P.N. Furbank

One jibs nowadays, perhaps as a result of reading Foucault, at the once-cherished notion of an ‘age’ – such an ‘age’ as one might be tempted to paint a ‘portrait’ of. For those brought up on ages, Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses was a shock, locating as it did Colbert and Cantillon, the Port-Royal Logique and the Encyclopédie, within one and the same episteme. (But, as Foucault was quick to point out, this was merely one possible dissection: there were many others he might equally well have performed.) The concept of an age seems riddled with fallacies, and especially perhaps when applied to the French mid-18th century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment. This latter name ought to be harmless enough, unlike that thoroughly obfuscating modern one, ‘The Enlightenment’ (which must, one supposes, stem from a mistranslation of the German definite article). All the same, that tag ‘The Age of Enlightenment’ can soon become a nuisance. It is a tendentious phrase, like ‘the true Church’, or ‘phlogiston’ – a phrase which many might have used in the 1760s, for their own intricate purposes. Thus a historian studying how these loaded phrases were used can hardly afford to use them himself, incorporating them as neutral terms into his own professional vocabulary.’’

It was the foible of the heroes of Italo Svevo’s novels to wake up each morning believing that, through their own striving, some splendid vita nuova might have begun and they might at last have become a quite different person; and it was the theme of their cheerfully Schopenhauerian creator that this was the most unchanging thing about them. (As it was, one might add, the most unchanging thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who not only went on expecting to be transformed, but managed to be so – and this without much reference to age. I come fresh from reading Ray Monk’s enthralling biography of Wittgenstein, a man who lived for change and through change and put all his genius into it.’

The Second World War, writes Ronald Blythe in the Introduction to Private Worlds, precipitated the ‘last great avalanche of private correspondence’. Thanks to the Education Act of 1918, it was greatest such avalanche there had ever been, and went with the most furious appetite for books – any kind of books, but Penguins for preference – and with the greatest impulsion to try ‘writing’ in the other sense too. For dozens of good reasons, cultural as well as military, that kind of war is not going to happen again. But the letters and diaries and efforts at fiction it inspired have survived in huge quantities; and from private sources, and the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum, Ronald Blythe has assembled an expressive collage, which is at the same time a meditation – just ‘one look’ at and ‘one assessment’ of, he says, an inexhaustible subject.’

Frank Kermode having now become ‘Sir Frank’, it seems a good moment to take a look back over his remarkable career: though by no means because that career is at an end, for he is producing at such a rate just now that it is quite a job to keep up with him. Very broadly, one can think of his career so far as falling into four stages. The first stage, from Romantic Image (1957) to Puzzles and Epiphanies (1962), was very much imbued with Symboliste theory, and Kermode was ready to go along with the notions of the autonomy and organic unity of the work of art (and with the word ‘art’ itself) and with the identity of form and meaning. Merely – though of course it was not a small ‘merely’ – he argued against the hermetic tendencies of Symboliste aesthetics. He praised Yeats for insisting that poetry was made for ordinary human beings and for ignoring the forbidding notice ‘No through road to action’, and he contested the idea, implicit in Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’, that to embrace Donne you had to give up Milton. It was a stage in which, not for the last time, Kermode offered himself as a reconciler and peacemaker. Romantic Image, moreover, in the way it pursued a certain figure, that of the Dancer, through innumerable avatars, anticipated the long vistas of his later work.’

That the ‘Great War’ is still deeply disturbing to the imagination came home to one last year, when a First World War tank stood on display in the forecourt of the British Museum. One reacted to the sight with a shudder of horror, and also an obscure resentment – at the idea, which seemed to be implied, that we must now proudly regard this appalling object as part of our ‘heritage’.’