Frank Kermode

• 1. Introduction

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  Frank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man, the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, in a family he later described as of "extremely modest means." He died in Cambridge on the 17th of August 2010, ninety years later, holding honorary fellowships at two of England's most storied institutions and the regard of scholars who called him the finest reader of Shakespeare alive. The distance between those two points is the story this documentary sets out to trace.

  How did a boy from Douglas, raised by parents who "struggled to maintain a respectable yet always precarious standard of life," become the Lord Northcliffe Professor at University College London and later the King Edward VII Professor at Cambridge? What was the book, published in 1967, that made his reputation permanent? And what does it mean that the most celebrated literary critic of his generation once resigned from a prestigious magazine, walked away from a Cambridge chair, and sued a city council over destroyed boxes of books? The chapters ahead try to answer each of those questions.

• 2. Isle of Man Origins

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  John Pritchard Kermode, Frank's father, was born in 1894 and returned from serving in the First World War to find the family business gone. His father-in-law had, in Kermode's retelling, "staged a robbery of the shop and stole the stock," leaving his grandmother bankrupt. The elder Kermode "took temporary jobs and then got what he thought was a job that would see him through, as a storekeeper," a position he kept for the rest of his working life.

  Doris Pearl Kermode, born in 1893 and described by her son as a "farm girl" turned waitress, anchored a household with some kind of Welsh ancestral connection, though that thread was faint by Frank's generation. The family's earlier generations had been somewhat more comfortable: a grandfather who worked as an organist, a grandmother who briefly owned an off-licence and general store before the robbery undid everything. By Frank's childhood in Douglas, that modest prosperity was a memory.

  Kermode's father retired after the Second World War in poor health. His mother developed dementia; his father was, in Kermode's own words, "an extreme diabetic," and died from the disease while living in a retirement home. Kermode himself came first in the examinations that earned him entry to Douglas High School for Boys, and from there he went to the University of Liverpool, a path that required, at every stage, outperforming expectations simply to keep moving forward.

• 3. War, Then the Academy

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  Six years in the Royal Navy, much of it spent in Iceland, separated Kermode's undergraduate education from his academic career. He began lecturing at King's College, Durham University, in 1947, the same year he married Maureen Eccles. The couple had twins.

  From Durham he moved to the University of Reading in 1949, where he produced the Arden edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest, an early signal of the Shakespeare focus that would run through his entire career. By 1958 he held the John Edward Taylor Professorship at the University of Manchester, and by 1965 the Winterstoke Professorship at the University of Bristol. Both were prestigious positions for a scholar still in his forties.

  When Kermode arrived at University College London in 1967 to take the Lord Northcliffe chair, the English department he led did something that had not happened in Britain before: it introduced contemporary French critical theory to the country through a series of graduate seminars. Structuralism, semiotics, and the ideas then transforming literary study in Paris were, for most British academics, a foreign language. UCL under Kermode made them available in English for the first time.

• 4. The Sense of an Ending

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  The year Kermode arrived at UCL, 1967, was also the year Oxford University Press published The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. The book asked a simple but vertiginous question: why do human beings need stories to have endings, and what does that need reveal about how we experience time, history, and mortality? The answers Kermode offered ranged across fiction, theology, and philosophy, and the book remained in print long enough to warrant a second edition in 2000.

  It is the work for which Kermode is best remembered, but it was not an isolated achievement. By the time it appeared he had already published on John Donne, on Wallace Stevens, on Edmund Spenser, on Romantic poetry, and on Shakespeare's final plays. The breadth was deliberate. Kermode was not a specialist in the academic sense; he was a reader in the older sense, someone who moved across centuries and genres because he thought literature demanded that kind of attention.

  The Genesis of Secrecy, his 1979 Harvard University Press study of narrative interpretation, extended the project the 1967 book had begun, this time directed at the Gospels and the question of why sacred texts resist transparent meaning. Those Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, delivered in 1975-76, formed the basis of the book. Shakespeare's Language, published in 2000 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, showed that he was still doing his most serious thinking about the playwright into his eighties.

• 5. Resignations and Controversies

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  Kermode joined the literary and political magazine Encounter as a contributor and became co-editor in 1965. Within two years he resigned, once it became clear the magazine was funded by the CIA. The revelation, which caused scandal across British intellectual life, made staying incompatible with the independence his criticism depended on.

  The Cambridge resignation was a different kind of rupture. Kermode had taken the King Edward VII Professorship in 1974 and left it in 1982, at least in part because of the tenure dispute surrounding Colin MacCabe. The fight over MacCabe's appointment exposed deep divisions in Cambridge's English faculty about literary theory, and Kermode, who had spent years championing precisely the theoretical approaches MacCabe represented, found the atmosphere untenable. He moved to Columbia University, where he eventually held the Julian Clarence Levi Professorship in the Humanities.

  Then in September 1996, something stranger happened. Boxes of valuable books and manuscripts belonging to Kermode were taken by Cambridge City Council refuse collectors, who removed them instead of the professional movers hired to transport the items to a new house. The Council denied responsibility. Kermode sued for £20,000. The episode was a reminder that even a scholar of his standing was not beyond the ordinary indignities of a city bin lorry on the wrong street.

• 6. Editing and Public Criticism

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  Fontana Modern Masters, the paperback series of short introductions to major thinkers of the twentieth century, reached a wide general readership partly because Kermode edited it with the same standard he applied to his scholarly work. His own contribution to the series was a volume on D. H. Lawrence, published in 1973. The series as a whole made figures like Fanon, Marcuse, and others accessible to readers who would never work through the primary texts.

  For decades he was a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, the two journals that, between them, set much of the agenda for English-language literary discussion. His 2009 collection Bury Place Papers gathered essays he had written for the London Review of Books. Pleasing Myself, published in 2001 by Allen Lane, ranged from Beowulf to Philip Roth and demonstrated that his reviewing voice was as distinct as his scholarly one.

  The co-editing of The Oxford Book of Letters in 1995, undertaken with his second wife Anita Van Vactor, an American scholar, was a departure from criticism into anthology-making. That same year he published Not Entitled, a memoir, through Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the New York house that also published Shakespeare's Language five years later. Knighted in 1991, he was made a Fellow of the British Academy and accumulated honorary fellowships at University College London and King's College, Cambridge.

• 7. A Scholar's Final Reputation

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  James Shapiro, the scholar, offered what amounted to a verdict on Kermode's standing a few months before his death in 2010: "the best living reader of Shakespeare anywhere, hands down." The assessment came from someone who had spent his own career on Shakespeare, which made it something other than courtesy.

  Kermode's bibliography runs to well over forty books, spanning editions, collections of essays, critical studies, anthologies, and a memoir. His 1987 co-edited volume The Literary Guide to the Bible, done with Robert Alter, brought the same secular close-reading he had applied to fiction to a text that most literary critics approached either as believers or left alone entirely. Concerning E. M. Forster, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009, appeared the year before he died, evidence that he was still writing serious criticism at ninety.

  The Sense of an Ending was reissued in a second edition in 2000, thirty-three years after it first appeared, still generating the readers and arguments it had when Kermode wrote it as the newest Lord Northcliffe Professor. That durability is the measure most critics aspire to and most do not reach.