A View of How It Was (Starting Out in the Thirties, by Alfred Kazin)

...These concerns effectively date Kazin's enterprise, fixing it within cultural chronology, in that epoch bounded at one end by the very early thirties and at the other by the close of World War II...

...Impressed by the young man, Chamberlain sends him, with a recommendation, to the New Republic, whose offices were then in New York...

...All my life," he has finally to confess, "I had lived among people who had seemed to me beautiful because they were the dust of the earth...

...Before and after that, literature and politics are largely separate, attracting different minds, being put to different uses, being asked to perform dissimilar miracles...

...But its truth remains, like the truth of the era which enclosed it—not to be extrapolated, codified or congealed into judgment, neither object lesson, nor argument nor data for theories...

...His book is as admirable a record of how they did that as any we have been given...

...wherever I went now, I felt the moral contagion of a single idea...

...That it didn't accomplish these things...

...He meets James T. Farrell: "The force of the documentation, the unwearying repetition of ugly, crippling details, had an intellectual ecstacy about it...

...The narrative begins in June, 1934...

...Authority, or rather its simulacra—heavy, unassailable opinions, correct readings of the archives, documented pronouncements of damnation or absolution— these are what we have come to expect from radicals recalling their pasts...

...Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1965...

...I looked to literature," he writes, "for strong social argument, intellectual power, human liberation...

...But today politics and literature, considered in relation to one another, have nothing of the intensity, the mutually reinforcing passion as of two armies encircling a common enemy, they had for him...

...that the thirties—self-conscious, dogmatic, backed to the wall by a despair for whose relief only the most noble-sounding attenuations of the spirit and the most socially apocalyptic diagnoses of the imagination would serve—gave us instead scarcely any permanent literature apart from the work of its outsiders, like Faulkner—is the subject perhaps of another kind of book, but it is not Kazin's...

...I now saw that the ideologues among these people had no moral imagination whatever, and no interest in politics...

...But the idea was far from single, and those who held any part of it could not guarantee their segment of truth or be justified by it...

...They were merely the slaves of an idea, fetishists of an ideology...

...He doesn't come, and this particular life is consummated in waste and pain...

...He speaks of Otis Fergusson: "sandy, caustic...

...Early in the book he tells of feeling that "to be Jewish was to be at the heart of things...

...Literature was what made you able to take politics with true seriousness, what made it possible to think of public events within a spiritual dimension...

...Kazin's own career as a writer begins abruptly in that hot summer of 1934...

...In a portrait of a woman cousin who lived with his family and meant a great deal to him as a child and youth he gives us one quintessential figure of the thirties, that age when even more radically than our own the self felt abandoned and deprived, yet struck back with madness, aspiration, fervor and insistence that something had to count and something had to come...

...History was preparing, in its Jewish victims and through them, some tremendous deliverance and revelation...

...He is not trying to pin politics in one belated fall...

...precocious, feverish, at once aggressive and somewhat self-pitying, he has "no prospects whatever," the times are against him and besides he has not yet learned how to act...

...What young writers of the thirties wanted," Kazin writes, "was to prove the literary value of our experience, to recognize the possibility of art in our Iives, to feel we had moved the streets, the stockyards, the hiring halls into literature—to show that our radical strength could carry on the experimental impulse of modern literature...

...Men lived in the thirties, Kazin is saying, with peculiar stresses, particular faces and one or another kind of relationship to the age which bred them and asked them to respond to it...

...But Kazin, while in no sense a daunted or even a modest man, is engaged here in something other than the validation of personal history or the establishment of a superiority to the waywardness of events...

...Although I was a 'Socialist' like everyone else I knew, I thought of socialism as orthodox Christians might think of the Second Coming— a wholly supernatural event which one might await with perfect faith, but which had no immediate relevance to my life...

...And finally, as the book draws to a close, he encounters Mary McCarthy, who sums up an age and points to a new one: "a wholly destructive critical mind, the first writer of my generation who made me realize that it would now be possible to be a radical without any idealism whatsoever...

...For there is no pressure in his book to account for the times, to breast-beat or bluster, to grade himself or the period...

...the real world did not exist for them, and they would never understand it...

...Before that, as one of his subsidiary themes, he has traced the decline of idealism in more strictly political contexts...

...What he is doing, in this elegantly written, mostly cool and always uncontrived book, is chiefly addressing himself to the questions of what politics meant to him from the beginning of the time when it could mean anything at all beyond rumor, what literature meant to him and, especially, what literature and politics meant to one another...

...salvation would come by the word, the long-awaited and fearfully exact word that only the true writer would speak...

...Andrt Malraux is telling a Loyalist rally about his ex periences in Spain and for Kazin "he was magnificently the writer as speaker, the writer as the conscience of intellectual and fraternal humanity, the writer as the master of men's souls...

...He quickly identifies the source, which was the same for him as for many members of his generation...

...He describes John Chamberlain, who lived on "notions of things," as looking like "Charles Augustus Lind bergh shyly starting out alone for Paris, like Gary Cooper at the end of a Western modestly warding off a kiss...

...no radical, Chamberlain was nevertheless energetically rocking the boat as a belligerent and iconoclastic critic for the New York Times...

...History was going our way," he writes at one point, "and in our need was the very lifeblood of history...

...Having no intention of irony, I would say right off that the most impressive quality of Alfred Kazin's memoir of his young intellectual manhood is its non-authoritativeness...

...Kazin's descriptions of many of the central literary figures of the decade—representatives, agents and unduplicable personalities as they simultaneously were—are almost invariably sharp, accurate and, more important, achievements in the fusion of character and events, the forcing of personal impression to yield up meaning in wider spheres...

...Kazin is nineteen, a student at City College...

...the word "memoir" is what matters here —what it felt like, what memory tells him how it felt like to come of age at a time when men and ideas were as never before or since so mortally joined, with all the confusion, intellectual peril, exaltation, sense of purpose and dread of purposelessness which that meant...

...A few years later, in Madison Square Garden, he was to come closest to seeing the dream incarnated...

...Never a Stalinist, he still has to move in his edu cation from absolute faith, a dream of time as succorer and servant of the will, to skepticism and sobriety of vision...

...To my surprise—I had never thought of criticism as an occupation—I suddenly found a way of writing, a form, a path to the outside world...

...And there, through the persons of Malcolm Cowley and later Otis Fergusson and even more through the general atmosphere of excitement and pertinence surrounding the magazine, Kazin discovers how to fuse his germinating interests and desires, discovers writing as an efficacious act...

...On an impulse he goes to see John Chamberlain, at that time an important figure on the cultural scene...

...The whole thrust of the book is to oppose, for the self's integrity and the age's true perspective, moral imagination to fetishism, slavery and righteous authority...

...The depression is still in high tide, Hitler has been in power for more than a year...

...These are the most familiar, most traditional elements of the book: his discovery of the tyranny of radicalism when it substitutes historical "laws" for human possibility, the discovery, really, that the disasters of the age have engendered a "cure" more deadly than the disease...

...Sophie knew that the world owed her something—love, a home, a husband, and from the edge of her bed she waited fiercely, her arms implacably crossed, her bulging eyes mad with rage and expectancy, waiting for him to come, for her life to reach its consummation...

...And William Saroyan, whose "insistence that he was strong about everything, his own man all day long, more his own man than anybody else—you bet your life!—was defiance, as he liked to say, of meaningless, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness...

...But later, in a marvelous act of counter-balance, he abandons the transcendencies, the rhetorical giantism, the quest of the imagination for motifs it can feel dignified by, and dignifies instead what his imagination has had in its purview all the time...

...Only in the sense that writers are today speaking out again on public issues and that a new nihilism and new anarchy are employing a putative literary impulse, or more accurately literary gesture, for vague political purposes does the present age bear any resemblance to Kazin's time of youthful commitment...

...Everything after this opening declaration proceeds to trace the onset and deepening of a feeling of relevance...

...In this regard nothing in Kazin's memoir is more moving than the passages that deal with his Jewishness, his Jewish sense of mission and apocalypse, his specifically Jewish commitment to literature as social fulcrum and politics as humanizing action, and, above all, his detailed, physical, unsentimental, Jewish knowledge that life and ideas are often, perhaps usually, sources of mutual betrayal...

...I had taken literally the claim that they identified their sufferings with the liberation of humanity...

...a desperate man, a sorehead, a fatalist," and of Bertram Wolfe, "Intellectual, saintly and nervous, like a harried American version of Mahatma Gandhi...

...This is why he almost never tells us what he was writing during these years (except that towards the end we learn he is finishing his huge study of our literary past, On Native Grounds...

...The book is anchored in men, therefore, not in abstract ideas...

...The path leads to a participation in the literary life and struggles of the thirties, which revolved so crucially, in that era of absolutes and exhortations, around the question of what literature was for, with its corollary question, how could life justify literature...