God and the American Writer (review)

From the beginning, Kazin writes, the mass of people in the United States have adhered to a “politicized, intolerant, and paranoiac religion,” but significant American writers have been radical individualists who “resist being on the side of the mob.” He devotes a chapter to each of twelve writers, showing them to be well outside the religious mainstream of their times.

Kazin describes Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain as haunted by their religious traditions. Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter wrestles with his Puritan heritage, and Puritanism wins. Melville, raised in the Dutch Reform Church, was tortured by the fear that the universe is meaningless and could “neither believe nor disbelieve.” The mechanistic determinism that Mark Twain embraced as an adult merely recreated the predestinarianism of his upbringing, and his endless literary denunciations of the Calvinist God express an obsessive personal hatred. Emerson and Whitman were transcendentalists, perceiving their own souls in Nature, God in their souls, and a universe of general beneficence. In contrast, the intensely introverted Emily Dickinson does not see God in nature but only as a character in her mind.

Religion, in Kazan’s view, has a way of forcing itself into the lives and works of American writers. The Civil War, he says, was the climax of the American belief in a personal God, as both sides saw themselves engaged in a holy war. Its uncontrollable events bludgeoned even the rationalist Lincoln to express, in his great Second Inaugural, a belief in the sovereignty of an inscrutable Providence. Faulkner, not himself a believer, writes about a South in which Calvinism unites with “race madness” to add “bigotry and arrogance to the curse of slavery” that has polluted a sacred landscape. William James, himself a beneficiary of the redeeming effects of a religious experience, writes about others whose lives have been similarly salvaged but, scientist-like, will only cautiously suggest that the God of the mystical encounter acts a lot like the human subconscious. For the naturalist Robert Frost, the idea of God is “something to play with.”

Kazin openly dislikes doctrinal or orthodox religion. In his reading, it was T. S. Eliot’s inner fragmentations that enabled his great poetry, while Eliot’s flight from his own instability into a dogmatic, traditional church only abetted his anti-Semitic and fascist tendencies. Kazin is fair enough, however, to see Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a wholly religious effort on the part of a traditional believer that succeeded in creating a widespread, also wholly religious, condemnation of slavery—though he insists that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s vision of the martyred Christian slave as a Christ-figure was idiosyncratic and her Christianity was “strictly her own.”

Kazin does not use transitions, so he’s harder to read than necessary; he’s redundant—often repeating quotations, for instance; and his attitude toward the “censorious” religion of the American masses is pretty censorious itself. But in its examination of religion in the lives and works of the writers he covers, the book is well researched and deeply engaging.