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Bringing it home to Uncle Willie

Frank Kermode, 6 May 1982

Joseph Conrad: A Biography 
by Roger Tennant.
Sheldon Press, 276 pp., £12.50, January 1982, 0 85969 358 9
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Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature 
by George Jefferson.
Cape, 350 pp., £12.50, April 1982, 0 224 01488 9
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The Edwardian Novelists 
by John Batchelor.
Duckworth, 251 pp., £18, February 1982, 0 7156 1109 7
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The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism 
by Allon White.
Routledge, 190 pp., £12, August 1981, 0 7100 0751 5
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... different ways: one of them is simply to juxtapose the popular novels of the day with Henry James’s Prefaces, then in progress. Another is to recall Conrad’s hatred of the public, and all the talk of new techniques, of an ideal novel that might, as Flaubert had wished, be ‘about’ nothing at all, which would not please Uncle Willie. Among ...

If Goofy Could Talk

Frank Cioffi, 6 April 1995

When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals 
by Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy.
Cape, 268 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 0 224 03554 1
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The Hidden Life of Dogs 
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
Weidenfeld, 148 pp., £12.50, May 1994, 0 297 81461 3
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The Tribe of Tiger 
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.99, October 1994, 0 297 81508 3
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... being slaughtered to those of the victims of the Holocaust, and of a steer being spared to Anne Frank being spared. They also suggest that there might be an equivalent of Yad Va Shem’s Avenue of Righteousness among the whales: ‘Perhaps whales sing sagas of great acts of sacrifice by whale cows of days gone by.’ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who is a ...

Beware of shallowness

James Wood, 7 July 1994

Art & Lies 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 224 pp., £14.99, June 1994, 0 224 03145 7
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... the style. Her later books are too often merely glib. In Written on the Body, we encounter Crazy Frank: ‘I had a boyfriend once called Crazy Frank. He had been brought up by midgets although he himself was over six feet tall. He loved his adoptive parents and used to carry them one on each shoulder.’ No real current ...

Convenient Death of a Hero

Arnold Rattenbury, 8 May 1997

Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944 
by E.P. Thompson.
Merlin/Stanford, 120 pp., £12.95, December 1996, 0 85036 457 4
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... to a high military officer of a Warsaw Pact country, then watch it.’ On 31 May 1944, Major Frank Thompson, wearing the British uniform that should have protected him, was captured along with the Bulgarian Partisans to whom he was attached, near Likatova, north of Sofia, found guilty at a staged trial, and publicly shot on 5 June. His bearing throughout ...

It’s the worst!

Ange Mlinko: Frank O’Hara’s Contradictions, 3 November 2022

Meditations in an Emergency 
by Frank O’Hara.
Grove, 52 pp., £12.99, March, 978 1 61185 656 9
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... Idon't care what Wystan says,’ Frank O’Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch. ‘I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue ...

Voyagers

James Paradis, 18 June 1981

Sir Joseph Banks 
by Charles Lyte.
David and Charles, 248 pp., £10.50, October 1980, 0 7153 7884 8
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The Heyday of Natural History: 1820-1870 
by Lynn Barber.
Cape, 320 pp., £9.50, October 1980, 9780224014489
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A Vision of Eden 
by Marianne North.
Webb and Bower, 240 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 906671 18 3
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... in 1788 around Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert ...

A Little of this Honey

Frank Kermode, 29 October 1987

Oscar Wilde 
by Richard Ellmann.
Hamish Hamilton, 632 pp., £15, October 1987, 0 241 12392 5
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... not to attempt it. For, as he saw it, everything that could be said had already been said – by Frank Harris and others, including Shaw himself; and although Wilde was ‘incomparably great as a raconteur, and as a personality ... these points cannot be reproduced.’ There is obviously some truth in this; we can hardly imagine what it must have been like ...

Marshy Margins

Frank Kermode, 1 August 1996

The True Story of the Novel 
by Margaret Anne Doody.
Rutgers, 580 pp., $44.95, May 1996, 0 8135 2168 8
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... Seven Gables and The Portrait of a Lady, or for that matter between Daphnis and Chloe and Ulysses. James admitted that there was no definite boundary between novel and romance, but he knew that in such extreme cases there was no problem telling one from the other. Of course you can argue that there is realism in Longus, and myth in ...

My Man

Frank Kermode, 2 January 1997

Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus 
by William Klassen.
SCM, 238 pp., £12.95, June 1996, 0 334 02636 9
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... word means ‘betray’. Yet of the 44 times paradidomi occurs in connection with Judas, the King James Bible erroneously translates it as ‘betray’ on all but four occasions. So a single mistranslation has done much to perpetuate the idea that Judas was a traitor, made him a scapegoat instead of a participant in the action of ‘saving ...

Power-Seeker

Frank Kermode, 12 October 1989

Bernard Shaw. Vol. II: The Pursuit of Power 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 422 pp., £18, September 1989, 0 7011 3350 3
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... included Yeats, with whom, despite their antithetical temperaments, he did theatre business, Henry James, another unkindred spirit, Tolstoy another, Strindberg another, and, nearer home, Gilbert Murray and the lecherous, contentious and extremely able Wells). He worked heroically to keep the Court Theatre going, to overthrow the stage censorship, to educate ...

Under threat

Frank Kermode, 21 June 1984

Tributes: Interpreters of our Cultural Tradition 
by E.H. Gombrich.
Phaidon, 270 pp., £17.50, April 1984, 0 7148 2338 4
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... perfect instance of the truth of the Warburgian position that in scholarship, as – according to James – in life, relations stop nowhere. In its more intimate way it is as striking a performance as the Huizinga lecture. The memorial address on Frances Yates is affectionate and delicate, but too brief, not for its occasion but for a book in which it keeps ...

The Sacred Cause of Idiom

Frank Kermode: Lady Gregory, 22 January 2004

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 127 pp., £7.99, September 2003, 0 330 41993 5
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... books in his excellent library and met at his table such great men as Browning, Tennyson and Henry James. Gregory was regarded as a fair landlord, and it has been conjectured that this regrettably unusual reputation was later responsible for Coole getting off so lightly in the desperate days of the Civil War. He believed in Catholic emancipation, thinking it ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
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... a table convivially cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed ...

Canons

Frank Kermode, 2 February 1984

Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism 
by James Barr.
Oxford, 181 pp., £13, June 1983, 0 19 826323 6
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Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth 
by Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock.
Cambridge, 170 pp., £15, September 1983, 0 521 25491 4
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... row going on among the professionals who deal with the real thing. This powerfully written book by James Barr is for the most part a polemic against a new wave of Biblical criticism called by its proponents ‘canonical criticism’, and to get the hang of Barr’s book one needs some idea of what he is attacking. Canonical criticism is not a one-man ...

Grandiose Moments

Frank Kermode, 6 February 1997

Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Vol. II 
by Max Saunders.
Oxford, 696 pp., £35, September 1996, 0 19 212608 3
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... in interpretation. If you add to the list other works wholly or partly biographical, such as Frank MacShane’s of 1965, and various memoirs such as Douglas Goldring’s South Lodge, you have to agree that Ford the man has been capable of sustaining interest. The record as to his work is not quite so impressive; of his eighty-odd books not many are ...

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