A Bridge to the World
I met Alfred Kazin because
of I.B. Singer. It was 1991, and I'd been working at the Forward for
less than a year when Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning master of Yiddish
fiction, died. The next day, the phone rang: "This is Alfred Kazin. I'd like to
write something about Singer." If Singer himself had been on the line, I could
hardly have been more surprised--or more delighted. Both men, to my mind,
inhabited a peak of the literary Olympus, but I had not understood how
connected Singer's Yiddish-speaking world was to Kazin's mandarin American
literary milieu. Of course, the evidence was everywhere.
In A Walker in the
City , his first and best volume of autobiography, Kazin describes his first
walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, when he was 14 years old. He'd become
separated from classmates who were headed to City Hall, but he decided to
continue across the bridge alone. In rhapsodic language reminiscent of Henry
Roth, Kazin takes in all the crackling sounds and sights of the emerging city,
the trolleys and the crush of people and the dark roofs of Manhattan. "Only the
electric sign of the Jewish Daily
Forward , burning high over the
tenements of the East Side," he writes, "suddenly stilled the riot in my
heart."
Whether
that sign stilled his heart with calming thoughts of home (where the
Forward was read in Yiddish by his house-painter father and dressmaker
mother) or whether it momentarily halted the reach of his escaping imagination
is not explained. For Kazin, both were no doubt true, for he was able to
express multiple selves simultaneously. He once told me that he had considered
calling his final and fourth volume of autobiography, published in 1996, simply
Jews . He opted instead for A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment , a
line taken from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." "Jews ," he decided, "would
be too much." But it isn't as if he chose the lines of the anti-Semite at the
expense of his own American impulse toward ethnic self-assertion. (He had,
after all, called his third memoir New York Jew .) When I suggested that
what he was really doing was Judaizing Eliot, making him serve as an epigraph
to Kazin's American-Jewish life-hungry odyssey, he laughed approvingly. "Yes,"
he said, "I like that."
In 1942, at the age of only 27, Kazin had published On
Native Grounds . The grandeur of the title and the immodesty of the
subtitle-- An Interpretation of Modern
American Prose
Literature --mark it as the sort of book only a grateful child of immigrants
could write. Who else would tune his ear so finely for traces of an emerging
national consciousness, while teasing out the finer points of its economic,
social, and moral awareness? His open-armed embrace of American literature, his
magisterial "we" in speaking about literary matters in this country, had the
assertiveness of the newly enfranchised. Once, after I got to know him better,
he told me that his daughter Kate had moved to Israel, and I jokingly observed
that she was really on native ground. Kazin was not amused. He had
labored too long to make America his own to feel it pulled out from under him,
even in jest.
He never
denied the Jewish piece of his identity. It's just that America was where he
felt it was possible to express all the pieces of himself at once. Kazin was
different from many first-generation intellectuals who sailed into American
high culture and sent for their past only long after they had established
themselves, like immigrants bringing over the rest of the family. Kazin brought
everything with him at once.
The story Kazin wound up telling in the
Forward about Singer recounted the Yiddish writer's desire to see the
grave of Edmund Wilson. Singer was, Kazin recalled, fascinated to learn that
Wilson, that patrician WASP man of letters, had chosen a Hebrew inscription for
his headstone. Kazin was clearly delighted with this confluence of
elements--Wilson translating himself into Hebrew; Singer translating himself
into English; and Kazin himself telling the story, presiding over both,
knitting together the two disparate elements that fueled his own unique
style.
No wonder
Kazin was drawn to the bridge in A
Walker in the City .
Brownsville, the neighborhood in Brooklyn where he came from, had one foot in
eastern Europe and one in the New World. Kazin himself had one foot in
Brownsville and one foot in the highbrow literary world of Manhattan. Critics
such as Kazin and writers such as Saul Bellow--born the same year as
Kazin--stretched out their intellect and imagination across disparate worlds
and helped a generation of book-hungry immigrant offspring walk into American
cultural life.
Kazin was a bridge for me as well. It was his
introductions--to Henry Roth, to D. H. Lawrence, to Henry James-- that helped
me feel at home with great modernist writers. Kazin wrote about American
literature in particular as if he had discovered it himself. He imparted to
everything he wrote that same feeling of magical discovery he describes
experiencing when he walked as a young man out of immigrant Brooklyn into
sophisticated Manhattan.
One day this past winter, my
wife and I went to a party in Westchester also attended by Kazin and his wife,
Judith. My wife and I had taken the train, and the Kazins offered us a ride
back to the city--but only if I drove. His wife told me they didn't mind
risking their own lives in the dark but that younger people were another
matter. Needless to say, I was terrified, creeping along the Saw Mill Parkway
as if all of Western literature were in the back seat. Kazin's conversational
style now closely resembled a memoir in progress--he chatted casually about
Harry Levin, the great Joyce scholar at Harvard, and about critic Clifton
Fadiman's TV appearances, and about Singer, whom he had recently written about
for the New York Review of Books .
We came to the West Side
Highway. There, in the distance, was the George Washington Bridge, lit up in
the darkness. This was the same approach to Manhattan, I suddenly realized,
that I had known when I was a teen-ager making the drive to New York from the
Westchester suburb where I grew up. Though I'd had a very different childhood
from Kazin and approached Manhattan from a direction completely different from
Kazin's Brownsville, I remembered vividly the sense of possibility the drive
suggested. And I understood that it was partly because of Alfred Kazin that New
York seemed a place of the imagination, a place where life opened up. My heart
filled with gratitude. Here was Kazin, 50 years older than I but still
traveling happily toward New York, still talking about books and people with
passion and devotion, and still holding out the promise of a New World.
