'Alfred Kazin' by Richard M. Cook
BOOK REVIEW
A biography of one of the dominant figures in 20th century literary criticism.
Alfred Kazin
A Biography
Richard M. Cook
Yale University Press: 452 pp., $35
HE wrote his first book review for the New Republic in 1934, when he was 19, and his last for the New York Review of Books in 1998, weeks before his death at 83. In those 64 years, if you were to reduce magazine format to newspaper column inches, Alfred Kazin produced -- what: a mile of criticism? Two miles? Three? This doesn't take account of his dozen or so books, among them such celebrated works of American literary history as "On Native Grounds" and several outstanding memoirs, including "A Walker in the City."
By any measure a long and seemingly a glory road, from the Brownsville tenement where he grew up in a Jewish immigrant family to an honored and rewarded position as a leading intellectual and critic. Yet a road beset by self-doubt, erotic maelstroms, unclubbable angers and a hunger for success -- achieved but blighted in later years by a conviction of failure. All this was patrolled by a lifelong liberal decency -- a sheepdog nipping at the heels of its obstreperous sheep. As a 1930s leftist, Kazin sat in the Trotskyist alcove at City College of New York, at war with the adjacent Communist alcove. He read James Joyce during the speeches, though, uneasy with his fellow leftists' intolerance, and neither joined nor forgave their old-age swing to the intolerant right (think Norman Podhoretz, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol).
Kazin's biography by Richard M. Cook, who teaches American literature at the University of Missouri, lays out the complications of this genial, acerbic figure. He makes much use of Kazin's journals -- a good thing, though it has drawbacks. The journals, particularly the earlier ones, explore their author's arrogance and scruples, advances and retreats, to the point where they blur rather than illuminate his character. At times, too, Cook's prose is both stiff and cloudy -- a contrast with the quoted passages exhibiting the poetic bite of Kazin's own writing. His friend Philip Roth praised a literary criticism "which read like a passionate communication intended for intelligent, living human beings rather than like a 1940s academic exercise or a 1930s political tract."
