20/03/2014 Meet the Author

We will have more on the top stories at eight o'clock. Now time for Meet

The Author. John Carey is the chief book

reporter for the Sunday Times. People call him penetrant and

waspish. He is also a president `` Professor at Oxford. His latest book

is an engaging autobiography interspersed with formal essays on

writers he advised from John Milton to George Orwell. He calls it the

history of English literature and me, how we met, how we got on and

what came of it. John Carey, this is a book really

about one man's discovery of English literature over 80 years. Is it too

soppy to call it a love affair? It is not too soppy but it is

incomplete. I think what I get from literature is not only feelings but

thoughts. It is true that when I started to be captivated by English

literature which was only when I got to grammar school at the age of 12,

it was poetry that I was captivated by, and very much poetry that fed

the feelings. The first poem I really loved was GK Chesterton's the

panto. I still admire it. George Orwell thought it was pure fusty.

That is the one which goes Don John of Austria is much into war.

Wonderful rhythm. You went on to discover a more thoughtful and

serious side of literature? Yes, it was particularly reading as an

A`level text, sure's Saint Joan, not only the play but the preface, which

I thought it was a marvellous piece of writing, about the time before

nationhood in feudal Europe when what mattered was Catholicism and

the religions which were starting to develop to challenge it. Also in the

play itself, there was a marvellous bit where Joan is being questioned

about her voices. She says they come from God. He says, they come from

your imagination. She says, of course, that is how God speaks to

us. Brilliant. The intelligence was what I so admired in Bernard Shaw.

The intelligence and provocation that he would annoy people if he

possibly could. You have already mentioned two things which loom

large in this book, one is that you have a grammar school education and

the other is George Orwell. You are a great believer in grammar schools

and you lament that almost all our grammar schools have disappeared.

Why? ICV counterarguments, I am not ignorant of those and I know people

who failed the 11 plus were seriously disadvantaged. For me, I

was lucky, I passed the 11 plus and transformed my life. Why? It was a

tiny grammar school in East Sheen but it was staffed, the teaching

staff, the Masters, it was single sex, were the kind of people you

wanted to be like. You wanted to have their kind of knowledge and

values. That seems to me, in teaching generally speaking, to BD

magic power. You are a great enthusiasts the George Orwell, why?

It is not only his writing which I admire and I do admire it because of

its economy, clarity, plain`spoken bus and wit. I admire him for his

life. He would hate this but I think it is the life of a secular saint,

if you like. He sees the light, has done with imperial is, becomes a

socialist or his life, goes over to communism, sees the light about that

and tells the truth about coming as and Stalinism. He is a truth teller.

You admired in Oxford 60 years ago as an undergraduate and you got your

first academic job. You said you were interviewed by a man called

bison whose view was that literature should be for enjoyment and it was

wrong to turn it into something arcane and scholarly `` a man called

Dyson. You said it was a view you wanted to discredit, partly because

you agreed with it? What I feel about academic literature is more of

it should be written for the general reader. The people I admire as

critics are people like CS Lewis, people like FI leaders, as a matter

of fact. `` FR Leavis. People writing are not coming from the

academic community at all. I'm thinking of people like Richard

Holmes, his biography of Coleridge, Doctor Johnson and Savage. I think

of Jenny Uglow, the remarkable biography of Hogarth. And none of

the people who are writing the big biographical books come from

academia. You are man who writes for newspapers, inevitably, the choice

of books made by you and literary editors is somewhat arbitrary. There

are so many books and which ones you choose are matter of chance, what

you want to achieve with those? I do want to encourage people to read

books, that is my main aim. I think reading books for pleasure seems to

be threatened at the moment. I do want to be too apocalyptic about it

but I do think that teenagers read less. Not younger children but

teenagers. So my aim actually is if I am reviewing, to direct people to

books that I think are truly rewarding and sometimes, of course,

to direct them away from books which are not. I like to think of, it

happened to me when I was younger, is these papers getting into homes

with children and they are being read. My column, my review is being

read by young people. I have had young writers say, I read your

column. It is a lovely thought that I might have influenced in however

small away there movement towards reading for pleasure `` I might have

influenced in however small a way. John Kerry, thank you.

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