Struggles with Belief
CHRISTOPHERSEN, BILL
Struggles with Belief God and the American Writer By Alfred Kazin Knopf. 278 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Bill Christophersen Author. "The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's...
...and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other...
...Kazin fleshes out his picture with the sort of cultural and biographical asides that are no longer in critical favor...
...Kazin, we realize, does not quite trust the serene, deific Whitman—nor his orphie elder, Emerson...
...Even more startling is Emerson's view, at 19, that blacks were "an upper order of inferior animal...
...Whitman's poetry, for example...
...Kazin spends relatively little time on her life (Dickinson, unlike the globe-scouring Melville, rarely left home...
...you feel there is some bitter fairy, which is biting him all the time.' " We don't, of course, need such asides to appreciate the fiction...
...God and the American Writer is not without flaws...
...Eliot, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner...
...The ultracompressed verses of Melville's spiritual sister and contemporary, Emily Dickinson—all except seven of which were published only after her death —testify to what Kazin calls her "catchas-catch-can negotiations with what was left in 19th-century Amherst of the old Puritan God...
...He translated this despair into the long poem Clarel...
...The address, Kazin reminds us, is couched in religious terms to a divided country where both the North and the South suffered losses in the belief that God was on their side...
...His only struggle with God, it would seem, was a kind of sibling rivalry...
...The Almighty has his own purposes...
...In the Prelude, Kazin alludes to Increase Mather, whose Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1693) reprised the Salem Witch Trials...
...Lincoln, Kazin says, was not simply being diplomatic: A rationalist for most of his life, he was turned into a believer by a war whose horror embarrassed reason...
...Kazin allows himself one detour: a survey (in Chapter Three) of how the country's leading literary figures responded to the issue of slavery...
...of our inner despair of words...
...The author of autobiographies (A Walker in the City) and essay collections (The Inmost Leaf), and the editor of almost as many books as he has written, Kazin is perhaps best known for On Native Ground (1942), a study of American prose from 1890 to 1940...
...Hawthorne never felt he belonged to any such community of love and fellowship...
...Kazin introduces his book's central strain: a brooding skepticism...
...Nevertheless, Kazin prefers to keep the windows open as he roams the house of the text—to air his discussion with personal apostrophes, the comments of other writers, evocations of 17th-century Salem (where Hawthorne's magistrate ancestors judged Quakers and witches) and of 19th-century Concord (where Hawthorne lived not far from Thoreau and Emerson...
...Its format and purpose preclude, however, the extended treatment of individual authors that distinguishes God and the American Writer...
...These 12 essays take up Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William James, Mark Twain, T.S...
...Nor does he scrutinize her innovative prosody...
...Kazin discusses Hawthorne's relationship not to God but to the Puritan theology of his forefathers, approaching the subject through The Scarlet Letter...
...I merely did His dictation...
...Shortly thereafter he refers to George Herbert and John Donne as contemporaries of the New England Puritan poet Edward Taylor...
...Kazin spackles the gaps in a Prelude...
...Alfred Kazin, a cultural historian and literary critic of the old school, continues to ignore the gimcrackery of today's critical discourse...
...Clearly he meant to say that Mather, who frowned on the court's admission of spectral evidence, seemed to think it was better for a guilty witch to escape than for an innocent man to die...
...Song of Myself" proclaimed the divinity of each American self, starting with the poet's...
...Kazin's larger point, though, that Hawthorne's deepest engagement was with his ancestral heritage, can't be gainsaid (even if David Reynolds, in Beneath the American Renaissance, paints a competing portrait of a Hawthorne so keyed in to his own times that when he went to London he had a friend mail him stacks of Massachusetts dailies...
...She is, says Kazin, the "most penetrating literary intelligence honored in this book...
...God and the American Writer is the literary equivalent of high communion...
...both English poets died a decade before Taylor was born...
...The side trip is revealing...
...In some respects," notes Kazin, "he was harsher than the Puritans...
...Hawthorne, for instance, moral wrestler that he was, never went near the mat on this issue...
...Or the rueful astringency of his observation that Lincoln's rejection of slavery marked "the moral leadership from the White House on the race question which seems to have died with him...
...Why the end run...
...He declared in a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce that in the antebellum South the two races "dwelt together in greater peace and affection...
...What he says is: .. .for a guilty witch to die than for an innocent man to escape...
...Because judging from his fiction, says Kazin, Hawthorne "does not seem to have been much interested in 'God.'" Readers familiar with the short story "Young Goodman Brown," that nightmare of spiritual bewilderment, may wonder at this inference, suited as it is to the novels...
...Behind the mythic hero who freed the slaves, some historians contend, was a calculating politician...
...Alas, it was...
...There are, to be sure, less harrowing refrains in our literature...
...The style not only delights, it leavens weighty subject matter...
...The study begins with William Dean Howells and examines, in turn, the naturalists, the journalists of the Progressive Era, the postwar writers from Willa Cather to Sinclair Lewis, the Lost Generation, and the social writers of the 193 0s...
...Alfred Kazin's brand of criticism—fervid, straightforward, personal—is a vanishing art...
...The chapter highlights a trip Melville made to the Holy Land in 1857 and the journal he kept, published for the first time in 1989 and testifying to extreme disillusionment...
...Theinsightresonates...
...he was such a favorite of photographers that he was virtually a professional model...
...In his 13th book these virtues are again on display...
...Still a classic, it brings coherence to a welter of works while breaking down barriers between academic disciplines...
...Hawthorne, whom Melville visited en route, wrote of his haunted friend: "Melville can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief...
...The "dark necessity" that governs the characters' fates in The Scarlet Letter owes a good deal of its darkness to the isolation each is cowled in...
...His Hawthorne is an emotional recluse, a man "so taciturn by nature, that Emerson said 'in his conversation...
...At 82, he has spent a lifetime reading American literature and writing about it with perspective, intelligence and empathy...
...The book invites us to consider the extent to which our post-Puritan literature reflects authors' struggles with belief: sometimes a dead and buried belief (Hawthorne), sometimes a dead but not-yet-buried belief (Melville), sometimes an evolving belief (Lincoln...
...It also reflects the audience Kazin is aiming at...
...That audience is not the graduate student intent on dismantling the canon or the junior professor cultivating a specialty niche...
...Or the dry humor of this biographical snippet on Twain: "He went bankrupt after investing in a typesetting machine that would be the only one of its kind...
...They had a covenant with God...
...The portrait isn't new, but it has never been rendered more poignantly...
...He willingly posed holding a 'butterfly' on his finger...
...Chapter One, by contrast, virtually amounts to a false start...
...It was wood, a contraption...
...OnNative Ground identified American realist writing with social protest...
...that of neither has been answered fully...
...Instead, he quotes one bone-chilling verse after another whose subject is "the silence of the universe" and whose trademark dashes "remind us...
...And it is Hawthorne who sees to it the adulterers remain isolated, in effect aborting their planned escape...
...The detour re-engages the title theme with Harriet Beecher Stowe, who said of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "God wrote it...
...In making the case, Kazin defrosts words long encrusted in patriotic ice...
...it is the average intelligent reader— anyone who can empathize with, say, a Herman Melville whose lovehate relationship with God, brought frontand-center in Moby-Dick, sank his novel writing career...
...Kazin celebrates this stellar self, but his wry description of Whitman speaks volumes: "With his great beard and the various slouches to which he put his hat...
...But two minor errors don't spoil the pleasure of reading Kazin's reminiscence of walking half the night with a wired, insomniac Robert Frost...
...The book's most surprising chapter is the one on Abraham Lincoln...
...than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf...
...God and the American Writer identifies much of our romantic writing with spiritual protest...
...Behind themythic hero, counters Kazin, was a prose stylist whose second inaugural address (1865) reveals not only an earnest abhorrence of slavery but a spiritual conversion-in-progress...
...Its thesis is that "modern American literature was born in protest" —protest against the commercial age that mushroomed after the Civil War, pre-World War I provincialism, and a class structure whose fault lines gaped during the Depression...
...It was therefore tactful and conciliatory of Lincoln to observe that "the prayers of both could not be answered...
...The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic When the Modern Language Association holds its annual convention in Toronto at the end of this month, the English profs in attendance will discuss such topics as "Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique" and "Queering the Modern Novel...
...Melville limns Jerusalem as "arid rocks...
...He savors their verses over lunch, as it were, but these are not the writers he turns to on a bleak night...
...Kazin, grappling with it, complains that it is sometimes "as baffling as acathedral explored by flashlight...
...The Civil War and its root cause, he explains (refusing to brook any revisionist opinion on the matter), constituted the century's moral touchstone: "On this terrible subject all true and ancient believers outdo the Biblical Jacob—they wrestle with [God] forever...
...Along the way it spotlights trends in philosophy, history and criticism, from the New Humanists to the New Critics...
...In taking up Melville...
...a Village of Lepers," and the Dead Sea as "foam on beach and pebbles like slaver of mad dog...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 18
