Writers and Writing A Kazin Assortment
BALAKIAN, NONA
A Kazin Assortment The Inmost Leaf. By Alfred Kazin. Harcourt, Brace. 273 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by Nona Balakian Staff member, New York "Times Book Review" As A reviewer of current books in...
...Of how many modern writers one could say this...
...Reviewed by Nona Balakian Staff member, New York "Times Book Review" As A reviewer of current books in journals and magazines, Alfred Kazin always commands respect...
...A man of wide sympathies who keeps life and literature on an equal footing, he unfailingly engages our attention...
...He might, then, even have something more pungent to say about Dostoyevsky than that "he is occupied with the irreversible reality of the universal isolation...
...and perhaps the most interesting essay in the book is the one which deals with the tortured Fitzgerald of The Crack-up...
...Yet, his one partial attempt to do this with Faulkner suggests that he can, if he wishes, occupy himself with such matters...
...Sincerity is the chief source of his persuasive powers, and to his further advantage he can rely on a clear-cut, uncomplicated attitude to help him decide just where he stands with a particular writer or his work...
...Not that we expect detailed analysis or a basic evaluation in the short review...
...it will only increase our delight in the variety of literature...
...Kazin's essays are best when they are arguing with some other critic's limited interpretation: He has sensible things to say in contradiction of Aldington's view of D. H. Lawrence, Quennell's approach to Ruskin, and Richard Chase's analysis of Melville...
...There is too little discussion of form in the larger sense, and even less anything resembling sustained analysis of style...
...The habit of generalization is another trait of Mr...
...Transplanted into a book, the review invariably looks like undernourished criticism...
...In the long run, however, the biographical emphasis crowds out the esthetic values, which are, in fact, considerable in most of the writers he is treating...
...In publishing what is essentially a miscellaneous collection of reviews, printed over a period of fifteen years, Mr...
...Read consecutively, these essays on diverse writers (among them Kafka, Proust, Gide, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Fitzgerald) seem not only slight but often diffuse and even tedious...
...In a book, the suggestion of justness is not enough...
...He is effective, too, when he can put to use his psychological penetration, as in his piece on "The Anger of Flaubert" and on the Gide of the Journals...
...In the absence of sustained analysis, his judgments seem too sweeping and at times even questionable...
...Kazin will come to the end of a short, obituary-like essay on Joyce before he makes the statement (quite unrelated to what has gone before) that "for me [Joyce's] importance has always been primarily a moral one...
...What we miss as we go along is literary perspective-the kind that comes when a critic connects significantly the diverse things he has read...
...Yet, a heightened esthetic awareness, it seems to me, will never diminish the human values he so justly prizes...
...one looks for more solid stuff...
...More than most reviewers, he has the gift of spontaneity and with it the ability to convey the plain reader's unguarded response...
...It is hard to make out Mr...
...Kazin is openly hostile to the "new critics...
...He will not admit that they have absorbed, however rigidly, the latest developments in criticism, and can only see that they are cold and mechanical...
...Nevertheless, that service has its established bounds...
...He might not, then, so easily refer to Cummings as "sentimental," speak of Ellen Glasgow so derogatorily as "genteel," or say of William and Henry James that "the great depths of life are not in them...
...The quick flashes of insight, so welcome when encountered in newsprint or in the back pages of a literary magazine, the happy turns of phrase that help fix a writer's essential quality, when given permanence between book-covers sound after a while like a catalogue of impressions and a short cut to critical analysis...
...For instance, Mr...
...Perhaps because their unity is predetermined, Mr...
...Yet, this is not the meat of his essay...
...As a reviewer who can be reflective on a variety of subjects, he undoubtedly renders a service to literature...
...Unfortunately, there is a major obstacle in the fact that Mr...
...Kazin's writing which is magnified to his disadvantage in this collection...
...Kazin has, I fear, overreached these bounds...
...Kazin's specific point of view about these writers...
...And it is curious to see the transformation that takes place...
...If the length of his pieces makes this difficult, it should not prevent him from at least silently considering the particular literary tradition from which a writer derives before attempting to-classify him...
...Kazin makes far too few illuminating comparisons and apt references...
...Nor is anything he says in a review of Sherwood Anderson's Letters quite so revealing as the remark that for Anderson "writing was not just a means of personal expression but a search for salvation...
...For one who is familiar with a long line of writers from Flaubert to Hemingway, Mr...
...this is a very American fault...
...But, even by modest critical standards, it is dissatisfying to be endlessly confronted by provocative statements which the writer is unable or unwilling to develop...
...In another longer piece on Blake, he makes the perceptive comment that "the idea that something must be is what is hateful to Blake," yet in discussing his work later on he emphasizes aspects of the poet that are far less original or interesting...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 51
