To the Editor:
Alfred Kazin’s Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer deserves a closer reading than it has so far received. Jack Richardson [“The Working Critic,” November 1973] well describes Kazin’s style of “appearing . . . light and easy,” but he tends to take the appearance for the reality. Mr. Richardson strives for a similar ease in his own writing, he tells us, yet he has delivered an admittedly “brutal” judgment in his review of this book. The reasons for his dislike, and for the book’s surprising critical neglect in general, tell something, as they used to say, about the state of the culture.
Contrary to Mr. Richardson’s impression, Bright Book of Life is not a loose chronicle but a book with a thesis. It argues that the American novel since the war has mirrored the decline of society into what is now a universal condition of despair. Just why Kazin has seen fit to couch his thesis in deceptively “easy” prose is a matter for speculation. My guess is that he found himself rather surprised by the drift of his argument toward a pessimistic conclusion, then chose to let it stand rather then attenuate it with speculation. The result is that his strictures at first appear, as they did to Mr. Richardson, as mere “slaps on the wrist.”
Following his description of the loss of faith by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Cummings, cited as a critical commonplace by Mr. Richardson, Kazin takes up the same theme in the novels of their inheritors. Here his critique of the older generation’s modernism begins to lead to his conclusion. For he interprets the perpetuation of formal concerns by the postwar writers as also no more than bourgeois in inspiration. In surveying their work Kazin continues the method which Mr. Richardson defines but believes him to have abandoned: a. “pierc[ing] through the often willful camouflage of the contemporary novelist . . . to uncover his particular concern.” That concern turns out to be the novelist himself.
Kazin enforces this conclusion with writer after writer. Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is “the expression of some deep inner struggle.” Kurt Vonnegut writes out of a personal “bitterness at the souring of so many American hopes.” John O’Hara’s “personal excitement” is the only thing that makes interesting a society in which “the social soil is too thin to hold anything of people but their ambition.” In John Cheever’s stories about the prosperous, everyone is “disappointed . . . there is no mastery . . . except Cheever’s.” It is the same with J. D. Salinger’s characters, who are important only to him, with John Updike’s “omnipresence,” Saul Bellow’s “personal epic,” and Bernard Malamud’s speech lurking in the voice of each of his characters. Philip Roth’s novels asserted “that he was free,” in Joan Didion’s “you feel for her,” and in Susan Sontag’s the writer is “more interesting than her characters.” Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and the other “nonfiction” novelists exhibit the same tendency.
Kazin administers more than slaps on the wrist over this self-centeredness. He calls Salinger an “absolutist of feeling,” accuses Bellow of “moral haughtiness” for loving nothing but his own opinions, and Capote of attempting to spread his own, obsessive “negative eros” over all his subjects. Kazin especially resents the non-fiction novelists for aggrandizing themselves by easy denunciations of society. Where with Updike he finds a disappointing absence of struggle with society, with Capote he charges that In Cold Blood has the effect of relieving the liberal imagination of responsibility for society. In general, the nonfiction novel exists “in order not to change the American situation that makes possible so much literary aggression against it.”
But it is in “The Absurd as a Contemporary Style,” the chapter that Richardson finds little more than a convenient omnium gatherum, that Kazin exposes the bourgeois spirit implicit in all this. “‘Meaninglessness,’” he states, contemptuously putting the word in quotes, “is a middle-class state of mind.” Novelists satirize the language of the Pentagon and the advertising agencies while reducing life to formulas with similar results. They strip down not the world but the novel to the absurd. The Europeans “who invented the term” had a quarrel with existence. But the Americans “have merely realized the limitations of their own power.”
Given this indictment, so savage when it is summarized, why has Kazin chosen the title, Bright Book of Life? And how has he managed to leave Jack Richardson, a perceptive critic, with an impression of flaccidity and “inconsequence”? Richard Poirier has recognized Kazin’s attitude, if not his tone. In his review Poirier complains of “sputtering put-downs of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, . . . Joseph Heller, and William Burroughs.” Mr. Richardson’s own observations about Kazin’s deceptively easy style and unwillingness to get bogged down in tendentious theorizing apparently account for some of his own difficulty with the book. Add to this the paradox of Kazin’s blaming novelists for failing to confront American society but not blaming them for their own imaginative failings.
The trouble with society, as the end of the century approached, was obviously society itself. With the loss of the old bourgeois confidence came an expectation on every hand of dissolution. No one felt this so keenly as the novelist, who had depended so long on a social furniture that, as the century’s accelerating wars showed, could be carted off in one of those quick changes of scene that have led us to think of contemporary history as macabre entertainment.
The trouble with the novel, in other words, may be traced to the decline of our culture.
The novel has been a middle-class art form—another commonplace of the sort Mr. Richardson deplores, but necessary to state nonetheless. Postwar American society has experienced the breakup of middle-class society, Kazin believes. The resultant “pervasive social anxiety” is reflected in the novel but, with few exceptions, not imaginatively seized upon by it. Thus, Mary McCarthy is right that nature is dead but she is not able to render the evidence in Birds of America. There is much brilliance, mad humor, and invention abroad, but, with the exception of Nabokov, no one is able to succeed on a large scale. The novel remains the bright book of life, but few are writing it.
Personally, I would have preferred a more explicit statement of this thesis. Richard Poirier contends that it amounts to an attack on the greatest writers of the age in timid dismay at their masculine toughness and out of a politically conservative fear of their anti-establishment rage. Jack Richardson, on the other hand, laments the absence of “a passionate bias.” That neither is concerned with Kazin’s theme of social decline supports my own belief that the novel has suddenly stopped seeming important in the same way that, a few years ago, the explication of poetry stopped seeming important. As for the state of the culture, that forgotten problem seems to be discussed only at the back of the New York Times Book Review and in the boardrooms of foundations. But whatever our trouble may be, somewhere between the views of Poirier and Mr. Richardson there should be room for a serious discussion of Bright Book of Life.
Peter Shaw
New York City
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Jack Richardson writes:
It is difficult to reply to Peter Shaw’s sweeping analysis of my article, the state of the novel, and the decline of culture. He seems more concerned with unburdening himself of dark generalities about social and artistic decline than in dealing with Kazin’s book, which if it is based upon such a hysterical and worn-out slogan as “the American novel . . . has mirrored the decline of society into what is now a universal condition of despair” is even a sorrier performance than I took it for. Better no critical idea at all than one that says no more than that novelists are affected by the world they live in.
Our culture may or may not be in decline; the novel may or may not be moribund: argument about such statements is a barren enterprise. What is fruitful is the sort of criticism to which Bright Book of Life aspired and which it failed to produce, namely, an original view of the artistic manner of a particular time and a judgment of that manner which is enforced by analysis that goes beyond mere summarizing of disconnected attitudes toward the world.
Mr. Shaw will no doubt find in this definition of criticism an inordinate aversion to those critical commonplaces he thinks need stating. However, it was this sort of criticism I expected from Alfred Kazin, and my article simply registered the reasons for my disappointment.
