{"id":2975,"date":"2015-09-22T03:02:27","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T03:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/group\/bookclub\/cgi-bin\/wordpress\/?p=2975"},"modified":"2015-10-09T04:31:28","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T04:31:28","slug":"penelope-fitzgerald-j-l-carr-and-the-death-of-the-spirit-we-must-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/?p=2975","title":{"rendered":"Penelope Fitzgerald, J.L. Carr, and the “death of the spirit we must fear.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When Booker prize-winning poet, essayist, and novelist Penelope Fitzgerald<\/strong> wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition of J.L. Carr<\/strong>‘s A Month in the Country, <\/em>she cited Carr\u2019s epigraph from\u00a0The Harpole Report<\/em>: “It is the death of the spirit we must fear.”<\/p>\n

Then she explains what might be considered the unconventional author’s credo: “The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in\u00a0one\u2019s own independence and to do only what we are expected to do. At\u00a0the same time, it is a mistake to expect anything specific from life. Life\u00a0will not conform.”<\/p>\n

It’s hard to imagine an author of more independent mind than Carr. Part of that stubbornness, certainly, was the refusal to bow to the passage of time \u2013 as evident is his fight to save St. Faith church in Yorkshire (read about that effort here<\/strong><\/a>). That was in life, but in his writing? \u00a0The magic is in how he turns time to his own fashioning. Fitzgerald writes:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u2018And it\u2019s gone. It\u2019s gone. All the excitement and pride of that first\u00a0job. Oxgodby, Kathy Ellerbeck, Alice Keach, Moon, that season of calm\u00a0weather \u2013 gone as though they\u2019d never been.\u2019 Early in the book the\u00a0perspective of time is established. Birkin is looking back, with wonder,\u00a0at the very last years of a lamplit, horse-drawn age. Of course, he and\u00a0Moon have another set of memories to haunt them, from Passchendaele.\u00a0But Birkin believes that the future is opening up. \u2018Well, I was young\u00a0then.\u2019<\/p>\n

Carr is by no means a lavish writer, but he has the magic touch to\u00a0re-enter the imagined past. Birkin notices, as he walks back down the\u00a0road, how he first smelled, then saw, the swathes of hay lying in the\u00a0dusk. At the Sunday school outing, \u2018Afterwards, most of the men took\u00a0off their jackets, exposing their braces and the tapes of their long woollen\u00a0underpants, and astonished their children by larking around like great\u00a0lads.\u2019 Those tapes! Who would have remembered them except Jim Carr?<\/p>\n

From the first Birkin has seen that the wall-painting is a Doom, a\u00a0Christ in Judgement with its saved and its sinners in a great spread of\u00a0reds and blues. He finishes the restoration according to contract, just as\u00a0the first breath of autumn comes to Oxgodby. But the moment when\u00a0the year crosses into another season becomes indistinguishable from his\u00a0passion, making itself clear as it does quite suddenly, for Alice Keach.<\/p>\n

\u2018All this happened so long ago.\u2019 The tone of\u00a0A Month in the Country<\/em>,\u00a0however, isn\u2019t one of straightforward remembering or (if there can be\u00a0such a thing) of straightforward nostalgia, or even an acute sense of the\u00a0loss of youth. More complex is his state of mind when he thinks of the\u00a0people \u2013 perhaps only a few \u2013 who will visit Oxgodby church in its\u00a0meadows and regret that they missed seeing the master painter himself\u00a0\u2013 \u2018as one might come to Malvern, bland Malvern, and think that Edward\u00a0Elgar walked this way to give music lessons\u2019. This is a nostalgia for\u00a0something we have never had, \u2018a precious tugging of the heart \u2013 knowing\u00a0a precious moment gone and we not there\u2019. But even this has to be\u00a0distinguished from downright pain. \u2018We can ask and ask, but we can\u2019t\u00a0have again what once seemed ours for ever.\u2019 You can only wait, Carr\u00a0says, for the pain to pass, but what is it that once seemed ours for ever?\u00a0Or is this, like the Shropshire Lad\u2019s, an unanswerable question?<\/p>\n

Read the whole introduction here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Booker prize-winning poet, essayist, and novelist Penelope Fitzgerald wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition of J.L. Carr‘s A Month in the Country, she cited Carr\u2019s epigraph from\u00a0The Harpole Report: “It is the death of the spirit we must … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}