Robinson quoted a line from the novel and was surprised when Burgess recognized it. Both were huge fans – so much so that Burgess wrote a piece in the Times Literary Supplement seeking to discover the true identity of the (by now late) author. His family reluctantly revealed his real name: Sir Henry Howarth Bashford, Honorary Physician to King George VI. The following year, Burgess persuaded Heinemann to bring out a new edition for which he provided a foreword. Robinson provided another one for the 1987 Penguin paperback. Later, Kingsley Amis reviewed Frank Muir’s anthology (not kindly) and also revealed himself to be a fan of Carp. But how do the two Carps compare with other English comic classics such as The Diary of a Nobody, Cold Comfort Farm and Three Men in a Boat ? They more than hold their own, which makes their neglect all the more puzzling. The Journal of Edwin Carp has never been reprinted since its hardback début, and Augustus Carp, Esq. has been reissued only four times in nearly ninety years. One explanation is their complete lack of English cosiness. They are surprisingly tough for their times. The Journal of Edwin Carp has less-than-veiled references to drunkenness, prostitution, virginity, vomiting and urination. Its author, Richard Haydn, was homosexual and took an extremely cynical view of suburbia, women, marriage and children. Augustus Carp, Esq. is an attack on religion and hypocrisy. Bashford had a religious mother and fell among ‘muscular Christians’ at university. The book was his revenge. An enterprising publisher could do worse than reprint both these splendid books back-to-back in one volume. It could be entitled Two Carps.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © Andrew W. Pye 2013