ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997 TAG: 9703290001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: HILLEL ITALIE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Author and critic Alfred Kazin is the living definition of a New York intellectual.
A wise man once said the difference between the fiction writer and the critic is that the fiction writer can describe people in conflict while the critic can only imagine them alone.
That wise man is Alfred Kazin, and he's a critic, a critic who for some 60 years has written both about those who can describe people in conflict and about the conflict within a single mind, his own mind.
Then again, Kazin, author of more than a dozen books, is not simply ``a critic.'' He's a personal historian, a cultural historian, a philosopher, a theologian. He's a New York intellectual who practically defines what it means to be one, a son of Jewish immigrants who called one of his books, without irony, ``New York Jew.''
``I grew up in that tradition of intellectual socialism, and in the 1930s it was very natural. Also, all of those people, or most of them, were Jews,'' Kazin said during a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment.
``My friends, most of whom are Jewish, are as a matter of course nuts about literature, about music. The other day, a friend of mine who lost his job as a publisher - we're sitting and we're talking. He spoke for an hour and a half about the beauties of Brahms.''
Kazin, 81, frail in body and strong in mind, a handsome, somewhat stooped man, with silver hair and narrow blue eyes. Direct and assertive as a speaker, he is equally striking as a listener. He listens as if he were reading, in rapt silence, his head erect, small eyes focused, closed smile fixed in concentration.
He will work as long as he can write and think. He still free-lances reviews, and he has recently completed ``God and the American Writer,'' an extensive work on 19th-century American authors. A paperback edition of ``A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment,'' a collection of his journals dating back to the '30s, is to be published this spring.
``The older you get, the more intense life becomes, everything goes quickly quickly, faster faster, the great sense of belonging to another period,'' Kazin said.
``One of the things I'm very much involved with in my notebooks these days is the relationship between body and mind. Life is a constant paradox in the sense that, especially as you get older, you are your body, but meanwhile your mind, especially at night, or, if you're a writer in daytime, goes out in the most unexplained ways.''
Here's another way to differentiate fiction writers from the rest of the world. There are people who write fiction and there are people who live the life of a fictional character. Kazin easily fits into the latter category.
Think of him as a character out of Henry Roth or Bernard Malamud. His life is so quintessential that you may feel you've heard it before; then again, Kazin helped make this kind of life quintessential.
Born in 1915 to Russian immigrants, he grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood so self-contained, and so Jewish, that even meeting a gentile seemed as though you were encountering another world. It was here that he absorbed the ``fire and color of immigrant life.'' And not far from this neighborhood, a teen-age Kazin fell in love - at the public library.
``Whenever I entered the library I would walk up and down trembling in front of the shelves,'' he would later write.
``The automatic part of my reading was history. The past, the past was great: anything American, old, glazed, touched with dusk at the end of the 19th century, still smoldering with the fires lit by the industrial revolution, immediately set my mind dancing.''
In the same circular way a writer becomes a writer by writing, Kazin became a critic by being a critic. Riding on the subway in 1934, he read a New York Times book review and disagreed so strongly that he got off the train near the Times' offices and confronted the critic, John Chamberlain. Kazin was soon writing criticism for the New Republic, thanks in part to Chamberlain, who recommended him as ``an intelligent radical.''
The radical intellectual ceased being radical by the end of the '30s, but remained an intellectual. He met Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. And he wrote at Partisan Review along with Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy and Delmore Schwartz.
``This avant-garde gnawed on each other, lived on each other,'' Kazin once wrote. ``Yet through the very basis of the association that Partisan Review editors and writers had with each other was a kind of group identification, these people saw themselves as loyal to a great cultural tradition. It was my tradition.''
Fame, at least at the level a critic can expect, came in 1942 with ``On Native Grounds,'' his acclaimed history of American literature and society from the late 19th century to the beginning of World War II. He has also written several books about his early years and has edited several collections of other writers. His reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times and several other publications.
The role of books in society has changed drastically in the past 50 years, but Kazin hasn't changed his opinion on the role of the critic. He stands by what he wrote in the introduction to ``On Native Grounds,'' addressed both to those who wanted literature to make political statements and those who considered literature a purely private experience.
``True criticism only begins with books but can never be removed from their textures,'' he wrote.
``We have seen the relation of the writer to society either ignored or simplified, though it can never be ignored and is never simple. We have seen the life taken out of criticism, the human grace, the simple all-enveloping knowledge that there are no separate uses in literature but only its relevance to the whole life of man.''
Although Kazin called one of his books ``Writing Was Everything'' he doesn't believe life is to be lived only in the mind. He dismisses the statement of George Bernard Shaw, who once remarked that only on paper has humanity achieved real beauty and abiding love.
``I don't agree with that. That was Shaw, a writer I admired very much. He didn't believe in sex, he had no interest it, and he was a vegetarian,'' Kazin said.
``Some of the most beautiful moments in my life have been eating steak, drinking red wine, and, uh, and, uh ...''
And sex?
``What?''
And sex.
``Definitely.''
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS. Alfred Kazin, 81, recently completedby CNB``God and the American Writer,'' an extensive work on 19th-century
American authors.