J. L. Carr | Articles in Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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The Harpole Report; A Month in the Country, [8] 12; maps, dictionaries and small books of, [32] 69; A Month in the Country, [69] 54; A Day in Summer, [80] 49

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Old Testament Profits

Ursula Buchan on J. L. Carr, A Day in Summer

Nearly thirty years ago, I let down J. L. Carr, the novelist, and, as a result, regret grabs me by the throat every time I take down one of his books from the bookshelf. Reading A Day in Summer recently proved no exception.

Judgement Day

C. J. Driver on J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

After a lifetime of teaching English literature, I have accumulated a private and rather eclectic pantheon of great (mainly modern) novels, in which J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country holds a central place. Carr finished it in 1978, and it was published in 1980 by the Harvester Press, and then by Penguin in paperback. The novel received more acclaim in America than in Britain, although it did make the shortlist for the Booker Prize, where it lost out to one of William Golding’s less successful novels. In due course, as was Carr’s wont – because he thought little of most commercial publishers – he bought back the rights and published it under his own imprint of the Quince Tree Press, from which (blessedly) copies are still available (as are Carr’s seven other novels).

Trouble at Tampling

C. J. Driver on J. L. Carr, The Harpole Report

J. L. Carr was a primary school head in Kettering, Northamptonshire, who took early retirement from teaching so he could become a full-time writer, and who supported himself, his wife and his son in the meantime by setting up and running from his home a publishing house, the Quince Tree Press, which produced a series of ‘little books’, mainly selections of the great English poets, and county maps that Carr drew and illustrated himself. Probably the most famous of the ‘little books’ – designed to fit into an envelope and light enough for an ordinary postage stamp – is Carr’s Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers. Carr wrote eight novels, one of which is, I am as certain as it is ever possible to be, a masterpiece. One cannot credit him with the amplitude which T. S. Eliot identified as one of the characteristics of greatness in a writer, because even that masterpiece – A Month in the Country – is very short, almost a novella, but it contains more of the fullness of life than most very long novels.

Extra-ordinary Cricketers . . .

Andrew Hall on the maps, dictionaries and small books of J. L. Carr

In July 1967 the schoolmaster and part-time novelist J. L. Carr took two years’ leave of absence to see if he could make a living as a publisher of illustrated maps and booklets of poetry. Both were unusual: the maps featured small, annotated drawings of people, buildings, flowers, animals and recipes associated with places in the old English counties and were meant for framing and to stimulate discussion, while the works of British poets were presented in 16-page booklets, as Carr believed that people could only absorb a few poems at a time.

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