Alfred Kazin
The solitary New York Jew
Richard M. CookYale, 452pp, £25,
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 .
He certainly wasn’t unattractive, at any rate to women. His personal life was unusually mouvementé, with four wives, numerous mistresses and too many casual flings to count. Kazin’s foibles included ‘breaking into Mozart arias, on the street, after sex, and, to relieve the strain, after difficult occasions with his family,’ of which there were many, not least since his philandering complicated his relationship with his children as they grew up. But then his writing is attractive too, in a way that Cook (an academic teacher of American literature, needless to say) does not properly convey.
Acutely conscious of his heritage as he was, Kazin was neither religious nor a Zionist, and his misgivings were strengthened when he visited Israel. He befriended there the political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, whose fine book Rubber Bullets laments the tendency of Zionism to deny ‘cultivating the solitary self, the lyrical personal voice of the individual,’ and the way that
autobiography — as the voice of the first person singular, of the self-reflecting, self-narrating individual, not as a soldier or missionary of a particular collective — has not flourished in Jewish or Zionist culture,
which is precisely what did flourish in Kazin’s own autobiographical writing.
Later in his life he engaged once more in political debate, as he saw several of those contemporaries move sharply rightward to form what we know as the neo-conservative movement. Kazin wrote to Daniel Bell — one more of the New York intellectuals, and his brother-in-law — about something ‘only a few of us know’, that
some horribly reactionary national policies were actually born, long, long ago, in the violent debates between radicals dominating the City College alcoves.
In 1983 he turned his savage indignation on the neocons in the pages of the New York Review of Books, while giving a rare political speech on The Strange Death of Liberal America.
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