Frank Kermode as a Teacher of Henry James

Last year an item appeared on the Internet list devoted to the Jameses asking about great teachers of Henry James. My first reaction to the question was that I had never had a great teacher of James; though I have written a dissertation, articles, conference papers, and a book about Henry James, I had never had a course on James. I did read Washington Square in high school, but that experience had little effect on my later interest in James. In college I read The Ambassadors in a course in American fiction (now that I think back on it, I realize how ambitious the professor was to assign this long, complex novel), and I was very interested by the novel, but not enough to further explore James’s writing. And the instructor, Sidney Kaplan, a respected early champion of African-American literature, was never particularly known as a Jamesian.

My graduate English department had no “James expert” while I was completing my graduate degrees; Quentin Anderson, the one certified Jamesian at my graduate school, retired the year I arrived. Before graduate school, my own extended expatriate experience had prompted my interest in James. While living abroad, I had discovered that one spends considerable time thinking and talking about national cultural differences, and I took great comfort from the discovery that in fictions like “Daisy Miller,” The Europeans, and The American someone a century before me had dramatized the same contrasts between cultures that my fellow expatriates and I confronted and discussed every day.

I always supposed that my interest as a reader, teacher, and scholar of James’s writing was the result of that expatriate experience. But the question about James teachers made me remember that Frank Kermode had awakened my interest in James’s narrative techniques. One does not normally think of Kermode as a “Jamesian,” although I suspect that this has to do with the vast range of subjects about which he has written and taught—including James. One certainly did think of Kermode as a narratologist in the years immediately following the appearance of The Genesis of Secrecy (1979). I took Kermode’s seminar on narrative theory during the spring of 1983, and James was central to the understanding of narrative technique that informed that class. In retrospect, I realize that, although this seminar did not spark my initial interest in the scholarly study of James, it was the one course I ever had that directly advanced my interest in his fiction.

Kermode’s seminar was unusual for several reasons. After a much-publicized brouhaha over a tenure case at Cambridge University, Kermode had resigned his chair and taken a position at Columbia. ¹ The news of Kermode’s coming to our department thrilled me, since he was my favorite literary critic. He wasn’t just mine, either; one of my professors had called Kermode “the greatest living literary critic in the English language.” Kermode’s arrival at Columbia excited my fellow students, so many of whom wanted to enroll in the announced seminar that Kermode had to interview and select candidates in order to keep the class size to fifteen. As I recall, there were two (sometimes overlapping) constituencies in the class. One consisted of advanced graduate students who had completed their course work and were writing dissertations; these students wanted to take the course to impress Kermode and solicit a favorable letter of recommendation for their job dossiers. The other group consisted of the theory-starved—those whose interests in post-structuralist theory were not satisfied by the regular offerings of a department with what we now would call a strong old historicist bias or by the presence on campus of Edward Said.

Kermode introduced the seminar by confessing that he had only once been involved in a successful seminar, one that he supposed was still going on. ² He was not quite sure what a seminar was supposed to be, and I think this is because he conceived of a seminar more as a reading and discussion group than as a structured course. He was uncomfortable with leading a seminar...