GOD AND THE AMERICAN WRITER
By Alfred Kazin
Knopf, 272 pages, $25
Once more, and unapologetically, Alfred Kazin goes back to the main lode, the same American literary ore he has mined for the 55 years since, as a 27-year-old, he published “On Native Grounds.” No snorts at the canon for him.
To change the metaphor, like a master pianist, Kazin again plays the old standards, but he interprets them freshly. This time he views Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Stowe, Lincoln, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Faulkner and Frost through the mother of all prisms: the way God weaves in and out (mostly out) of their works. And as always, by writing about writers, Kazin is stalking bigger game. He wants to say what America is, what our religion is and is not, what we believe in when we are beyond belief. He wants to reconstruct how we came to be a culture reduced to its feelings (although the Promise Keepers might not agree).
Read the afterword first, where Kazin says just what he thinks. Americans profess religion so vehemently, he says, because we don’t have God, not a compelling, living God, and our writers have had to go to their private rooms, to wonder at what they call God, or to curse him for his absence, or to find surrogates: Whitman’s self, Lincoln’s America, Eliot’s High Church. For the better part of two centuries, they have had to call on their personal resources alone to answer for themselves the hugest questions:
“If the American writer is usually alone in his imagination and in his devotions a secret to the rest of us, one reason is that religion is so publicly vehement, politicized, and censorious. The American writer has not been hostile to our periodic revivals and national `awakenings,’ just uninterested. Abraham Lincoln wordlessly turned away from the most elastic Baptist church on the Kentucky frontier to follow his own deciphering of human destiny. . . .
“Still, so much radical individualism is bracing as opposition and innovation, never as belief in itself. There is no radiance in our modern writers, just stalwart independence, defiance of the established, and a good deal of mockery. . . .
“Where with us is God the content and not just the message?”–that is, not just the word, the symbol, the ritual or the transitory feeling?
Instead of God with depth and dimension, America’s best imaginings have been drawn to the individual as lovable God (Walt Whitman’s self), or as wrathful God-seeker and God-killer (Melville’s Ahab), or anti-Puritan Puritan (Hawthorne), to William James’ therapy, or Dickinson’s and Frost’s intellectual puzzlement. Kazin’s America is the land of unending restlessness and recklessness, leading to quests but not to consistencies; a diversity of creeds bequeathed us with a tradition of uncertainties and surrogate gods. “Starting from embattled lonely beginnings,” he concludes, “each church in America was separate from and doctrinally hostile to others. The individual on his way to becoming a writer was all too conscious that it was his ancestral sect, his early training, his own holiness in the eyes of his church that he brought to his writing. He became its apostle without having forever to believe in it, in anything–except the unlimited freedom that is the usual American faith.”
Kazin marks many epiphanies on his way up to this conclusion. His modular intensity is arresting. There is not another critic alive who is capable of such luminous, frequently startling sentences. In this, he emulates Emerson: “He (Emerson) built on the infinite as if it were within the reach of a single sentence.” “As the Reformation turned every man into a priest, Emerson hoped to turn every American into a genius.” “Melville could neither believe nor be happy in his disbelief.” ” `Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was New England’s last holiness.” In “Huckleberry Finn,” Twain “depicted man as the animal with a Bible.” “Faulkner, a Calvinist without religion, sees nothing in life but human nature and the weather.” His aphorisms are as sprightly as ever: “Farce is catastrophe without a context and without a solution.”
Religion is ostensibly the lens for this re-vision of American literature, but Kazin is no more ponderous than he is systematic. He has earned the right to assume that his readers will be interested in his views not because they are tossed-off opinions but because they are earned by a lifetime of careful, often inspired reading. At times he chats about the luminaries as if they were his neighbors: “Every time I read Henry James the elder, who can be vaguely exalting but bogs down just when the argument, if you can locate it, should go forward, I think of Emerson’s rueful remark in his journal, ” `After us, mysticism should go out of style for a very long time.’ ” At times Kazin’s writing is on fire. Whole passages tremble with insight, as in a page forcing upon the reader the harsh understanding that, “The piety supporting white supremacy was sanctioned by the exclusiveness depicted in the Bible.”
Still, for all its many pleasures, this is a rough book that could have used rigorous editing of the sort that is no longer high priority at major publishers. There are frequent repetitions, even of phrases. Distractions pile up, as in a long excursus on Twain’s American innocents abroad, and many passages on slavery and the Civil War, a subject that, so grave and heavy as it is, threatens to run away with the story line until the connection is finally made clear in the passage quoted above, which comes only 20 pages from the end. Kazin the critic would say of Kazin the writer that it is as if, when the going gets tough, he veers from confrontation with the existence or nonexistence of God. He does not consistently, as Ahab did, “strike through the mask.”
Kazin’s title might well have been reversed. It is the writers who stand in the foreground, God in the back. These writers are the carriers of his faith in the American genius. Fifty-five years after “On Native Grounds,” the faithful Kazin knows his writers, and one hopes that his latest book will send his fortunate readers back to them with brightened eyes.
