***The Literary Critic’s Critic-Alfred Kazin’s- Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from  Hemingway To Mailer

Book Review  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer, Alfred Kazin, 1973

There used to be a saying, true or not, that those who could not write, write professionally and for the public taste, taught-or, more stingingly, became literary critics. The author of the book of literary criticism under review, Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway To Mailer, was a writer who could write for the public and who was also a trenchant literary critic with many important insights about the modern novel, particularly the trends in American novels and literary styles in the post-World War II period through to the time of publication of the book in 1973.

Kazin hones in on the successes, failures, and foibles of what every fairly well-read student or young intellectual who grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s was reading. Mostly our immediate literary forbears like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck the middle ground of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, J.D. Salinger, and William Styron of writers who were holding forth at the top of the literary table when we were ready to read serious material, and  some of our near contemporaries like Joan Didion and Philip Roth. There was hardly a literary light from the Jazz Age to the Age of Aquarius who didn’t get a jab from Kazin’s pen as he went about his business of knocking many who I considered literary giants off of their pedestals.

Moreover Kazin’s literary project also had thematic elements as he paid special attention to various schools of writing; those who like Hemingway who came out of World War I and the Jazz Age depending on European novelistic approaches; those like Mailer who came out of the Great Depression and World War II to make a name by inserting themselves into the public consciousness; black writers like Ralph Ellison and the incomparable James Baldwin who spoke for the invisible; women writers (and California too) like Joan Didion bringing a fresher West Coast cast to the novel: the New York City Jewish writers’ scene; heartland writers like Nelson Algren; the “beats” above all Jack Kerouac; and, immigrant writer like Nabokov. Some of the writers can comfortably fit into more than one category but I would admit that Kazin had a pretty good eye for dissecting the major literary trends.         

Of course every literary critic depends for his or her livelihood on making some provocative and scathing comments about mere mortal creative writers else why read their critiques. So Kazin, like his brethren, goes to work on Mailer as a baggy, airy journalist, J.D. Salinger as a writer of kids’ books, Hemingway as a guy who lost his way, Steinbeck as a one-note-johnny, Jimmy Baldwin as too acerbic, Truman Capote, well, as, lightweight after In Cold Blood, Thomas Wolfe as a drifter and Tom Wolfe as a caterer to fashion. No one is obliged to follow Kazin unto death with his criticisms and some of his judgments have not withstood the test of time but by all means if you want a very well-written study of mid-20^th century American literary trends this is a book to immerse yourself in.             

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The Hidden Life of Alfred Kazin

Edward Mendelson

August 18, 2011 Issue

Alfred Kazin’s Journals

selected and edited by Richard M. Cook

Yale University Press, 598 pp., $45.00

Alfred Kazin’s Journals is a profound and exciting book, more so even than the best of the dozen works of criticism and autobiography that he published during his lifetime. Almost every morning from the age of eighteen, in 1933, until his death in 1998, he wrote his private thoughts about literature, history, the social world of publishing, universities, and politics, his four marriages and uncountable affairs, the “many people I know and admire, or rather love,” and what it means to be a Jew. He wrote sometimes as a literary and erotic conqueror, sometimes as a guilty victim of conscience, always with infectious intellectual energy.

Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Alfred Kazin, 1946

Kazin climbed from a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn to the sudden fame of his book about American writing, On Native Grounds (1942), to the literary editor’s desk at The New Republic, where he followed Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley, and on to the success of his memoir A Walker in the City (1951). By the 1960s he was the most powerful reviewer in America, passing judgment in The New Yorker and the Sunday book reviews, and in more than sixty essays in these pages. As he recorded in his journals:

The beggarly Jewish radicals of the 30s are now the ruling cultural pundits of American society—I who stood so long outside the door wondering if I would ever get through it, am now one of the standard bearers of American literary opinion—a judge of young men.

Dag Hammarsköld asked him to lunch at the United Nations. John F. Kennedy asked him to lunch at the White House after learning that Kazin was writing an essay about him. Kazin, unimpressed, portrayed Kennedy as a charmer without substance.
Readers expect revelations from a posthumously published journal, and this one does not disappoint, though the secret it reveals has no shock value. From adolescence onward, Kazin was engrossed in a spiritual and sometimes mystical inner life that he never talked about. None of his friends or lovers seems to have been aware of it. It was far more hidden than his notoriously florid erotic life. Much of what he had to say in his essays about other people’s religion was secretly about his own, especially when he described an inner faith that rebelled against all churches and doctrines. He wrote in An American Procession (1984):

Emerson was beginning to understand that total “self-reliance”—from his innermost spiritual promptings—would be his career and his fate.

The same thought prompted his journal entry: “Emerson made me a Jew.”
The journals make clear that his long introduction to The Portable Blake (1946) was a disguised self-portrait, with Blake’s Christianity standing in for Kazin’s Judaism:

[Blake] was a libertarian obsessed with God; a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man as the end of his search. He was a Christian who hated the churches; a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals.

Kazin …