The New York Times-20080127-In the American Grain- -Review-

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In the American Grain; [Review]

Full Text (1265  words)[Author Affiliation] Brian Morton's novels include Starting Out in the Evening and Breakable You.

ALFRED KAZIN

A Biography.

By Richard M. Cook.

Illustrated. 452 pp. Yale University Press. $35.

Alfred Kazin was born in 1915; he began writing book reviews while still in his teens; and when he was 27, On Native Grounds, an extraordinarily accomplished meditation on American prose literature from the 1890s to his own time, appeared. From the moment of his precocious arrival on the literary scene until his death, on his 83rd birthday, in 1998, Kazin was himself one of the glories of American literature. The author of a prodigious stream of reviews, critical studies and memoirs, Kazin was one of the great critics of his time and one of the great autobiographers. It's hard to think of many writers who wrote so well for so long.

Whenever anyone writes about the New York intellectuals -- the group of male Jewish writers who came to prominence in the years after the Second World War -- Kazin's name is near the top of the list. And yet he wasn't a typical member of the tribe. If you were drawing a composite sketch of a model New York intellectual, you'd make him an atheist, largely unconcerned with spiritual questions; a partisan of European literary modernism; and a creature whose political thinking had been forever marked by 1930s debates about socialism and Communism. Kazin, by contrast, was God-haunted (I want my God back is the next-to-last sentence of his 1978 memoir, New York Jew); unquenchably fascinated by American literature and American history; and politically radical, but in a fashion that owed less to Marx than to Whitman -- Kazin's radicalism was democratic, generous, angry and thoroughly in the American grain.

A representative essay by a New York intellectual (Philip Rahv, say, or Irving Howe) is a nimble and intricate blending of literary and political analysis. A representative Kazin essay is something else. His essays often start in the same place -- he could tease out the delicate ties between art and politics as deftly as anyone -- but then he'll take a sharp turn, striking off for a territory of reverence and rapture, of awestruck contemplation of the sheer mystery of being alive. In an essay on Thoreau's journals, seeking to capture Thoreau's uniqueness as an observer of the natural world, he quotes Simone Weil's remark that attentiveness without an object is prayer in its supreme form. In an essay on Emily Dickinson, after examining the poem that begins with the line Because I could not stop for Death, he comments: To write of death with this wonder, this openness, this overwhelming communication of its strangeness -- this is to show respect for the lords of life and death. This respect is what true poetry lives with, not with the armed fist of the perpetual rebel.

Most of the New York intellectuals seem to have regarded personal life as unworthy of literary examination. Here too, Kazin was different. He wrote three volumes of memoirs -- A Walker in the City, Starting Out in the Thirties and New York Jew -- that are at once vivid works of social history, gold mines of literary gossip and unforgettable portraits of the author himself: ardent, lyrical, avid for experience, moral, moralistic, in love with reading and writing, in love with New York.

Richard Cook's biography, the first that has appeared of Kazin, is a respectable effort, well written and well researched, but it isn't the work of art that Kazin deserves. Cook gives us lists of places where Kazin taught, lists of people he met (Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, Delmore Schwartz), lists of people he socialized with, but he doesn't have much of a gift for storytelling, so we don't end up with the sense a great biography can give us -- that we've lived alongside its subject. Nor does Cook seem to have much feeling for the growth and development of Kazin's ideas. In his criticism, Kazin kept returning to the same writers; the figures who inspired him in his 20s continued to inspire him when he was an old man. Did his relationships with these writers change? Deepen? Stagnate? Cook doesn't address this in any significant way.

Sometimes it seems Cook doesn't really get Kazin. The biographer attributes the critical indifference that met the 1984 publication of An American Procession, Kazin's account of the literary scene from Emerson to Fitzgerald, to the risks incurred when a critic relies wholly on his own personal impressions and reflections, rather than on the work of other critics. The book, Cook continues, is a very personal work. Kazin keeps other critics out to get more of himself in. He insists on being alone with his writers -- one-on-one, writer-to-writer, taking their measure according to his lights, his experiences, his prejudices.

Coming upon this passage, the reader may be tempted to deface the margin with a comment like What the hell should he be doing? Being alone with writers is what any good critic does, what any good reader does. It was precisely through his deeply singular, deeply personal relationships with his writers -- Melville and Thoreau and Emerson and Dickinson -- that Kazin produced such indelible criticism.

In his essay The Writer and the University, Kazin himself made this point as well as anyone ever has: Above all, the writer does not work with anyone; he is not a collaborator, he is not cooperative; and it can be to his very peril as a writer if he sacrifices the excruciating precision of his vision. It's hard to understand why a biographer who does not instinctively rejoice at the example of a critic who insists on being alone with his writers should have wanted to take Alfred Kazin for his subject. For Kazin, you could say, being alone with his writers was prayer in its supreme form. At times, one almost gets the sense Cook is embarrassed by Kazin. If this is so, it's easy to see why. Kazin was passionately personal, passionately excessive; he was a virtuoso of the art of going too far. You can see it even in the titles of some of his books. The volume of excerpts from his journals, for example, is called A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment.

When I first heard about the title, I remember thinking it was a bit much. Shortly after that, I had occasion to visit Kazin in the hospital. He already had endured prostate cancer and heart disease; I can't remember which of his afflictions he was suffering from when I visited. One of his books had recently received an appreciative review in The New Republic; I mentioned the review, thinking it would cheer him up. But he didn't want to talk about the review. He wanted to talk about Lincoln. He had just finished reading David Herbert Donald's biography of Lincoln -- a wonderful biography, Kazin said. He said the more he learned about Lincoln, the more fascinated he was; he said the story of Lincoln was the story of America. I was 40 years his junior, and healthy where he was ailing, but as he continued to speak about Lincoln and America, and as I drank it all in, I could only envy the astonishing vitality of his mind, and I remember thinking that the title of his volume of journals was not so excessive at all. A lifetime burning in every moment. He was in his pajamas, elderly, sickly, with time running out, and yet the flame was dazzling.

[Illustration]PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD NEWMAN/GETTY IMAGES (1968))