"Perception at the Pitch of Passion": Alfred Kazin in Retrospect

Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writing. By Alfred Kazin. Edited by Ted Solotaroff. Harper Collins, 2003

In the last decade or so, the work of Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) seems to have gone into an eclipse. Once one of America's most present critics and author of perhaps the best single work of American literary history, On Native Grounds (1942), Kazin's absence is baffling.¹ Very much a public intellectual, Kazin could well have suffered from the emergence since the 1960s of a theoretically oriented literary professoriat. New York intellectuals such as Kazin wrote primarily for Partisan Review, Commentary, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker and cultivated what Irving Howe, one of their number, once named "the style of brilliance." As all-purpose critics, figures such as Kazin saw themselves as keepers of the republic's cultural conscience (Gunn). As he wrote near the end of On Native Grounds: "criticism has been the great American lay philosophy, the intellectual conscience and the intellectual carryall" (400).

Ted Solotaroff's introduction to Alfred Kazin's America is a useful guide to what makes Kazin's writing—ranging from reviews, literary criticism, literary-intellectual history, autobiographical memoirs, and literary profiles—so rich an achievement. But in consultation with Philip Roth, Solotaroff decided to "concentrate on his writings about Kazin's American subject, and to include his personal as well as critical writing" (xiii). This choice echoes Kazin's own words in the 1981 essay "To Be a Critic": "Forty and more years ago when Ibegan practicing this peculiar trade of criticism, I had thegood fortune to fall in love with a then unfashionable subject, American literature" (Solotaroff 506). Yet some who question the exclusively American orientation of the collection will point to the sentences that follow the ones just quoted: "I say 'fall in love with,' not 'specialize in,' for it never occurred to me to devote myself exclusively to this literature. . . . To devote oneself exclusively to American literature would have seemed to me a confession of mediocrity" (506). Solotaroff's focus on Kazin's writing about America and Americans gives the volume a certain coherence but at the expense of neglecting Kazin's considerable cosmopolitan range. As a result, for instance, one of Kazin's best essays—his long introduction to The Portable Blake (1946)—is omitted from Alfred Kazin's America.

In what follows, I want to focus on some of the essential characteristics of Kazin's work as a way of beginning a reassessment of his legacy. What I want to suggest is that Kazin's oeuvre is worth retrieving not only for its critical acuity but because he left a body of work of considerable critical, cultural, and moral stature, although that work is certainly problematic in particular aspects.

Kazin ranged widely across any number of nonfiction genres. This should put him in the good books of those who deconstruct the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction, fiction and memoir, literary and intellectual history, and create a general category called "writing." Yet Solotaroff's decision to present us with Kazin on America will set off alarm bells among contemporary advocates of a "transnational" American studies. If Kazin's great concern in On Native Grounds was "the absorption [of writers] in every last detail of the American world," he also insisted, it should be noted, that this absorption was inseparable from "their deep and subtle alienation from it" (53). He rendered this alienation more specifically American by adding, "All modern writers, it may be, have known that alienation equally well. . . . But what interested me here was our alienation on native grounds" (53). In a more personal idiom, Kazin's essential theme was the loneliness and disappointment that the promise of American life bequeathed to its writers and intellectuals. In this he anticipated Perry Miller's 1952 essay "Errand into the Wilderness," where Miller wrote that, having finally realized...