JEWS AND OTHERS
Maloff, Saul
JEWS AND OTHERS SAUL MALOFF T HE SPIKY ti.fle of Alfred Kazin's tumultuous memoir demands that' we attend and come to terms with it before we are released to turn to the text. The secret is...
...The embarrassed Jews and the shocked goyim--what will they make of it...
...That Wilson could also be "eccentric and cranky, unself-conscious, and a 'character'" are signs of election rather than personal flaws, and further evidence of his fierce, exclusive devotion to books and ideas, study and learning...
...Despite all the eager beavers from the newer stocks, the few figures with the most unquestioned influence still represented--and often in the person of Edmund Wilson himself --the old American clerisy...
...His old America was gone...
...Kazin accepts with belligerant pride and pleasure amounting at times to glee large elements of the caricature: his literary and self-portrayed personal manners are far from impeccable...
...Because you play by the rules, you Can't beat him...
...and to correct these, to shore up standards, ~ was not only a matter of intellectugl honor but a final defense of culture and civilization (if any was left): a "patrician belief that through style everything, even in his disordered country, would yet fall into Commonweal: 597 place . . . . This insistence on 'correctness'~ as of a judge or minister or national leader in the days when a few solitary geniuses molded American culture-became basic to the sense of his role in American life...
...and it is in that created country that an outsider can be naturalized, though first, perhaps, he must invent himself...
...Astonishingly, randomly, inconsequentially, a forgotten prayer out of his longburied childhood, or the first wordphrase of it, floats unwilled up and into his b~ave attempts at conversation with his son, the prayer children once recited upon awakening in the morning: Le/onecho . . . . Before Thy Face . . . Before Thy Face I render thanks to Thee, Everlasting King . . . Le/onecho...
...and now they were infesting the universities, teaching Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, the Metaphysical Poets, the Puritan Divines...
...I am doing a little mind-reading when"I say that, in selecting his title from among twenty or thirty possible ones, he hoped to goad madness in old adversaries, actual and imagined, for whom New York and Jew are synonymous terms, the first marginally a euphemism for the unutterable second...
...remains an open question and we are still trying to imagine and invenr answers...
...How is it possible to be at once uncompromisingly a Jew and easily, comfortably, un-selfconsciously American...
...The usurping second- and third-generation Jewish intellectuals, that is to say, and the beleaguered old-line American moral and intellectual aristocracy...
...And in, keeping with their rampant emotionality, their intellectual and cultural lives were (what shall one say...
...of A. who will rob you blind, even though he already owns the country, and jew you down out of a sulphurous compound of avarice, a lust for vengeance and the pleasure he *New York Jew, by Alfred Kazin, Knopf...
...Paul G6odman, Hannah Arend~, among others...
...Commonweal: 599...
...At his grave Kazin, estranged from the synagogue and a stranger to the ancient tongue of his people, fumblingly recites the awesome Kaddish, the prayer for the dead which does not mention death...
...What is an American...
...Powerful amenity" is an odd phrase...
...The last American man of letters, the great anachronism . . . now depended on 'style' in an aristocratic-political sense more familiar to English universities and the House of Commons than to American intellectuals...
...a "nursing home," his body and spirit broken, his mind a shambles...
...All the "pushing at the world to let him in" will not get him all the way there...
...The warning reads: NEW YORK JEW ALFRED KAZIN and you may take it or leave it, but you can make no mistake about it...
...New York Jew and patrician old American meeting on the ground they held in common...
...Incredibly, such persons were suddenly their colleagues...
...the world was being deluged by solecisms, errors in fact and judgment, faulty translations, pedanffy, ignorance, excess and folly everywhere...
...and on the other the old American clerisy...
...the America he saw "depicted in Life magazine" was shoddy beyond bearing...
...As drama--as a drama of the mind--it is fascinating, and entirely credible...
...For the strong meaning of the phrase, we must look elsewhere, and read the mind behind the book, since Kazin has nothing further explicitly to say about this powerful craving...
...Never mind that the argument might prove difficult, if not impossible, plausibly to sustain...
...Gentlemen do not utter the word Jew...
...native wit, talent, hard work, infinite ambition, Jewish superego will not quite allow him to feel completely at home in America...
...It is daunting or outrageous...
...If one moved very cautiously, making allowances for the play of fancy, and were willing to risk lapsing into absurdity and to include among the risks that there is no such ~ thing in any hard sense, a case could be made out that these qualities and views, acting together, describe a kind of writing that may plausibly be called New York Jewish...
...Moderation was one of the very many words they did not seem to understand...
...Gorillas don't read literary critics and memoirists...
...On the one side, are academic barbarians and vandals...
...No doubt consciously the jacket design echoes and fulfills the intention: there it is, like sticks of dynamite, dazzling white set against stark black...
...and certainly they would never think of using, except perhaps in the private chapel of their minds, any of the gorilla grunt-words...
...Deplorable taste in clothes, wives, children, parents...
...Lamentable...
...The scene---a two-part juxtaposed scene--is also immensely moving...
...to a life of reading and writing...
...The question was ss delightful to me [Kazin writes] as Edmund's writing that he had lost himself in four thousand years of Jewish history and could not get out...
...but the Library itself, that great place of rest and culture situated at the center of Manhattan's cankered heart comes to signify for him--the Library with its own fading elegance, marble stairs, golden tables, spacious reading rooms, turn-of-thecentury "intellectual insurgence and radical hope that bedrocked my book" --the "powerful amenity that I craved for my own life, a world of power in which my own people had moved about as strangers...
...And SO on . . . . Clearly, this is not a caricature of Kazin's readers...
...Increasingly with time Wilson grew even more curmudgeonly...
...Kazin is fond of saying that, as a critic, he can read a writer's mind...
...Both Jews, both American...
...Fresh out of the "Jew land" of the Brownsville ghetto and its academic terminus City College (of its legendary period in the Thirties), Kazin sits day in and day out-lives!--in the monumental NY Public Library reading for what would become On Native Grounds, his landmark study of the emergence of modern American literature, absorbing the America made habitable by its creators, easing his way into the country through their intercession, taking it in by swallowing it whole...
...In the face of death, he finds his ancestral Presbyterianism of no help...
...and beneath it, the sapper's name, also vertically set, also white on black...
...The grand old man is greatly taken with a Hebrew maxim, recited by faithful Jews in synagogue as they come to the end of the year's prescribed reading: Hazak Hazak Vinithazak . . . Be Strong, Be Strong, and Let us Strengthen One Another...
...We must look, in fact, to Protestant America...
...From the photograph on" the back of the dust jacket Kazin regards the commotion with a certain dour amusement, the eyes skeptical, shrewd, dismissive, the closed mouth set in a thin, damp, mirthless smile...
...Defiant, clamorously self-$ssertive, it taunts and proposes to intimidate us...
...In order to ask this at all, we must ask it naively and pass over in uneasy silence all complex questions of definition...
...to the literature and writers, that is, of Protestant America of the old dispensation...
...and in particular to the figure of Edmund Wilson and what the great man represented for the New York Jew...
...I should add, therefore, that the book is prodigally rich as personal andintellectual history, an important work .by a notable figure in American letters, and as such essential reading, Not the least of its gifts is a large gallery, of the kind of brief, vivid, revealing portralcs which Kazan .has fashioned inr a minor art-form and made virtually his own: Isaac Rosenfeld, Bellow, Lionel Trilling (as a "false" Jew in a complex disguise), Agee, Henry Luce, Richard Hofstadter, Stark Young, Van Wyck Brooks, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell...
...if they must, they say Jewish, as in Jewish men...
...Sheer fancifulness, of course, a fugitive, whimsical, self-indulgent notion of the kind New York Jews such as I are given to indulge...
...but there is no overlooking or getting around it...
...at first glance the words seem almost to nullify each other: certainly one does not naturally suggest the other...
...The surprising last scene in this closet drama is a perfect fusion of life and art...
...Emotion, indeed, was "foreign," alien, a cultural contaminent, so to speak Mediterranean, Aegean, Adriatic, Caribbean, certainly not Atlantic, given to raised voices, wide gesticulation, stridency, hysteria, shrieking or at least loud laughter, weeping, wildly fluctuating moods, erratic moodiness, elation and melancholyjoy and sorrow and nameless emotions noisily vented...
...Professional interest is one thing...
...lit (These reflections on themes and motifs are not intended as a review...
...Distaste, expressed by pursed mouth, was the closest he came to feeling anything so coaxse as emotion...
...The "eager beavers from the newer stocks...
...They came from teemlitg tenements in such positively anthropological habitats as the Lower East Side and Brownsville...
...Wilson stands astride the book like a colossus, offering himself as the ideal example of the writer-intellectual totally devoted to the life of the mind, a man who "had exposed himself to literature as the maximum experience of his life," who "lived in literature as he did not anywhere else," and to whom, from the beginning of their friendship, Kazin "felt altogether related...
...unkempt, disorderly, unruly, given to wild excitements and enthusiasms, love and hate and nothing in between...
...Behind the pressing urge to correctness, I saw the moral significance of 'right words' to Wilson's classmthe professional gentry of lawyers, preachers, educators, scientists, which from the time of New England's clerical oligarchs had remained the sustaining class of American intellectual life...
...Was it possible that Jews had an answer...
...The memoirist sees his life as high drama enacted at a furious pitch frequently marked by sturm-and-drang and shading off at times into melodrama, as if a life worth living must ,be continuously charged with significance or it is nothing: a religio-dramatic view of life...
...His "portrait" of the NY Public Library should be cut in stone at the base of the lions' paws...
...here is spaciousness large as America...
...but if this were drama I might be powerfully tempted to say in the end the son has become the father, and the father the son...
...At home in the "Jew land" of the West Side of Manhattan, relaxed in "our old profane New York style," Kazin feels himself to be an alien and interloper in the great midlands...
...he asks Kazin...
...he can be irascible, nasty, malicious, vex15 September 1978:596 ing, outrageous, and he would like us to know this...
...he is mad about literature, no less now in his ambassadorial period than in his brilliant youth---an enthusiast, an excited panegyrist, crazy about books and set fire to by ideas, with the wide-eyed passion of first discovery...
...But gentlemen do...
...The "newer stocks" with "their pretentious social science theories and academic careers and ridiculous 'New Criticism...
...While English was nominally their native tongue, they spoke it in gutteral accents wild, heavy traces of steerage clinging to their vowels, consonants, intonation, their molars and tonsils visible...
...The bequest is engraved in Hebrew on Wilson's tombstone in the Wellfleet cemetery...
...Yet it is to the literature and writers of the "native ground" that Kazin has always been most deeply attracted...
...In a developing panic I felt I had been thrown out into outer space...
...Flamboyant...
...In that range there are no lows or middles--only highs...
...Here are light and air, vitality and talent, zeal and passion...
...Kazin sees "a kind of political majesty to all this...
...Their passions were barbaric as the cut of their coats...
...Oh, dear...
...Now, deep in the belly or archaic brain of America, a New York Jew (or newyorkjew) is a Jew from anywhere (unless he is from your hometown and went to high school with you, in which case, if he wore the school tie and kept his voice down and his hands still while speaking softly or not at all unless to regale you with jewbaiting jokes, preferably blue--in which case he was a "white Jew" and one of your best friends), from anywhere in the U.S...
...least of all does it suggest amenity...
...and there is, or was, a kind of gentleman, generally but not always an academic, who may be thought of as a far subtler, fine,line version of the charcoal cartoon: hairless, willowy, colorless, in fact bloodless, genteel, prim, reproving...
...But New York Jewish intellectuals real and mythical are fated to be "anxiously Americanized": out there is a continent waiting to be possessed, and resisting the embrace...
...I I II I I I JEWS AND OTHERS SAUL MALOFF takes in cunningly outsmarting the heathens in any transaction...
...But in some sense the continent lay empty until its writers discovered, populated and invested it with these other qualities-created it...
...I knew no one...
...In Wellfleet, in his lonely eminence, Wilson is dying...
...And the "world of power" from which the immigrant Jews were by the nature of things excluded suggests (what...
...10.95 [307 pp...
...Kazin's old father, estranged from the synagogue and Jewish tradition, lies dying a cruel death in...
...The New York Jew as the Last Puritan, legitimate heir of the old American clerisy...
...Out of the "brown decades" of the exploding post-bellum America the "greatest power instrument in history" is being forged and the "new literature was being created inside an old century--proud, stormy, yet elegant...
...Where Kazin's allegiance lies seems plain...
...The trespasser will feel, and is meant to feel, quite drained, morally exhausted, by the time he has cleared the underbrush of his responses and seen plain or obscure what lies beneath the tangle...
...on a train rushing through the empty darkness he discovers that "America was endless...
...A kike, goes the sad old [Jewish] joke, is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room...
...Something wondrously strange hapi pens here...
...As a kind of parting gift, 15 September 1978:598 as a father might to a son, he gives the Kazins a "magnificently desolate Audubon prim...
...Famously a swallower whole of the world's tongues, ancient and modern, he has made himself a Hebraist (in the grand old Protestant clerical tradition and more immediately in order to carry out properly his celebrated work on the Dead Sea Scrolls), and even something of a Yiddishist...
...bigness, dominance, acquisitiveness and aggrandizement, exploitation and oppression, as Kazin learned from his socialist forebears and by looking out the door---~but it in no way suggests amenity...
...his slyness is inbred, instinctive, tribal, implanted in the blood, and was further refined in the Business School of Jew York University...
...as a stylist, and he is a distinctive one, he runs from hectic, at times overblown, high eloquence and sweeping intensity, velocity, emotionality-the grand effect--to little verbal infelicities and oddities of phrasing, as if in the rush to reach the height he stumbles through the underbrush and lowlands, indifferent to or disdainful of them: an odd mixture of dazzling, gleaming artfulness and crude roughdraft heedlessness...
...but when it came to books and ideas those exotics behaved like enflamed, or betrayed, lovers...
...The secret is out, the challenge flung at our feet...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 18
