From the archive: John Carey’s normal people

August 1987: Geoff Dyer reviews the writer’s selected works

The eminent Oxford literary critic John Carey died on 11 December 2025, aged 91. In 1987, Faber & Faber published a collection of Carey’s work, “Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism, 1969-1986”. The writer – and Oxford alumnus – Geoff Dyer reviewed the book for the New Statesman

The really great thing about John Carey, according to a recent profile in the Sunday Times, is not that he is “the foremost critic of our times” but that he is “the people’s critic”. Who these people are and whether or not they were consulted on the matter isn’t mentioned, but presumably they’re the good folk who peruse the book pages of the Sunday Times (not a paper one thinks of immediately as an organ of the people) which has served as Carey’s main outlet for the last decade or so. Now for some people Raymond Williams might have seemed a more deserving recipient of this kind of praise but the irony involved here is fittingly Careyesque.

Carey is the quintessential critic for Sunday papers whose review pages serve as a staging post between the long haul of the news and the pull-out history of ratatouille through the ages in the colour supplement. In the introduction to this selection of his journalism Carey notes that one of the aims of book reviewing is to try to win back “a large potential readership of ordinary intelligent people”. The purpose of the Sunday reviews as far as a significant number of their readers is concerned, though, is to save them having to read the books.

Carey’s speciality is literary biography, 2,000 words of précis and piss-take from which the “ordinary” reader can learn all s/he wants about Chesterton, Lowell or whoever. Not surprisingly most of the subjects of these biographies are dead, but what is surprising is how few of the books featured in Original Copy are of much interest to people like… well, people like me. Most of them seem pretty dull. These are not so much the books the reading public likes as books on which a parochial and largely anti-intellectual literary establishment and the “quality” Sundays – and the “quality” Sundays are pretty near the core of this hermetic consensus – have conveyed undue value.

In his books on Donne and Dickens, Carey has proved himself a fine and serious critic but in these pieces there is very little criticism. There are scattered insights and formulations plus the expected swipes at structuralism (ludicrously dismissed as the idea that “literary texts ought to mean anything we require them to, or that authors do not create their works but are created by them”) but the chief trait here is fluency and wit, both of which Carey possesses in abundance.

He is particularly sharp about “the limp-wristed exquisites” who dominated English cultural life from the end of World War I to the 1950s and his sympathy for those on the receiving end of this power elicits our allegiance. Not that Carey wants to be enlisted into any kind of political allegiance. The “socialist” policy of converting grammar schools into comprehensives will, he says, have the unfortunate effect of turning Oxford once again into a playground for public schools. That the problem might be Oxford’s rather than the comprehensives doesn’t seem to occur to him.

The spuriousness of 1930s intellectual life, Carey also notes, “is still perfectly observable in English left-wing intellectuals today”. What upsets him about the latter is that they are out of touch with the “ordinary”, “decent”, “bread-earning”, “responsible”, “normal”, “hard-working” citizens (these phrases come up again and again) who make up Carey’s socio-moral constituency. Hence Oxford dons are derided for their smug “uppishness” and DJ Enright praised as a champion of ordinary existence against the whimsies of the over-educated.

Carey himself went up to Oxford in the mid-50’s and liked it so much that he’s stayed on in that everyday world as a lecturer ever since. What was that he said about Huxley? “There’s something absurd about fulminating against mankind’s ‘craving for pleasure’ when you’re staying at Claridges.” But the supreme exponent of this kind of contradiction, as far as Carey is concerned, is Sartre, whose vaunted identification with the masses was apparently betrayed by his actual disdain for them.

Another striking feature of Original Copy, ironically, is that apart from the abstracted majority of the hard-working, Carey doesn’t come across that many people he’s keen on either. Examples abound; here is one which shows him on particularly good form:

“Among the current clichés I especially deplore is the one which refers to hospital patients kept alive by machines as ‘cabbages.’ This is inaccurate and insulting to vegetables. For a cabbage is a sturdy, self-reliant being, and compared with an average specimen of twentieth-century manhood it has….a positively athletic air.”

All this is very witty. You can enjoy it in the same way that you can enjoy the “laconic rhetoric of denigration” (as Carey, with his knack for the self-administered bull’s-eye, calls it) of Evelyn Waugh, the people’s novelist.

[Further reading: From the archive: Mr Eliot’s poems]