RSSPleasing Myself. Frank Kermode. Allen Lane.
In real life, Frank Kermode is softly spoken. An interlocutor does best to get as close as possible, so as not to miss a word. Many of the words are not Kermode's: they are quoted from writers he admires, and most of those are poets. The poets, could they be present, would be pleased to hear their lines pronounced with such a fine regard for rhythm, balance, sense and nuance. Shakespeare's Language, Kermode's last book before this, was justly hailed by its reviewers as the ideal critical tribute to the way the greatest of all poets actually wrote. It wasn't hard to imagine Shakespeare hailing it too. After all, the book brought him alive.
This new collection of essays works the same revivifying trick for poets of the 20th Century: Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Empson, Marianne Moore, Henry Reed and Roy Fuller are among them. Most of the essays are book reviews, and most of the books reviewed are books on: writing about writing. So this is writing about writing about writing. But Kermode is a practised hand at getting back through the layers of commentary to the ignition point of the gaseous expansion. In the beginning, somebody said something inspired, and this artist among critics already has it in his memory. For Kermode, language comes first. If a writer can actually write, here is a critic who can tell. The guarantee is that he writes so well himself.
Some reviewers were surprised that Kermode showed such a talent for narrative in his memoir Not Entitled. They shouldn't have been: he has always shown it. Some of his earlier books had grand, over-arching themes, but a knack for vividly recounting the events was always in plain sight. The first thing he looks for in art is a quality he possesses, and although he is too modest to think it sufficient in his own case, he is confident enough to call it a necessity in others. If they've got that, there is much else they can safely lack. Reviewing Roy Foster's first volume of the Yeats biography, Kermode ought to be two steps away from the poetry, but he is instantly in the poet's mind, which he knows to be a jumble sale. Foster is given credit for annotating the detritus: sooner or later we have to know about the Order of the Golden Dawn. But later is better.
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)