Kudos for Kazin

By SANFORD PINSKER

The late Alfred Kazin (1915-98) belonged to a cantankerous group known as the New York Jewish intellectuals. True, not all of them were Jewish—the poet Robert Lowell was not, nor was his wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, but most of them were, and most of them grew up on the mean streets of Brooklyn during the Depression.

The New York intellectuals were a restless bunch, uncomfortable in the limited, altogether parochial world of their immigrant parents but equally uncomfortable, or unwelcomed, in the larger world that loomed across the Williamsburg Bridge.

Equal doses of brains, ambition, and chutzpah account for their extraordinary success. Their excited argumentation began early, and many fondly remembered the legendary debates pitting Communists against Socialists that raged in the alcoves of City College. By contrast, Kazin spent his time in the school’s library, convinced, even then, that ideologues were a waste of his time. That conviction continued throughout his lifetime.

Richard Cook’s recent biography makes much of Kazin’s childhood upbringing in Brownsville, and he spins out a Freudian explanation about Kazin’s mother that presumably accounts for her son’s later difficulties with women. As people used to say in vaudeville, “I vasn’t there, Charlie,” but any reader of A Walker in the City (1951), the first in a three volume series of Kazin memoirs, will know just how pivotal his mother was to the entire family. A seamstress, and often the family’s sole breadwinner, she “stitched” the family together, as Kazin’s telling word would have it.

What the momma’s-boy thesis omits, however, is that Kazin was a mighty handsome momma’s boy. Moreover, after the publication of On Native Grounds (l946), a literary history that made him famous early on. Kazin caught the eye of a good many eligible young ladies. His lifelong journals not only include his responses to virtually everything he ever read but also candid accounts of the various women he slept with. There were many: four wives, lots of one-night stands, a generous handful of mistresses, and those women, such as the writer Josephine Herbst or the intellectual giant, Hannah Arendt, who were close friends of the platonic sort.

I knew Kazin from the mid-l980s until his death, not only because he had lectured at Franklin and Marshall College (where I was teaching) but also because I ran into him at conferences or visited with him when I was in Manhattan. Being in his presence was exciting but also exasperating because it didn’t take much to set him off. I once mentioned a piece about the Lubavitcher Rebbe I had published in First Things, a neoconservative journal focusing on religion and the public square. Kazin went ballistic—not only because he abhorred anything smacking of neoconservatism, but also because Hasidic Jews gave him the willies.

Truth to tell, no special effort was required to raise Kazin’s hackles: his stormy marriage to the writer Ann Birstein often ended in broken crockery and public shouting matches; he felt that his son Michael was wasting his time as an Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) radical during his undergraduate days at Harvard, and his daughter Kate’s decision to move to Israel was more than he could understand or abide. With colleagues, other writers, formers friends, you name it—Alfred could be a crank.

On one occasion during the mid-l990’s, when I took him round the corner from his apartment for dinner, he began by telling me that he knew why I wanted to have dinner with him. “Why?” I foolishly asked. “Because Irving’s dead.” True enough, Irving Howe had died in l993, and Kazin felt that, under the circumstances, he was second best. After all, I had written articles about Irving but not about him, and, for Kazin, that presumably demonstrated a decided lack of judgment.

That Kazin could be such an important, indeed, such an indispensable American critic and still feel insecure is one of the stories told at length in Richard Cook’s biography. Because he thought of himself primarily as a writer (rather than as a scholar), Kazin valued his “voice,” and the independence it required, above all else. Ideologues tended to swell the ranks of protest parades; Kazin stayed at home and perfected his paragraphs. Everything he wrote, from On Native Grounds, through his three-volume memoir, to his final book, God and the American Writer (l997), was intensely personal, as much about Kazin as it was about literary history, Melville, Whitman, or William Faulkner.

On the face of it, Kazin’s 50-plus years at the writing desk looks to be the seamless tale of one success after another. What Cook’s biography makes clear, however, are the costs that came with the territory: the false starts, the struggle to make ends meet, and most of all, the nagging doubts. Small wonder that he was cranky; like so many battle scars, it came with the territory of being a New York Jewish intellectual of a certain age.

Part of Kazin desperately wanted a secure academic job (he blamed Lionel Trilling for blocking his chances at Columbia and another Jew, Harry Levin, for doing the same thing at Harvard), but he also worried that an academic job would make him, well, an “academic,” rather than a writer. Most of the time, whether it be at Smith, the University of Minnesota, or a distinguished chair at SUNY Stony Brook, Kazin’s notebooks make it clear how much contempt he could (privately) dish out to his colleagues.

And even when Cook finds moments where Kazin got along with people, those in the know know better. At Stony Brook, Cook tells us that he enjoyed talking about renaissance lit. with Judah Stampfer, a sweet man who had been trained as a rabbi and who had written a book of poetry and a passably good novel. But when Stampfer asked Kazin to comment on the typescript of a new novel, Kazin returned it with these terse words scrawled across the title page: “Too Jewish!”

According to his biographer, Kazin also enjoyed the company of a young Americanist named Peter Shaw. That is probably true when they were colleagues and Kazin would pass along speaking gigs that he didn’t want to bother with—“Crumbs from his table,” as Shaw liked to put it. But after Shaw had a serious heart attack and left Stony Brook, he became an activist for cultural conservatism, which is to say he became, so far as Kazin was concerned, an ideologue.

Many things irritated Kazin over the decades (the sterility of New Critical “close reading,” for example or the waves of critical theory that followed), but nothing, absolutely nothing, vexed him more than the country’s shift to the Right as a response to the excesses of the countercultural 1960s.

Kazin’s displeasure could cut like a knife. When I used the word “kudos” in a review, he hectored me about learning the distinction between words that were quick and words, like “kudos,” that were dead; and then he went on to berate me for writing on a computer in the first place. Kazin used an old-fashioned Royal manual typewriter, the sort of thing now housed in a museum.

Near the end of his life Kazin ruminated about the Holocaust and about God. On the coffee table of his small living room were stacks of books he had agreed to review. We would talk about why Saul Friedlander was the premier Holocaust historian or why Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep remains the definitive novel about the immigrant Jewish experience. On those afternoons—and there were many of them—Alfred’s crankiness slipped away and what I saw was a man defined by, and engaged with, the world of letters. I do not imagine I will experience anything like those afternoons, ever again.