When in 1959 the young literature researcher and lecturer John Carey moved from Oxford’s elitist Christ Church college to the generally left-leaning Balliol, he was astonished on first going into the Senior Common Room to be confronted by a figure who said “Hello, I’m Christopher Hill. Can I get you some coffee?”
Hill, head of the college, was a celebrated Marxist historian who both specialized in and championed the revolution that in mid-17th century had overthrown the monarchy and established an English republic.
“Balliol’s leftism was not dogmatic,” Carey writes here, in what is essentially his autobiography, “but liberal and tolerant.” Exactly the same could be said of Carey himself, later to be a leading light in Oxford’s English faculty. He was a man who opposed what he saw as the upper-class domination of literary studies that preceded him, while later opposing literary theory, a more radical manifestation than anything he represented, but something that he felt to be itself dogmatic, and deploying a obscurity that any critic worth the name would condemn in an imaginative author.
The Unexpected Professor is a cornucopia of anecdotes about the more famous UK literary names, not to mention the Oxford ones, of the second half of the 20th century. Of poets, Carey met Auden, Graves, Larkin, Hughes (though he thought the poet’s book on Shakespeare “appalling nonsense”), Heaney and many others.
As for Oxford, formerly venerable figures, now known only to literary scholars, such as Helen Gardner, Humphrey House, H.W.Garrod, J.B.Leishman and F.W.Bateson all appear, not to mention William Empson, teaching at Sheffield. As for Tolkien, he’s described lecturing on Beowulf as “mostly inaudible and, when audible, incomprehensible … Green mildew grew on his gown, as if he had recently emerged from a wood.”
Robert Graves was Oxford’s Professor of Poetry in the early 1960s. Carey well describes him as having been “deeply traditional” while at the same time liking to be thought a maverick (which he was). He told Carey that on the last day of WW1 he’d received a postcard from Wilfred Owen but had thrown it away, not realizing that he’d been killed.
Carey was educated in grammar schools — in UK usage free, largely academic, schools meant for children who’d passed an entrance exam. The problem with them was that these entrance exams left three-quarters of British children feeling, at 11, that they were failures. But Carey describes the abolition (he says “extermination”) of these schools in the 1970s as “vindictive,” claiming that several of the teachers he benefited from would have been university professors in today’s scheme of things. His qualified radicalism can be seen as having its roots in his grounding in these elite, non-fee-paying schools.
The same grounding lies behind what is likely to be his best-remembered book, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). In it he highlighted how the literary intelligentsia between the world wars tried to exclude a half-educated mass readership by making their work deliberately obscure. The obscurity of modernism in all the arts has, of course, other explanations, and the book was panned by many critics. Even so, its argument deserves attention, especially in its English and literary contexts.
Carey has, by contrast, always believed in maintaining the common touch. He’s written some 1,000 book reviews, he calculates, and his memories of London literary editors are never dull. Even so, the reviewing knack of neat encapsulation seems to have become too much of a habit for him, with the result that a considerable amount of this book is taken up with his views of the greatest names in English literature, at the rate of two or three paragraphs per name. Did we really need this? Clearly as a teacher Carey had a great deal more to say on these authors, and to have them all here in these potted versions feels like a writer simply adding, with the minimum of labor given his professional specialism, to the book’s word-count.
I have two other objections. First, Carey is wrong to say (on page 116) that Samuel Johnson chose the poets he wrote about in his Lives of the Poets. His publisher supplied him with the names, and the articles were to be introductions to re-prints of these poets’ works. Donne, most famously, was omitted, which was why Johnson had to discuss the “metaphysical” style when writing his life of Abraham Cowley.
Secondly, I can’t agree with Carey’s main thesis in What Good are the Arts? (2005), which he repeats here, that a work of art is “anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person.” He claims that the alternative to this is telling people what they ought to like, or at least admire. An alternative, and to my mind correct, way of looking at this is to consider “art” as an aspect of “artistry.” This was what the word originally meant, and to continue to apply the term only to work that shows talent removes almost all the problems.
Carey was obviously a fine teacher who never went above his students’ heads, despite having achieved the astonishing task of translating Milton’s Christian Doctrine from Latin over a five-year period. He says here that he taught his students singly whenever possible, and considers “the current abandonment of tutor-student contact in many English universities” to be a disgrace.
For the rest, he reveals himself as a keen gardener, a lover of the vivid and the sensuous in literature, someone who let the counter-culture of the 1960s pass him by, and “a Christian who just happens not to believe in God.”
On the evidence of this book, then, Carey’s is not a deeply original mind. But he’s a passionate educator, an excellent communicator and a very hard worker. For most people that would probably be enough.
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