A la Kermode

Sir Frank Kermode

Colleague Mark Feeney offers a reflection on the contributor's note --the sentence or two, usually at the foot of a book-review or other article, though sometimes on a separate page, which tells the reader something about the writer. Mark writes:

The history of the contributor's note offers few, if any, examples of memorable writing. Situated at the intersection of ego and resume, it serves a very useful function _ but does it so functionally.

Joe Friday presides as tutelary deity over the contributor's note and its just-the-facts imperative: who (the writer's name), what (his or her most recent or best-known book), and, sometimes, where (an academic or journalistic affiliation). That's it. Forget how and why _ or anything that might take up more than two or three lines of type. Even so, the May 10 issue of the London Review of Books suggests the genre actually offers certain imaginative possibilities.

The issue includes the text of a Frank Kermode essay, "Fiction and E.M. Forster" and, of course, his contributor's note. Kermode is one of our most distinguished literary critics, as well as a frequent contributor to the LRB, which means the bare-essentials approach might be dispensed with. So it largely is. Two of Kermode's more than 50 books are mentioned ("The Sense of an Ending," probably his best-known, and "Shakespeare's Language"), but there's no mention of his academic career (he's taught at Manchester, Bristol, University College London, Cambridge, Columbia, and Yale) or his knighthood.

Instead, it's noted that Kermode's text is drawn from his Clark Lectures, at Cambridge, delivered earlier this year. It's further noted that Forster's celebrated book "Aspects of the Novel" originated in his Clark Lectures, delivered 80 years ago. That's a nice touch, a rare factual fillip in the contributor's note canon. But the real flourish is the first sentence. "Frank Kermode's present intentions are not clear." Rarely have forthrightness and whimsy collaborated so succinctly.

Kermode has put himself in that very rare category of writer (it may be a list of one) whose contributor's notes bear future attending to. Will subsequent LRB issues inform us whether his intentions have become any clearer? "Only connect," Forster famously urged in his novel "Howards End." Perhaps "only clarify" will become a comparable injunction in upcoming Kermode contributor's notes.