John Carey, an author, literary critic, and academic, "who lobbed contrarian hand grenades at high-culture snobs and ossified elites who, in his view, revered lofty affectation over accessibility and saw appreciating the arts as a path to moral superiority," died December 11, the New York Times reported. He was 91.
A Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford from 1975 to 2002, he wrote several books, as well as reviews for the Sunday Times of London--for nearly 50 years--in which he challenged sacred cows and received wisdom. In The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), Carey accused modernists like Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence "of writing abstrusely with the express purpose of preventing the rabble from understanding their books," the Times noted. "This book is richly stocked with people whom any person of decent instincts will find loathsome."
"He truly dislikes, and helps us to dislike with him, the bleating toffs, the scented scribe agonizing over his weightless sonnet, the glassy metropolitan snobs, the varsity idlers in their pleated gowns," noted critic James Wood in the London Review of Books (2001), adding that Carey's "complaints vibrate with an appealing, nonconformist" outrage.
His early books include studies of Milton, Dickens, and Thackeray. In 1975, he published an essay in the New Review titled "Down with Dons," which began: "From the viewpoint of non-dons, probably the most obnoxious thing about dons is their uppishness. Of course, many dons are quite tolerable people. But if you ask a layman to imagine a don, the idea will come into his head of something with a loud, affected voice, airing its knowledge, and as anyone who has lived much among dons will testify, this picture has a fair degree of accuracy."
Noting that Carey "bestrode the ever-narrowing bridge that connects the academic teaching of English literature to the world of literary journalism like a colossus," the Guardian wrote that "he combined his professional duties with a half-century-long stint on the books pages of the Sunday Times. All this gained him a formidable reputation as the most erudite and possibly the most pugnacious critic of his generation."
Carey wrote, edited or compiled more than two dozen books, ranging from anthologies (The Faber Book of Reportage, 1987; The Faber Book of Science, 1995), to John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981); What Good Are the Arts? (2005); and William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (2009), which was awarded the 2010 James Tait Black memorial prize.
In the Guardian's obituary, D.J. Taylor observed that Carey "was a generous and courteous man, much admired by his students--with whom he was prepared to take infinite pains--and revered by fellow critics, here in a world of declining print circulations and squeezed space, as the last great book-world don." He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982 and fellow of the British Academy in 1996.