THE SCRIBES OF NEW JERUSALEM

Alfred Kazin is the present dean of American criticism — a figure from a more open generation of literary commentary, a noted scholar who can hook the general reader. His fruitful life has been devoted largely to the study, the interpretation, the celebration of American literature. That does not mean the constant splurge of imaginative writing from all comers and of all qualities that emits from the nation’s presses. It means the great and classic literature: the world-class authors who have penetrated the American consciousness and come to stand, around the world, as the great examples of the American artistic imagination.

Kazin’s first book, On Native Grounds, appeared in 1942, the title declaring his lifetime interest. The nation was now at war; Thirties critics and commentators were warming to the nation’s role as preserver of democracy; affirmations of national cultural identity were needed. The book appeared one year after F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, and it had a similar impact. Matthiessen had re-envisioned for his generation a key period in the American imagination: the great cultural transformation of New England from 1837 to the Civil War. He explored the work and distinctive culture of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, proclaiming their fundamental originality. The view was revisionist. Until recently, the great 19th-century tradition had been the Genteel Tradition of Whittier, Longfellow, and Lowell, now nearly forgotten.

Kazin’s book took a similar story, but set 50 years on. Looking at the rising tide of Realist and Naturalist novelists at the close of the 19th century, he argued that they were no less exploratory and original. Writing not out of theory or foreign influence, but from the economic crises and the moral, political, and religious despairs of this era of technologization, urbanization, robber barons, Social Darwinism, and muckraking, they constructed a critical and very contemporary vision of America at the time it became modern. Indeed modern (and Modernist) American prose literature grew, Kazin argued, “out of the critical years of the late nineteenth century which saw the emergence of modern America, and was molded in its struggles.”

Kazin’s argument was culturally rooted, learned, critical of technological America. It also expressed the voice of liberal Forties intellectuals who were beginning to feel a greater love for their country. The argument — that America’s modern literature was made on native grounds — was a tale of the writer’s need to take imaginative possession of his own soil, then of the ironies of that possession. It was also, for many of us, to a degree excessive, as it went along with the revised patriotisms of wartime, those renewed arguments about the singularity of American national character. It was meant to compensate for those who saw the spirit of modernity and Modernism in American writing as part of a larger international revolution, or a drama of the Twenties conducted by expatriates in Parisian cafes. The truth surely is that the best modern American writing has really been an amalgam of two forces: an American cultural and social tradition, revived in the 1940s, and the Modernist experimental arts and influences of Europe.

In a number of other fine studies — the lively international essays of his collection Contemporaries, the autobiographical explorations of A Walker in the City — Kazin widened his map. He took on board the dramas and anxieties of European Romanticism and Modernism, the world-awareness of the Jewish inheritance, the international urgencies of modern, then postmodern change. Still, the American tradition stayed at the center. In probably his best book, An American Procession (1984), Kazin attempted to settle the matter, going back to the American Renaissance Matthiessen had brought into play. He takes us canonically through the great procession, starting with the Transcendentalist Emerson, with his distinctive, romantic, American sense of self and nature, then through the ironizing powers of modernity (best exemplified by Henry Adams), to the general climate of a 20th- century literature where all the great writers sensed something irretrievably wrong.

God and the American Writer is Kazin’s latter-day revisiting of the classical heritage of American literature. Here are the writers he knows intimately, has written on often. But the theme is new, perhaps (for Kazin) even surprising. It is the omnipresence of God in the core writers — again the line runs from Hawthorne, Emerson, and Melville, via Dickinson, William James, and Twain, to Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner — and the strange fist they have made of believing in, disbelieving in, arguing with Him. The aim is another reading of American culture. Now it is essentially a religious culture, born in the predestined certainties of Calvinism. It develops through the wild arguers, the mutant writers of the 19th century who were — to quote Melville on Hawthorne — “God’s spies.” It comes into the 20th century, the age of materialism and secularism, when, even so, the passion and struggle did not die. Hart Crane still looked to the curve of Brooklyn Bridge to “lend a myth to God.” Wallace Stevens saw poetry, not religion, as the supreme fiction, yet still read some neo-divine linkage in the “ambiguous undulations” of pigeons in the evening sky. Only in recent writing does Kazin see the essence departing, as a materialist psychological imagination replaces the religious one.

Kazin finds an excellent epigraph in Emily Dickinson’s “We thank thee, Father, for these strange minds that enamor us against thee.” His interest is, he explains, not in the artist’s professions of belief, but “in the imagination he brings to his tale of religion in human affairs.” The hook can usefully be read as a sequence of interlinked but free-standing essays on Great Writers: learned, original, and sometimes — like the essay on T.S. Eliot, who departs the native grounds and his St. Louis background for Britain and Anglo-Catholicism — open to detailed dispute. But throughout, there is a running argument about the importance of “the tale of religion” in American culture.

It begins with that American Renaissance — with the ambiguities, the rival optimisms and pessimisms, of Emerson and Thoreau, the self-makers and yea- sayers, on the one side, and Hawthorne and Melville, the ironists, the nay- sayers, on the other. Being distinctly Emersonian himself, Kazin is particularly good on the great self-seeker. He notes that what was new about him was not his moral sentiment, but his euphoric exaltation of it — here was a man whose egotism was as fervid as Scripture.

A second key argument is the distinctive impact on the American imagination of slavery and the Civil War. He gives a strong reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin — which was, he rightly says, not only an abolitionist tract, but a typical mid-19th-century work in which a writer of religious devotion (compare George Eliot, Tolstoy) compassionately considers the moral problem of “life among the lowly.” But what makes the great difference is the Civil War itself. Until this time, many writers, including Transcendentalists, harbored ambiguous attitudes about slavery and the question of secession. Kazin makes his point by devoting a central chapter to Abraham Lincoln, emphasizing the importance of the Second Inaugural Address. Now God and country became one. This, as Lincoln himself said, was true for both sides, each claiming a Biblical justification. But after Lincoln, Kazin says, religion and the religion of America became synonymous for many Americans, changing the nature of the moral struggle for writers.

The war finally silenced many writers, and changed the sensibilities of most who lived through it — like Herman Melville, left, as his friend Hawthorne said, “not able to believe or disbelieve,” struggling with doubt and blank negation on an agonized tour of the Holy Land. It also completely changed and redirected American literature. Kazin gives the subject a new importance, seeing in the war a fundamental influence he feels was overlooked by Edmund Wilson — whose Patriotic Gore is a brilliant study of the war’s political and rhetorical discourse, but implies that the conflict had little impact on serious American literature.

There are marvelous chapters on individuals here, especially that on William James, a powerful evocation of a major figure. All are deeply explored and show an engaged critical imagination trying to follow the sinuous movement of thought and sensibility as expressed in poetry, prose, and letters. At times, however, Kazin’s concern with the American procession becomes a narrowness. The chapter on T. S. Eliot, for example, has nothing to say on the vastness of Eliot’s endeavor, as writer and philosopher, to comprehend the “mind of Europe” and its crisis. Kazin has no great interest in the history of symbolism, the larger struggles of modern philosophy, the experimental revolution of modern forms (vers libre, stream of consciousness). This is a more personal book than many previous; his own engagement in the theme is clear. Often, it is anecdotal — there are wonderful, insightful reminiscences of Robert Frost, whom Kazin knew well at Amherst (“The world was Robert Frost, and he could never shut up about anything in it”).

Perhaps it is not quite Kazin’s best book. Sometimes there’s an air of ground too often revisited, instances too often quoted. But it has an invaluable energy of belief, even when addressing the literature of unbelief. What it speaks for is interesting and important: the “orphic” independence of religious awareness, the hunger for insight into other-ness, conveyed by the visionary passions of the imagination. American writers made a church of themselves, became apostles without having to believe in anything except unlimited freedom. Kazin is concerned with the contrast between such religious and metaphysical energies and American “official piety,” the result of the way religion and the religion of America became one. America may have been founded as a Calvinist pilgrimage, a great, convenanted reliving of the journey of the chosen into the Promised Land. But it became a land of schisms, Great Awakenings, multiple utopias; many of the utopias grew narrow, divisive, fundamentalist. Meantime, official piety became, he says, “publicly vehement, politicized, and censorious.” Deism, the religion of reason and enlightenment, was written by Jefferson into the Declaration of Independence; it did not, Kazin notes, become the American inheritance. Unlike the impact a common religious heritage had on European societies and thinkers, America and its official faith sent writers into individual quests for their own personal church, their own encounter with the varieties of religious experience.

Filled with a lifetime of literary experience, loaded with its own quirks and passions, this is a fine book. Kazin stands above and apart from most of the current wars of the decanonizing postmodern academy. For him, there is an American canon, an American imagination, a distinct if now dissolving American literary culture, a writer’s struggle with divinity and history framed on native grounds. He also has a way of writing about and interpreting that writing and its writers that is governed by intimate understanding, intense scholarly curiosity, cultural love. It sees writing as invested with spirit, imagination, struggling intelligence, individual vanities and crises, and as a critical struggle with the certainties, rather than a way of possessing or asserting them. That is what makes Kazin “Emersonian.” Again he has found a refreshing, illuminating way of telling the great tale of the major canonical writing now being displaced in modern multicultural theory, but that was achieved on native grounds — and other soils too.

Malcolm Bradbury is a British novelist and scholar. His works include Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel, The Atlas of Literature, and (with Richard Ruland) From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature.