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"Some Kind of Creative Pulse": An Interview with Frank

Kermode

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 “Some Kind of Creative Pulse”:
An Interview with Frank Kermode

Nicholas Birns and John Boe

Sir Frank Kermode has had perhaps the most accomplished career of any
literary critic of our time. Born in 1919 on the Isle of Man, he completed his
education at the University of Liverpool, and taught at the Universities of
Reading, Manchester, Bristol, and London. From 1974 to 1981, he occupied
the King Edward VII chair of literature at Cambridge, which he left over a
controversy involving Colin McCabe, a young, theoretically inclined critic. He
finished his teaching career in the US at Columbia (where one of the interview-
ers—Nicholas Birns—took a class from him) and the University of Houston.
Kermode is the well-respected author of many books of criticism, among them
the seminal The Sense of an Ending (1965) and The Genesis of Secrecy
(1979), which are models of stylistic elegance and theoretical sweep, as well as
History and Value, a look at some neglected books from the decade Kermode
first began to read books seriously—the 1930s. His memoir Not Entitled
(1995) is a charming and self-effacing memoir essential for anyone who wishes
to understand how academia changed in the 20th century. Lately, he has turned
his attention to Shakespeare, writing Shakespeare’s Language (2000) and
The Age of Shakespeare (2003). Throughout, Kermode has maintained
what he would call a deuxième carriere in writing reviews and criticism in
newspapers and other outlets aimed at the general reader. In 1979, he played a
large part in the founding of The London Review of Books, to which he still
contributes regularly, sometimes reviewing writers, such as Zadie Smith, who
are more than fifty years his junior. Now in his mid-eighties, Kermode remains
a vital presence on the literary scene and is perhaps our fullest embodiment of
what it means, today, to be ‘cultured.’
The interview took place in Kermode’s flat in Cambridge in July 2005,
one day after the July 7 terrorist attacks on London.

WOE: How did you learn to write?

KERMODE: I was taught well in primary school and in what we call
grammar school (that would be high school for Americans). I was
reasonably well taught by a man who was interested in writing and

An Interview with Frank Kermode - 9

probably wrote books himself. But I wouldn’t like to pin the responsi-
bility on any one person.
WOE: At one point in Not Entitled you talk about writing well as being
beautifully economical with the truth.
KERMODE: Did I write that? That’s a famous remark made by a British
civil servant in court, I believe. When he was accused of lying, he said
he didn’t think that was fair. He said all he’d done was been economical
with the truth. So if I said it, I borrowed it from him.
WOE: Are you conscious when you’re writing well? That it’s going
well, that this is good material, and so forth?
KERMODE: I always feel most content when I’m actually writing
something that’s working. I wrote an article today, in fact, that has
been buzzing around in my head for three weeks or so and it was fun
writing it.
WOE: You write books I can give my undergraduates like The Age of
Shakespeare as an introduction to Shakespeare and more scholarly books
like Shakespeare’s Language on related material. Does your sense of an
audience or voice consciously change when you’re writing for these
different venues?
KERMODE: I think so. The Age of Shakespeare was not a book that
came to me to write, it’s a book that somebody asked me to write for a
series. There are many people who could have done it much better; it’s
that kind of processing information about theaters, acting companies
and politics. It’s a short book and it might have been a useful book.
Shakespeare’s Language is a serious book.
WOE: When you write for a general audience is it the actual writing
that’s different from your academic writing, the actual vocabulary, or
is it more the premise, how you conceive the piece?
KERMODE: I was trying to think the other day about when I first re-
viewed a book. It was a long time ago, over fifty years ago. It was for a
learned journal, the Review of English Studies, and I was totally excited
about it. Since then I must have written a thousand reviews. I’ve found
the type that suits me best is for the London Review of Books, which is
slightly less extensive than those for The New York Review of Books. I like
that amount of time and space, two to three thousand words. Three
thousand words is more or less what I want to say. I like those loose
fitting reviews where you give a good account of the book but you say
what you like on top of that.

10 - Writing on the Edge

WOE: When you write for The London Review of Books who do you picture
as your reader? Do you have an ideal reader in mind?
KERMODE: As I had a hand in founding The London Review of Books,
I suppose I had in mind some kind of person. The person who would
be reading The Times Literary Supplement if it was available, which it
wasn’t because that was the occasion, of course, when they were on
strike. I guess the concept of the audience was just people who like to
read about books. We had the model of The New York Review, which I’d
been writing in since it began. So I was familiar with the idea that even
if you couldn’t give them names, there was an audience for this kind
of reviewing, this kind of writing. Then in the years since then—that
was 1979, so 26 years have gone by—I think we’ve made a certain kind
of reader, we’ve got people now who’ve been reading it all their lives,
who like the tone of it. Not everybody does—some people think it’s
too chipper, too irreverent. We got into very big trouble over the twin
towers, of course, as you probably saw. We lost subscribers.
WOE: With the Art Spiegelman cartoon?
KERMODE: I was thinking of the letters. We printed several pages of
letters. Marjorie Perloff led the opposition, and she was horrified that
somebody said, “it’s hard to resist saying they deserved it.” Which was
a pretty monstrous thing to say at the time. At least it wasn’t the right
moment to say it. I don’t think I would like anybody to say it about
yesterday, but it applies in just the same way. But anyway, there are
substantial bodies, real people not just an ideal reader, they’re actual
specimens. The opening of the bookshop has made a huge difference
too. You won’t have seen that.
WOE: It’s in Bloomsbury?
KERMODE: Yes, quite near the LRB office and the British Museum.
The original idea was just a bookshop, but now there are discussions
and readings a couple times a week, and singles nights! All kinds of
stuff is going on there that brings LRB people together.
WOE: I’d like to switch to our second topic: teaching. I know you don’t
teach now, but you did for many years. I was wondering if you could
talk about how you tried to teach students to write, think, read, your
pedagogy.
KERMODE: I was never a good teacher.
WOE: Having taken one of your classes, I disagree. I thought it was a
really good class.

An Interview with Frank Kermode - 11

KERMODE: What class was it?
WOE: It was the Metaphysical Poets at Columbia University. You really
warmed up when we got to Marvell and Herbert and Vaughan. You
guided us through the poems in a way that really was the best in-class
experience I’ve ever had with that sort of thing.
KERMODE: Well, thank you. I remember teaching that course with a
certain dismay. It seemed like quite a lot of people were not catching
on at all. I felt a kind of non-response. You mentioned Herbert, whom I
like quite a lot. He has these sort of trick poems, doesn’t he? Explaining
tricks is never a good idea, probably. However, I’m very glad for your
testimony of it. It worked for you anyway. I had a big Shakespeare class
there, about 160 people.
WOE: Was that the class that Ted Tayler usually did?
KERMODE: Yes. Ted is a teacher by birth, almost. He loves teaching;
if he didn’t get some, he’d go out and find some. I wasn’t really like
that at all. I didn’t like the big classes; I’d never really done that before,
160 people. And then the roof of the building where we had the class
collapsed!
WOE: Was it different teaching in the States than in Britain?
KERMODE: Yes, very different. Secondary education is so different in
each of the countries. Then again it’s very different here from what it is
in other universities. Cambridge is a very permissive kind of teaching.
Students are only obliged to undergo a weekly meeting with a tutor,
one hour. The lectures are like going to the movies—there are hundreds
of lectures you can choose from. Things are so constructed here I think
that anybody who is really clever, very smart—and naturally we get a
lot of them—can do almost without consulting the faculty at all. They
just sail through, get their first class degrees, and join the civil service.
So that’s a real difference between teaching here and teaching at a place
like Manchester. There you really have to give them your attention. It’s
different teaching at an Ivy League from teaching somewhere else, isn’t
it? I haven’t had a very broad experience, actually.
After I was at Columbia, the last thing I did over there—rather
stupidly I think—was I taught at Houston for three semesters. The
contrast was enormous from Columbia. In Texas you had to go back
and explain what a poem was. You really had to get right down to it
before you could make any progress. But I was lucky in a way because
I had some students, graduate students, who had been through their
creative writing department. Richard Howard and others had made
them write villanelles, sonnets, all these tricky verse forms. At least they

12 - Writing on the Edge

knew what it was to write a poem, however bad; they knew there was
a craft to be studied, and that was a great help. If you took a beautiful
puzzle sonnet like “Prayer” they were at least a few steps closer towards
getting on terms with it.
WOE: Is that experience what inspired you to say in Not Entitled that
the study of poetry ought to begin by learning how to write in various
poetic forms?
KERMODE: I’ll stand by that. I think it would be a good idea. If some-
body wants to study music, you’d think it very strange if they were
never required to do any exercises in counterpoint. We seem to assume
we’re born with a poetic ability, but we’re not, it’s a craft and it has to be
taught. Those who learn to write poetry don’t all turn out to be poets,
but they do have a better understanding of poetry afterwards.
WOE: One of things you said in Not Entitled was that it was possible
for students to spend three years at Cambridge without ever having
been supervised by a teacher directly employed by the university, or
even, in some extreme cases, by a college lecturer. I teach at a major
university, UC Davis, and the situation is not at all as dire as that, but
there are similar situations in most major U.S. research universities. I’m
wondering if there’s any hope for the major research faculty to do the
bulk of the teaching at such institutions?
KERMODE: Well that’s what they’re there for I suppose. I don’t know
I crashed out of Cambridge because of my abortive attempt to reform
the teaching program. Nobody wanted change. They resented me for
coming in and disturbing them.
WOE: How much did theory and French theory in particular, play a
role? When you left there was the whole controversy with Colin McCabe,
where he did not get tenure because he was seen as too theoretical, too
committed to Marxist and deconstructive vocabularies.
KERMODE: That was really the occasion of my leaving. The attempt
to reform the teaching had failed. It was one of those difficult situa-
tions where you have a conflict of ideas, but you also have a personal
element. So the whole thing blew up over a tenure case, as they tend
to do. One of the things we did as part of the job was to sit in on young
teachers’ classes to see how they were doing. McCabe had faults as
a teacher, but he was still a beginner. Also, of course, he was heavily
into theory. He’d studied in Paris and soaked up a great deal there. He
was pushing some of this in his lectures and classes, and some people
actively didn’t want it. However, he only had a temporary appoint-
ment. All first appointments are for three years and he had a three-year

An Interview with Frank Kermode - 13

appointment. People were out to get him, they didn’t want him, and I
was sort of betwixt and between because I had not admired him as a
performer but noted a great improvement in his second year of work.
I thought he was being got at unfairly by some people I didn’t like.
He was voted out, and we fought against that but lost. McCabe was
unjustly treated but he had to go. Since he went to a prestigious chair
in Scotland, it didn’t harm him in the slightest.
But at the time I was torn—I thought I had to defend him, but it was
a difficult defense. So it became a matter of personality. These people
who attacked theory didn’t really know anything about it, of course. I
thought the whole quarrel about theory was just a ghost of the quarrel
about tenure and the inexplicable fear and loathing of MacCabe in some
senior members. It wasn’t a serious problem at all, but the newspapers
thought it was.
WOE: Amazing it made the newspapers.
KERMODE: Oh yes, I was always being taken out to lunch by reporters
from the posh papers, asking me to explain ‘theory.’ And then you’d
find it garbled in the articles.
WOE: Did you see the books you did in the sixties and seventies like
Sense of an Ending, or The Classic, or The Genesis of Secrecy as part of
theory or were they more intellectual history?
KERMODE: Sense of an Ending was done before the theory wave broke,
before it hit our shores or your shores. After all, literary history has
got a long history, it goes back too Aristotle and beyond, doesn’t it?
We’ve now apportioned it to the French. I suppose in a way that Sense
of an Ending is literary theory, but it’s not French literary theory. Now
there’s a bit of that in The Genesis of Secrecy. I was at some conference in
Chicago talking about the book, when Paul de Man said, quite angrily,
“You wouldn’t have been able to write that had it not been for us.” And
that was probably true, I think. I was interested in theory, to a degree,
but I stopped being interested in it.
WOE: I want to talk about your interest in the Bible and in religion,
which was also in The Genesis of Secrecy. How did that come into your
work? You say you’re not a believer.
KERMODE: No, I’m not a believer. I think it came in, as I remember it,
when I first came to Cambridge in 1974. I was married and my home
was in London. During the week I lived in college, and I found myself
with a lot of time on my hands. The first thing I realized when I came
here was that you never needed to do anything you didn’t want to.
I always thought I had enough Greek to read the New Testament. It

14 - Writing on the Edge

needed a little polishing so I bought myself a New Testament Greek
grammar and got the language up. Then I started solidly reading the
New Testament. One of the things I noticed or thought I noticed was
that the general standard of scholarship on the New Testament is
higher than in our field. I mean, people actually have to know some
languages, and what they’re talking about, which is not always the
case in literary studies, as you know. I got very interested in it and then
I got an invitation from Harvard to give those Charles Eliot lectures.
They gave me a year’s warning but it would be a year of hard work,
with little time to write a lecture series. So I thought I must give these
lectures on something that my head was full of at the moment. And
that was what was occupying my mind at the time, and that’s why I
wrote Genesis of Secrecy.
I maintained that interest for several years. Then that was it, I
wasn’t going to do anymore. I wrote a few articles and I even learned
some Hebrew. What’s interesting about that is the old saying about
language, “last in, first out:” I was looking at my Hebrew notebooks
the other day and I couldn’t make head or tail of them. Completely lost.
People still think that I’m interested in the Bible and send me books to
commend or review
WOE: You started off as a Renaissance specialist; how did you radiate
out to other fields?
KERMODE: I suppose I was always interested in fields other than the
Renaissance. Plus, I didn’t start my teaching career in the usual way
because of the war. I was in the Navy for almost six years and during
that time what I read had nothing to do with Spenser. I felt the only
teacher who ever really had a major effect on me, who luckily I fell
into the hands of, was a man called D. J. Gordon. He was a remark-
able Renaissance scholar, very flamboyant: I’ve written about him in
my memoir. I learned by doing things for him. He wrote a pioneering
article on Jonson’s Hymenaei, which involved checking references to a
huge array of sixteenth-century books. That familiarized me with the
background in a way that was not common, a way that was developed
at the Warburg Institute; nothing like it was being done at universities
at the time. So I got very interested in that, and the Warburg Institute
was a favorite place to work.
WOE: Your work with Gordon was that of an apprentice. And the
numbers in education aren’t such that every student can possibly have
the chance of being an apprentice to a great scholar.
KERMODE: I was very lucky. But he was an awful man, I mean a ter-
rible man. Then of course he became an alcoholic and died—he basi-

An Interview with Frank Kermode - 15

cally drank himself to death. By that time, of course, I had cast loose.
We were on friendly terms, as friendly as he would allow himself to
be. He died when I was at Harvard, actually.
WOE: In Shakespeare’s Language you suggest that during his career
Shakespeare discovered a new way of representing thought. You talk
about a new acting style, personation. Is this what Harold Bloom is
suggesting, more flamboyantly, in saying that Shakespeare invented
the human?
KERMODE: Well I suppose so. If I can get down to what he actually
means by inventing the human, it’s a very similar idea. There was a
wonderful collaboration between Shakespeare and Burbage, when
Shakespeare found someone who could do things with those soliloquies
that were not possible before. Not possible to Marlowe, for example.
Not possible for anyone. When you think about the soliloquy, in the
form in which we admire it, in Hamlet and Macbeth, it really had a
very short life. If we look at the Jacobean drama, as far as I know it,
there aren’t any interesting soliloquies. There are people coming and
telling you what you ought to know but that’s about it.
WOE: It turns into the interior monologue in novels. That’s the only
place you hear that sort of voice of that person speaking and thinking
out loud. It’s interesting that it does go away from the stage.
KERMODE: You’re right. What about style indirect libre, which we used
to worry about so much?
WOE: Or Henry James.
KERMODE: That’s right.
WOE: Books like Sense of an Ending or Genesis of Secrecy were originally
given as lectures. Are the books just the lectures as presented or did
you revise a lot in publishing them?
KERMODE: I think they’re as given but rather more of it. You have to
keep a lecture down to fifty minutes and the published versions prob-
ably represent more like an hour or an hour and five minutes of talk.
I was very impressed that the lectures I gave at Bryn Mawr—which
became Sense of an Ending—were so readily absorbed by the students.
I’ve never met students who worked as hard as students at Bryn Mawr.
You go into the library at 11 o’clock at night and they are at work. They
were great and their reports of my lectures in the newspaper were
fantastically accurate. They really weren’t all that easy for general
audiences, after all.

16 - Writing on the Edge

 I enjoyed Bryn Mawr. In 1965 I was staying in a place called the
Deanery—it was an old building where visitors stayed. I had my wife
and two small children with me—they were nine years old, two twins.
They were popular with the girls, of course, but there was an attempt to
stop us mixing with the students. They didn’t want us to be bothered
by them. I discovered that students were sending me notes more or
less asking me to coffee or supper or something and I wasn’t getting
them. When I’d sorted that out we all had a lovely time.
The answer to your original question is that it varies. For instance,
the lectures I gave at Irvine became much longer in print than the actual
lectures were.
WOE: That’s Forms of Attention.
KERMODE: I used to think the only way I’d have a book written was
if somebody asked me to do some lectures. But that rarely happens,
though I’m planning two series at the moment.
The last time I gave a lecture was at Berkeley, about three or four
years ago—the Tanner lectures. They worked badly; I just couldn’t get
them right. When I got to Berkeley I got sick, I got really bad asthma,
the doctors said something about the local vegetation. This was a re-
ally miserable time and the lectures were poor and none the better for
being panted rather than spoken.
WOE: Do you see your criticism as a form of creative writing? Do you
see criticism itself as a creative genre?
KERMODE: It’s difficult, isn’t it? You run into people who think you
need to be a poet to write good criticism of poetry. Coleridge, Keats—all
the best poets were critics. I really don’t know. You can tell the difference
between criticism that has some kind of creative pulse to it and criti-
cism that doesn’t. I’d say Christopher Ricks, for example, sometimes,
has a sort of poetic impulse.
WOE: Although he has never written any poetry.
KERMODE: As far as I know. I’m sure if he could he would, he doesn’t
like to leave things undone.
WOE: Before we go, I have to tell you my admiration for a book of
yours that nobody really mentions a lot, which is History and Value. I
really like this book, but people don’t seem to pay as much attention
to that as some of your other works.
KERMODE: I think that’s true. It’s probably not in print. I thought
quite well of it. It’s heavy going, some of it. But I’m glad you liked it. I

An Interview with Frank Kermode - 17

always thought my best little book was Forms of Attention, but nobody
really pays much attention to that one either.
WOE: Why was that your favorite?
KERMODE: Well I loved writing about Botticelli, for one thing—a
holiday. For similar reasons I sometimes risk writing about music:
getting away from literature.
WOE: How has your long study of Shakespeare affected you person-
ally?
KERMODE: I was just reading the autobiography of Canetti in which
he describes an experience that was absolutely formative for him. It
wasn’t reading, although he read enormously. It was the altar at Colmar
by Grünewald. In the middle of it is this dreadful crucifixion. There’s
this appalling, wonderful painting, and he claims to have spent dozens
of hours just looking at it. And it taught him what art ought to be—that
it shouldn’t offer solace and that it should never tell you that things
are going to end well, because they’re not. I’ve never had any experi-
ence quite like that. If it ever happened it would probably come from
Shakespeare—for Lear or perhaps Antony and Cleopatra.
WOE: You’ve written a lot about music and art and dance, unusually
for a literary critic. You did that wonderful early piece on the dancer
Loie Fuller and modernism. I’m interested in the role that has played
in your overall work.
KERMODE: A lot, I think. That came out of Yeats. I probably wouldn’t
have known the name Loie Fuller if I hadn’t stumbled upon it in a Yeats
poem. And then I was by chance able to stumble on a load of documents
about her, so I was able to write that piece that you’re talking about.
That was half a century ago. Music I’ve written less about, though lately
I’ve written quite a bit about opera.
WOE: You did a lecture about a few bars of Mozart, which I saw an-
nounced in The London Review of Books.
KERMODE: That’s right. Actually, I’d like to work it out sometime,
it’s really interesting. A lot of things seem easy until you do them. I’ve
been working for a long time with Sandy Goehr, a composer, and we’ve
been trying to produce a libretto for an opera on Lear that he wants
to write. We’ve worked together before, on a work called Sing Ariel,
which was based on a sort of a chopped up anthology of poetry, for a
small orchestra and a mezzo-soprano. Of course in these matters the
composer is the boss.

18 - Writing on the Edge

 With Lear, we’re sticking to Shakespeare’s language but of course
we can’t have. We can’t have the whole of Shakespeare’s text, only
about a third of it. There’s the question of what order to do things in,
how much it attention to give to Edmund and Edgar. We left out Kent,
then we him put back again. Lear’s a long play—and you have to cut
about two thirds of it out. We go a bit forward, a bit back; have great
ideas and drop them and say, “Let’s go back and start all over again.”
At least two years have gone by.
WOE: I think I could stand Lear if it were an opera. I’m with Samuel
Johnson: it’s a little too painful for me as a play, actually.
KERMODE: Well, the opera might be painful too.

John Boe teaches at UC Davis; Nicholas Birns teaches at Eugene Lang

College, The New School, New York.

An Interview with Frank Kermode - 19

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