John Carey, a critic and professor of literature at the University of Oxford 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 on Dec. 11 in Oxford, England. He was 91.
His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Leo.
Pugnacious, fearless and disdainful of academia's more pretentious mores, Professor Carey was a paradoxical figure in the British literary establishment for more than half a century.
As the Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford from 1975 to 2002, he held one of the most prestigious positions in letters. But in several books, along with the reviews he wrote for The Sunday Times of London for nearly 50 years, he challenged the sacred cows and received wisdom of his own milieu.
In "The Intellectuals and the Masses" (1992), he accused modernists like Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence of writing abstrusely with the express purpose of preventing the rabble from understanding their books. Reviewing a history of literary culture and decadence in England, he wrote, "This book is richly stocked with people whom any person of decent instincts will find loathsome."
At Oxford, if a colleague said something especially pompous during a meeting, Professor Carey would sometimes walk out.
"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," the critic James Wood wrote in The London Review of Books in 2001, adding that Professor Carey's "complaints vibrate with an appealing, nonconformist" outrage.
After growing up in a middle-class suburb of London, he arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate in 1954. (He took amphetamines to stay up all night cramming for exams, later recalling that he "read and read until dawn came and birds started singing.") He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Ovid's imitators and became a professor -- a tutor or don, in Oxford parlance -- in 1960.
His early works, including studies of Milton, Dickens and Thackeray, established him as a major authority on English literature. In 1975, as he took the Merton chair, he turned his typewriter against his comrades in academia, publishing an essay in The New Review titled "Down with Dons."
"From the viewpoint of non-dons, probably the most obnoxious thing about dons is their uppishness," the essay began. "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."
Many taxpayers, Professor Carey suggested, rightly considered his profession to be nothing more than a "frivolous hobby." He extended this attack in "What Good Are the Arts?" (2005), arguing that, while works of art might be worthy of discussion and admiration, appreciating culture did not automatically confer moral or spiritual benefits. Public funding of the opera, he contended, amounted to the poor subsidizing the entertainment of the "well-fed, well-swaddled" elite.
"What is difficult about sitting on plush seats and listening to music and singing?" he wrote. "Getting served at the bar in the interval often requires some effort, it is true, but even that could hardly qualify as difficult compared with most people's day's work."
Several prominent critics denounced the book. In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Carlin Romano called it "both simple and simplistic." Writing in The Spectator, Rupert Christiansen warned readers not to "expect the question proposed by the title to be satisfactorily answered."
But Terry Eagleton, in his review for The New Statesman, praised the book, writing that "it is to Carey's undying credit that he subjects the cultural mandarins to such withering scorn, not least given that he has been surrounded by them for half a century."
Professor Carey largely exempted literature from his broadside, describing it as an "idea-bank" that "no other art could compete with." As a book critic, he sought to write with the clarity of his literary hero, George Orwell.
"He would never have a semicolon," Andrew Holgate, his editor at The Sunday Times, where Professor Carey's byline appeared from 1977 to 2023, said in an interview. "He tried to have as few commas as possible and as few subclauses as possible. The drive of the style is full stops and a very active voice. Reading him was a joy."
Professor Carey may have been at his sharpest when telling readers what to avoid, as he did with "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" (1999), Harold Bloom's 768-page study. "Surely," Professor Carey wrote, "Shakespeare's life cannot have been as boring as this."
Reviewing "The Metropolitan Critic," a collection of essays by Clive James, he wrote, "Immortal names drop from him like dandruff so that the airily planted erudition can take on the tone of a sixth-form essay prize."
Mr. James was devastated.
"My opinions that I had thought so bold were chased down, bitten through the back of the neck and dined off for their tender parts, with the bulk of the corpse contemptuously left for the hyenas and the vultures," Mr. James recalled in his memoir, "North Face of Soho." "What made this treatment worse, I reflected bitterly, was that Carey could write."
John Carey was born on April 5, 1934, in Barnes, in southwest London. He was one of four children of Charles Carey, an accountant, and Winifred (Cook) Carey, who did secretarial work before having children.
A teacher encouraged him to apply to Oxford, and he arrived for his entrance exams on a cold winter night.
"I pushed open the creaking wicket door in the huge, iron-studded front gate, like something out of a Gothic novel," he wrote in "The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books" (2014).
The next day, he added, "Breakfast was in the college hall, which looked to me a bit like a medieval abbey -- not that I had ever seen one."
Two days after he returned home, a letter arrived informing him that he had won a scholarship.
"It was passed round reverently, but I don't think any of us understood, at the time, quite what it would mean," he wrote. "Perhaps my parents had an inkling, though. Their expressions of pleasure were subdued, as if they foresaw this would take me away from them to somewhere they felt they did not belong."
Professor Carey married Gillian Booth, also a literary scholar, in 1960. In addition to their son Leo, she survives him along with another son Thomas.
As a teacher, Professor Carey was nothing like he sometimes appeared on the page.
"He was courteous and kind and helpful and encouraging," Rhodri Lewis,a former student who now teaches at Princeton,sid in an interview.
The niceties ended though when guest speakers came to lecture. If the visitor was unconvincing bigheaded or flaccid in thought Professor Carey urged his students to go for blood.
"If you don't,"Professor Lewis recalled him saying,"then I will,and you'll probably be kinder than I'll be."