Lives in Writing (18 page)

His interest in the idea of apocalypse later led Frank into the area of biblical criticism and textual scholarship, and once again I found myself learning from him – this time about texts that were almost boringly familiar from my Roman Catholic background.
The Genesis of Secrecy
(1979) defamiliarised the gospels. Reviewing that book in the
New Statesman
, I commented:

He himself writes as a declared ‘secular’ critic, yet in the end he seems more dejected than are most Christians by the discovery that the truth about the historical Jesus is irrecoverable, not (to borrow a metaphor from Conrad) inside the gospels like a kernel, but ‘outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.’ Kermode accepts the infinite plurality of interpretation whatever kind of text is in question, but for him this acceptance is tragic, since we interpret over and over again in quest of a truth that we know is unobtainable. ‘World and book, it may be, are hopelessly plural, endlessly disappointing,’ he elegiacally concludes.
The Genesis of Secrecy
, however, does not disappoint. It is exactly what one expects from Professor Kermode: elegant, incisive, expert, and original. What could not have been predicted is that it would make the New Testament as interesting to the literary critic as Joyce or Kafka.

From Frank’s urbane, relaxed manner and fluent, educated speech you would never have guessed that he was brought up in a poor family and underprivileged environment on the Isle of Man. I remember him telling me ruefully once that his friends in America (where he was always much in demand as a visiting professor and celebrity lecturer) could never understand why he had such poor-looking teeth, being quite unable to conceive the lack of dental care and hygiene in British working-class society between the wars. But it was not until I read his memoir
Not Entitled
in 1995 that I fully comprehended the disadvantages in early life which he had overcome to make his brilliant career. His father was a storeman, his mother a farm girl and later a waitress. The family lived first in a tenement and then in a council house ‘designed by somebody who had a very low opinion of the needs and deserts of the lower classes’.

The young Kermode had his Wordsworthian moments – notably an epiphany experienced while on an errand one autumn evening, between the ironmonger’s shop and the Congregational chapel. ‘The faint smudged pink of the sky above the church complied with the noises of the street and the tread of unilluminated persons, who had no notion of the plenitude of which they were part.’ Elated by this sudden apprehension of the wonder of creation and his own place in it, the boy put a question to God: ‘Did other persons, when they ate oranges, experience the taste I had of orange?’ No answer was forthcoming, but merely to pose it was evidence of an unusually enquiring mind, precociously identifying the problematic nature of what cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind call ‘qualia’, and still find puzzling.

Precocity can, however, be a liability. Kermode won his scholarship to high school a year earlier than usual and was therefore always by far the youngest boy in his class. Fat, bespectacled, and without physical grace or dexterity (his father called him a
phynodderee,
the charming Manx word for a clumsy fairy), he was unmercifully bullied at school and soon lost the will or ability to learn. Ashamed to let his parents see how badly he had performed, he falsified a school report – a traumatic episode which he still found painful to recall in his memoir. The boy, in short, was deeply unhappy, and suffered something like a nervous breakdown. He recovered in time to win another scholarship, to Liverpool University, but the misery of those pubescent years sowed the seeds of anxiety and self-doubt in later life. Even at the height of his professional fame Frank Kermode always felt himself to be an outsider, almost an imposter. ‘Looking the part while not being quite equal to it seems to be something I do rather well.’

What most impressed me in the memoir was its vivid account of his service in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, which alternated periods of extreme tedium and discomfort with moments of lethal danger. Entitled ‘My Mad Captains’, alluding to a series of variously deranged superior officers under whom he served, this section of the book is as funny and alarming as anything in Evelyn Waugh’s
Sword of Honour.
Kermode, who had worked on the Liverpool–Isle of Man steamers as a student in his vacations, volunteered for the navy, and became, in due course, a lieutenant. His first ship was the
Sierra
, a slow, unlovely merchantman hastily converted for naval duties, commanded by Captain Stonegate, a decorated but traumatised survivor of Dunkirk, whom Kermode first encountered threatening indolent dockside workers with a revolver. Kermode reported to a Lieutenant Taylor, a gloomy pale-faced man who lived on an exclusive diet of pink gin and canned lambs’ tongues and who died two days later, possibly as a consequence of it. Kermode stepped into his shoes as Stonegate’s secretary, but before long the deranged captain blew his brains out with his revolver. His successor, Henty, fell down a staircase and broke both legs before Kermode could ascertain whether he was mad. The next captain, Archer, certainly was: a monster of the kind it is amusing to read about, but hell to live with. Gross of physique and appetite, cunning, venal and utterly dedicated to the furtherance of his own interest, he enjoyed humiliating his subordinates, and never bothered even to learn the name of his lieutenant, addressing him indifferently as Cosmo, Cosmos and Comody. Under his command the crew of the
Sierra
laboured vainly to lay anti-submarine booms outside the Icelandic harbour of Reykjavic for nearly two years of excruciating boredom, vile weather, physical discomfort and sexual deprivation. Once, in his cups, Archer set off on a suicidal voyage into the teeth of a force 10 gale in sub-zero temperature. ‘He poured himself a Scotch. “Well, Comody,” he said, “it seems we’ve fucking ’ad it.”’ Frank Kermode certainly thought so, but somehow the old tub survived.

Under a new captain, not mad for once, but a rather unpleasant martinet, the
Sierra
sailed to the Mediterranean as part of a convoy supplying the Allied forces in North Africa, and on this voyage Kermode first experienced enemy action. He was in a lavatory at the time, and arrived on deck a little late, to see two British ships on fire, presumably torpedoed, and destroyers scattering depth charges as a solitary Catalina circled the convoy. After an interval the survivors in a lifeboat rowing away from one of the burning ships inexplicably returned to board it, and almost immediately the ship exploded, blowing them to smithereens. The Catalina now proceeded, in breach of strict regulations, to fly along the line of the convoy, and since it was known that the Germans were using captured Catalinas, it was promptly shot down with the loss of all its crew, who proved in due course to be Canadian. Kermode laconically comments: ‘It is interesting to note that none of the people who died in this little action need have done so.’ He ended the war in the Pacific as a member of the crew of an aircraft carrier who expected, with some trepidation, to take part in the final assault on Japan. They were spared this ordeal by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. ‘The general opinion was that it saved our lives, and we were unethically pleased about this’ – a reaction which I find entirely forgivable.

That chapter of
Not Entitled
is so good that you wonder with regret why Frank decided after he was demobilised that his ambitions to be a creative writer were doomed and abandoned them to become an academic. Perhaps the two vocations seemed less compatible then than they did to my generation. I was born in 1935, just old enough to remember what it was like to live through the Second World War as a civilian, and to acquire from comic books and movies a rather simplified and heroic idea of what it was like for combatants; later I was a reluctant conscript, doing boring and banal National Service in the peacetime army. As a young university teacher I was often struck by the thought that many of my distinguished senior colleagues in the field of English Literature had seen active service in the war, yet very seldom spoke about it, and almost never referred to it in their published work. Would one have guessed, without being told, that, for example, Raymond Williams had commanded a tank in Normandy, Richard Hoggart slogged through North Africa and Italy with the artillery, Philip Brockbank piloted bombers over Germany, and Graham Hough and Ian Watt were prisoners of war in the notorious Japanese camps of Siam? I thought not; yet surely to have been in such life-threatening situations would leave its mark on a man, and make him take a somewhat different view of, say, cruces in Shakespeare’s texts, or symbolism in D.H. Lawrence, or the Intentional Fallacy, from those who had not had such experience? Not so, according to Kermode. The experience of modern warfare is so absurd, so chaotic and random, that there is really nothing to be learned from it except that it is better to be lucky than to be unlucky – and even that is not an unmixed blessing. Frank counted himself fortunate, but nourished a vague sense of guilt, common among survivors of war, who ‘have somewhere in their heads the notion that they have remained alive by some slightly underhand trick or evasion’. As he observes, one might expect that those who for one reason or another had had a safe, cushy war, or avoided it altogether, would be the ones troubled by guilt and low self-esteem: ‘But it doesn’t work like that, it never did.’ This helps to explain why in spite of being by his own admission a workaholic driven by academic ambition, at some cost to his personal relationships and family life, a man who occupied some of the most prestigious professorial chairs of English Literature in Britain and was knighted in 1991, his social manner was always modest, unassertive and ironically self-deprecating.

In an interview once Frank said, rather sadly, apropos of the flamboyant Yale professor Harold Bloom, that ‘there aren’t any Kermodians in the world’, meaning that he himself hadn’t attracted disciples like Bloom (or, one might add, like F.R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Northrop Frye and Jacques Derrida). This is true in the sense that Frank never formulated a critical ‘method’ or ideological apparatus which could be simply appropriated and applied by others. But many of us who pursued academic careers in what looks in retrospect like the Golden Age of English studies (from, say, the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) were covert Kermodians inasmuch as we regarded him as the most accomplished literary critic of his generation. Firstly, he wrote beautifully – a graceful, precise, apparently effortless prose. If its vocabulary is occasionally challenging, that is because of his unusual range and elegant economy of reference, not because of any professional pomposity or deliberate mystification. He was a master of the review-essay of the kind he published frequently in the
New York Review of Books
and the
London Review of Books
, where in a few thousand words he would spin original thoughts of his own on a variety of topics out of a courteous but searching encounter with another mind. He wrote in a late collection of such essays that criticism ‘can be quite humbly and sometimes even magnificently useful’, but it must ‘also give pleasure’. It was the anhedonist character of much post-structuralist discourse as much as its theoretical principles that made Frank turn against it in his later years, and led him to say that it had had an ‘interestingly catastrophic’ effect on literary studies. Secondly (and this is one reason why there are no card-carrying Kermodians) he was enormously wide-ranging and indefatigably curious in his intellectual interests. Renaissance literature, Romanticism, symbolism, modernism, narratology, hermeneutics and biblical criticism . . . Shakespeare, Yeats, Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Henry Green, Muriel Spark . . . The catalogue of authors and topics he wrote about seems endless. Few modern academic critics ranged so widely and to such effect. Thirdly, he never tried to say the last word about any of the many topics he touched upon. He was suggestive rather than exhaustive. He passed you the ball and left you some space to run with it yourself, and perhaps even score. That is possibly the most cherishable attribute a critic can have.

Frank Kermode died in August 2010, at the age of ninety, intellectually active to the last. I remember him with great affection for his geniality, his self-deprecating humour, his capacity to surprise you with an acute observation, and to make you want to revise a lazy thought or a careless expression. There was always, I felt, an underlying melancholy in his temperament, but a complete absence of self-pity. When I heard that he was seriously ill and wrote to commiserate, he replied characteristically: ‘The news is, alas, true. When I read
Eothen
for school cert I learned that in Kinglake’s time nobody any longer said “Alas!” but sometimes it does duty if only as a sigh. I’ve done and allowed to be done all that can be done and my friends come from the pain controllers, not the oncologists. I’m grateful for others, such as yourself, who have given me friendship and pleasure.’ In their unforced eloquence those words are deeply expressive of the man who wrote them.

IN 1961, AGED
twenty-six, I was in my second year as Assistant Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham University when the Head of Department, Professor Terence Spencer, decided that we ought to have a specialist in American Literature, and accordingly advertised a post for one. I remember being in his office one day when he showed me an application for this lectureship from a man two years older than me called Malcolm Bradbury, currently an extra-mural studies tutor at Hull University. He was completing a PhD dissertation on American literary expatriates and had a number of interestingly varied publications to his name, including a novel,
Eating People Is Wrong
, which I had heard of, though not read. ‘I don’t think we need bother interviewing anybody else, do you?’ Spencer said nonchalantly (heads of departments enjoyed the power of feudal barons in those days) and I readily agreed. I was the only teacher in the department under thirty-five; I looked forward to having a colleague of the same generation as myself, and one who seemed to have the same ambition to combine an academic career with writing fiction (at a time when creative writing was not on the curriculum of any British university). I had published my first novel in 1960, and Malcolm his in 1959. Naturally I read
Eating People Is Wrong
, and naturally he read
The Picturegoers
, before he arrived in Birmingham in January 1962. We quickly became friends, as did our wives Mary and Elizabeth.