NOT ENTITLED: A Memoir. By Frank Kermode. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 263 pp. $23

Frank Kermode is too fine a critic to write an ordinary volume of reminiscence. Even as he locates himself at a remove from his life, the better to see its contours, he cannot help distancing himself from his written text, and cautioning readers about the truth they can expect from autobiographers: "The percentage of truth we leave out may after all show through somewhere, even if we fake the record."

To start with the plain facts: Kermode was born on the Isle of Man in 1919 to a family of modest means. He attended Liverpool University, served in the British navy during World War 11, and taught literature for the next four decades-at Durham, Reading, Manchester, Bristol, University College (London), and Cambridge, as well as other institutions abroad. He worked as a journalist, became literary editor of Encounter, and was wounded in the heated public skirmish that saw the revelation of CIA funding of that journal.

He was wounded too in the critical wars over the ascendancy of "the new French approaches" to the study of literature. About these innovations, he is entirely sober: "The academy has long preferred ways of studying literature which actually permit or enjoin the study of something else in its place, and the success of the new French approaches has in many quarters come close to eliminating the study of literature altogether."

He won great fame as an astute reader of literature and was knighted for his achievement in 1991. The fame is only glancingly conveyed, and the knighthood goes unmentioned in the book.

Upon these plain facts, Kermode's memory and imagination work their magic. "The action of memory," he writes, "depends on the cooperation of fantasy." A life is remade by words, self-consciously, in a way that may not accord with events and persons and circumstances in their primary reality. No matter; that reality is lost anyway.

The first two of the six chapters constitute more than half of the book's length but take the author only to age 26. A reader may be tempted to scan the title page to see whether something was missed, whether this is just the first of several intended volumes. But no. Kermode's childhood on the Isle of Man in the shaping presence of his parents, his naval service in the uneasy company of eccentrics comic and tragic, his first years in academic life-these decades receive his sustained and bemused attention. In them, he was made.

For the later life of honors and recognition, to which, as to much else, he worries that he is "not entitled," there is less regard. He admits to being at times a reckless, self-destructive man ("The story of a life must, insofar as it is truthful, be at least in part a story of loss and desertion inflicted and received"), but of his personal adult life he provides few details, and they are likely to appear within the protective confines of parentheses.

One of Kermode's best-known books, on narrative technique, is entitled The Sense of an Ending. Over this memoir there looms an ending of a different sort. Kermode recalls Prospero's remark that, once he left his island and returned to Milan, every third thought would be his grave. "I have often written about imagined or fictive endings and said they are all images of the real one. Fall and cease. The third thought is much less alarming than it was: it makes sense of everything, even if one would prefer a different kind of sense." For so civilized a voice, one wishes an ending long deferred.

--James Morris