Fathers and Sons
Kazin, Michael
IN 1980, I began to keep a file of letters from my father. I don't remember exactly why I decided to preserve the letters, to treat them as historical documents and not just as his responses of...
...For him, America was a lifelong passion, greater than politics but never entirely separate from them either...
...And here, my old man had the most to teach...
...Often, I stuttered while talking to him on the phone, wanting to get the words just right...
...In 1980, partly thanks to Ronald Reagan, I gave up my dreams of revolution and began to appreciate the merits of social democracy— just at the time when its historical moment also seemed to be passing...
...I still shudder in wonder when I read his description of Jewish Brownsville in the 1920s in A Walker in the City or his coming to terms with William Blake, in an introduction published just after World War II: Blake's tragedy was the human tragedy, made more difficult because his own fierce will to a better life prevented him from accepting any part of it...
...He was, he writes, "critical of 'the system' and crazy about the country...
...They embrace cynicism because they are bewildered, and sometimes lazy, about the possibility of understanding history and about their ability to unravel the mysteries of good prose...
...Reagan cannot keep Salvador, Chile, etc...
...Referring to a recent argument, he began, "I was about ready to give you back to the Indians this evening (I return to dirty, delicious NY tomorrow) when your handsome letter was turned in...
...he commanded...
...He never forgot, and never allowed me to forget, that when it comes to politics or literature, it is the quality of the writing that counts...
...was, at best, incoherent and, at worst, at odds with NOTEBOOK the common sense of ordinary Americans...
...And it gets harder and harder to persuade students that the past is truly past, that it's not particularly meaningful to dismiss as "racist" both Charles Murray and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—even though, separated by a century, both of them voiced doubts about the intellectual abilities of black people...
...It was not reform-minded communists who made the revolutions in Poland— and Czechoslovakia and East Germany...
...Of course, I detested those who ran "the system" for compromising on black freedom and lying about Vietnam...
...None of that should matter . . . . Just go ahead once you've searched your mind again...
...MICHAEL KAZIN is the author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History, a revised edition of which has just been published by Cornell University Press...
...He wrote NOTEBOOK back: "The only question should be, 'Have I been entirely faithful to what I think?' Inevitably, other people will criticize you, will be hostile, jealous, stupid, God knows what else...
...Talking to you about American history," my father wrote in 1991, "reminds me of why Hofstadter was so important to me—there wasn't an item in our glorious and inglorious past we didn't savor like the most wonderful food...
...It included a Bundy, a 102 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 Campanella, a Schlesinger, a Kempton, and a Kazin...
...I was quoted saying that I had never actually bothered to read my father's books— which wasn't true but certainly had the desired effect...
...I don't remember exactly why I decided to preserve the letters, to treat them as historical documents and not just as his responses of and for the moment...
...In the latter half of the sixties, I was, like Bazarov, the antihero of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, eager to negate and "deny everything .. . with indescribable composure...
...BUT THE New Left's bad reputation, which helped Richard Nixon crush that innocent liberal George McGovern in 1972, began to nudge me rightward—toward a more sober brand of radicalism...
...I derisively quoted scummy Prof...
...After several glasses of wine, he shouted, as if to end the argument, "I'm a damn good writer, I know I am...
...From September 1984: "Thanks for your article, which I thoroughly agreed with but which, if I may play teacher once more, saddened me by all sorts of glib and vulgar current parlance...
...In my own classes, when I refer to Samuel Gompers or Frederick Douglass or Eugene Debs or Frances Perkins or even Woodrow Wilson, the vacancy signs go up—and I have to stop lecturing and become an encyclopedia, much abridged...
...MY FATHER retained, in equal measure, his ardor for teaching and his exasperation with the marching ignorance of our times...
...Laboring after the infinite, he felt himself shadowed by the Accuser...
...But the] ideological state has no rules except its own, insists on the senseless power of books, music, the most pathetic and powerless religious promptings for no reason but the fear of differences...
...In 1993, I wrote to him anxious about how my book on populism would be received, worried especially that my ideas weren't compelling enough to satisfy reviewers...
...There was the Thanksgiving dinner at his apartment in 1967...
...Of course, such judgments could be intimidating...
...Although we'd often been right about what was wrong, our solution (participatory communism...
...After all, you are writing about a thorny and militant subject at a time of tremendous political letdown...
...All over the world, the revolution was coming...
...I attempted to fire up my undergraduates with stories about the injustice of capitalist power and the resistance of virtuous workers, slaves, suffragists, and anti-warriors...
...Obviously the Nation didn't...
...My reactions lately to Begin and Reagan and practically everyone else have led me out of everything, have isolated me (in my heart) more than ever...
...I hate them but my article will not do much good, I guess...
...Not a bad motto for radicals and anarchists and social democrats and unapologetic liberals in this era of the Newt and the Bill...
...Trust the story, the drama of those Irishers (and workers) taking over...
...How could they ever grasp the quiet fury of the Viet Cong or the passionate rhythms of Fidel...
...and USSR were equally repugnant empires competing for dominance...
...Perhaps it was the heart bypass operation he had about that time—and my first recognition that the torrent of words would someday stop coming...
...Gradually, I began to understand that my father's anticommunism was not a way of opposing change from below, of wanting to keep the irrational masses at bay...
...I had argued—shouted—my own tune of rebellion in the sixties...
...The right, the ex-left, all sorts of critics will be after you...
...At the table, Richard Hofstadter wryly quoted Susan Sontag on America beginning with a genocide...
...But, having read just enough Marx, I was sure I had the key to how history and society worked—and just as sure that liberals like my father had no idea, or rather were wedded to a sentimental faith in free speech and the Democratic Party...
...Oh well, who ever said politics is the art of the possible...
...And when people learn that, yes, I am related to that Alfred Kazin, the reflected glory often fades and gives way to affectionate envy...
...I realized the old man was fighting the good fight, even if his hopes for victory and reform were about gone: in March, 1983 he wrote, "I've asked the NY Review to send you my satire and blast on the neo-conservatives...
...How did he deliver them so precisely, so elegantly...
...His letters in the eighties kept this up, if in a more encouraging tone: From July 1984: "Well, I hope you are seeing your way clearly on the book, I feel not only that your narrative gift should be emphasized all the way but that the narrative will bring out the significance of the material as interpretation alone will not...
...under control forever...
...You sound like a teevee commercial...
...I needn't add how many little revolutions have occurred and keep on occurring in this cruel but still liberal society...
...This is bureaucratic English, of the kind every academic illiterate in sociology or some such 'bunko science' employs...
...Indeed, we had a lot to get over...
...There was the 1966 article in the New York Times Magazine about freshmen at Harvard who were sons of famous fathers...
...By the early eighties, I had replaced contempt for my father's politics with tempered applause—even though he still liked to greet me on the phone, with singsong irony, as "comrade...
...In a 1995 preface to On Native Grounds, he recalled beginning the book at the age of twenty-three, sitting at his mother's kitchen table in Brooklyn...
...I have to say that just as I forgive everybody everything if I've had a good day at the typewriter, so I forgive you...
...It was utopians, inspired by a strangely compatible mixture of reason and religious faith— dreamers whose dreams were not so different from my father's...
...But his larger point stands...
...In the end, it is enough to be the son of a stubborn lover of democracy—and a damn good writer...
...Stop...
...In the late summer of 1983, I pressed the case to him that the U.S...
...Well, it's easier when you receive letters like this one, from the fall of 1984...
...Fresh from a campus protest against recruiters from Dow Chemical— a company that was manufacturing napalm— I accused America of committing "genocide" in Vietnam and compared all supporters of the war to "good Germans...
...But also thanks to Reagan, my father became a fighting liberal again...
...And even though he often ended his letters with such lines as, "Any chance of your coming out here before you Seize Power...
...HOW DOES one respond to this gift...
...Late in the sixties, during a dinner in Cambridge, we fumed about revolutions past and future...
...The adversary tradition is one that both of us, in different measures, have been allowed to live all our days so far...
...His memoir New York Jew contains some wrenching anecdotes about the radicalization of a boy named "Tim" and the suffering it caused his divorced father...
...Kirkpatrick voting against everybody else when she was still at the UN on account of the resolution condemning the murders in S. Africa had [in her words] 'an excess of language.'" This was the same Alfred Kazin who always admired the anarchists, who was proud of his grandfather's short career as a union organizer for the Hebrew Trades in the 1890s, whose father was a loyal Socialist, and who quoted his mother saying, in Yiddish of course, "We'll do it if we live . and if not, we'll do it anyway...
...Perhaps it was my marriage that summer, a sure sign that, at thirty-two, I was finally taking adulthood seriously (that's my wife's interpretation...
...To the absolute refusal to accept muddleheaded, dishonest prose or a politics reduced to getting power and clinging onto it...
...S0 I GRADUALLY came to appreciate the wisdom of the old liberal...
...While I still wanted my students to have opinions and defend them, I now thought they should earn the right to take a stand, by first absorbing some of the husky detail and moral complexity of the past...
...I know, I know, I told him...
...After spending a semester at one of the campuses of the University of North Carolina in 1984, he wrote, "My only real problem, as usual with students in literature, is that they are shrewd but non-literate, and I do get tired of mentioning exotic, out-of-theway books like Hamlet and War and Peace, the very sound of which seems to puzzle my students...
...From the other side of the turkey, C. Vann Woodward and his wife looked on silently...
...DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 105...
...That is the personal cost he paid for his vision, as it helps us to understand his need of a myth that would do away with tragedy . . . Blake was a man who had all the contraries of human existence in his hands, and he never forgot that it is the function of man to resolve them...
...Letters were easier, a little...
...When I began teaching in the late seventies, I was still, at heart, a radical organizer, on temporary leave to various history departments in the San Francisco Bay Area...
...In analyzing my own position, vis-a-vis you especially, I realize how much of a 'cultural' conservative I am but always, because of my hatred of POWER, a 'radical' in the sense that whatever is, to reverse Alexander Pope, tends to my sight to seem wrong . . . I have no solutions for anybody, am just a literary critic and dilettante who functions by reading fiercely...
...But agitational simplicity didn't wear very well—on my students or on me...
...And, writing my own books about Irish labor bosses in San Francisco and populist talkers and activists all over the landscape, I also came to admire his brand of patriotism: tough-minded, eternally wary of kitsch and platitudes but deeply in love with America—its land, its personalities, its language, its ideals...
...So he was an imperfect prophet...
...How could I use that horrible "Eisenhower word...
...In 1987, he wrote about one of my book reviews, "I do wish that you would omit the banal English—`rich descriptions of the working lives.' Never never write, 'Montgomery writes insightfully...
...Gradually, I learned the virtues of ironic reflection and the joys of narrative...
...As a political obsessive, I am inclined to emphasize the fact that 1980 was the year my father and I began sidling—ever so gradually and seldom without mutual complaint— to the same side of the barricades...
...Once, when I was a teenager, I thoughtlessly remarked that I was "verbalizing" some thought or emotion...
...He responded, "In the boom-andbust, dog-eat-dog world of the free market, those who do not benefit from it or those who have an adversary tradition can and do keep up a running fight...
...Two years later, in May 1985, he was still feeling isolated—but was still fighting: "At a recent meeting in NY celebrating Partisan Review's 50th anniversary, I and I alone of the doddering ex-radicals asked to pay tributes made a point of denouncing the US policy toward S. Africa...
...the old men would just have to get out of the way...
...There is no chance that the Polish people will ever be liberated from Soviet control by a revolution of their own...
...And do you recognize the grammatical mistake in the following—`the role each played . . . governed what form of collective resistance they mounted...
...Many of my students are quick to deny everything, yet few have Bazarov's confidence 104 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 that nihilism is the path to a better world...
...For Chrissakes Kazin, how can a radical and critic of mass culture refer approvingly to someone as a 'best-selling author...
...Here's his letter from March 18, 1981: "Send me stuff you publish, it delights my awakening, I mean reawakening, rebelliousness . . . I was planning to go down to my grave as a virtuous anti-Communist but your California man is driving me back to some very old feelings...
...He hated the Soviets and their ilk because, in the lands they controlled, they seemed to make democratic change impossible...
...DISSENT / Fa/11998 n 103 NOTEBOOK Over the past two decades, son began to converge with father in the classroom as well...
...Didn't the nation's history seem rather flat, he suggested, if framed that way...
Vol. 45 • September 1998 • No. 4
