Word: kazin
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Chance is one of the subtle themes in Starting Out in the Thirties, and it was by chance that Kazin entered the radical writer's community. Riding the subway home from City College one day in June, 1934, Kazin read a review by John Chamberlain, the radical New York Times reviewer, of a book on youth...
...Kazin got off the subway at Times Square and went up to see Chamberlain. Five hours later he left carrying with him a recommendation that he be given a chance to review books for the New Republic...
With this entree, Kazin met most of the characters whose portraits make up the rest of the book. Some of the names Kazin discusses are still familiar--Mary McCarthy, Malcolm Cowley, William Saroyan, and James T. Farrell; others, like those of V.F.Calverton, editor of the Marxist Modern Monthly. Otis Ferguson, the ex-sailor who worked on the New Republic, and Francis Corcoran, a pietistic Catholic who also managed to be a Communist, mean nothing to people who can hardly remember the early '50's. But all were part of the literary-political world of Alfred Kazin and all were part...
WHAT IS most striking about the radicals Kazin writes of is the ease with which they adopted radical postures. For many of Kazin's friends, radicalism was not the result of a John Winthrop-like examination of conscience, but rather a garment that for one reason or another, perhaps social or psychological, was congenial. Inconsistencies don't bother these people. "The cool-looking types I now met at cocktail parties never seemed to find it odd to express the most revolutionary opinions against the most luxurious backgrounds. It was as if they were demonstrating, more than their new principles...
...more irksome to Kazin, however, were "those middle-class and doctrinaire radicals who, after graduating from Harvard or Yale in the Twenties, had made it a matter of personal honor to become Marxists, and who now worried in the New Masses whether Proust should be read after the Revolution and why there seemed to be no simple proletarians in the novels of Andre Malraux. "Kazin's irritation with these men is a product of his involvement in the other community--the tenements of Brownsville. Although these middle class radicals may have been socialists, the socialism they espoused seemed more like...