The folly of the moon

The folly of the moonIt was a bad beginning that might well have been the end. Frank hadgiven a Radio 3 talk on ‘The Conference Game’ that was then printed inthe Listener where I happened to come across it. The talk’s occasion wasa rather exclusive academic gathering in Paris that Frank had attended,leading him to a series of reflections on conferences in general and thisone in particular, inasmuch as it not only exemplified the expectationsand disappointments of such gatherings, but also offered a basis forthinking about that since its intellectual framework was provided bywhat he referred to as the developing ‘Post-Structuralist’ account ofmeaning and interpretation. Conferences, he explained, demonstrateonly too well, that the desire to conclude, to arrive at an end, is alwaysfrustrated: ritually, they play out the pattern of this desire and its non-fulfilment, are successful only in terms of whether they turn out to beless disappointing than usual. The conference in question was exem-plary in this respect in that the person scheduled to give it its meaningand bring it to its end failed to come, thus staging by his absence thefailure of finality that, had he come, he would anyway have urged, giventhat the awaited absentee was Derrida. Frank in all this was cautiouslysympathetic, courteously dubitative, positioning himself characteristi-cally as a player on the margin of what was to be seen as just anothergame. Zealous in the cause of theoretical rigour and political resolve, Ifired off a letter to the Listener that began with disapproval of the fact thatsomeone of ‘Professor Kermode’s stature’ had decided to acknowledgeso superficially the innovative work coming out of France, proceededto correct his ‘theoretical misunderstandings’, and finished by repri-manding him for his lack of seriousness. Rather like Hume avoidingphilosophical delirium by quitting his study for backgammon and mer-riment, Frank acknowledged relief at the opportunity given to leavehigh theory for a good lunch and a couple of martinis, behaviour whichI regarded as grossly bourgeois and only to be expected from the Estab-lishment figure I took Frank to be.

So that should have been that. Instead of which, on the morning theletter appeared, I received a call from Frank’s secretary announcing thathe wished me to address the seminar he was running at Univer-sity College London. He was unable to speak to me himself, I was told,as he was just off to lunch with Borges (lunch again), which left me,barely a graduate student, somewhat intimidated and considerably

STEPHEN HEATH

apprehensive. Two or three months later, even more apprehensive, Iduly turned up at the seminar to give a presentation that ran over into itsnext meeting too. Frank’s kindness made it clear that if intimidation hadbeen an effect of the invitation, it had never been an intention, and Icontinued to turn up whenever I could. Though Frank characteristicallyclaimed to have played little part in its success, it was he of coursewho made the seminar, who encouraged and enabled consideration ofthe new theories and texts, he who posed the necessary questions,and ensured a constantly productive critical dialogue. The seminardepended on his skill in creating a space that was, to use a word indica-tive of a mode of human dealing he valued and so much himself typi-fied, eminently civil, open to critical discussion of new work in a waythat, with no predetermined agenda, allowed for genuine exchange, forthe emergence of positions, ideas, understanding (such civility was thereality of what I had been bent on rejecting as an evasive absence ofpurpose in the gently ironic tone of the radio talk). Rightly, the seminarachieved a certain celebrity, and Frank for ever after spoke of its per-sonal significance, of the pleasure and instruction that the seminar hadgiven him, of a kind that he had found in no other phase of his academiclife; something that would be said, even more so, by a great many ofthose lucky enough to have participated in it. The seminar’s mainconcern was, broadly, the poetics of fiction, this catching up and devel-oping Frank’s own concerns of the time with matters of narrative andinterpretation, novel and history. The seminar years, 1967–74, wereframed by The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967)and The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1979).

Frank was subsequently to talk of the literary and narratologicaltheory of that period as ‘another country’ in which he had gone to livefor a while. Introducing in 2003 a piece on ‘Secrets and NarrativeSequence’ first published over twenty years earlier, he remarked that itmight well be regarded as ‘aridly academic’, but offered it neverthelessas a reminder that in the seventies he had spent ‘much time devotedlydoing this kind of thing’. Indeed he did, but ‘this kind of thing’ was donein a manner neither arid nor simply academic. His interest at the time inthe elaboration of a general theory of fiction directly engaged the workof Barthes, Derrida, and the Communications narratologists; he was influ-enced by them while critically pursuing a course of his own, puttingthem to the test of the discussions and analyses collected as Essays onFiction: 1971–82 (1983), many of them written in the seminar years.

The focus was on the changing conditions of literary fiction, whichmeant first and foremost consideration of the novel, it being forKermode the central form of literary art ‘in our phase of civility’. Thehistory of the novel after all is an attempt to evade the laws of what

2 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1

Walter Scott called ‘the land of fiction’; it seeks continually to address thedissidence between inherited forms and the novelist’s present reality.Novels drawn on for the discussion of that dissidence were Sartre’s LaNausée and Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes and Dans le labyrinthe. Bothwriters were concerned explicitly with the bad faith of novelistic fictionsand their failure in respect of – in respect for – reality; a failure identifiedby each in the other. Robbe-Grillet was critical of Sartre’s novel for notkeeping things at their distance, for once again plunging the reader intoa tragic universe, and resorting to humanising fictions; Sartre con-demned the empty formalism of Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman.The importance of La Nausée for Kermode lay precisely in its explicittreatment of a crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, its ren-dering of the tension – the dissidence – between paradigmatic form andcontingent reality. Novels are heavy with what Sartre called the eideticimagery of bad faith, the fictive coverings of contingency. Roquentin’sexperience of which in La Nausée – the nausea that comes to its famousexistential crisis in the contemplation of the chestnut-tree root – rendersfraudulent the order imposed on life by the historical biography he iswriting, an order no less a cover-up than that attempted by the characterof the Autodidact trying to fit knowledge of the world to the alphabet.The nausea overwhelms human fictions, but these are a fact of life, offreedom. Roquentin urges himself to ‘beware of literature’, while thendeciding to write something that would make people ashamed of theirexistence, a novel that would be in itself a negation of being in the world,a work that would be the reason of a life ‘washed of the sin of existing’.The novel Roquentin projects, however, ‘beautiful and hard as steel’, isnot Sartre’s; between the nauseous experience of contingency andRoquentin’s projected novel lies Sartre’s book, his novel, that seeks toinclude contingency in a form which, inasmuch as it does so, destroyscontingency. La Nausée, that is, enters the land of fiction, the novel world,at once as a critique of fictions and as the recognition of their humaninevitability, with all the difficulties of authenticity such a recognitionbrings. What is exemplary for Kermode is precisely Sartre’s treatment,his recognition, of fiction as deeply to be distrusted yet humanly indis-pensable. The questions La Nausée raises are just the ones with whichKermode was concerned: are all the paradigms of fiction eidetic? ismauvaise foi the inevitable fate of novelists? how far is it inevitable that anovel give a novel-shaped account of the world? Novels have begin-nings and ends, are non-contingent, impose causality and concordance,have as their subject as novels the struggle between form and reality.Distrust of the weight of given forms produces that continual and, in thetwentieth century, accelerated striving for the new, ‘for a new novel’(Robbe-Grillet’s title for an early collection of his writings on the topic).

The folly of the moon 3

What is false needs clearing, the world purged anew of ‘its stiff andstubborn, man-locked set’, as Wallace Stevens put it in his poem ‘AngelSurrounded by Paysans’.

Kermode worked with a broad distinction between two modernisms,traditionalist and anti-traditionalist, with differing modes of reaction toa situation of transition and ‘eschatological anxiety’: one reacting interms of continuity, the other of schism: ‘one reconstructs, the otherabolishes; one decreates and the other destroys the indispensable andrelevant past’. A poem like The Waste Land draws on a tradition whichimplies the necessity of form, even if the form it may have can beapprehended only with difficulty; a new modernism claims to dowithout the tradition and the illusion of form. To cite other examplesKermode used, it is the difference between Schönberg and randommusic, or between Ford’s cubist novel The Good Soldier and the cut-upfold-in experiments of Burroughs. Traditional modernism may radicallyshift from traditional procedures but the shifts are recognisable, exten-sions of a shared language; the works of anti-traditional modernismevidently succeed only in so far as they are anti-traditional, ‘and sincethey are trying not to be [traditional] they more often fail’. That lastproviso is one Kermode always added, concerned as he was to keep wellto the fore his fundamental interest in fiction and reality, form andworld. Subversion depends on the existence of what is to be subverted,conventional expectations must be there to be defeated – Robbe-Grillet’sLes Gommes depends, after all, on the detective and Oedipal story con-ventions it resists.

In The Sense of an Ending, Kermode expressed surprise that, given therange and detail of modern literary theory, he had found nobody whohad tried to relate the theory of literary fictions to the theory of fictionsin general, and this at a time of the modern, post-Nietzschean awarenessof the structuring role of fictions for our lives and reality. Kermode’stheory, though he would have demurred at the idea of his having atheory, distinguishes fictions from myths. Fictions degenerate into mythswhenever they are not consciously held to be fictive: ‘Myth operateswithin the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequateexplanations of things as they are and were . . . Fictions are for findingthings out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Mythsare the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call forabsolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of alost order of time . . . fictions, if successful, make sense of the here andnow.’ Literary fictions belong to the category of the ‘consciously false’, acategory derived from Hans Vaihinger’s 1911 Philosophie des Als Ob,Philosophy of As If, a fundamental work for the development ofKermode’s thinking in this area. They are subject neither to proof nor


disconfirmation; when they no longer serve, they are given up, thrownon the dump ‘to sit among mattresses of the dead’, an image fromStevens’s ‘The Man on the Dump’, a poem Kermode often had in mind.The interest in biblical narratives that led to The Genesis of Secrecy – aninterest in which, he stressed, religion played no part – was in graspingand understanding those narratives as the fictions that they are, hardthough it might be to free them from their ‘mythical “deposit”’. Theimportant volume he later edited with Robert Alter was precisely aLiterary Guide to the Bible (1987).

Human beings ‘do time’, they live it and live in it, give it interpre-tations and meanings, imagine apocalypse or moments of fullness; anEnd when time runs out, or the ends we plot to make order in the timewe do. We make fictive models of the temporal world, models thatKermode studied in his work on – his recurrent fascination with –apocalypse and apocalyptic types, as in his work on literature. To thinkabout a fictive order of time, he introduced the idea of the aevum, laterrather regretting that it never caught on. In Scholastic philosophyaevum refers to the temporal existence of angels, an order of durationbetween time and eternity, between the temporal experience of mate-rial beings and the timelessness of God. Kermode took this over as ameans of specifying the re-ordering of the coordinates of time in whichwe are involved in elaborating and reading fictions: he tried ‘to extendthis idea to the time of characters in novels and so to illuminate therelations between our sense of real time and our concessions to thedifferent temporal structure of novels, with their inevitable preferencefor kairos over chronos, to which nevertheless some concessions orgestures must be made’.

If there was a central problem of modern literary theory for Kermode,it was that of value, of the ways in which value is attributed to one textrather than another. The increasingly dominant claim that the valuesattributed to certain – canonical – texts are merely imposed by institu-tional fiat was never one he could accept; Hamlet or Coriolanus, heinsisted, are instances of literary value, and if the capacity to recog-nise such value is sometimes hard to distinguish from some vacuousresponse, ‘the stock cultural OK’, that is no reason for giving up ‘faith inthe real thing’. At the same time, the role of institutions and historicalforces that certify particular works as deserving special forms of atten-tion must necessarily be taken into account. As he put it: ‘There are formsof valuation which are institutional, and which are very hard to shake,and that’s why I got interested in the canon question’.

That interest, developed notably in The Classic (1975), Forms of Atten-tion (1985), and his Tanner Lecture, ‘Pleasure, Change, and the Canon’(2001), led to the crux that Kermode acknowledged as that of the


difficulty of reconciling, without mythologising, epistemological scep-ticism with ‘some sort of highly conditional aesthetic’: the changing andvariously determined nature of values and canons was acknowledged atthe same time that they were accorded permanence and intrinsic quality,this justifying that fundamental faith in ‘the real thing’.

If he did not, as he agreed, effect such a reconciliation, perhapsimpossible in those terms, his studies of canons, their conditions, theways in which they are made and change and interrelate with valuesand valuation, were themselves the working out of the crux, even, andperhaps most interestingly, if that led to necessary contradiction, inevi-table paradox. In Kermode’s account, we must cope with the paradoxthat the classic changes yet retains its identity: ‘the classic is an essenceavailable to us under our dispositions, in the aspect of time’, an oft-repeated formulation. A classic would not be a classic, would not beread, if it were not open to modern readers, to their share in the pro-duction of its meanings. Indeed, we must believe it ‘to be capable ofsaying more than its author meant, even, if necessary, that to say morethan he meant was what he meant to do’. The books we take as classicspossess enduring intrinsic qualities and an openness to accommoda-tion. Texts may signify differently to different generations and to dif-ferent persons within them, but there is a substance that prevails: ‘KingLear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevailsby being patient of interpretation’.

Patient is a fully Kermodian word and quality, used supremely ofShakespeare: ‘The Patience of Shakespeare’ was the title of a lecturegiven in 1964. We can regard the classic as arrested in its time, requiringthe erudition of the critic as scholar to lead us to a reading approximat-ing to one available to a contemporary of the author’s. We can alsoregard it otherwise, see it as patient of change, accommodating of theaccommodations that we make in the course of times and that keepclassics alive as classics. To put this another way, following Kermode, theclassic survives by its possession ‘of a surplus of signifier’. We assignvalue to works we deem classic because they are complex, indetermi-nate, plural, available through time for our readings, accept our chang-ing systems and interpretative procedures. This, again, is their patience:they last through time, survive interpretations, all the commentariesthey generate precisely because of their openness – and this is theirvalue, is why they are canonical, are ‘good’.

Such an account leaves open certain questions; that, for example, ofplurality as a – the? – condition of quality. It leads too to matters regard-ing the establishment and continuation of canons. Literary canons aredifferent from rigid theological canons, the latter protected by powerfulinstitutions, interpretatively policed, and more or less impermeable. The


classic today has been secularised and given as literary text in thehistory that Kermode traces in The Classic. The policing of meanings hasloosened into the recognition of that inherent plurality which forKermode defines the classic and that secularisation enables. Rightlythen, the last chapters of The Classic are devoted to practical demonstra-tions, readings of The House of the Seven Gables and Wuthering Heightsthat are concerned precisely with the ways in which classics are open tothe modern reader and by which they are kept canonical. Similarly,Forms of Attention uses Hamlet for a demonstration of the kind of moderninterpretation generated by canonical works and that is the condition oftheir continuing canonicity; such works need new appraisals dependingon new perceptions, the negotiation of new adjustments to the givenagreements as to what counts in this or that text. Which is exactly whatKermode aims to show with his Hamlet demonstration: a canonical textis renewed through a reading which shifts its interpretative foucs to therhetorical figure of hendiadys and its significance with regard to themany doublings in the play. What in the terms of the given interpreta-tions of Hamlet was marginal is established as fundamental to its under-standing, the play newly accommodated, its patience – its continuedmodernity – again confirmed.

If the theory of the seventies was another country, Kermode’s truecountry was literature, poetry. However receptive to theories and whatthey might offer, the seventies seminar was always grounded in theliterary, this at a time when Kermode was already regretting what hesaw as a developing academic ‘indifference to literature’, an ignoranceof what it is to read it, a denial even that there is any such thing. Lateryears saw no improvement. ‘The direct experience of poetry is largelyneglected’, he wrote in his memoir Not Entitled (1995); modern literarycriticism had gone defensively metacritical, finding anything better thanpoetry. He disliked intensely ‘political and sectarian misuse of litera-ture’, at the expense of teaching it and bringing people to share in itshuman value; at the expense too of literary criticism and its necessaryrole in the discussion, appreciation, evaluation, and encouragement ofliterature.

‘Trouble with blokes like Kermode’, Philip Larkin complained to hisfriend Robert Conquest, ‘is that they have, as salaried explainers ofpoetry, a professional interest in keeping poetry hard and full of allu-sions’. Kermode thought of himself indeed as one of the professionalpeople paid, as he put it, ‘to do the community’s serious reading’; hisinterest, however, was not at all to keep poetry hard, to erect initiates’barriers round literary works. As he insisted in Shakespeare’s Language,ordinary readers and commentators may have somewhat differentinterests, though they must at times come together if the commentators


remember their duty. It is a duty fully remembered in that book, butone too that he acknowledged throughout his professional life; and notleast in his copious literary journalism (only he could have writtena short column for the Daily Telegraph on Chapman’s very difficultElizabethan poem Ovid’s Banquet of Sence in a way that discovered it forreaders, that told a young teenager in the 1960s, for example, why, andhow, and how with pleasure he might and should read it). There wasno theoretical hesitation for Kermode in specifying criticism as entail-ing ‘immediate encounter with particular texts’; vigilant reading wasnecessarily and of course the critic’s primary business. Not, evidentlynot, as the range of his work makes clear, that this meant tying criti-cism to close reading: different depths of focus are needed, a variety ofapproaches and levels, everything in the best interests of a fully literarycriticism. That was the reality of the method that he never had, thereason for the lack of ‘disciples’ – ‘there aren’t any Kermodians in theworld’, he observed, without much regret.

An Appetite for Poetry (1989) and Forms of Attention (1985): those twotitles in themselves express the love of and care for literature that was theessence of Kermode’s work – ‘intensity of attention or . . . love’, Auden’sformulation gets it right. Certain books, many indeed, were special,were deeply part of him, recurrent in his appreciation of literature,significantly always there in his writing, teaching, and conversation.Dante’s Divina Commedia, for example, from which he would oftenquote at length in the Italian, or Spenser’s Faerie Queene, his imaginationstirred by the poem’s ‘dark conceits’. There were less major works aswell which he admired and to which he often turned; Ford MaddoxFord’s The Good Soldier was one, of interest for its unreliable narrator andchronological dislocations, of value for the new experience of narrativeand novel it offers (he took E. M. Forster to task for not having appre-ciated the achievement of Ford’s novel, ‘about which he really ought tohave known and said something’ in Aspects of the Novel). There werealso, of course, the books of his formative years: the poetry of Auden, thenovelists of the thirties discussed in History and Value. Many individualpoems too were profoundly part of the make of his mind, fundamentalsources and resources of literary experience; Wordsworth’s ‘Resolutionand Independence’ was one such, a poem to which he often returned inhis writing.

His concern was knowing books, making us understand what it is tovalue works, prompting us to literature. He gave texts in a way that nevercompromised on intensity of attention to them as literary. The UCLseminar was full of theories and systems of analysis; texts were used,yes, but above all encountered, read with a brilliance of insight andappreciation that has remained, for me at least, as a model for reading


and teaching literature. Two books especially that I gained from theseminar were very much Kermode books. One was Henry Green’sLoving (1945); a book that he also discussed in a lecture at the time of theseminar given at Harvard in 1972 and entitled ‘The Use of the Codes’(later published in Essays on Fiction 1971–82). The codes in question werethose proposed by Barthes in S/Z, and the purpose of the lecture wasto challenge Barthes’s use of them in support of his distinction betweenthe lisible and the scriptible, between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts; theformer determined by the restrictions on plurality – the closure – thecodes impose. What Kermode sought to demonstrate, somewhat out oftrue with the actual point and development of Barthes’s distinction, wasthat narratives were by nature incapable of full closure, as indeed thehistory of their changing interpretations could be taken to confirm; andindeed as Barthes’s own analysis in S/Z of a Balzac novella might itselfsuggest. A few years later, Loving figured in another Harvard lecture,one of the series that became The Genesis of Secrecy, where it was taken upin a discussion of interpretation and the play between ‘carnal’ and ‘spir-itual’ senses (those particular terms stemming from the book’s focus onthe gospel narratives): the former being manifest, primary, obvious,much the same for the community of readers; the latter those calling onpractices of interpretation, the co-production of new meanings.

Loving was very much one of Frank’s special books (Green’s 1939Party Going too). Set in an English-owned country house in Ireland at thetime of the Second World War, it has a story of sorts and an upstairs–downstairs set of characters, mostly downstairs. There is something of abeginning, the death of the old butler and his replacement by the headfootman, and then an end, the departure for England of this new butlerwith one of the housemaids. Yet narrative expectations and conventionsare not quite held to. As the writing of beginning and end suggests, thestory is given as just that, a story, a tale. From ‘Once upon a day an oldbutler called Eldon lay dying’, we pass through the novel to ‘Over inEngland they were married and lived happily ever after’; with bits ofincidents as we go along – the married daughter of the house, whosehusband is away fighting, has a lover and is discovered naked in bedwith him by a maid; a ring disappears and an insurance-companyinspector arrives. The novel is largely made up of dialogue embedded inturns and patterns of language, images and allusions that spread outacross the text, overriding the terms of a simple ‘carnal’ reading. Par-ticular words stand out as words, images as images – the butler ‘slippedinside like an eel into its drainpipe’; a maid’s eyes are ‘like plumsdipped in cold water’. There are peacocks in the grounds whose criesinterrupt the world of the novel and which are written into it as vividlywrought compositions of beauty and colour, making a picture, just as


the maids do, written into a scene of them dancing under the greatchandeliers of the ballroom: ‘minute in purple, multiplied to eternityin the trembling pieces of glass’. The peacocks exceed any realisticfunction, as they do any reduction to some symbolic meaning;they are textual, unoriginated metaphors, with no foundation otherthan in, and for, the writing itself. I cannot now remember quite what –theoretical? – use was made of Loving in the seminar, but I do rememberimmediately the close attention to its linguistic and rhetorical substance,the attention drawn to what Kermode called the ‘beautiful willfulness’of its writing and the effect of its conduct at once of novel and text, theyone and the same, recto and verso of a single work, but woven in andout of each other, creating surprises and pleasures.

The other seminar book was Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941),regarded by Kermode, along with To the Lighthouse (1927), as one of thegreatest novels of the twentieth century. Set again in a country house,this time in England, on the day of the village pageant, it treats of a groupof people, their intimacies and distances, things said and not said,attempts at communicating meanings that fail, until, the pageant over, acurtain goes up on the novel, bringing it both to an end and to anotherbeginning, another history – ‘Then the curtain rose. They spoke’. Thereare tensions of violence – a snake with a toad stuck in its mouth isfuriously stamped on and blood stains the man’s white tennis shoes; andthe odds and ends of the day are fashioned through a writing thatstartles with images – characters follow a breach of decorum ‘likeleaping dolphins in the wake of an ice-breaking vessel’; someone hesi-tating is in two minds that ‘flutter from right to left like pigeons risingfrom the grass’ – and words are reflected and reflexive, turning back andforth between the novel’s world and the writing of that world – ‘wordsthis afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence’; ‘words raised them-selves and became symbolical’, ‘words came to the surface’. A piece readin a newspaper starts ‘fantastic’, ‘A horse with a green tail’; goes ‘roman-tic’, ‘The guard at Whitehall’; then turns ‘real’, ‘one of the troopersremoved part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about theface’.

Kermode was interested in the novel’s ‘little language’, an expressionfound in the final section of The Waves (1931). The section is Bernard’ssoliloquy in which he faces problems of language in registering thereality of experience; he now tired of stories and sentences, false ‘all-their-feet-on-the-ground’ phrases, ordered sequences that are ‘a conven-tion, a lie’ – ‘I have done with phrases’. He longs for some ‘littlelanguage such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words’, needs ‘ahowl, a cry’. Woolf remembered ‘little language’ from Swift’s, Journal toEstella, which she reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement in 1925. In


the sixty-five diary-letters of which the Journal is composed, the ‘littlelanguage’ takes the form of a mode of intimate address depending oncombinations and substitutions of letters and inclining to the childish; itthrows off the forms of public discourse to create itself as the reverse ofjust those conventions of polite conversation that Swift would satiricallyanthologise in his Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversa-tion. Woolf’s little language is not Swift’s, is literary not childish, isenvisaged with regard to achieving a mode of expression capable ofcapturing the reality of experience and perception. In her essay ‘TheCinema’ (1926), written just after her piece on Swift’s Journal, Woolfimagined the possibility of cinema moving from standard representa-tions of emotions and experiences, simple equivalents of statements ofthe kind ‘I am afraid’, to give the fear itself, to realise the howl and the crythat Bernard wanted. This would be ‘more real, or real with a differentreality from that which we perceive in daily life’. ‘Is there’, she won-dered, ‘some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak,and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye?’ The cinema, with onlythe slightest help from words might manage the necessary abstractionfrom the given ready-made forms (though, in fact, just as she waswriting, the cinema was about to be inexorably tied to them by thecoming of sound and its industrial establishment as ‘theatrical cinema’,its films subject to conventions of narrative and dialogue), but Woolf’smaterial is language, which comes thick with common places, stockrenderings, given orders. Her little language Kermode showed is createdin the very texture of Between the Acts, a writing which makes ordinarysense, just as a novel should, but then also engages readers differently inits figures and movements and repetitions, persistent ‘rhythms’, as,following E. M. Forster, Kermode called them, underlying and overlying‘the main tune of the narrative’. Triadic clusters, for example, are founddisposed across the novel – ‘the swing, tramp, and trudge’, ‘transitory,flying, diaphanous’, ‘incurious, irresponsive, and insensitive’, and so on;with the text pointing itself to this ‘flow of unusual three-decker words’.The conventions and failures of language, the problems of matchinglanguage and reality, of kairos, chronos, and contingency are writ largetoo in the pageant itself with its periods of language, the struggles of itsorganiser-artist, and the random disruptions of cows, rain, people.

In that same ‘Cinema’ essay Woolf noted how in Shakespeare ‘themost complex ideas form chains of images through which we mount,changing and turning, until we reach the light of day’. That might come,though perhaps without the finality of ‘the light of day’, from Shake-speare’s Language, in which indeed the idea of ‘little language’ is againimportant. Word and action go together, so ‘the word must be dulyattended to’, which is the book’s purpose, duly attentive to the poetry,


to the words of the plays. Shakespeare, Kermode shows, became adifferent kind of poet in the course of his writing life, moving away fromrhetorical explicitness towards a more difficult and inward-turning dra-matic language ‘that does not try to give everything away’. In the plays ofthe great period, those of the Globe Theatre, there was less and lesssimple clarity, and even what might seem simple often comes with ‘a kindof aura of obscurity, enough strain on the language to tax the reader’smind’; what we find increasingly are ‘energies, flurries of oblique asso-ciation’ . . . knotty verbal plots and subplots characteristic of Shakespeareat his best’. ‘Little language’ is here for Kermode a particular word orset of words used to give undercurrents of sense to the dramatic move-ment of the plays; we find a passion for, an obsession almost with certainwords, chiming and repeating through a play in intricate lexical chains,extended through their semantic range, thawed out. ‘Become’ and itsderivatives in Antony and Cleopatra are one example of this.

This attention to Shakespeare’s language, to the words of the playsand to the complex ideas – the complex of ideas – created is a matter ofliterature; it is the opposite of any reduction of the plays to a philosophy,or worse, an ideology. Shakespeare was certainly a thinker but the think-ing was in dramatic dialogue, dramatic poetry. As so often, Kermodefinds himself needing a remark made by Wallace Stevens in his essay ‘ACollect of Philosophy’: ‘the probing of the philosopher is deliberate asthe probing of the poet fortuitous’.

Stevens was essential for Kermode; from early on he had been ‘in lovewith him’, inward with his work and its world as he was with Shake-speare’s. He published a book on Stevens, his second, at a time when thepoet was little known in Britain, as well as several later essays on hiswork; he prepared an edition of Harmonium that was ‘lost to the world’due to copyright problems, and later with more success co-edited theLibrary of America Collected Poetry & Prose; but then Stevens was aroundin all his writings, whether directly concerned with him or not. It was thepoetry that mattered and that was not to be drained off into somedoctrine made up from lines picked out here and there from Stevens’sworks. The poems turn over ideas, enact meditations – Kermode talkedof the longer poems involving ‘pools of thought’ – but they are poetrynot philosophy, which is what matters. ‘The poem must resist theintelligence/Almost successfully’, cited by Kermode from ‘Man Carry-ing Thing’ as an ‘accurate aphorism’ to be remembered (the ‘almost’ is ofcourse important). ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ says it clearly:‘The poem is the cry of its occasion’; what counts is the experience ofthat, of the poem’s particularity.

The richness for Kermode was Stevens’s sense of poverty and theachievement of the poetry from that. ‘Natives of poverty, children of


malheur,/ The gaiety of language is our seigneur’ (‘Esthétique du Mal’).Stevens’s poetry accompanied Kermode’s concern with fictions: ‘thetheory/ of poetry is the theory of life,/ As it is, in the intricate evasionsof as’ (‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’): the theory of life sincewithout poetry poverty would be our lot; the intricate necessary evasionsof as, all the as ifs, the mitigations of poverty that images and fictionsachieve. ‘Between “as if” and “is”’, Kermode wrote, ‘there is a very littledistance’, but the distance is exacting; it is there that Stevens’s poetry hasits occurrence, where the poems work, where they make their particularsufficings – ‘The poem of the mind in the act of finding/ what willsuffice’ (‘Of Modern Poetry’). The mind creates fictions by which realitycomes to suffice, and this is the business of the poet who endows lifewith the supreme fictions without which we live in poverty. Stevenswrites ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, one of his extended meditativepoems, but no fiction can be finally supreme, can be the End, the coin-cidence for ever of a fiction with reality. ‘The final belief is to believe ina fiction, there being nothing else’, Stevens wrote in the first Adagianotebook; fiction not myth: ‘The exquisite truth is to know that it is afiction and that you believe in it willingly’.

*

Music was important. Frank’s critical writings often naturally turn tomusical terms – Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet abrilliant scherzo, the lamenting of the brevity and mortality of love inthe first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream the second subject of asonata. Occasionally he wrote about music more directly, as in his littlebook on E. M. Forster – ‘our most musical of novelists’, as BenjaminBritten called him – the second chapter of which is devoted to‘Beethoven, Wagner, Vinteuil’ (when I manifested a certain enthusiasmfor it, he characteristically declared it ‘not very good’). It was, of course,the experience of music that was dear to him. From music after all hederived ‘the little I knew about “holiness”’; always, Bach’s ‘Actus Tragi-cus’ cantata (BWV 106) gave him some sense of, some feeling for whatthat might mean. He worked with the composer Alexander Goehr on asong-cycle entitled Sing, Ariel written for three sopranos and a smallinstrumental ensemble. Frank’s task was to choose a range of Englishpoems to be set and give them a coherent – and dramatic – continuity,form them into a cycle. The poems used – complete or a few lines – aresome of those Frank most admired and Sing, Ariel stands for us now asa powerfully moving memory of that admiration.


Then, in what was to be the last decade of his life, he collaborated withGoehr again, providing the text for the latter’s opera Promised End,based, as its title suggests, on King Lear, a play that Frank believed itimpossible for anyone who cared about poetry to approach withoutawe. Staying in the country in Italy one summer, he carried around acopy of Lear, pessimistic as to what he could do. He did, though, comeup with a text and then a libretto, using only Shakespeare’s words,which Goehr put into music in twenty-four sections or ‘preludes’. Therewere cuts, obviously – half the length of the play; they had to be done,as Frank said of those made by Boito for Verdi’s Othello (a work he muchadmired).

He did not live to see the first performance at Covent Garden’sLinbury Theatre last October. The music was dark, powerful, sensuous;the opera bleak, a reimagining of the play that pulled it to the side ofBeckett, leaving no possible resolution; and with Kent and Albany cut,intimations of some goodness that could survive the horror disap-peared. Lear is under the shadow of the promised end but its end is false,‘broken apocalypse’ as Frank called it; time does not stop, suffering andthe inescapable obligation to go on are for ever.

‘Weaker and weaker the sunlight falls’ (‘Lebensweisheitspielerei’). Thepoems of Stevens’s last years were for Frank ‘the greatest modernpoems in English about death and old age, and possibly about any-thing’. ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ was one of these poems,close to Frank: ‘call it, again and again,/ The river that flows nowhere,like a sea’. The leaves fall, ‘we return/ To a plain sense of things’ (‘ThePlain Sense of Things’); it is ‘as if/ We had come to the end of theimagination,/ Inanimate in an inert savoir’. Yet the poem even then isnevertheless accomplished, ‘the absence of the imagination/ had itselfto be imagined’; blank cold, the great pond and ‘the plain sense of it,without reflections’, leaves, mud, water ‘like dirty glass’, the pond’s‘waste of the lilies’, the poverty – ‘all this/ Had to be imagined as aninevitable knowledge,/ Required, as a necessity requires’.

In the section of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ entitled ‘It MustGive Pleasure’, Stevens writes of an hour, a day, a month, a year that maybe ‘filled with expressible bliss’. This indeed is poetry, able to make sucha time. It was there intensely in a poem by Philip Larkin, somewhatstrangely entitled ‘Unfinished Poem’, and somewhat strangely againomitted from all editions of the Collected Poems after the first (but nowincluded in the recent Complete Poems). He read it aloud quietly andmovingly one evening: the poet in his room, death in mind, waiting forthe start of his feet on the stair, feet one night heard coming up, the dooropening, but then over the threshold: ‘Nothing like death stepped,


nothing like death paused,/ Nothing like death has such hair, arms soraised./ Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?/ Why is he nothere? What summer have you broken from?’ The cry of that last line, thejoy and pain of it, this was Frank’s joy and pain, what literature andpoetry were deeply for him, which others were to share, his transmis-sion of literature and its experience, whether in his teaching, his writ-ings, his life.

‘Where there is an imagination of happiness, death is a scandal’, Frankwrote. Remembering as a child walking in spring with his motherthrough fields of primroses, Frank thought of himself as ‘evidentlyhappy, perhaps a little too happy, happier than sensible people willallow themselves to be’. The qualification was necessary; it would not doto forget the plain sense of things, but nor would that do. For Stevens, in‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘he/ That has lost the folly of themoon becomes/ The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty’. Thoseproverbs were never to be Frank’s domain; the appetite for poetry,the attention to literature, the folly of the moon were never lost.


The folly of the moon

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