Alfred Kazin, New York Jew

Alfred Kazin (1915–1998) was every inch the New York Jewish intellectual at a time when that brilliant cantankerous crowd included the sociologist Daniel Bell (Kazin’s brother-in-law), the political analyst Irving Kristol, the art critic Clement Greenberg, and several literary critics, including Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Norman Podhoretz, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Irving Howe. As teenagers they witnessed the heated oratory as streetcorner socialists and communists fiercely debated what should be done in the midst of the Great Depression; later many of them would participate in the legendary shouting matches that occurred in the alcoves of City College—although Kazin, ever the nonjoiner, preferred to spend his free time in the library. Small wonder that these bright ambitious young men became secular Jews, eager to make their way out of parochial beginnings in Brooklyn and into the bright lights and giddy opportunities of Manhattan; and small wonder that Kazin, throughout his life, would find himself at odds with anyone whom he regarded as an ideologue.

Richard Cook’s estimable biography not only tells the story of how Alfred Kazin rose to prominence as an American writer but also how his experiences mirrored those of an entire generation. Cook’s sources include extensive interviews, Kazin’s published work, and, most important of all, material gleaned from Kazin’s extensive notebooks.

Kazin’s first book, On Native Grounds (1942), propelled its twenty-seven-year-old author onto the national stage. Such subsequent books as A Walker in the City (1951), New York Jew (1978), and God and the American Writer (1997), together with a steady outpouring of influential essays and book reviews, solidified his well-deserved reputation as the dean of American criticism. After the death of Edmund Wilson in 1972, Kazin was considered by many to be our country’s last man of letters.

Cook rightly calls On Native Grounds “one of the more extraordinary personal efforts of connection and possession in American literary scholarship”; the same thing might be said of everything Kazin wrote. He was an American writer who wrote about America. Looking back on his long career at the writing desk, Kazin declared his never-wavering love affair with American literature: “In a sense this literature was mine—I felt part of it and at home with it. . . . I responded [to the writers and their work] with intellectual kinship and pleasure. I knew the modulations of their language; I could see their landscapes. And very important, indeed, I shared much of their belief in the ideal freedom and power of the self, in the political and social visions of radical democracy.”

What Cook adds to the oft-told tale of Kazin’s American rapture is an account of the terrible costs that Kazin’s success exacted: agonizing years spent trying to get the narrative voice or structure for books such as A Walker in the City or An American Procession (1984) exactly right; three failed marriages, with the one to the writer Ann Birstein often leading to broken crockery and public shouting matches; horribly strained relationships with his son, Michael, and his daughter, Kate; and, perhaps hardest of all to understand, his often desperate efforts to secure a position with tenure, a job that would relieve the pressure to balance his monthly expenses by combining book reviewing with lecture fees.

If any literary critic had the right to feel supremely self-confident, it would be Alfred Kazin; but what his notebooks reveal is quite the opposite. He fretted over bad reviews, never understanding how “payback” among academics works, and he always imagined, without any evidence, that Lionel Trilling blocked his continuing efforts to get a job at Columbia. He counted himself a member of the radical Left (unlike such neoconservative contemporaries as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz), but he was uncomfortable with the antiwar agitation fomented by the New Left. Kazin preferred to stay on the sidelines and to express his indignation in sharply worded paragraphs. His son Michael, then the copresident of Harvard’s sds chapter, preferred more direct...