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The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books
Best known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him - an escape from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him elected, age 40, to Oxford's oldest English Literature professorship.
He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of 1950s Oxford, but also his inspiring meetings with writers and poets - Auden, Graves, Larkin, Heaney - and his forty-year stint as a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Times.
This is a book about the joys of reading - in effect, an informal introduction to the great works of English literature. But it is also about war and family, and how an unexpected background can give you the insight and the courage to say the unexpected thing.
He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of 1950s Oxford, but also his inspiring meetings with writers and poets - Auden, Graves, Larkin, Heaney - and his forty-year stint as a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Times.
This is a book about the joys of reading - in effect, an informal introduction to the great works of English literature. But it is also about war and family, and how an unexpected background can give you the insight and the courage to say the unexpected thing.
361 pages, Paperback
First published March 18, 2014
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April 18, 2019
”People who spend a lot their lives reading books, as I was doing, find, after a time, that they prefer reading about things to actually seeing them. Reading about them surrounds them with imaginative allure, but when you actually see them they seem bald and ordinary.”
There are all sorts of reasons why a scene read in a book may surpass that of actually seeing it for yourself. The descriptive scene may be written by a writer who is influenced by love or despair, and readers benefit from their state of mind when they describe a scene for us to read. The writer, not unlikely, has a better grasp of descriptive terms than a lay reader, and again we benefit from their command of language. John Carey uses William Wordsworth’s description of seeing Mont Blanc for the first time:
The real Mont Blanc may not live up to the image that Wordsworth had obtained from his books, but for me, just as books are never just books, I can see something, say the Forum in Italy or the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul or Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland, and see those things through the eyes of all those writers who have described it to me in the past. In this sense, everything I see while traveling is made grander for me by the experiences of others.
This is a memoir of an Oxford life in books, but it is also the biography of a lifetime scholar. I have often wondered if I missed my calling, electing to go out into the world of business and forgoing the life of a scholar. When Carey talks about the introductory classes at Oxford where he learned to decipher 17th century handwriting and produce pages of type with trays of metal letters in the same way as a printer would in the 17th century, my soul yearns more than a bit for that life of scholarship. Alas, ships do sail away with us still left at the docks.
I find myself agreeing more than disagreeing with him about books. He loathes Don Quixote. I must admit I am among that small number who do as well. I find it mind numbingly repetitive and boring. Carey adds the term hateful and disgusting to his list of descriptions. If I had finished the book, I have a feeling I would have agreed with him.
I can still remember when I first discovered that Thomas More, the executioner of Protestants, was the same man who wrote Utopia. At first, I thought that I was confusing two different Thomas Mores. After all, it is a rather plain and common name, but it was not the case. ”I began to see why Protestantism seemed so outrageous to conservative souls like More, and why it turned him from the witty, open-minded humanist who wrote the Utopia to a rabid heretic-burner.” Carey gives him more credence than I do. I simply can not forgive him for the unswerving maliciousness with which he prosecuted those who disagreed with him. I am glad that I read Utopia before I knew more about him, but I will at some point reread it, and the question will be, can I see it for what it is without smelling the taint of heretic flesh burning?
Carey tells lots of stories about writers. I will share one of them with you. It is actually one that I had read before, but I still laughed reading it again. The British poet Robert Graves was having a scandalous affair with the American poet Laura Riding, and during a amorous disagreement, Riding flung herself out a three story window. Graves, very prudently, ran down to the first floor before launching himself out the window to join her. Fortunately, neither of them were hurt. I do wonder, did she ever figure out that he did not jump out of the third story window?
Carey spends a summer reading D. H. Lawrence, and even though he struggles with many things regarding Lawrence’s writing...he can’t stop reading it! He recommends Lawrence’s travel writing about Italy, which I had never thought about reading. It is not the first or last book added to my TBR from the pages of Carey’s memoir.
Carey discusses the hazards of being a book reviewer after witnessing the impact of a review he wrote on John Wain. ”It was quite a salutary lesson for me, though, because I hadn’t been reviewing for very long and it taught me that sentences that delight you with their wit and acuity when you write them can be horribly hurtful to the wretched creature at whom they are aimed.”
I have witnessed many reviewers on Goodreads who have written very spiteful and malicious reviews that, frankly, in a different era a writer should be slapping them across the face with a weighted glove and challenging them to a duel. These reviewers are interested in “entertaining” their mob of followers who enjoy seeing the evisceration of anyone other than themselves. Certainly these reviewers forget that there is a human being behind every book ever published. For me, it is no different if the writer is living or dead. I treat them with proper respect. Unfortunately, these negative reviewers are encouraged by scores of supportive type comments and cascades of LIKES. Oh yes, and because it is an excessively negative review, there is the ever popular comment commending them on writing an “honest review,” as if to say that positive reviews are dishonest. In my opinion, it is beneath whom I perceive readers to be. I certainly expect them to conduct themselves better than the mobs that attend political rallies.
To me, readers, writers, listeners, musicians, art appreciators, and artists are the ones to uphold civilisation and culture. Those who are so certain in their convictions are usually those who know the least. As much as we all want to escape to our books and ignore the rest of the world, we simply cannot afford to do so. We live in uncertain times.
”Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Reading does the opposite. It encourages doubt.
Reading distrust certainty. Think of Yeats:
Be kind. Be aware. Read on.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
There are all sorts of reasons why a scene read in a book may surpass that of actually seeing it for yourself. The descriptive scene may be written by a writer who is influenced by love or despair, and readers benefit from their state of mind when they describe a scene for us to read. The writer, not unlikely, has a better grasp of descriptive terms than a lay reader, and again we benefit from their command of language. John Carey uses William Wordsworth’s description of seeing Mont Blanc for the first time:
...grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more can be.
The real Mont Blanc may not live up to the image that Wordsworth had obtained from his books, but for me, just as books are never just books, I can see something, say the Forum in Italy or the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul or Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland, and see those things through the eyes of all those writers who have described it to me in the past. In this sense, everything I see while traveling is made grander for me by the experiences of others.
This is a memoir of an Oxford life in books, but it is also the biography of a lifetime scholar. I have often wondered if I missed my calling, electing to go out into the world of business and forgoing the life of a scholar. When Carey talks about the introductory classes at Oxford where he learned to decipher 17th century handwriting and produce pages of type with trays of metal letters in the same way as a printer would in the 17th century, my soul yearns more than a bit for that life of scholarship. Alas, ships do sail away with us still left at the docks.
I find myself agreeing more than disagreeing with him about books. He loathes Don Quixote. I must admit I am among that small number who do as well. I find it mind numbingly repetitive and boring. Carey adds the term hateful and disgusting to his list of descriptions. If I had finished the book, I have a feeling I would have agreed with him.
I can still remember when I first discovered that Thomas More, the executioner of Protestants, was the same man who wrote Utopia. At first, I thought that I was confusing two different Thomas Mores. After all, it is a rather plain and common name, but it was not the case. ”I began to see why Protestantism seemed so outrageous to conservative souls like More, and why it turned him from the witty, open-minded humanist who wrote the Utopia to a rabid heretic-burner.” Carey gives him more credence than I do. I simply can not forgive him for the unswerving maliciousness with which he prosecuted those who disagreed with him. I am glad that I read Utopia before I knew more about him, but I will at some point reread it, and the question will be, can I see it for what it is without smelling the taint of heretic flesh burning?
Carey tells lots of stories about writers. I will share one of them with you. It is actually one that I had read before, but I still laughed reading it again. The British poet Robert Graves was having a scandalous affair with the American poet Laura Riding, and during a amorous disagreement, Riding flung herself out a three story window. Graves, very prudently, ran down to the first floor before launching himself out the window to join her. Fortunately, neither of them were hurt. I do wonder, did she ever figure out that he did not jump out of the third story window?
Carey spends a summer reading D. H. Lawrence, and even though he struggles with many things regarding Lawrence’s writing...he can’t stop reading it! He recommends Lawrence’s travel writing about Italy, which I had never thought about reading. It is not the first or last book added to my TBR from the pages of Carey’s memoir.
Carey discusses the hazards of being a book reviewer after witnessing the impact of a review he wrote on John Wain. ”It was quite a salutary lesson for me, though, because I hadn’t been reviewing for very long and it taught me that sentences that delight you with their wit and acuity when you write them can be horribly hurtful to the wretched creature at whom they are aimed.”
I have witnessed many reviewers on Goodreads who have written very spiteful and malicious reviews that, frankly, in a different era a writer should be slapping them across the face with a weighted glove and challenging them to a duel. These reviewers are interested in “entertaining” their mob of followers who enjoy seeing the evisceration of anyone other than themselves. Certainly these reviewers forget that there is a human being behind every book ever published. For me, it is no different if the writer is living or dead. I treat them with proper respect. Unfortunately, these negative reviewers are encouraged by scores of supportive type comments and cascades of LIKES. Oh yes, and because it is an excessively negative review, there is the ever popular comment commending them on writing an “honest review,” as if to say that positive reviews are dishonest. In my opinion, it is beneath whom I perceive readers to be. I certainly expect them to conduct themselves better than the mobs that attend political rallies.
To me, readers, writers, listeners, musicians, art appreciators, and artists are the ones to uphold civilisation and culture. Those who are so certain in their convictions are usually those who know the least. As much as we all want to escape to our books and ignore the rest of the world, we simply cannot afford to do so. We live in uncertain times.
”Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Reading does the opposite. It encourages doubt.
Reading distrust certainty. Think of Yeats:
’The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’”
Be kind. Be aware. Read on.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
August 14, 2019
For He Is an English Man
To be a master of a literature is not to pretend to dominate its content but to allow oneself to be dominated by its scope and subtlety; to recognise that one’s opinions are simply a marginal part of that content and not a judgment on the whole. This is the sense in which Carey is a master of English. The language has made him. And his book is a tribute to the force and skill of that language.
What English has made John Carey is a modest, witty, morally sensitive, interesting person with an ability to tell a story of his life that is both charming and profound. It is charming in its unassuming detail of what the title identifies as an entirely unexpected life. And it is profound for exactly the same reason. There are no great epiphanies, no quasi-religious conversions to the life of the mind, just the incremental inexorable drift of a human being toward a fate which is a surprise rather than a decision.
My grandmother was a Carey. So perhaps I’m prejudiced by the possibility of a genetic connection (I admit to feeling this sort of thing when I encountered the memorial in Winchester Cathedral to a certain seventeenth century Bishop Carey). Nevertheless I think any prejudice is justified by the way Carey does his literary criticism - with the precision but not the bluster of a Harold Bloom, with the conscience of a Terry Eagleton less the Marxist rhetoric, and echoing the devotion of a James Wood while accepting its subliminally religious character. Carey’s religion is literature but he doesn’t expect himself or anyone else to feel the need to be saved by it.
Carey’s self-revelations are typically tentative and hesitant not rationalising or self-assertive:
To be a master of a literature is not to pretend to dominate its content but to allow oneself to be dominated by its scope and subtlety; to recognise that one’s opinions are simply a marginal part of that content and not a judgment on the whole. This is the sense in which Carey is a master of English. The language has made him. And his book is a tribute to the force and skill of that language.
What English has made John Carey is a modest, witty, morally sensitive, interesting person with an ability to tell a story of his life that is both charming and profound. It is charming in its unassuming detail of what the title identifies as an entirely unexpected life. And it is profound for exactly the same reason. There are no great epiphanies, no quasi-religious conversions to the life of the mind, just the incremental inexorable drift of a human being toward a fate which is a surprise rather than a decision.
My grandmother was a Carey. So perhaps I’m prejudiced by the possibility of a genetic connection (I admit to feeling this sort of thing when I encountered the memorial in Winchester Cathedral to a certain seventeenth century Bishop Carey). Nevertheless I think any prejudice is justified by the way Carey does his literary criticism - with the precision but not the bluster of a Harold Bloom, with the conscience of a Terry Eagleton less the Marxist rhetoric, and echoing the devotion of a James Wood while accepting its subliminally religious character. Carey’s religion is literature but he doesn’t expect himself or anyone else to feel the need to be saved by it.
Carey’s self-revelations are typically tentative and hesitant not rationalising or self-assertive:
“I thought of the padre who had given me Tom Jones, and how much I had admired him, and it came to me that, though I thought of myself as an agnostic, I was really a Christian who just did not happen to believe in God. As a choirboy I had sung the Magnificat hundreds of times, praising God for putting down the mighty from their seat and sending the rich empty away, and my belief that this was right, and that the mighty and the rich deserved to be humbled and to go hungry, had outlasted my belief in God.”It’s difficult not to like the man, even if he isn’t a relative.
March 18, 2014
John Carey is a respected academic, chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times for forty years, a critic, a commentator and an author. His works have included biographies and his controversial books, “The Intellectuals and the Masses” and “What Good are the Arts?” This, however, is something different – a warm, funny and enjoyable autobiography- taking our narrator from his early childhood in Barnes in the 1930’s to the present. It is the memoir not only of a life, but also of Carey’s relationship with books and, for a reader, it is a delight to have this incredibly learned man make his love (and incredible knowledge) of literature come alive.
The book begins with Carey’s early life in London, interrupted by the war and the blitz. As a young boy, after a night of bombing, Carey apparently asked his father whether they were "dead yet"? The innocent question prompted his parents to relocate to the countryside for the duration of the war. In Radcliffe-on-Trent, the author started school and began a love of reading; consuming comics and Biggles, among other treasures. Returning to London, the author started grammar school – a system he obviously believes in passionately (and with which I agree wholeheartedly). For this book is, among other things, wonderfully opinionated. Carey is an unapologetic socialist and a man who did his utmost at Oxford to help break down barriers of privilege and wealth and help admit students who did not come from public school. Himself a grammar schoolboy, Carey won an Oxford scholarship; beginning his many years at the prestigious university after an interlude of national service (partly in Egypt).
During his time at Oxford, the author muses on his studies and recalls attending lectures by J.R.R. Tolkien, among others. Tolkien’s lectures were apparently mostly inaudible and, if audible, incomprehensible. Green mildew grew on his gown, as though he has stepped out of a wood... As well as commenting that he often did not enjoy his reading as an undergraduate; reading to learn, rather than for pleasure, he also makes the interesting observation that people who spend much of their time reading may find that they actually prefer reading about things rather than actually experiencing them. He gives an example of Wordsworth, finding a visit to Mont Blanc a disappointment when he finally saw it and suggests that reading can deaden the world as well as enliven it.
However, there is much for readers to enjoy in this book. Carey enthuses about his love of poets and authors. There is the visit by Robert Graves, among others, and digressions into what almost become short essays on authors such as D H Lawrence and George Orwell. He discusses book reviewing, writing, book prizes and everything in between. I found this an extremely enjoyable read, written by an utterly charming and intelligent author. Of course, he is aware that almost none of his readers will have his knowledge, but he is so enthusiastic that you feel ready to try some of the writers he has mentioned. As John Carey himself says, we should all Read On.
I received a copy of this book, from the publishers, for review.
The book begins with Carey’s early life in London, interrupted by the war and the blitz. As a young boy, after a night of bombing, Carey apparently asked his father whether they were "dead yet"? The innocent question prompted his parents to relocate to the countryside for the duration of the war. In Radcliffe-on-Trent, the author started school and began a love of reading; consuming comics and Biggles, among other treasures. Returning to London, the author started grammar school – a system he obviously believes in passionately (and with which I agree wholeheartedly). For this book is, among other things, wonderfully opinionated. Carey is an unapologetic socialist and a man who did his utmost at Oxford to help break down barriers of privilege and wealth and help admit students who did not come from public school. Himself a grammar schoolboy, Carey won an Oxford scholarship; beginning his many years at the prestigious university after an interlude of national service (partly in Egypt).
During his time at Oxford, the author muses on his studies and recalls attending lectures by J.R.R. Tolkien, among others. Tolkien’s lectures were apparently mostly inaudible and, if audible, incomprehensible. Green mildew grew on his gown, as though he has stepped out of a wood... As well as commenting that he often did not enjoy his reading as an undergraduate; reading to learn, rather than for pleasure, he also makes the interesting observation that people who spend much of their time reading may find that they actually prefer reading about things rather than actually experiencing them. He gives an example of Wordsworth, finding a visit to Mont Blanc a disappointment when he finally saw it and suggests that reading can deaden the world as well as enliven it.
However, there is much for readers to enjoy in this book. Carey enthuses about his love of poets and authors. There is the visit by Robert Graves, among others, and digressions into what almost become short essays on authors such as D H Lawrence and George Orwell. He discusses book reviewing, writing, book prizes and everything in between. I found this an extremely enjoyable read, written by an utterly charming and intelligent author. Of course, he is aware that almost none of his readers will have his knowledge, but he is so enthusiastic that you feel ready to try some of the writers he has mentioned. As John Carey himself says, we should all Read On.
I received a copy of this book, from the publishers, for review.
March 5, 2017
(Nearly 4.5) This has remarkable similarities to David Lodge’s Quite a Good Time to Be Born; both are straightforward chronological autobiographies of working-class, bookish lads who were born in London in 1935, evacuated from the capital during the War, and went on to do military service and embark on a perhaps unlikely academic career alongside their own writing projects. Carey’s is the more interesting of the two books for bibliophile readers unfamiliar with the subject’s work, while Lodge’s is really best suited to his die-hard fans. (I am one, so I loved it, but I can recognize that its style is rather workmanlike.)
The subtitle is “An Oxford Life in Books,” and although Carey does give a thorough picture of events in his personal and professional lives, the focus is always on his literary education: the books that have meant the most to him and the way his taste and academic specialties have developed over the years. “Perhaps most people form their aesthetic preferences very early, or maybe they are partly inbred,” he writes. “I don’t know. But I do know that I wanted poems to supply vivid, sensuous images [like Chesterton, Keats and Tennyson], and I still prefer ones that do.”
If you can believe it, when Carey got to Oxford in the 1950s the English literature syllabus ended at 1832 – meaning the Victorians and Moderns were utterly excluded. Instead you started with Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, which had him once sit in on a lecture by J. R. R. Tolkien, who “was mostly inaudible and, when audible, incomprehensible.” Ha! So to begin with Carey specialized in the seventeenth century, particularly Donne and Milton (whose Christian Doctrine he translated from Latin and whose annotated poems he edited).
It was only once Carey was already an Oxford professor that he educated himself in the Victorians and Moderns, discovering a deep love for Dickens and Thackeray (he would write books on both) on the one hand and Lawrence, Orwell, Conrad and Larkin on the other. He also produced the first biography of William Golding and won a James Tait Black award for it. His other published work includes the much-maligned The Intellectuals and the Masses (about the cultural shift to Modernism, which excluded the unlearned masses), the controversial What Good Are the Arts? (which argued for total subjectivity, i.e. art is anything anyone has ever called art), and several thematic anthologies for Faber.
I especially enjoyed the “Reviewing” chapter: Carey estimates that he has reviewed upwards of 1000 books for the likes of the New Statesman and the Times, and here chooses the 20 books that have stuck with him the most over the decades, generally biographies and sweeping social histories. Of these the one I’ve read is Mauve by Simon Garfield and the one that most appeals to me is Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks.
Ultimately what this book conveys is the joy of being a lifelong reader. The remarkably compact final chapter, “So, in the End, Why Read?” gives multiple good reasons and ends with the exhortation “Now read on.” He doesn’t have to tell me twice.
The subtitle is “An Oxford Life in Books,” and although Carey does give a thorough picture of events in his personal and professional lives, the focus is always on his literary education: the books that have meant the most to him and the way his taste and academic specialties have developed over the years. “Perhaps most people form their aesthetic preferences very early, or maybe they are partly inbred,” he writes. “I don’t know. But I do know that I wanted poems to supply vivid, sensuous images [like Chesterton, Keats and Tennyson], and I still prefer ones that do.”
If you can believe it, when Carey got to Oxford in the 1950s the English literature syllabus ended at 1832 – meaning the Victorians and Moderns were utterly excluded. Instead you started with Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, which had him once sit in on a lecture by J. R. R. Tolkien, who “was mostly inaudible and, when audible, incomprehensible.” Ha! So to begin with Carey specialized in the seventeenth century, particularly Donne and Milton (whose Christian Doctrine he translated from Latin and whose annotated poems he edited).
It was only once Carey was already an Oxford professor that he educated himself in the Victorians and Moderns, discovering a deep love for Dickens and Thackeray (he would write books on both) on the one hand and Lawrence, Orwell, Conrad and Larkin on the other. He also produced the first biography of William Golding and won a James Tait Black award for it. His other published work includes the much-maligned The Intellectuals and the Masses (about the cultural shift to Modernism, which excluded the unlearned masses), the controversial What Good Are the Arts? (which argued for total subjectivity, i.e. art is anything anyone has ever called art), and several thematic anthologies for Faber.
I especially enjoyed the “Reviewing” chapter: Carey estimates that he has reviewed upwards of 1000 books for the likes of the New Statesman and the Times, and here chooses the 20 books that have stuck with him the most over the decades, generally biographies and sweeping social histories. Of these the one I’ve read is Mauve by Simon Garfield and the one that most appeals to me is Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks.
Ultimately what this book conveys is the joy of being a lifelong reader. The remarkably compact final chapter, “So, in the End, Why Read?” gives multiple good reasons and ends with the exhortation “Now read on.” He doesn’t have to tell me twice.
September 26, 2019
Highly recommended for anyone with a similar and hearty obsession with books about, the intellectual life, academics, all taking place in Oxford. Despite a few minor flaws a romp that I felt thrilling and eye opening.
August 2, 2019
John Carey has written a delightfully witty and erudite memoir. Already as a young boy he had a great love for books, and it is interesting to follow the progression of his reading. Professor Carey is an eminent critic who has published several books and has broadcast many book discussions. He has chaired the Booker Prize and the Man Booker International Prize.
In this memoir John Carey writes about many different topics, but I particularly enjoyed reading his discussions of D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Joseph Conrad. It is a book that I felt like re-reading the moment I finished reading it. Perhaps one day...
###
Extracts
"I still have that Encyclopædia Britannica. It always looks a little naked on my shelves, without its glass, and it is not much good for reference, being the eleventh edition (1910–11). But it is a time machine. Its pictures and descriptions of cities and countries show a world that two wars and modern communications have swept away. Here, preserved in photographs and tiny print, are Conrad’s Africa and Proust’s France and the Germany of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks."
"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. Reading about them surrounds them with imaginative allure, but when you actually see them they seem bald and ordinary."
"Merton is ancient and glorious, and dominated by a cathedral-scale chapel, glimmering with early fourteenth-century stained glass. Tucked under the shelter of its great tower is a tiny fourteenth-century quadrangle called (no one knows why) Mob Quad, which hoards the sun in its Cotswold stones and releases it as the day cools, so that I was folded in warmth the moment I stepped through Mob’s narrow entrance that first evening."
"Thomas Mann, whose novels I started with, surprised me by being so funny. It wasn’t how I’d been brought up to think of Germans. Buddenbrooks is about the decline of a great nineteenth-century merchant family, so it ought to be sad. But it constantly subverts the feelings you’d think it proper to have." Professor Carey then provides an example. Coincidentally I have also been reading Buddenbrooks, and I delighted in his various observations of Thomas Mann's works."
"A new custom that had mushroomed since I did the first edition, I found, was for authors to preface their terrible tomes with pages of effusive thanks to all those – teachers, academic colleagues, friends, parents, partners, children, childminders, and as like as not the family dog – without whom the volume would never have come into being. I cursed them all fervently in my heart."
"Reading Dickens straight after George Eliot made the differences between them very clear. Eliot is great because she is serious and rational. Dickens is great because he is not. He is an anarchic comic genius, and critics who treated him as a moralist seemed to me way off course."
"What objective test could you apply to identify a ‘real’ work of art? People have suggested that real works of art are the ones God likes. But, even if you believe in God, how can you tell what art He likes? Does He prefer Beethoven to Mozart or vice versa? Others have suggested that real works of art are those that make people behave better. But that raised the second question I’d asked at the start, and the answer is disappointing. A hundred years of experimental psychology have led researchers to the conclusion that behaviour is a complex outcome of nature and nurture and can’t be altered by works of art."
In this memoir John Carey writes about many different topics, but I particularly enjoyed reading his discussions of D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Joseph Conrad. It is a book that I felt like re-reading the moment I finished reading it. Perhaps one day...
###
Extracts
"I still have that Encyclopædia Britannica. It always looks a little naked on my shelves, without its glass, and it is not much good for reference, being the eleventh edition (1910–11). But it is a time machine. Its pictures and descriptions of cities and countries show a world that two wars and modern communications have swept away. Here, preserved in photographs and tiny print, are Conrad’s Africa and Proust’s France and the Germany of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks."
"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. Reading about them surrounds them with imaginative allure, but when you actually see them they seem bald and ordinary."
"Merton is ancient and glorious, and dominated by a cathedral-scale chapel, glimmering with early fourteenth-century stained glass. Tucked under the shelter of its great tower is a tiny fourteenth-century quadrangle called (no one knows why) Mob Quad, which hoards the sun in its Cotswold stones and releases it as the day cools, so that I was folded in warmth the moment I stepped through Mob’s narrow entrance that first evening."
"Thomas Mann, whose novels I started with, surprised me by being so funny. It wasn’t how I’d been brought up to think of Germans. Buddenbrooks is about the decline of a great nineteenth-century merchant family, so it ought to be sad. But it constantly subverts the feelings you’d think it proper to have." Professor Carey then provides an example. Coincidentally I have also been reading Buddenbrooks, and I delighted in his various observations of Thomas Mann's works."
"A new custom that had mushroomed since I did the first edition, I found, was for authors to preface their terrible tomes with pages of effusive thanks to all those – teachers, academic colleagues, friends, parents, partners, children, childminders, and as like as not the family dog – without whom the volume would never have come into being. I cursed them all fervently in my heart."
"Reading Dickens straight after George Eliot made the differences between them very clear. Eliot is great because she is serious and rational. Dickens is great because he is not. He is an anarchic comic genius, and critics who treated him as a moralist seemed to me way off course."
"What objective test could you apply to identify a ‘real’ work of art? People have suggested that real works of art are the ones God likes. But, even if you believe in God, how can you tell what art He likes? Does He prefer Beethoven to Mozart or vice versa? Others have suggested that real works of art are those that make people behave better. But that raised the second question I’d asked at the start, and the answer is disappointing. A hundred years of experimental psychology have led researchers to the conclusion that behaviour is a complex outcome of nature and nurture and can’t be altered by works of art."
December 21, 2018
This is a charming and enjoyable book, written in a surprisingly casual and informal style, without any of the flourishes you might expect from a professor of literature. Carey gets carried away by the lines he cites from words of poetry in a way that strikes this jaded reader as, shall we say, overly rhapsodic, but when he sticks to the chronological account of events, his writing is clear and crisp. I went away with lots of suggestions for further reading (John Buxton's Elizabethan Taste, Carey's own The Intellectuals and the Masses, Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men) and a store of anecdotes about the literary intelligentsia. For those who love the idea of a life lived in books (and I suspect that's more than a few people here on Goodreads), this particular book should have a special place in their hearts.
April 12, 2015
"So in the End, Why Read? There are as many answers to that question as there are readers. My answer is that reading opens your mind to alternative ways of thinking and feeling. Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Reading does the opposite. It encourags doubt."
This book is a the memoir of John Carey and his career as an English professor at a college in Oxford. He discusses the books that meant a lot to him as they appear in his life. He also gives insight into the extremely conservative life of Oxford of the 1950's and 1960's. It's an easy, compelling read with interesting commentaries on well-known books. I thoroughly enjoyed this.
This book is a the memoir of John Carey and his career as an English professor at a college in Oxford. He discusses the books that meant a lot to him as they appear in his life. He also gives insight into the extremely conservative life of Oxford of the 1950's and 1960's. It's an easy, compelling read with interesting commentaries on well-known books. I thoroughly enjoyed this.
March 31, 2015
I remember a conversation with a friend, about fifteen years ago. We'd just seen the Lindsay Anderson film If.... and were talking about the bits we'd liked best. I said that I'd liked the weird bits the most. He said, 'Yeah - the bits in black and white, all the surreal stuff?' I looked a little puzzled, and gave my answer. It was a list of all the day-to-day things that happen in a public school, which its inhabitants clearly seemed to think were ordinary. Ever since I've had an enduring curiosity about what actually goes on in The Great Universities (TM) - if only in the same way an anthropologist does about a tribe of humans previously thought lost to civilisation.
The book is a memoir of Oxford but also of reading, and the importance books have played in Carey's life. It is also, as he states from the outset, a tribute to the grammar school system, long since destroyed by the kind of socialist that enjoys leaving smoking holes in his own feet. That preface is also a warning to the reader. I've quoted these words from one of Carey's earlier books before, but they're just as truthful now:
'The reader has a right to know what sort of person will be laying down the law in the rest of the book - what his quirks and prejudices are, and what sort of background has formed him [...] This would save the reader a lot of time, since he would know from the start how much of the book's contents he could automatically discount.'
Carey makes it clear what sort of background formed him. He was an accountant's son (incidentally, something he and I have in common), an occupation the Bloomsbury set loved to despise as 'clerks', as if further consideration were somehow unnecessary. As with Larkin, post-war austerity and deprivation seem to have entered his soul. Seemingly innocent objects - a mangle, a cucumber frame - stand for rare glimpses of luxury. He reads the magazines of the time -Chums, Biggles and, though not mentioned in this book, The Wide World - but never forgets the writers he discovered at Grammar school, the vivid clarity of their images.
After arriving at Oxford on a scholarship, he recalls the peculiar rituals. One involves being thought a rather spiffing sort for smashing more panes of glass than your Daddy did when he was there; another involves being carried out in a coffin in a mock funeral procession after getting expelled. The calculated rudeness, too, and what it tells you about an entire world of thought:
'One night I was sitting opposite him at dinner when he had a guest, for whose benefit he was identifying the various notables seated round the table. I heard his guest ask who I was, and [Sir Roy] Harrod replied, quite audibly, "Oh, that's nobody".'
Call this score-settling, if you like. I call it reportage, and I'd like to point out that no attempt at improving things that ignores or excuses away exchanges like this is likely to go far. The same might be said for Carey's warnings about watching more green fields vanish under concrete and sewage pipes.
From here, additional work finds his way. He tutors with 'military' robustness, determined to update and improve the syllabus. Additional work - editing Milton, moonlighting in Grub Street, judging prizes - seem to arrive almost out of the blue. A cottage is bought and renovated in the Cotsworlds; bees are lovingly kept. He writes books of his own, edits anthologies. He also meets living writers that he admires - Larkin, Graves, Heaney. Thankfully, these pieces are kept fresh, and free of hero-worship, especially the parts on Graves' rather dotty assertions.
I enjoyed the book for its outsider's take on Oxford and for Carey's punchy, vivid style. Not all of the material is fresh - some comes almost verbatim from earlier essays - but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Throwing crusts of bread from the Hammersmith Bridge results in a 'swooping, screaming tornado of beaks and feathers'. During an exam, the sheets of paper 'flared up at you like arc lamps'; a house damaged by bombing 'lost its entire wall on the street side, exposing all its rooms with their furniture still in place, like a doll's house with the front lifted off'. Bees land in the darkness of their hive, the orange pollen on their back legs 'shining like brake lights.'
He can surprise you, too. Although Carey owns up that book awards are well-meaning lotteries, not infallible exercises in recognising merit, he is honest enough to share his feelings on being awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and this touching bit of self-depreciation: 'Academic matters apart, I had not won anything since the Richmond and East Sheen Grammar School for Boys cross-country run some fifty-eight years before.' Curiously, his favourites among the thousand or so books he has reviewed for the Sunday Times are largely non-fiction. Among those are John Osborne's virulently angry autobiographies, rather than Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, or Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs.
Now the flaws. They're few, in truth. Attractive as Carey's anti-luxury stance can be, I like to think I'm not the only one who finds it a bit much when he savages aftershave as 'foppish', as if not stinking is an affront to basic human decency. When mentioning the work of the 1994 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Carey gets his name wrong. When Carey complains about the reviews for The Intellectuals and the Masses, I recall more sympathetic reviews than he seems to, such as Ian Hamilton's. While I've described Joyce's Ulysses as a handful of diamonds sprinkled over a slag heap, I haven't forgotten that Orwell couldn't read it without feeling 'an inferiority complex', nor that he aped its multiple-style approach in his second novel.
These minor gripes aside, if reading punctures 'pomp' and 'makes you see that ordinary things are not ordinary', Carey has excelled at both here. I sincerely hope this will not be his last book.
The book is a memoir of Oxford but also of reading, and the importance books have played in Carey's life. It is also, as he states from the outset, a tribute to the grammar school system, long since destroyed by the kind of socialist that enjoys leaving smoking holes in his own feet. That preface is also a warning to the reader. I've quoted these words from one of Carey's earlier books before, but they're just as truthful now:
'The reader has a right to know what sort of person will be laying down the law in the rest of the book - what his quirks and prejudices are, and what sort of background has formed him [...] This would save the reader a lot of time, since he would know from the start how much of the book's contents he could automatically discount.'
Carey makes it clear what sort of background formed him. He was an accountant's son (incidentally, something he and I have in common), an occupation the Bloomsbury set loved to despise as 'clerks', as if further consideration were somehow unnecessary. As with Larkin, post-war austerity and deprivation seem to have entered his soul. Seemingly innocent objects - a mangle, a cucumber frame - stand for rare glimpses of luxury. He reads the magazines of the time -Chums, Biggles and, though not mentioned in this book, The Wide World - but never forgets the writers he discovered at Grammar school, the vivid clarity of their images.
After arriving at Oxford on a scholarship, he recalls the peculiar rituals. One involves being thought a rather spiffing sort for smashing more panes of glass than your Daddy did when he was there; another involves being carried out in a coffin in a mock funeral procession after getting expelled. The calculated rudeness, too, and what it tells you about an entire world of thought:
'One night I was sitting opposite him at dinner when he had a guest, for whose benefit he was identifying the various notables seated round the table. I heard his guest ask who I was, and [Sir Roy] Harrod replied, quite audibly, "Oh, that's nobody".'
Call this score-settling, if you like. I call it reportage, and I'd like to point out that no attempt at improving things that ignores or excuses away exchanges like this is likely to go far. The same might be said for Carey's warnings about watching more green fields vanish under concrete and sewage pipes.
From here, additional work finds his way. He tutors with 'military' robustness, determined to update and improve the syllabus. Additional work - editing Milton, moonlighting in Grub Street, judging prizes - seem to arrive almost out of the blue. A cottage is bought and renovated in the Cotsworlds; bees are lovingly kept. He writes books of his own, edits anthologies. He also meets living writers that he admires - Larkin, Graves, Heaney. Thankfully, these pieces are kept fresh, and free of hero-worship, especially the parts on Graves' rather dotty assertions.
I enjoyed the book for its outsider's take on Oxford and for Carey's punchy, vivid style. Not all of the material is fresh - some comes almost verbatim from earlier essays - but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Throwing crusts of bread from the Hammersmith Bridge results in a 'swooping, screaming tornado of beaks and feathers'. During an exam, the sheets of paper 'flared up at you like arc lamps'; a house damaged by bombing 'lost its entire wall on the street side, exposing all its rooms with their furniture still in place, like a doll's house with the front lifted off'. Bees land in the darkness of their hive, the orange pollen on their back legs 'shining like brake lights.'
He can surprise you, too. Although Carey owns up that book awards are well-meaning lotteries, not infallible exercises in recognising merit, he is honest enough to share his feelings on being awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and this touching bit of self-depreciation: 'Academic matters apart, I had not won anything since the Richmond and East Sheen Grammar School for Boys cross-country run some fifty-eight years before.' Curiously, his favourites among the thousand or so books he has reviewed for the Sunday Times are largely non-fiction. Among those are John Osborne's virulently angry autobiographies, rather than Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, or Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs.
Now the flaws. They're few, in truth. Attractive as Carey's anti-luxury stance can be, I like to think I'm not the only one who finds it a bit much when he savages aftershave as 'foppish', as if not stinking is an affront to basic human decency. When mentioning the work of the 1994 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Carey gets his name wrong. When Carey complains about the reviews for The Intellectuals and the Masses, I recall more sympathetic reviews than he seems to, such as Ian Hamilton's. While I've described Joyce's Ulysses as a handful of diamonds sprinkled over a slag heap, I haven't forgotten that Orwell couldn't read it without feeling 'an inferiority complex', nor that he aped its multiple-style approach in his second novel.
These minor gripes aside, if reading punctures 'pomp' and 'makes you see that ordinary things are not ordinary', Carey has excelled at both here. I sincerely hope this will not be his last book.
March 22, 2014
What a wonderful, enthralling book, especially when he's writing about authors he loves (I was so pleased he rated George Orwell so highly, I agree with him that his early novels are underrated and his essays are second to none.) I was always pleased when John Carey appeared on Newsnight Review as he always talked sense and cut through all the rubbish and hot air, as this book does. Also he seems like a very nice man.
February 7, 2015
I enjoyed reading Oxford Professor Carey's account of his academic career and his life in reading. He has certainly done more reading than most and shares with his readers some of his likes and dislikes about books he has read and many he has reviewed or taught. You will come away with new titles you will want to delve into. He reads not just literature but biography, autobiography, poetry, science, and history.
He provides insight into what it is like to be an Oxford Don and reside in such a storied place and the slowness of change to come to the status quo there. He has written works of literary and cultural criticism and biography. I want to read his work The Intellectuals and The Masses.
If you love reading, you will enjoy Professor Carey's book.
He provides insight into what it is like to be an Oxford Don and reside in such a storied place and the slowness of change to come to the status quo there. He has written works of literary and cultural criticism and biography. I want to read his work The Intellectuals and The Masses.
If you love reading, you will enjoy Professor Carey's book.
August 19, 2017
I absolutely loved John’s writing style. John lives in Barnes in London and I’ve been there a few times so next time I go I will definitely try to look him up! The book was a pseudo biography of John seen through some of the books that massively influenced him. He has to be one of the most underrated writers I have read recently. I loved his journey though university and how he started teaching and how he became a recognised professor. His knowledge and breadth of learning is incredible. Here are some of the best bits:
• “I simply wanted to get an oxford scholarship. So I took one of peter's pills (drug like ecstasy) each evening and the results were phenomenal. I read and read until dawn and birds started singing, and I discovered that Pope was a great poet and Dryden much less boring than id supposed."
• “It was a luxury to get up each morning and know you could spend the whole day just reading. Alone with a book I could stop pretending and just be myself.”
• “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. Reading about them surrounds them with imaginative allure but when you actually see them they seem bald and ordinary.”
• “I was a bit surprised that a knowledge of English literature was reckoned so desirable as a qualification for the civil service. Looking back though it strikes me that the commissioners may have valued it because they believed that literature trains you in ways of thought outside your own place and time.”
• “Not that Lawrence approves of lovers touching each other in the normal way he was puritanically repelled by cuddling and petting and feared and detested love. It sucked the valour and wildness out of men he warned and glued them to their putrid routines. It was a vice like drink and could lead only to slimy, creepy, personal intimacy. Married couples should not be united in love but finely separate in their dynamic blood polarity like 2 eagles in mid-air grappling and whirling.” (Like a violent dance?)
• “In a letter of 1908 (YES 1908) DH Lawrence wrote: If I had my way I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal palace with a military band playing softly and a cinematograph working brightly, then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in all the sick the bald and the maimed; I would lead them gently and they would smile me a weary thanks and the band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah chorus …….. Reading this we can see why Bertrand Russell said that Lawrence’s mystical philosophy of blood led straight to Auschwitz.”
• “Literature functions by making us imagine what it would be like to be someone else, inhabiting another body, thinking other thoughts. Lawrence is able to bring that about because he writes with such passionate conviction … his natural aristocrats (in his books) feel special and individual and separate from the mass and everyone who is educated and reads books has felt like that. So we are made to see ourselves though them and learn about ourselves.”
• “David Lewis-Williams "The Mind in the Cave": a key factor in the book's argument is that for thousands of years Neanderthals and new people – immigrants, belonging to our own species Homo Sapiens – lived side by side in Western Europe’s Stone Age sites. The crucial difference between them was that Neanderthals because of neurological structure of their brains could not form mental images whereas new people could imagine a spirit world where as Neanderthals were congenital atheists.” So what's the next stage in the human evolution of the mind? What works better than when we work with images?
• “Also new was Provines discovery that speakers on average laugh more than audiences. Previous studies had assumed the opposite. The only exception he said was when the speaker was male and the audience female in which case it was the females who laughed. This pattern emerges sadly. Already by the age of 6 girls are leading laughers, boys the best laugh-getters. Provine sees his as an expression of power relations between sexes and cites instances of laughter as subservience from other cultures.”
• “I simply wanted to get an oxford scholarship. So I took one of peter's pills (drug like ecstasy) each evening and the results were phenomenal. I read and read until dawn and birds started singing, and I discovered that Pope was a great poet and Dryden much less boring than id supposed."
• “It was a luxury to get up each morning and know you could spend the whole day just reading. Alone with a book I could stop pretending and just be myself.”
• “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. Reading about them surrounds them with imaginative allure but when you actually see them they seem bald and ordinary.”
• “I was a bit surprised that a knowledge of English literature was reckoned so desirable as a qualification for the civil service. Looking back though it strikes me that the commissioners may have valued it because they believed that literature trains you in ways of thought outside your own place and time.”
• “Not that Lawrence approves of lovers touching each other in the normal way he was puritanically repelled by cuddling and petting and feared and detested love. It sucked the valour and wildness out of men he warned and glued them to their putrid routines. It was a vice like drink and could lead only to slimy, creepy, personal intimacy. Married couples should not be united in love but finely separate in their dynamic blood polarity like 2 eagles in mid-air grappling and whirling.” (Like a violent dance?)
• “In a letter of 1908 (YES 1908) DH Lawrence wrote: If I had my way I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal palace with a military band playing softly and a cinematograph working brightly, then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in all the sick the bald and the maimed; I would lead them gently and they would smile me a weary thanks and the band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah chorus …….. Reading this we can see why Bertrand Russell said that Lawrence’s mystical philosophy of blood led straight to Auschwitz.”
• “Literature functions by making us imagine what it would be like to be someone else, inhabiting another body, thinking other thoughts. Lawrence is able to bring that about because he writes with such passionate conviction … his natural aristocrats (in his books) feel special and individual and separate from the mass and everyone who is educated and reads books has felt like that. So we are made to see ourselves though them and learn about ourselves.”
• “David Lewis-Williams "The Mind in the Cave": a key factor in the book's argument is that for thousands of years Neanderthals and new people – immigrants, belonging to our own species Homo Sapiens – lived side by side in Western Europe’s Stone Age sites. The crucial difference between them was that Neanderthals because of neurological structure of their brains could not form mental images whereas new people could imagine a spirit world where as Neanderthals were congenital atheists.” So what's the next stage in the human evolution of the mind? What works better than when we work with images?
• “Also new was Provines discovery that speakers on average laugh more than audiences. Previous studies had assumed the opposite. The only exception he said was when the speaker was male and the audience female in which case it was the females who laughed. This pattern emerges sadly. Already by the age of 6 girls are leading laughers, boys the best laugh-getters. Provine sees his as an expression of power relations between sexes and cites instances of laughter as subservience from other cultures.”
March 31, 2014
John Carey, respected academic, writer and reviewer, here looks back over a life in books, the importance they have had for him as man and professor, and how they have shaped his career and destiny. The first part of the book is pretty much straight autobiography, but once he gets to Oxford, where he spent his whole working life, the more the book becomes a series of mini-lectures on the writers that he has loved and studied.
Overall, this is an entertaining and engaging memoir, and I enjoyed the insights into academic life, but I did find that sometimes the literary essays seemed out of place and too detailed. For example, he goes into Milton’s Latin treatise “Christian Doctrine” at some length, as he does into his discovery of a previously unknown poet who knew Donne. He even quotes from some of the reviews of his own books, reviews of which he is patently extremely proud, seeing nothing odd in boasting of being reviewed in such newspapers as The Scottsdale Arizona Progress or the Fort Worth Texas Morning Star-Telegram – important papers no doubt, but hardly likely to impress the regular reader of this book. At one point he even says, when talking about his good reviews, “In case this all sounds disagreeably triumphalist…”Well, yes, it does a bit. In fact all the way through I felt that Carey has a bit of a chip on his shoulder (perhaps from not having been to public school like so many of his peers?) and constantly feels the need to justify his own thoughts and actions. This becomes tedious.
He’s certainly a name-dropper, even with the doctors who treated him when he was very ill, and is “sure they saved my life”. Well probably. Unless it was the cleaning lady who did the trick, who tapped the ash from her cigarette into her bucket (really? In an isolation ward where he is being barrier nursed?) who said consolingly “you won’t die, love”. And he didn’t. These odd little interludes grated on me.
Although always standing up for the common reader, he also appears to think that his readers are possibly pretty ignorant, for when he mentions that Oxford’s Radcliffe Science Library is open access, feels impelled to explain what open access means. It seems unlikely to me that anyone reading this book won’t have some prior knowledge of how libraries work.
He also shows an unpleasant tendency to feel entitled to act as he wishes, presumably due to his innate erudition. At a Larkin reading he tells us that Larkin “said he wanted no one to make a recording or take notes. Luckily I was seated behind a large sofa, so was able to take notes unobserved…”No need to respect Larkin’s request, then….
He also implies that he single-handedly instituted reforms in the curriculum and teaching methods at Oxford. Perhaps he did. But was he really such a lone voice in the wilderness?
So yes, I did enjoy reading this, although I found myself bridling at regular intervals, and yes, I did enjoy Carey’s mini-lectures (but then I’m a literary soul myself) but I did find the whole book rather unpleasantly self-obsessed, an impression Carey never gives when he appears on TV or radio, and this disconnect puzzles me. Do I recommend the book? Yes indeed – it’s just a shame he couldn’t have taken himself a little less pompously.
Overall, this is an entertaining and engaging memoir, and I enjoyed the insights into academic life, but I did find that sometimes the literary essays seemed out of place and too detailed. For example, he goes into Milton’s Latin treatise “Christian Doctrine” at some length, as he does into his discovery of a previously unknown poet who knew Donne. He even quotes from some of the reviews of his own books, reviews of which he is patently extremely proud, seeing nothing odd in boasting of being reviewed in such newspapers as The Scottsdale Arizona Progress or the Fort Worth Texas Morning Star-Telegram – important papers no doubt, but hardly likely to impress the regular reader of this book. At one point he even says, when talking about his good reviews, “In case this all sounds disagreeably triumphalist…”Well, yes, it does a bit. In fact all the way through I felt that Carey has a bit of a chip on his shoulder (perhaps from not having been to public school like so many of his peers?) and constantly feels the need to justify his own thoughts and actions. This becomes tedious.
He’s certainly a name-dropper, even with the doctors who treated him when he was very ill, and is “sure they saved my life”. Well probably. Unless it was the cleaning lady who did the trick, who tapped the ash from her cigarette into her bucket (really? In an isolation ward where he is being barrier nursed?) who said consolingly “you won’t die, love”. And he didn’t. These odd little interludes grated on me.
Although always standing up for the common reader, he also appears to think that his readers are possibly pretty ignorant, for when he mentions that Oxford’s Radcliffe Science Library is open access, feels impelled to explain what open access means. It seems unlikely to me that anyone reading this book won’t have some prior knowledge of how libraries work.
He also shows an unpleasant tendency to feel entitled to act as he wishes, presumably due to his innate erudition. At a Larkin reading he tells us that Larkin “said he wanted no one to make a recording or take notes. Luckily I was seated behind a large sofa, so was able to take notes unobserved…”No need to respect Larkin’s request, then….
He also implies that he single-handedly instituted reforms in the curriculum and teaching methods at Oxford. Perhaps he did. But was he really such a lone voice in the wilderness?
So yes, I did enjoy reading this, although I found myself bridling at regular intervals, and yes, I did enjoy Carey’s mini-lectures (but then I’m a literary soul myself) but I did find the whole book rather unpleasantly self-obsessed, an impression Carey never gives when he appears on TV or radio, and this disconnect puzzles me. Do I recommend the book? Yes indeed – it’s just a shame he couldn’t have taken himself a little less pompously.
December 18, 2015
The Unexpected Professor John Carey I knew of John Carey through his meticulous translation of John Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana. I also knew of several of his popular books on history and literature and that he had been a Booker judge. This autobiography tells us much about his charmed life from the time he went to Oxford through his brilliant career in academia and as a reviewer.
My favorite part was about his bee keeping which seems to keep his ego in check. God knows nothing else does. He takes us on a tour of English literature from his dismantling of the tyranny of Old English in grad schools to an exploration of the great writers –in his opinion from the 16th century onwards. What’s best is his comments on Donne and Orwell. Like a fussy old school marm he shows us what really “good” writers are like, that is those he approves of such as the dusty translations of the Russians.
What is not so fine is his parochialism. He mentions Americans only in passing except for Eliot, and really Eliot became an Englishman although Carey gossips like an old hen about the master poet’s culinary habits. Surely one American -Melville, Hemingway, Frost, Whitman- should be good enough for the patrician Carey.
He also lays it on thick about his own books and gives too lengthy a digest of them. And I am confused about his them versus us idea of academic writing contrasted with plain writing. For Carey himself was an academic writing rather than a plain writer.
I like the personal parts of his book best: his remembrance of his mentally ill brother, his father, his children in miniature bee keeper’s outfits. But really I found the work empty. Although he knows his literature, he really doesn’t seem to understand it. He is very much a snob, although he himself was a victim of the class struggle and wars. In the words of one of Joseph Heller’s characters from that wasteland of America, 'He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it'
My favorite part was about his bee keeping which seems to keep his ego in check. God knows nothing else does. He takes us on a tour of English literature from his dismantling of the tyranny of Old English in grad schools to an exploration of the great writers –in his opinion from the 16th century onwards. What’s best is his comments on Donne and Orwell. Like a fussy old school marm he shows us what really “good” writers are like, that is those he approves of such as the dusty translations of the Russians.
What is not so fine is his parochialism. He mentions Americans only in passing except for Eliot, and really Eliot became an Englishman although Carey gossips like an old hen about the master poet’s culinary habits. Surely one American -Melville, Hemingway, Frost, Whitman- should be good enough for the patrician Carey.
He also lays it on thick about his own books and gives too lengthy a digest of them. And I am confused about his them versus us idea of academic writing contrasted with plain writing. For Carey himself was an academic writing rather than a plain writer.
I like the personal parts of his book best: his remembrance of his mentally ill brother, his father, his children in miniature bee keeper’s outfits. But really I found the work empty. Although he knows his literature, he really doesn’t seem to understand it. He is very much a snob, although he himself was a victim of the class struggle and wars. In the words of one of Joseph Heller’s characters from that wasteland of America, 'He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it'
April 2, 2017
Here is a "life in books" in the old British style, but surprisingly written in 2014. It does have a lot of unique character: the author is an old-fashioned Oxford snob, who made his name by simultaneously revitalizing the Oxford tradition of integral scholarship in the classics, and writing a work of literary criticism that was "controversial" for opposing snobbery, but is now taught in schools. This mini-biography in itself contains both the high and low notes of the book.
If I myself were British this book would certainly be 4 stars because it discusses academic institutions which live on today, but in forms and old traditions no longer existing. The contrasts are apparently great, but Carey does not emphasize them; he simply carries on through the years, focusing on the people he met and the books he read from time to time, about which his opinions are neither radical nor especially rich, but distant and banally republican (I notice his judgment of Dostoyevsky is borrowed directly from Orwell).
Carey's lack of political commitment is simultaneously fascinating and incredibly aggravating. He describes how dejected he felt at being on a committee to revise and replace the King James Bible, discarding centuries of poetic tradition, but apparently he had no thoughts at the time of resigning his position and protesting the committee, nor does he in retrospect. Similarly, he feels he lacks standing to criticize Zionism because he himself hails from a formerly imperialist nation. But one could simply criticize both imperialism and Zionism...
Reflecting on the book does give one pause to consider unspoken currents lying beneath British history, culture, and politics, so in that sense it is an interesting read.
If I myself were British this book would certainly be 4 stars because it discusses academic institutions which live on today, but in forms and old traditions no longer existing. The contrasts are apparently great, but Carey does not emphasize them; he simply carries on through the years, focusing on the people he met and the books he read from time to time, about which his opinions are neither radical nor especially rich, but distant and banally republican (I notice his judgment of Dostoyevsky is borrowed directly from Orwell).
Carey's lack of political commitment is simultaneously fascinating and incredibly aggravating. He describes how dejected he felt at being on a committee to revise and replace the King James Bible, discarding centuries of poetic tradition, but apparently he had no thoughts at the time of resigning his position and protesting the committee, nor does he in retrospect. Similarly, he feels he lacks standing to criticize Zionism because he himself hails from a formerly imperialist nation. But one could simply criticize both imperialism and Zionism...
Reflecting on the book does give one pause to consider unspoken currents lying beneath British history, culture, and politics, so in that sense it is an interesting read.
October 5, 2019
An incomplete (the author is still very much alive) biography of a well-known Oxford University professor in English literature. Hence the "life in books" part of the title. The story is well told and never gets boring (but see below).
I especially appreciate his praise for so-called grammar schools which are English state schools that use entrance tests to limit their intake to promising students. If I understand correctly, this system has been attacked by the loony left that presumably wants to prevent class mobility. It was attending such a grammar school that allowed the author to win a scholarship for Oxford University.
Also his characterization of Cervantes' Don Quixote as a "colossal disappointment" had me nodding vigorously. He found it "boring and hateful" (Chapter 7, p. 195).
Thus a very pleasant and interesting read. Objectively, it should get five stars. However, subjectively, I only put four because of too much poetry, which I don't like.
Highly recommended.
I especially appreciate his praise for so-called grammar schools which are English state schools that use entrance tests to limit their intake to promising students. If I understand correctly, this system has been attacked by the loony left that presumably wants to prevent class mobility. It was attending such a grammar school that allowed the author to win a scholarship for Oxford University.
Also his characterization of Cervantes' Don Quixote as a "colossal disappointment" had me nodding vigorously. He found it "boring and hateful" (Chapter 7, p. 195).
Thus a very pleasant and interesting read. Objectively, it should get five stars. However, subjectively, I only put four because of too much poetry, which I don't like.
Highly recommended.
May 16, 2018
I wanted to like this more than I did. Perhaps it was because many of the writers Carey discusses are not my favorites. It was interesting and his life at Oxford does fall in the range of my previous fantasies about academic life.
June 28, 2015
Half way through The Unlikely Professor I was deciding which friends and relations I would give copies to. It was such an enjoyable read: there was Carey's wartime childhood in Barnes; some hilarious stories of army service in Egypt; the eccentricities of Oxford in the fifties and sixties; and Carey's pithy judgements on English literature. Plus a little gentle romance, in the ditching of his childhood sweetheart for a fellow undergrad glimpsed in profile during an Oxford lecture.
I had bought the book expecting Oxford, but the tales of my home patch in South West London were a bonus. Barnes has gone upmarket since the 1940's. Hammersmith, pre-flyover, sounds like a charming place. And Mortlake, well I guffawed at the description of it as some kind of no-go area, "a slum, dark and threatening ...I didn't linger on the way back". Carey knows what Mortlake is like now and sounds more shocked at its current prosperity than he did at its earlier roughness.
From school to Oxford was an awkward transition. Carey makes a point about how today's students have it easy, psychologically at least, arriving for interviews to find Welcome placards and balloons. So different from his day, when he turned up for his interview at St John's college and the porter "handed me a key, told me the number of my room, and bade me goodnight." It wasn't designed to reassure a grammar school boy: "as I stumbled off across the dark quadrangle it occurred to me that I probably did not belong in Oxford".
I loved Carey's hero worship of his brilliant but taciturn English tutor, whose slightest response to an undergraduate's essay was savoured as much as the most articulate commentary. When a student read him an essay, "after an expressive silence, he would allude to some passage in Shakespeare or Virgil or Dante that seemed to him apposite, and that he assumed we knew, and follow it with a string of interrogative bleats - 'Eh? Eh? Eh?' - that invited us to comment on it."
As he begins to make his mark as a critic, we see just how much hard graft it takes - whether it's having to read all of D.H.Lawrence's novels, the voluminous writings of John Donne, or, later, having been picked as William Golding's biographer, the two and a half million words of Golding's private journal, which took six months in itself.
Now here's where my disappointment started. There was no insight into how Carey copes with all this. Does he read fast or slow, late at night or early in the morning? How does he keep notes of what he's read? How does he negotiate dull sermons, letters and tracts but make sure he's not missing anything?
And when he's finished reading, how does he decide what line to take on a writer or a book? How different does it have to be from the orthodoxy? He remarks about Paradise Lost that Satan is the most interesting character. That was about the one idea that I remember from studying the poem at A level. So is that something Carey came up with and which has been hugely influential? Or was it conventional wisdom, in which case I'm surprised Carey thinks it's worth including.
But I'm afraid that's not the end of my complaints. In its final stretches, the clever parallel tracks, of intellectual and real life, seem to separate. We don't hear about his domestic arrangements for ages. I thought he must have got divorced from Gill and didn't want to mention it, but no, she pops up again as if nothing has happened. And there's an uncomfortable roundup of favourite books he's reviewed. There are interesting details - like how Frank Muir was buried along with a copy of Carey's very favourable review of his autobiography (laminated, I hope). But it becomes a bit like a leaving speech - a cheery roundup of achievements under an appropriately self-deprecating sheen.
And then there's the final chapter, 'So, in the End, Why Read?'. It's about two pages long, and almost half of that is quotations. It feels dashed off. The final words in the book are: "reading releases you from the limits of yourself. Reading is freedom. Now read on."
I couldn't get out of my mind a vision of an over-committed Carey being hounded by his publisher to finish the book to a deadline, and of Carey deciding that he'd just finish it even if there was only an hour left. That may be unfair, but after so enjoying the first parts of the book, I couldn't have been more predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt.
It's still a great read, and points you to his enthusiasms: I'm already enjoying 'Coming Up for Air' thanks to Carey's praise for Orwell. And I'll probably read more Lawrence, and maybe even have another look at Milton. Then there's Heaney and Larkin. In fact, there's a comprehensive, undergrad-style English Lit reading list in the book if you want to take advantage of it. But I won't be buying extras copies to give away.
I had bought the book expecting Oxford, but the tales of my home patch in South West London were a bonus. Barnes has gone upmarket since the 1940's. Hammersmith, pre-flyover, sounds like a charming place. And Mortlake, well I guffawed at the description of it as some kind of no-go area, "a slum, dark and threatening ...I didn't linger on the way back". Carey knows what Mortlake is like now and sounds more shocked at its current prosperity than he did at its earlier roughness.
From school to Oxford was an awkward transition. Carey makes a point about how today's students have it easy, psychologically at least, arriving for interviews to find Welcome placards and balloons. So different from his day, when he turned up for his interview at St John's college and the porter "handed me a key, told me the number of my room, and bade me goodnight." It wasn't designed to reassure a grammar school boy: "as I stumbled off across the dark quadrangle it occurred to me that I probably did not belong in Oxford".
I loved Carey's hero worship of his brilliant but taciturn English tutor, whose slightest response to an undergraduate's essay was savoured as much as the most articulate commentary. When a student read him an essay, "after an expressive silence, he would allude to some passage in Shakespeare or Virgil or Dante that seemed to him apposite, and that he assumed we knew, and follow it with a string of interrogative bleats - 'Eh? Eh? Eh?' - that invited us to comment on it."
As he begins to make his mark as a critic, we see just how much hard graft it takes - whether it's having to read all of D.H.Lawrence's novels, the voluminous writings of John Donne, or, later, having been picked as William Golding's biographer, the two and a half million words of Golding's private journal, which took six months in itself.
Now here's where my disappointment started. There was no insight into how Carey copes with all this. Does he read fast or slow, late at night or early in the morning? How does he keep notes of what he's read? How does he negotiate dull sermons, letters and tracts but make sure he's not missing anything?
And when he's finished reading, how does he decide what line to take on a writer or a book? How different does it have to be from the orthodoxy? He remarks about Paradise Lost that Satan is the most interesting character. That was about the one idea that I remember from studying the poem at A level. So is that something Carey came up with and which has been hugely influential? Or was it conventional wisdom, in which case I'm surprised Carey thinks it's worth including.
But I'm afraid that's not the end of my complaints. In its final stretches, the clever parallel tracks, of intellectual and real life, seem to separate. We don't hear about his domestic arrangements for ages. I thought he must have got divorced from Gill and didn't want to mention it, but no, she pops up again as if nothing has happened. And there's an uncomfortable roundup of favourite books he's reviewed. There are interesting details - like how Frank Muir was buried along with a copy of Carey's very favourable review of his autobiography (laminated, I hope). But it becomes a bit like a leaving speech - a cheery roundup of achievements under an appropriately self-deprecating sheen.
And then there's the final chapter, 'So, in the End, Why Read?'. It's about two pages long, and almost half of that is quotations. It feels dashed off. The final words in the book are: "reading releases you from the limits of yourself. Reading is freedom. Now read on."
I couldn't get out of my mind a vision of an over-committed Carey being hounded by his publisher to finish the book to a deadline, and of Carey deciding that he'd just finish it even if there was only an hour left. That may be unfair, but after so enjoying the first parts of the book, I couldn't have been more predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt.
It's still a great read, and points you to his enthusiasms: I'm already enjoying 'Coming Up for Air' thanks to Carey's praise for Orwell. And I'll probably read more Lawrence, and maybe even have another look at Milton. Then there's Heaney and Larkin. In fact, there's a comprehensive, undergrad-style English Lit reading list in the book if you want to take advantage of it. But I won't be buying extras copies to give away.
April 6, 2014
From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Academic and reviewer John Carey looks back on a life in and around books..
Academic and reviewer John Carey looks back on a life in and around books..
March 30, 2017
Extracts...
September 15, 2016
John Carey is a retired professor of English literature, author and book reviewer for The Sunday Times in England. This autobiography details how a boy born into pre-war London became one of Britain’s foremost literary critics.
Carey was, by his admission, a fairly average and disinterested student until he attended East Sheen Boys’ Grammar School where he was lucky enough to have inspired and inspiring teachers who introduced him to Latin, Greek and English Literature. After obtaining a scholarship he attended St John’s College, Oxford and went on to teach at Keble and Merton colleges during the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s.
Carey is an unapologetic anti-elitist when it comes to literature and education. He has written several books critiquing modernist writers including Lawrence, Eliot and Woolf. He has bitterly criticized the destruction of the English grammar school system (which accepts students on the basis of merit rather than geography or ability to pay). It’s extremely clear from this book that Carey loves good literature (whatever nationality it might be) but has no qualms knocking down writers and books previously thought untouchable. Carey can’t stand Don Quixote (finding it both dull and offensive), Joyce is almost unreadable, Lawrence is misogynistic, anti-semitic and downright “silly”, and he wrote a rather infamous review of Ted Hughes’ book “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being” that almost ruined their friendship, but he loves and is passionate about his chosen subject and writes about so many authors and their works that it’s hard to keep track of them all. It’s a miracle to me that Carey managed to get married and have a family, his reading list is so prolific! Thankfully Carey is equally open and hilarious about negative reviews of his own books (whilst quite happily publishing the positive reviews alongside them).
It is the final chapter where Carey discusses why we read that the book really comes into its own. You may not agree with his judgments anywhere else but the last few sentences are golden.
You can find many of Carey’s reviews on his website www.johncarey.org and they make for very entertaining reading, whether you agree with him or not.
Carey was, by his admission, a fairly average and disinterested student until he attended East Sheen Boys’ Grammar School where he was lucky enough to have inspired and inspiring teachers who introduced him to Latin, Greek and English Literature. After obtaining a scholarship he attended St John’s College, Oxford and went on to teach at Keble and Merton colleges during the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s.
Carey is an unapologetic anti-elitist when it comes to literature and education. He has written several books critiquing modernist writers including Lawrence, Eliot and Woolf. He has bitterly criticized the destruction of the English grammar school system (which accepts students on the basis of merit rather than geography or ability to pay). It’s extremely clear from this book that Carey loves good literature (whatever nationality it might be) but has no qualms knocking down writers and books previously thought untouchable. Carey can’t stand Don Quixote (finding it both dull and offensive), Joyce is almost unreadable, Lawrence is misogynistic, anti-semitic and downright “silly”, and he wrote a rather infamous review of Ted Hughes’ book “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being” that almost ruined their friendship, but he loves and is passionate about his chosen subject and writes about so many authors and their works that it’s hard to keep track of them all. It’s a miracle to me that Carey managed to get married and have a family, his reading list is so prolific! Thankfully Carey is equally open and hilarious about negative reviews of his own books (whilst quite happily publishing the positive reviews alongside them).
It is the final chapter where Carey discusses why we read that the book really comes into its own. You may not agree with his judgments anywhere else but the last few sentences are golden.
You can find many of Carey’s reviews on his website www.johncarey.org and they make for very entertaining reading, whether you agree with him or not.
February 14, 2018
John Carey’s memoir is quite a delightful account of a life of the mind: how it came to be fashioned, built, and enjoyed. I loved his accounts of boyhood, and his mental grappling with where he came from to Oxford. This move, from working class Britain to the rarefied elite of the most well known educational institution on Earth, gives rise to a tension that he explores beautifully, both here, and as he points out, in his earlier book The Intellectuals and the Masses, which I hope to read too.
There is a distinct sincerity in the tone that the professor writes in. For instance, sentences like “But then, giving you time to work by yourself was what. as far as I was concerned, university was for” shone through, prompting me to nod as I read, and note them down. I learnt a lot about English literature, but I also learned that Samuel Beckett is the only Literature Nobel winner to also appear in the Wisden Cricketer’s Almanac, scoring 18 and 12 for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1926. As a cricket fan, I cannot tell you how happy that makes me!
My favorite parts of the book, however, were towards the end, when 20th century literature, as well as ideas on art and literary travel appear. They are intriguing, super-intelligent discourses, and I will return to them later. The professor’s discussion of Orwell too, is something, to be copied out, read often, and remembered.
There is a distinct sincerity in the tone that the professor writes in. For instance, sentences like “But then, giving you time to work by yourself was what. as far as I was concerned, university was for” shone through, prompting me to nod as I read, and note them down. I learnt a lot about English literature, but I also learned that Samuel Beckett is the only Literature Nobel winner to also appear in the Wisden Cricketer’s Almanac, scoring 18 and 12 for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1926. As a cricket fan, I cannot tell you how happy that makes me!
My favorite parts of the book, however, were towards the end, when 20th century literature, as well as ideas on art and literary travel appear. They are intriguing, super-intelligent discourses, and I will return to them later. The professor’s discussion of Orwell too, is something, to be copied out, read often, and remembered.
October 18, 2015
This is a strange hybrid of a book. Part memoir, part lit crit, I am not sure if it quite works. According to a newspaper review I read he had originally wanted to write about his life through the books he had read, which I think might have made for a better read. As it is we get quite a lot of autobiography, which is interesting, and then chunks of poetry and prose ranging from the 16th century to the present day with Carey's observations.
I enjoyed the insight into judging literary awards and prizes, the critics' reactions to his controversial views, and aspects of his personal life such as bee-keeping, but I closed it wishing his publishers had allowed him to follow his original instincts, rather than end up with a book that is neither one thing nor the other.
I enjoyed the insight into judging literary awards and prizes, the critics' reactions to his controversial views, and aspects of his personal life such as bee-keeping, but I closed it wishing his publishers had allowed him to follow his original instincts, rather than end up with a book that is neither one thing nor the other.
March 27, 2021
4.5 stars. (Half a star regrettably removed for the fact that Carey describes his twenty (TWENTY...!) favourite reviews he’s written in his lifetime in full detail for no apparent reason. Actually, there is a reason but it’s inchoate. It’s also smack-dab in the middle of a pretty interesting part of his biographical narrative and effectively dissects two pretty, like, important parts from one another so that you’re forced into reading all thirty pages of reminiscence but soon forget what he was talking about... I agree with one reviewer who likens this part of the book to an old man backing you into a corner at a cocktail party to tell you all about his life’s work from start to finish and in painstaking detail before you can think up some excuse to run away.)
December 3, 2014
as the title tells you, this is by an Oxford academic. He was asked to write his memoirs and did so by concentrating on his reading life; he was teaching, editing and critiquing English literature after all. This was my lunch time read for the 6 weeks or so of the last Springwood Library closure and I savoured every moment. He is an interesting man, in Oxford with a lot of the greats of 20th Century – Tolkien, CS Lewis, WH Auden, Philip Larkin and many more.
H.C
H.C
April 11, 2014
The first few chapters are well written, somewhat like Nabokov 's autobiography. But there wasn't first rate writing in some other parts of the book. Some interesting anecdotes along with a number of large quotations from poems and books: does make you wonder if this was simply to fill up more pages.
September 10, 2016
This is really a book for anyone interested in English literature since the author's life evolves around it. I think it does give a good look into the world of Literature. At the same time since the author studied in Oxford, it does give a good look into life at Oxford University. An interesting read.
August 27, 2015
I enjoyed his anecdotes of Oxford and found some of what he said about authors of interest but it did not make me want to read any books or authors in particular which is may be what I was hoping this book would do.
June 15, 2016
A new book by a retired Oxford professor is quite entertaining
about his schooling and career. It is not pedantic in the least.
Most enjoyable for me were all his takes on classical and modern
texts. By modern, he meant Victorian and 20c novels. It was fun
to see what he liked or not.
about his schooling and career. It is not pedantic in the least.
Most enjoyable for me were all his takes on classical and modern
texts. By modern, he meant Victorian and 20c novels. It was fun
to see what he liked or not.
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