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.
