We are sitting in Frank Kermode's sunny Cambridge flat. He pivots meditatively on an elegant rocking-chair, occasionally pulling on a pipe. Behind him the wall is lined with books, by George Steiner, Derrida, Henry James and countless others. Many are written by him. He is 80 now, with a half century of literary criticism behind him - the kind that students of English literature relish everywhere, such as an early classic, Romantic Image (1957), about the isolation which is the Romantic conception of the artist. He has written countless essays and reviews for newspapers and literary periodicals, taught at various universities, including Harvard and Cambridge, and was knighted for his achievements in 1991.
As we talk, his wide, delighted, infectious smile breaks out frequently. He appears relaxed and at peace with himself. He has good reason to be, having just published a stunning book on Shakepeare's language. But Kermode is never smug. As the title of his autobiography, Not Entitled, suggests, he prefers the self-deprecatory put-down, relishing creating versions of himself as a clumsy, fat boy, a failed poet and violinist, a poor teacher, and an inadequate family man. And now, although he has laboured hard to produce a book about Shakespeare that both critic and layman will enjoy, he is convinced that in certain circles his very accessibility will be sneered at: "What I do is despised by some younger critics who want everything to sound extremely technical. I spent a long time developing an intelligible style. But these critics despise people who don't use unintelligible jargon."
The success of literary theory has come at the expense of the study of literature, believes Kermode: "Poems are hard to talk about, so people prefer to talk about something else. Deconstructionism is supposed to be over, but New Historicism isn't, which means that you'll have some fellow talking about why Wordsworth put one date on "Tintern Abbey" rather than another, instead of talking about the poem itself."
Hand in hand with this focus on theory is the narrow drive towards specialisation: "People get fixated on their own little speciality, and then they miss so much." Kermode has not limited himself in this way; he has written extensively on subjects as various as Donne, Wallace Stevens, Yeats and the Bible. His book on Shakespeare has a broad frame of reference, from Auden to Coleridge to Stephen Greenblatt. The latter is, says Kermode: "The best of the New Historicists, although when writing about King Lear, he gives equal importance to contemporary accounts of witchcraft and exorcism. The implication is that they both have their place in the conversation of the time, and one is as important as the other. If you allow that to happen, Shakespeare's plays will dwindle into mere documents of their time. The whole idea of literary value comes under threat."
Treating Shakespeare as a poet whose rhetorical style and ornate phrasing evolved into a tighter, harsher and more complex dramatic achievement, Kermode's own study works incisively and compellingly through the bard's oeuvre without sacrificing for one second the intensity of his focus on the text. Key words - eye, shadow, act, time, becomes - are opened out to reveal a kaleidoscope of meaning and subtlety: "Shakespeare is part of the heritage business now, people go to Stratford, buy a mug, and watch the plays. It's an artificial preservative. Somebody has got to attend seriously to the language. That's why I wrote this book."
His method hinges on faith: "I do my thinking as I write. It's an act of faith, sitting down in front of a blank page to write about, say, Macbeth. You have to count on inspiration coming as you write." He sees Hamlet as the "turning point" in Shakespeare's career: "It constitutes a quantum leap in the development of English poetry and drama . . . the whole idea of dramatic character is changed forever. Of all the plays, it offers the biggest reservoir of surprise and pleasure." He pauses and adds: "But Lear is the most awesome. In its relentlessness."
"Patience . . . is defeated by fortune, by nature, by the indifference of heaven to justice. Much of the effect of King Lear arises from its own unsparing cruelty, which can sometimes seem to be a sadistic attitude to the spectator, we are . . . forced to deal with a pain that does not hinder the poet from playing his terrible games."
Lear brings in the notion of Apocalypse, "an image of the state to which humanity can reduce itself", and a theme which Kermode has addressed in his collection of essays, The Sense of an Ending (1967). For a book with such a millennial theme, it was way ahead of its time: "It has never been out of print and has just been reissued with an extra chapter. Nobody was thinking about the millennium when I wrote it. The nuclear threat was our most immediate fear." He pauses and adds one of his typically ironic asides: "People always prefer to think the end is nigh. It makes life more interesting."
In The Sense of an Ending, Kermode unravels the human need to create fictions with "intelligible ends", suffused as we are by the uncertainty of our place in time. In The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) he shows how literary critics have the same need to interpret meaningful patterns in the texts they investigate. But perhaps these "drab enigmas" (such as the real identity of the Man in the Mackintosh in Ulysses) have no purpose after all: "We expect everything to hang together."
His autobiography, part of which is a self-confessed fiction, dwells in a similar twilight zone: "The action of memory depends on the co-operation of fantasy . . . the autobiographer will remember only in order to forget what he cannot bear to remember." He started writing Not Entitled with the intention of conveying the "comic experience" of his life in the navy during the war (the title comes from a term used when pay was withheld from sailors because of fines for transgressions).
He served under several "mad captains" of the Royal Naval Reserve: one who existed on a diet of pink gin and lambs' tongues, another who liked to fish, play cards, flaunt easy women, and stash tinned groceries in his cabin. Kermode nearly went mad himself, marooned off Iceland for two years, there to build an anti-submarine boom which was never constructed.
He did not see action, but picked up some arcane learning along the way: "I hadn't known that in the tropics, a man should always put on a jockstrap at sundown and wear a cummerbund after dinner."
He is characteristically satirical about himself as a boy, noting as most troublesome his "habit of deference" which he picked up from his mother ("from being born poor"). His mother always expected the best of him, and it was from her he inherited his love of words: "The pleasures and pains of being an only son."
A native of the Isle of Man, the son of a storekeeper, Kermode left home when he won a scholarship to Liverpool University, and has felt "mildly alienated" ever since: "Some of us Manx who have made our lives in England have had to settle for a permanent condition of mild alienation." His long teaching career, which included stints at Manchester, Reading and Harvard, ended at Cambridge, where relations with the university were fractious and ultimately led to his resignation from the chair some 20 years ago.
Still it was there that the apparently deferential Kermode showed he was capable of taking a stand, and on behalf of a literary theorist to boot: "There was vicious enmity towards a young man called McCabe, a post-structuralist, who had published a book on Joyce and, after teaching at Cambridge for five years, was looking for tenure. I supported McCabe, and we lost. There were many nasty tricks played by apparently intelligent men. I left, and so did McCabe, who, I'm glad to say, went from strength to strength."
His open mind is also illustrated by his support for incorporating creative writing into the study of literature, a practice many older academics disdain: "When I taught at the University of Houston in Texas, the students had been taught certain techniques of writing poetry. As a result they could relish the sense of difficulty overcome in Donne's poetry, how he follows an argument in a stanza form that opposes it at every turn. It makes sense. If you studied music it would seem absurd not to learn the whole grammar of music."
In his autobiography, Kermode asserts: "I am by temperament likely to make the wrong choice." The one obvious illustration of this assertion in his long career was a libel case brought against him by Conor Cruise O'Brien. Kermode had taken over from Stephen Spender as joint editor of Encounter magazine: "It was started in 1953 with the backing of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a gentlemanly Cold War organisation supported by American foundations which later turned out to be merely fronts for the CIA."
In 1966 O'Brien gave a lecture in which he expressed his suspicions about the magazine's disinterestedness. A regular columnist with Encounter rejoined with allegations about O'Brien during his time as a UN representative in the Congo. O'Brien threatened to sue for libel unless a retraction was made, and Kermode found himself in a maze of buck-passing, disappearing witnesses, assurances from colleagues evaporating into thin air, and his own naivete about politics and the law.
In the middle of it all, his mother died: "I only took four days off, before flying back to the Encounter crisis. I should have said to hell with Conor Cruise O'Brien. In the end he was good-natured about the whole thing. He knew it wasn't my fault. But to defer mourning is an important mistake, a mistake of the kind that later exacts its price; the reflection that the mistake was made out of vanity increases that cost."
In Romantic Image, Kermode characterises the Romantic poet - such as Yeats or Wordsworth - as by nature estranged from his surroundings: "It is true that many artists are rather odd. Look at Auden, one of the great artists I've known - he had a passion for punctuality, he had to eat at a certain time, drink so many vodka martinis, go to bed at a certain time. He persisted with a deeply unhappy love affair for the last 30 years of his life. And in spite of being so self-destructive, he was prolific."
I suggest that "alienated" and "self-destructive" are terms he has used to describe himself. But Kermode is having none of my neat analogies; he will not put himself on the same level as the Romantic artist: "There are many forms of alienation and self-destructiveness. There isn't much point in being estranged if you aren't bright as a button."
He does confess, however, that his first wish was to become a creative writer: "I wrote a lot of poetry when I was young, but then it stopped visiting. Anyway, I wasn't any good. I wrote plays too. I ended up becoming a professor because I had to find work after the war." He pauses, and smiles disarmingly, determined to the last not to be pleased with himself: "It's a mug's game, really."
Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode will be reviewed in the books pages next Saturday by Declan Kiberd