Kermode, Frank 1919–

(John Frank Kermode)

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "ker-mode"; born November 29, 1919, in Douglas, Isle of Man; son of John Pritchard and Doris (Kennedy) Kermode; married Maureen Eccles, 1947 (divorced, 1970); married, wife's name Anita (divorced, 1991); children: Mark, Deborah. Education: University of Liverpool, B.A., 1940, M.A., 1947. Hobbies and other interests: Music.

ADDRESSES: Home—9 Oast House, Grange Rd., Cambridge CB3 9AP, England.

CAREER: Writer, editor, and educator. University of Durham, Durham, England, lecturer at King's College, 1947–49; University of Reading, Reading, England, lecturer, 1949–58; University of Manchester, Manchester, England, professor, 1958–65; University of Bristol, Bristol, England, Winterstoke Professor of English, 1965–67; University of London, University College, London, England, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, 1967–74; Cambridge University, King's College, Cambridge, England, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and fellow, 1974–82. Harvard University, visiting professor, summer, 1961; British Academy, Warton Lecturer, 1962; Bryn Mawr College, Mary Flexner Lecturer, 1965; Princeton University, Gauss Lecturer, 1970; Harvard University, Charles Eliot Norton Professor, 1977–78; Columbia University, visiting professor, 1983, 1985; Yale University, visiting professor. Military service: Royal Navy, 1940–46; became lieutenant.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Literature (fellow), British Academy (fellow), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary foreign member), American Academy of Arts and Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellowship, Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1963–64 and 1969–70; knighted by Queen Elizabeth of England, 1991; Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Sciences (France); Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award, Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University, 2000, for Shakespeare's Language; recipient of honorary degrees from University of Chicago, University of Liverpool, University of Newcastle, Yale University, University of the South, Columbia University, Harvard University, and University of Amsterdam.

WRITINGS:

CRITICISM

Romantic Image, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1957, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1958, reprinted with a new epilogue by the author, Routledge (New York, NY), 2000.

John Donne, Longmans, Green (New York, NY), 1957.

Wallace Stevens, Oliver & Boyd, 1960, Grove (New York, NY), 1961, revised edition, 1967.

Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews, 1958–1961, Chilmark Press (New York, NY), 1962.

William Shakespeare: The Final Plays, Longmans, Green (New York, NY), 1963.

The Patience of Shakespeare, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1964.

On Shakespeare's Learning, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1965.

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1967, new edition with a new epilogue, 2000.

Continuities, Random House (New York, NY), 1968.

Modern Essays, Collins (New York, NY), 1971.

Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays, Viking (New York, NY), 1971, published as Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Fontana, 1973.

Novel and Narrative, University of Glasgow Press (Glasgow, Scotland), 1972.

D.H. Lawrence, Viking (New York, NY), 1973.

(Contributor) Seymour Chatman, editor, Approaches to Poetics, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1973.

The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change, Viking (New York, NY), 1975, reprinted with foreword, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1983.

How We Read Novels, University of Southampton Press (Southampton, England), 1975.

The Genesis of Secrecy, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1979.

The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1983.

Forms of Attention, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1985.

History and Value: The Clarendon Lectures and the Northcliffe Lectures, 1987, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1988.

An Appetite for Poetry, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989.

(Arranger of text) Alexander Goehr, Sing, Ariel: For Principal Mezzo Soprano, Five Players and Two Sopranos: Op. 51, Schott (New York, NY), 1989.

Poetry, Narrative, History, Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1990.

The Uses of Error, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1991.

Not Entitled (memoir), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1995.

(Author of foreword) Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca, Literary Reinterpretation of Madame Bovary and King Lear, translated by Aina Pavolini Taylor, edited by Colin Rice, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1998.

(Author of preface) Robert Musil, Five Women, translated from the German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, D.R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1999.

Cleanth Brooks and the Art of Reading Poetry, Institute of United States Studies, University of London (London, England), 1999.

Shakespeare's Language, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2000.

Pleasing Myself: From Beowulf to Philip Roth (essays), Allen Lane (London, England), 2001.

Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism, 1958–2002, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2003.

The Age of Shakespeare, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2004.

Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon, edited and introduced by Robert Alter; with commentaries by Geoffrey Hartman, John Guillory, and Carey Perloff, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

EDITOR

English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1952.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Methuen (London, England), 1954.

Seventeenth-Century Songs, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1956.

The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands, Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1960, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1961.

Discussions of John Donne, Heath (Lexington, MA), 1962.

Spenser: Selections from the Minor Poems and the Fairie Queene, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1965.

Four Centuries of Shakespearean Criticism, Avon (New York, NY), 1965.

The Metaphysical Poets: Essays on Metaphysical Poetry, Fawcett (New York, NY), 1969.

King Lear: A Casebook, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1969.

(With Richard Poirier) The Oxford Reader: Varieties of Contemporary Discourse, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1971.

(With John Hollander and others) The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, two volumes, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973.

Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1975.

Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet, and Other Stories, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1986.

(With Robert Alter) The Literary Guide to the Bible, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987.

(With Keith Walker) Andrew Marvell, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

(And author of introduction) Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1992.

A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

(With wife, Anita Kermode) The Oxford Book of Letters, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Joan Richardson) Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose: Wallace Stevens, Library of America (New York, NY), 1997.

(And author of introduction) T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1998.

(With Anthony Holden) Bernard Bergonzi and others, The Mind Has Mountains: a.alvarez@lxx, Los Poetry Press (Cambridge, MA), 1999.

(And author of introduction) The Duchess of Malfi: Seven Masterpieces of Jacobean Drama, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2005.

OTHER

Contributor to periodicals, including Spectator, London Review of Books, New Statesman, New Republic, New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and Review of English Studies. General editor, "Modern Masters" series, Fontana, 1970–, and "Oxford Authors" series, 1984–. Coeditor, Encounter, 1966–67.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A libretto based on Shake-speare's King Lear.

SIDELIGHTS: Frank Kermode, widely respected as a literary critic and scholar, has written on a range of topics, from the Bible and Shakespeare to deconstructionist theory and the value of the review essay. He is perhaps best known for his ability to assess and explain arcane subjects for layperson and academic alike. Stephen Logan, writing in the Spectator, praised The Uses of Error, a collection of Kermode's reviews published in 1991, for its evenhanded treatment of different scholarly factions and of literary debate. Logan wrote: "[Kermode's book gracefully attests the workings of a critical intelligence at once tentative and assured, in a style in which lucidity ministers to subtlety, and terseness entails no sacrifice of precision."

For Kermode, the possibility of being endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted is a prerequisite for a work's inclusion into the literary canon. In an age of skepticism, the indeterminacy of certain works is what makes them endure. Kermode's argument, put forth in the three lectures constituting Forms of Attention, was described by John Bayley in the Times Literary Supplement: "A tolerant orthodoxy is based on the fact that we know nothing for certain: hence Hamlet and Ulysses are perpetually discussable—and it is because classes can and will conveniently discuss them that they are in the canon. Critical uncertainty makes them immortal, and it is the attention of the critic that gives them perpetual value."

1979's The Genesis of Secrecy brings the Bible, one of the most enduring and widely discussed canonical texts in the Western world, under Kermode's scrutiny. Although biblical scholars have demonstrated an interest in employing the methods of literary criticism, Ker-mode notes that few secular scholars had included what he terms sacred texts among the focuses of their attention. In the Times Literary Supplement, C.H. Sisson commented upon the appeal that the Bible holds for Kermode: "As [Kermode] remarks, 'The scholarly quality and discipline of the best biblical study is high enough to be, in many ways, exemplary' for literary critics." Sisson pointed out, however, that Kermode's belief that scholars themselves determine what is permitted in terms of interpretation leads to the interpretation or criticism mattering more than the text itself, an idea that scholars should—but would not necessarily—reject. "The best critics," contended Sisson, "disappear before the work; the worst hold the stage."

Many of Kermode's essays have been concerned with the problems inherent in the interpretation process, especially between the adherents of avant-garde literary theories and their more conservative counterparts. Kermode argues for establishing a middle ground between what he calls "the catastrophe theorists," those deconstructionists who believe that every literary text carries within it the seeds of its own subversion, and the "panic-stricken reactionaries" who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything to literature beyond the conventional elements of characterization, plot, and theme. Speaking of Kermode's The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction, Gregory A. Schirmer wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Here is that badly needed voice of reason." However, critic Valentine Cunningham was not so easily persuaded by Kermode's arguments. Reviewing the work in the Times Literary Supplement, Cunningham faulted Kermode for failing to back up his assertions. "The theories of post-structuralism," the critic noted, "offend Kermode's sense of history and so he seeks to handle them with the precisions of historical assurance thus displayed. They also offend his sense of morality…. Nowhere in this collection, however, is Kermode very precise about where the amorality, let alone immorality, of the new criticism really resides." Nevertheless, Cunningham praised Kermode for his sensible argument against post-structuralism.

By 1990, when Kermode published An Appetite for Poetry, his position had become more resolute, a response to the escalating battle between the opposing camps of literary interpretation. "In 1983, Mr. Ker-mode was tolerantly witty about the academic vogue of structuralism and its more 'frightening' offshoot, deconstructionism," wrote Nina Auerbach in the New York Times Book Review. "Today he writes defensively, as a beleaguered believer within a profession avid to dismantle the inheritance it is our business to preserve." Although Auerbach pointed out that some of Kermode's comments about his scholarly opponents are perhaps too negative and thus unfair, she believed that his celebration of the literary canon is an important reminder of the glorious possibilities of literature. As Auerbach observed: "An Appetite for Poetry is among Mr. Kermode's most compact, accessible and intense books, one whose eloquence will remind many teachers and scholars of the magnitude of what we do."

Much of Kermode's service to the world of letters has been as an editor, and in 1995 he produced A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel. Kermode and coeditor Peter Parker provide an "intriguing chronological guide to the modern novel" through the use of timelines and plot synopses, commented Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman. The book covers works published through 1993 and offers information on numerous popular and literary authors, including J.R.R. Tolkien, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Martin Amis, and numerous others. The editors include the cultural and historical importance of each author and book listed. A careful descriptive literary analysis is also included for each book. Seaman concluded that the book is "a terrific resource for any library."

The Oxford Book of Letters, edited by Kermode and his wife, Anita, also appeared in 1995. The book contains a collection of some 300 letters chosen by the "enthusiastic, erudite editors of this eclectic volume," commented Seaman in another Booklist review. The letters were written in Britain and America from 1535 to 1985, with an emphasis on the period from 1700 to 1918, a period that the editors consider a "golden age" of letter writing. The letters not only provide direct commentary on social, political, and cultural issues of their times, but also show how language, punctuation, vocabulary, and writing styles evolved during the 500-year span covered in the collection. Numerous male letter writers are featured, which "shows once more that theories about the letter as a specifically female genre don't work," noted Loraine Fletcher in the New Statesman & Society. Among the correspondents featured are Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and other literary and intellectual notables. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book "an interesting and important record of a dying art."

"Fifty-odd years ago," Kermode recalled in a 1999 essay published in the London Review of Books, "I was asked to review a book about Shakespeare by an aged professor who claimed that a career spent largely in teaching Shakespeare gave him a right to have his final say on the subject. This notion I found grossly self-indulgent." Kermode said that as a preface to the fact that—half a century later, after a career of teaching and writing about William Shakespeare himself, and older than the professor whose views Kermode once dismissed—he would produce his own book on the Bard.

Though self-skeptical about the need for yet another Shakespeare study—"it obviously cannot be that there is a shortage of books about Shakespeare," Kermode said, citing a 1997 bibliography that contained more than 4,700 items—he nevertheless embarked on an examination titled Shakespeare's Language, which bowed in 2000 to some acclaim. Written for the lay reader ("not for horrid profs," as Kermode wrote in a letter to his publisher), Shakespeare's Language sets out to dissect the development of the playwright's speech patterns, pacing, and imagery. The book reveals the author's "two main aims," according to Colin Burrow in the London Review of Books. "One is to bring attention back to Shakespeare's language, since, as Kermode sees it, critics are now too concerned with politics and power to acknowledge that Shakespeare wrote poetry. The second aim is to describe a Shakespeare whose work displays distinctive virtues and failings at different stages of his career."

Breaking the Bard's works into two chronological categories, Kermode studies first the plays written up to 1600, before the playwright's theatrical company moved to the Globe Theatre. This early era produced such standards as Twelfth Night and As You Like It; as Kermode sees them, they are rife with "rhetorical devices and sometimes amass comparisons and similes without any regard for characterization or dramatic context," as Burrow explained. The reviewer found some fault in Kermode's assessment of the earlier plays as what the author termed the "old ranting rhetorical style." To call it that, argued Burrow, "is to ignore the fact that to audiences in the 1590s that early language was challengingly, dazzlingly new."

The plays written after 1601—such as Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear—begin to show the linguistic maturity of Shakespeare, says Kermode. These works "show characters thinking in verse," noted Burrow, "and these moments are for Kermode the core of what is valuable in Shakespeare." Burrow concluded that while some contemporary scholars may not agree with Kermode's views, feeling the author "is seeking to turn the clock back thirty-odd years to a world in which it was possible to say that sometimes Shakespeare is beautiful and sometimes he was in a hurry," still his study provides enough thought-provoking challenge to "makes us all think about how and why we value Shakespeare's language."

Kermode has continued to create deeply analyzed and scholarly works on Shakespeare. The Age of Shakespeare, published in 2004, is "an Old Master's retrospective," commented Ralph Berry in the Contemporary Review, in which Kermode "returns to a scene he has graced on many occasions, and offers a succinct guide to Shakespeare's work." The book is "written in elegant, concise prose accessible to laypersons," noted School Library Journal reviewer Starr E. Smith, and offers summaries of ongoing critical debates about Shakespeare's origins. Kermode also provides a concise historical summary of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in which Shakespeare lived and worked. He explains connections between the political and religious issues that were current in Shakespeare's time, and delineates how they influenced the development of live theater and English popular culture as defined by theater. Kermode explains many of the technical aspects of Shakespearean theater, and discusses the numerous technicians that were critical to putting on a play. He comments on issues such as theater facilities, Shakespeare's contemporaries and colleagues in the theater business, financing of plays during Shakespeare's time, and the types of acting companies that performed the plays. Kermode also includes a detailed biography of Shakespeare and provides a brief analysis of many of the Bard's plays. In a Booklist review, critic Ray Olson called Kermode "a remnant of the seemingly vanishing breed of readable literary critics." "This is a beautifully written testimony to a life of engagement with Shakespeare," Berry concluded. Edward T. Oakes, reviewing the book in First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, noted that a great deal is in fact known about Shakespeare, his works, and his background, and that "an evening spent with this vigorously lucid book will set it all out before the eager and curious reader." Kermode "pleasurably shows how [Shakespeare] and his works were of their age and also transcended it," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

After a lifetime writing about other authors, Kermode took on a more personal subject: his autobiography. He published Not Entitled in 1995. In these pages, suggested Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, Kermode treats himself with some self-abasement, even in the punning title. The author reveals some of his childhood (he claimed to be a disappointment to his father, "being fat, plain, shortsighted, clumsy, idle, dirty") and recalls an unsteady beginning to his literary career. Kermode writes that he had no aptitude for poetry or play-writing. "It was also emerging that my poetry wasn't up to much, so there was nothing left for me except to become a critic, preferably with a paying job in a university." Despite such self-deprecating views, Not Entitled "[is not] depressing to read," stated Lehmann-Haupt. "In fact, the section on his childhood is an inspiring story of a bright young man transcending the expectations of a lower-middle-class family from the Isle of Man."

Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism, 1958–2002, is a retrospective of some of Kermode's most notable essays written during a span of more than four decades. The nineteen lectures and essays included in the book range widely among Kermode's critical and intellectual interests. Topics include typology in Nathaniel Hawthorne's works; the influence of Cambridge University on the development of literary criticism in the twentieth century; the Bible and the New Testament; opera and modern dance; and the works of literary notables, such as Joseph Conrad, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, W.H. Auden, and, once again, William Shakespeare. Kermode dwells on topics such as the importance of criticism, the nature of interpretation, the meaning of literary canons, and the indisputable human intellectual need for interpretation of literature and life. The works represented in the book all display Kermode's "blend of sophisticated reading and consistently accessible writing," stated a Publishers Weekly contributor. "Humane and learned, Kermode's essays carry a lot of weight," although Kermode himself "wears his learning lightly," commented a Kirkus Reviews critic. Library Journal contributor William Gargan noted that "Kermode's graceful prose is jargon-free and his ideas intellectually challenging." Seaman, in another Booklist review, concluded that Pieces of My Mind is "criticism at its finest."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel, p. 1720; July, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of The Oxford Book of Letters, p. 1854; September 15, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism, 1958–2002, p. 194; February 1, 2004, Ray Olson, review of The Age of Shakespeare, p. 941.

Contemporary Review, January, 2005, Ralph Berry, "Kermode on Shakespeare," review of The Age of Shakespeare, p. 49.

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, June-July, 2004, Edward T. Oakes, review of The Age of Shakespeare, p. 44.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2003, review of Pieces of My Mind, p. 895.

Library Journal, April 15, 2000, Neal Wyatt, review of Shakespeare's Language, p. 90; September 15, 2003, William Gargan, review of Pieces of My Mind, p. 58; February 15, 2004, Jaime Anderson, review of The Age of Shakespeare, p. 126.

London Review of Books, December 9, 1999, Frank Kermode, "Writing about Shakespeare"; June 1, 2000, Colin Burrow, "Not for Horrid Profs," review of Shakespeare's Language, pp. 11-13.

Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1983, Gregory A. Schirmer, review of The Art of Telling.

New Statesman & Society, July 28, 1995, Loraine Fletcher, review of The Oxford Book of Letters, p. 37.

New York Times, November 9, 1995, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Editor Berates Himself in a Memoir of Modesty," review of Not Entitled.

New York Times Book Review, October 1, 1989, Nina Auerbach, review of An Appetite for Poetry, p. 12.

Publishers Weekly, June 12, 1995, review of The Oxford Book of Letters, p. 54; July 28, 2003, review of Pieces of My Mind, p. 88; January 19, 2004, review of The Age of Shakespeare, p. 65.

School Library Journal, April, 2004, Starr E. Smith, review of The Age of Shakespeare, p. 184.

Spectator, February 23, 1991, Stephen Logan, review of The Uses of Error.

Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, spring, 2005, Logan D. Browning, "A Conversation with Sir Frank Kermode," p. 461.

Times Literary Supplement, March 13, 1969; January 11, 1980, C.H. Sisson, review of The Genesis of Secrecy; July 22, 1983, Valentine Cunningham, review of The Art of Telling; November 22, 1985, John Bayley, review of Forms of Attention.