Legendary literary critic Frank Kermode, who had a long association with Harvard University Press, passed away on Tuesday. He was 90 years old. Elisabeth Sifton, a former member of the Harvard University Press Board of Directors, shared her memories of Kermode for the Paris Review. Here, Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters remembers the Kermode he knew.
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Frank Kermode gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard for 1977-8, and he published the book based on the lectures, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, very soon thereafter, in 1979. By the time I got to the Harvard Press in 1984, his relationship to the Harvard Press was a sealed deal, thanks in no small part to the efforts and enthusiasm of the now-legendary HUP editorial team of Arthur Rosenthal, Patricia Williams, and Maud Wilcox. In fact, the relationship between HUP and Kermode was so extraordinary that Arthur engineered a project that is the kind of thing no one believes happens in publishing anymore. Frank was teaching at Columbia where he’d sought refuge from Cambridge, England. He’d found a place to live but then needed to move. Frank was a magician, a very Prospero, with words, but he could hardly tie his shoes. He must have called Patricia in desperation to say he could not manage to figure out how to move. In any case Arthur got the message and went down to the business manager and said to him “you have trucks and boxes and people. Help our author move.” It wasn’t magic, but in a few days colleagues from the Press warehouse had moved Frank.
What was cool about making Frank feel at home with the Press was that there was a paradoxical logic at work, that worked spectacularly well then and for all the future years when Frank was publishing with us directly and even more recently when he remained one of my chief advisers on what to publish and big ventures after the others had departed. Even for the last two years or so we were having intense chats about how to develop and who might edit a New Literary History of the British Isles for us, a book in the line of our French, German, and American volumes. At the heart of the paradox is the fact that no one embodied the highest standards of literary criticism and scholarship in English (and American) literary studies better than Frank, and yet he insisted that he was not entitled (to quote the title of his autobiography.) He was not entitled yet he had been the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge before the battle over the Cambridge Structuralist claimed him as its second victim. He was the best, but he kept saying he was not. “Domine, non sum dignus.” He more than Groucho Marx could truly claim that he did not want to belong to any club that would have him. But as soon as Frank gave the Nortons, Arthur Rosenthal wanted him to be in the HUP club, and to be the prize member of the HUP literary studies list. The world of literary studies was exploding in the '70s with new and exciting work, but none of it was appearing on the lists of the big university presses because the College of Cardinals, people like WJ Bate at Harvard, blocked its appearance. This created a credibility problem that Arthur’s adding Frank to the list solved for Harvard.
And Frank was never kidding about rejecting privilege. He was deadly serious about it. He was not a bitter malcontent, stewing away off in his corner. He was always gravitating to the center and the top of the heap, but raising questions about the structural nature of the heap. The Norton Lectures are dedicated “to those outside,” to those who are not insiders. He himself was from the outside, not even from England, from the Isle of Man. He was an only child with no athletic skills. Really only good at reading, except he could hardly see. Needed glasses. No one was more an insider than Arthur J. Rosenthal, but he had a taste for those who though humbly born were the aristocrats of the world of thought, like Frank, the impoverished scholarship boy who’d done well at school. Arthur could see there’d be plenty of incalculable benefits to getting Frank to join us. And so after the superb Nortons, he and Patricia and Maud cooked up an offer Frank could not refuse to keep him on board.
Frank’s intellectual interests had led him to champion strange, foreign, French literary theorists who had busted open the normal ways of studying literature. He was not religious but he’d become intrigued with the way the conservative forces in a society always set about to squash deviant readings. As a lover of poetry he knew that serendipity was basic to the writing of powerful poetry. So he explored canon formation and interpretation in Genesis of Secrecy.
The editors at the Harvard Press encouraged Frank and explored ways of developing a big book. Frank might fumble around to find his keys to the door of his house, but he’d proven himself a genius at organizing groups of people and big projects, as the irresistible (to this book buyer) Modern Masters showed. By 1984, the plan for The Literary Guide to the Bible was made with Bob Alter (whose recent reflection on Kermode is here) as his copilot, and by 1987 this huge book was out and it was a great success and that foreshadowed the renewal of interest in religion by advanced humanists like HUP’s Charles Taylor.
The Literary Guide to the Bible is the kind of book only a press with some resources like Harvard can develop and launch successfully. This is part of their calling, their mission and was why—even though I did not know it—I came to HUP. I came to develop books of the heft of the Alter/Kermode. Of course Kermode made it his moral mission to reach those outside the elite academies, which is why accessible critical writing that is aimed at the public has been his forte and this is what connects him to the many writings of Greil Marcus, Anthony Grafton, and Robert Christgau and other HUP authors and critics who work to deadline and inside space limitations.
That is the heart of the matter. There are many more memories Frank’s passing call up. But more important are what he did working with people at the Press, and more important for me personally but also professionally was the way he helped me again and again since even before I got to HUP til yesterday when he worked hard to assure that we could publish Tony Tanner’s new Shakespeare book. As a scholarship boy from the country, I felt a strong identity with Frank. I have a thick file of correspondence between us from the early 80s til now. David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film says of Alec Guinness that he had “a remote, reflective personality that often worked well in movies.” Kermode had a remote, reflective personality that often worked well in criticism. It was endearing. That’s why Arthur organized the moving of his books in the 80s. And look what happened one time when Frank was moving and Arthur did not take care all worked well? You may know the sad story of how all Frank’s library got taken away by the rubbishmen in the 90s. He never got a one of them back. Endearing he was and tough. He was unrelenting in his reader’s reports—never cruel but fearless in rendering judgments.
HUP Syndic William Todd told me one reason he loves The Genesis of Secrecy and his students do too is the way it stands up for the right of the humble and poorly educated to learn to read for themselves and resist having the clergy tell them how to think and feel about what a text does for them.
Kermode was able to walk a line in his writing and academic work where the tension between authority and dissidence was always precarious but assured. Personally, he meant the world to me. He embodied the ongoing presence of critical writing and judgment in literary studies.
