Alfred Kazin's America

by Kazin, Alfred; Solotaroff, Ted; Solotaroff, Ted

• ISBN13: 9780066213439
• ISBN10: 0066213436
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-11
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

<p>Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that in his books, essays, and reviews, Kazin succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters, the one who kept closest track of its proceedings, its history, its symbiotic relationship with American society, and its relations with other Western literatures. He did so out of a particularly passionate concern for the significance and well-being of our literary heritage. The America that was mostly a political and cultural position-taking for his fellow New York intellectuals was for Kazin a lifelong possession and a complex fate. His working title for his final book, <i>God and the American Writer</i>, which dealt mostly with nineteenth-century authors, was "Absent Friends."</p><p>At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he typically put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." To indicate the development of this charged point of view, Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. These excerpts also provide the pleasure of his sharply etched portraits of the Brownsville, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, and Cape Cod literary milieus and of such figures as Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Hannah Arendt.</p><p>The selections in <i>Alfred Kazin's America</i> follow the course of his career. They are introduced by the editor's substantial essay, which connects the youth to the man and both to the critic, and draws upon Solotaroff's own relations with him. This close joining of the personal to the critical seeks to pass on and reactivate a great American critic's presence and legacy.</p><p>As our sense of the American past continues to dry up and threatens to blow away in the heavy winds of change, those writers who can make our heritage come alive again and challenge us become all the more essential. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that takes us back to Emerson and forward through our literature to the better part of our own Americanism. </p>

Author Biography

Alfred Kazin was Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xiii
Introduction	p. xv
Home is Where One Starts From
The Kitchen	p. 3
"Beyond!"	p. 8
Mrs. Solovey	p. 14
Yeshua	p. 25
The Literary Life
Brownsville: 1931	p. 31
The New Republic: 1934	p. 36
At V. F. Calverton's: 1936	p. 40
The Age of Realism
Preface to On Native Grounds	p. 51
The Opening Struggle for Realism	p. 56
Two Educations: Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser	p. 65
An Insurgent Scholar: Thorstein Veblen	p. 81
The New Realism: Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis	p. 90
Willa Cather's Elegy	p. 105
All the Lost Generations: F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos	p. 114
The Literary Life
Provincetown, 1940: Bertram Wolfe, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv	p. 159
Delmore Schwartz	p. 166
Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling	p. 170
Contemporaries
The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound	p. 181
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury	p. 200
Southern Isolates: Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy	p. 213
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: The Historian at the Center	p. 222
President Kennedy and Other Intellectuals	p. 229
Professional Observers: Cheever, Salinger, and Updike	p. 245
The Earthly City of the Jews: Bellow, Malamud, and Roth	p. 255
The Imagination of Fact: Capote and Mailer	p. 270
The "Single Voice" of Ralph Ellison	p. 282
Two Cassandras: Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates	p. 289
James Wright: The Gift of Feeling	p. 300
Departed Friends
The Intoxicating Sense of Possibility: Thomas Jefferson at Monticello	p. 307
Emerson: The Priest Departs, The Divine Literatus Comes	p. 314
Thoreau and American Power	p. 325
Hawthorne: The Ghost Sense	p. 336
"Melville Is Dwelling Somewhere in New York"	p. 344
Walt Whitman: I Am the Man	p. 370
Lincoln: The Almighty Has His Own Purposes	p. 383
Emily Dickinson: Called Back	p. 402
Creatures of Circumstance: Mark Twain	p. 407
William and Henry James: Our Passion Is Our Task	p. 423
The Death of the Past: Henry Adams and T. S. Eliot	p. 432
The Literary Life
Edmund Wilson at Wellfleet	p. 455
Hannah Arendt: The Burden of Our Time	p. 467
The Directness of Josephine Herbst	p. 477
Saving My Soul at the Plaza	p. 481
Summing Up
A Parade in the Rain	p. 499
To Be a Critic	p. 506
Appendix	p. 523
Index	p. 527
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Alfred Kazin's America
Critical and Personal Writings

Chapter One

The Kitchen

In Brownsville tenements the kitchen is always the largest room and the center of the household. As a child I felt that we lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms were annexed. My mother, a "home" dressmaker, had her workshop in the kitchen. She told me once that she had begun dressmaking in Poland at thirteen; as far back as I can remember, she was always making dresses for the local women. She had an innate sense of design, a quick eye forall the subtleties in the latest fashions, even when she despised them, and great boldness. For three or four dollars she would study the fashion magazines with a customer, go with the customer to the remnants store on Belmont Avenue to pick out the material, argue the owner down -- all remnants stores, for some reason, were supposed to be shady, as if the owners dealt in stolen goods -- and then for days would patiently fit and baste and sew and fit again. Our apartment was always full of women in their housedresses sitting around the kitchen table waiting for a fitting. My little bedroom next to the kitchen was the fitting room. The sewing machine, an old nut-brown Singer with golden scrolls painted along the black arm and engraved along the two tiers of little drawers massed with needles and thread on each side of the treadle, stood next to the window and the great coal-black stove which up to my last year in college was our main source of heat. By December the two outer bed-rooms were closed off, and used to chill bottles of milk and cream, cold borscht, and jellied calves' feet.

The kitchen held our lives together. My mother worked in it all day long, we ate in it almost all meals except the Passover seder, I did my homework and first writing at the kitchen table, and in winter I often had a bed made up forme on three kitchen chairs near the stove. On the wall just over the table hung a long horizontal mirror that sloped to a ship's prow at each end and was lined in cherry wood. It took up the whole wall, and drew every object in thekitchen to itself. The walls were a fiercely stippled whitewash, so often rewhitened by my father in slack seasons that the paint looked as if it had been squeezed and cracked into the walls. A large electric bulb hung down the center of the kitchen at the end of a chain that had been hooked into the ceiling; the old gas ring and key still jutted out of the wall like antlers. In the cornernext to the toilet was the sink at which we washed, and the square tub in which my mother did our clothes. Above it, tacked to the shelf on which were pleasantly ranged square, blue-bordered white sugar and spice jars, hung calendarsfrom the Public National Bank on Pitkin Avenue and the Minsker Progressive Branch of the Workmen's Circle; receipts for the payment of insurance premiums, and household bills on a spindle; two little boxes engraved with Hebrew letters. One of these was for the poor, the other to buy back the Land of Israel. Each spring a bearded little man would suddenly appear in our kitchen, saluteus with a hurried Hebrew blessing, empty the boxes (sometimes with a sidelong look of disdain if they were not full), hurriedly bless us again for remembering our less fortunate Jewish brothers and sisters, and so take his departure until the next spring, after vainly trying to persuade my mother to take still another box. We did occasionally remember to drop coins in the boxes, butthis was usually only on the dreaded morning of "midterms" and final examinations, because my mother thought it would bring me luck. She was extremely superstitious, but embarrassed about it, and always laughed at herselfwhenever, on the morning of an examination, she counseled me to leave the house on my right foot. "I know it's silly," her smile seemed to say, "but what harm can it do? It may calm God down."

The kitchen gave a special character to our lives; my mother's character. All my memories of that kitchen are dominated by the nearness of my mother sitting all day long at her sewing machine, by the clacking of the treadle against the linoleum floor, by the patient twist of her right shoulder as she automatically pushed at the wheel with one hand or lifted the foot to free the needle where it had got stuck in a thick piece of material. The kitchen was her life. Year by year, as I began to take in her fantastic capacity for labor and her anxious zeal, I realized it was ourselves she kept stitched together. I can never remember a time when she was not working. She worked because the law of her life was work, work and anxiety; she worked because she would have found life meaningless without work. She read almost no English; she could read the Yiddish paper, but never felt she had time to. We were always talking of a time when I would teach her how to read, but somehow there was never time. When I awoke in the morning she was already at her machine, or in the great morning crowd of housewives at the grocery getting fresh rolls for breakfast. When I returned from school she was at her machine, or conferring over McCall's with some neighborhood woman who had come in pointing hopefully to an illustration -- "Mrs. Kazin! Mrs. Kazin! Make me a dress like it shows here in the picture!" When my father came home from work she had somehow mysteriously interrupted herself to make supper for us, and the dishes cleared andwashed, was back at her machine ...

Alfred Kazin's America
Critical and Personal Writings. Copyright © by Alfred Kazin. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings by Alfred Kazin, Ted Solotaroff
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