John Carey

a wonderful writer and thinker

I realise I never posted to reflect on the very sad news of the death aged 91 of John Carey, one of the key English critics and certainly the most senior to devote as much energy as he did to communicating with a wider audience, through his reviews in the Sunday Times, his appearances on television and radio (see, for example, the In Our Time episode on the Epic), and some of the books he wrote and edited, especially William Golding and Faber anthologies concerning utopias, reportage, and science. Too much was made of his anti-elitism really; he was an extremely keen reader of Milton, Shakespeare, Ishiguro, Marvell, Bacon, Dickens, Donne, Lawrence, and various others.

He could be a little perverse, struggling at times to balance his extreme high standards (and resulting irritation) with his temperamental geniality and good nature. Imagine the emotional-rollercoaster ride endured by young John Stubbs on reading Carey’s response to his biography of John Donne (one of three pieces he contributed to the New York Review of Books, to my knowledge his only writing in American publications):

“Stubbs is an inaccurate reader of Donne’s poems”;

“Donne’s thoughts and motives are a more elusive matter, and Stubbs’s interpretation of them is often questionable”;

“Stubbs seems unaware of any of this”;

“you wonder whether he actually understands Elizabethan English”;

“no one will regret reading it.”

I talked to Carey at length for this article in the New Statesman, published during the first lockdown but hopefully useful as a tribute to his life and achievement:

https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2020/04/john-carey-last-public-critic