There is always a remarkably serene sense of what an author would and wouldn’t have liked – ‘Jane Austen would have endorsed it instantly, and with amusement’ – often combined with puckish non sequiturs: His essays on Sterne, Austen, Hardy, Trollope, Dickens, George Eliot and others begin incisively and then drift sideways, as critical argument is forsaken for biographical chatter and a widespread sowing of the field with puffed wheat. This huge new collection, which gathers essays from four decades, some of them wonderful pieces of work, shows that Bayley is at his worst when reviewing biographies of novelists, and at his best when reviewing poetry. Carey quickly becomes coarse and crowd-pleasing Eagleton switches on his smooth-running dialectic machine and Bayley unravels yards of delightful babble. ![]() All three men tend to write journalism which, at least when it is stalking the common reader, functions at levels below their best intelligence. Leavis than they would probably like to admit they would all agree, for instance, along with Leavis, to a marked suspicion of Virginia Woolf, for interestingly similar reasons. In their puritanism (Carey), suspicion of overprivileged aestheticism (Carey and Eagleton), and belief that literature is at its most powerful when disclosing life (Bayley, and to some extent Carey), all three critics are far more marked by F.R. And John Bayley, with his hospitable style and gift for canonical gossip, again and again attempts to defend the sensible common reader against academic criticism tout court – what he has variously called ‘the higher criticism’, ‘smart academic critics’, ‘the literary lads’, ‘the clever men at Yale and elsewhere’, and ‘the high-tech men’. ![]() ![]() Terry Eagleton, with his blokeish binarisms and comic’s patter, increasingly presents himself as the sensible Marxist alternative to toothless and ornate theory in America and continental Europe. John Carey, scourge of Modernist ‘intellectuals’ and reliable dribbler of cold water on all forms of overheated aestheticism, comes across as the last defender of sensible English decency. In their very different ways, the three most prominent Oxford professors of English since the war have all been populist pretenders.
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