Unsurprisingly, he remembers that he disliked Plato from the first, thinking that
his belief in absolute truth, beauty and goodness, and his notion that some kind of ideal perfection exists, which humanity always falls short of, were not only groundless but also dangerous and damaging to human life.
He is justifiably "worried" by his antipathy to this "great philosopher". Then one day he is walking down Broad Street in Oxford and bumps into Sir Maurice Bowra, who offers his opinion that Plato is "wonderful stuff . . . Of course, the philosophy's nonsense." Some of us might reserve judgment on this flippancy until we had discovered Plato's opinion of Sir Maurice Bowra, but Carey just feels "greatly relieved" and carries on contentedly down Broad Street.
Say what you like about the pursuit of absolute truth, beauty, and goodness, it can make for rather exciting autobiography. Carey's memoir, by contrast, lacks the urgency of his polemical and critical books; it ticks off the landmarks of a deservedly successful literary-academic career, and then sort-of climaxes with his winning the Biography award for William Golding at the 2009 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Carey confesses, with endearing and characteristic honesty, that given his opinion of literary prizes as "meaningless" and arbitrary, he cannot say why he is so moved when the chairman of the judges reads out his name.
Carey does not quite have the rare gift for anecdote, though he pays a fine tribute to W.H. Auden. You didn't feel "awestruck" in Auden's presence, Carey writes, "because he made things easy by being so unaffected." In general, Carey's reminiscences of writers are less enjoyable than his reminiscences of reading.
The book comes alive in its lengthy and frequent literary-critical digressions. It is hard to think of a contemporary critic so good at the essential task of communicating enthusiasm-of making you see the brilliance of this novel, or this simile. He pins down, for instance, how some of Wordsworth's most affecting lines are those which admit he can't describe what he is talking about ("I should need / Colours and words that are unknown to man"): "He is the only poet who can point so unerringly to the aching gulfs in ourselves that lie beyond poetry, beyond expression, beyond help."
Which rather supports Carey's point, made in the book's coda, that "Reading takes you into other minds and makes them part of your own. Reading releases you from the limits of yourself." If reading Wordsworth can make even John Carey sound, for a moment, almost otherworldly, it must be true.
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