BRILLIANT CRITIC
Kramer, Hilton
Brilliant Critic Contemporaries, by Alfred Kazin. An Atlantic Monthly Press Book: Little, Brown. 513 pp. §7.50. Revietued by Hilton Kramer A lfred Kazin's new book will be a surprise and a...
...He may say of Snow's novels that "they are not altogether novels," but he discusses them all the same as if they were major achievements...
...There are also a number of remarkable travel essays...
...Something similar takes place in his essay on Robert Lowell's Life Studies...
...Revietued by Hilton Kramer A lfred Kazin's new book will be a surprise and a delight even to those readers, like myself, who have already read many of its separate essays as they appeared in the magazines to which he is a tireless and welcome contributor...
...The essay on Dreiser is one of the best statements on the aesthetics of realism anyone has given us...
...There is no other critic in this country just now who addresses himself to the immediate literary scene with so much passion, intelligence, and taste, and there have been very few others at any time who seemed, by virtue of their style and their ability to make compelling equations between personal experience and literary events, so well equipped to write about contemporary literature as a participant more than an observer...
...The piece on Bernard Malamud, while honoring perceptively the poetry and delicacy of this wonderful writer's vision, provides a salutary discussion of what precisely has been lost by Jewish and Negro writers "who have rejected special pleading in favor of modern art...
...The tone he establishes in his essay on Snow is a tone that could only be acceptable in dealing with a truly monumental writer...
...while Kazin knows very well that Snow is not first-rate, his sympathy for the kind of large social panorama Snow attempts (and fails, really, to create) traps him, I think, into writing about these novels as if they were great...
...As a writer himself Kazin knows that the only way he can do this is to speak clearly and eloquently in his own voice, and he thus makes of criticism a personal testimony as well as a mode of analysis...
...In Contemporaries we are a long way from that dehumanized school of criticism that makes of every work of literature an elaborate impersonal mechanism for dispensing moral paradoxes...
...That book marked a profound change in Lowell's poetic style...
...It is this ability to fix in our minds a vivid image of what he has seen, whether in a book or in the cafe of a new country, that makes Kazin's book so memorable and enjoyable...
...The elaborate literary devices of Lord Weary's Castle were abandoned for a more freely-spoken verse based on plain speech...
...Though so far as I can tell, I met none of the people Kazin names in his piece, I found that rereading it in this collection brought back to me an instantly recognizable image of the country and its artists and its atmosphere...
...The personal force behind each of Kazin's essays—and there are seventy-four of them in this collection—derives from this ambition to put the reader as closely in touch with the writer's vision as a third party possibly can, removing those obstacles of false taste, ignorance, and naked prejudice that might stand in its way...
...Where one is tempted to quarrel with Kazin is in his weakness for mistaking a writer's intention for his accomplishment in those cases where the intention is so clearly congenial to his own interests and temperament...
...We are in the presence of a writer who cares, and who makes of his care the starting point of a passionate discourse...
...This can happen with writers as different as C. P. Snow and Robert Lowell...
...I happened to read the one on Israel, "At Ease in Zion," while I was on my way to visit that country for the first time, and it proved to be a reliable guide to the tone and style of everything I was to find there...
...Kazin's writreader a vision and a document of the world that he cannot do without...
...Kazin is obviously thrilled by this turning away from a style that seemed to be derived so thoroughly from literature to one drawn more directly from life, and yet in praising Life Studies he quite overlooks the smothering narcissism, the cold manipulation of the self, that lies at the heart of that book...
...All the same, Contemporaries abounds in memorable critical distinctions...
Vol. 26 • September 1962 • No. 9
