Vivian Gornick on J.L. Carr
Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: notes of a chronic re-reader includes a chapter on J.L. Carr’s beautiful achievement A Month in the Country, an apparently slight book that as I wrote last July
contains multitudes. It is about trauma, community, friendship, the countryside, time, the pleasures of work, simplicity, memory, England, architecture, art, archaeology (of various sorts) and, yes, love.
As Gornick writes in her introduction to this collection of essays on books she has re-read,
It was to the books that had become my intimates that I would turn and turn again, not only for the transporting pleasure of the story itself but also to understand what I was living through, and what I was to make of it.
‘Transporting pleasure’ is an apposite term to use for Carr’s novel, which Gornick writes about in Chapter 7, and which she first read in the 1980s. She goes on to examine Pat Barker’s excellent Regeneration (which I’ve taught several times), and comments:
When I re-read them both recently, I had the uncanny sensation that the large one (Regeneration) was commanding me to give the small one (A Month in the Country) a kind of attention that I had previously denied it.
She writes that it was the rural idyll element that she remembered from her first reading, and less of the darker landscape. Both novels are, of course, about the damage done to individual men by the War, and how the characters are or are not regenerating/recovering. She had forgotten how much Carr’s central character, Tom Birkin, is a casualty.
Birkin is a survivor of Passchendaele, a true horror (right now true horrors from are again on our screens). Though he now has a stammer and a twitch, he is not a nihilist. He takes very seriously the work of restoring the mural, and it comes alive for him:
The joy Tom feels over every element of the restoration process is palpable.
And he starts to see look deeply into the life he sees in the painting, until eventually he has fully revealed the masterpiece, the moment of glory being when he, and only he for that precious moment, witnesses it in its astonishing greatness.
As this process takes place, his own connection with the vicar’s beautiful wife, Alice Keaach, stagnates, and our hearts fall:
A dreamy kind of sorrowing begins to overtake the narrative. The leak in Tom’s spirit is acquiring existential poignancy. The summer ends, the work is done, Tom is ready to leave the village.
As readers we feel
The heartbreak of all the unlived lives that ever were.
The next part of the chapter looks at Regeneration (with a side trip to the musical Gypsy) before Gornick returns to Carr, as she admits that until she re-encountered Billy Prior in Regeneration she had under-recognised the force of the War in the shorter book and
The very particular achievement of this jewel of a book was the indelible portrait of a man returned from the war that had most resembled hell with a spirit that is permanently stunted.
That is how Billy Prior would have ended up, permanently stunted.
As she finishes, Gornick realises:
That because my life had been sufficiently free of catastrophe I remained equipped with a renewable spirit that had often been laid low but never done in. In Billy and Tom, however, both ruined by the war, it had sickened to a perilous degree.
For those of us living a lives sufficiently free of catastrophe, right now as we witness the horror in Ukraine from afar, these books provide powerful reminders of that terrible peril and possibility.