The Unexpected Professor by John Carey

My friends Lorna and Will gave me a copy of The Unexpected Professor by John Carey in 2014, the year it came out – fast forward seven years and its time has finally come. I took it away on holiday with me, and it was somehow the perfect read – such a wonderful book.

It’s an autobiography, I suppose, but the subtitle tells you what the main gist of The Unexpected Professor is about – ‘An Oxford life in books’. He does talk a bit about his childhood, and a bit more about his time in the army, but those are not the selling point of the book for me. I couldn’t wait to get to Oxford with him – and even though that doesn’t happen for about a hundred pages, please excuse me glossing over the first chunk of the book to get to the bit that I loved most. (I should say – he writes very well about school life and various experiences during national service in the army, including wondering whether he’d accidentally shot a fellow soldier during an ill-advised demonstration with a gun – an incident that clearly stayed with him vividly. But naturally Oxford and books won me over more.)

Carey goes to Oxford as an undergraduate in the ’50s – following his stint of national service, as was expected then. Despite studying English literature, his interview had involved Latin, Greek, and French – and the course he was set to study ended somewhere before the Victorian period. He would later be instrumental in extending the course to include Victorian and 20th-century literature, and making Old English optional – by the time I arrived as an undergraduate in 2004, we spent a term on ‘1900-present’, though very few people chose to do anything after mid-century. And Old English was technically optional, but nobody ever seemed to present me with the option not to.

Much of what I enjoyed about reading about Carey’s time as a student was comparing what it was like for me, fifty years later. Some of it hadn’t changed at all. He defines things like ‘collections’ – when you sit with the head of your college and he/she talks to you about your studies and your future – which is still exactly the same, subfusc and all. On the other hand, there were no male-only colleges by the time I was studying, and only one female-only college – which is now also mixed.

Carey was at St. John’s College, which is where one of my two closest friends at uni was, so I spent a lot of time there. She lived in a building that is described as a beautiful garden in The Unexpected Professor – for it didn’t exist at the time. He glosses over the ’50s and ’60s desecration of colleges, building hideous concrete blocks in almost all of the beautiful college settings.

What he doesn’t gloss over at all, thankfully, is reading and writing. While he doesn’t mention a female author in any depth under towards the end of the book, Carey does write insightfully and engagingly about many different authors – Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Orwell. When they come up, he spends pages and pages analysing, exploring, talking about their shifting critical reception and the passages that most interest him. It would all be very self-indulgent if it weren’t also so enthralling for the reader. In these sections, autobiography fades away and literary criticism comes in – though in a style different from most books in that genre, which Carey openly derides. More on that shortly…

Carey seems to have lived a very charmed academic life in the next half century in Oxford. Time after time, he was given multiple job offers or funding pots. He even gets offered a job as a Fellow at Keble before he has finished his DPhil! I’m not sure if this is a sign of times changing or Carey’s particular talent, but it is unheard of now for an English academic to walk into a job – or even, for most of us, to get any funding. Carey misses out the years of scarcely-paid part-time work, scrabbling for any chance of a permanent gig. While he and his wife – their romance is dwelt on briefly but touchingly – aren’t exactly rich, they are certainly doing better than most of my academic contemporaries were at that stage. They also got to live on St John’s Street, one of the most lovely streets in Oxford – though apparently rather run-down at the time. His various academic posts and involvement with the English department are a fascinating overview of the changing ethos, and I found his genuine engagement with his students’ work, undergraduate and postgraduate, very admirable.

While teaching, Carey was also writing. Some of his best-received books were anthologies – the Faber Book of Reportage and the Faber Book of Science, the latter of which my father loves. To get his head around centuries and centuries of thought in these areas, and selecting innovative and compelling examples, sounds like a daunting task – but he makes it sound almost a pleasure. He also writes some literary criticism and other cultural texts, including the only one I’d previously read: The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is while compiling critical thought on Milton that Carey realises he thinks most literary criticism is drivel – not quite his word, but not far off.

I’m sure he’s right, but I am coming onto my only qualm about this book. He is very disparaging about his colleagues in the literary field, and not particularly gracious when they don’t like his work. I suppose that’s understandable – but it definitely became clear that when he is critical of someone, their book is bad; when someone is critical of his book, they are wrong – and probably histrionic. Sadly, this does become very sexist at one point – he writes of his former supervisor’s review of his book: ‘when I dipped into Helen’s Encounter review its bossy tone reminded me so forcibly of my mother’s shrill, bigoted denunciations of my teenage relationship with Heather that I never finished it’. Setting aside the fact that he definitely finished reading it, calling a woman’s review ‘bossy’ and ‘shrill’ is not a good look, and I wish his editor had spoken to him about it. Perhaps they did.

It’s a small quibble in a book I otherwise totally loved and relished reading. I might have suggested cutting off the beginning and making this entirely a book about Oxford and books, but also recognise that is because I love those things myself. Part of my pleasure was in thinking of the streets and remembering my time as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Oxford – but I think The Unexpected Professor would delight you even if you’ve never stepped foot in Oxford. Because we all, after all, love books.