The ultimate self-doubter
‘I love to think about America,” Alfred Kazin, 26, recorded in his journal in February 1942. He was finishing his canonical study of modern American literature, “On Native Grounds,” written as he shuttled between his parents’ Brownsville tenement in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Jewish Brooklyn (Kazin drafted sections on the kitchen table) and the cavernous Room 315 at the New York Public Library, imagined as the center of the universe. Richard M. Cook’s empathic, absorbing biography of perhaps the foremost literary critic of the second half of the 20th Century faithfully chronicles the story of Kazin’s journey out, beyond Brownsville, to the America of his dreams.But Cook struggles to capture the emotional springs of Kazin’s complex relation to “America as an idea” (as the young critic wrote in the last chapter of “On Native Grounds”). “I’m against the system, but crazy about the country,” Kazin explained years later, reflecting at 80 about his career (he died at 83 in 1998) and his long-nourished resistance, as the faithful son of socialists, to the inequities wrought by American capitalism. The tension between his outsider status as a Jew among the gentiles (literary and academic) and his profound identification with the major figures of the American literary tradition%26#8212;their “terrible and graphic loneliness”%26#8212; created in Kazin an intensity of self-consciousness fueled by an orbiting ambition and deep reservoirs of resentment.
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Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 1:12 am under