Roots
A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment
by Alfred Kazin
HarperCollins. 341 pages. $26.00
“In Stockholm to lecture. . . . France: Fulbright professor in American literature. . . . Now teaching at Notre Dame. . . . I wanted to remain at Smith after my wonderful visiting year as Neilson Professor. . . .” Such is the life, now possible for a distinguished scholar of American literature, that is recorded by Alfred Kazin in his journals. Now in his early eighties, Kazin has written acclaimed works of criticism as well as several volumes of autobiographical memoirs, and has edited anthologies of William Blake, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But the interesting thing about A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (the phrase is from T.S. Eliot) is that, notwithstanding the whirligig of fellowships, lectures, and honors, the entries in it keep returning more and more frequently, and more and more obsessively, to the same place: Kazin’s homely Brooklyn roots and his own Jewishness. You can wander to the ends of the earth and God will still pull you back with the pluck of a string, say the Catholics; something similar seems eventually to pull ambitious Jewish boys back to Brownsville.
As a young man, surely, Kazin would never have expected his journey to be so circular. He describes here a poor and unhappy home, a father silent, aloof, and self-absorbed, a mother grim with work. The formative political experience of his life was coming of age, and becoming a radical, in the 30’s. And then in 1938 the critic Carl Van Doren suggested that the twentythree-year-old Kazin write a book on the “new” American literature. For years he sat in the New York Public Library, poring over Henry James, Dreiser, Emily Dickinson, H.L. Mencken, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More—hardly the reading list of someone obsessed with Jewishness—and in 1942 produced On Native Grounds, a book which established him overnight as a leading literary critic.
In the 1930’s and 40’s, Kazin seems to have known everybody—at least slightly. Working as an editor at the New Republic, he was able to introduce himself to former editors like Edmund Wilson and Van Wyck Brooks. In his journals he describes gatherings at which he met and observed Simone de Beauvoir, Sidney Hook, Dwight Macdonald, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the British economist and Labor leader Harold Laski (“Profuse compliments on On Native Grounds, but nerve-racked me by name-dropping”), the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson (“in the flesh he seems to me as great a character as Gilbert Osmond in James’s Portrait of a Lady”), the playwright Clifford Odets (“In his emotion he let [his] glasses fall on the flagstones, where one lens cracked. When I wondered what he would do now, he looked at me half in surprise and said with a touch of pride, ‘Not to worry! I have four duplicates upstairs’”).
As these extracts may suggest, however, Kazin’s anecdotes about mid-century notables are in fact rather empty. He may have been in the same room with them, but the names he drops do not, on the evidence offered here, seem to have welcomed him as an intimate, or allowed much in the way of sustained or revealing contact.
More evocative, at least in the entries from his early and middle years, is Kazin’s portrait of his own life as one lived, passionately, for culture—meaning high culture—and of a global community of intellectuals, now gone, who felt that they were in some meaningful sense at the center of the only action that counted. Nowhere does Kazin mention radio or TV, and he hardly even notes the existence of newspapers or popular magazines (though he himself worked for a while at Time). Instead he is forever being transported by novels and classical music, and the people who matter to him and who give him a charge (sexual as well as mental) are those who write for the little magazines.
Personifying this world was the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. “What luck,” Kazin writes in his journal after the war,
Hannah Arendt placed next to me at a dinner for Rabbi Leo Baeck, and I have sought her out several times since. Darkly handsome, bountifully interested in everything, this forty-year-old German refugee with a strong accent and such intelligence—thinking positively cascades out of her in waves—that I was enthralled, by no means unerotically.
And again, a little later:
I love this woman intensely—she is such a surprise, such a gift. I am a sucker for this kind of advanced European mind, so much better stocked and subtle than the exhausted radicalism of almost every Jewish intellectual I know. She has brought into my life so many unexpected traits and pleasures, like her intense love of poetry as a higher form of thinking. She gives me Hoelderlin, I give her Blake.
Then, jealousy intrudes. At a dinner party, Kazin finds Arendt focusing her attention on “the Russian French historian of science and philosophy” Alexandre Koyré. “Returned to my room lonely and scared,” he writes, “I just wanted to weep.” The whole episode captures beautifully the way high-mindedness went along in this circle with low feuds, Freudian longings, and extramarital affairs, and helps explain why the pages of A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment are as likely to be devoted to sex romps with some intellectual wannabe as to explicating literary parallels in Henry James. If power is an aphrodisiac, so, apparently, was a working knowledge of Blake and Ignazio Silone.
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As Kazin ages, however, the journal entries are filled less and less with sexual and intellectual networking, or with the kind of inadvertently hilarious distractions which sometimes make it seem as if a good deal of 20th-century history passed with Kazin otherwise engaged (“Reminds me of the time we were making love on the couch while the radio was on and it announced the death of Stalin”). Their place is taken instead by solitary reflections on Jewishness: being Jewish, who is Jewish and who is not, the plight of Jewishness. “The Jews, the Jews, the Jews—the repetition of it in my own mind sometimes drives me mad.” To Kazin, this quality, Jewishness, has hardly anything to do with religion. For him the central Jewish fact is the Holocaust—a subject on which he has much to say, virtually none of it original or even especially thoughtful—and Jewishness itself seems mainly to function as a bridge back to his own subconscious, his own family, his own “tribe.”
Though he was a radical in the 3O’s, even politics for Kazin is repeatedly reduced to the tribal, and almost always discussed with reference to some statement or other made by a fellow Jew. In particular, his vituperative remarks about neo-conservatives center not on their ideas or on issues of policy, neither of which appears to interest him, but rather on his conviction that neoconservatives are Jews who have gone over to work for the Gentile establishment.
The deeper one reads in this book, the more salient becomes the tribal, the familial, motif. Kazin told the tale of his parents exhaustively in his 1978 autobiography, New York Jew; in the 1990’s, he has retold it to his journals:
The young fellow from Minsk is an orphan, will never get over the day his father Abraham died in New York in his twenties, leaving his mother to bear a posthumous son and to flee with the two boys back to Minsk. Where she marries again, puts my father in an orphan asylum. He will learn to fend for himself, will prove adventurous enough in America to go West as a painter on the Union Pacific Railroad before turning east to find a Jewish girl to marry. He will always seem to me the lonesomist man in the world, more like a son than a father. I learned to love him, my kid sister never could.
It is, of course, common enough for the elderly to dwell on their own childhoods, their parents, even their grandparents, and Kazin is hardly alone in his nostalgia: Jewish New York is now the subject of volume after volume, documentary after documentary, and an affluent version of itself is sentimentally reenacted in synagogues and community centers across the country. But what is striking is how much more deeply engaged Kazin is by the world of Jewish Brooklyn and Jewish New York from which he fled than by the world of Hannah Arendt to which he aspired. In these pages, the ultraserious world of postwar literary criticism and public philosophy now seems dusty, distant, and unlamented—including by Kazin himself.
Occasionally, it is true, he will look up and observe that the sort of discourse he and his cohort practiced has been replaced by postmodernism, deconstruction, and the rest. Occasionally, too, he will rail against “the little commissars now in the English department instructing us to look down on so many classics.” But by and large the New Left types in today’s academy seem to have replaced Kazin and company without so much as a shot being fired in return.
Of the two great milieus of Kazin’s life that came under assault in this century, one, “Jewishness,” by far the more mortally attacked, not only survived but underwent a miraculous revival, though Kazin himself evinces no special curiosity about either of its two main contemporary forms—Jewish religion and Jewish national existence in the state of Israel. As for the world of literary humanism, the beating it took seems to have left it for dead; should it ever experience a revival, that too will occur without the help of Alfred Kazin. Which raises a question: for the sake of exactly what, then, has his been a lifetime burning in every moment?
