Alfred Kazin
From Philosopedia
Kazin, Alfred (5 June 1915 - 5 June 1998)
Kazin’s God and the American Writer (1997) states that he is not interested in a particular artist’s profession of belief but, rather, “in the imagination he brings to his tale of religion in human affairs.” The concept of God, he concludes, figures importantly in the American literary imagination, God and man “eternally watchful of the other.” However, he was not an observant, just a nominal, Jew.
He found Samuel Clemens and T. S. Eliot anti-Semitic. Hawthorne, he found, would not believe in God but could not escape the “power of blackness” that tormented his Calvinist ancestors: “In the depths of the heart,” Hawthorne wrote, “is a tomb and a dungeon.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was preceded by eight generations of clergymen, refused such a dungeon and overthrew organized religion altogether, proclaiming that divinity lies within: the “infinitude of the private mind.” Whitman, although “drenched in religion,” dared to come up with his own creed, a self-celebration and ecstatic, world-embracing sexuality in which God is one’s bedfellow and “sleeps at my side all night.”
Emily Dickinson thought Whitman was being “disgraceful” with such an idea. Kazin found that she “explained the religious quest better than anyone, and with justice to all, when she tossed off in a letter, ‘It is true that the unknown is the largest need of intellect, although for this no one thinks to thank God.’ ” Although Kazin admired Dickinson as having “the most penetrating intellect,” his favorites being Melville and Lincoln, two tortured souls who wanted to believe in God in the face of annihilation. Melville, Kazin held, retained a faith “even if he did not always know what and where and whom to believe.” Lincoln, however, remained the rationalist who joined no church.
Richard M. Cook's Alfred Kazin, A Biography (2008) is the first biography about Kazin. Reviewer Brian Morton found that Cook's book is not the work of art that Kazin deserves.
(Alfred Kazin's Journals (Yale University Press, 2011) was reviewed by Edward Mendelson.
Kazin arranged for his cremains to be given to Judith Dunford, who asked that his ashes be consigned to the East River in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. (The New York Times, 23 July 1999)
Books
On Native Grounds (1942, nonfiction)
A Walker in the City (1951, memoir)
Starting Out in the Thirties (1965, memoir)
Bright Book of Life (1973, nonfiction)
New York Jew (1978, memoir)
An American Procession (1984, nonfiction)
A Writer's America (1988, nonfiction)
A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (1996, memoir)
God and the American Writer (1997, nonfiction)
