Kermode on Kermode

He lived to be ninety, and my first thought at his death in August 2010 was that his talent will survive. As Melvin Lasky of Encounter used to say laconically, if you were rash enough to mention Kermode, he was a good critic, and good criticism survives the years and the centuries, as the deathless fame of Samuel Johnson testifies. Sometimes, however, a talent can be put to strange purposes, and in his memoir Not Entitled (1995) Frank Kermode wrote as he wished to be remembered. It is a highly readable book, compounded of fact and fable. I knew him for over fifty years, and we sparred cheerfully when we met, since the dogmatic divide (as we both knew) was too wide to be bridged. It was an affable friendship that survived, above all, by silence.

In November 1919 Frank Kermode was born on the Isle of Man, where his father was a warehouseman; and Kermode was schooled there. In his mid-teens he was converted to communism by a Scottish shipyard worker, and studied at Liverpool University in the heady days of the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War, in which he was too young to fight. Liverpool left happy memories of student camaraderie, bridge-playing, affairs, and not writing a doctoral thesis. His literary memory was superb, and languages were never a problem: he was taught Latin as a Liverpool freshman by George Painter, a young classicist from Cambridge who would become famous for his biography of Marcel Proust, and he also acquired Greek.

As a young lecturer at Reading University in the early fifties he made the short journey one evening to Oxford to talk about W. B. Yeats. I was living there then, and that is how we met. The audience numbered a dozen or so, and what I heard would one day appear in his first book, Romantic Image (1957), revealing unnoticed connections between the modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and a preceding generation of late romantic poets and critics like Yeats and Arthur Symons. We had been corresponding over a bibliography, so I introduced myself, and I remember his startled look, a gesture he soon learned to control. I was nearly a decade younger than he, and bibliographers are easily imagined as decrepit and white-bearded. I have since grown into the part, but he remained much as he was: compact of frame with a face smooth, nut-brown, and unaging.

Romantic Image won deserved acclaim, and he briefly returned to the grimy North, as he cheerfully put it, to a chair in Manchester. The North never quite left him, even after he left it in 1965 for Bristol and London, though it did not survive in his voice. There is a gentle persistent paranoia common among upwardly mobile northerners of humble origin, and it never left Kermode, though he always insisted that in his boyhood he had been well fed. Even if you are not patronized or persecuted you can feel that you might be. Donald Davie, a Yorkshireman whose first teaching post was in Dublin, used to remark that the Church of Ireland had suited him perfectly in his Irish years, being low church and slightly persecuted as a minority sect. There is security in the thought.

Fame took them both to America before 1960, and they continued to go, drawn by popular admiration, good salaries, and dry martinis at faculty parties, which had nothing to do with their admiring the United States, least of all its foreign policy. They liked being in America. American literature is largely a protest literature, after all, or seen to be; and there were always plenty of colleagues happy to attack the administration of the day, with or without martinis. Kermode and Davie did it better than any foreign visitor. They had had practice. America taught pay-bargaining, too, which traditionally does not exist in British universities, where salaries are fixed. Midcentury America, by contrast, was as rife with pluralism, subsidized apartments, and leaves of absence as the medieval church; and academic conversation was full of talk of three-star restaurants and cottages...