The Reading Life

By GERALD SORIN

ALFRED KAZIN
A Biography
By Richard M. Cook
464 pages. Yale University Press. $35.

Eight months after I interviewed Alfred Kazin in October 1997, the widely influential literary and cultural critic, once lauded as “the boy wonder of American Criticism,” was dead at the age of 83. I was saddened by the news, of course, but relieved and gratified, too, that I had had such an opportunity.

Kazin spoke with me for nearly three hours. Not much earlier in his life he’d have gone on forever, but the prostate cancer, phlebitis, and a heart condition with recurrent chest pains demanded that he stop for a nap. Despite the cruel physical debilitation, Kazin’s mind—one of the quickest and most searching in the 20th century—was as keen as ever. And as Richard Cook writes in this comprehensive, well-written, and judicious biography, he was a marvelous raconteur. I had come to interview Kazin about Irving Howe (whose biography I was writing). What I hadn’t realized until reading Cook's book was that Kazin thought the only contemporary American critic worth writing about was himself!  It was a bracing and intellectually exciting experience.

So was reading Cook’s biography of this boy from impoverished Brownsville, born to barely literate Jewish immigrant parents in 1915, who rose to prominence in American life and letters. Kazin fulfilled his dream of “crossing Brooklyn Bridge,” of going “beyond.” His restlessness, however, continued.  The “contradiction” between wanting “the enclosure of home and the city,” he said in his 70's “has never ended for me.” This deeply felt desire for home made Kazin different from many of the other New York Jewish intellectuals who had made it out of ghettos on the Lower East Side or in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Irving Howe, for example, rarely expressed such an impulse, and Norman Podhoretz consciously rejected it.

Kazin’s desire for the open city, for America, Cook shows, was perfectly evident in the work the budding critic chose. In Kazin’s first book, On Native Grounds (1942), he performed an act of chutzpah: He demonstrated throughout this still-in-print classic an aggressive readiness to enter into conversation with Hawthorne and Dickinson, James and Cather, to take American literature and make it his own.

Immediately, Kazin was recognized as someone who would make continued contributions to the cultural dialogue, and in an original voice. His lyrical style, indirect method, and complex world view differentiated his work sharply from the narrowly ideological interpretations of the literary Marxists, and the close ahistorical readings of the New Critics. He demonstrated a broad, humanistic liberalism, a patriotism that transcended nationalism, and something I would call hopeful agnosticism. Kazin’s love affair with America would be life-long, but as Cook is anxious to show, this did not prevent Kazin, despite his delight in mixing with the high and the mighty, from being a scathing critic of the United States for its corruption, neo-imperialism, and hypocrisy, especially on the issues of class and race. Indeed, Kazin remained a socialist his entire life, another way in which he distinguished himself from the other New York intellectuals—other than Howe, about whom Kazin told me: “Well, Irving thought he had the answers; I don’t.”

Kazin’s desire for home is best expressed in another of Kazin’s still-in-print classics, Walker in the City (1951), and Cook spends a good amount of time here. Walker opens with Kazin returning to his childhood Brownsville to “go over the whole route.” He revisits his school and the synagogue, and he walks along still bustling Pitkin Avenue. For Kazin, the need to leave, Cook writes, led “ineluctably to the impulse to return.” These inner “divisions,” Cook suggests, gave Kazin insight into the divisions at the heart of modern culture. Perhaps. But they certainly seem to have contributed to the writer’s creative imagination, and his ability to pull together the sacred and the profane.

Kazin’s ability to write so well was evident early in a journal he kept from 1938, at age 23, until his death. Seeds were planted here that came to flower as articles for Partisan Review and Commentary, mid-century vehicles for vibrant cultural discourse. Kazin’s journal entries describe intense encounters with friends, especially Hannah Arendt and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and enemies (Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, et al) and narratives of quiet morning reading—from Blake to Bellow, from Whitman to Wilson, as well as his own many adventures with love and sexuality.

Cook pays little attention to the question of why Kazin, well before his death, gave to the New York Public Library, and left open to researchers, these apparently unexpurgated, sometimes salacious, perhaps even libelous journals. (Cook merely mentions the $30,000 Kazin received for the journals.) There is no need for psychobabble, which Cook refreshingly avoids, but some speculative probe of what Kazin’s rare if not unique openness might mean would have been interesting.

But Cook has met an extraordinary number of challenges. One might envy the biographer who has at his disposal a life-time of journal entries as well as three of his subject’s autobiographical explorations(Walker in the City, Starting Out in the Thirties, 1965 and New York Jew, 1978). On the other hand, this embarrassment of riches could be overwhelming enough to discourage even the most confident biographer. Perhaps that is part of the reason there has been none until now.

We are, therefore, in Richard Cook’s debt for this study of a man of great achievement in a relatively long, sometimes happy and sometimes unhappy, life. There were broken marriages and two children from separate unions who were alienated from their father for long periods of time. Kazin was also subject to the isolation and loneliness suffered by so many writers as well as to the same consternations and loneliness that all people face. He was troubled, too, by the same existential, insoluble questions. He may, however, have spent more time worrying about them.

One of his worries was God, yes God, with a capital G (yet another thing which distinguished him from most of the other New York Jewish intellectuals). This was especially evident in his writings about Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Faulkner, and in God and the American Writer (1997), where Kazin is often ecstatic and most penetrating in several long essays including, his analysis of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address.” Obviously, Kazin was not only interested in Adonai. Indeed, he expressed his ongoing interest in Jesus and Christianity quite early. Cook, I think, doesn’t do enough with this.

He does, however, make it abundantly clear that Kazin was a committed “secular” Jew, and he is superb in his exploration of what that term meant to Kazin, even as its meaning changed for him over time. Kazin struggled with the “Jewish question” all his life. And “it came to [him] more and more,” he said, as late as 1987, “that there was no intellectual solution to my long search for the meaning of Jewishness.” Many of us, it appears, are in very good company.