Missing in Action

Seymour Krim? Never heard of him? Start by reading this book cover to cover. If you know Seymour Krim, this collection of "pieces," a compendium of his grand kvetches, will remind you of a true indispensable American individual. Here are essays culled from the books Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (1961); Shake It for the World, Smartass (1970); You & Me (1974); and the posthumous What's this Cat's Story? (1991)—the titles alone show Krim's unique perspective and snappy language. Krim was a writer of his time, a postwar man of letters when bravura literary performances were prized; as these essays demonstrate, Krim sits in the company of those he considered his betters: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, among writers who "made it." While "success"—the kind he describes so poignantly in his most anthologized essay, "For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business"—eluded Krim, he produced an impressive body of work, at a time when writers actually responded to one another's ideas, when ideas were important. You cannot help but be struck by that interaction and commitment to Culture. To be dramatic, we won't see the likes of him again.

As with any anthology of a forgotten author's work, one should ask, why read him now? Krim's writerly complaints feel fresh. Take, for example, the question he poses in his essay "The American Novel Made Me": where does "the legendary U.S. novelist go when except for a handful of individuals he is no longer a culture-hero in a radically new environment, when his medium is passing into the void of time, and when he is still stuck with a savage inner need to speak, confess, design, shape, record—the whole once-glorious shmear?" Krim declares his exit from the ambition of novel writing "in the dangerous gamble to make the Word deed," and faces the new challenges of creative nonfiction. Akin to Truman Capote's boast that he had invented the nonfiction novel, Krim makes a claim for journalism as art.

I loved these essays when I first saw them in The Village Voice or Soho Weekly News or some other important downtown venue—not that he didn't write for the big guys too, The New York Times, etc., but the fringe freed him up. A young writer trying to be a writer in the seventies, arriving on the scene, looking to strut her stuff, who would be there in the world of secular Jewish intellectuals to pave a path? Krim, that's who. If you were looking for fame, glory, celebrity, wealth, go elsewhere. Krim was at the thrilling nexus of jazz, sex, and the Beat literati, and I discovered his work through this window: Krim's important introduction to Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels (1965). Krim there articulated the "post-T.S. Eliot straight jacket of American letters" that all writers of his time had to acknowledge and then go to extremes to squelch, giving permission for the new voices of his era. This vital essay explained the exigencies and experimentation of the Beat movement, and indeed, the impetus behind much of the mid-century writing at large.

Krim, it was clear, had his own "anxiety of influence." Check out his honest to god cocksure language. The curmudgeonly wordsmith packed a phrase like nobody's business, inspiring writers of the trendy "new journalism." He jockeyed uncomfortably with the likes of Tom Wolfe, first coining the punchy term "radical chic," as The Nation writer Dan Wakefield remembers in the volume's foreword.

The editor Mark Cohen's emphasis is Krim as Jew, as good a focus as any. Cohen's smart introduction and selections make a good case for the Jewish Krim. Cohen is surprised that "Jewish studies" failed to adopt him. While Krim was profoundly and culturally undeniably Jewish, his relation to traditional practice, say in the manner of the Partisan Review...