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Pieces of My Mind

Writings 1958-2002

Frank Kermode 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 467pp.

Sir Frank Kermode is the outstanding British literary scholar of his generation, and one of the few with an international reputation, but he is not properly speaking an Englishman. He grew up on the Isle of Man, which, although it is visible in clear weather from the coast of northwest England, is not part of the United Kingdom, having a curious constitutional status as a dependency of the Crown (which makes it a favored haven for off-shore banking and other louche enterprises). After his school-days on the island, Kermode attended the nearest mainland university, at Liverpool, and launched on an academic career that eventually took him to chairs at Manchester, Bristol, London, Cambridge, Columbia, and Harvard. Throughout this distinguished progress, Kermode the Manxman has preserved a certain distance and difference from the English establishment and its habitual attitudes. If he has been happy to make a life and career in England, he is also at home in the United States. Now in his eighties, he lives in active retirement in Cambridge (England), still writing.

Kermode has always preferred to develop his ideas in essays and lectures rather than in sustained monographs, and Pieces of My Mind contains a substantial and representative selection of them. They show how bewilderingly diverse and numerous his interests are. Kermode's basic assumptions are that if one is interested in literature one needs to take in much of it, and that a serious interest in literature involves an extensive concern with other things. He began fifty years ago as a Shakespeare scholar, with a learned and still necessary edition of The Tempest. This interest was most fully expressed in Shakespeare's Language (2000), a widely praised book which is likely to remain his most popular. Shakespeare appears in the present collection in a minutely attentive study of the presence of pairs and other doubled entities in Hamlet. Kermode has long been fascinated by the aesthetic movement of the fin de siecle before last, as is apparent in the first essay here, "Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev," and a later study of the development of Botticelli's reputation; both of them have an oblique relation to Yeats, who is one of Kermode's poetic points of reference. Another is Wallace Stevens, on whom he has written a short book and who is discussed in two of these essays.

In the late 1960s Kermode embarked on a long exploration of the nature of narrative. He pursued it in The Sense of an Ending (1967) and The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), lectures delivered at, respectively, Bryn Mawr and Harvard; there are extracts from both in the present collection. They show a powerful and complicated mind at work, though some of his basic ideas are simple: in The Sense of an Ending he points out that though a clock makes only the one sound, "tick," we, in our love of stories and plots, hear it as "tick-tock." Kermode always writes elegantly, but in these lectures he makes few concessions to his listeners; there is a glittering density in the presentation. In the early 1970s, like many of his contemporaries, he discovered the French structuralists and poststructuralists, notably Barthes and Derrida. He took what he needed from them without ever becoming a disciple. He also began a long period of preoccupation with the Bible and its narrative modes; an early Protestant upbringing had made him very familiar with it, though he insisted that he was not a believer. In The Genesis of Secrecy he examines the Gospels as examples of narrative. The book is full of insights, but Kermode's interest in secrets and hidden senses gives his exegesis a Gnostic flavor. The close attention to texts whose truth he could not accept seems to have left him dispirited; The Genesis of Secrecy's final words are, "our sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a momentary radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut on us."

At about this time Kermode was also making brilliant and intricate analyses of famous novels, such as Wuthering Heights and Conrad's Under Western Eyes. In a note in the present collection he disarmingly remarks that the Conrad essay, originally a lecture at a high-powered conference on narrative in Chicago, is "probably the most arduous in the book.... My lecture could be called aridly academic, but I include it as a reminder that in the seventies I spent much time devotedly doing this kind of thing."

There is a similar wry sense of an ending in his note on the extract from The Genesis of Secrecy: "But then my interest faded, giving way to other preoccupations." The rueful, self-deprecatory note is characteristic of Kermode; for all his celebrity, he has never felt any inclination to play the pontiff. It is a note that pervades his engaging memoir, Not Entitled (1995), which extracts high comedy from his wartime service in the Royal Navy and his later career in the academy. By the late eighties he seems to have felt that he had taken the investigation of narrative as far as it could go and that it was time to break away from the demanding narrowness of the academy (from which he had in any case recently retired) and to draw closer to general readers, as he does in his extensive literary journalism, some of it included in the last part of this collection. He also seems to have become more cheerful, believing that literature "must give pleasure," to invoke a phrase from Wallace Stevens. The shift in attitude is evident in a more relaxed style of writing, and in the titles of his later books: after the portentous Sense of an Ending and The Genesis of Secrecy, there came the down-to-earth An Appetite for Poetry (1989), and the personal note of Pleasing Myself (a collection of reviews published in England in 2002), and the present Pieces of My Mind.

Kermode's long and splendid career as scholar, critic, and reviewer is something to be grateful for. In acknowledging that, one also has to say that such a career is probably no longer possible. This is not just because writers of his learning and acuity do not appear very often, but because the restrictive (and publicity-conscious) professionalism that dominates the academy on both sides of the Atlantic means that brainy young academics who would like to range as widely as Kermode would be severely discouraged from doing any such thing.

Bernard Bergonzi's most recent book is A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford University Press).