Word: kazin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CONTEMPORARIES (513 pp.)-Alfred Kazin-Atlantic-Liftle, Brown...
...Jarrell writing about writers is another matter; his virtues are exactly those that Alfred Kazin lacks. Jarrell understands that what is serious need not be solemn. The scales of justice are part of his equipment, of course, but they are a lighter model than the vast, slow-swinging mechanism that burdens Kazin. After following Jarrell's ardent and scholarly puffs for the short stories of Kipling or the poems of Eleanor Taylor, the reader feels that life will not be supportable without these stories or these poems. Kazin's approval of a writer, however well thought out, inspires...
...Kazin's solemnity may be the result of his status in what is usually a two-level hierarchy of book reviewer (bottom) and book critic (top). Kazin is in the middle, looking wistfully upward. He charges that book reviewing is wretchedly done in the U.S. and deplores "the professional philis-tines" of the daily press. He complains of the New York Times's Orville Prescott, for instance, that it is no longer possible to tell what book Prescott is reviewing, since all his reviews sound as if he had written the books himself. The trouble with Kazin...
...World in the Evening followed in 1954. But the elegant dactyls remained on the literary scene. Their possessor had moved to Southern California in 1939. There he taught, wrote film scripts that seldom saw celluloid, and set aside left-wing politics to dabble in Vedanta-living, as Alfred Kazin once remarked acidly, "by the River Ganges where it flows into the Hollywood desert...
Readers aware of these critical benisons will be baffled long before they finish Passion. Could Kazin have been joking? Is it possible that Wilson does not care much for Chekhov and Turgenev...