The Faculty mourns the death of John Carey, Merton Professor from 1975 to 2002, undoubtedly the man with whom the title of Merton Professor of English Literature will remain indelibly associated in the public mind. For Carey combined his formidable Renaissance scholarship – he wrote his thesis on John Donne’s Ovidianism, translated Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana for Yale, and edited all but Paradise Lost for the Longman Complete Shorter Poems – with a vast range of what is now called ‘public-facing’ writing and broadcasting on literary topics, from Sunday Times reviews through guest appearances on Radio 4’s In Our Time, to chairing the Booker Prize and writing controversial books against literary elitism. He belonged to no school of criticism, nor did he seek to found one, but generations of readers both within and beyond academia have been stimulated by the extraordinary vitality, humour and perceptive daring of his critical style. Who could forget the Dickens Carey showed us in The Violent Effigy (1973), not the champion of Victorian domesticity but a sensibility thrilled by murderous, combustible violence, whose brilliantly skewering humour was touched with cruelty. Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind and Art was likewise unforgettable in bringing alive to readers the tensions of Donne’s imaginative art, oscillating as it did between the imperatives of Anglican conformity and the terrors of apostacy, an oscillation shot through with satire and irony, but also with passion. As Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes, surely echoing the experience of many in the Faculty, by the time he actually met him, John Carey
was already the man who had taught me how to read - and also how to write. Until the start of my second year as an undergraduate, I had no idea that critics didn’t have to be dull and pompous, and then I read his book on Dickens and felt the stirring of something completely new. Laughter, mostly, but also the recognition that intelligence and readability didn’t have to be alternatives to each other . . . Whatever he wrote about looked entirely fresh and new when seen through his eyes, and he wrote about it all with an unbeatable mixture of common sense and wit.
Whatever he wrote about looked entirely fresh and new when seen through his eyes – Robert’s statement perfectly conveys the experience of reading John Carey’s criticism, as well as characterising what Carey looked for as a critic. ‘Nashe’s loving cultivation of the commonplace renovates experience for us’, Carey wrote of the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe in a chapter on Elizabethan prose in the Sphere History of English Literature in 1970. This pleasure in literature’s power to renew and refresh our perceptions of the world around us is part of what Seamus Perry has called Carey’s ‘cult of ordinariness’, a relish for writers who notice and write well about the everyday. Working on the annotations to Milton’s shorter poems in the 1960s, Carey was scathing about the abstraction and dullness of much academic criticism. His prefatory adjudications of the merits of these long, learned analyses of neo-platonic myth and allegory are brisk, almost ironic, but also immensely serviceable to the reader. For although Carey was to write in an anti-intellectual vein in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) and What Good are the Arts? (2005), he showed no sign of impatience with the serious, erudite complexity of the Renaissance writing – Donne’s sermons and poems, Milton’s poetry and prose – whose qualities he did so much to convey to generations of readers, scholarly and otherwise.
Nor was Carey’s generosity in bringing interest and vitality to all aspects of literary criticism confined to his writing. The English Faculty at Oxford has changed a great deal since 1975, when he became its Merton Professor, and one of the changes has been in its establishment of a post-graduate programme, with taught masters’ degrees and a structured pathway of doctoral supervision, moving through monitored stages, as well as a lively, seminar-rich ‘research culture’. Under the much more informal and austerely isolated regime of the 1980s, many doctoral students would have floundered, uncertain of their direction, but for John Carey’s immense generosity and the omnivorous critical interests that made him the go-to graduate academic advisor. Almost everywhere I go in the university world, the mention of John Carey will prompt a senior academic to confide to me that, had it not been for the Merton Professor, they would have given up their doctoral studies. In addition to running the ‘Prolegomena’ – the preparation for graduate studies – single-handedly (and very amusingly), John Carey ran a weekly graduate seminar at Merton, astonishingly, in those days, the only English literature research seminar of its kind.
What constitutes ‘research’ in English literature has, at Oxford and elsewhere, also changed enormously since John Carey retired from the Merton Professorship in 2002. After his retirement, Carey devoted himself to more public-facing critical writing. Though in some ways his ‘cult of ordinariness’ might seem to be in sympathy with the orientation of literary critical work towards cultural, material and post-colonial critique, an antipathy to the perceived obstacle of cumbersome intellectual frameworks is just as likely to have been Carey’s response. But whatever his response might have been, it would have been expressed with the riveting energy and vividness he brought to all his critical writing. I am one of that generation of doctoral students which owes a debt to John Carey’s kind and cogent advice, and it is a great personal regret to me that I had so short a time to enjoy his occasional visits to Merton before he became ill. He will be missed by the Merton community, by the English Faculty, by his former students and by readers the world over for whom his name is synonymous with the idea of literary criticism at its lively and controversial best.
— Professor Lorna Hutson, Merton Professor of English Literature
