Leaving the Best Unsaid

...Spender later denied this, yet I wonder why Kermode, after insisting that he recalled it correctly says, with some danger to his own enterprise, that it "only goes to show you shouldn't put too much trust in memoirs...

...At first glance this might look like a virtue, and it is—up to a point...

...Not Entitled ends with Kermode again enjoying his entitlement to lie diagonally in bed...

...The affair receives a final comment: "The worst of it was that while I did not know that I was invited to play the part [of co-editor] largely because I was thought to be safely inadequate to it, I could wake in the night and suspect it was so...

...Consider the following, wherein he exposes the failings of the "club of journalists" as "professional deformation possibly aggravated by the fondness for drink": "For when you read in the press reports of activities or opinions of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge, there is almost always something amiss, often absurdly so, in the reporting...

...Academic strife at Cambridge University is vividly evoked, but of course not entered into in full...

...Kermode, a scholar in the Ker mode, has an additional advantage: He is a stylist whose sentences and paragraphs resonate wryly or wistfully with implication and irony...

...He edits the influential Modern Masters series, through which many of us got to know the likes of Wittgenstein and Frantz Fanon...

...How, I wondered, did Kermode manage to write about his time in the Navy, now that he is in absolutely no sense in it...

...You can qualify and qualify until you qualify yourself out of your qualifications for writing...

...His baker's dozen of subsequent books includes monographs on Wallace Stevens and D. H. Lawrence, and my favorite, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theo-ry of Fiction...

...It is a species of the good writing that cannot help eliminating truth from autobiography...

...but the cumulative effect of such Tightness on page after page presses on the mind...

...He tells us that in the case of "the remarkable ninth line of [George Herbert's] sonnet 'Prayer,' you need the whole poem to see why that line is perfect," so I naturally reread the sonnet once and the line several times, but still cannot see why it isn't the weakest line of the poem...

...Reviewed by John Simon IF ANY MAN should not have written an autobiography—or even a memoir, the now preferred term—Frank Kermode is that man...

...Professionally also, it is a luxury to do as one pleases, as it were, to write diagonally on one's page...

...Of course, truth is a lot to expect from working people with deadlines...

...Why wouldn't "remind" be the word, perhaps augmented by an adverb...

...You are tempted to exclaim, "Shit or get off the Kermode...

...Even if this may in part be an argument pro domo—bluntly put, self-exculpation?how exemplarily it is phrased...

...On top of that, au milieux—an error that makes matters more embarrassing...

...From Manchester he went to Bristol, a place where his children were less likely to catch bronchitis, but where he would be unhappy "wearing good tweeds and walking my dogs on the downs—I who never owned tweeds or a dog...

...Can one get absolution, I wonder, for confessing to sins one leaves thickly fogged over...

...This can hardly have been what the students expected when, glistening with youth, they first offered themselves to our care...

...Kermode was born and raised in Douglas, then a town of 20,000 souls...

...There ensues another paragraph's worth of niggling, nagging equivocation, even though it includes the fine image of "syntax conducting its tense, pacific struggle against meter" in the poetry of Horace...

...How...

...As long as she belongs there, I will belong there also, or be as close to belonging as I am entitled to be, for as long as I am entitled to be...

...But I know from dealings with jour-nals which aren't in such a hurry, and can employ armies of checkers to question every date and quote, that there is, somehow, in ephemeral journalism, a natural drift from veracity...

...The one certainty about a position calculated by dead reckoning is that it will be inaccurate...

...Is it because, as in degringolades, French may seem a cushioning, an evasion...

...of the future father of Marianne Faithfull...

...His next stop is University College, London: "James Sutherland, my predecessor in the Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature (as F. W. Bateson famously remarked, it was like being Mammon Professor of God), brought me lunch, handed over some keys, and gave it as a general opinion that there was a stormy passage ahead and he was getting out just in time...

...Throughout these years my private life was in a great muddle...

...After we get an account of a scholarship to Liverpool University in 1937, problems appear...

...Kermode informs us that he has no intention of speaking about his two marriages and "the 40 years in which I shared my bed with one woman or another, because I am in absolutely no sense doing so as I write...

...In Algiers, he has dinner at a policeman's house when an alert sounds and hubby dashes off, "leaving his wife placidly beating the mayonnaise and explaining how fatal it was to stop doing so even for a second...

...I think knowing it is worse...

...I defy anyone to read pages 153-158 without his head spinning, especially on reaching the final qualification, Kermode's resolve to speak for his various selves "subsumed under this hypothetical self," if only "in a manner that by trying to make them seem interesting falsifies them, insofar as [get this!] what does not exist can be falsified...

...He confesses that "in the matter of ethical choices...

...A position of the highest academic rank—the appointment is made by the Crown at the suggestion of the Prime Minister?it ended one period of discontent and inaugurated another...

...Kermode carries his cryptic or elliptic mode over into most things...

...Although the book, at 263 pages, is short by current standards, the omissions—sometimes silent, sometimes rubbed in—could have easily taken us, I would wager, to 300 and beyond...

...Or again, we are told one of the mad captains was a hoarder of groceries that nearly overflowed his cabin, but that he managed to dispose of them "deftly with the aid ofhis friends, though I still feel I ought not to say how...

...When the CIA connection is revealed, the first meeting ever ofthe stellar Anglo-American board of Encounter is convoked...

...Is the reader expected to smile benignly at a critic who failed his way into criticism...

...Absurdity escalates...

...Either way, you are supposed to reveal more than Kermode, whose Not Entitled: A Memoir, despite a great show of admitted sins, is guilty of even greater sins of omission...

...So there is in journalism an unavoidable tendency to error, as there is in navigational dead reckoning...

...This mixture of the whimsical and the elegiac, the bittersweet leaps backward and forward, and a tone of amused detachment characterize the entire book...

...But the only interesting detail we get is that Spender was so agitated that he announced "he was going off to look at some pictures at the National Gallery to calm himself...

...But in the part on his Navy experiences, the best, Kermode is able to speak his mind more freely: "Of course I disagree with Sophocles when he advises us to call no man happy, for I have known happy men, all in one way or another mad...

...Nothing in his background or his early schooling pointed that way: Geneticists and environmentalists should be equally puzzled...

...it might be in Hampstead or Dulwich, Regent's Park or Golder's Green or Battersea...

...Like Caesar's Gaul, Not Entitled is divisible into three parts of unequal length and interest, but none negligible...

...How seriously are we to take the remark that, having failed as dramatist, novelist and poet, "there was nothing left for me except to become a critic, preferably with a paying job at a university...

...The memoir tends to be at its best when it telescopes past and present, reminiscence and rue, and perceives life as a bedeviling double exposure, a discontinuous continuum...

...which "reminded me (if that's the word)" of the "disparaging remarks" Hough used to make "about books of mine...

...We must content ourselves with knowing him better as a scholar and critic than as a man, which may be just as well...

...Certainly a memoir such as Gore Vidal's recent Palimpsest, in which malicious and often untrustworthy gossip abounds, is not to be endorsed...

...Why all these minute distinctions...

...Shoveling qualifications upon qualifications, and Hume upon Rousseau, our memorialist concludes—what...

...a memoir allows you to tell only what you remember or choose to remember...

...The ostentatious self-depreciation is surely ironic, but it strikes sour notes as it recurs with strained insistence...

...Once more we hear dimly about "continuing turbulence in my private life"?rather like a weather report tossed off by a radio announcer—balanced by general satisfaction with the chairmanship at University College...

...Kermode argues against imposing a pattern on life as Nabokov does in Speak, Memory: "I call that faking, though with admiration...

...What is impressive, though, is that the son should have become a professor of Renaissance and modern English literature, who could read Greek and Latin as well as French and Italian, and, it would seem, German...

...The early years of penury, for example, in retrospect seem years of plenty: "Yet I grew fat and stayed so until, suddenly, I became a slender adolescent, still of course shortsighted, the victim of various tics, worried about many things, especially girls, for a few years looking, and even contriving to feel, like other youths...

...Next comes a typically Kermodian riff about whether there is such a thing as the self, or whether it is merely illusory...

...Even though Cambridge is incomparably more prestigious, "my partner at the time had no wish to leave London," we read, and wonder yet again at this infinitely detached way of referring to a wife...

...Like the poet, Kermode takes something from his own experience—in this case, the Navy and its use of dead reckoning—and, by analogy and symbolic extension, constructs a master metaphor that, as it were, anchors the complex and elusive in a palpable and unforgettable image...

...Why is the precise French word strange in this context...

...Has he forgotten about the period of omnipotence on the verge of World War II...

...young Frank sometimes helped him with the crates...

...Neither parent is discussed in detail...

...What is the difference between a life lived and a life "subject to a narrative accounting...

...Father Jack presided over the storeroom, was looked down on by the office workers and was a compulsive gambler...

...The book offers interesting recollections of academic colleagues such as Peter Ure, D. P. Gordon and John Wain, but Kermode is always better when not naming names...

...There is no point of rehashing the entire confrontation here, but our author indulges in rather more breast-beating than seems strictly warranted...

...And further: "I have never quite understood the mixture of timidity and—a word that comes strangely to mind in this context—jemenfoutisme [from the French je m 'enfous, I don't give a damn] that I exhibit in those existential crises which the outside observer can reduce to simple stereotypes but which may in truth be the central, most profound, most idiosyncratic, and most instructive moments of a life, or at any rate a life considered as subject to a narrative accounting...

...Why would an existential crisis, if genuine and rending, seem stereotypical to anyone...

...He runs an important writers' seminar attended by present or future literary notables...

...He tells us what a mistake it was?is—to defer mourning, but again fails to go into detail...

...But the Kermodian pudeur reaches even more amazing heights, or depths...

...Sierra, where he can't remember learning anything he "wanted to know," but did learn how "to drink far too much, never to speak of women (except a wife if you had one, or the wives of colleagues) without innuendo or obscenity, and to deal with the madness of captains...

...The first is "Man to Man," an account of growing up as the fat, clumsy, unprepossessing son of working-class parents on the Isle of Man...

...If the country were France, one would assume that "partner" denoted mistress, perhaps passed off as a spouse...

...In the midst of the scandal, Kermode's mother dies, and though the son dutifully goes to the Isle of Man to do the necessary, he must soon return to the Encounter mess...

...It may be that happy autobiog-raphers, the ones who cheerfully tell all, must also be slightly mad...

...And why would any species of good writing militate against truthfulness...

...All around was good Wordsworthian material, sea and mountain, the annual delights of gorse and heather, the dense summer fogs and howling autumn gales...

...A favorably evoked character is identified only as Paul...

...My only problem is that while I see the connection between Lord Northcliffe and Mammon, I fail to see that between English literature and God...

...In an autobiography you are expected to relate your life...

...We learn in passing that this partner had been a student at Radcliffe, and are free to conjecture that she is American, and that she had been in one of Kermode's classes at Harvard...

...it brings in two famous professors of English, and does not seem in any way to contravene the truth...

...In Encounter, a column by a bibulous Welshman elicits a libel suit from Conor Cruise O'Brien that the magazine, and more specifically Kermode, loses...

...And there is that jocular modesty, possibly genuine, but so persistent as to feel increasingly forced, as in "I took up Italian, under the instruction...

...The author is discreet not only about himself, but about others too...

...At a Carnegie Hall concert he is "astonished by the playing of the wrong national anthem," and by "Dimi-tri Mitropoulos, who used no baton and twitched remarkably...

...Another maze of qualifiers...

...He then does give us some vague notion of his two wives, anyway—the censorious beauty and the wild one—and promptly proceeds to exalt the Shandian pleasure of being able to sleep diagonally in one's own bed...

...There now...

...We hear of the rude response by Graham Hough, one of Kermode's colleagues and friends, to a lecture by George Steiner (how I wish this were quoted...

...Indeed, I drank wine in celebration of his wedding and continue to take comfort from this connection with true fame...

...Frank Kermode has published scholarly and critical works of genuine merit, and rates fully-deserved entries in Reader s Encyclopedia and other respected handbooks...

...Old age, and a mild but inappeasable addiction to alcohol, restores the fat...

...No explanation...

...The middle, and meatiest, part of the book, "My Mad Captains," a takeoff on Antony and Cleopatra's "my sad captains," concerns the five years Kermode spent in the wartime Royal Navy, and the more or less demented officers he served under...

...The passage is no less than a metaphysical poem in prose, a conceit elaborated with the wit (in both the old and new senses) of a John Donne, about whom Kermode has cogently written elsewhere...

...A bit later on, Kermode allows that "nothing of higher-level significance could possibly be inferred from my dull days over dull books, my dull thoughts, my sadness at the very idea of myself...

...It accounts for my failures or half-failures as husband and parent, for some fairly stately academic degringolades, for much time and spirit wasted in epochs of unease...

...You can lie or omit important facts in every kind of writing, good or bad...

...Is suspecting one's incompetence really the worst thing...

...Here were men whose achievements one could never hope to equal...

...We come to a reference to Shaw's book on socialism as one "I should have to list, in the improbable event of somebody requiring me to do so, among the forces that shaped me, insofar as I can claim shape...

...It was even hard to say where I lived...

...What are we to do with that parenthesis...

...For lodging a minor complaint against his Captain, he is "simply removed from the scene" and shipped to the U.S.A...

...Still, we do get a sense of how delinquent an administration and one's colleagues can be, and how much the state of studies suffers thereby: A committee initiated by Kermode "found it was quite possible for a student to spend three years in Cambridge without ever having been supervised by a teacher directly employed by the university or even (in some extreme cases) by a college lecturer...

...What reticence...

...Yet even in this context, Kermode prudishly refuses to quote a limerick that he assures us has stayed with him forever...

...He employs or promotes, among others, David Lodge and A. S. Byatt...

...In any event, we are afforded some colorful details of Manx life, and a feeling that, shamed as he felt by his son's ineptitude, Jack loved him because "loving people you know intimately has to be consistent with your finding them infuriating in all sorts of ways...

...At the end of the chapter comes an unpleasant lapse when, apropos of an unspecified voice heard in moments of pleasure, there pops up this: "Nous nous arretons quelquefois au milieux [sic] de nos jeuxpour ecouter sa voir...

...Or, for that matter, Connecticut or Massachusetts, New York or New Hampshire...

...They have been positively received in both academic and more general intellectual circles...

...Neither, however, is a memoir that carries decorum to the point of Grundyism...

...The final, or postwar, period itself breaks into three chapters, entitled with significant understatement "The Rest," "Incomplete" and "Errors," followed by a tiny coda, "The Flight...

...Finally, he rises to the pinnacle as co-editor (with Melvin Lasky, and succeeding Stephen Spender) of the prestigious magazine Encounter, allegedly unaware that it and its international sister journals were sponsored by the CIA...

...Well, if one can only write about what one is doing as one writes, the possibilities of autobiography would be rather seriously restricted...

...Yet what can possibly be wrong with perceiving, as one looks backward, an order in a human life...

...Herewith Kermode's epiphany: "Looking the part while not being quite equal to it seems to be something I do rather well...

...The coming of war with its possibility of imminent death is clearly a powerful aphrodisiac, but we are given only a few hints and no details...

...Kermode tells us that "1939-40 marks the brief epoch of my omnipotence," but he does not sufficiently explain, elaborate or illustrate...

...It is pleasant to think that at 95 or so he is still enjoying his retirement, having missed 28 years of worsening academic weather...

...I have no idea whose voice this is, or where this French quotation (if it is a quotation) is taken from, let alone what its function here might be other than showing off...

...This evidently refers to lectureships in America, but why those disparate London addresses, especially since we are told: "Yet it was the only period of my life when I felt, perhaps only imagined I felt, in charge of it...

...Kermode is on the toilet when his ship, now in a convoy to North Africa, first sees action...

...and mail arrived in sporadic heaps, so that "you could follow the course of love from longing to desertion in one batch of letters...

...That is good writing...

...it may have its uses but they are not the uses of the truth, only of serviceable approximation...

...His mother was a farm girl who had been a waitress, and instilled in her first-born a sense of deference he came rather to regret...

...His father unloaded ships with one or two assistants...

...Kermode, however, is not...

...It is only on page 245—less than 20 from the end—that we learn of Kermode's King Edward VII Professorship at Cambridge, and even then Sir Frank begins with his vacating it in 1982, then works back to his obtaining it in 1973...

...in the way drunken drivers feel in charge of their vehicles...

...Thus the book ends with a coda that is, so to speak, a hymn to qualification by a supreme qualifier...

...As has been said about W. P. Ker (who preceded him by a good many years at University College, London), "his writings do not startle or waylay...

...A curiously in-between kind of place, this autonomous possession of the British Crown is in many ways closer to the Continent and, in some ways, self-governing...

...There is a Celtic Manx language, and there was one famous, now forgotten Manx writer, Sir Hall Caine...

...His early Romantic Image, where he addressed problems of romanticism and symbolism on both sides of the Channel, with particularly interesting comments on dance, augured well...

...Invariably, just when you try to write off Kermode as a hopeless equivocator, along comes a passage of compelling insight and powerful expression...

...It is here that he encountered the phrase "Not entitled," meaning the docking of your fortnightly pay for various misdemeanors, as well as its slang synonym "northeaster," which could refer also to any ill wind that blew trouble your way...

...The Sierra spent much time in Reykjavik trying to lay unlayable antisubmarine cables, "as lightless winter followed nightless summer" (nicely put...

...These deviations from fact occur even when there is apparently nothing to be gained by them...

...When to be competitive would now be ridiculous, I still rather envy, among the dwindling company of my contemporaries, those who remain, or seem to remain, slim and clear-eyed, age-defiant, tomb-defiant, as ever easy and bold with women...

...We read about an academic andjournalistic career, but right off are apprised of the impossibility of doing an autobiography...

...Our quasi-memorialist concludes by telling us about the statue of Diana given him by friends, and now presiding over his otherwise "commonplace" Cantabrigian house and garden...

...given a clearly defined alternative," he had "almost always, for what seemed at the time powerful and virtuous reasons, chosen wrongly...

...no editor is quite capable of the celestial observations needed to correct it...

...moreover, they quite often killed themselves, or spent months in the local hospital being put together, wooing the nurses with tenderly expressed obscenities in Spanish or Italian...

...Half of that time was put in on the undistinguished H.M.S...

...Oh, the teasing vagueness of it...

...For instance, he describes the English faculty at the University of Manchester as comprising "an alcoholic and one or two slackers, which is about the normal proportion...

...Along with the more athletic kids, Frank worshiped the motorcyclists who came to the island to compete in the Tourist Trophy races...

...After singing the praises of Roland Barthes, Kermode comes out against structuralism, nicely having it both ways...

...But they counted for less than the memory of those leathered heroes, who hurled themselves on their beautifully smelly machines round the dangerous corners, through the mists and over the mountains...