Word: kazin
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Like all anthologies, Contemporaries has its ups and downs; even allowing for this inherent defect of the form however, this collection of Alfred Kazin's literary and social criticism of the last ten years or so is not as good as it should be. One judges Mr. Kazin by his own high standards: his first, best book On Native Grounds, a study of American literature from then to now, is one of the finest brief surveys of the field, comprehensive yet insightful, carefully thought-out but delightfully without a theory to hawk, Kazin has traveled far on the reputation this...
...thing, Mr. Kazin ought to find himself a new editor--if he has an old editor. This collection appears to have been put together directly from the magazines and reviews in which the pieces first appeared. A particularly annoying, if minor evidence of this is the repetition in one essay after another of the same brief quotations and marginal illustrative remarks. Thus, for example, Kazin complains no less than three times in three consecutive essays about Kinsey's statistical approach to American sexual experience; he refers to Emerson's famous lecture series on capital-C "Culture" to make the same...
...stuff inside is Kazin's, of course; and a lot of the editing it needs should have been done at Kazin's desk. Far too many of these pieces read like first drafts; they contain only preliminary thought, the superstructure of an essay, which should largely disappear from the finished product. One comes upon the final few sentences of an essay with something of a shock: "What? That...
...especially true of the pieces to which most readers will turn first, those on contemporary American and British fiction. These articles are grouped under the title, "Famous Since the War," and just everybody is covered, from Lawrence Durrell to J. D. Salinger ("Everybody's Favorite"--but not Mr. Kazin's). While the Salinger article, a review of Franny and Zooey, is shrewd and right, the articles on Mailer, Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas and the others should be read as quickly as they were evidently written...
Perhaps this is unfair to Kazin; perhaps his reviews can only be as good as the rather disappointing post-War fiction he is discussion. In that case, though, one has a further objection, that it may have been unwise to republish these essays so soom after their initial appearance. In some cases, less than a year has elapsed since they appeared in the Atlantic or the Reporter; and even if one were to undertake the serious job of consistent editing the material needs, it would be difficult to establish an underlying point towards which all should tend. (Ihab Hassan tried...