A wit said of Gibbon’s autobiography,” wrote Walter Bagehot, “that he did not know the difference between himself and the Roman Empire.” Something similar may be said of the career that Alfred Kazin (1915–1998) devoted to the two subjects that were of obsessive interest to him: American literature and himself. What he wrote about Walt Whitman in God and the American Writer is indeed a key to the temper of his own literary oeuvre. “Whitman, after his best work was done,” wrote Kazin, “never tired of summing up self and career, interpreting both in weary but friendly new perspectives. He never tired of self-portraits, especially when he discovered readers who thought him as wondrous as he did himself.” Like the author of Song of Myself, though more prosaically, Kazin too “never tired of summing up self and career … especially when he discovered readers who thought him as wondrous as he did himself.”
Some of Kazin’s self-portraits are explicitly autobiographical—among them A Walker in the City, New York Jew, and A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment—while in other writings he includes himself in group portraits of American literary masters. For when one returns to his critical histories of American literature, beginning with On Native Grounds (1942) and ending with God and the American Writer (1988)—the working title of which, by the way, was Absent Friends—one comes to understand that these histories, too, are a species of autobiography. Indeed, with God and the American Writer the reader is sometimes left to wonder if Kazin was always able to distinguish his own role as a critic from that of the Almighty in the universe, so omniscient are his pronouncements on both life and art and so absolute are his political and social animosities.
He was nothing if not forthcoming about the “personal” character of his literary judgments. In an interview with Roger Bishop on the occasion of the publication of A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin, in 1996, he came as close as he ever would in defining his critical response to literature:
One of the things I discovered, to my surprise, in writing a book of literary criticism … was that I could think what I really wanted to say about William James or Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman by first writing in my journals as if I were writing about a personal experience. That helped me to write about these people—I hope I did—as personal experience.
The great advantage of this “personal” style of critical discourse lies, of course, in its affectation of intimacy with the reader, a strategy that allows the critic to bare his soul, or at least his soulfulness, no matter what his ostensible subject may be.
This is its downside as well, for the soulfulness of the critic, all too often, is projected onto the writers under discussion. Thus, when Kazin concludes an account of Emily Dickinson’s poetry by observing that “We have a sense of the human soul stretched to the farthest, of valor encompassing the most that it can know,” it does indeed sound more like a journal entry, of interest mainly to and about the critic himself, than an exegesis of an actual poem. As a critical observation, it is something that could be said of so many poets that it doesn’t take the reader very far in distinguishing Dickinson’s special quality. For that, alas, there is no substitute for the kind of “close reading” that Kazin never tired of castigating in his many attacks on the New Criticism, which, as we all know, was more concerned with the words on the page than with the state of the critic’s soul.
In writing about the new anthology of his critical and personal writings that Ted Solotaroff has now assembled in Alfred Kazin’s America, I am obliged, however, to declare an interest—or rather, an absence of disinterestedness.[1] For while Kazin and I were acquainted with each other over the course of many years and had many friends (and ex-friends) in common, and I have more than once over the years had occasion to praise one or another of his early books—my praise for A Walker in the City, written many years ago, is featured on the cover of the latest paperback edition of that book—we were never friendly with each other.
It may be that Kazin was initially put off by my New England accent—I was born and raised in Massachusetts—and for that reason regarded me as insufficiently Jewish. This, for Kazin, was a matter not easily forgiven. (If you doubt it, take a look at his assault on Lionel Trilling in New York Jew.) For my part, I felt a deep distaste for the narcissism, self-dramatization, and sentimentality that became more and more pronounced in his later writings. Only once did we ever have a serious conversation, and that was by chance. Kazin was then teaching at Amherst College, and on one of his trips to New York we ran into each other at the Century Club, where we were both members. It was in the middle of an afternoon, and there were scarcely any other members present. Kazin looked so distraught on that occasion that I invited him to have a drink, which he eagerly agreed to.
It turned out that at Amherst that morning he had discovered that there were undergraduates in his class who had scarcely any idea of who Adolf Hitler was—a less common phenomenon then than it would be today. He was beside himself with what can only be described as grief as a result of that experience. I was pretty upset myself when he told me the story, but Alfred was clearly suffering, and so I sat with him, drinking and talking, or rather listening, until it was time for him to leave. The next time he saw me at the Century, he avoided me.
I cannot say that I was shocked by this snub, for by that time I had written some pieces for Commentary and other publications that were bound to incur Kazin’s wrath. The issue was politics, of course. In Alfred Kazin’s America, any intellectual suspected of conservative sympathies was regarded with a contempt that bordered on paranoia, and the contempt was compounded into an intense loathing if the malefactor in question was a Jew. Jews, in Kazin’s conception of the moral universe, were expected to uphold the pieties of the political Left as an inviolable creed. Above all, they were forbidden to traffic with the conservative enemy. It was all a ghastly parody of a religious tradition that condemned sinners as “unclean.”
It therefore comes as no surprise to me to discover that in compiling Alfred Kazin’s America, Mr. Solotaroff has felt it appropriate to include several pages that vilify me as well as The New Criterion. In this respect, the editor of Alfred Kazin’s America has been completely faithful to Kazin’s dearest convictions, which, it has to be said, were a little nutty on the subject of Jewish conservatives. For at one time or another Kazin’s roster of despised defectors from the liberal faith has included Saul Bellow, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Allan Bloom, Edward Shils, Irving Kristol, Joseph Epstein, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, and virtually the entire Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. This strikes me as distinguished company, and I am flattered to be included among them.
It must also be acknowledged that The New Criterion has not been laggard either in criticizing Kazin as a critic and historian of American literature or in responding to his attacks on our journal and its contributors. This critique of Kazin began with a review of the fortieth anniversary edition of On Native Grounds in the first year of our publication, in May 1983, by Kenneth S. Lynn, author of studies of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and other American subjects. About Kazin’s treatment of two writers—Hemingway and Faulkner—Lynn was particularly devastating. In excruciating detail, Lynn compiled an anthology of factual and interpretive errors in the section devoted to Hemingway. These extended even to a complete ignorance of the northern Michigan landscape that is so central to Hemingway’s early stories as well as the political slant Kazin had appropriated from Malcolm Cowley in his portrait of Hemingway. “Even though Kazin did not like Cowley as a person,” Lynn wrote, “he was so enraptured by Exile’s Return that in a key chapter of his own book called ‘Into the Thirties: All the Lost Generations’ he seems to have simply rewritten the Cowley line in more operatic language.”
It was in his account of Faulkner, however, that Kazin exhibited an abject ignorance. As Kenneth Lynn wrote:
Faulkner is a writer who is so “regional” that he is “almost parochial.” He has “essentially a boyish mind.” The “antics and institutions” of the South excite in him “a lazily humorous disgust” that is “often indistinguishable from cynical acquiescence.” His work does not spring “from a conscious and procreative criticism of society or conduct or tradition.” The great “problem” of his writing is “its lack of a center.” In sum, Faulkner’s “corn-fed, tobacco- drooling phantoms are not the constituents of a representative American epic, protagonists in a great modern tragedy.”
In later years, to be sure, Kazin acknowledged that he had been been “frightened” by Faulkner when he first encountered his work in the 1930s, and in later accounts of Faulkner he was nothing if not fulsome in his praise of the writer. What Kazin could never bring himself to acknowledge, however, was that his criticism of Faulkner, just like his criticism of Hemingway, derived in large part from the Communist Party line on these writers in the years that Kazin was writing On Native Grounds. On the contrary, as late as 1994, in his Harvard lectures called Writing Was Everything, he boasted that “I have never recovered from the Thirties or wanted to.”
Moreover, Kazin’s paranoia on the subject of Jews, conservatism, and The New Criterion developed into something really ugly as he grew older. In our issue for April 1986, we published a long review of Irving Howe’s The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson. Howe, the founding editor of the magazine Dissent, was, of course, another apostle of the socialist creed who never recovered from the Thirties—that “low, dishonest decade,” as W. H. Auden correctly described it in his poem “September 1, 1939”—or wanted to. The reviewer was the late James W. Tuttleton, an eminent scholar of American literature who served for many years on the faculty of New York University. His principal criticism was that Howe had made a complete muddle of Emerson’s political views.
Strangely, Howe ignores Emerson’s essay “Politics” altogether. Perhaps the reason is not far to seek. In “Politics” Emerson is quite straight-forward in claiming for government the function of protecting the rights of private property. Democracy may be “better for us,” but that is only “because the religious sentiment of the present time accords better with it.” Emerson is in fact fundamentally skeptical of politics, of political parties, and of the claims for the centrality of the state… . Irving Howe never grapples directly with the central formulation of Emerson’s political thought.
In response to this criticism of Howe, Kazin promptly attacked Tuttleton in the pages of Dissent accusing him—of all things —of anti-Semitic motives by suggesting that Tuttleton “no doubt has his private reasons for snapping at Jews.” This was truly an outrage, based on nothing but political spite, and for me it destroyed whatever respect I may still have harbored for Kazin as an honorable man of letters. It also casts some doubt on the reliability of Mr. Solotaroff’s introduction to Alfred Kazin’s America in which it is unequivocally stated that “Kazin refrained from joining the saving remnant of [socialism] around Irving Howe’s Dissent.” Needless to say, there is no reference to Kazin’s smear in Mr. Solotaroff’s introduction nor to Mr. Tuttleton’s response to it in The New Criterion for December 1987, for the author of that introduction remains one of those “readers who thought [Kazin] as wondrous as he did himself.”
Notes
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- Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings, by Alfred Kazin, edited by Ted Solotaroff; HarperCollins, 592 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.
