REVIEWS

...For a critic such as Alfred Kazin, intent on celebrating those who are concerned with the word, these recognitions are bound to be discomforting...

...and once again, we watch the development of Eliot's vitiated yearning for religious salvation as it leads from the sharp despair of The Waste Land to the willed hope of the poems of religious conversion...

...Whatever is not firsthand in Whitman is fake...

...An American Procession is a book about America's rise to the center of the world's stage...

...And he was amazed to discover that they had the temerity to sting an Adams...

...The truth is that Adams never quite understood that there were real scorpions in that democratic American garden...

...The intense commitment to language and writing that filled the pages of On Native Grounds can also be found in An American Procession...

...For Kazin, the author of A Walker in the City, one suspects it is still a question of proving his right to belong...

...Wilson could not only trace his ancestry back to Cotton Mather, he would assume a proprietary interest in places...

...In the final analysis, Kazin is too much at home with these writers, too comfortable with his subject matter...

...The Alfred Kazin now approaching his seventieth birthday shares with the critic who was not yet thirty when he wrote On Native Grounds a need to make sense of American life through an examination of American writing...

...Language excites him to the point where he can bring himself to forgive what would otherwise be unforgivable...

...For Wilson, American history was a family affair...

...So graceful is Kazin's 131 prose that we have to force ourselves to take issue with what he is saying: "[Adams] became, inextricably and winningly, first a witness to history, then a symbol of history, and finally the embodiment of history trying to understand itself...

...Of course, it isn't altogether fair to criticize a writer for what he never intended to do...

...I would have liked an opportunity to read Kazin on the one as provincial in the education he demanded from ancestry and the other as an educated provincial...

...To see history as style," Kazin writes, "one must begin with the sense of command...

...His purpose is not so much to make sense of America as it is to make sense of himself in America...

...Because of this, his book's argument is not really political...

...But the book also contains passages of such strong phrasing that we are quick to make them part of the way we shall now look at our literary past...

...For Kazin, the sense of discovery is the ultimate act of critical homage...

...Both the book's approach and its thesis are closely related to what used to be called "wisdom literature...

...As a critic, Kazin is not particularly interested in exegesis, nor does he seek from literature the liberation of humanity from its own history...

...What ringing syntax for so small a man...

...In America, style is too often confused with substance...

...Kazin's first book, On Native Grounds, evoked an equally personal response, at least for this reader...

...It is historical criticism of a kind that transforms writers into characters, the people who guided the critic out of Brownsville...

...The appeal of An American Procession transcends one's reactions to its judgments...

...And, like Wilson, Kazin finds it difficult to approve of a country in which a thing will count because it is American rather than because it is good or evil, virtuous or vindictive...

...Only a sensibility that shares with Emerson, Melville, and Whitman a love of language, a commitment to the democratization of speech itseiC, could have produced such powerful chapters...

...And here are Twain, Dreiser, Crane, much as we have always seen them...

...He can't afford to...

...The 'newness' with which Emerson has identified himself made him deliverer of an uncreated culture...

...Other Americans understood that history has public as well as private consequences...

...At the same time, only a mind still intent on proving itself to a culture that it views as frequently confused and sometimes even mendacious could have accepted so completely what is a traditional view of American literary culture...

...Literature remains as central to An American Procession as it was to On Native Grounds...

...Kazin himself has admitted that he "had difficulty getting a handle on the central theme...

...Or even whether the price was necessary...

...And it turns out to be a difficult book to judge, at times remarkably insightful and stimulating, at times too diffuse...

...And yet, if Kazin's sense of discovery remains exciting, many of his arguments seem curiously traditional...

...But among the virtues of that great American unwashed who made Adams nervous was the insistence that command be earned...

...I suspect this accounts for the book's excessively oracular tone: judgments pound us, as self-propelled and insistent as if shot from a howitzer...

...Instead, he remains singularly determined to renew our excitement in both the writer and his work...

...but considered as a book with a thesis— that the expansion of the American sense of selfhood found its voice in a literature in which that self assumed heroic proportions for our writers—it is not particularly convincing...

...From 1830 to 1930, he takes us from writer to writer...

...And too much obeisance to style, the reader adds to himself...

...Alfred Kazin's new book is one of those largescale thematic studies in which a prominent critic offers a summing-up of American literary culture...

...What it offers the reader is a good writer's statement of purpose...

...I learned from it that while criticism might be marginal to the 130 writing of fiction and poetry, there could not be a literary culture without it...

...What Trotsky, in a remarkably felicitous phrase, termed "the plot mentality of history" has few better examples, at least in America, than Adams bewailing the arrival of the Israel Cohens or Pound accusing the "yids" of sending the "goyim" to slaughter while the stench of Auschwitz was still on the wind...

...As is often the case, the reader's encounter with Kazin's critical opinions becomes intensely personal...

...Unlike his mentor Edmund Wilson, Kazin has never been able to distance himself from the country...

...An American Procession must ultimately be judged not only on the basis of Kazin's love of good writing but on the interpretations it offers of major American writers from 1830 to 1930—the era Kazin somewhat arbitrarily labels "the crucial century...

...in short, here is Alfred Kazin's somewhat conventional American Century...

...But the long chapter on Adams, along with the remarkable prologue in which Adams and Eliot are pitted against each other—and against the reader, too—shows us not only Kazin's own criticism but the idea of historical criticism at its most powerful...

...He was so much the American squire that he could take his spiritual leave from a country he claimed no longer to understand...

...If we pause long enough to look at our guide, we see a man who knows the price he has paid for literature but who is, perhaps, no longer quite certain of why he paid it...

...Still, one can be forgiven for wishing—especially when Kazin himself skirts the possibility by writing, "The real muse is History—but History buried in words...

...It was, I remember, the first book of literary criticism I ever picked up...

...There are chapters that can stand with anything American criticism has offered over the past two decades...

...Melville's protagonist and hero is thematically the deserter, the shipwrecked sailor, the castaway, the tramp, the mad author, the criminal—and most centrally, the iconoclast who does not escape retribution from society by becoming a murderer...

...What irritates him about a writer such as Howells, for example, is that Howells lacked not a sense of drama but the kind of commitment to language and style that his friend Henry James possessed in such abundance...

...I, for one, found myself wishing that he had allowed himself to remain more of an outsider, that he had turned his attention to, say, the line leading from Adams to Pound...

...THIS BOOK IS INTENDED AS MORE than a work of criticism...

...Kazin's struggle with American culture is perhaps best contained in what he writes about our national b&ste blanche, Henry Adams...

...In the last analysis, they send one back to a darker America, Melville's America, where one "does not escape retribution from society by becoming a murderer...

...For a culture that saw itself clearly, a critic was the keeper of accounts...

...Once again, we are presented with an Emerson who is American culture's one-man fifeanddrum corps...

...And Kazin's argument has as its source the way in which he feels himself buffeted by history and saved by literature...

...for Kazin, he is so distinctly American a voice that he becomes the nation itself...

...For me, Adams's importance lies well beyond his talents...