The Harpole Report by J.L. Carr

"You cannot compare the human brain, with its infinite possibilities, to a box room."

The Harpole Report by J.L. Carr (Secker & Warburg, 1972)

There are two J.L. Carr novels currently available as Penguin Modern Classics. One is A Month in the Country, first published in 1980, which everybody loves and everybody agrees is a modern classic, however you define the words. It’s also available as a Penguin Essential, in the company of Mrs Dalloway, Lolita, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a load of other books where you don't actually need to name the author.

But the other Modern Classic is How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, which was first published in 1975 and was the subject of our last entry. And this seems to me an odd choice for a second Carr.

His biographer describes HSSWWTFAC as his weakest novel, and while I haven't yet read them all, I certainly think it comes off second-best to The Harpole Report, which was published three years previously. This is The Teaching One, where HSSWWTFAC is The Football One - maybe Penguin calculated that there were more football fans than teachers in the book-buying public.

(Or maybe something peculiar happened with the rights - Carr published eight novels, all with different publishers, which tells its own exciting story. And of course Carr tells it too: The Publishing One, otherwise known as Harpole & Foxberrow, General Publishers, is next on my list.)

The Harpole Report is told in a kind of scattershot epistolary style, through excerpts from the school log, personal journals, internal memos, and various other correspondence, and is framed as an "independent report" - in practice, that means the author gets to do extra jokes on top of the jokes. Youthful-ish George Harpole is the newly-appointed acting head of Tamplin St Nicholas Primary School, and this is the story of his first year. 

To illustrate the general early dynamics, here is a note from Harpole to his staff.

All male staff should cease insistence on being addressed as 'Sir'. This archaic title inhibits easy relationship between ourselves and the children. Although they accept it as the way of things in schools, it implies we are different to other men. Similarly female staff should discourage children from addressing them as 'Miss', 'Teacher' or 'Ma'am'.

And here is the reply from one of the teachers, Pintle.

My class and all children with whom I come in contact will continue to address me as 'Sir'. All strikes, demonstrations, civil disturbances, pornographic theatrical performances and bedding without wedding are due to such erosion of the social order. I am one of the Old School and refuse to bow before the rising tide of National Decay.

Picking his Desert Islands Discs in 1976, Frank Muir chose to take The Harpole Report with him, describing it as "The funniest and perhaps truest story about running a school that I have ever read." That also neatly sums up its two advantages over HSSWWTFAC: it's funnier and it's truer.

The truthiness of HSSWWTFAC was a sticking point for some readers when it came out. Brian Glanville decried its lack of internal logic and called it "absolute crap", and Carr, nettled, altered later editions by removing a Glanville quote from the flyleaf and adding an explanatory note.

The impulse here was 'Can this unbelievable feat be made to sound like the truth even though it didn't happen?' … is this story believable? Ah, it all depends on whether you want to believe it.

Which seems an odd position. Suspend your own disbelief! If you like! Your call! No pressure! I actually think the sheer non-sensicality of HSSWWTFAC - they play Rangers in the final; yep, the ones from Glasgow - gets at something interesting about football and memory and how the two work on each other, but I haven't quite worked out the kinks in that thought yet. So you'll have to wait for it.

The funniness, meanwhile, is partly just a question of having better jokes. But more, there's an alliance between truthiness and funniness in the comic novel: if the characters resonate, if they feel real - or at least real-adjacent, reality-tethered - then they can get away with almost anything. Laughter renders the unbelievable into the believable. Here's Edwin Shutlanger, headmaster of the grammar school down the road, explaining to Harpole how he rose to his high position despite lacking, by Harpole's estimation, "scholarship, presence and an acceptable moral code."

'My form was a C streamer, dull, brutish, and utterly unappreciative of the 1870 Public Education Act. The Salt Mines was the place for them and, in a properly organized state, most of them would only have been allowed up for air on Christmas Day.'

Shutlanger decides that if he is to "escape into a headmaster's cosy nest," he has to impress the inspectorate. He has to be different. He realises that every class in the country studies the Normans, and each one of them makes a castle out of paper and glue; "there must be a thousand of these primitive fortresses decaying gently on cupboard tops up and down Britain." So. Different.

'I bought a big bag of cement and two more of sand and whenever one of these brutes gave me offence, I detained him and compelled him to mix concrete and cast it into small blocks two inches in length and one in depth. Other offenders mortated the blocks into walls: my Castle grew … One of the staff, an embittered, unsuccessful man, said that it was true to history in one respect at least - it had been founded on tears and misery.'

He breaks the spirits of the boys in his class, and begins to take in "malefactors" from other forms. This wins him popularity with his colleagues, though not with his weary and "near-suicidal" pupils or their parents. One even tries to have him shut down by government, "but no regulation forbidding the erection of a dwelling inside a dwelling could be found." And then, the punchline:

'My Castle no longer stood: it loomed … An inspector came, a little, bent woman. She edged gingerly into my room and gazed at my Castle. She was silent for a very long time. Then, in awed tones, she said, "Mr Shutlanger, what triumph for the Montessori method! The children have been living History!" Three months later I was appointed to a Post of Responsibility in a forward-looking school.'

And as for the castle? "'It was built to last … It must still be there. No doubt my successors keep rabbits in it.'"

All Carr's novels are funny; all are wistful; all exist somewhere on a spectrum between those adjectives. The laughter always echoes in some unapproachable emptiness. Perhaps The Harpole Report is a little too far towards the funny side of things to be considered a Modern Classic - it even has a happy ending, as our hero gets the girl, though not quite on his own terms. Penguins love misery.

One further note. It seems that to read a J.L. Carr novel is to come across another form of a joke that you’d thought belonged to somebody else. The Two Ronnies in HSSWWTFAC, and here Shane Warne’s famous critique of Monty Panesar: that he hadn’t played 33 tests, but instead one test 33 times. Here’s one of Harpole’s colleagues watching the acting headmaster in high dudgeon.

‘I’ve never been spoke to like this before in all my thirty years experience,’ she wails.

‘You have not had thirty years experience, Mrs. Grindle-Jones,’ he says witheringly. ‘You have had one year’s experience 30 times.’

As noted, I’m doing The Publishing One next. Looking forward to Harpole turning to Foxberrow, shortly after throwing a book over a house, and saying “That’s the real quiz.”