A few weeks from now, a good university press will publish the first biography of Alfred Kazin. This should make me, his only son, happier than it does. Not that I have any complaint with the book itself. The author — Richard M. Cook, an English professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis — appraises my father’s work with sympathy and insight. Inevitably, he describes the tumultuous relationships my father had with his four wives, several lovers, a few of his students, and many of his fellow authors, as well as my sister and me. “Only too much is ever enough,” my father liked to say, attributing the line to John Updike. After reading his biography, one could conclude that even too much did not make Alfred Kazin happy. But these tales are too familiar to bother me, and they will not surprise anyone who knew my father or has read his three volumes of memoirs.
My uneasiness is due instead to artistic egoism. Ever since I began composing little editorials for my middle-school newspaper, people have asked, “What is it like being the son of a famous writer?” Once I started publishing articles and books about U.S. history, the question seemed to come at me every week or so. But in recent years, I’ve heard it less often. Perhaps that’s because my father died in 1998, and the names of literary critics fade quickly from public memory. Or perhaps the people I meet tend to be historians or journalists who are as familiar with my work as with my father’s. Or maybe they are just too polite to ask a question that might seem disrespectful to a gray-bearded academic. But now, thanks to Professor Cook, I will probably hear the question again.
So here’s an answer: I’m utterly ambivalent about it, and reading his biography has helped me understand why. My father’s influence makes me anxious, but it also gives me comfort. The anxiety is simpler to explain. He routinely wrote long pieces for The New York Times Book Review, and, on occasion, the identifying caption would read, “the critic and teacher Alfred Kazin.” The authority of that definite article! Almost everyone who picked up the Book Review, the editors must have assumed, already knew who Kazin was. Anyone who didn’t was clearly a newcomer to serious literary conversation and needed a quick, if subtle, lesson about who deserved a “the” and who did not.
High on the list of the deserving were the writers whom Irving Howe famously called “the New York Intellectuals.” Besides my father, unofficial members included Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Clement Greenberg, Norman Mailer, Richard Hofstadter, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, and Howe himself. Saul Bellow headed up a one-man colonial office in Chicago, and Hannah Arendt and Edmund Wilson were revered, if somewhat distanced, sages.
As every graduate student in American studies or literature used to know, most of the New York Intellectuals were Jews from working-class backgrounds who abandoned the Marxism of their youth, read widely and fiercely, and gradually became arbiters of the best the nation’s culture had to offer. From the 1950s into the 1980s, no one who cared about the ideas swirling through America’s politics, writing, or art could avoid their erudite and passionate debate, even though much of it took place in such low-circulation venues as Commentary and The New York Review of Books.
But all the New York Intellectuals are either dead or in their dotage, and they have no real successors. Filmmakers, creators of innovative TV shows, and edgy contributors to popular magazines, Web sites, and the Times op-ed page now rule the cultural dialogue. And they are as likely to live in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., as on the West Side of Manhattan. No writer of serious nonfiction gains the broad esteem and recognition once bestowed on the likes of Hofstadter and Wilson.
I’ve had better luck reaching the public than have most academics. I frequently write for newspapers, and my last book was reviewed in The New Yorker as well as The Journal of American History. Alas, my primary audience remains fellow professors and their students. My father never had a best seller or won a Pulitzer Prize. But his splendid reputation earned him a long lunch with President John F. Kennedy in the White House; the topics under discussion ranged from F. Scott Fitzgerald and André Malraux to Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. I got to have a quick sandwich last year with Karl Rove, who loves political history. We mostly traded anecdotes about past campaigns.
Several other children of the Intellectuals tolerate a similarly diminished stature. David Bell, Adam Bellow, Dan Hofstadter, and James Trilling have all written fine books, as did Nicholas Howe before his untimely death. Helen Wilson is an intensely original painter, and William Kristol edits a prominent conservative magazine. But they live all over the country and have concerns as diverse as their addresses. Only Kristol’s renown rivals his father’s, and it derives from his TV-ready skill at political combat rather than from any great talent for social thought.
Confronting my father’s work is a more complex experience than failing to match his fame. He wrote with authority and elegance about an intimidating range of subjects — politics, religion, painting, and photography, as well as fiction from many continents. Among his most memorable essays are a lengthy piece about the art and theology of William Blake and a savage account of Jewish neoconservatives’ basking in the favor of the Reagan administration. And he was incapable of composing a dull or indifferent sentence. This is how, in 1956, he concluded an introduction to Moby-Dick:
Man is not merely a waif in the world; he is an ear listening to the sea that almost drowns him; an imagination, a mind, that hears the sea in the shell, and darts behind all appearance to the beginning of things, and runs riot with the frightful force of the sea itself. There, in man’s incredible and unresting mind, is the fantastic gift with which we enter into what is not our own, what is even against us — and for this, so amazingly, we can speak.
Malraux once observed, “The poet is haunted by a voice with which words must be harmonized.” I don’t write poetry, but I know what he meant.
Yet, when I reread Alfred Kazin, I’m often pleased, and a bit surprised, to find myself agreeing with what he thinks as well as awed by how well he expresses it. His first book, which came out in 1942, narrated the American past in a way that I’ve tried to emulate without realizing I was doing so.
On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature made the 27-year-old Kazin a phenomenon in the English-speaking world of letters. The sprawling account of major writers from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression broke with the hermetic New Criticism then on the rise among literature professors. He framed each author’s work within his or her particular environment of time, place, and sentiment while also narrating the tension between a Whitman-like ethos of democracy and a Menckenesque scorn of the foolish masses. The method, inspired by Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought, allowed him to evaluate Upton Sinclair and the anonymous authors of the Works Progress Administration guidebooks alongside Wharton, Dreiser, and Faulkner. The result was a saga of the national culture festooned with keen judgments and wit.
Reviewers more than praised the book; they paid tribute. Trilling called it “not only a history but a moral history.” Howard Mumford Jones considered it the best study ever written about the nation’s literature. From Britain, Harold Laski declared that Kazin was “among the six best critical minds America has had since Emerson.”
While Laski certainly overdid it, On Native Grounds remains, after all these years, a formidable accomplishment — and a deftly political one. My father started drafting the book as Hitler was gobbling up Czechoslovakia, and he completed it soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That horrific context filled him with a “world-historical sense of purpose.” In the book, the past never seems quite past, as he analyzes how one modern writer after another challenged or evaded the tyranny of new money and old beliefs. “I have never recovered from the thirties or wanted to,” he wrote decades later. While rejecting the crude Marxist formulas of the era, he always believed a critic should reveal the painful conflicts and wild hopes for deliverance that are at the heart of so many important books. “For all its historical background,” he recalled about On Native Grounds, “it was written out of an old-fashioned belief that literature conveys central truths about life, that it is indispensable to our expression of the human condition and our struggle for a better life.”
His literary stardom still intimidates me, but that statement makes me feel like his peer, almost his comrade. Like many erstwhile New Leftists, I became an academic because I wanted to continue a life of political engagement, albeit with a secure income and the opportunity to spend lots of time in libraries. Beginning a Ph.D. program at the same age that my father was being compared with Emerson, I wanted to understand how social movements had emerged and advanced, prospered and failed. This history could serve the movements of the future, I immodestly thought. Thirty years later, I’m not sure whether anything I’ve written has served so instrumental a purpose. But it’s a comfort to come across a line by my father that I could have written myself, albeit not as well.
While I’m not a literary critic, I am inclined to view the past through the language and behavior of historical actors. When I wrote about American populists, left and right, it was their effusive metaphors about the moral many and the wicked few that motivated me. I embarked on a biography of William Jennings Bryan after reading letters from his followers who regarded his speechmaking as a form of latter-day prophecy.
In my current project — a history of the American left — I’m trying to explain how the cultural work of radicals did more to change the United States than did their efforts to seek power in workplaces and government. The other day, I came across a statement, almost a declaration, in On Native Grounds that I hadn’t noticed before: “Who is there to deny that the very fame of American writing in the modern era, the very effort to create a responsible literature in America appropriate to a new age, rests upon a tradition of enmity to the established order, more significantly a profound alienation from it?” Some of the authors he was referring to — John Reed, Richard Wright, and his good friend Josephine Herbst — will have a place in my book, too.
Everything my father wrote, from that first book to his last essay, gained ardent readers. But he never again published a volume as influential as On Native Grounds. Increasingly, reviewers, particularly in academe, perceived the one-time insurgent as a gruff custodian of the canon. Worse, they criticized him for appreciating literature too much and theorizing about it too little, if at all.
In 1984 he published An American Procession, a study of writers from Emerson to Fitzgerald that was a sequel of sorts to his youthful triumph. But this time, the reception was exceedingly tepid. Reviewers faulted him for putting no ideas in play or even perceiving that it might be valuable to do so. In The New York Review of Books, Denis Donoghue remarked, “Kazin’s chosen writers are presented as if they were major characters in a novel, required only to be interesting and to enter upon relations with other characters only a little less interesting. Critical qualifications which would retard the narrative are kept out.”
Those words stung my father, who was nearing 70, to the quick. Yet they were not unfair. In his later work, he did come back time and again to his favorite authors, sometimes refreshing earlier opinions, sometimes just repeating old stories. He still wrote regularly for such top editors as Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic and Robert Silvers at The New York Review. But with the postmodern wave conquering departments of literature, not many rising academics thought he had anything left to teach them.
He had never warmed to the New Critics back in midcentury, and the new vogue for critical theory exasperated him. After teaching a seminar one day in 1984, he wrote to me, “My only real problem, as usual with students of literature, is that they are shrewd but nonliterate, and I do get tired of mentioning exotic, out-of-the-way books like Hamlet and War and Peace, the very sound of which seems to puzzle my students.” A favorite graduate advisee, Mary Beth McMahon, recalls that he once threw a Bible at a student, “using the canon as a cannon,” as she puts it.
Although his attitude won him no friends, I can’t blame him for being unhappy about this particular intellectual turn. Humanities professors are as fashion-conscious as high-school juniors, and the nuggets to be found in Foucault, Kristeva, and Bakhtin quickly turned to dross in the hands of many academics who imposed the same tone of jargon-filled irony on every text they studied. I, too, found it depressing, and tedious, to read criticism — or history — that employed a specialized vocabulary and bristled with references that scared away the uninitiated. Such writing gives little pleasure to the reader and will not endure.
Recently, in fact, the postmodern fever has noticeably cooled. New historicists have restored the significance of context, cultural and biographical, to the understanding of literature. Terry Eagleton, whose books on literary theory are more readable and popular than most, now blasts its current practitioners for being “shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion, and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals, and foundations, superficial about truth, objectivity, and disinterestedness.” I can almost hear Alfred Kazin applauding.
In the end, the greatest debt I owe my father is the great respect and limitless passion he had for writing well. Postmodernists talk about “a hermeneutics of suspicion.” He taught me to be suspicious of every word I type. Have I used a cliché or a lazy term borrowed from social science? Does my narrative capture the essence of an event or an individual? Can I stand to hear it read out loud? His unspoken rule was: Write a sentence, mistrust it, revise the sentence, mistrust it a little less, then revise it again.
For many years, I avoided reading the authors he wrote about so often. I took just one literature class in college — on modern drama — and didn’t dip into Emerson or Dreiser or Henry Adams until years after I had finished my dissertation. But I fell under my father’s spell just the same. To lose oneself in reading and writing is one of the highest, and most sustained, joys in my life. And the old man will always be at my shoulder, asking if he can read a draft, knowing he could help me make it better.
Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is author, most recently, of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 17, Page B10