Not Entitled: A Memoir Book

​Dear Professor Kermode
You won't have remembered me, but I was a callow undergraduate at King's when you were King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, and, happily, attached to my college. In a way I regret the adjective 'callow' but it was really an inevitable companion to the noun. And, come to think of it, you might remember me as a C.U. who nonetheless had the nerve naively to approach you to partake in a poetry reading I organised sometime in 1977 or 1978. You drew as I recall the Spenser card: I can hear your diffident-sounding, relaxed, voice declaiming:
"It was to weet the good Sir Satyrane" -
Prof J.A.W. Bennett, really an Oxford man, read the closing stanzas of Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde', and my then girlfriend and I held hands and suffered an authentic frisson:
"O younge fresshe folkes, he or she
In which that love up-groweth with your age" ....

I still can't believe I achieved this coup. Professors were unapproachable, formidable. In fact I felt intimidated by most academics I encountered - you, Lisa Jardine, J.A.W.Bennett, Muriel Bradbrook, even John Barrell. Only Helena Shire, and of course Colin MacCabe, furiously demolishing donnish conventions in his signature donkey jacket, and with whose fate you were later to become involved, felt approachable, even though none of you wore your formidable learning on your sleeves. Compounding this belief was the fact that, as you recall, "I was forbidden to give tutorials, the most important form of teaching". You probably saw Postgrads and Researchers, but not wet-eared Undergrads, and in any case we assumed you would be too busy researching your next book. Under instruction - from whom I can't recall, I don't think it was a printed 'reading list' - we had dutifully trooped off to Heffers at 20 Trinity Street and purchased, int.al., your Renaissance Essays and Modern Essays. I'd never heard of you before my matriculation, but a brief perusal of these volumes was enough to convince me and others that you had, in a phrase not then current, A Brain The Size Of A Planet - had not only read everything, but also everything anyone else had written about everything, and had insightful things to say in a memorable way. Once, I recall, some of us huddled into your rooms in King's for a species of soirée, the principal fascination to us hormonal undergrads being your then partner, and soon-to-be wife, the glamorous Anita. At that time I was unaware that a mild-mannered silvery-haired academic could pull a striking younger blonde American bird. So I guess I did learn something that evening. And, be it added, I learned precisely nothing more on the matter from Not Entitled, which sedulously avoids all discussion of your marriages.

But, I remind myself, this is supposed to be a review of your memoir. It was certainly an eye-opener to discover that you came of working-class origin on the Isle of Man, and had served a torrid young manhood in the Royal Navy. When you're young, all adults seem to have been that way forever, and if asked I'd have assumed you to have been a nice middle-class lad from the Home Counties, clever at school and in due course an Oxbridge First in English Literature. How wrong one can be. Reading on, I was somewhat saddened by your constant self-deprecation and, more, by your mostly unpleasant experience of Cambridge. It should be a truism to note that a pupil's or student's experience of a school or university is likely to be far removed from a teacher's or tutor's, but I still somehow want you to have enjoyed Cambridge as much as I did. My three years reading English at King's from 1975 to 1978 were among the best years of my life. Now the wheel has come full circle, and I find myself at 61 working at a provincial university in a job I don't enjoy, beset by political and personal wrangles, but where I'm sure many students are having a great time and forging lastingly good memories.

So farewell then, Professor Kermode. It is now more than seven years since you passed away, at the age of 91. Your presence in my life was far less fleeting and tangential than mine in yours, but I salute you from afar for your integrity, your fabulous scholarship and the memories of a glimpsed you, bustling along with an armful of papers or even more characteristically, in whites fresh from the squash or tennis court, in the dear dim and dead days of the late 1970s.