Learning

John Carey is a man of the left: When I attended his lectures on Milton at Oxford back in the mid-1970s, I sensed a radical fervor akin to that of Cromwell’s blind attack dog that made me vaguely consider signing up with the Cavaliers. Yet this stern and black-gowned individual was the same man who had written The Violent Effigy on Dickens’s fascination with corpses, coffins, waxworks, executions, and wooden legs, which still ranks as one of wittiest and most playful books written on the novelist.

Carey, who retired as Merton Professor of English in 2002 and continues to act as the lead reviewer inThe Sunday Times, is a man of contrasts and inconsistencies. The year before assuming the most prestigious literary chair at Oxford, he wrote “Down with Dons” (1974), a scorching essay which accuses his fellow dons of living in a protected environment that stimulates “greed and self-indulgence” and of having rude and arrogant children. Obsessed with the idea of class and possessing a strong populist streak, he is at the same time fiercely meritocratic. The meritocracy he espouses is the most elitist of systems, involving intense competition. He extols ordinary life as lived by “the man on the Clapham omnibus,” but his own lifestyle is highly unconventional. He did not own a television until he was asked to review for the Listener back in 1969, and he was not sorry to see it go back to the rental store in 1974 when his reviewing stint was over.

All this comes out in Carey’s memoir, The Unexpected Professor. A friend had suggested Carey write a history of English literature, but the prospect did not appeal to him as it entailed too much “donkey work.” Instead, he decided to do something “more personal—a history of English literature and me how we met and what came of it.” The result is a life seen and lived through books.

Born in 1934 in Barnes, in southwest London, Carey was a wartime child, and wartime scarcity left its mark. He was brought up to believe that austerity builds character, and that feeling never left him. His father had been a successful accountant, but the Depression killed the firm for which he worked. An older brother was autistic, which meant that he could not bring school friends home to visit. In that situation, books became natural companions, and he describes himself as “an abnormally self-absorbed little boy.”

We follow his childhood reading from the exploits of the cartoon hero Rockfist Rogan of the RAF, a Spitfire pilot and boxing champion, to W. E. Johns’s Biggles in the South Seas and Tarka the Otterby Henry Williamson—the latter unequaled until he came across Ted Hughes many years later. He did not exert himself until grammar school when he got glasses and realized that he enjoyed the competitiveness.

At this point, his reading starts in earnest: Among the poets, he was attracted to the exoticism of Chesterton’s “Lepanto,” Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters,” and Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.” He wanted poetry “to suggest vivid sensuous images and I still prefer ones that do.” His first grown-up books were George Eliot’s Silas Marner and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, and it was Hardy’s novels which made him “feel at home, for the first time, inside someone else’s world.”

Set texts included Twelfth Night, Anthony and Cleopatra, and A Winter’s Tale from which he learnedlarge chunks by heart, something he regrets is no longer encouraged. As a choirboy, he had been forever imprinted with the rhythms of Hymns Ancient and Modern and the King James Bible. Though he gave up his faith in the sixth form, he winces whenever he hears the New English Bibleread in church.

He credits his grammar school training with getting him a scholarship at Oxford and he deplores the closing of Britain’s non-fee-paying grammar schools which had furthered social mobility, but were abolished by Labour in 1970s—a casualty, incidentally, of the party’s obsession with equality. Having completed his military service, where the upper-class aspirants at Officer Cadet School had “filled [his] mind with tumbrils and guillotines,” he took up residence in St John’s College.

He found the Oxford of the 1950s to be a congregation of the doddering and the amateurish. We get a glimpse of an ancient J. R. R. Tolkien, who “seemed immemorially aged, and green mildew grew on his gown, as if he had recently emerged from a wood.” Literature was considered a source of enjoyment, something that shouldn’t be too heavily analyzed. “This was a common view in Oxford and one I was keen to discredit, not least because part of me sympathized with it.” As a “grammar school swat,” he felt ill at ease among the favored gentleman all-rounders from Eton and Harrow. P. G. Wodehouse’s belief that Oxford should have room for Bertie Wooster is noted with scorn.

His reading reinforces his inner puritan: Spenser he censures for “craven power worship,” while Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is praised for exposing obscene luxury in the character of Sir Epicure Mammon. Milton’s defense for the beheading of Charles I “naturally put him on my side.” He decided if he were to remain in Oxford “it was this century of mystics and eccentrics who fought a civil war and chopped off a king’s head that I wanted to study.”

By this time, Carey’s asceticism seems to have hardened into a creed, in which self-denial is equated with intelligence and which resurfaces regularly in the book: On Orwell, whom he hero-worships, “I admired even more Orwell’s frugality and contempt for luxury.” As “the most intelligent of the English novelists,” George Eliot is praised for her “puritan distrust of passion and of luxury.” And about “the thirst for bleakness” exhibited by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre he notes that “fierce frugality of this caliber breeds a sharp critical intelligence.”

Having passed his B.A. with a First, he sat for the Civil Service exam and came out top of the class, but got a deferment to pursue graduate work at Oxford. He stayed on ever since.

While occasionally one gets a glimpse of the charm of the place, mostly Carey comes across as a man with a sizable chip on his shoulder. Once at dinner in Christ Church, where he acted as tutor for a year, a guest had asked the economist Sir Roy Harrod sitting opposite who Carey was. “Oh, that’s nobody,” came the answer. The sensible course would have been to shrug it off, but the remark stayed with him. On a subsequent occasion when his father innocently bragged in a store about his son being at Oxford, Carey “could not help thinking how Sir Ray Harrod and people of his ilk would have despised my father and his ilk, as he had despised me.”

Inspired by the Harrod incident, his anti-elitism and championship of the common man manifests itself decades later in Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), which ticks off the Bloomsbury avant-garde for deliberately having made their art incomprehensible to exclude the masses. The theme was further developed in what What Good Are the Arts? (2005), which was triggered by a visit to the Krupp arms dynasty’s house in Essen and its art collection. Rather than having a civilizing influence, Carey’s version of art divides people by conferring an aura of phony spirituality on the rich, the powerful, and the educated. With what right can anyone claim that his taste is superior to someone else’s? With the modern world providing no ultimate answers, all he can come up with as a definition of art is “anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that person.”

As he notes, not all reviewers were pleased, and with good reason: For a highly learned individual like Carey, this is a cop-out. It is perfectly legitimate to laugh at today’s entrenched art establishment, which in nebulous artspeak promotes the obscure, the shocking, and the marginal. But Carey’s definition is precisely the kind of surrender that allowed Marcel Duchamp to exhibit his urinal in a museum back in 1917 and pronounce it a work of art, a detour from which art has never recovered.

Just as the proletarian affectations of the old Etonian George Orwell become annoying, so does Carey’s constant need to prove his common-man credentials, his chippiness, and his frugality. It becomes a nervous tic. This is a person who on the morning of his wedding bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate in Christ Church’s Tom Quad, only to fret afterwards about having been contaminated by the insidious charm of Oxford: “I was touched by the Christ Church infection just like all the others.”

Carey is at his best when he lightens up on his Tribune-of-the-People routine and focuses on his own joy in reading. Just as art lovers often see landscapes in terms of paintings, he tends to experience life though literature: “People who spend a lot of their lives reading books as I was doing find, after a time, that they prefer reading about things to actually seeing them,” he writes. He prefers reading Shakespeare to seeing him performed on stage: “When actors start to waddle around and gesticulate it seems absurdly inferior to what your imagination has created from the words on the page.” And he reads novels “as if they were patterns of poetry interspersed with relatively uninteresting prose.”

Unlike many of his academic colleagues, Carey’s greatest strength is his clarity of style, as proved in the book’s superb section on seventeenth-century scientists. In his inaugural lecture as Merton Professor, “The Critic as Vandal,” he rightly castigated his colleagues for “turning literary works into barely readable prose.” He is especially proud of the fact the faculty library asked him for a fresh copy of his first book, John Milton, as the old one was disintegrating, heavily underlined and annotated in the margins by many hands: “I felt it deserved to be hung up somewhere like one of these bedraggled regimental flags you come across in cathedrals.” Most importantly, as a critic, Carey posses the one vital attribute: He makes you want to read. And join the Cavaliers, of course.