The death of John Carey, the critic and former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been reported today. I discovered him through his 1992 book
The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939, which skewered the snobbish and anti-democratic attitudes that pervaded modernist literature and Fabian politics.
Here is Ian Hamilton reviewing Carey's book in the London Review of Books the year it came out:
The book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no patience with high-flown talk about predicaments and alienation. He is first of all an educator. His sympathies are with readers rather than with writers and he believes that, with the advent of mass literacy, a great educational opportunity was missed.
Instead of sneering at Leonard Bast’s pretensions, Forster should have been teaching him at night school. But that could never have happened because, however the intellectuals chose to dress up their disdain, it was actually class-based – it had its roots in a fear and loathing of the mass, a revulsion which in some cases turned into super man delusions or fantasies of mass-extermination.
Carey's views are, I think, less controversial now than they were when The Intellectuals and the Masses was published, yet the idea that modernist writers must be, or at least ought to be, on the side of social progress was held for many decades.
Here's my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold expressing a generation's sense of betrayal when T.S. Eliot's Conservative politics and adherence to the Church of England became known:
HOW NICE for a man to be clever,
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.
To peer into basements, up alleys,
A nose for the search.
To challenge with pertinent sallies,
And then JOIN the Church.
I had a very good teacher for A level English Literature, but I have shaken off his taste for the modernists over the years, now preferring Dickens and Auden to his gods Lawrence and Eliot. And I suspect we can all see now what Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems in 1979:
Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event.
In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular.
All of this Auden rejected.
I commend The Intellectuals and the Masses to anyone with an interest in the literature and politics of the early 20th century.
