About every twenty years, more or less, American intellectuals rediscover religion. And, about every thirty years, more or less, American intellectuals rediscover the Civil War. We are at present, I fear, in one of those periods of harmonic convergence, when American intellectuals have rediscovered both God and the Civil War at the same time. Famed critic Alfred Kazin’s latest book, God and the American Writer, is a prime example of what takes place when this epiphany happens to someone to whom these topics are not merely terra nova, but terra incognita.

God and the American Writer is an old-fashioned book of literary criticism. It consists of twelve “trenchant critical studies”— to quote the publicity material—and a prelude and afterword. The subjects range, in chronological order, from Hawthorne to Faulkner, with stops in between for Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melville, Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, William James, Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and assorted incidental hangers-on. There is plenty of biographical detail, plenty of well-chosen quotation. There are no gendered readings, no multicultural perspectives, no playful deconstructions of text, no body parts strewn about the literary landscape. There are also no surprises. But for the occasional neologism and reference to events in the recent past—and the occasional autobiographical anecdote dispensed in the magisterial tone of a Grand Old Man—this collection could have been written in 1942, when Kazin published On Native Grounds, his first book of criticism.

Hawthorne, we are told, is a storyteller who is “afflicted” by the “judicial crimes of the first Hawthornes in Salem,” “mesmerized by what he feared and hated in their sense of justice,” haunted by the “gloom and chill prevailing in Puritan times.” Emerson was “a prophet not of God in every American heart but of rugged individualism,” a believer in the great man who “of course … never saw around him a man greater than himself.” Walt Whitman “knew that American individualism, American strut and brag, American egocentricity, American triumphalism in all departments, had just found in him their most extreme and shameless expression.”

Kazin does, of course, have some strong personal tastes, a few of them idiosyncratic. He is, for example, deeply irritated by Mark Twain. Kazin loathes Tom Sawyer; he only grudgingly accepts the conventional view that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a great book. Twain’s satire rubs Kazin the wrong way, and Twain the man annoys him. On the other hand, Kazin is reverential toward T. S. Eliot, whose “virtuosity” and “ravishing lines” (despite the need for Pound’s “cutting and redressing”) yield “intense pleasure.” This appreciation, Kazin admits, comes despite Eliot’s appalling anti-Semitism because “if I had to exclude anti-Semites [from admiration], I would have little enough to read.” In a chapter that virtually sings with excerpts from her poetry, Kazin proclaims Emily Dickinson “the most penetrating literary intelligence honored in this book.” Dickinson provides the virtual mantra of the collection, as Kazin repeatedly quotes her remark: “It is true that the unknown is the largest need of intellect, although for this no one thinks to thank God.”

Ah yes, God. What about God, who forms half the titular subject of the book? God plays a surprisingly limited role in these essays; mostly He gets cameo appearances and the occasional walk-on. It is not until the afterword that Kazin meets his subject head-on, only to rediscover American individualism. Thus, Kazin avers that the “American writer was so self-sufficient that if his art was entirely his own, so (if he had one) was his religion.” More to the point, if the “American writer is usually alone in his imagination and in his devotions a secret to the rest of us,” the reason is that “religion is so publicly vehement, publicized, and censorious.” The American writer is the apostle of an individualism that is “bracing in opposition and innovation, never as belief in itself… . Self-determination can also be the private reasoning from the heart which goes into belief”—whatever that means.

As this indicates, Kazin has some trouble sorting out the difference between organized religion and God, although he seems quite sure that the latter, if He exists at all, does not spend much time inhabiting the former. In Europe, at least, organized religion is “a social experience … is heritage, is institution, is teaching, company, and safety. It is where we are most at home and is always there when we want to go home again.” Never mind that Kazin has been rather unkind to T. S. Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic institutional yearnings because he “never recognized that in not coming close to the Father and the Son he was as much a ‘heretic’ in the American style as the self-dependent writers of the ‘inner light’ he condemned.” In America, this religious traditionalism is limited to the South, where, Kazin explains, it serves the interests of reaction and racism. Thus, Faulkner comes in for praise because “such is now the shallowness and aggressiveness of public religion in the service of hard-right politics that one wants to thank God that Faulkner was not personally a believer.”

But, back to the religious individualism of the American writer. What insights does it supply us? Melville “took on ‘God’ as a power so like himself that He became a rival”; Emerson’s “personal gift of faith was limited to himself.” Although thoughts of the divine “never left Emily Dickinson’s mind … the fact that He was never there when you needed him led her in so many directions peculiarly her own that what she came to think in a poem or letter astonished her before it did everyone else.” Mark Twain spent his life trying to dispose of the Presbyterian God that poisoned his success with guilt. William James “believed so much in religion as therapy” that belief in God was unnecessary for him. Frost is “so triumphant in his own eyes that in his mental journey he generously included God as an idea intellectually (not devotionally) to be wrestled with.” At least Harold Bloom, whatever his failings, has the scholarly imagination to come right out and call this individualistic American religion a new form of gnosticism and to treat writers as its exemplars.

What does Kazin make of the striking and lovely metaphors about God that he tosses out earlier in the book, Dickinson’s wonderful “our Old Neighbor—God” or Whitman’s “God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night”? What of the deep travails of depression and faith that impel Melville to the Holy Land, a trip described in a travel diary that, in Kazin’s well-chosen excerpts, is haunted by the aridness of the place: “Desert more fearful to look at than the ocean.” Or the profound sense of providence, expressed in the cadences of the King James Bible, that permeates Lincoln’s utterances, especially during the war years. Kazin inexplicably downplays the resonance of the King James Bible in Lincoln’s language and dismisses Lincoln’s providential deity as a God “born of war. It would not have survived without him, since only Lincoln understood him.”

Kazin finds it difficult to give these things the weight they deserve because, as he explains, “I think of religion as the most intimate expression of the human heart, as the most secret of personal confessions where we admit to ourselves alone our fears and losses, our sense of holy dread and awe before the unflagging power of a universe.” What this means to Kazin is that “really good American writers” don’t talk about religion, don’t say with Tolstoy that “God is the name of my desire,” don’t confide “in a personal God.” For Kazin, religion springs from the human personality, not from an encounter with the objectively transcendent, be it a personal God or something else. Skeptics can certainly write about the religious impulses of others, but it does take an act of empathetic imagination that Kazin seems hard pressed to muster. Even when the words are there, the spirit is absent.

As an intellectual appreciation of religion, the pieces are also somehow unsatisfying. The book’s approach—primarily self-contained essays internally focused on individual writings—inhibits the enunciation of wider themes and connections. For example, reading the essays together, I was struck by the prominence of nature in so many of these writers’ experience and expression of the divine. Perhaps I am still under the spell of “From Edwards to Emerson,” the classic essay by the late Perry Miller. In it, Miller brilliantly observed that Emerson represented a continuation of eighteenth-century New England’s ecstatic communion with “the images and shadows of divine things” in the natural world, now unhampered by the sense of original sin that restrained the Puritans from fusing God and nature into one. Nevertheless, it was difficult not to notice the recurrent image of forests, especially snowy ones—not to mention rivers and seas—and to wonder what a more systematic treatment could have drawn from that peculiarly American theme.

It might seem odd that someone so deeply out of sympathy with the religious impulse should write a book that purports to be about the artist’s relationship with God. In fact, Kazin tells us that he actually intended to write a book about slavery but he realized that, as he quotes a friend (an admiring friend, of course), “The War (and slavery) is really the reason for the awful fascination of the whole subject of God in America. You put this unforgivingly.” So, Kazin was saddled with God when he really wanted slavery.

Kazin expends a great deal of effort attempting to convince the reader that slavery was bad, a matter about which I believe society has already reached a certain amount of moral consensus (if I may borrow a line from the Los Angeles Times review of December 21, 1997). Kazin apparently discovered the evils of bondage rather late in the day; he recounts that when viewing an exhibition of the Gilman Collection of historic photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, he was “devastated” to see the picture of a slave who had been branded on the forehead by his owner, a sugar planter. The story reminded me a bit of the eighteenth century’s fascination with The Man of Feeling; people in salons would read the novel, weep at the hero’s travails, and then, impressed with their own sensitivity, would feel themselves to be persons of great benevolence.

Well, there’s no zealot like a convert. Kazin condemns Nathaniel Hawthorne as “maladroit” for the indifference to slavery that permitted him to accept patronage appointments from the pro-Southern Democratic party. He is shocked to find that Jefferson disliked slavery because of the degradation it caused fellow slaveholders, not because of any great fellow-feeling for his slaves. He is aghast that many northerners were more troubled by the prospect of disunion than by the persistence of slavery.

Emerson’s virtue was that, despite a slow start, he embraced the antislavery cause and the war, proclaiming “gunpowder smells good.” Kazin incongruously interprets this remark as expressing “the relief of an intellectual liberated from his books and papers,” although I’m not aware that the Sage of Concord made any great efforts, beyond the lecture circuit, to escape his study. Most students of the period view Emerson as too self-absorbed to be anything but lukewarm on the subject of slavery. Be that as it may, Kazin prefers the “realist” Emerson—a man who complained that the Civil War was “abominably in my way”—to “the lesser Transcendentalists” who saw the war in terms of sin and salvation, a focus rather closer to the theme of the book.

Even Lincoln, who appears as a literary figure on the strength of his second inaugural address, comes in for his share of blame for being weak on race and temporizing over emancipation. In his moralistic fervor, Kazin forgets that Lincoln—“the realist”—had the loyalty of border states to contend with and that he feared that he lacked the constitutional authority to emancipate the slaves since, among other things, they were legally classified as property that could not be confiscated by government without just compensation. Kazin’s heroes are intransigents like William Lloyd Garrison—who alienated fellow radical abolitionists by his egotism and the “severity of his language”—and John Brown. Now John Brown is certainly an interesting taste, a man who believed that he was sent by his Maker to purge away the sins of this guilty land with blood and whose first step in that direction, three years before his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry, was to split open with broadswords the skulls of five of his pro-slavery neighbors in Pottawatomie, Kansas.

This type of historical interpretation by hindsight is naïve at best. But, Kazin goes beyond merely condemning historical figures for not having attained the moral insights of the late twentieth century. He is so intent on the long shadow that slavery casts over the American landscape that he adopts an anti-Southern attitude replete with every cliché of the last hundred years. In his chapter on Faulkner—one of the book’s most compelling in purely literary terms —we begin with Jefferson Davis wondering whether the Confederacy would have won the Civil War had it established Christianity as its official religion. We then go on to find out that “the race hatred never ends,” lynchings continue to this day in Mississippi jails, that “no people in the officially democratic United States of America were so bossy, thrusting, cocksure as a Southerner who thanked God every day he was not a ‘nigger.’” Nobody?

In fact, I found that the more I knew about the subject under consideration, the less I agreed with Kazin’s readings, something that other reviewers have noted also. (God and the American Writer was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award and has been widely reviewed in the popular press.) Perhaps this simply reflects the perils of being a generalist in an age of specialization. Nevertheless, the chapters most tightly focused on the slavery issue, those on Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe, were unpersuasive to this reader, partly because of their tone and partly because so much of the background material was a bit off the mark. For example, Kazin calls Stowe’s father, the irrepressible Reverend Lyman Beecher, an abolitionist. This, I suppose, is just what the Beechers wanted once they figured out which way the wind was blowing. Until then, however, Lyman (and the rest of the family) really did temporize on the issue of slavery, remaining colonizationists until rather late in the day. Kazin also misreads the debate over excluding slaveholders from the Lord’s Supper, finding it rather beside the point; ironically, given Kazin’s own moralism, contemporaries saw the exclusion of slaveholders as a radical position that condemned slavery too fiercely.

As a final aside, and at the risk of sounding gratuitously unkind, I feel obliged to warn potential readers that the book could have used another draft or two before publication—or at least a good editing by a sympathetic hand. It is sometimes difficult to understand what Kazin intends to say; some sentences scan well enough but, on reflection, don’t have any real meaning; other sentences run on breathlessly. Favorite incidents, phrases, and quotations are repeated seemingly unnoticed. I find it increasingly troubling that today’s economics of publishing—if that is the culprit—are such that an eminent writer with a longstanding reputation is left to such treatment.