In memoriam

It's hard for me to say anything coherent about Frank Kermode, who passed away a couple of weeks ago. His articles are brilliant, of course, but it is far beyond my ability to evaluate that brilliance, or to place it in context. As Michael Wood, himself a veteran critic, says, ``Kermode is too multifarious a writer to have something as dogged as a `theme' for his critical work,'' which may be one way of admitting an awed critical defeat.

I first came to Kermode through his article, in the London Review of Books, on Zadie Smith's On Beauty. At the time, I was going through a I-hate-Zadie-Smith period---which in retrospect had more to do with my envy of her fame---and Kermode's (nearly) unqualified praise of her irritated me. Surely Kermode wasn't blinded by her as well? Surely he knew better than to say, "I should explain that I delight in all three [of her books] and do not believe that this book is [...] a recovery from a post-White Teeth slump"? Surely he knew how wannabe Jewish, how "creative", Autograph was? Apparently not; he even compared Smith to Forster, her exemplar, in a shocking final sentence: "[Kiki] [the metaphysically enormous black woman about whom the novel revolves] is the measure of Zadie Smith's powers at 30, Forster's age when he published Howard's End."

Novelists such as myself, callow, unpublished, twenty-six, are like adolescents: they preen, they jeer at perceived rivals, they choose their idols with care, preferring the dead over the alive, the aging over the contemporary. Their reaction to an esteemed critic celebrating one of their younger bete-noires is likely to be one of a) A pause, a deep breath, and a resumption of jeering, the object of which is now not only the novelist but also the critic who saw fit to praise him, or b) A frantic inquiry into how seriously they're supposed to take this critic. In my case, I found that Kermode was one of only two literary critics ever to have been knighted (the other, William Empson, is Kermode's Kermode; his Seven Types of Ambiguity the densest, most rewarding piece of literature, non-fictional or otherwise, I have ever tried to read), that he had been writing for the LRB, which I already revered to impossible extents, since its inception, that his works on Shakespeare have become part of the critical canon. I grudgingly told myself to read more of his articles, keeping, at the same time, as open a mind as possible about the Smiths of the world.

In the eighteen months since then, Kermode has tried to show me what it means to be a literary critic. A deft eye, an ability to understand what a novel is trying to do, a willingness to chase that intention down into the depths of the fiction: these are indispensable, to be sure, but in a sense also beside the point. The most important element of all is sympathy, which can only be cultivated, I know now, over decades of suppressing that strident interior voice without stilling it. In his hundreds of reviews, Kermode comes very close to this ideal of criticism.

Here's a link to one of his best articles, a close reading of T.S. Eliot's poetry in relationship to the word "shudder", written a few months ago, when he was ninety and a half.