Frank Kermode Obituary

[Dominic Hughes]

Frank Kermode, who rose from humble origins to become one of England’s
most respected and influential critics, died Tuesday at his home in
Cambridge, England. He was 90.

His death was announced by The London Review of Books, which he helped
create and to which he frequently contributed.

The author David Lodge called Mr. Kermode “the finest English critic
of his generation,” and few disagreed with that assessment.

The author or editor of more than 50 books published over five
decades, Mr. Kermode was probably best known for his studies of
Shakespeare. But his range was wide, reaching from Beowulf to Philip
Roth, from Homer to Ian McEwan, from the Bible to Don DeLillo. Along
the way he devoted individual volumes to John Donne, Wallace Stevens
and D. H. Lawrence. Unrelentingly productive, he published “Concerning
E. M. Forster” just last December.

His collections of literary criticism and lectures — among them “The
Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction” (Oxford
University Press, 1967 and 2000), “The Genesis of Secrecy” (Harvard
University Press, 1979) and “The Art of Telling: Essays on
Fiction” (Harvard, 1983) — became standard university texts. The poet
and critic Allen Tate called “The Sense of an Ending” “a landmark in
20th-century critical thought.”

Mr. Kermode also wrote for the general book-reading audience, chiefly
in The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and
his judgments were typically measured but pointed, whether reviewing
Philip Roth, John Updike or Zadie Smith. His pungent take on Updike’s
series of “Bech” novels managed at once to express a certain awe at
the writer’s talents while discounting the books in question, calling
them “works of the left hand.”

Yet despite the variety of his work, he almost invariably tied what he
wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary
critic Lawrence S. Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The
Independent, described as “the conflict between the human need to make
sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek
meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are
indifferent, even hostile, to story.”

For instance, in his best-known book, “The Sense of an Ending,” Mr.
Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning and order to
a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe.
Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a
connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting
eschatologically toward some final judgment.

Yet, as he pointed out in “The Genesis of Secrecy,” narratives, just
like life, can include details that defy interpretation, like the Man
in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s “Ulysses” or the
young man who runs away naked when Jesus is arrested at Gethsemane in
the Gospel according to Mark.

Mr. Kermode’s critics sometimes faulted him for a deliberately
difficult style and what Mr. Lodge called “intellectual dandyism.”
Although in “The Art of Telling” Mr. Kermode suggested that innovative
French approaches to literary criticism like structuralism and
deconstructionism might eventually find at least some place in the
mainstream, he took to task some of the more radical attempts to
subvert traditional texts through gender or racial perspectives. In
“An Appetite for Poetry” (Harvard, 1989) he reaffirmed his belief in
the value of reading literary classics as a way of gauging both ideals
of permanence and the forces of change.

The view of him as uppermost an establishmentarian was only reinforced
in 1974, when he attained what is considered the pre-eminent post in
English literary criticism: the King Edward VII chair of English
literature at King’s College, Cambridge University, an appointment
made by the crown at the suggestion of the prime minister. In 1991 he
was knighted.

But even his occasional detractors respected him for his brilliance,
his evenhandedness and his humaneness. The critic Richard Poirier,
reviewing “Puzzles and Epiphanies” (Chilmark, 1962) for The New York
Review of Books, praised Mr. Kermode’s criticism for its freedom from
“polemical or theoretical limitations” and for possessing “the power,
which Arnold required of good criticism, ‘to ascertain the master-
spirit in the literature of an epoch.’ ”

John Frank Kermode was born on Nov. 29, 1919, in Douglas, Isle of Man,
the only son of John Pritchard Kermode, a storeroom keeper who earned
three pounds a week, and the former Doris Kennedy, a farm girl who had
been a waitress and who had given her son his unwanted “habit of
deference” and had inspired his love of words, as he wrote in his
memoir “Not Entitled” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995).

He transcended his unpromising background beyond all expectations,
winning scholarships to the local high school and to Liverpool
University, from which he graduated in 1940. He learned to read Greek
and Latin as well as French, Italian and German, and he went on to
become a professor of Renaissance and modern English literature.
...
His writing, though, reached beyond academia. His “Shakespeare’s
Language” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000) — which traced the
development of the playwright through the evolution of his poetry and
concluded that “Hamlet” signified a major turning point — was a best
seller in England.

At the time he worried about the book’s accessibility, telling an
interviewer for The Irish Times: “What I do is despised by some
younger critics, who want everything to sound extremely technical. I
spent a long time developing an intelligible style. But these critics
despise people who don’t use unintelligible jargon.”

Perhaps there was a touch of sarcasm in the comment, a bit of
grumbling. But he clearly had little patience for critics who seemed
to write only for other critics. As he wrote in “Pieces of My Mind:
Essays and Criticism 1958-2002” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003),
criticism “can be quite humbly and sometimes even quite magnificently
useful.” But it must also “give pleasure,” he added, “like the other
arts.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/books/19kermode.html?src=me