Pleasing Myself: From Beowulf to Philip Roth - Hardcover

Kermode, Frank

3.71

21 ratings by Goodreads

9780713995183: Pleasing Myself: From Beowulf to Philip Roth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713995181 ISBN 13: 9780713995183

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2001

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Kermode himself has sometimes said that much of his best work has been done at shorter length, in the essays he has written on a very wide range of subjects for literary journals of one kind or another. Pleasing Myself brings together the best of these pieces from the last decade, on topics as diverse as Donne, Yeats, Howard Hodgkin, gnosticism, the sea and money, as well as further thoughts on Shakespeare. Each of them is concise and entertaining, and has something original or pithy to say about its subject. They will bring as much pleasure to their readers as Kermode unashamedly admits the writing of them brought to the author.

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Review:

Sir Frank Kermode is the grand old man of English letters, and in Pleasing Myself he gathers together a collection of some of his finest literary journalism published between 1990 and 2000. Kermode reflects on the dying art of the journalistic review essay, which is "in my view a satisfactory genre, for the writer can be moderately expansive and please himself, as well as moderately expansive and willing to please". The pleasure for Kermode is that "I educate myself in public, which I take to be the reviewer's privilege". What follows are 29 elegantly written reviews of everything from Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf to Philip Roth's "splendidly wicked book", Sabbath's Theater. Kermode admires WB Yeats and TS Eliot as poets, quarrels with the same Eliot and William Empson as critics, worries over the philosophy of Russell and Ayer, admires the paintings of Jack Yeats and Howard Hodgkin, castigates American New Historicism as "a bloodless ballet of social practices", and wonders "if money is a kind of poetry". Pleasing Myself is characterised by Kermode's endorsement of Empson's belief that "there was a right and a wrong moment to bring theory into the business of intelligent reading, and that the professionals chose the wrong one". Kermode is never guilty of choosing his moments badly, although some readers might find that Pleasing Myself is an interesting but rather self-absorbed summary of what Kermode has been asked to review over the last 10 years. --Jerry Brotton

Synopsis:

Frank Kermode has a strong claim to be Britain's most distinguished literary critic. Over the course of a long career, he has written on a enormous variety of English literature, most recently William Shakespeare's plays. This collection should be of keen interest to lovers of that literature, and also to those interested in post-war British intellectual life. For as much as these essays exemplify the tension, the patience and the insight of a great critic, in their defense of proportion and clarity they are also works of ethical importance.

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