Henry Wilfrid Carr

Henry Wilfrid Carr (22 February 1894 – 3 April 1962) was a British consular official in Zurich where, in 1918, he encountered James Joyce. They quarrelled, and Joyce caricatured Carr in Ulysses. The relationship between Carr and Joyce was portrayed in almost entirely fictional terms by Tom Stoppard in his 1974 comedy Travesties, in which Carr is the central character.

The real Henry Carr Henry Wilfrid Carr was born in Houghton-le-Spring, Sunderland, Co Durham, on 22 February 1894, one of the four children, all sons, of Thomas Carr, a draper, and his wife, Mary Ann. The performance was a success, but Carr and Joyce fell out over the financial arrangements. They quarrelled furiously, and sued and counter-sued each other in the courts. The cases were not settled until February 1919. Joyce won his financial case but lost in a suit for slander.

In Zurich, Carr met Nora Tulloch, whom he married in 1919. They went to Canada where Carr joined a department store and became company secretary. By 1928 he was foreign manager of Henry Morgan and Co, based in Montreal. In 1934 they moved to England. At the time of the Second World War they were living in Sheffield. They were bombed out, and moved to a Warwickshire village, where Carr commanded the Home Guard. In 1962, while on a visit to London, he had a heart attack, and died in St Mary Abbots Hospital, Kensington on 3 April, aged 68. |

Carr and Compton are described as having "swaggersticks tight in their oxters, as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their mouths a volleyed fart". Carr is portrayed as coarse and foul-mouthed: "God fuck old Bennett. He's a whitearsed bugger. I don't give a shit for him," and "I'll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king".

The real Carr was well aware of Joyce's malicious depiction of him, but expressed his lack of concern about it.

Stoppard's Carr In the 1970s, Tom Stoppard, struck by the fact that Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara were all in Zurich in 1917, wrote a play that brought all three together in the unreliable memory of the octogenarian Carr looking back five decades later. In Travesties (1974) Carr is the central figure with the others in orbit around him. Carr is seen both as an old man reminiscing and as the young man of 1917 – the same actor plays both Carrs. The young Carr spies on Lenin, argues with Tzara about the nature of true art, is persuaded by Joyce to play Algernon and later quarrels over the cost of buying new trousers for the role. The old Carr concludes the first act:

After further confused memories and mix-ups in the second act, the old Carr concludes the play:

Notes, references and sources