“The Intellectuals and the Masses” by John Carey

I am currently looking to re-read some books that I remember from the past and which had an influence on the way I tend to see and understand the world. This one, originally published in 1992 was one I read at the time and which has stayed with me through my adult life. The impact second time around was – as I expected – less strong, but I still find the book to be both fascinating and important in what it conveys.

John Carey combined for many years a career as an Oxford academic teaching English literature at Merton College with that of one of the Sunday Times’s leading book reviewers. He did not therefore live exclusively in an ivory tower among scholarly elites. He kept a foot firmly anchored in the real world of contemporary publishing and read a huge variety of books, non-fiction as well as fiction. He was (and indeed is) therefore no intellectual snob and, as this book attests, he is somewhat contemptuous of those who are. These are prejudices that I very much share and were I think solidified by my reading of this book over thirty years ago. And they have very much helped to shape the direction I have looked to taken in my own career.

The core argument is that the dominant attitude of British literary elites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was one that held the mass of the population in disdain. Many of the key figures who presided over the development of ‘modernism’ were highly snobbish in their attitudes and abhorred the rise of a literate middle class in particular who lived in suburbs, read newspapers and enjoyed realist, approachable novels of a kind Virginia Woolf labelled ‘middlebrow’. The case John Carey makes against them and for writers like Arnold Bennett (hailed as ‘the hero of this book’) is well made and compelling, being rooted in the suggestion that modernist literature, like modern art, was in large part deliberately made to be inaccessible in order that might only be appreciated by intellectual elites as a means whereby they might distinguish their taste from that of the burgeoning bourgeois hordes. They never sought a mass audience for their work, being entirely content with a small, refined audience of similarly highly-educated people like themselves.

This argument is I think well made in this book, and I think holds true to a large extent today in the universities I have worked in throughout my professional career. There is an often unspoken but clearly perceptible culture which holds teaching in some disdain and which assumes that the publication of a research paper that very few will ever read is of greater value than a text book that will be read by many thousands. Academic journal articles are often written in a language that will never appeal to a wide audience and which can be hard to understand if you are not a highly educated specialist in the relevant field.

So far so good, but I think that Carey’s book does tend rather to overstate the case. Is it really so elitist or snobbish to lament the loss of countryside when new housing estates are built, to find advertising intensely irritating or to deplore the quality of much that passes for journalism in the tabloid press? I was also not so convinced by the links he makes between the thinking of British intellectuals and the rise of fascism and nazism in Europe. Of course there were examples of fools like Wyndham Lewis who approved of Hitler’s rise in the 1930s, but in truth there is not so much that the highly educated British writers ever really had in common with him. Most were left-leaning and far more bamboozled by Communism than fascism as has been shown repeatedly in equally enjoyable books by the likes of David Caute and Roger Scruton. I also thought from time to time that Carey tended to ascribe views to an author simply because they were given voice by a character created by that author. These examples were not so persuasive.

In other respects this is a great book, written as it just had to be given its subject matter in a highly readable style. The amount of reading that John Carey draws on to make his points is hugely impressive and of course, as is always the case when I read works of literary criticism, serves to remind me that despite over fifty years of pretty obsessive reading how very poorly read I still am.