Alfred Kazin's Journals

Alfred Kazin’s Journals are the collected private writings of twentieth-century American literary critic and public intellectual Alfred Kazin, first published in 2011 after an extensive period of editing by American literary scholar Richard M. Cook. In Cook’s hands, more than 7,000 journal pages have been reduced to about one-sixth of that number. The published journals still cover the whole period during which Kazin kept his journal, from 1933, when he was eighteen, until the last weeks of his life in 1998. The Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants, Kazin rose to prominence in the 1950s and 60s as the foremost commentator on the new generation of Jewish-American novelists, including Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. He was also a revered writer on nineteenth-century US literature and an influential public commentator who dined with President John F. Kennedy.

Cook’s selections from the earlier years of Kazin’s journal focus on his growth as a reader and writer. One by one he falls in love with the great American writers whose work he will consider for the rest of his life (and return to again and again in his journal): Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and above all Emerson, whose thought animates not only Kazin’s literary opinions but also his spiritual life. The development of American writing becomes the theme of his breakthrough critical work, On Native Grounds (1942).

At the same time, Kazin reflects on the upheaval of contemporary world events, noting Hitler’s rise to power, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and America’s entry into the war. Revelations about the concentration camps shape Kazin’s sense of his Jewishness.



In 1944, Kazin writes: “The book is not a journal, it is an exercise book, a disorderly pile of shavings.” At the same time, the journals have a deeper value as a testing ground for the ideas which would find their way into his published books and essays: “Everything that is fundamental in me has first found its expression here… There is no joy like working out one’s ideas for oneself, like coming to the root of the matter for oneself.” It is in his journals that Kazin first explores his own thinking on contemporary topics: the cold war, the rise of communism in intellectual American circles, and the arrival of Jewish Americans in the mainstream of American culture.

These ideas inform his second book, the memoir A Walker in the City (1951). This publication, together with On Native Grounds, establishes Kazin as a major figure of contemporary American letters. “I who stood so long outside the door wondering if I would ever get through it, am now one of the standard bearers of American literary opinion — a judge of young men.”

Kazin meets the great and the good of American and world literature: among them the poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, critic and theorist Hannah Arendt, novelists Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Vladimir Nabokov. Of many of these figures, he offers comic descriptions. Irving Howe suffers from “a fatal particle of vulgarity.” Lionel Trilling’s prose is dismissed for its “specious reasonableness.” Elizabeth Bishop’s hair “rises electrically up her head.” John Cheever is a “performer,” Salinger a “cute child” and Updike a “professional.” He sums up his friend Saul Bellow as “Saul: who like a precious jewel may let himself be handled, but who is impermeable.”



One of his fullest descriptions is devoted to the by-then revered poet T.S. Eliot, whose “face has aged and relaxed greatly, so that one’s first impression of him physically is of a rather tired kindness as opposed to the otherworldliness and hauteur of his early pictures. He was extremely kind, gentle, spoke very slowly and hesitatingly… He looks like a very sensitive question mark – long, winding, and bent; gives the impression that his sensibility is in his long curling nose and astonishing hands.”

Alongside his public career and intellectual development, Kazin records a passionate inner life. He struggles with envy and self-doubt: “I am poisoned [by] hatred of others [...] who are ‘better,’ more efficient, who do not flatter and love me unceasingly.” He writes, under the influence of psychotherapy, about his “dominant mother” and “reclusive father.”

He is overwhelmed by his sexuality, returning over and over again to the subject of women and sex: “the blousy half-nakedness of the girls in the streets…drops of sweat on their lips…breasts and hot purple mouths of the Bergdorf Goodman women.” He frequently gives in to the lure of adulterous liaisons. A the same time he often writes about sex with an almost spiritual longing: “I should like to write the true story of intercourse, of the socket and the holding, the solid and the fluid, and above all that sense of the running, the dance, the flight, when the two are one and the one is one because it is one of two.”



Ultimately his sexual and intellectual passions spring from the same source, as he himself wryly recognizes: “I finally made some sense of the Orwell, after two tries, and taking a shower, was amused to see the mighty, strong prick on me as a result of my… writing thoughtfully and well.”

Through his many affairs and turbulent marriages, Kazin maintains a sense of being alone, a quality he finds reflected in his favorite writers: “they have nothing in common but the almost shattering unassailability, the life-stricken I, in each. Each fought his way through life — and through his genius — as if no one had ever fought before.”

Diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 1998, Kazin reflected deeply on the widening gap between his body and soul: “And all the time my mind is singing, my soul, spirit, call it what flying around of its own accord. What a division, my friends, what a dual self I walk around in—these days. No wonder one starts embracing supernatural agencies and whimpering ‘Get me outa here’.”