The critical mind of Frank Kermode

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When Bertrand Russell discovered Evelyn Whitehead, the object of his furtive adoration, in agony from an attack of angina, he was suddenly convinced that "the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable ... A sort of mystic illumination possessed me". Quite what Mrs Whitehead must have made of this epiphany, suffering as she was from a more immediately unendurable kind of heartache, is not on record. But then Russell had to excess a facility for pleasing himself.

Fortunately for us, and in spite of his title, Frank Kermode doesn't suffer from egomania; he soon takes Russell to task for his perjurious brand of self-indulgence. Pleasing Myself, impressive for its range and fluency, bears witness to the lives and writings of many characters Kermode knew personally.

The pieces collected in this successor to The Uses of Error appeared in the course of the past decade: most were written for the London Review of Books. Kermode finds the excursive review-essay a congenial form, occupying a middle ground between the reviled academy's unwieldy commentaries and the slender proportions of the newspaper article. Another benefit was the chance to tackle the "extra-curricular" subjects of painting and philosophy, to "educate (himself) in public".

The first three essays (on Beowulf, WB Yeats and TS Eliot) are slightly disappointing: consistent in their advocacy of literary criticism, they are curiously hands-off in practice. In view of Kermode's complaint about Eliot's Clark Lectures ("too few instances of close literary criticism"), it is a shame that his aptly-chosen quotations fail to elicit more comment, especially since the piece on Shakespeare's corrections is "critical" in Dr Johnson's sense of the word: "exact; nicely judicious; accurate; diligent."

An essay on Marianne Moore is at one point vulnerable to the same objection as Kermode's claim in 1964 that Shakespeare was enamoured of the "processes of freely associative thought", which "have nothing to do with schemes". He remarks of Moore's The Steeple-Jack (a poem Eliot admired) that the "pattern" of its line lengths is "arbitrary". How arbitrary can a pattern be? It is true that the lines vary considerably in length. Yet the word "formal" in the stanza he quotes ("with waves as formal as the scales/on a fish") seems there, at least in part, to caution against regarding the ebb and flow of these lines, however they may appear, as the effect of chance. A later review cites Jonathan Raban's observation that waves which seem unruly from a boat look composed from the vantage-point of a cliff. One kind of criticism might propose that we, as readers, are in the boat, while the author presides cliff-top.

But should an author's thoughts and intentions be accorded such pre-eminence? The question comes up in the second essay on Empson, of whom Kermode says that he spent 40 years "explaining ... that the purpose of criticism was to follow the movement of the author's mind". He doesn't tell us whether he agrees with this approach, and can sound vaguely sympathetic towards the idea of replacing "the author" with Foucault's "author function". Yet, writing on the Romantics, he finds the idea that poems revised over the years might not be the products of one distinct, recognisable individual "pretty appalling", and is not afraid to introduce a wealth of biographical detail, frequently derived from acquaintance, to his own commentaries. My only complaint is that it's not clear quite what the relevance of this biography is to the textual criticism Kermode evidently favours in theory, and intermittently practises.

Not surprisingly, Shakespeare and his critics prompt the best responses. The most robust and cogent piece is on "new historicism". We are on familiar ground here, since the school received a drubbing in Kermode's last book, Shakespeare's Language.

But it is still refreshing to encounter unabashed distaste for the pervasive critical emphasis on things allegedly hitherto neglected and excluded: Kermode's remarks might be applied to the current vogue for writing about "the Other", a term so overused that it now means virtually nothing.

This is a stimulating book which gets better and better as it progresses. As Kermode remarks of John Jones's Shakespeare at Work, it deserves to be "read for pleasure, and then reread to pick quarrels about details" - usually about the ones that are missing.