Review: The Unexpected Professor/An Oxford Life in Books

Can books free you from the confines of your own life? Professor John Carey says yes and no
David Sexton13 March 2014

The Unexpected Professor/An Oxford Life in Books by John Carey (Faber, £18.99)

Does reading a lot of books make you a better person? Or wiser at least?

John Carey, an Emeritus Professor of English at Oxford, the author of studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray and more general cultural polemics, as well as being for many years the lead book reviewer at The Sunday Times, offers himself up here as a test case.

It is, he tells us at the outset, “a history of English literature and me, how we met, how we got on, what came of it”.

Carey was born in Barnes in 1934 and thus experienced the austerity of the war years as a child. In 1941, having survived the Blitz, the family moved out of London to Radcliffe in Nottinghamshire, fondly remembered here, but returned home to Barnes in 1947. At Richmond and East Sheen Grammar School for Boys, where he was well taught, Carey discovered his talent for hard work and coming top, as well as his love of literature, especially poetry. “Life outside books was fairly humdrum,” he says.

Encouraged by the French master, in December 1951 he took the scholarship exam at Oxford (St John’s —“People had told me it was important to apply to the right college but I didn’t even know what a college was, or how colleges differed from the university”). He won an Open Scholarship but did two years of national service, in the East Surrey Regiment, posted to Egypt, before going up, finding that having learned to “pretend to be a soldier, to pretend to be an officer” served him in good stead in university life too.

Once he got to Oxford, he never left. His career there was an unbroken, therefore uneventful, success, as he moved from job to job, and college to college, before ending up Merton Professor of English. At one point, he does say, “Christ Church stopped paying me at the end of term and the Balliol job didn’t start till the autumn”. But there we go, rough with the smooth, eh?

He has had a happy marriage and two sons, bought and restored a Cotswolds cottage, enjoyed gardening and, most vividly, bee-keeping. Setbacks have included a snippy piece in Private Eye in 1984 suggesting he was unpopular at Oxford and an alarming episode in 1981 when an adverse reaction to an anti-malarial drug he took on a British Council lecture tour of India nearly killed him.

So instead of incident, the memoir is extended with yet another potted guide to English literature, in which he tells us that Milton’s poetry worked for him “because the noise it made was matchlessly grand”, that Vanity Fair is Thackeray’s only great novel, that Wuthering Heights is “unexpectedly tiresome”, that Tennyson became a bore after 1850 except for Maud, that Browning by comparison is almost a modernist poet, and so forth. In one chapter, he simply rehashes for us 20 favourites of his own book reviews, “as some of them could be ones readers had missed and would enjoy”.

As a critic, Carey is, for all his scholarship, strangely simple-minded. He is driven by class-resentment of the kind commonly felt by all of us grammar-school boys who have made our way in a world dominated by public schoolboys, as Oxford and Cambridge are, a domination maintained by the destruction of the grammar schools by de haut en bas public school politicians. Carey presents his memoir as “among other things, my tribute of gratitude to a grammar school” and it is that, but it is even more the opposite, an expression of sustained resentment against perceived class-privilege, never far to seek in Oxford, of course.

“In 1950s Christ Church people would ask you quite seriously and directly what school you were from and who your parents were, as if such things mattered,” he remembers bitterly.

In Carey’s reviews, ticking off toffs is an effective, simplifying strategy, energetically and entertainingly applied, year in year out. But it distorts his judgment much more widely (flying back from Egypt he denounces even the pyramids as “blank-looking monuments to tyranny and stupid self-aggrandisement”).

In The Intellectuals and the Masses, he seriously argued that modernism was a deliberate attempt to exclude the masses from high culture by making it too difficult for them to understand. In What Good Are the Arts?, as an ultimate expression of egalitarianism, he maintained that all judgments in art and literature are wholly subjective: “The artworks that are most deeply precious to you may not be precious to other people, that doesn’t make you better or them worse”.

Being so full of class-consciousness, Carey could never concede that culture involves knowing “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (Matthew Arnold). So he has to say: “I knew my evaluations were subjective and personal (as, incidentally, all the judgments in this book are), reflecting the kind of person I was and the kind of upbringing I had.”

If taken literally, this would seem to disqualify him from professing literature, as he has done. Yet it is observably true in this memoir.

He ends, though, by boosterishly proclaiming quite the opposite. “Reading releases you from the limits of yourself.” This is not what reading has done for John Carey himself. That’s not what came of it.

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