A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment
Kazin, Alfred
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment" The Last of Kazin Alfred Kazin is the quintessential New York literary intellectual —always provocative, but often intemperate, and even malicious, mixing a high intelligence with bouts of...
...Bulger admits to helping his brother Whitey get a job as a custodian...
...You can also be inspired by the insight and wit of such noted conservative thinkers as: Joseph Sobran, Mona Charen, James Kilpatrick, William F Buckley, George Will, Thomas Sowell, Robert Novak, and Cal Thomas...
...Kazin is obviously an anachronism in these dreary days of deconstructionism, postmodernism, and Maya Angelou...
...Exp...
...Kazin is not just a participant in the literary-political wars...
...I would walk up and down the "American" rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, taking in the portraits of solemn colonial and Revolutionary figures...
...70 July 1996 • The American Spectator A Great One-Two-Three Punch...
...It was not that Kazin had any particular opinion about those things himself...
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...I have never been able to express the excitement I get from "Americana," from Constance Rourke's saying, "the poet of American nationality"—from the very names Cope, James, Pierce, Dickinson, and Roebling in Lewis Mumford's The Brown Decades—from Thomas Beer's Hanna and The Mauve Decade—from the letters of William James...
...He should be treasured for that...
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...To think of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Henry James, of Emerson and Whitman and Dickinson in the same breath, as it were, gives me extraordinary satisfaction...
...The neighborhood is decaying, even "putrescent," but it inspires Kazin's most descriptive writing...
...Phone...
...Kazin is probably doing some reconstructing again...
...mostly it is attitude that counts...
...A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin Alfred Kazin HarperCo/lins /34r pages / $26 REVIEWED BY John Corry JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...Similarly, he is poignant when he writes about old age...
...Conservatives often think it is the other way around...
...I understand I can obtain a full refund on all unmailed copies at any time...
...but if you do, you will be wrong...
...Nonetheless, Kazin's views, the purely political ones aside, no longer fit the prejudices of the current establishment...
...Kazin has gotten around — Rome, London, Yaddo, Miami Beach, Wellfleet—but he is most at home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan...
...The politics he practiced is not clean, and it's not meant to be...
...Date: Apit,r6c1 wea wan nic Name...
...It may be he is the last of his kind...
...He is also a participant in the literary-political wars...
...Throughout his career he has shown the characteristic Irish inability to distinguish between his noblest acts and his most vain, a Celtic tendency to make jokes of serious things and serious things of jokes...
...I. B. Singer's apartment is at the corner...
...He also disdains, among many others, "the demagogue Newt Gingrich," Ronald Reagan, William Bennett (whom he recalls as a "sedulous ape"), "Billy" Kristol, Camille Paglia, members of the Colonial Dames of America, Alan Greenspan, and that "aggressive TV twerp Mike Wallace...
...When Kazin gave the Massey Lectures at Harvard last year, he noted that the Modern Language Association had entitled a session at one of its conventions z-"The Muse of Masturbation...
...Kazin has an attitude, and he takes it with him wherever he goes...
...The New York that formed him no longer exists, and in the places where scholarly critics now dwell, the love of literature has given way to a grim, sometimes wacky, pedantry...
...So many people do not share my past that I am free to invent it...
...Ever since he first appeared in print—in the New Republic in the 193o's — he has treated literature as literature, and not ideology...
...Ideas no position to complain when it predictably turned on its supporters with arrogance and ruthlessness...
...He bumps into Malamud at Broadway and 86th...
...Many other prominent people turn up in Kazin's journals, among them Robert Frost, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, T.S...
...A feminist examined the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and found that the style was "clitoral...
...Then he notes that Miller "is a millionaire, has an estate, travels everywhere with the greatest freedom and aplomb, is a steadfast pillar of the American stage and the American scene...
...I was there, and so I know...
...Memoirists are always selective about their memories...
...At 8o, Kazin is the dean of American critics...
...Malice is there, but so is a sense of the absurd...
...In his autobiography, Out of Step, the late Sidney Hook, commenting on Kazin's 1965 Starting Out in the Thirties and his 1978 New York Jew, loftily declared: "He has reconstructed his political past to make it fit the prejudices of the current literary establishment...
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...And he scoffs at the newspapers that accused him of playing politics when he got a job for his brother jack: The allegation was certainly true, but the attempt to give it a pejorative cast struck me as absurd...
...Did he have any regard for the girl...
...Did he have a daughter of his own...
...Address City: State: Zip...
...The dean of critics sounds silly...
...When anyone in public office makes a recommendation, it is per se a political action...
...Kazin remembers that he never did like Hook, anyway...
...It allows him to make otherwise empty pronouncements...
...He is simply not PC...
...Multiculturalism distresses him...
...Eliot, Stella Adler, Elie Wiesel, Bernard Berenson, Jerzy Kosinski, Bernard Malamud, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer, and Jacqueline Onassis, with whom he once shared a taxi...
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...Much of this, of course, is bracing...
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...Upset by Republican victories in the 1990's, he finds he is living in the "most reactionary and regressive climate I have ever known...
...Kazin seems to want to give himself a kind of moral credibility by showing how much he has anguished...
...In consistently asserting the prerogatives of an older, local politics against mandates from Washington, Bulger has, on balance, served his community well...
...he would be proud to hear them described as national ones...
...You may dismiss the wars as inconsequential, internecine squabbling among intellectuals, mostly Jewish or black...
...Residency does not require any expertise...
...Not all literary intellectuals are political, although those who are usually live on the left...
...Such, such are the joys of English / lit now, but Kazin hearkens to an earlier time, and he is better than that...
...72 July rg 9 6 • The American Spectator...
...There is a good deal of this in the journals...
...He meets the playwright Arthur Miller, "dressed as always in blue work shirt, work pants, and heavy work shoes...
...In A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment—the title is from T.S...
...Black night...
...Here is an extract from 1938-1945: I recall the excitement under which I lived for weeks in 1939, when I knew I had this passionate and even technical interest in images of the American past...
...He says loneliness has pursued him, three marriages have failed, and he has been happy only in spurts...
...That is Bulger's politics in a nutshell: ruthless, atavistic, occasionally open to featherbedding and corruption, and considerably less destructive than the national politics that has supplanted it.have consequences, leading to domestic legislation and foreign-policy initiatives...
...Kristol wondered what had gone through the correspondent's mind...
...The prizes went to those Democrats—like Tip O'Neill and the Kennedys — who joined it, even if that meant being part of the juggernaut that rolled over Bulger and his neighbors as if they were so many bugs, and destroyed the neighborhood culture that had been the modus vivendi of Boston's poor since the nineteenth-century migrations...
...Where 0 Where did I lose that love for the world," he writes, "that was as real to me as being alive...
...One extract reads simply: "Black night...
...Discredit Kristol on the squeal rule, and you did not have to listen to him on NATO or anything else that agitated the neocons during the Cold War...
...He flaunted it during the Cold War...
...he has also become one of its victims...
...The wars have shaped our culture, and our culture has shaped our politics...
...But Kristol deserved better than that, and certainly the audience did not roar...
...Thirteen years old and already a tramp...
...He is dealing with what he knows...
...The book, made up of extracts from Kazin's journals—some of which have appeared in the New Yorker and Paris Review—is divided into five sections: 1938- 1945, 1946-195o, 19504978, 1978-1993, and 1993-1995...
...Thomas Eakins, always a hero to my spirit...
...With the election nearing, it is more important than ever that you receive concise commentary, and news analysis, without a liberal bias...
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...When anyone in public office makes an appointment, it too is, by definition, a political action...
...Some extracts go on for pages,while others are very brief...
...Kazin is being candid, or perhaps very dry...
...Bulger's failings are human ones...
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...Eliot—Kazin is doing a kind of summing up...
...But he did not like a great many people, and the people he disliked most were on the right, and for him the personal was the political...
...It would be impossible for him to think of Emily Dickinson's poetry as clitoral...
...Here is an extract from 1978-1993 in its entirety: One advantage of getting old...
...Kristol could not contain his laughter as he dismissed this thirteenyear-old degenerate as the sort of person liberals worried about...
...Kazin insists on being atleast a little derisive of even the people he likes...
...In the 1980's, for instance, he once turned up at a conference of the neoconservative Committee for the Free World at the Plaza Hotel in New York...
...Each in his way, however, told us how we should feel about it...
...But what was done to Boston in the 1970's was no joke, and Bulger was one of the first to recognize it...
...The literary-political wars often were fought over tangential issues...
...Kazin was being gratuitously nasty, and the stylish New York Review of Books was happy to help...
...Then he also notes that Miller "opens up every conversation, at least with me, by expressing his bitterness at the Times," whose theater critic takes him too lightly...
...The audience roared...
...Norman Podhoretz, say, or Irving Kristol did not tear down the Berlin Wall, and neither did Noam Chomsky or Norman Mailer build it...
...As an example, he cited a television correspondent who interviewed a 13-year-old girl about her life as a "sexual activist...
...The only time such acts are reprehensible is when they involve shoddy politics...
...HASG96 The interview was part of a segment about the "squeal rule," under which children would be required to tell their parents or guardians before they could get an abortion...
...Here is how Kazin described this episode in the New York Review of Books: With the contempt of a nineteenth-century Tory backbencher deriding Irish rebels, Professor Kristol strongly defended the "squeal rule...
...But Kazin flaunts his sensibilities and displays his angst overmuch...
...Perspective has fled, and all judgment is lost...
...Had he reflected on what he was saying...
...He also writes very well...
...And the cartoons are hilarious...
...Bulger may not have been a typical Massachusetts politician, but he was typical of that now-tiny subset of Massachusetts politicians without national aspirations...
...Kristol, a panelist, spoke during one session about "mindless" journalists...
...He positively brags about bending the rules to get veteran's benefits for a dirt-poor family whose father/breadwinner is in the slammer...
...Conservatively Speaking, Of Course...
...In a different era, he could have been a Daley or a LaGuardia, but the smarter money was on the national Democratic party...
...Kazin, the "first native son after so many generations of mud-flat Russian Jews," is an American writer...
...Only the Conservative Chronicle brings you 32 pages packed with the nation's top conservative columnists and cartoonists, every week...
...The Last of Kazin Alfred Kazin is the quintessential New York literary intellectual —always provocative, but often intemperate, and even malicious, mixing a high intelligence with bouts of foolishness as critic, memoirist, and kvetch...
...And yet he cannot be accused of sour grapes...
...The personal is still the political, and he still disdains the neocons...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
