Posted on January 16, 2008 by Steve Pollak
A few more notes on the new Alfred Kazin biography by Richard M. Cook (some of you might want to read my earlier post on Kazin to understand why I wouldn't want the New York Times' William Grimes to have the last say on this book):
The Wall Street Journal ran a review by author Robert K. Landers in Saturday's paper. Here's more:
Kazin brought a rare intensity to literature, as one of his editors noted. But in a time when political passions ran high, he did not let his own so run away with him that they might impede his rise rather than serve it. He never joined the Communist Party or publicly expressed support for it; he signed no petitions for or against the Moscow show trials. He played it safe, Malcolm Cowley, his editor at the New Republic, came to suspect. Yet radical politics was central to Kazin's thinking in those days, as Richard M. Cook observes in "Alfred Kazin," an excellent biography -- sympathetic yet critical, as good on the works as on the life of the eminent literary critic.
Also, The New Yorker ran a blurb in its 'Briefly Noted' section. The unsigned piece said:
This diligent biography draws heavily on Kazin’s own insights about himself and his surroundings, offering a testament to the struggles and triumphs of a writer who, though hampered by self-seriousness, “bourgeois” neuroses, and a string of marital failures, kept his social and aesthetic ideals intact throughout decades of turmoil. Suffering from what he called “a critic’s weakness for ideas,” Kazin was nevertheless a ruthless assessor whose greatest legacy is his resolute honesty.
It almost sounds like a completely different book compared to what Grimes wrote.
Go figure.