On and off his professional beat
Raymond Carr
PLEASING MYSELF by Frank Kermode Allen Lane. £20.00, pp. 277 ISBN 0713995181 In this collection of long review essays, Sir Frank Kermode, our most distinguished professor of English Literature, takes us from Beowulf, Shakespeare and Donne to W. B. Yeats, William Golding and Philip Roth. But sometimes literary editors entrust to a reviewer books that lie outside his professional beat. These extra-curricular excursions delight the case-hardened reviewer. Thank God for not another piece on Henry James. In exploring an unfamiliar terrain in order to educate himself the reviewer educates his readers. No economist, Sir Frank tackles James Buchan's Frozen Desire. We no longer accumulate money to satisfy our desires but as an end in itself, replacing all other psychological goals to become 'The God of our Times' and a subject of the dinnertable conversation for Boston Brahmins. There is an essay on Professor Corbin's The Lure of the Sea. It examines our changing attitudes to the sea. Once rooted in theology it was regarded as a hostile element. Our attitudes changed when we began to bathe for medicinal reasons at
Weymouth and Brighton. Nature replaces Genesis and the sea becomes sexy. Our forebears looked through their lorgnettes at female bathers descending from their bathing machines while men might experience the 'virile exaltation' of an erection on jumping into cold water. The title of this book is Pleasing Myself. Its author infects us with the evident pleasure he derives from such sociological curiosities.
There is a common and vulgar objection to English literature as an academic discipline. We can enjoy Middlemarch at leisure by ourselves without the aid of university professors. The Oxford English school fought a long and losing battle to maintain the study of Anglo-Saxon. as giving the subject a respectable disciplinary hard core. The antiquarian and linguistic interests of Oxford dons not only bored all except the gifted minority of their pupils, it hid from the dons themselves, until Tolkien's lecture of 1936, that Beowulf was a poem of high tragic seriousness. Kermode recommends Seamus Heaney's translation for capturing its epic grandeur.
On his professional beat, Kermode is much concerned with the technical problems of establishing a reliable text and the discovery of a poet's authentic voice. Poets revise their early works. Auden and Yeats were obsessive revisers. We have early manuscripts of Wordsworth's The Prelude that differ substantially from the final 1850 published poem. Shelley held that the 'the
mind in creation is a fading coal . . . when composition begins inspiration is already on the decline'. Given this Romantic view of genius any tinkering about with the early version must take away from the original inspiration. But is there not 'an underlying coherence of purpose' in Wordsworth? Does not the young radical of 1800, as Poet Laureate, mature like old red wine?
Kermode knew the late William Empson 'at least as well as either of us wanted'. Empson was much concerned with John Donne. As an atheist he could not conceive how an intelligent man like Donne could swallow a theologian's nonsense about God. Hence for him Donne was a committed follower of the New Philosophy — the heretical astronomy of Copernicus, life on other planets and so on. Empson's choices of a preferred text were therefore influenced by 'a set of prior assumptions about them and the author'. The formidable Helen Gardner did not share these assumptions and the two could battle to the death over the correct reading of a single line.
Some of Empson's contrived arguments are dismissed by Kermode as absurd and contemptible. But the 'barbarous jargons and swollen books' of the New Historians of the English faculties of American universities are even more absurd and contemptible. They tease out from texts 'unsuspected hierarchical, sexist and imperialist senses'. At their hands, Shakespeare's plays become a 'series of semiotic events — the mobilisation of political representations'. Spenser is revealed as a proponent of feudal constitutionalism against Tudor and Stuart monarchical absoluteness. Kermode obviously relishes Empson's response to a lecture of the archpriest Derrida, sent to him by a New History enthusiast. He found Derrida — or Nerida as he insisted on calling him — 'very disgusting'.
In a letter, Joseph Conrad maintains that he writes in order that his readers may see. This is to translate visual experiences to the printed page. The painter confronts a similar problem. Kermode writes with great sensitivity on art. One of his review essays deals with Leo Steinberg's controversial The Sexuality of Christ. Renaissance artists who portrayed Christ's penis were seeking to translate into paint the theological implications of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Christ became on earth fully human, a sexual being like all of us.
Kermode makes clear that he is writing for an educated public. But even members of the educated public may find their capacities strained to the limit. In the Steinberg essay the reader is confronted with an admittedly simple Latin sentence. The essay on the influence of the Gnostics on English poets or that on the influence of rabbinical Midrash on the Bible read as if Kermode shared Carlyle's belief in the therapeutic benefits of hard work. But there are wonderful things in this book, for example a sensitive tribute to Roy Fuller. The reader can select to please himself.
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