Alfred Kazin: A Biography
By Richard M. Cook
Yale University Press
2007, $35, pp. 452 |
The Jew Who Read America
Any account of American intellectual history in the last century is bound to note the shaping power of free-lance intellectuals who booted themselves up without the institutional support of university professorships and mapped out their terrain on the strength of their own originality and tenacity. Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Edmund Wilson, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Susan Sontag and Cynthia Ozick spring to mind. Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) occupies a secure place in that company.
These days, Kazin is probably best remembered for his magisterial literary history of America, On Native Grounds, published in 1942 when he was just 27 years old, and A Walker in the City (1951). In the latter, a memoir of his Brooklyn youth he recalled his first tentative steps at venturing forth and provided a non-fiction complement to the novels of the era as an imaginative recreation of the Jewish immigrant generation and its children. Two more memoirs followed—Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1979)—plus a steady outpouring of books: anthologies like The Viking Portable Blake, essay collections and selections from his journals, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (1996). A sturdy compilation, Alfred Kazin’s America (2003), edited by Ted Solotaroff, supplies a judicious harvest from the full spectrum of Kazin’s writing.
Kazin set his sights on being an intellectual-at-large, the Jewish Edmund Wilson. While he lacked Wilson’s passion for languages and global literary reach, he had no less a gift for extracting from literature its essential features and cultural meaning. Like Wilson, Kazin mastered critical prose in long and short forms—the sweeping panorama and the slashing review—and both men enjoyed briefly the pulpit of The New Republic as associate editors, though more than a decade apart. Kazin shared with Wilson an “ever more pressing urge to make order of his life with words.” Like Wilson, Kazin kept a daily journal. And both were four times married, with sometimes punishing consequences. In domestic disorder and sorrow, the Jewish apprentice kept pace with the Yankee master, wife for wife.
Kazin emerges in Richard M. Cook’s ambitious biography as a passionate and troubled man who sublimated his personal disappointments into a singular eloquence. Cook explores the agitated Brooklyn youth and the Emersonian thinker-at-large, one brooding on his past and the other roaming freely through literature. He connects the dots between Kazin the estranged son, Kazin the baffled husband and Kazin the embattled father; Kazin the celebrant of America and Kazin the mourner for Hitler’s victims; Kazin the rhapsodist and Kazin the Jeremiah; Kazin the walker in the city, ardently harvesting its sensations, and Kazin the scholar in the library, taking the republic’s measure through its fiction. Through it all is Kazin the autodidact, who saw into a book’s essence not so much through critical judgment but through a fusion with its author.
Cook, a professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has written a jam-packed, sprawling and generous book, which combines elements of a novel with those of a gigantic notebook. Aided in the early stages by Kazin himself and by Kazin’s son and his widow, Cook has amassed an astonishing amount of information about his subject’s comings and goings. Here is ample evidence that despite Kazin’s hectic life he somehow left room for long bouts of writing. For a man who spoke often and mournfully about his own loneliness, Kazin suffered perhaps the most sociable loneliness in history.
Seen in a longer perspective, the biography is about rising in the world, a Bildungsroman about an actual Bildung. “The story of Alfred Kazin’s Brownsville youth and rapid ascent to literary-cultural fame has become part of the larger story...of notable American successes,” observes Cook.
The makeover from walker in the city to interpreter of American literature was not easy. Kazin’s family—his launching pad—packed his suitcase with a lifetime supply of fears. “It was not for myself alone that I was expected to shine, but for them—to redeem the constant anxiety of their existence,” Kazin wrote. His father, raised in an orphanage, was a lonely man who read the Forverts (the Forward’s Yiddish incarnation) after dinner and then slipped quietly out of the apartment. “Papa was always looking for an exit.” His mother was the “raging life force,” a seamstress who “stamped the treadle hard against the floor, hard, hard and silently, grimly at war, beating out the first rhythm of the world for me.” This childhood, aggravated by a youthful stammer, turned him toward books and “subterranean channels of sympathy” that opened up onto “the great world that was anything just out of Brownsville.”
Kazin embraced American literature for its Whitmanesque populism and its Emersonian infinitude of the private self, while also maintaining a warm spot for the figures of lonely integrity: Henry James, who confessed that “the port from which I set out was…that of the essential loneliness of my life”; Henry Adams, “an immensely private, proud, unfathomably touchy person,” and Herman Melville’s great “isolato,” who primed his imagination by sacrificing social relations. Undoubtedly, Kazin was smuggling personal confessions into such accounts, constructing a profile of himself by projection.
This merger of self and America, Kazin’s normal way of reading, also helped to give special traction to his writing. His prose was sensual, thick with impressions, and savory with the vernacular. Beyond an ardor for the visions of life through literature his deepest understanding of America was through its language. “Salvation,” he wrote, “would come by the word.” A syncopated American speech, with its highbrow Latinate vocabulary and earthy Ango-Saxon terms, its sharps and flats, its downbeats and blue notes, gave his writing a strong flavor and resilience.
His zest for socializing stimulated numerous lasting friendships—especially with the historian Richard Hofstadter and his wife Felice, the writer Josephine Herbst, and the philosopher/critic Hannah Arendt, who beguiled him as much with her Hegelian opacities as with her “darkly handsome” eroticism. Indeed, as Arendt’s copy editor, Kazin pared down the overwrought sentences of The Origins of Totalitarianism into sensible English. The downtown New York intellectuals who frequented his apartment—among them Isaac Rosenfeld, Harold Rosenberg, Robert Lowell and Saul Bellow—constituted a virtual census of intellectual New York as a bustling, noisy Galician shtetl, only instead of the Sabbath it had the cocktail hour.
Kazin’s personal life remained unhinged into his 50’s, as his marriages collapsed, sometimes publicly. Not until his fourth marriage, to Judith Dunford in 1983, when he was almost 68, did he find domestic peace. An eventual reconciliation with son Michael was slow and rocky. Michael had moved far to the left politically, was deeply involved in the SDS chapter at Harvard and had been beaten and gassed in the street fighting with police at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. That story ended well. Michael completed a Ph.D. in history from Stanford and became a professor first at American University and now at Georgetown. He traded revolutionary dreams for faith in “the merits of social democracy.”
Kazin’s identity as a Jew was complex and, on the surface, somewhat contradictory. His feelings were poorly defined but powerfully experienced. They grew as he aged. Cook’s research turned up the fact that in contemplating an edition of his later journals, he thought of simply calling it Jews. At the same time, in a lifetime of writing he showed only passing interest in Jewish writers in any language, and the exceptions were mainly his contemporaries: Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud.
His Jewish identity was a compound of family feeling and Holocaust nightmares. He wrote in New York Jew that “somewhere I had come to believe that Jew and my family were identical,” and “the Jews are my unconscious.” Indeed, the opening section of New York Jew, which calls up visions of his grandfather, Abraham, whom he never knew, and his father, Gedaliah or “Charley,” is among the most vivid writing in Kazin’s substantial output. The Holocaust pressed itself on him with a rare immediacy. In 1945, he left a conference in Salzburg, Austria, to visit a Displaced Persons camp outside town. He recorded in his journals that climbing over a fence to get into the camp he met Jews who “might have stepped out of Sutter Street.” One woman assailed him: “Everyone has gone home now…only we are left; only we have no home to go to. You American Jews…you American Jews—do something!”
What Kazin did was belated, but 14 years later, with his then-wife, Ann Birstein, he published Anne Frank’s diary as The Works of Anne Frank. The next year he reviewed Elie Wiesel’s Night in the Reporter Magazine, the first important recognition the book received, leading to a long friendship with Wiesel. Wiesel, he would later write, “became my Holocaust.”
Kazin wrote about Israel only now and then, and with mixed feelings. But after the 1967 war he wrote for Harper’s, “When I think of Mama dying under that picture of Herzl, of the touching faith of the Jews in…through Israel, I feel an inexpressible pride in our ability to live, to fight it through, to live.” There it was for Kazin, one symbol as a triptych: Family, Holocaust and Israel. Kazin’s later decades were productive and turbulent.
He survived many of his intellectual peers to become the eminence grise of American letters. He took public risks, inserting himself, probably spontaneously, into the 1963 uproar over the perception by critics that Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, had denigrated Nazi victims as passive. Striding to the front of a public meeting called by Dissent magazine, Kazin admonished its editor, Irving Howe “That’s enough, Irving,” he called out. “This disgraceful piling on has got to stop.” Later, he would deride neoconservatism and its intellectual cheerleaders who were sounding off in journals like Commentary and The New Criterion. In a notably harsh swipe, Kazin scoffed at the intellectuals who had traveled “from Ellis Island to the Age of Power.”
His later books generally got mixed reviews. Along with compliments came complaints that Kazin had withdrawn from literary analysis in favor of portraiture, which some reviewers saw as a failure to confront political and moral issues such as race, or the work of other scholars. New York Jew in particular was a gallery of his contemporaries (Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Paul Goodman, Wilson and others) in which some portraits were etched in acid. One reviewer called him “Kazin the Avenger.” For example, the portrait of Trilling as a literary/political commentor excessively concerned with his reputation prompted a letter of protest to the New York Review of Books, signed by 19 writers and scholars. Kazin was stung: “I feel humiliated, devastated…by this onslaught against me,” he complained. New York Jew, in fact, soared high on wings of tattle and gossip.
To consider Kazin against the background of his generation of the New York intellectuals, one should observe that being the least ideological and abstract among them, he intensively cultivated sensibility and the particularities of seeing and writing—an eye for the significant detail and an ear for the decisive phrase. In that respect, he was the heir of his American mentors, most particularly Henry James and Henry Adams. Irving Howe once said of his generation’s intellectual migration, “As ideology withered, personality bloomed.” Kazin was ahead of the crowd. He was a great teacher of how to think about literature at a moment when arguments over social ideas appeared to be exhausted.
Richard M. Cook’s biography of Kazin is a richly layered work and the product of a long immersion in Kazin’s voluminous journals, personal papers and correspondence, with Cook and many others. That connection continues. Cook is currently editing the journals; when published, they are bound to even further enhance Kazin’s status as one of the most fertile American literary minds of the 20th century.
Mark Shechner is a Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. Among his recent books are Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth.
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