According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred Kazin’s biographer as well as the editor of his journals, the nearly 600 pages of entries assembled in this book represent only one sixth of the total mass Kazin deposited in the archives of the New York Public Library. Kazin himself hoped to bring forth an edition of the journals, evidence of the pride he took in the observations, impressions, enthusiasms, speculations, sexual conquests and competitive urges he recorded several mornings a week, scribbling in bed as well as ‘on the subway, the train, and the plane’, with the gusto of one convinced that ‘the pouring river of all [my] associations’ formed the true record not only of his life but also of his life’s work.

This claim was based, it appears, not on hubris but on its opposite, Kazin’s suspicion, deepened over the years, that his private writings surpassed his public ones — a self-appraisal unusual in a serious literary man and quite remarkable for one who at the time of his death in 1998 at the age of 83 ‘was remembered’, Cook asserts, ‘as one of the two or three most influential writer-intellectuals of postwar America’. The phrase ‘writer-intellectual’ cagily obscures Kazin’s actual vocation, that of literary historian and critic — in fact he was considered a likely heir to his hero Edmund Wilson.

Wilson too was an indefatigable journalist. But it is hard to imagine him ever thinking his personal jottings were definitive of his creative being. A literary artist, secure in his gifts, he assumed his legacy rested on the classics he laboriously conceived and meticulously executed: Axel’s Castle, To the Finland Station, Patriotic Gore and others. Kazin, the ‘writer-intellectual’, completed half a dozen volumes of literary criticism, but scarcely any of them are read today. The one work Cook describes as ‘canonical’, Walker in the City, a loving memoir of Kazin’s early years in immigrant Brooklyn, was one of three such books he wrote, each a journal-like narrative of linked rhapsodic memories in which kitchen quarrels fuse with the books he read and the contemporaries he knew.

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