The Last Man of Letters: Sir Frank Kermode

And so the last man of letters has gone. The grandfather of British criticism, snowy Abraham of the English faculty, Sir Frank Kermode himself has sailed off into the undiscovered country. With perfect timing he has bid farewell before the blustery brouhaha over university funding becomes anymore squally and severe.

Sir Frank was, and still is, the man for a humanities student. The poster-boy to unite young and old, new-critic and post-structuralist, Renaissance plumage to twentieth-century plainness. That wry, slightly donnish twinkle, so different from the humourless evangelicism of high theorists or dusty old-schoolers, becalmed the soul. When one stumbled and groped through the scholarly woods, grazing knees and barking shins, he was ever the searchlight to guide you through.

Page after page, full stop after full stop, full of wryly amused insights. He embodied what every true teacher, every Professor worth his tweed, should have: curiosity. Zeus-like he gazed down from Olympus and plucked the fruitiest offerings from every school. Life was too short for the sweaty, spittle-flecked polemic and closeted duelling that still bedevils literary lecture theatres. He was both the midwife of theory and the high priest of Literature with a capital L. Resident of the red-brick and the Cambridge college.

The range was quite extraordinary. While others trimmed their sails for ever more anorexic specialisms, Sir Frank chose academic adiposity. Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, the Bible, aesthetics, Yeats…on and on it spirals. And not content with merely the English canon, he dusted down his Greek on arrival at Cambridge and took on the gospels. There were few avenues he didn’t explore, few peaks he hadn’t climbed. In one lifetime he combined three careers: trendy new theorist floating his signifiers with interdisciplinary zest; slippered and cardiganed Cambridge Professor, launching stout defences of the greatest and the good, couched in Forsterian grandeur as a Fellow of Kings College; and, finally, a prolific journalist, stern Cerberus of the review desk, exhaling pages of dizzying, three-headed copy worthy of Hazlitt or Dr Johnson.

National treasureship is an overused accolade. But as humanities academics start adopting the foetal position and hope their mastery of Joyce’s dress sense will keep them employed, he seems a worthy recipient. Amid an age of endless commodification, where the man of letters, the academic-journalist and the Shakespearean with a clause or two on Philip Roth is becoming evermore Arcadian, Sir Frank should be mourned from Peterhouse to Parliament. We shall not see his like again. A true hero. All we can do is weep now he is gone: both tears of grief and tears of envy.

My first acquaintance with poets: Seamus Heaney

This blog was first published on the Palatinate website on 6 August, 2010

There’s really only one thing to do in the Lake District. Walk. To bestir oneself off one’s fleshy rear and sally forth into the undulating bosom of Mother Nature herself. If you come looking for nightlife, for Corinthian excess and the frolics and frivolity of summertime then disappointment awaits. The Lake District has still yet to hear of sunshine, it seems, duffel-coated as always in damp, clingy mist. Shops shut unseasonably early. People tromp and stomp along looking painfully walkerish. Residents bray with a countrified burr and rubberised vowel sounds. You would no more see a Waterstone’s in the middle of Keswick as a branch of Blacks in the middle of Trafalgar Square. Alfred Wainwright is a household name. It is all most unsettling. Walking, climbing and bleating, it seems, is all.

Unless. Unless, of course, one is an eager, daffodil-gazing, soppy-eyed, brow-clasping, pink-shirted sort of cove who knows his Wordsworth from his Southey. The sort of spongy waste-of-space who falls into a swoon at the mere sight of a gentle incline. The nails-on-the-board type irritant for whom family walks are a symptom of bourgeois hegemony and Dad holding the compass merely another example of patriarchal oppression.

For these sorts of pirouetting pests there is another escape route. Another priest-hole into which the unwanted can dive for safety. Dove Cottage has a long history of sheltering those pale, well-dressed sorts who feel breathless at the mere mention of peaks, scaling and crampons.

Dove Cottage is, of course, the home of the arch flower-gazer. The field-skipping fop above all field-skipping fops. Mr William Wordsworth. The most famous Romantic poet and the most famous resident of the Lake District. And now something of a cash cow for town councils who’d barely be able to spot a line of anapaestic tetrameter without the most sympathetic of spectacles. Busses, restaurants and endless books emblazoned with the poor man’s name.

Visiting these things can send you into something of a spin. It is only when eyeing up the place that those myths of lettuce-leaf spinelessness still hovering around Romanticism shatter. You realize what the outdoors and nature must have represented to them, plunged as they were in the late eighteenth century gloom. The roofs were low and windows sparse. The change when Wordsworth and Coleridge blubbed their way through the heaths and heather would have been truly sonnet-worthy, a complete gear-shift from the shadowy enclosure of life indoors. It is all, not to put too fine a point on it, rather intriguing. During the tour we were chatted round by a pony-tailed young neo-Romantic who pointed out Wordsworth’s chair, his travelling case, his bed, the scales of Thomas de Quincey and the washing chest where the pioneer of Romanticism pampered and preened of a morning.

But that wasn’t it. Far from it, indeed: merely an intriguing aperitif. As I pottered aimlessly up from the shop to the museum a trio of elderly folk bobbed up in my wake, led by a large, crinkle-faced fellow accoutred in a pleasingly Gandalfian mackintosh. I snatched a quick glance behind only to jerk slightly. If there is one mane of hair (machined-washed white and carelessly plumed) that all card-carrying Keatsians, all Shelley-spouting spongers would recognize in the dark it was this one. And then they started muttering to themselves. Pure Irish. The low, gravelled, sonorous sound of the greatest living poet in the English language merely yards away from me. Seamus Heaney. Famous Seamus himself!

An intriguing occurrence I thought? Or not…Maybe many of you are sick to death of bumping into Nobel Prize Winners and other Madonnas of the mind. For you it is the oldest of hat. More than likely, perhaps. Some Oxonians probably can’t shake off Geoffrey Hill or feel the faint onset of queasiness as Richard Dawkins rounds the corner, the former Simonyi Professor collaring them irksomely in the danger-spot of North Oxford. For all I know even the word Lucasian still bears unwelcome baggage for a handful of loyal Cantabrigians, eliciting weary moans at the thought of Professor Hawking espying them over the shelves of Border’s popular science section.

For me, however, it was something of an occasion. I thought it impolite to stare and so continued on my way while Heaney was welcomed warmly by a member of the Dove Cottage staff. I was clearly the trendsetter, however, as he proceeded to follow me into the small museum room. A nervous silence reigned. I commandeered the left hand side while Dr Heaney pulled up a chair on the right.

Even now I don’t think I alone imagined a faint unease on the great man’s face, the slight quiver of the upper lip or nervy movements of the hands. Understandable, I suppose. As an avid reader of the two small-press magazines my poetic attempts have graced thus far, he’s probably realized for some time that the game is up. He will have read the free-verse sprawl of ‘Park’, my debut masterpiece, and choked back tears of envy at the combustible new aesthetic initiated by what many have called the Dunciad of the third millennium: none other than my sprightly, Betjeman-esque lyric skip ‘Mr Chaucer’ topped off with some Eliotic border work.

In fact, thinking back, it was almost ceremonial the way he squirmed uneasily in his chair, readying himself for his imminent dethroning as the greatest poet in the language. His successor standing yards away, Bolingbroke enacting a poetic toppling of Richard II. At one point I thought about congratulating him on ‘Digging’, perhaps mentioning how much I’d learnt from North, but then realized this was no time for letting one’s guard down. In the Bloomian, Oedipal struggle for poetic supremacy little mercy can be shown. I rebuffed his grandfatherly smiles. I knew him not, misreading every whimpering cough and unsaid plea. If pushed, I suppose one might call it the baton-passing moment for post-post-modern poetry. Both of us, sipping from the Wordsworthian fount: he the John the Baptist presaging my arrival.

But I couldn’t keep it up. Just as I thought of leaving, I relented. I swallowed my pride whole for one last time and went to ask him for his autograph. He smiled, benevolently but with obvious sadness, scribbling his name, date and location. Then, for a few precious seconds, we locked in eye-to-eye: a Marlowe-Shakespeare, Amadeus-Mozart sort of a moment. As he handed back the card it seemed as if he was handing me the key to something more, to be amongst the poets truly.

I wandered out, clasping it to my breast and knowing with a full stop here and a heroic couplet there the peaks of Parnassus could be mine. But then came an alarm bell, a dreaded siren call, the sight of walking boots and jackets being unloaded from the car: symptoms the only diagnosis of which was another enforced walk en famille.

AIas, I wasn’t built for such things, and so, to this day, all I know is that somewhere among the gauze and grass, the heathery peaks and crags of the Lake District, lies the mislaid key to poetic immortality. Lost for a generation. It seems, perhaps, that I’m not genetically primed for such literary feats after all. Some future Wordsworth more fit for duty than I will find it couched beneath the rocky stubble and finally hear the call of Calliope.

As for me…at least I can say I once met Seamus Heaney

Award ceremonies: no country for discriminating men

This article was first published in Palatinate (issue 717, Tuesday 16th March, 2010)

Award ceremonies bemuse me. Not the most profound bemusement, I admit, in this time of worrying political bowel movements or world famine, but a bemusement nonetheless. Let me explain.

Some years ago I happened to be in London on the evening of the 2003 Baftas. I’d been granted an afternoon of freedom from boarding school, and stumbled out into the starry mainland of our beloved capital. And there was the red carpet, the panicky organizers scampering about importantly and an impressive collection of radioed and ear-pieced bouncers perfecting a look that could only be catalogued as ‘moody stare’.

Much to my disappointment, I couldn’t wait the three hours until the thing was due to begin. But the taste was enough. It was power, glamour: the crowds patiently serried in against the security railings, trying to nail that high C on the second movement of their symphony of whoops and wails. All waiting for the immortals to descend from their Olympian heights. Perfectly enchanting.

It had all the finery and glitz one could ever want from London. The cool southerly breeze bristled with a very British gentility. It was a night that demanded tuxedos and dresses more expensive than most third-world defence budgets. It promised style. In fact, the flashy showiness of the red carpet as a whole is wonderful. It’s the apogee, the apex, the Parnassian peak.

But…and I fear it’s a rather big but. Of almost Susan Boyle-like proportions.

The fun plunges into disaster when the ceremony begins. The mood fribbles and leaks away. All the end-of-term excitement is replaced by the tedium of a last assembly where even the Head of Physics seems determined to deliver a Marlovian soliloquy.

Baftas 2010 was no exception. Poor Jonathan Ross looked like he was trying to do breaststroke in a pool full of yoghurt. Out he flopped, bouncing around with his usual tiggerish enthusiasm only to be met by a roomful of marble-faced lip-zippers. And Vanessa Redgrave! Her speech was almost Ciceronian in its labyrinths and curls. Few word-users other than Shakespeare can claim to be for all time, but that night Redgrave’s pleonasm nearly got her there.

And here is where my burgeoning bemusement was conceived. The product of a rather unfortunate encounter between a free Saturday night and a broken remote. Put simply: I cannot understand the point of televising award ceremonies. Not the Baftas, Brits, NME awards, British soap awards, National Television, South Bank Show or Spectator gong-givings.  Nor, blasphemous though it may be, even the sybaritic, Sandra-Bullock-speeching Oscars.

The school simile seems appropriate. Because award ceremonies are exactly like the worst kind of school prize-giving. Ties for sport, cups for academic achievement, all manner of badges, bouquets and banquets for effort and trying-your-best. Something like a graduation ceremony, one imagines. And anyone who has endured, screamed and snored through any of the above knows that they are only fun if you are receiving a prize.

Nothing is better, in fact. The only prize I’ve ever received was at the age of eleven. For effort. Few moments since can surpass the heady ecstasy of tearing open the exclusive, for-my-eyes-only letter informing me of the school’s decision; the cloying mock humility about how touching it was just to have some recognition after those long, dark years of being neglected by the staff room; and then that bright, golden Wednesday afternoon when all my friends headed off for PE while I and a select group of other effortful and earnest pupils were bussed to the local book shop and allowed to choose our prizes.

Magical. As was the day itself. I’ve rarely been cleaner, so scrubbed and flannelled by my parents who were determined I out-gleamed all others on the assembly stage. My hair was combed, my shoes shined. There was the rather tricky socks-down versus socks-up dilemma (we were still forced to wear shorts at this stage) and the unnervingly intricate choreography – walk up, smile, right hand out, on no account let it be the left hand, shake hands, chat, walk off.

When the time arrived we ‘prize winners’ were marshalled through to the reserved front row. I gave a cursory wave to the rest of my class who were sectioned off at the back of the hall, and then ran through a few versions of the oh-not-another-prize look.

And the whole thing was perfect. For me.

However, I imagine it sent most others – the unworthy non-winners – into therapy. And the same, I fear, is true of award ceremonies. The only person who enjoys the Bafta for Best Editing or Oscar for Best Live Action Short is the winner, and perhaps their partner or parents.

I’m not much of a Reithian, but surely sitting through the cinematic equivalent of an end-of-term assembly is not the stuff of licence fees and bracing public broadcasting. We should demand more from TV. And not be content with such dross just because it has a few early-evening hopes that the rest of the night doubtlessly fails to deliver.