"I used to want to live to avoid your elegy," Robert Lowell wrote ruefully in a poem to his late friend John Berryman. I thought of this line when I sat down to write about Alfred Kazin, who died June 5 on his 83rd birthday after a protracted battle with cancer. Would Alfred (as I only learned to call him when I'd known him for many years; to me, he was the eminent critic and mentor, I the youthful disciple) have wanted a tribute from me? Over the course of the nearly quarter-century I knew him, we spent as much time not speaking as speaking; misunderstandings, insults, fits of hostility and rage were as characteristic of our relationship--I don't dare call it a friendship, though to me it was one--as were genial exchanges. We fought, snarled, dashed off angry letters. But that's how Kazin was--that's who he was. His passionate, flaring temper helped make him the person I admired, it made him vivid, memorable, intense, someone whose very presence in a room kindled powerful feelings. Maybe he wouldn't have minded a few commemorative words from me after all.
We met when I was in my mid-20s and at work on my first book, a biography of Delmore Schwartz. One of the things that excited me the most about this project was the chance to meet my literary heroes, not least among them Kazin, who had been a significant figure in Delmore's life. "A Walker in the City," Kazin's lyrical memoir of a New York childhood, was one of the most cherished books in my extensive high school library of coming-of-age paperbacks. (I can still conjure up the cover, a portrait of a moody boy gazing longingly at the Brooklyn Bridge, his connection to the great world of Manhattan.) "I'm so glad that you are going to do a biography of Delmore, but I don't envy some of the interviews you are going to have!" he wrote me on a postcard in reply to my request for an interview. I have described elsewhere the awkward encounter that ensued: I found myself reading aloud to him the very pages in my work-in-progress in which Delmore denounced him as "a serious menace to criticism." After a tense dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Village, a few blocks from Kazin's bleak writing warren above an auto driving school on West 8th Street, he saw me off with a summation of where matters stood with us: "I like you, Atlas, but cut the crap."
