An American Procession

...But that was the boast of his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy who inspired Tender Is the Night, which is where Kazin got the quote...

...Poe would have been just fine, according to Kazin, if he had had the good luck to be born in Paris...

...he was the same at fifty as he was at twenty, preoccupied with his moods and motives, saying the same things about himself over and over again...

...The errors just pile up as the parade goes on...

...They apply the word "evil" only to political arrangements which they do not like...

...Like Emerson, his basic unit of utterance is the sentence, and, again like Emerson, he has difficulty stringing his sentences together in a manner which will keep the reader turning the page...

...In James BoswelL" The Later Years, 1769-1795, Frank Brady speaks delicately of Boswelrs "obvious infirmities," but it is easy to make a more blunt assessment: In many ways, Boswell was a first-class buffoon...

...But what really happened, as attested by all of Fitzgerald's major biographers, is this: In May 1923, when Conrad was staying at the Doubleday estate, Fitzgerald and his friend Ring Lardner got roaring drunk and tried to get the great man's attention by performing a tap dance on the lawn outside his window...

...He has nothing of interest to say about Emerson, for example, whom he rightly regards as the spiritual progenitor of American letters...

...Woolf said that about 1910...

...He writes, for example, that...

...The reader often has to backtrack to see what train of thought, if any, led to the sentence he is reading...

...To be fair, a felicitous observation surfaces now and then in this sea of intellectual melted caramel...

...It probably made the place more interesting for resident mandarins...

...Reading this biography you'll have no Stephen Miller is executive assistant to the Board of Radio Free Europe and author of Special Interest Groups in American Politics (Transaction Books...

...trouble understanding why his dour and difficult father had no use for him...

...Emerson possessed, in concentrated form, that American strain of innocence, that blindness to what most of mankind has experienced as History, which Europeans have always found so exasperating...

...not only did they fail to get Conrad's attention, they were thrown off the grounds for drunken behavior...

...Likewise, Kazin's portrait of Hawthorne passes over Hawthorne's happy marriage--perhaps the happiest of any major American writer--and the pleasant years that Hawthorne spent in his beloved "old Manse" in Concord...

...it would not have been in Adams's character or in his philosophy to worry over the two thousand prosecutions under Section 3 of the Espionage Act...

...but now miss and regret his noise and his hilarity and his perpetual good humor, which had no bounds...

...Beyond a certain point, it is not possible to have both universalism based on citizenship and also redistribution based on need...

...This is palpable nonsense...

...That is characteristic of Kuttner's approach...

...Apart from its slanted biographies and annoying political intrusions, An American Procession is filled with appalling errors of fact and judgment...

...And, in the same paragraph, we are told that when Joseph Conrad visited the United States and was secluded on a Long Island estate, Fitzgerald, unable to see him, "humble as Gatsby, waited on the lawn for the merest sight of the great man...

...Kazin writes literary criticism the way Henry Steele Commager writes history--he is all gush and unction...

...Kazin just gushes on, apparently pleased with Emerson's version of secular humanism...

...It was impossible to be more honored and cherished, far and near," Henry James wrote of Emerson, "than he was during his long residence in Concord...

...The prologue's title is "Old Man in a Dry Mouth," under which is an epigraph, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," On that note, we are introduced to Henry Adams as an old man and Eliot himself as a young man...

...But Eliot wrote that in 1918, and he was referring to James's physical death, not his critical standing...

...he continually brags about his ancient Scottish lineage, yet he never stops flattering the rich and politically powerful...

...Kazin, who takes every shot he can at religion, declares that James had no respect for church religion...

...This is completely false While James could not bring himself to believe in any church doctrine, he had a deep regard for organized religion, the more organized the better...

...Though he made his name in London, Boswell was one of a remarkable group of Scottish writers who made a name for themselves in the second half of the eighteenth century in Edinburgh, or, as it was often known, the Athens of the North...

...So what if Concord also contained its share of hard-drinking and unlettered Yanks...

...heels on the national flag...

...If anything, James's revisions made novels like Portrait of a Lady easier and more colloquial...

...Emerson saw everything, even contemporary horrors like the Middle Passage, in a mellow light...

...PROCESSION Alfred Kazin/Alfred A. Knopf/$18.95 George Sire Johnston We know that we should have stayed home, that Alfred Kazin's American procession is going to be a grim parade, a sort of anti-Fourth of July, a few pages into this endless book...

...Great writers, we tend to assume (probably mistakenly), are often difficult and eccentric human beings, but I wonder whether any other great writer has been so deficient in dignity as the drunkard and compulsive womanizer, James Boswell...

...But Kuttner finds himself in an uncomfortable box...

...This involves considerable biographical distortions...

...Eliot...

...Emerson's neighbors were the likes of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Ellery Channing, and their ranks were swelled by visitors from Boston like Margaret Fuller...

...In the end, The Economic Illusion fails to persuade, burdened by its misrepresentation of evidence, prudent evasions, and preference for assertion over demonstration...

...He isolates and builds his discussion around the least happy epochs of a writer's life...

...Kazin talks of Emerson's "genius for compression...

...When Carter enraged Helmut Schmidt by asking why the Germans simply couldn't get together and tear down the Berlin Wall, the pale ghost of Emerson was hovering nearby...

...Melville, Poe, and Dickinson were not gregarious people...

...But even when Kazin has got the story straight, the book suffers terribly from his manner of writing...

...Emerson, the supreme "individualist," would have detested Marx's ideas about class struggle, and the fact that certain of Marx's early romantic writings, lifted from their context, sound like Emerson signifies nothing...

...They shared with Poe the kind of literary temperament that is not happy anywhere outside of a vale of Kashmir or an opium den...

...Even Samuel Johnson complained to him: "Of the exaltations and depressions of your mind you delight to talk, and I hate to hear...

...Brady spends too much time chronicling the ups and downs of Boswell's moods and too much time on Boswell's career as a lawyer...

...he always protests his devotion to his wife, yet he continually leaves her to go off and have fun in London--doing so even when he knows she is at death's door...

...Very touching, very romantic...

...Kuttner, having offered his brief for egalitarian economics, concedes that fostering a "politics of equality" is "a little harder...

...But Kazin, in this critical-biographical survey of great American writers, tries to skew as many of his subjects as he can into their company...

...Kazin is an unreconstructed liberal in the debased sense of the word--he is a social democrat, really--and such liberals in their heart of hearts do not believe in radical evil...

...Luna in The Bostonians...

...It is inconceivable how he would have reacted to Dachau or the Gulag...

...His favorite trick is to say that a writer would or would not have been outraged by a certain political development...

...As the welfare state becomes larger and more universal, it becomes less redistributive...

...Kazin quotes Virginia Woolf as saying that 1908 was the year "human nature changed...

...But Professor Kazin has one set of standards for judging Americans, and another for Europeans...

...He approved of the art and rituals of the Anglican and Roman THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 churches and wrote excitedly, when he first visited Rome, of seeing the Pope...

...There were certain complications in life," Henry James noted dryly, "which he never suspected...

...When he died, Edmond Malone--the century's greatest Shakespearean scholar who was also Boswell's close friend and collaborator on Life of Johnson--said, "I used to grumble sometimes at his turbulence...

...These people did not suffer fools gladly...

...Kazin also has the gift of quotation...

...He is oblivious to the most glaring fault in Emerson's philosophy, which is a complete unconcern with the problem of evil...

...Boswell's influence was not that of Adam Smith or David Hume, but through his masterpiece-The L6fe of Samuel Johnson--he changed forever the course of biography...

...The chapter on Henry James is particularly misleading...

...But these two desiccated figures, who projected their melancholy onto everything around them, set the tone for all that follows...

...Boswell got the essence of what Johnson and others said, if not their exact words, Brady argues, and most of Johnson's contemporaries would agree with him...

...This allows him to indict America for shortcomings which have nothing to do with the literary personalities being discussed...

...But Poe's French counterparts--symbolist writers like Baudelaire and Rimbaud-were, if anything, even more neurotic...

...But he also never lets us forget that Boswell was liked by an extraordinary variety of distinguished men and women...

...One does gets tired of hearing about Boswell's irresponsible behavior...

...Kazin inserts sententious political squibs into the narrative at every turn...

...Professor Kazin should reread (or read for the first time) the descriptions of Mrs...

...Virtually every float in his parade is decorated with ash and cinders, with the subject furiously staring into space or grinding his George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...There is no indication anywhere of a critical intelligence bearing down hard on the texts at hand...

...He always complains about gonorrhea, yet he continually picks up prostitutes...

...Kazin has the bad taste to bring in Karl Marx six times as a gloss on Emerson...

...He chides Henry James for his "total surprise" at the outbreak of World War I. But one is hard pressed to think of a single European writer--or statesman, for that matter--who was not similarly dumbfounded...

...Boswell, he makes clear, was a man with intense curiosity about the social, political, and cultural world (he cared not a whit about the natural world...

...And not the mellow, spiritually reconciled Eliot of later years, who rejected his early poses of disaffection, but the young nervous wreck who wrote The Waste Land...

...Critics have argued, for example, that the rich supply of wonderful conversation with which Boswell lards Life of Johnson is mostly his own creation, or else there because he had the bad manners to scribble continuously in the company of others...

...Surely this is the crucial problem for "radical democrats"--deciding whether univerAN AMERICAN salism or redistribution is more important, or else finding a way to combine the two...

...JAMES BOSWELL: THE LATER YEARS, 1769-1795 Frank Brady/McGraw-Hill/S24.95 Stephen Miller What does one make of a great writer who liked to perform on the London banquet circuit as an after dinner singer of doggerel...

...Or who once ended a day drunk in St...

...They think that if the right social levers are pulled, human affairs will cease to be difficult...

...He once told a Catholic woman that he envied her faith...

...This is plausible in political terms--the more people involved, the greater the pressure on the government to provide decent service--though the American experience with the Postal Service argues against it...

...Brady understands Boswell's genius very well...

...A few paragraphs later, Kazin says that Eliot in 1916, the year of James's death, "admitted that James had been dead for some time...

...If Poe had spent his life drinking absinthe in the sixth arrondisement, his desolation would have been no less acute...

...In a footnote, Kazin then gives us all of Section 3 of the Espionage Act...

...Also, by quoting from Boswell's correspondence with Malone, Brady shows us what a careful writer Boswell was--how he usually resisted Malone's attempts to make his prose more dignified and latinate...

...This book does neither...

...Kazin says that it was one of E Scott Fitzgerald's boasts "never to be too tired for anything...

...Thus, we get Hawthorne in his dotage, Mark Twain after his bankruptcy, Melville when he was an obscure customs inspector, Eliot before his conversion and happy second marriage, and Adams after the suicide of his wife turned his mind to distilling wormwood and gall...

...If Kuttner's book is any evidence, the illusions are still theirs...

...When dealing with a genuine social deviant like Poe, Kazin blames his subject's mental disorders on American society...

...Many paragraphs become a series of nonsequiturs...

...For Kazin, solitude and desolation are the hallmarks of being a writer in America...

...Paul's churchyard, singing ballads in the company of two women in red cloaks...

...Joshua Reynolds, who was present at many of the conversational feasts that Boswell attended, said that "every word in [Life of Johnson] might be depended upon as if given upon oath...

...But such pleasures are few in the nearly four hundred pages of sentimentalism and distortion, and this reviewer could not wait for the fleet of street cleaners after the last float...

...What Boswell actually did was write condensed notes--a method, as Boswell himself said, that "brings to my mind all that passed, though it would be barren to anybody else...

...On Stephen Crane: "He was never heard to protest America's maneuverings against Spain in the name of Cuban 'freedom.'" These are surely issues, but they belong in another book...

...Not, mind you, the young Henry Adams, the brilliant writer, lecturer, and social figure, but the bitter octogenarian, whose favorite topic of conversation was "the total failure of the universe...

...Jimmy Carter is Emerson's degenerate posterity...

...This is why, parenthetically, so few great writers since Flaubert can be described as liberals in the current sense of the word, for a vision of the world which eliminates half the equation has a hard time translating itself,into meaningful works of literature...

...No writer, except his friend Thomas Carlyle, could be windier...

...Each writer is depicted, implicitly or explicitly, as a victim of America's crass civilization...

...But Brady persuades us that Boswell was neither a liar nor a stenographer...

...In short, Boswell the writer was very um~rn~tea m,mage 1 For Leisurely Touring and Sightseeing THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985...

...Instead of "their multifarious colloquies," for example, he wrote, "their plunge.., into the deeps of talk...

...Before the floats bearing Emerson and Hawthorne and Whitman pass by in due chronological order, there comes a banner, so to speak, in the form of two bleak quotations from T.S...

...Kazin goes on to say that for the New York Edition of his works, James "rewrote his earlier novels in his elaborate later style...

...The sentences themselves range from the ungrammatical ("Adams would be more interested in world conflict than in the social misery filling up realism from Chicago") to the platitudinous ("The unredeemed wasteland of the century began in 1914, that onset of all our woe") to the ridiculous ("The Sound and the Fury is certainly hot...

...Western European ones are more generous and efficient because they cover the middle classes...

...While not a deep thinker, he was a great listener who, as Brady says, "prized [his] ability to 'tune' himself to others...

...Buffoonery aside, Boswell is a difficult subject for the biographer because there was no development in his life...

...Of Emerson, for example, Kazin writes that "his situation in rough, indifferent, harddrinking Concord was one of isolation...

...It would be difficult to find two drearier Grand Marshals for a parade...

...Some of our great writers have, of course, been what Melville called "isolatos...

...The distinction is not trivial, because she was referring to the tremendous impact that the first PostImpressionist exhibit, which opened in London in December 1910, had on English sensibility...

...But he has shown how hard it will be for those on the left to construct a sound economic case...

...Concord was a hive of intellectual activity...

...Kazin instead serves up the late, ailing Hawthorne during the Civil War, when his imagination had run dry and he had become disgusted with American politics...

...Brady also realizes that Boswell brought a discipline to his work that he could not bring to his life...

...And to say that James never allowed the "unconscious force of sex" to his heroines is nonsense...

...I don't mean to pick on Emerson, who was a luminous phrase-maker, but Kazin's avoidance of such a glaring issue is symptomatic of a political bias which informs the whole book...

...At a fairly young age, Boswell was accepted into a club that included Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Adam Smith, Richard Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Edmond Malone, Joshua Reynolds, and Charles James Fox--to name only its most wellknown members...

...Of Thoreau he writes: "The altar was Nature, but Henry Thoreau's God was one of those faint radio signals that can still be detected from a stellar explosion that ceased millions of years ago...