That rose, Sara van Fleet … I still have it. Pressed in a book. My Bannister-Fletcher, as a matter of fact. Someday, after a sale, a stranger will find it there and wonder why.

As Alice Keach said to Tom Birkin, “Sara van Fleet isn’t any old rose” – but why did J.L. Carr pluck this particular flower for his heroine?

Sara van Fleet is of the rugosa variety – that makes it one of the oldest and hardiest roses still in existence. A drawing by Chao Ch’ang, active around 1,000 A.D., features one. They were brought to Europe from Asia in 1784.

More importantly for literary purposes, it is one of the most richly scented roses. One specialist praised it as having “a contralto scent in contrast with the Tea’s soprano.” That means its linger with Tom Birkin in more than memory.

Along with the China Rose, it is pretty much alone in producing flowers from May to October. Alice Keach told us so:

“Sara van Fleet,” she said. It was a pink rose, a single. “It’s an old variety. Mind! It has sharp thorns. And it keeps on blooming. You’ll see  – there’ll be some right into autumn.” She smiled. “Even if you don’t visit us again, you’ll know – I usually wear one in my hat … Here, take one.”

 ***

Tom Birkin is quite specific about his eating habits: “I was going to be happy, live simply, spend as little as paraffin, bread, vegetables and a bit of bully-beef now and then might cost me. I could have managed on a couple pints of milk a week, but this weather it wouldn’t keep so I should have to have three: oatmeal porridge is very sustaining and needs only warming to make a second meal.” Bully-beef is a kind of corned beef, and it’s useful to remember that this was the time before refrigeration and, for most rural housing, before indoor plumbing. “Each day still began much alike. I brewed up, fried a couple of rashers and a round of bread…” Rashers are thin slices of bacon.

More than once, he tells us: “I usually cut two rough rounds of loaf and a wedge of Wensleydale and took it outside to eat.” But what is Wensleydale? The choice of this white, crumbly cheese gives us some notion of where the fictional Oxgodby is situated – for the cheese would not traveled more than a few miles from the small village of Wensleydale, situated in the upper valley of the River Ure in North Yorkshire. The cheese was first made by medieval Cistercian monks from France – and so has an unusual harmony with the work that occupied Tom Birkin by day. In Yorkshire, one has Wensleydale with apple pie in the summer, with Christmas cakes in the winter.

But the porridge and bully-beef, the antique roses and a well-known cheese associated with Yorkshire, make a bigger point: this is an England that was disappearing by time Carr published his book in the 1980. Carr conjures these disappearing  markers of British life, preserving them in the perfect world of 1920s Yorkshire he recreates for A Month in the Country. 

The renowned Yorkshire dialect is almost as exotic to a Londoner as it is to those on this side of the Atlantic. Hence Tom Birken’s puzzled reaction to his fellow passenger’s warning on the train that marked his entry into Oxgodby: “Thoo’s ga-ing ti git rare an’ soaaked reet doon ti thi skin, maister.”

Where did this fascinating dialect come from? We offer the 9-minute film clip below, tracing the origins of the language in the linguistic wrestling between the Anglo-Saxons and the Viking settlers under the ancient Danelaw, a term which designated the lands under the jurisdiction of the Norse invaders. According to linguists, the compromises that resulted created the English we speak today. Yorkshire villages like Oxgodby were the go-to places for language oh, say about a thousand years ago.

Can’t get enough? Below the video clip we offer two soundtracks of the Yorkshire accent from the British Library – in the first, a man describes his Yorkshire childhood in the 1920s, describing a world very much like Oxgodby.

1) Welwick, Yorkshire: Miss Dibnah explains how to make white bread, brown bread and spice bread. Read a transcript of this recording on the British Library’s ‘Sounds Familiar’ website. Link here.

2) Appleton Roebuck, North Yorkshire: Sydney talks about growing up in the 1920s with six siblings in a small, three-bedroomed house in Appleton Roebuck. Link here.

“This was the book nobody rejected, because they did not get the chance,” wrote biographer Byron Rogers of J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country. That’s not quite true. There were a few reviews of Carr’s book when it was first published, even before it was short-listed for the Booker Prize and received the Guardian Prize for fiction.

Still, the tone for the early reviews before the awards were announced, and the tone now, decades later, is markedly different. See if you agree.

Reviews in 1980:

“There is a strong temptation to call this an idyll, and the temptation need not be resisted, for so it is, in the true sense of the word. But this should not suggest any sort of cloudly poeticism. The writing is energetically colloquial, well-salted with specific detail. Totally unsentimental, but although so clearly observed, it is all seen from a distance. Half a lifetime has passed since 1920, and the brief episode is preserved undimmed and unaltered, needing no other pathos than that of the past. Slight but beautifully done, this book has a quality of its own that will not be easily forgotten.”

– Graham Hough, London Review of Books

“It is short; it is odd; it is memorable; it is admirable.”

– Marghanita Laski, Country Life

“One of the joys of August, when few novels are normally published, is to catch up with anything which has fallen through the net. J.L. Carr’s new novel is something which nobody should miss whose roots really belong to the English countryside. Mr. Carr’s is a beautiful tale, and, at any rate so far as this reviewer is concerned, a profoundly affecting one.”

– Auberon Waugh, London Evening

Reviews since 2000:

Slim as it is, this is a tender and elegant novel that seemingly effortlessly weaves several strands together. Carr has a knack for bringing certain scenes into sudden, sharp focus, rather as waves lift forgotten things to the surface. He writes with particular precision and admiration about the joys of skilled men going about their business. He also subtly evokes lost rural customs and ways of living that, even at the time, had begun to fade from view: cart rides and seed cake and honey-thick accents that had not yet been filed down by mass communication.

The sense of things lost to time is pronounced but not overplayed and there’s a gently elegiac quality to the developing picture of a warm and hazy English countryside summer. This pleasant vision is countered by his rawer and more acute account of the deep mark left on a man when a chance of happiness is glimpsed and missed and left to settle in the memory.

– Natasha Tripney, The Guardian, 2010

Happiness is a rare subject. Pain, disillusionment, and misfortune are well documented. Great novels turn on betrayals and confrontations: adulteries and wars; tragic misunderstandings and sudden upheavals of the heart. Plot is driven by conflict (or so the chorus goes). Revelations propel narratives.

Happiness, on the other hand, is trickier. Happiness is static, rarely dramatic. Instead of sudden twists of action and circumstance, it yields subtleties. Contentment builds slowly and steadily build; joy emerges fully-formed from a beautiful collision of time and place. Wonderful in life but, in a book, usually the conclusion of a drama or foregrounding for a tragedy; rarely the foreground.  …

The happiness depicted in A Month in the Country is wise and wary, aware of its temporality. When he arrives in Oxgodby, Birkin knows very well life is not all ease and intimacy, long summer days with “winter always loitering around the corner.” He has experienced emotional cruelty in his failed marriage. As a soldier, he witnessed death: destruction and unending mud.

But the edges are brighter for it. Birkin’s idyll in the country is brought into relief by what Birkin has gone through in the past and the disappointments that, it is implied, await him. Carr’s great art is to make it clear that joy is inseparable from the pain and oblivion which unmake it. In a world where the most vivid heavens and hells are of our creation, Carr suggests, paradise and purgatory are deeply personal. What we value most in life, then, may also be the most difficult to share. After all, though the tacit love between Birkin and Alice is one of the most beautiful and memorable aspects of the book, it really amounts to little: the layers of affinity and implication that grow in their conversations, a blush flaming Alice’s pale cheeks, her vanishing laughter which sounds, “like…well, like a bell.”

– Ingrid Norton, Open Letters Monthly

“Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic – ‘Now you don’t see; indeed, there’s nothing to see. Now look!’ Day after day it was like that and each morning I leaned on the yard gate dragging at my first fag and (I’d like to think) marveling at this splendid backcloth.”

The verdant Yorkshire countryside, with its dales and moors and rivers, will be familiar to readers of the Brontës and Ted Hughes. But, as the saying goes, “Seeing is believing.” We thought you’d enjoy the short video below.

Our new director, Robert Harrison, host of Entitled Opinions radio show. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

You asked for it. And we made it happen. The Another Look book club will continue this fall under the directorship of Robert Pogue Harrison, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, host for the popular “Entitled Opinions” radio show, and, of course, the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford. His most recent book, Juvanescence, was discussed on KQED’s Forum here.

Robert chaired our event on October 14, 2014, featuring Italo Calvino‘s Cosmicomics. And some of you may have recognized him in the audience for our crowded spring event on Albert Camus’s The Stranger.

With Another Look founder Tobias Wolff‘s retirement, Another Look will no longer be hosted by the English/Creative Writing Department. Continuing Studies will assume the management of the program. We are still working out the changes that will occur under the Continuing Studies banner.

Stay tuned for the formal announcement that will launch the fourth season of Another Look in the next few weeks.