Frank Kermode

Fifty-odd years ago I was asked to review a book about Shakespeare by an aged professor who claimed that a career spent largely in teaching Shakespeare gave him a right to have his final say on the subject. This notion I thought grossly self-indulgent There seemed to be little reason to believe that at his age he could suddenly have found anything interesting to say. And there surely were enough books on Shakespeare already, many of them dull, many of them silly, without the addition of another of which the primary motive was vanity and an understandable fear of oblivion. My editor, detecting a breach of decorum, declined to publish my review. I thought this deference cowardly; I have now changed my opinion. I did so when I caught myself thinking that I had some vaguely apprehended right or duty to produce a book about Shakespeare, and needed to persuade myself that this was not a delusion.

William Sherlock’s Practical Discourse concerning Death, published in 1689 and known familiarly as Sherlock on Death, was a bestseller in its day and long after. Dr Johnson commended Sherlock’s style as ‘very elegant’. There was a long tradition of ‘how to’ books about dying, and, as his fuller title suggests, Sherlock was offering a modern approach to the problem. I thought of Sherlock when reading this brief new book by Adam Phillips, which might well be entitled Phillips on Death, and could justly be described as very elegant.‘

When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family. Avowedly happier with the lives of others than with his own, he remains as close as the circumstance permits to the condition of invisible watcher. Biography, he says, had formerly provided an ‘exit from myself’, and here he is, still, as far as is consistent with the product being autobiography, ‘stepping from my own life into other people’s where there seemed to be so much more going on’. Although he writes about his experiences at prep school, at Eton, as an articled clerk, a temporary officer and an aspiring writer, he does so almost apologetically, the lives of his relations having so much more going on in them.‘

Claire Messud’s first novel, When the World Was Steady, published five years ago, won praise from critics who know what they’re talking about – for example, Penelope Fitzgerald, writing in the LRB. It was a book that showed an easy technical control, an ability to do the things novelists have to do, and in so young a writer these skills were reasonably thought to presage later and more ambitious performances. She seemed to know how all manner of people talked, whether in dull offices and suburban religious groups or in far more exotic settings. Rich racketeers and the petty crooks attending them, people eagerly taking dreary jobs (‘35-hour week at £4.83 an hour’), gay clergymen, they all sounded right. The story of two middle-aged sisters, one staying at home with a formidable mother, the other long since emigrated to Australia but now divorced and wandering about Bali, created all sorts of opportunities.’‘