John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford and one of his generation’s most noted literary critics, died last week at the age of 92. His obituary appeared, inter alia, in the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph newspapers. Here is an excerpt from the Daily Telegraph:
…”Professor Carey… does not always distinguish clearly between the three forms of snobbery he derides, the social, cultural and intellectual, lumping them together under a general aura of disapproval,” wrote Auberon Waugh, who otherwise enjoyed his analysis of the Bloomsberries and their ilk. “And he scarcely mentions the form of snobbery which is no less prevalent in British literary circles, and to which I suspect he is somewhat prone himself: the frantic desire to establish one’s own moral superiority.”
John Carey was born in Barnes, west London, on April 5 1934, the fourth and youngest child of an accountant who, after the war, became company secretary to the designers Colefax & Fowler. As a small boy, he was evacuated to a school in Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottingham, where he was considered a slow developer: “I seemed to have been permanently asleep — cut off from reality by a fog of self absorption,” he recalled.
He woke up on his return to London at Richmond and East Sheen Grammar School, where a superb English teacher, Mr White, inspired him with a love of literature. He became the first from his school to go to Oxford, winning a scholarship to St John’s, where he was taught by JB Leishman. Before going up he did two years’ National Service with the East Surreys.
Even before taking his degree, Carey had made up his mind he did not want to leave Oxford. Merton had one-year scholarships for recent undergraduates, and Carey won the Harmsworth scholarship, then a one-year lectureship at Christ Church, followed by a one-year junior fellowship at Balliol, before being given a fellowship at Keble in 1960. His doctorate charted Ovidian influences on late Renaissance English verse.
Christ Church came as a tremendous shock. In his essay “Down with Dons”, a fiery and famous piece of invective written in the 1970s, Carey took issue with what he saw as the self-regarding elitism of Oxford academe. “Christ Church in those days was just like Brideshead, full of unbelievably rich young men, some clever, some not. The dons I was writing about were like Maurice Bowra, whom I admire for many things, but he’d be with his friends… and they’d listen to the conversations going on around them and would, quite loudly, allocate these people to social classes… That kind of snobbery and disregard for people’s feelings seemed to me counter-intellectual.”…
He doesn’t seem to have left any books or articles displaying any extended analysis of the works of Evelyn Waugh but does leave this reference in his 2014 memoir The Unexpected Professor. He is here recounting some undergraduate “mayhem” he witnessed as a faculty member in which a student on its periphery suffers broken glass in his eye, temporarily blinding him:
…What impressed me was his lack of resentment. He was from a public school himself, and his ethos seemed to be that young gentlemen would cut loose from time to time and it was just bad luck if you were in the way. The whole episode was an illustration of Evelyn Waugh’s famous reference in Decline and Fall to ‘the sound of English country families baying for broken glass’. But that was in 1928 and I’d not expected to find the tradition alive and well thirty years later” (p. 148).
This seems to suggest that his position on student behavior has mellowed somewhat from that expressed in reference to Brideshead in the 1970s.
