In Memory of Frank Kermode 1920–2010

Shortly after the death, at ninety, of the scholar-critic Frank Kermode in the summer of 2010, the London Review of Books—for which Kermode had long served on the editorial board and as a major contributor—published a set of memorial tributes, recollecting both his widely influential writings and the distinctive aspects of his personal life. All of these tributes were written by British friends and admirers; there was nothing from the American side of his long life. None of his many American friends were represented; nothing was said of his American contacts, his visits to American colleges and universities—including Vanderbilt and the University of the South—his America-based lecture series and frequent publications in American journals, not least the Sewanee Review. Any of his American friends could have contributed recollections and enriched the account of his presence and manner. What follows here in no way attempts to speak for every aspect of his American adventures. It simply draws on the particular circumstances of my own six decades of contact and friendship with Frank, the beginnings of which predate those of all but one of his British memorialists.

In the London Review pieces there was a recurrent emphasis on the special importance of his book The Sense of an Ending. That book's inception was the set of six Flexner lectures given at Bryn Mawr College in the fall of 1965, in an endowed series previously graced by Alfred North Whitehead, I. A. Richards, Arnold Toynbee, and Isaiah Berlin, among other distinguished scholars. I was teaching at Bryn Mawr then and eagerly supported the English department's nomination of Professor Kermode; this was based mainly on his extraordinary introduction to the Arden Tempest and his more recent Romantic Image—very different productions, both equally authoritative. There was a scheduled causerie the day after each lecture, and my recollection is that certain members of our department, then deep in the decidedly different theories of Northrop Frye, gave Frank rather a hard time, which he responded to with—as one came to see—a characteristic mix of deference and slyly firm resistance.

His six weeks at Bryn Mawr were not without other disobligings. He, Maureen, and their two young children were lodged in guest quarters at the college deanery, an accommodation of late nineteenth-century design, satisfactory for single occupants on brief visits but quite otherwise for a family of four unfamiliar with local customs and rules. There was at least one memorable night when the Kermodes returned late and keyless after the routine lockup and were grudgingly rescued by an annoyed super. In general, though the children apparently enjoyed their brief time at a nearby Quaker school, their parents seemed regularly perplexed, if not intimidated, in managing daily business. Lacking a car complicated their difficulties. But, again characteristically, Frank's preface to The Sense of an Ending speaks only of his gratitude to the college and the English department chairman for hospitality and friendship.

Toward the end of their stay Frank appealed to me for help in finding additional luggage for their return to the U.K. I drove him to the nearest department store in neighboring Ardmore and wound up actually making the selection for him. I dimly recall profuse apologies about the inconvenience and his own ineptness.

As it happened, my direct exchanges with Frank date back nearly a decade before his Bryn Mawr visit. In October 1958 appeared an essay in the Spectator signed by a certain Frank Kermode on the poetry of Wallace Stevens—to my awareness the first serious notice in Britain of a poet who, along with Auden, had for the rising generation of John Ashbery and his friends displaced Eliot and Yeats as chief precursors of reference. I wrote Kermode a letter of appreciation and included an account of a reading by Stevens at Harvard early in 1948. It was an exceptionally cold and snowy winter in our Cambridge; the reading took place in an uncomfortable lecture hall with rickety wooden seats, and those attending in heavy winter gear made a lot of noise in...