Puzzles and Epiphanies (Routledge Revivals)

Essays and Reviews 1958-1961

Sir Frank Kermode

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138841451
• eBook ISBN: 9781317554271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book, first published in 1962, is a collection of twenty-four essays written by Frank Kermode between 1958 and early 1961, and are all concerned with criticism and fiction. Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 includes essays on the works of James Joyce, William Golding, E. M. Forster, and J. D. Salinger, amongst many others. This book is ideal for students of literature.

PUZZLES AND EPIPHANIES

Essays and Reviews 1958–1961

by

FRANK KERMODE

First published 1962

by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane

London, E.C. 4

Printed in Great Britain

by Cox & Wyman, Ltd

London, Fakenham and Reading

© Frank Kermode 1962

Second impression (with corrections) 1963

No part of this book may be reproduced

in any form without permission from

the publisher, except for the quotation

of brief passages in criticism

To KARL MILLER MELVIN LASKY STEPHEN SPENDER begetters of these ensuing

CONTENTS

• PREFACE
• I POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
• II ON DAVID JONES
• III THE MYTH-KITTY
• IV HUNTER AND SHAMAN
• V COUNTER-REVOLUTION
• VI SECOND NATURE (Paul Valéry)
• VII EDMUND WILSON AND MARIO PRAZ
• VIII NORTHROP FRYE
• IX SILLIES
• X THE ONE ORDERLY PRODUCT (E. M. Forster)
• XI PUZZLES AND EPIPHANIES (James Joyce)
• XII A SHORT VIEW OF MUSIL
• XIII PASTERNAK
• XIV THE INTERPRETATION OF THE TIMES (Christopher Isherwood and Anthony Powell)
• XV OLD ORDERS CHANGING (Allen Tate and Giuseppe di Lampedusa)
• XVI HENRY MILLER AND JOHN BETJEMAN
• XVII BECKETT, SNOW, AND PURE POVERTY
• XVIII MR. WAUGH’S CITIES
• XIX MR. GREENE’S EGGS AND CROSSES
• XX FIT AUDIENCE (J. D. Salinger)
• XXI MR. WILSON’S PEOPLE
• XXII WILLIAM GOLDING
• XXIII DURRELL AND OTHERS
• XXIV NABOKOV’S BEND SINISTER

Preface

The essays in this book were written between 1958 and early 1961, and are all concerned with modern criticism and fiction. Only the first piece is much changed since its first publication, and that merely because it was abridged for The Partisan Review and here resumes its original length. Comparing these attempts with other essays of the same years on subjects more frequently cultivated by men of my profession, I see that although they are much lighter in tone there is little room for doubt that they can easily be identified as—to borrow an unpleasant expression of Valéry’s—sales baisers du professeur de littérature. The collection itself has the unity imposed upon it by a limited mind of promiscuous habit.

On one of these essays I may allow myself a defensive word. The article on Dr. Zhivago appeared on the day of English publication, and there are certainly better introductions to the book by later writers who can read Russian. But I have included the review simply because it was written before the novel was obscured by storms of irrelevant comment upon its politics, and upon the award of the Nobel Prize to Pasternak. One could see it more steadily at that moment before the storm broke. The other essays on Pasternak were based on earlier works of his which were published here after the success of Dr. Zhivago. The last of them is an obituary notice written for The Spectator. It repeats some points made earlier, but I think with good reason; and I believe we cannot be too often reminded of them.

I am most grateful to my wife and to Mr. Bernard Bergonzi; and to the editors of the following publications for permission to reprint essays which first appeared in their journals: Encounter, The Spectator, The London Magazine, Partisan Review, The Listener, The Review of English Studies, The Review of English Literature, The International Literary Annual,To the editors of Encounter and to Karl Miller, sometime Literary Editor of The Spectator, I owe a special debt, since a large number of these essays were written at their express invitation; and in my dedication I do what I can to show gratitude.

Frank Kermode April, 1961

Note to the Second Impression

my essay on Musil contains a misleading passage, and I take this chance of correcting it. It occurs on p. 100, where I refer to extant parts of The Man Without Qualities not yet translated into English. I now learn from Musil’s translators that the ‘posthumous’ part of the novel in Gesammelte Werke, Bd. I is largely an arbitrary compilation of miscellaneous work-sheets and obsolete drafts. Some of this never had any connexion with Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and the whole in no way represents Musil’s intentions. I am greatly indebted to Miss Eithne Wilkins (Mrs. Ernst Kaiser) for this information. She and her husband are now editing the posthumous material.

Why, with the time, do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange?

Shakespeare

I Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev

DOI: 10.4324/9781315732206-1

diaghilev figures in the title simply as a terminus; he arrived in Paris in 1909, and everybody knows what happened. ’Le rêve de Mallarmé se réalise’, said Ghéon. What dream of Mallarmé? That which found a true theatrical sonority, a stage liberated from cardboard falsities; which emerged from a confluence of the other arts and yet remained, as Wagner did not, theatre. The Ballets Russes demonstrated the correspondence of the arts so wonderfully that in comparison Wagner’s effort was, said Camille Mauclair, ‘une gaucherie barbare’. Diaghilev arrived, not a moment too soon, in response to prayers from both sides of the Channel. One could trace the developments in taste which prepared his reception— not only in the limited sphere of the dance, but in writings on actors (the cult of Duse, for example), in the fashionable admiration for oriental art and theatre, in avant-garde agitation for theatrical reform. In March, 1908, The Mask, a quarterly dedicated to this end and strongly under the influence of Gordon Craig, prayed in its opening editorial for a religion that did not ‘rest upon knowledge nor rely upon the Word’ but rather brought together ‘Music, Architecture, and Movement’ to heal ‘the Evil … which has separated these three Arts and which leaves the world without a belief. The editor can hardly have expected his prayers to be answered so soon—not precisely by the theatrical reforms he had in mind, but by the Russian dancers, prophets of that Concord and Renaissance he so earnestly requested. Havelock Ellis, with his usual wide view, put the situation thus in The Dance of Life (1923): ‘If it is significant that Descartes appeared a few years after the death of Malherbe, it is equally significant that Einstein was immediately preceded by the Russian Ballet.’

Ellis makes Diaghilev a John the Baptist of a ‘classico-mathe-matical Renaissance’, and the notion that this was a renaissance of some kind or other was evidently in the air. However, such credit as is due to its heralds should not all be awarded to the Russian ballet. There was, obviously, Isadora Duncan; but Isadora doesn’t take us to the root of the matter. Where, for my purposes, that lies, I can perhaps suggest in this way: what Camille Mauclair said of Diaghilev was somewhat disloyally said, for he had used almost the same words years before of the American dancer Loïe Fuller. Art, he declared, was one homogeneous essence lying at the root of the diversified arts, not a fusion of them; and Loïe Fuller was it, ‘a spectacle … which defies all definition … Art, nameless, radiant … a homogeneous and complete place … indefinable, absolute … a fire above all dogmas ‘. The language is Mallarméan; as we shall see, it was all but impossible to write of Loïe Fuller otherwise unless you were very naïve. Still, not even Mallar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontmatter 1
• Frontmatter 2
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• I POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
• II ON DAVID JONES
• III THE MYTH-KITTY
• IV HUNTER AND SHAMAN
• V COUNTER-REVOLUTION
• VI SECOND NATURE (Paul Valéry)
• VII EDMUND WILSON AND MARIO PRAZ
• VIII NORTHROP FRYE
• IX SILLIES
• X THE ONE ORDERLY PRODUCT (E. M. Forster)
• XI PUZZLES AND EPIPHANIES (James Joyce)
• XII A SHORT VIEW OF MUSIL
• XIII PASTERNAK
• XIV THE INTERPRETATION OF THE TIMES (Christopher Isherwood and Anthony Powell)
• XV OLD ORDERS CHANGING (Allen Tate and Giuseppe di Lampedusa)
• XVI HENRY MILLER AND JOHN BETJEMAN
• XVII BECKETT, SNOW, AND PURE POVERTY
• XVIII MR. WAUGH’S CITIES
• XIX MR. GREENE’S EGGS AND CROSSES
• XX FIT AUDIENCE (J. D. Salinger)
• XXI MR. WILSON’S PEOPLE
• XXII WILLIAM GOLDING
• XXIII DURRELL AND OTHERS
• XXIV NABOKOV’S BEND SINISTER