A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin.
Brown, John L.
The paperback edition of the Harper hardcover A Lifetime Burning in
Every Moment contains selections from Alfred Kazin's journals,
arranged in five sections: 1936-45, 1946-50, 1950-76, 1976-93, and
1993-95. (Unfortunately, the individual entries are not dated, which may
create a certain confusion.) The fourth section, dealing with the period
of approaching old age, is by far the longest (134 pages).
In spite of his early recognition as an outstanding critic (On Native
Grounds was widely acclaimed upon its appearance in 1943, when he was
twenty-seven), as a visiting professor at leading universities, as the
recipient of numerous awards including the National Book Critics'
Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, Kazin has had a troubled life.
Beginning with his youth as the son of a poor Jewish family in
Brownsville, it continued through three failed marriages, anguish about
the Nazi slaughter of the Jews, and worry about the political and
spiritual problems with which he was constantly confronted. The
selections here frequently offer fresh details on Kazin's previous
autobiographical works, A Walker in the City (1981; on his youth in
Brooklyn), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), and New York Jew (1978).
Quite understandably, many entries deal with the author's
contacts with other critics and intellectuals. A traditionalist in his
critical views, Kazin is "proud to be a critic outside the
fashionable university opinion." He defends the accepted canon
against postmodernist attacks, has little sympathy with
multiculturalism, which "has replaced truth and knowledge by
opinion." He lauds the work of Henry Adams (despite Adams's
anti-Jewish prejudice), "which is central to my sense of American
history," and of Whitman, "the great voice of American
nationality." He knew Robert Frost when both were teaching at
Amherst and found him "a tragic figure, fighting to throw off the
curse." He comments perceptively and often astringently on dozens
of his contemporaries, both European and American - he loved Italy in
particular and speaks of many Italian writers and thinkers, including
Ignazio Silone, Carlo Levi, Paolo Milano, Salvemini. Visiting Bernard
Berenson's villa "I Tatti," he encountered Leo Stein,
Gertrude's brother, who abominated his "big sister."
Later, in Rome, he met Berenson himself, "who took me in quickly,
quietly, absolutely."
As a young Jewish critic in New York in the 1930s, Kazin became
closely associated with "the Partisan Review crowd." In
London, during the war, he met T. S. Eliot, "kind and gentle,"
and seemed tolerant of the poet's anti-Semitism. He remembers F. O.
Matthissen, whom he knew at Harvard, and recalls contacts with Elizabeth
Bishop, Josephine Herbst, Ralph Ellison, and fellow Jews like Harold
Bloom, Saul Bellow, and Irving Kristol, about whom he had mixed
feelings.
But literary discussion does not completely dominate these journals.
Kazin would seem to be even more concerned in recording frankly a life
which has been far from idyllic. With the passage of the years, in spite
of "the glow of fame" surrounding him, he has suffered a
mounting sense of the "bleakness" of his life, indeed of all
human life. One day, in Central Park, watching a frightened cat fleeing
up a tree, he ruminates: "I am like that cat - up a tree and
waiting to fall from this stupid life, this loveless life." After
his three failed marriages, he felt "bruised and starved for
love." (With Judith, his fourth wife, he finally found happiness.)
Unable to sleep, "pursued by the Furies," he weeps "in
the emptiness for the emptiness." The burden of mortality, of
death, weighs heavily upon him. During his weekly radiation treatments
for cancer, he believes that he "is making a desperate effort to
cheat death." He seeks salvation from "the emptiness" in
his Jewish heritage and in a renewal of faith and spiritual life. Deeply
moved by a visit to Israel, he strengthens his ties with Jewish friends
like Elie Wiesel ("meeting him was an extraordinary
experience"). After making the acquaintance of Hannah Arendt, he
writes, "I love this woman intensely," and devotes several
entries to praising her work. He also has a deep reverence for two other
Jewish women: Simone Well, who played a heroic role in the Resistance;
and the martyred Edith Stein, murdered in Auschwitz. (A convert to
Catholicism, she has recently been canonized.)
The concluding pages of the journals, like the final chapters of
Writing Was Everything (see WLT 70:2, p. 410), turn to prayer, to God,
to Christianity, and to the tragic fate of the Jewish people and express
Kazin's fervent desire "to see our lives with the eyes of
faith and to make the world shine again."
John L Brown Washington, D. C.
