John Carey is, or ought to be, a national treasure. The Merton professor of English literature at Oxford from 1975 to 2002, he is the brilliant editor of Milton, the brilliant author of books about Dickens and Thackeray and Donne, and the brilliant biographer of William Golding; he has also been a tireless campaigner for the common reader against the snobbery, as he conceives it, of literary and cultural highbrows. No matter what task he sets himself as a writer, his feline intelligence is present: curious, lucid, graceful and as content playing with his prey as breaking its neck. In 1977, appointing him lead book reviewer of the Sunday Times must have felt like a punt, but the choice was inspired. The position won him an admiring audience at breakfast tables across the land, and launched him into the orbit of the great and the good. As he approaches the start of his 10th decade, it seems safe to assume that somewhere along the line a knighthood was quietly turned down.
Sunday Best is Carey’s second collection of reviews and journalism. The first, Original Copy, was published in 1987 and showed its author to be a man of eclectic and carefully cultivated dislikes. Carey says that, re-reading it, “I found its constant point-scoring a bit overdone”. He adds that he no longer feels “the compulsion to be funny or caustic all the time” and that the pieces in Sunday Best have been chosen not because “they are funny but because they can open new lives and new perspectives for the reader”. Sunday Best is a pleasure, and one can only marvel at the facility with which, over and again, Carey distinguishes the signal from the noise. The jokes are first-rate: “you end up feeling that [Samuel Beckett] would have made an excellent Pope.” And yet as I read it through, I could not escape the feeling that point-scoring Carey is a better and more invigorating writer than his amiably evangelising double—and that he opens more new perspectives, too.
Some of this feeling no doubt arises from the omission of personal favourites: the 1998 review in which Carey describes the experience of reading Harold Bloom on Shakespeare as “like chatting with an acquaintance and gradually realising he believes that death rays are issuing from his television screen” is a masterpiece of its kind. But there is also a principle at stake, to which I’ll return.
Carey reflects that the poetry of RS Thomas is elusive because it “offers little lip or ledge for commentary to get a purchase on”. The genius of Carey’s writing is to find in the objects of his attention the lips and ledges that enable him to scale them, to take their measure and to appraise whether the view from the top has been worth the climb. His favoured supports are drawn from an author’s biography or social background, though he just as often makes use of authorial dishonesty, clumsiness, pedantry or special pleading. His undertaking in Sunday Best, then, is a demanding one: to select a range of reviews in which he denies himself many of the footholds that ordinarily make his ascents so enjoyable to behold.
Perhaps this is why his own areas of expertise are kept under wraps: only a handful of the pieces treat literary critical titles (he has notably generous words for Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language), and only one examines a work that could itself be described as literary (a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories). There is nothing remotely sustained on the works of living poets and novelists: Beckett, Thomas, John Betjeman and VS Naipaul are as current as things get, and even they are only approached through the frame of their biographies.
What Carey offers instead is polished, often substantial, and carefully extra-literary. He is very good on the socially catalytic effect of railways in the 19th century, and of the two world wars in the 20th. As befits the editor of the Faber Book of Science, he ranges widely: quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle are treated with clarity and verve—and he is just as invigorating on the theory of evolution. Likewise, he reminds us how little of the human mind we can claim to understand, and how often we distract ourselves from this want of understanding with fictions (IQ tests; mental illness as a matter of faulty brain chemistry) masquerading as scientific or medical fact.
None of this qualifies as received opinion, but nor is it original to Carey. Although his own voice never exactly vanishes in Sunday Best, its appearance in various asides—and in a thread of scarcely contained rage at the violence done to grammar schools by a set of expensively educated ideologues in the 1960s and 1970s—made me wish for more. In what is one of only two negative reviews that Carey has seen fit to include, he writes of Alan Macfarlane’s Letters to Lily on How the World Works that “as an anthropologist he is, it seems, disqualified from making any useful judgements, and the most he can tell her [ie the Lily of his book’s title] is that some people think one thing and some another”. Descriptive prose as Carey writes it is, of course, a form of judgement: he is always observing rather than merely witnessing, always thinking about how to re-present that which appears before him in a way that will catch his readers’ attention. All the more perplexing, then, that it should be so difficult to disentangle Sunday Best from the charge that Carey lays against Macfarlane: the self-congratulatory reluctance to discriminate.
Here we arrive at the principle I mentioned earlier. In introducing Sunday Best, Carey suggests that he nowadays takes book reviewers to have two chief obligations. One of these is to the authors of the books they review. A review might be the work of a left-handed evening or two, but engages with the right-handed labour of years: reviewers should tread as gently as they can. The other responsibility is to readers: “too many books are published for anyone to read for themselves, so some kind of filter is needed, and book reviews provide it.” The job of the reviewer is to ensure that the reading public remains “in touch with the current of ideas”. As nobody would be able to keep up without the services of the newspaper books pages and the likes of the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books, such sentiments are—as far as they go—unarguable. The problem is that they do not go far enough.
As most fully articulated in his What Good Are the Arts?, Carey views it as a given that literary and artistic merit is a matter of opinion, and opinion alone. You like this, I like that, and neither of us should be shamed into forgetting that popular acclaim means more than the approval of Oxbridge or Bloomsbury. The critic has a role in making available new perspectives, but it is up to the reader to decide what he or she admires; although the market may sometimes appear to be crude, it follows that—unlike its critics—it is never snobbish.
The difficulty with this position is one that Carey works hard to elide when in polemical mode, but that he is too intelligent and honest a critic to deny. Call it Harold Bloom. However -ridiculous Bloom’s pseudo-vatic grandstanding might be, it sells extremely well. But Carey knows rubbish when he sees it, and wants his readers to recognise it too; wants them, that is, to distrust the superficial appeal of that which the Blooms of this world would have them purchase. Despite himself, he wants to educate their taste—to help them become the most discerning readers they can.
Carey’s most famous piece of work probably remains his 1975 essay “Down with Dons” (included in the pre-publication version of SundayBest that I read, but for some reason cut from the version now for sale.) It opens with the assertion that “from the viewpoint of non-dons, the most obnoxious thing about dons is their uppishness”—their willingness to lord it over the “philistine majority”. As Carey was, in the mid-1970s, the very model of a modern don himself, there is perhaps some self-implicatory irony at play here. Either way, the piece fizzes with sharply observed judgementalism and, on the strength of it, Noel Annan would describe Carey as “a master at fouling his own nest”.
But the truth is that, by proclaiming “the relative insignificance of Oxford, and of universities in general”, Carey was less denigrating higher education than making an offer of service to the fourth estate. Fleet Street saw the possibilities: here was a confident insider, an iconoclast dissatisfied with his lot, and a writer with the skill and desire required to communicate with the broadest possible readership in a less deferential age.
In 2020, Carey published A Little History of Poetry. A year later a companion volume appeared, 100 Poets: A Little Anthology. Both are aimed at an audience of “teenage readers” who might be deterred from literary study by bad academic prose and the lumpen analyses of the academic and cultural mainstream. Both do what they do very well, and smuggle in an enjoyable heresy or two en route. But I wonder if Sunday Best isn’t itself a part of the problem that Carey sets himself to correct. If reading books in general and poetry in particular opens up new perspectives but does not provide us with the wherewithal to judge which of these new perspectives is worthwhile—if, in other words, good writing is simply writing that sells—why bother learning to read seriously at all? If pushed, I suspect that the author of Original Copy could have answered that question. I’m not sure that the same can be said of the one responsible for Sunday Best.
