New York Jew: A Tale Distorted

...Although Trilling did not deny his Jewish background, he took great pains to distance himself from Jewish manners and Jewish questions...

...there were only anti-Nazis, pure and simple...

...II What constituted an appropriate response to Nazism...

...Such is Kazin's case against Trilling on this matter, a. case developed by fits and starts, at times presented explicitly, at times offered in the muffled voice of innuendo...

...Trilling, rehearses the orthodoxy of anti-anti-Communism, and reduces Jewish history and culture to a narrow ethnic mystique...

...In this sense, we might call Kazin's Jewish mystique a misrepresentation of sorts—a simplification and a distortion of the complex world of Jewish history and Jewish culture...

...It comes as some surprise, though, that a few weeks after the book was reviewed favorably in the New York Times Book Review, 19 distinguished intellectuals objected—in a letter to the editor of the book review—to what they described as Kazin's "grotesque misrepresentation" of Lionel Trilling, the well-known literary and cultural critic who died several years ago...

...Kazin, as one might suspect, was on the other side...

...Could he not get published...

...and therefore the nightmare of Nazism, Kazin implies, should have haunted him...

...Or should we dismiss it as resentment on Kazin's part for not having received quite as many literary honors as Trilling received...

...cc 1 he reciprocal civility of authors," Samuel Johnson said, "is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life...

...He simply has no use for the sober anti-Communists, and he damns them in several ways...

...Kazin's sense of Jewishness, Robert Alter has said, is "peculiarly disembodied...

...Yet perhaps Nazism did not haunt him—did not, that is, haunt him more than the other nightmares of the twentieth century...

...Among this latter group, whom we might call the sober anti-Communists, was Lionel Trilling, though it should be said that he was less vocal about these matters than other more political writers such as Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, and Diana Trilling...

...Kazin also assumes that Jewish writers are obligated to wrestle with their Jewishness directly,' not obliquely, and so he condemns Trilling for evading the subject...

...These- descriptions of the urban landscape are very much in the American grain, recalling the poetry of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, and they possess an energy and dazzle that Trilling's grave "English" prose never attained...

...11 / NOVEMBER 1978 Stephen Miller New York Jew: A Tale Distorted In the third volume of his autobiography, Alfred Kazin grotesquely misrepresents the character of Lionel...

...Although Kazin was never an apologist for the Soviet Union and was never as foolish about the Soviet Union as Lillian Hellman, his autobiography perpetuates the legend of scoundrel time that Hellman created in her autobiography...

...Was he persecuted bypoliticians, hounded out of a job...

...At times Kazin forgets that he is a cornered Jew and gives us affecting portraits of several American writers as well as luminous descriptions of the many walks he has taken in Paris, London, Rome, and New York...

...the least thought about the matter should have made Kazin realize that the Jews are not the only people rooted in the past...

...Alfred A. Knopf...

...Kazin criticizes Trilling for defending himself from the many things he had left behind—in particular, his Jewish origins...

...Whatever we think of Kazin's portrait of Trilling, his picture of intellectual life during the McCarthy era surely qualifies as a grotesque misrepresentation...

...In fact, we may say that Kazin, unlike Trilling, is very much an American writer, both in his celebrations of walking in the city and in his spiritual aggrandizement—his championing of the lacerated self...

...should be indulged in only by those who knew Trilling and, Kazin—only by those who are capable of entering into an argument about Trilling's character...

...Yet it is also a disturbing, misleading, and irritating book...

...As Kazin says: "I had never encountered a Jewish intellectual so conscious of social position, so full of adopted finery in his conversation...

...One of the consequences of anti-antiCommunism is that it has led to a serious exaggeration and distortion of the evils of the McCarthy era...

...He reduces Jewish history and Jewish culture to a melodramatic, one-dimensional lamentation about the miseries of a people who are misfits, outsiders...

...In New York Jew, Kazin seems to be engaged in a spiritual competition both with Trilling—implying that Trilling was less moved by the nightmare of Nazism than he was—and with himself...

...Finally, some were sincere ex-radicals who became tediously obsessive in their preoccupation, with the spread of Communism...

...The question for most intellectuals was not whether one should be for Communism but how one shou;d be against it, and the debaters sorted themselves out into two distinct groups: the anti-Communists and the anti-antiCommunists...

...To some extent they were right...

...Perhaps Nazism did haunt Trilling as it haunted Kazin, but he chose not to let it determine what he would write about...

...Kazin says of this period that "the demand for orthodoxy suffocated me...

...11, NO...

...the general ideas that go into the making of the portrait...

...As is obvious from the book's title, Kazin makes much of his sense of himself as a Jew, and this self-consciousness is continually related to his preoccupation with the Nazis' war against the Jews...

...Trilling, Kazin implies, embraced anti-Communism because it was a safe position, one in tune with the political orthodoxy of the fifties...

...The Cold War, they realized, was not an American invention—not an American fit of self-induced madness...

...Although such crude terms don't do justice to the nuanced political positions of many, they have a certain appropriateness since they were employed by those participating in the debate...

...The question is a two-fold one: What were the appropriate responses to the evils of Communism and Nazism...

...Ill at ease in their isolated freedom, they continually conjure up a sense of community that is based upon their anguished and outraged awareness of the unique nature of their people's sufferings...

...Trilling, Kazin suggests, carefully avoided the question of Nazism because it would not help his literary career to dwell on subjects that might call attention to his Jewish origins...

...he considered himself an anti-anti-Communist...

...An idle question, one would think, since there were no antianti-Nazis...

...According to Kazin, Trilling was a careerist, an opportunist who always worried about his reputation...

...And these qualities are especially apparent in Kazin's portrait of Trilling...

...For Trilling," Kazin says, "I would always be 'too Jewish,' too full of my lower-class experience...

...that was all they could think or write about...

...Such a mystique usually has little to do with the felt life of a particular cultural or religious tradition...

...The disinterested outsider can only examine Stephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Perhaps the Trillings snubbed Kazin—if, indeed, they did snub him—not because they disliked his politics or were uncomfortable with his Jewishness but because they found him too intensely American...

...We fought," he says of one such marriage, "like the cornered Jews we were...

...Should we dismiss Kazin's portrait of Trilling as mere petulance on Kazin's part for having been, in effect, snubbed by the Trillings...

...This generalization is simply untrue...

...A writer who was at the center of literary life in London for about 40 years in the mid-eighteenth century, Johnson well knew how writers are wracked more than most people with the pains of envy, jealousy, and resentment...

...For one thing, he does not believe they were sober...

...The orthodoxy of anti-anti-Communism still reigns in intellectual circles, and all those who think differently are considered hysterical crusaders or opportunistic careerists...

...The guiding light of this disembodied Jewishness is Franz Kafka, whom Kazin calls "our brother" and "our great and beautiful novelist, prophet, misfit"—a prophet because his works anticipated the Holocaust...

...I say this not to unmask Kazin's Jewishness as a literary pose—and not, certainly, to question the sincerity of Kazin's deep anguish about the fate of the Jews under the Nazis...

...But Kazin is "home" only for a moment, only when he confronts the horrors of the concentration camps...

...The American Spectator November 1978 7...

...But Kazin has also left his Jewish past, and the Jewish mystique that he rehearses in this autobiography is also a defense of sorts, a way of being Jewish without bearing the weight of Jewish traditions...

...But in the New York intellectual and academic circles in which Trilling and Kazin moved anti-antiCommunism was orthodoxy...

...Some anti-Communists were out-and-out reactionaries who were quick to label any liberal idea as Communist-inspired...

...Anti-anti-Communism, Trilling continues, "was not quite so neutral a position as at first it might seem to have been: it said that although, for the moment at least, one need not be actually for [emphasis Trilling's] Communism, one was morally compromised, turned toward evil and away from good, if one was against it...

...Trilling was thus one in spirit with the writers who worked with Kazin on the staff of Time magazine, about whom he says: "How helpful to some careers it became to say so"—to say, that is, how much one opposed Communism...

...Throughout New York Jew, Kazin implies that on both issues—if we can call Nazism an issue—Trilling's response failed to pass the test of adequacy whereas his own passed with flying colors, The question of an appropriate response to Communism requires some historical elaboration...

...The portrait is an ambivalent one...

...Lionel Trilling thought otherwise...

...Learning about the Jews at Belsen who greeted their liberators by reciting the most important Hebrew prayer, Kazin says: "Weeping in the rain, I said it with them...

...Yet he too, like Kazin, was the son of poor Jewish immigrants...

...But it was a mind so fine, Kazin soon implies, that no clearcut political or cultural position could violate it...

...Trilling turned his back on this question because, as Kazin says twice in the course of three pages, all his life Trilling defended himself from the many things he had left behind...

...It would be pointless and heartless to ask whether this is an appropriate response to Nazism, but it is a disturbing and—in some ways—a complacent response, for Kazin's Jewishness quickens into life only when he thinks of the Nazis and his marital ordeals...

...In that essay, Trilling argues that "our high culture invites us to transfer our energies from the bourgeois competition to the spiritual competition...

...If this is a joke, it is in bad taste, since to compare the harassment and mild persecution of several thousand Americans with the murder of millions of innocent Russians (Vishinsky was the chief prosecutor of Stalin's purge trials) is absurd...

...Just as Senator McCarthy labelled all liberals crypto-Communists, so many anti-anti-Communists thought all anti-Communists were crypto-McCarthyites...

...One .wonders why he refrains from calling Lionel Trilling a "bourgeois deviationist...

...Although American diplomacy may have needlessly exacerbated tensions at times, the Soviet Union was a power to be feared and indeed to be preoccupied with...

...He seemed," Kazin says, "intent on not diminishing his career by a single word...

...Because Trilling was eager to become a respected and respectable cultural critic, he could not afford to be a New York Jew...

...In what way, one wants to know...

...The Jews, he says, have suffered—and, presumably, will continue to suffer—because "in a world increasingly conceived as the struggle of 'modern' revolutionary forces, the Jews seemed to be entirely a people of the past, living in the past...

...To suggest the hold Kazin's vision of the Cold War years still has on many intellectuals, one need only quote from a recent article on Lionel Trilling in Salmagundi, a leading literary journal, where the writer lumps all anti-Communists—sober or not—together, and speaks of the "headlong flights" of writers like James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Whittaker Chambers, John Dos Passos, and Arthur Koestler ' from one political extreme to the other" (emphasis mine), as if this very mixed bag of writers espoused a politics that was the mirror image of Stalinism...

...Kazin, in fact, makes it quite clear that he wanted to escape the weight of Jewish traditions—that it was his early ambition to move in a "world of power in which my own people had moved about as strangers...

...Throughout the book Kazin makes fun of Trilling's favorite terms of discourse—society, culture, the educated classes—implying that these genteel phrases enabled Trilling to avoid confronting the sordid realities of American power during the Cold War era...

...The nightmare of Nazism is the thematic note of the book, one that Kazin sounds throughout...

...In any case, Kazin's response is clear: The matter—or, rather, the awesome fact—of Nazism is for him "the nightmare that would bring everything else into question, that will haunt me to my last breath...

...it was, rather, the posture of a trimmer...

...Kazin was wiser, for he knew that "government ruled, not 'Society.' " Kazin's speculations about Trilling's motives might be right if preaching anti-Communism truly helped one's career in the literary and intellectual world...

...Let us assume that Kazin is right and that Trilling, as Robert Alter put it, adopted "the manner of a facsimile WASP...

...The son of a Jewish tailor, he implies, has no right to speak the way Trilling did...

...This sensibility is commonplace among those who have, in some measure, become deracinated—have lost their cultural moorings and are floating free...

...The path to one's origins is not a straight and narrow one...

...For a moment I was home...

...According to Kazin, LionelTrilling's anti-Communism was a less passionate affair...

...Lionel Trilling is one of the central figures in Kazin's book, which is the third volume of an autobiographical trilogy that includes A Walker in the City and Starting Out in the Thirties...

...10.95...

...The initial bow of respect is followed by a slap in the face...

...To fathom the motives that led to this misrepresentation is impossible, but Lionel Trilling's essay, "The Fate of Pleasure," provides an intelligent gloss on the emotional and intellectual strategies at work in New York Jew...

...Kazin, however, needs the notion of Jewish uniqueness in order to link the suffering the Jews underwent at the hands ofthe Nazis with the suffering he—a New York Jew—underwent in his several marriages...

...By making Kafka serve as the archetype of the Jewish imagination, and thus especially capable of being appreciated and understood by Jewish readers, Kazin does violence to the unique literary characteristics of Kafka' s work that make it moving and chilling to many readers, whatever their ethnic background...

...Such speculations, I think...

...It was Kafka who said that "not the murderer but the victim is guilty," and Kazin says that the Jews "were just a people accused [emphasis Kazin's], as of old...

...I say it to point out that the emotional and intellectual configuration of Kazin's Jewishness is a very contemporary phenomenon, resembling the mystique peddled by other contemporary writers who dwell on their blackness, womanness, Irishness, etc...

...Both assumptions betray a rigid and self-righteous kind of cultural determinism...

...Trilling's response to Nazism was inadequate because there simply was no response...

...Kazin himself calls Irving Kristol a "professional rightist," a phrase that belongs to the arsenal of Stalinist vituperation...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...

...6 The American Spectator November 1978 To assign vulgar motives to those who take the path of a Trilling smacks of ethnic mystique...

...And they are worthy of discussion, for they touch upon a question that has been at the center of American intellectual life since the end of World War II...

...Or, to put it in less abstract terms, intellectuals have some need to show to others not how rich or successful or clever they are, but how spiritually intense they are—how much they are capable of suffering, anguish, and rage...

...Kazin is not so much in touch with his Jewish past as haunted by that aspect of it which speaks only of suffering...

...The land of Kazin's Jewish mystique is a uniform vale of tears, a land peopled only with "obsessed, grieving Jews...

...Just as some Armenians (or Poles, or Ukranians, or blacks, or countless other persecuted ethnic and racial groups) will be more preoccupied with their distinctive history and distinctive miseries than others, so some Jews will choose the path of a Kazin, some the path of a Trilling—if, indeed, Trilling's path is correctly charted by Kazin...

...The anti-anti-Communists considered it reprehensible to dwell on the evils of Communism because they thought that by doing so one played into the hands of reactionary forces...

...But there were other intellectuals who deplored the excesses of the radical right and yet at the same time recognized that it was perfectly legitimate to worry about Soviet expansion under the banner of Communism, which they saw as a threat to America's allies and ultimately to the United States itself...

...After the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, most American intellectuals broke completely with the Communists, the exception being Lillian Hellman and a band of Hollywood screenwriters who devoutly worshipped the Soviet Union until the late forties and early fifties...

...Kazin confesses that he was once invited to dinner at the home of Lionel Trilling and his wife, Diana Trilling, and that he was never invited back...

...Perhaps, to use a contemporary idiom that seems especially appropriate, they thought that he came on too strong...

...Unfortunately, New York Jew is shot through with ethnic mystique...

...When Trilling first appears on Kazin's stage, he is praised as a "master of distinctions," someone with an extraordinarily subtle and fine mind...

...and Kazin, an intellectual who had not lost touch with his Jewish past, made him uncomfortable...

...According to Kazin, Lionel Trilling did not have such nightmares—or, at least, he never alluded to them, never confronted the fact of Nazism in his writings...

...Kazin knows how terrible the final solution was, but surely the notion of the eternally suffering Jew makes it easy to lose sight of the uniqueness of the Nazis' treatment of the Jews...

...a people whose only mission was to feel guilty...

...Dense with precise observations of the urban landscape and rich in fascinating sketches of famous writers, New York Jew is a tightly-woven and elegantly-written work of autobiographical art...

...Kazin assumes that anti-anti-Communism was the only enlightened, responsible, and courageous position that one could take during the Cold War era...

...Kazin also calls a congressman on the House Committee on Un-American Activities "the good American Vishinsky...

...During the first five years of the forties, European Jews truly were cornered...

...For Kazin, being Jewish means belonging to a community composed of suffering outsiders...

...Perhaps Kazin can so confidently appropriate Kafka in this way because Kazin himself has such a limited notion of Jewishnessequating it with suffering and guilt...

...by dwelling on the fatality of his Jewishness, he seems to be reassuring himself that, as Trilling put it in his essay, " 'I have more life in me than I have.' " New York Jew, however, is not all in this vein...

...In an introduction to the re-issue of his novel, The Middle of the Journey, Trilling says that the very phrase anti-anti-Communism "tells us how much authority Stalinist Communism still had for the intellectual class...

...it does not mean subscribing to a distinctive body of customs, ceremonies, and thought...

...Anti-Communism may have played well in Peoria—and thus may have helped the careers of some journalists and many politicians—but it bombed in New York, where Whittaker Chambers, who preached anti-Communism in the pages of Time, was regarded with a loathing usually reserved for the likes of a Hitler...

...No one," Kazin says, "could have been more discerning, and less involved...

...Kafka earns the right to be labelled with an "our" because for Kazin he is the Jewish writer, his imagination dominated by a distinctively Jewish sense of guilt and suffering...

...and some, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, were unscrupulous exploiters of populist paranoia about foreign ideologies...

...About Diana Trilling, for example, he has the following to say: "She was a dogged woman and looked it, with a passion for polemic against all possible dupes of the Soviet Union that in the McCarthy era and the heyday of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was to make her the scourge of all mistaken ill-thinking 'anti-antiCommunists.' " Mentioned in the same breath as McCarthy, Diana Trilling is also caricatured as the political equivalent of a woman's temperance crusader, her anti-Communism the self-righteous passion of someone whose favorite literary genre, according to Kazin, "seemed to be the letter to the editor...

...No doubt those who attempt to assume a way of life far removed from their origins may appear ludicrous and pathetic, but Kazin implies that acting in this way constitutes a kind of ethnic dishonesty, a betrayal of one's background...

...It comes as no surprise that Alfred Kazin's New York Jew, * a memoir of life among writers and intellectuals in New York during the past 30 years, shows up some authors for the vain, petty, and mean-spirited souls they often are —personal qualities that say nothing, of course, about the quality of their work...

...Moreover, by writing about Kafka in this way, Kazin indulges in a kind of ethnic obscurantism, for there is no such thing as a distinctively Jewish imagination—a point that should be apparent to anyone who has read Saul Bellow, Isaac Babel, Isaac Singer, Philip Roth, and a host of other Jewish writers...

...The American Spectator November 1978 5 One would think that a writer bent on describing the shape of intellectual life in New York after the war would offer a reasonably serious discussion of the relative merits of both positions, but Kazin does no such thing...