The critic cornered

The day the late John Carey went too far

Last year I wrote an essay for Slightly Foxed – in an upcoming issue soon, I hope – about the love affair between Elizabeth Smart and George Barker and the two novels they each wrote about it, respectively By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and The Dead Seagull. While researching it I came across this sorry literary contretemps. It slipped my mind until we found ourselves walking past the house where Barker was born – in Loughton – over the New Year. (A stone’s throw from Smart’s Lane, as it happens.)

In the autumn of 1991 the late John Carey – Merton Professorship of English at Oxford and literary critic at the Sunday Times – was called on to review By Heart by Rosemary Sullivan, a biography of Elizabeth Smart, who had died five years previously.

Carey was noted for his sharp literary judgements, often pungently expressed. As ever, he didn’t waste much time getting down to business. “Elizabeth Smart’s is a tragic story of failure and betrayal. Her writing is not much known, and, to be honest, does not deserve to be,” he began. “Her novella, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, has nothing to recommend it beyond a few brilliant similes and its unforgettable title.”

Carey himself came from a modest background and he was always alert to snobbery, wealth and privilege. He did not warm to Smart.

Like many rebels, Smart came from a wealthy background… [Her father] was exceptionally generous, and paid Smart a regular allowance throughout her life, which her renunciation of bourgeois values did not prevent her accepting.

There was more.

She signalled her distinction from the rest of Ottawa’s gilded youth by carrying the Oxford Book of English Verse around with her, and when she was 19 her father bought her a 200-acre mountain with a cabin where she could be alone and write… But she yearned for cultural distinction that would transcend mere social glitter. Unfortunately, she was not very good at anything.

Carey follows this with a brief account of the ups and downs of Smart’s affair with Barker – mostly downs, it has to be said. Their daughter, Rose died of an overdose. “Outwardly tough and cheerful,” Carey writes of Smart’s reaction, “she relied more and more heavily on drink, and became one of London’s first glue-sniffers.”

He records Barker and Smart having “a drunken brawl”. It ended when “Smart bit right through [Barker’s] lower lip, and he was rushed to hospital for stitches”.

“You feel like cheering,” Carey adds.

The review closes with a brutal critique of both Smart and her biographer.

Sullivan’s celebration of Smart’s “new ethic” seems wildly at odds with the facts. Smart was, she proclaims, a “female imperatrix”, who “rebelled against everything that would deny her female vision”. Yet the truth is she prostrated herself before Barker, idolising what she saw at his divinely inspired male genius…

Though she resented his infidelities she also approved them, because they matched her romantic dream of how a poet should behave…

Women’s proper creativity, she declared, lay in having babies, not writing. Without babies, they could not be truly women. Sullivan hails this “fierce dogmatism” as another of Smart’s ethical breakthroughs. Yet surely it is just what piggish males had been saying for centuries. In Smart’s case it was a compensation, of course, for her own. failure to write. She was one of literature’s victims. Her mother often expressed her dismay that Smart should consort with poets, and Sullivan quotes these philistine intrusions with patient amusement. Yet they seem spot-on. Smart would almost certainly have been happier and healthier had she never read a line of literature in her life.

The review was headlined ‘Rebel Without a Clue’.

Acidic – perhaps cruel – though it all is, however, this is not what got Carey into trouble. Earlier in the review he had characterised Barker, almost in passing, as “a minor English poet who enjoyed some vogue in the 1930s… [who] is, one gathers, still alive”.

It was that glib, throwaway line that hurt the most. The review was published on 27 October. Barker died later the same day.

Just three days later the critic Allan Massie leapt to his Smart’s defence in the Daily Telegraph. Massie didn’t particularly know Smart, but he was both a friend of Barker’s and the brother-in-law of Barker’s widow, Elspeth.

Under the headline ‘How Wrong Can a Critic Be?’, Massie fought fire with fire.

Carey is… an accomplished critic. His reviews are distinguished, in my opinion, by a combination of narrow sympathies and a willingness to flatter fashionable writers. If on the other hand a writer is out of fashion, or dead, the Professor has a merry time. Such are fair game for those who like their birds sitting.

Moreover, he was not letting Carey’s off-hand dismissal of Barker’s talent go unchallenged.

CH Sisson, a better critic, called [Barker] “one of the most remarkable figures of the age”. For those of us who agree with Sisson, and think Barker one of the authentic poets of our time, Carey’s dismissal was bad enough. But [Barker] would have been able to read this piece on the morning of his death, if he bothered about Professor Carey, which I doubt…

Massie refrains from adding that TS Eliot published Barker at Faber when the latter was just twenty two and that Yeats claimed to like his work “better than I like anybody else in the new generation”.

Instead he offers a stirring defence of Barker and Smart and their belief in the value of poetry and the literary life.

He… belonged to the vanished, roaring London of Soho and Fitzrovia. Most of his friends – Dylan Thomas, Colquhoun and MacBryde, Johnny Minton, David Archer – are long dead. That generation had its faults. Its members led undisciplined lives. But they had one great virtue. They believed in Art and Poetry. They didn’t see either as a branch of the fashion or an adjunct to the media.

Professor Carey seems to think poets should all be solid citizens. He devotes a paragraph to one of George and Elizabeth Smart’s children, a beautiful girl who made a mess of life and died of a drugs overdose. Sad, but such things happen in better-regulated families too, even in North Oxford…

George Barker and Elizabeth Smart took risks with life. They caused pain. They damaged themselves. So do most of us, in different ways. But they did so in pursuit of something noble, the old Romantic ideal that poetry is of supreme value. It’s out of date of course. The Professor tells us that “Smart would almost certainly have been happier and healthier had she never read a line of literature in her life”. So what? So this is a Professor of Literature writing.

According to Barker’s biographer, Robert Fraser, Carey wrote to another of Barker’s friends to apologise. But at the Sunday Times Christmas Party that year, he was sipping a glass of wine in a corner of the room when, he told Fraser, he saw a “winged Fury” descending on him. It was Barker’s daughter, Raffaella. Following behind was her mother, Barker’s widow, Elspeth. Carey panicked and tried to clamber over a nearby table to escape. Unfortunately, on the other side of the table was a wall. With nowhere for Carey to go, one imagines the two women’s displeasure, and the family’s offence, was forcefully conveyed.

“Be wary, Carey!” was Elspeth’s parting warning.

These days you don’t read many reviews as savage as Carey’s of By Heart. Perhaps that is a pity. Anodyne praise is the death of criticism, and indeed of reading pleasure, and if the review pages were more enlivened by stylish vitriol perhaps they would be more avidly read. Still, the story is a reminder that these things have their costs and words need to be weighed carefully.

I’m never entirely sure what I think of Barker and Smart. There’s no question that they caused a lot of pain and damage, to other people and, at times, to each other. But, as Massie says, they believed profoundly in the value of poetry and art, and pursued it relentlessly – like furies of another kind, I suppose. In an age when no-one seems to value such things at all, when such certainties are almost unthinkable, it’s not difficult to see something commendable, even admirable, in their zeal. They seem to belong to another distant, richer world.

Update: please do read the comments below from two of George Barker’s children. I’m really grateful to Raffaella and Edward for sharing their thoughts and memories.