Posted on January 3, 2008 by Steve Pollak
If any critic were to be considered the supreme inspiration for Jewish Literary Review.com, it would be Alfred Kazin (pictured right).
When I was kicking around the idea of starting this site, I actually tried to get the domain name “NewYorkJew.com” but it was already taken. (And, unfortunately, the site looks to be nothing but a bunch of advertising). On top of that, I decided not to go with that name because I would have had to explain the significance to people who were not familiar with Kazin’s book and might have wondered why I named the site “New York Jew” when, in fact, I live and write in Atlanta.
In any event, it is with great pleasure that I finally get to mention his name on this blog. Richard M. Cook has written a new biography of Kazin, aptly titled, “Alfred Kazin: A Biography,” and the New York Times ran a review of the book in yesterday’s paper.
The Times’ William Grimes wrote that Cook, who teaches American Literature at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, is “conscientious and thoroughgoing.” But, later, Grimes says Cook “suffers from excessive politeness”:
He bends over so far to be fair that you can almost feel the sinews straining. Kazin was not, by most accounts, a pleasant person. He could be self-absorbed, rude, condescending and humorless.
We’re left to assume that Cook must have made Kazin out to be a pleasant person. Grimes never bothers to back his ‘sinew straining’ assessment with any actual evidence. Instead, he offers tongue-in-cheek congratulations to Cook for taking Kazin to task for his serial philandering.
Towards the end of the piece, here’s how Grimes summarizes Kazin:
As a literary critic, Kazin remained true to himself and his moment. This was his strength and his weakness. Everything, for him, was personal. A critic who could lash out at bedroom wallpaper for being sickening “with its irrelevance,” he engaged writers with an almost audacious presumption, feeling the contours of their psyches and clutching them in an intimate, passionate embrace.
I agree with the last part of that assessment and, along that vein, I picked up my copy of “New York Jew” and found the part where Kazin talked about meeting a young Saul Bellow. I think it’s a great example of the way Kazin used simple yet vivid details to sketch a portrait of a great writer:
Through the Chicago writer Isaac Rosenfeld — whose wife, Vasiliki, was my secretary — I met Saul Bellow, who was also just in from Chicago, and who carried around with him a sense of his destiny as a novelist that excited everyone around him. Bellow was the first writer of my generation — we had been born ten days apart — who talked of Lawrence and Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, not as books in the library but as fellow operators in the same business. As I walked him across Brooklyn Bridge and around my favorite streets in Brooklyn Heights, he looked my city over with great detachment. He had the gift—without warning, it would follow a séance of brooding Jewish introspection—of making you see the most microscopic event in the street because he happened to be seeing it. In the course of some startling observations on the future of the war, the pain of Nazism, the neurotic effects of apartment-house living on his friends in New York (Chicago was different; it was a good thing to grow up in Chicago), he thought up some very funny jokes, puns, and double entendres. It was sometimes difficult to catch the punch line, he laughed so fast with hearty pleasure at things so well said. And they were well said, in a voice that already shaped its words with careful public clarity. He explained, as casually as if he were in a ball park faulting a pitcher, that Fitzgerald was weak, but Dreiser strong in the right places. He examined Hemingway’s style like a surgeon pondering another surgeon’s stitches. Then, familiarly calling on the D.H. Lawrence we all loved as our particular brother in arms, he pointed to the bilious and smoke-dirty sky over the Squibb factory on Columbia Heights. Like Lawrence, he wanted no “umbrella” between him and the essential mystery. He wanted direct contact with everything in the universe around him.