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Alfred Kazin

The solitary New York Jew

Richard M. Cook
Yale, 452pp, £25,

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Tuesday, 8th April 2008

In a recent review of They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn’s book about the neo-conservatives, Mark Lilla began by asking:

How many of you are sick to death of hearing about City College in the 1930s, Alcove One and Alcove Two, the prima donnas at Partisan Review, who stopped speaking to whom at which cocktail party .

Less happy was the academic appropriation of culture which was to be such a baleful story in the period covered by Kazin’s life, from his starting out in the Thirties to his death ten years ago. He began in healthy fashion with old-fashioned literary journalism, and precociously at that, his first review in a grown-up magazine appearing when he was 19, before he became a prolific and accomplished critic. He nevertheless shared the growing assumption of American authors that the proper place to live was a campus, and still more that a writer’s natural lot was to be supported by someone else rather than by his own pen.

Early on we learn that his life would be spent ‘applying for grants, hustling up visiting professorships, getting his name on lists’; and how. As life goes by, Kazin arrives in Pasadena

on a two-month fellowship at the Huntingdon Library . . . the Guggenheim Foundation had renewed his fellowship . . . a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters . . . Kazin would be offered a Gauss lectureship in the fall . . . Kazin accepted a summer Fullbright . . . Finally there were the Guggenheim and Bollingen foundations to petition,

until he reader wants to shout, ‘Get a job, man!’ In his twenties he had indeed ‘begun to think seriously’ about finding proper employment and did work for a time on a commercial magazine, but he soon kicked the habit.

While not quite ornery or obnoxious, Kazin was clearly an awkward man. For all of assimilation and ascent into the mainstream, experience ‘made me realise that I was regarded as a Jew . . . a question of manners . . . The general view was that the Jews were low,’ although the truth is these things are a matter of personality. As Richard Cook says in this detailed if humourless biography, Kazin never got over ‘his perceived lack of social grace’, which he attributed to his upbringing, when plenty of people born at the very bottom of society have the greatest charm.

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