Posted on January 29, 2008 by Steve Pollak
I guess that if you write a biography of one of the greatest literary critics of our time (pictured above), you have to be prepared for a close reading of your work. Richard M. Cook, author of “Alfred Kazin: A Biography” has scored points for his earnestness and for his research of Kazin’s life and work but in two reviews in the New York Times, he’s been taken to task for being too sympathetic towards his subject and, most recently, for not having enough of an understanding of Kazin.
Here’s more from the most recent Times review, written by author Brian Morton:
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.”
The book also received a review in the L.A. Times over the weekend. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Richard Eder contrasted Cook's writing with Kazin's:
Kazin's biography by Richard M. Cook, who teaches American literature at the University of Missouri, lays out the complications of this genial, acerbic figure. He makes much use of Kazin's journals -- a good thing, though it has drawbacks. The journals, particularly the earlier ones, explore their author's arrogance and scruples, advances and retreats, to the point where they blur rather than illuminate his character. At times, too, Cook's prose is both stiff and cloudy -- a contrast with the quoted passages exhibiting the poetic bite of Kazin's own writing. His friend Philip Roth praised a literary criticism "which read like a passionate communication intended for intelligent, living human beings rather than like a 1940s academic exercise or a 1930s political tract."
For more on the book, see my previous postings here and here.