A Writer's Block

...He is most eloquent about New York, which figures here more as a character than as a city...

...There is "a loneliness in the world," Kazin claims, that "cannot, should not be appeased...

...No one would deny that it was the most significant event in history, but the truth is that life continues despite it, that no matter how often we call to mind those images which banished forever the idea that civilization could protect us from elemental barbarism, for most people-Including Kazin-the quotidian crises of marriage, family, career, ambition are what dominate daily existence...

...The hectic intellectual climate of New York in the 1940s has never been captured so well...

...Reading New York Jew, lean see why...

...Recounting various love affairs, he lapses into sentimental prose: "I wanted her so badly that my heart was clanging in my ears like the wire fence around the reservoir in the wintery wind...

...But when Kazin abandons the rhetoric of indignation and concentrates on people he has known-particularly on the thwarted lives of his friends Paul Goodman, Isaac Rosenfeld, Del-more Schwartz-his book becomes a testament to the brilliance and squandered passion of his generation...

...Up and down, straight and across, numbered and ranged against each other like a balance sheet, the great midtown streets were glowing halls of power...

...No, Kazin is not one of those cosmopolitan intellectuals, curious about ideas and passionate about Modernism, who commanded opinion around Partisan Review in the old days, or one of those Jews enthralled by T. S. Eliot...

...The straight-ness of the streets-columns in a bookkeeper's account book-made you run and claw your way to your goal...

...Alfred Kazin never really managed to write another book as magisterial as his one book of serious criticism, but his autobiographical trilogy is perhaps a more heroic venture...

...There were banks on every corner...

...The Jews could not state their case without seeming to overstate it," he remarks apropos a pious after-dinner speech by Elie Wie-sel, and goes on to note that "The world is getting tired of our complaint...

...Suffering is seen as an obligation...

...Still, these rather vehement reservations did not prevent me from finding most of New York Jew intensely moving...

...Kazin is the character announced in the peremptory title of his autobiography -no more, no less...

...So without irony is Kazin that he can divulge, in the midst of a polemic against the sordid Upper West Side and how he was "pressed on every nerve end" by the scarcity of parking spaces, that he was returning from a weekend in East Hampton...

...Kazin is the Lear of West End Avenue...

...Surely it disproves Yeat's famous claim that "The worst are full of passionate intensity/The best lack all conviction...

...New York Jew is the definitive record of an era, the history of a literary generation made as alive to me as the world of William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser was to Kazin when he wrote On Native Grounds...

...Bernard Berenson was "simply a pushing Jew," he reminds us-a sentiment attributed to Santa-yana, but obviously his own...

...With this she had burned me forever...

...like so many of his contemporaries, he believes himself condemned to a misery that holds out the promise of redemption...

...Apart from such ponderous monuments as The Education of Henry Adams or the garrulous volumes Henry James devoted to his family, our literature tends to be too grandiose to accommodate the delicate art of literary reminiscence perfected by the English-who assume that everyone deserves a biography...

...Reviewed by James Atlas Author, "Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet" Alfred Kazin has not made a name for himself by aspiring to the sort of literary gentility that found its apotheosis in the late Lionel Trilling...

...Mary McCarthy then chimed in with her opinions: "She warmed to her topic with positive delight...

...When a Bohemian Greenwich Village girl announces, "You have changed my life," he proclaims: "She had taken the phrase, the litany, the accusation, straight out of my heart...

...Recounting his eagerness to escape their fierce diatribes, Kazin utters virtually the only charitable thought toward a wife to be found in the entire book: "Although Natasha and I were drifting away from each other, I thought of her with longing in this inhuman setting...

...His descriptions of walking around New York with Henri Cartier-Bresson, or through London's devastated streets in the last days of World War II, of dawdling in Rome, of waking in the Brooklyn Heights studio where he wrote Walker in the City, prove Kazin is a master of vivid, evocative prose...

...Kazin is, indeed, simply hopeless on the subject of women...

...The sharpness of outline was overwhelming...

...As he moves from one dreary flat to another, from tortured affairs to precipitous marriages to inevitable divorce, it becomes clear that Kazin lacks a talent for happiness...

...But his conviction that he has been branded forever by the shame of his origins is no less a shibboleth, one suspects, than Trill-.ing's well-tailored identity...

...The dominant motif in New York Jew is rage...

...She had burned me...

...his life in New York is "crowded with love and anger...

...and New York Jew is a blunt declaration of its author's unyielding obedience to his own identity, proclaimed over and over with a defiant, willful shamelessness...

...The great New York light, the glare of New York, the unmatchable effrontery of New York had never been so open...

...Paul Goodman resembled a cat, Diana Trilling "was a dogged woman and looked it...

...With his bald round head and that hoarse, heavily breathing voice box coming out of the red face of an overfed fox-hunting squire, Wilson looked apoplectic, stiff, out of breath...

...For Trilling, I would always be 'too Jewish,' too full of my lower-class experience...

...Lionel Trilling's labored civility infuriated him...

...Americans have no real tradition of autobiography...

...Summoned to discuss On Native Grounds, Kazin heard out the great man's verdict-he never gets aroung to letting us know what it was-and noted the gravity of Wilson's manner: "He looked like a man who had been built for thought and nothing else...

...When that marriage, predictably, comes to an end, he falls in love with a frantic young novelist-to whom he is presumably still married-and compares the grim hysteria they foment in one another to the trials of "Scott and Zelda...

...It was a constant challenge just to walk up Park Avenue...

...people on their way to work "have an angry sense of their own energy...

...In this sequel to Walker in the City and Starting Out in the Thirties, Kazin has fashioned a self-portrait of the writers as a breast-beating, agonized Jew, straight out of Scholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel...

...Neither has he ever evinced much enthusiasm for European literature and culture (On Native Grounds, his one substantial work of criticism, concerned American writers...

...True, Norman Mailer offered elaborate sketches of Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald in Armies of the Night, but they were caricatures animated by Mailer's anxiety over what his subjects thought of him...

...she looked beautiful in the increasing crispness of her analysis...

...The memoir provides an urban biography that fixes Manhattan's terrible grandeur as memorably as Balzac captured the feverish greed of Paris: "New York was now rich in aluminum and steel buildings that resembled the massed file cabinets and coded systems they were built to hold...

...Inspired by New York and by the tragedies of his friends, Kazin is lamentably obtuse about his own life...

...Kazin, though, for all his self-absorption, is a remarkable portraitist...

...A self-condemned narcissist, he reports that "the bountiful figure in the next bed is more real to me as a figure in my sexual mythology than as a wife...

...Angry" is his favorite adjective: a girl has "angry hair...

...Bitter as it is, the story of this ambitious critic "who stammeringly cannot stop reading, noting, collecting material, walking, writing, pushing at the world to let him in" has much to offer...

...Kazin is, moreover, a self-appointed ethnic policeman, vigilant about those who fail to proclaim their Jewishness with sufficient fervor...

...Behind all of his experience, he informs us time and again, lies the Holocaust...

...He therefore courts disaster, accepting a teaching post at Amherst even though he despises the cloistered academic life, visiting Austria after the War despite his obsession with the Holocaust...

...In a voice that, like a deaf man's, suggested some despair of ever connecting with the outside world, he nevertheless bent down to his every thought, a watchmaker looking through his lens...

...He was fortunate to have known-or at least encountered-every writer of note, from T. S. Eliot and Van Wyck Brooks to Saul Bellow and Robert Lowell, and to have experienced the various intellectual rites de passage obligatory for writers of his generation: working at Time under Henry Luce, a fellowship to Yaddo, lunch at the White House during the Kennedy years...

...Perhaps the most memorable scenes of all involve Edmund Wilson, whom he depicts first in 1942 when Wilson was married to Mary McCarthy...

...The author's infallible sense of the dramatic, his genius for the revealing detail, and the genuine fervor with which he responds to the subtlest qualities of experience converge to produce a memoir that has the feel of life...