Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim

3. The American Novel Made Me

58 3 The American Novel Made Me “The American Novel Made Me” is a passionate addition to the rich literature that celebrates and wonders at the young Jews of the 1930s, whose extraordinary bookishness was indistinguishable from their budding patriotism. Like Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1958), Charles Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan (1986), Alexander Bloom’s Prodigal Sons (1986), and James Atlas’s biography of Delmore Schwartz (1977), Krim’s essay powerfully captures how “an isolated, supersensitive N.Y. Jewish boy,” found in John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and many other novelists “the America out there and more than anything I wanted to identify with that big gaudy continent and its variety of human beings who came to me so clearly through the pages of these so-called fictions.” But this essay is also a full-throated argument for New Journalism as the inheritor of the space once occupied by the novel. Krim argues that the ambitious writer’s “only choice is to insert himself into these events through his writing, to become an actor upon them instead of a helpless observer.” That is a good description of what New Journalism became from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, a period that has been called the “last, great good time of American journalism” (Weingarten 2005, 8). Krim pioneered such writing, and in this piece he is one of the first to define and defend it. I was literally made, shaped, whetted and given a world with a purpose by the American realistic novel of the mid to late 1930s. From the age of 14 to 17 I gorged myself on the works of Thomas Wolfe (beginning with Of Time and the River, catching up with Angel and then keeping pace till Big Tom’s stunning end), Hemingway, Faulkner, James T. Farrell, Steinbeck, John O’Hara, James Cain, Richard Wright, Dos Passos, Erskine The American Novel Made Me . 59 Caldwell, Jerome Weidman, William Saroyan, and knew in my pumping heart that I wanted to be such a novelist. To me, an isolated, supersensitive N.Y. Jewish boy given the privacy to dream in the locked bathroom of middle-class life these novels taught me about the America OUT THERE and more than anything I wanted to identify with that big gaudy continent and its variety of human beings who came to me so clearly through the pages of these so-called fictions. I dreamed southern accents, Okies, bourbon-and-branchwater, Gloria Wandrous, jukejoints, Studs Lonigan, big trucks and speeding highways, Bigger Thomas, U.S.A., U.S.A.! Nothing to me in those crucial-irredeemable years was as glamorous as the unofficial seamy side of American life, the smack, brutality and cynical truth of it, all of which I learned from the dynamic novels that appeared in Manhattan between 1936 and 1939. They were my highschool, my religion, my major fantasy life; instead of escaping into adventure or detective fiction—there were no groovy comic books then, such as Pete Hamill writes about 10 years later when Batman flew into his head over in Brooklyn, or if there were I was already a kid snob tucked into my literary American dreamscene—I escaped into the vision of reality that these fresh and tough pioneering writers were bringing to print from all corners of the country. In an odd way, even though most of these books ended bitterly or without faith, they were patriotic in a style that deeply impressed my being without my being able to break down why: they had integrity to the actual things that people did or said, to the very accents of frustration or despair voiced by their characters, they were all “truthful” in recreating American life. This was a naked freeshow about my real national environment that I damn well did not receive at home—a home full of euphemisms and concealments, typical , with the death of one parent and the breakdown-suicide of the other hanging over the charade of good manners—or in the newspapers, radio or at the movies. Except for the fairy tales read to me as a bigeyed child and an occasional boy’s classic like Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island or the Tom Swift books this was the first body of writing that had ever really possessed me and apparently I would never (and will never) get over it. How can I communicate the savage greenness of the...