Since the publication, some thirty years ago, of On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin has been an important, working critic of American literature. By “working critic” I mean that he has held criticism to be a profession that, when called upon to demonstrate its skills, attends to the tasks that the times present to it with the dispatch necessary to meet deadlines and with the self-assurance needed to overcome the practical difficulties of writing for publications of widely varied literary standards. Indeed, if one must single out one of Kazin's critical virtues as preeminent, one would have to select his ability to adapt himself to the occasion at hand and never to affect the apologetic or diffident attitude with which so many literary critics defend themselves when caught in the popular marketplace. In an essay that appeared originally in this magazine, an essay entitled “Writing for Magazines”¹ and written as an homage to Chekhov's ability to produce, without labored self-consciousness, the occasional piece, Kazin stated his attitude toward this form:

Perhaps because one is read on Monday and can be forgotten the same day, there is an art in being inconsequent, an art which avoids the crashing and rhetorical final note, the art of appearing as light and easy as in one's heart one knows a “piece” must be.

Only those who know how much anguish and complaint can be occasioned by the writing of an article or a short piece of criticism can appreciate how liberating such a notion as this can be, and although I would question the use of the word “inconsequent,” I feel that the sentence I have quoted could serve as a motto for all who derive some part of their living from the attempt to write entertainingly and critically on diverse subjects.

Of course, like all mottos, this sentence needs qualification when used as a guide in the practical world. If one spends a good deal of time subjected to what passes for critical writing nowadays, one might feel that there is indeed a superabundance of articles and essays that are easily forgotten in a day, that are so light, easy, and truly inconsequent that they betray not so much an aversion to punditry as an inability to penetrate any subject in a manner deeper than that which is produced by a facile opinion and a coquettish style. From the sixty-second television aperçu, with its puns and one-liners, to the antic excesses of the quarterlies with their often too ingeniously imaginative celebrations of new and “popular” culture, there is more than enough evidence about today to make one feel that the light-handed and the light-headed have become synonymous and regnant virtues, and that any need to call for their celebration is superfluous.

In the case of Alfred Kazin, one understands, since he is intelligent and cultivated, that when he uses the words “light and easy” he is calling for something quite different from the quick slapping together of a judgment in the manner of a journalistic reviewer. He is, rather, defending that aspect of criticism which deals with the immediate, which takes on works of art that are good and bad, important and trivial, complex and obvious, and which judges and analyzes them in a manner that permits itself the use of certain assumptions about art and life without those assumptions necessarily being stated in the piece of criticism itself. It is in the nature of such criticism that it not probe too deeply into its object—indeed, in most instances, such probing would be ludicrously unwarranted—and that it not expand too far beyond the subject's boundaries and enter into large formal and social considerations. Within these limits, however, a great deal can be accomplished.

If the critic writes well, there will be the pleasure of watching enjoyment or outrage turn into an exquisite coherence that, although compelling in itself, also has the practical use of giving us more ways to talk about and consider our literature. Though the working critic may not be too detailed about what he has come to value in culture, he nevertheless, through his tone and allusions, can inform us that he is not writing in vacuo, that he has deeper reasons for condemning or praising than the exigencies of his form allow. It is such intellectual pervasion that converts a review into criticism, and although it is an indefinable element, the intelligent reader appreciates and recognizes it when it is genuine and deplores the affectation of it when a reviewer, hoping to rise above his station, begins to quote, analogize, and in other ways air his specialist's knowledge in an unbalanced and obtrusive way, providing undigested gobbits of opinion and erudition. Finally, the yeoman critic reminds us, through his craftsmanship and constancy, that literary commerce need not always be a rare, sublime exchange, that it can have about it a quotidian practicality which, if nothing else, makes the reading of books seem an unforced social activity.

Such is the type of criticism most of us who write with any regularity for. journals try to practice and it is the type in which Alfred Kazin has excelled over the past three decades. One need only read through Contemporaries, a collection of pieces of criticism that first appeared in such magazines as Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Partisan Review, COMMENTARY, etc., to realize that Kazin belongs in the first rank of those who can make concise, informative judgments of writers which ferret out their intentions and idiosyncrasies with the easy authority that comes when someone is both passionate and knowledgeable about the reading and writing of books. These short essays in Contemporaries have the vitality of the direct, uninhibited response to works of art, yet they are infused with habits of analysis which subtly earn for the critic his right to a point of view. In his “The World of Saul Bellow,” for instance, Kazin admonished those who saw in the author of Augie March and Seize the Day a tough, urban realist whose writing contained much that, in Kazin's phrase, “seemed a dull and gritty naturalistic catalogue,” and quite rightly pointed out that Bellow gives the most commonplace details in his writing a persona that is far from naturalistic and is actually intellectually designed to present a dramatic complement to the fateful actions of his characters and their speculations about how to live life, endure death, and face destiny. In short, Kazin was one of the first of Bellow's critics to understand how much he was attempting, and he stated this understanding in a way worth quoting for what it says both about Bellow and about Kazin's critical method:

But a novelist is defined not only by his mind, his style, his address; he is defined as well by his ruling subject, the idea of drama that is his obsession, by that point of view which is not only the content of his work but also its truly driving and unconscious side.

Later I will come back to Kazin's notion of a “ruling subject,” but for now I will only say that it has served him well as an interpreter of modern fiction, allowing him to pierce through the often willful camouflage of the contemporary novelist and to uncover his particular concern.

I have been speaking of Kazin's ability to work as a front-line critic, someone who deals with the books and ideas of his time in a way that demands quick, concise explication and judgment. But he has also another, more scholarly attribute that; combined with his critical sense, produced On Native Grounds. I am speaking now about his sense of literary history, or more precisely, American literary history, which he used to trace the interactions of our society and its literature through the first four decades of this century. On Native Grounds still is, to my mind, the best guide to America's post-19th-century literary evolution, a guide that includes everything from the chronicles of long-forgotten, hermetic literary squabbles to the thrust of social realism and aristocratic symbolism into the educated consciousness of America. With this first book, Kazin very clearly presented us with the substance of his critical interest, with his firm belief that literature is enmeshed in society, that it is not an exotic pastime for connoisseurs of verbal sensibility but a vital, tangible force that should be the fiber and bone of a culture.

In the section of On Native Grounds entitled “Criticism at the Poles” Kazin did battle with both the Marxist critics who had made literature a useful historical tool and the aestheticians of the New Criticism who wished to make literature a self-contained item that was fit for little else but speculative, analytic study. In retrospect, the type of Marxist criticism he inveighed against seems hardly worth the effort of a refutation; the new semanticists, because they were intelligent and adept in their science, were another matter. Critics like Blackmur, Empson, and Burke were making indisputable contributions to our understanding of the creative method, and Kazin, though suspicious perhaps of their assumptions, nevertheless admitted their value. But he also saw what to him was a danger that far outweighed whatever insights they were giving the world about the nature of poetic “signs” and “ambiguity.” It was the danger of the technician absorbed by method and forgetful of human ends and purpose. Thus Kazin wrote:

The Marxist critics were scientists; but this was a science perpetually talking all around the object, a science that could disclose every insight relevant to the making of literature save why it was important to me.

Why literature is important to men was what On Native Grounds was all about, both as criticism and as history, and it was natural that someone writing, so to speak, a scholarly evaluation of the accuracy of Whitman's “Democratic Vistas” should feel a certain animus toward the sort of literary analysis that, through its professional requirements and insistence on intellectual specialness, made Whitman's egalitarian artist seem a contradiction in terms.

That the New Critics concentrated most of their energies on poetry and either openly disdained the novel or considered it too uncomplicated a form—James, Flaubert, and Joyce excepted of course—for their delicate instruments to be expended on, was certainly another cause for Kazin's antagonism. For although he has written in his career upon practically all modes of verbal expression, Kazin has always been on his surest ground and at his critical best when the novel has been his subject. He has again and again, explicitly and implicitly in his writing, announced his faith in this form as perhaps the best and most meaningful way to come to some sort of understanding with life, to experience it in a distilled yet expansive enough fashion so that personal vision and general recognition coincide for a time and create what we call artistic truth.

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It was this faith, coupled with Kazin's aforementioned historical sense, that made one expect Bright Book of Life,² a study of the American novel since World War II, was going to be a work of high criticism, a work that would allow Kazin to pursue in detail and at length the nature of fictional narrative and the worth of its recent embodiments in America. Yet even if one expected less, Bright Book of Life must be called a failure, and a failure that is in no way magnificent. Although in a brief foreword Kazin states that notwithstanding the publication of certain chapters of his book in magazines over the past years, Bright Book of Life is intended to be an “integrated account of the fiction written in the United States since the outset of World War II,” it is in reality no more than an uninspired outline of writers and their themes, a series of flaccid explanations of novelistic attitudes whose only claim to integration is that one man had the temerity to put them between the covers of a book. It is hard to be so brutal about one's disappointment in a work from which much was expected, but it is harder still to understand what Kazin had in mind when he delivered this book for publication.

To give an idea of the level and originality of insight that runs through Bright Book of Life, I will quote from the opening chapter on Hemingway, a chapter that, in effect, tells us that when Hemingway lost his faith in the power of le mot juste to order life he became a symbol of literary despondency:

This severe modernist aesthetic, this faith in a conscious perfectibility through the right ordering of words, was the property of rebellious privileged children of the upper middle class. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cummings all had the strongest possible sense of the breakdown of their moral inheritance—“you are all a lost generation”—and of their own exceptionality and luster as individuals.

It is this sort of no-nonsense statement of the obvious that is one of the faults of Bright Book of Life. But there are others, far more significant, that tend to vitiate even the critical qualities that Kazin possesses, qualities about which I have spoken admiringly. Here I return to the notion of a ruling subject, a notion that is fine and proper for the workaday critic who is under an obligation, since he is often confronted with the new or misunderstood, to discover first what a writer's commitments are. However, it is a barren enterprise for a critic to grind his way through the Weltanschauungen of some forty-odd novelists, especially when he can do no better than throw Ralph Ellison, William S. Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, and God knows who else together under the heading “The Absurd as a Contemporary Style.” Instead of telling us that such and such is the way a certain writer looks at the world and forcing him to sit among others with vaguely similar concerns, the critic's job in a book of such ambition as Kazin's must be to investigate how that point of view and the art objectifying it can be shown to be vital and meaningful, not only in terms of the writer's success or failure in handling a theme but in terms of the history of the art he is practicing and the history of the society he is living in.

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But hard judgment, which Kazin has proved himself capable of in the past, is almost totally absent from Bright Book of Life. The sharpness with which he dealt, for instance, with Salinger and John O'Hara in earlier essays has become muted, replaced by the desire to fit them into a category and to understand their way of looking at things and the manner in which they represent aspects of our society. Updike, Styron, and Bellow receive long admiring analyses followed by odd, little slaps on the wrist. On Updike: “All he lacks is that capacity for making you identify, for summoning up affection in the reader. . . .” On Bellow: “Bellow's more lasting fictions will probably be those whose personae are not exactly as intelligent as he is—The Victim and Seize the Day.” On Styron: “But the narrative [The Confessions of Nat Turner] is so dreamlike that we cannot really believe this man has been a slave and the organizer of so many killings.”

Now Kazin seems to consider these as nothing but codas to his symphonic analyses, but the reader may be forgiven if he is slightly taken aback at the casualness with which Kazin drops these cool remarks about writers he is busy putting into historical perspective. In the case of Updike one is entitled to ask what kind of writer it is that produces neither affection nor identification in his reader? The answer is—a bad or trivial one, and one would like to know how Kazin could find so much to admire in such basic deficiency. If Bellow's two shortest works are going to be the “more lasting” of his oeuvre, does that mean that Augie March, Henderson, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet suffer from some flaw deeper than their admittedly loose form and overweighted intellectuality? Or is it that they are too closely tied to the problems and details of our present world for posterity to take much enjoyment from them? Has Styron really failed as a novelist with the most important character he attempted, and if so, is it a failure of craft or of intellectual courage?

That Kazin never even considers questions like these as he skips along from writer to writer indicates that he perhaps has too much faith in the novel, that he believes that its existence is an indisputably good end in itself. It is a pleasant faith to have, but it is a pity that this perfect opportunity for an apologia by one of the few critics capable of zealous cogency was missed. Neither a random collection of sharp critical pieces nor anything like the literary history practiced in On Native Grounds, Bright Book of Life strains itself and our patience in the attempt to integrate our postwar literature, to find some idea with enough cohesive force to warrant an index that contains the name of almost every well-publicized novelist now writing in America. But there is no such idea to compel our attention in this book, not even a passionate bias that might at least shed some light on Kazin's assumptions when he is judging the worth of his contemporaries. All in all, an odd book, written by a good working critic who seems to have made a great effort to find the precise meaning of “inconsequent.”