When I arrived in England in my teens in the late 1950s, eager to discover all I could about English and European art, literature and music, I took good reviewing for granted. Philip Toynbee was writing in the Observer, soon to be joined by A. Alvarez, while the back pages of the New Statesman regularly ran pieces by David Sylvester and Wilfred Mellers. I can still recall the excitement of reading Toynbee on Claude Simon's L'Herbe: I'd never heard of the author before, he wrote, but I salute a master. He then deftly compared the novel to Proust and Faulkner and sent me off eager to buy the book, no matter how hard up I was.
What we expected, and got, from these critics was a personal response emerging from a deep awareness of the needs of the present and the possibilities inherent in the past. They were concerned with what was required now precisely because they had a profound understanding of tradition. They were not academics but informed general readers, listeners, viewers, with a personal stake in the flowering of fiction, poetry, music and art. They could place Simon or Berryman or Stockhausen or Beuys in context and then say why they felt we should pay attention to them.
That was long ago. Today, by and large, reviewers are either academics, who seem to have little feeling for what the present requires, or journalists, whose only world is the world of now and who, therefore, lacking perspective, are at the mercy of fashion.
Frank Kermode stands out as a notable exception. Though he has always struck me as a different bird altogether. There has been a curiosity there, an eagerness to follow up what is new and exciting while always retaining a sense of how it relates to the old. He has travelled the world and wherever he has found himself he has been willing to learn - from theoreticians in France, from Bible scholars in Jerusalem and from poets and novelists everywhere. It is no wonder that he has been friends with so many of the major writers of our time, for he is precisely the champion they need. Now that he has retired he has devoted more time to reviewing and regularly publishes in the London and New York Review of Books leisurely pieces of three to four thousand words on every conceivable topic, from Beowulf to money and from the Bible to the lure of the sea. Some of these have been collected here.
At his best, as in the pieces on poets and on pre-modern topics, Kermode perfectly fulfils the functions of the good reviewer: he is not afraid to be personal, but always in the interests of his subject, as when he recalls the tone of Empson's voice as he read his poetry or conversations with Henry Reed and A.D. Hope; he is deft at placing the works he is dealing with in context and quietly filling us in with the necessary background (he does this quite beautifully and unobtrusively in the Beowulf piece); and he has the ability to sum up in a single apt sentence: "To be finely tuned to poems, while remaining obstinately herself, was her purpose in life," he says of Marianne Moore; "So, despite the passion at the heart of the enterprise there is in the product a certain bleakness," he writes of Empson. Throughout, he is both elegant and well-mannered - the nearest he comes to losing his temper is in this rebuke to a New Historicist: "It seems sad that a scholar who obviously knows how to find things out, and can obviously write, should feel compelled to deal in imaginary trouvailles, and to use this modish jargon." There is no jargon in these pieces; what we hear in every line is the voice of an individual.
But this well-mannered tone and Kermode's evident way with words, allied to the editors' willingness to let him write at length, can be a drawback. Toynbee and Alvarez had only a few hundred words to juggle with, so they made every sentence count. In the latter part of the book, when Kermode moves from poetry and Renaissance themes to fiction and more general topics, he often lacks edge, repeats himself, and, in the end, says nothing very much, though always elegantly.
It also becomes clear that his range is in fact quite limited: though he can be deft in his comparisons where poets are concerned ("Searching the history of English poetry for a writer of comparable national stature (to Yeats) one is driven back to Milton, another apocalyptic revolutionary."), when he writes about William Golding or Philip Roth there is no sense that he sees them (as Toynbee would have done) in the larger context of European and world fiction.
Kermode is in a sense a very English critic of the best sort: alive to the importance of Virgil and Dante, deeply committed to the great English-language poets of the 20th century, but, for all his interest in theory and Midrash, in Barthes and Frye, is only really at home in the world of moral debate which is the ground of the English and American novel, and without any sense of the importance of form or the metaphysical thrust of the European novel. But no one can be everything, and Kermode's gifts are so needed in our impoverished journalistic culture that one can only hope he will go on feeling it worth his while to spend time on the ephemeral art of the reviewer.
Gabriel Josipovici is a novelist and critic. His book, A Life, was published earlier this year