On Native Greats

...Such picturesque conjunctions of writers in time and place suggest Van Wyck Brooks' Makers and Finders series, of which The Flowering of New England was first and best...

...In a sense, however, this very stability that Kazin has redefined so superbly in An American Procession does not bode well...

...We go on reading them for their language, their eloquence, and their boldness in probing all the recesses of the human heart...

...Words were for Emily Dickinson "not a transcription of life, they often invented it...

...There was vast emptiness inside them, corresponding to the emptiness of the continent...

...She knew nothing of Society...

...Are they, brilliant and informed as they are, wrestling with the same problems as the 19th-century writers in a manner that cardinally affects their own writings or that makes us come to terms in a quite new way with Hawthorne and Emerson, Melville and Thoreau...

...After World War I the diversity was even greater, the sense of a common past even slighter...

...Lawrence flung down the challenge as early as 1922, in Studies in Classic A merican Literature...

...Matthiessen's American Renaissance, followed in quick succession by Kazin's own On Native Grounds and Edmund Wilson's The Shock of Recognition...

...But I happened to readv4« American Procession in Cambridge, half a block from Longfellow's home, where Hawthorne visited in his Concord years...

...Is this true of the best of our writers today...

...Neither knew of Emily Dickinson's poetry, yet Kazin is sure James would have been embarrassed by her...

...A block farther is Berkeley Street, where Mark Twain came nervously to show Howells the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and where James picked up Howells for their long evening walks together, debating the future of the American novel...

...When the grim-browed Pilgrim Fathers came in a black spirit of black revulsion from Europe, Lawrence said, they wanted no kings, no bishops, "even no God Almighty...

...Leaping up nervously every five minutes to raise or lower the window, Melville seemed eager to have the interview over, but then he broke out with a confidence that has teased biographers ever since...

...Lawrence's challenge was finally met in 1941 by F.O...

...Mark Twain and Henry James equally could not read each other, and said so with some emphasis...

...These books appeared during the War, when America's consciousness of itself was being very practically tested...

...The most passionate single utterance of Thoreau's life," Kazin writes, was "A Plea for Captain John Brown"—John Brown whom Hawthorne called a "bloodstained fanatic," adding, "No man was ever more justly hanged...

...Each of these names has been sounded repeatedly in the culture that I share with Adams...

...Usually where a book is read does not matter...

...The artist works by locating the world in himself...

...Equally remote were the exotic landscapes dreamed up by Wallace Stevens in Hartford...

...Mark Twain, also in Chicago that summer, was too busy trying to recoup his fortunes after the Paige typesetting fiasco to go to the Fair...

...Decade after decade we learn to know those old writers better, but decade after decade they come, so to speak, not to know us or be able, in Brooks's sense of "the usable past," to help us in imagining, and hence understanding, the kind if world we live in now...

...An American Procession makes that reading or rereading a prospective delight—although the book is so delightful in itself that it runs the danger, as no doubt has happened with Leon Edel's biography of Henry James, of being a substitute...

...At the World's Fair in 1893 Dreiser met the schoolteacher who stayed married to him long enough to edit Sister Carrie...

...He was convinced," Julian reported, "that Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret which, were it known, explains all the mysteries of his career...

...In a frenzy of urbanization Chicago was flinging networks of roads, wooden sidewalks and flickering gas lights across the empty prairie, ready to draw in the packing houses, the steel plants and the immigrant hordes to work in them...

...Kazin writes evocatively of such patterns in a passage about Henry Adams...

...It is because names are traditions...

...Kazin keeps a nice balance between biography and criticism, appreciating how each enhances the other so long as their distinction is strictly observed...

...In his famous remarks on tradition, quoted by Kazin, T.S...

...She arrives the same year and at the same age that Dreiser had arrived 10 years before he began writing her story...

...Melville burned them...

...Since then, institutionalized in our universities, the symphonic patterning of our American classics in a dialectic of themes and counter-themes, has remained remarkably stable...

...After 17 years, Julian Hawthorne turns up unexpectedly, seeking his father's letters...

...It was a fictional river that suddenly gave me an acute sense of my surroundings, of course, fictional because it was the river of Faulkner's imagination—he may never have seen the actual Charles—hence imaginatively accessible in a way the real river, unmediated, could not be...

...Faulkner "lived in sacred history like a character in the Bible," but it was not Hemingway's or Fitzgerald's history, and certainly not that of Hawthorne's Salem...

...Henry Adams was very much present, sitting on the steps of the administration building, as Edmund Gibbon had sat on the steps of the Ars Croeli in Rome (the comparison is Adams') when he conceived the idea of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...

...It became the critic's job to find the common bond that joins these warring worlds...

...In a letter to his brother, Henry told of lying on the slope of Wenlock Edge above the Severn in Shropshire, musing on Darwin and the ganoid fish...

...Caught up as I was in the subtle play of Kazin's mind, his aphoristic eloquence, his sheer love of what he is writing about, I forgot my surroundings until, in his discussion of The Sound and the Fury, Kazin spoke of Quentin Compson's last day at Harvard and his death in the Charles River, which runs just outside my door...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University This is a magnificent study of the classic American writers from 18301930, an ultimate refinement of everything that Alfred Kazin has been so successfully saying for the past 40-odd years about Emerson and Whitman, Dickinson and James, and all the other elect in a well-stabilized canon...

...There are no letters...

...Kazin is so fully aware of the interrelation of elements in a culture, their "in-teranimation," as I. A. Richards would say, that he can move gracefully among them without ever forgetting their discreteness of kind...

...Kazin asks, "Why should names alone, Wenlock Edge and the Severn, which denote places I may never have seen and which Adams does not bother to describe, delight me...

...Kazin further understands, as Brooks did not, the determining role of language in powerful fictions...

...But in his final chapter on Whitman, Lawrence is as enthusiastic as Emerson himself about what will happen when Americans find their soul...

...Though Kazin stops at 1930, the book is also necessarily about what has happened since to the national mind that writers had such a large part in making and which now seems in an advanced state of dismantlement...

...Eliot says that if an ordering of past masterpieces —something we should feel in our very bones—is to persist, it must, if ever so slightly, be altered every time a genuinely original new work appears...

...Both ocean and idiom separated Eliot's London and Pound's Florence from the New Hampshire of Robert Frost and the New Jersey of William Carlos Williams...

...American writers learned from each other, though selectively, but were often wildly at odds about American democracy and the human heart...

...Kazin begins another chapter with the arrival in 1889 of the fictional Carrie Meeber in a very real Chicago...

...But Kazin understands, as Brooks did not, the mediating role of fictions in the creation of a culture...

...He felt rejected by Hawthorne, whom he had loved in a brief adoring relationship whose impact turned Moby-Dick from a whaling yarn into a symbolic triumph...

...Good for nothing," Emerson called them...

...Among them are the fictions writers make of their purportedly real selves, as Thoreau did in Walden, Whitman in "Song of Myself," Henry Adams in the Education, and Hemingway in A Moveable Feast...

...It is still conceived in Laurentian terms as a continuing, self-defining struggle with the Puritan past, its angry God, His providential history in which every slightest occurrence counts, and its Old Testament devotion to the sacred Word...

...Emerson was "an instinctive stylist who even on the platform seemed to be waiting for his own voice to astonish him...

...The works do not affect each other directly, to be sure, but through the minds of readers alive both to the new and the old, and through the minds of writers writing, no matter how antagonistically, with the old still a force in the depths of their being...

...The transcendentalists half a mile down the road from Hawthorne could not read his romances...

...As Kazin observes, Jews of Orthodox background are particularly at home with this tradition and the breaking of it...

...He begins one chapter, for instance, with an apparently nonliterary account of Melville's anguished life in New York City after the Civil War, 19 years of isolated drudgery as a customs inspector, earning $4 a day, later reduced to $3.60...

...Crass materialist energy was giving birth overnight to a new architecture, a new sociology, a new social realism in literature...

...But despite the beauty and challenge of this backward glance, we cannot, beset as we are by extremities of contemporary world politics, read the pre-Civil War American classics, or even pre-World War I classics, with much more immediacy, more suspension of strangeness, more of a sense that they are really ours, are really us, than we read, say, the three Greek tragedians of the tradition that concluded so abruptly with the death of Euripides and the end of the Peloponnesian War...

...The Waste Land, "misread for a generation with Eliot's encouragement," becomes a greater, not a lesser, poem after we learn of the madness, the sexual disasters, that lie behind it...

...In his preface, "The Spirit of Place," he began with a stream of negations as intense as those of Henry Adams...

...Not a single paragraph by Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis could be inserted without grotesque incongruity in a novel by Hemingway or Fitzgerald...

...We are too disassociated, the feeling of continuity is lost, even though their towns are our towns and they made, as Whitman did, stump speeches for the radical wing of the Democratic Party...