A secret poet
Peter Levi
NOT ENTITLED: A MEMOIR by Frank Kermode Collins, £18, pp. 264 This book is not memoirs but musings, a curious and in some ways an enigmatic mixture, but Frank Kermode is an old- fashioned, working-class Manxman. The only other Manxman I know is the philoso- pher Quine, who is a beaming, bright-eyed, and I think very happy retired eminence at Harvard, full of cheerful tales of Bowra and Berlin, and even more enigmatic than Frank Kermode. I have always liked the Isle of Man, ever since I went there to run a boy-scout camp. There was only one cloud on the whole island that summer, but every morning it came down from its hill and went out to sea, and every evening it climbed black to its place, soaking our campsite twice a day.
Kermode was brought up with the same sort of rhythm, selling newspapers and later inspecting tickets on the ferries. On these pleasurable ships a number of old ladies and gentlemen travelled both ways on deck every day, for the sake of their lungs. One of them on young Frank's ferry was the grandmother of the poet Roy Fuller, though Frank never met her. But it is that sort of book, full of musing and wonderful- ly mellow.
In a way it is a memorial to the dead poet in Frank Kermode; he is often referred to but never quite materialises, and his privacy preserves the centre of the labyrinth with ease. The war opens out into a long and wonderful chapter of actual memoirs, but he was a naval officer, mostly the captain's secretary, so life is observed in others, and a more brilliantly described series of mad captains I have never read. These pages are written with loving atten- tion and deep bitterness, which humour never quite overcomes: they are for con- noisseurs, better than the novels of Larkin or the poems of practically anybody. It looks as if this genius, lugubrious and unsung, will plod his way through life undiscovered. Had he gone on as a poet that might have happened, but he was rescued to help annotate Jonson's Hymenaei, and that task he claims taught him his trade.
Here I become suspect, because I knew his rescuer, Gordon, whose portrait here as the ultimate mad captain is as ruthless and as warm as John Wain's of C. S. Lewis in Huny on Down, and I cannot name a third academic portrait written since the war with equal distinction. I knew many of his Reading friends too, including lain Fletch- er who had no degree but was omniscient, and I wish he had written about more of them. I also wish Collins had given him an index.
Yet I wished mostly that he would tell us more about his imaginative world. I remember him first on Yeats, but better on Wallace Stevens; I did not see Hymenaei until later. The Stevens was a small stu- dent's guide as I remember, but of such a brilliance I read it and reread it; it spread its wings far beyond the series it nested in. Since then I have always opened anything of his with hope and do not remember ever being disappointed, though as time went on I read fewer books by critics. I suppose the best living critic must be either Frank Ker- mode or Stuart Hampshire.
His account of a scramble up the aca- demic ladder is so mind-chilling that it made me thank God I refused to become an English don when I once had the chance, and stuck to the unambitious, humorous edges of Greek and Latin. I think he was at Liverpool, Durham, Manchester, Bristol, London, Harvard and Cambridge, and even where he is benign about a place they sound deadly beyond the imagination of loathsomeness. Cambridge is the worst, and his brief analysis of the self-interested, lethargic workings of its English faculty makes the imagination run cold. The three streams of Cambridge English criticism used to offer hope, they altered the way we read, at least in our adolescence. I mean, as he says, I. A. Richards, Empson and Leavis: it was possi- ble to have the most pleasing meetings with all three if one was not an English don and not at Cambridge. The faculty, however, refused to set its house in order; most of His first words were, "You can reach me on my mobile".' the teaching was, and perhaps still is, done not by selected employees of Cambridge or any of its colleges, but by hacks as a way of earning less than you would pay a plumber. The faculty will not keep a central register of who is considered qualified to teach. Meanwhile, if anyone is ever newly appointed by the faculty, their only duty was, and I dare say is, to give lectures, of which there are in consequence far too many, advertised in a list which is too long and not properly organised. It makes one see why dons gibber, and why the better English dons have a furtive missionary fer- vour.
A lot of the book is about quarrels of this kind rendered abstract. Kermode has taken, so it seems to me, a fearful beating from life in the last 25 years. The hectic days of structuralism were bad enough, but Encounter was worse, and Cambridge worse than that. Structuralism, destruc- turalism, and all those movements, were invented, as he hints once or twice, as an alternative to reading literature. A lifetime of experience persuades me that this paradox is true, and I was glad to see it said.
But looked at as autobiography the career exemplifies the principle that one is promoted higher and higher until one reaches a level where one is incompetent: not that so intelligent a man as Kermode could ever be incompetent precisely, but he failed as others have done to defeat the deep anti-life fogs of the fens. The Encounter crisis, when it emerged that the CIA had long been funding the magazine, reveals the villainy of Goronwy Rees, which is surely well known at least as gos- sip, but also a naiveté so incredible I did not myself believe it (and I believe easily) until now. Kermode loved and admired Mel Lasky just as Stephen Spender loved Junky Fleishman. Life is inscrutable, is it not?
The good news is that Frank Kermode is happy as a retired man in his garden in Cambridge where he is still on the most amicable terms with King's, membership of which Noel Annan fixed for him. In this book he runs through the names of many old friends, some all too briefly, a few too mercifully. Al Alvarez makes a surprise appearance in extreme youth, there is a flicker of the dead and dusty days of Came-Ross in London, G. S. Fraser promising, Lord Gowrie whose title confuses Kermode but he knows that Lowell recommended him as a teacher, which is the important point. Alas, after that the names become more numerous, and I have seldom read anyone on the list later than Barthes, some 30 years ago. But two of the greatest excitements in the book were glimpses of Roman Jakobson, just as wild and dotty as I imagined him, and of the poet Montale. It is a book by a secret poet, a secret Manxman who has retired from the ferries and is not like anyone in our world except maybe Quine.
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