Generous Estimates
Puzzles and Epiphanies. By Frank Kermode. (Routledge, Kegan Paul, 25s.)
IN a study of his business called The Gay Science, the amiable Victorian critic Dallas, who is now almost forgotten while the influence of Matthew Arnold goes marching on, observes that in the appraisal of literature 'the deliberate selection of a lower form of pleasure need not interfere with our estimate of a higher.' The whole career of Dr. Leavis may be seen as a crusade to root out this damnable heresy, and it is agreeable to find that Mr. Kermode seems serenely in- different about whether it is a heresy or not.
do not see,' he observes parenthetically, 'why critics, like everybody else, may not sometimes like the good better than its enemy the best.'
No challenge: and the more magnanimous for seeming, perhaps deliberately, unweighed. Mr. Kermode is never afraid that what he says may be used against him. He likes reading books as they come out, as a scientist might enjoy keeping abreast of what is going forward over a wide field, and he seems unaware of the mina- tory shadow of some classic behind each one, prompting the negative comparison and the safety of rejection. Not the least of the pleasures of reading these essays (many of which, one is happy to see, first appeared in the Spectator) is our sense of the critic's interest in every author he discusses—Isherwood, Beckett, William Gold- ing, Nabokov, Durrell, Sir Charles Snow—for his own sake, and the absence of any ungenerous qualms about whether they may or may not turn out, with time, to seem quite first-rate.
Not that Mr. Kermode is not rigorous in his approach—no critic is more so—but he displays the rigour and resources of a don without mounting the don's habitual treadmill of resent- ments, fears and prejudices. He makes convic- tion itself seem strangely old-fashioned. Reading him we feel, for example, that Dr. Leavis is in some curious sense the last stubborn representa- tive of a patristic culture, an ultimate stronghold of hooded conservatism and jealously guarded good taste. It is because his taste is so infinitely better than that of most conservative hierarchs that Leavis reads and re-reads George Eliot, Conrad and D. H. Lawrence instead of Kipling, Buchan and Dornford Yates, but he shares the total in- ability of his class and kind to assimilate criteria to which he is not accustomed, and modes of artistic experience and enjoyment which have come in since his time. Not so Mr. Kermode, who seems by contrast (if he will forgive me the analogy) as pacifically and unselfconsciously modern as a Harwell researcher, and so unin- flamed by the hallowed old ideologies of 'our time' that he cannot be bothered even to make defensive gestures in their direction.
For example, his piece on Beckett and on Snow. A daring and controversial juxtaposition? Not at all, they are merely two authors who in- terest him, in their various ways, and about whom he makes some almost comically accurate and reasonable suggestions. Beckett, he points out. is 'exactly typical' of 'what we now expect of artists.' Not modern, one notices, not significant, but simply 'typical.' Yes. And Snow? 'On the whole we find life disappointing rather than desperate; and so, in a sense, Snow, who asks US to throw ourselves into no special posture to read him, is more concerned than Beckett with what daily concerns us. It is only by an effort of will that we can cease to be interested in what interests him.'
In a characteristically muted way this seems '
to me to make a very subtle point. It is quite true that we make an effort of will to. grasp the fashionable author, and 'throw ourselves into a special posture' to receive him. (The point, a propos of Beckett, appears in a recent New Yorker joke of a bright young matron at a din- ner table remarking to her neighbour 'As some- one said on TV the other night, a life finds its meaning in living.' A popular gloss on Malone's:
can't go on. I'll go on.') The present-day typi- cal author compels us into the posture of taking an interest, not in what interests us, but in `living.' Snow, however, is not typical; and so Possibly belongs to the future, or to the past.
For understandable reasons Mr. Kermode's reasonableness backfires on him somewhat when he comes to discuss Dr. Zhivago. Motives of de- cency and of piety no doubt persuaded him, When he wrote art articles on Pasternak, into a more combative stance than comes naturally to him? Does he really think that 'Dr. Zhivago is an accession to that small group of novels by which all others are, ultimately, judged'? We seem to be standing again for a moment be- side Dr. Leavis's club chair. Surely Dr. Zhivago is the visionary autobiography of a poet, com- plete with poems; a cry of affirmation in a dark time, like the, old Russian epic? It has no characters, but figures who stand for life or for death, and even Pasternak cannot escape the logic which prevents a figure proclaimed to be alive and whole from being anything of the kind. Whitman and Pasternak can proclaim life as against death, as poets, but a novelist must go about things differently—Tolstoy's characters Awe because the question does not arise.
But Mr. Kermode is in general at his best when he is analysing, in today's novelists, the kinds of wholeness which our disintegrated society aspires to, or wistfully establishes in the
past, in Catholicism, or in composite myths like the Cambridge of Moore and the Marabar Caves. Aspirations to wholeness fascinate him, and he acts, admirably, the part of a natural historian as he shows us how they come about and how they dominate the writer. He prefers to reveal rather than to judge, and that is why his own comment, or Dallas's, is relevant to his mode of criticism, for whatever their ultimate worth a novel like Allan Tate's The Fathers, or It Gattopardo, provide him with a text on which
to hang his extraordinary knowledge and under- standing of the myth-making imagination. He shows us how writers come to have to believe what they do believe, and this kind of neutral iconography is enormously rewarding to the reader, clearing his mind of all sorts of preju- dicial cant. Mr. Kermode modestly claims that 'the collection has a unity imposed upon it by a limited mind of promiscuous habit.' It is a very good sort of unity to have,
JOHN BAYLEY
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