`America the Mix'

Why should we be surprised that Alfred Kazin, the Brooklyn-born son of Jews who fled tsarist Russia, became an “Americanist,” a celebrator of all that is best in American culture, especially literature? After all, the obligatory hyphens – “Russian-Jewish-American” – are a giveaway. Like so many of us, Kazin answered to the idea of America, the impossible challenge the Founding Fathers set for us, to live up to our accomplishments and bottomless potential. This has nothing to do with patriotism, nationalism, jingoism or militarism. It is not about politics. It has to do with the unlikely experiment launched in 1776.

Like many writers, Kazin felt the pull of the years immediately preceding his birth (in 1915, six days before his friend, Saul Bellow), the era into which his parents were born. Thus, on the third page of A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment, the selection he made from the journal he kept for 60 years, Kazin wrote:

“I have never been able to express the excitement I get from `Americana,’ from Constance Rourke’s saying, `the poet of American nationality’ – from the very names Cope, James, Peirce, Dickinson, and Roebling in Lewis Mumford’s The Brown Decades – from Thomas Bee’s Hanna and The Mauve Decade – from the letters of William James. To think of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Henry James, of Emerson and Whitman and Dickinson in the same breath, as it were, gives me extraordinary satisfaction. Makers and movers and thinkers – observers in the profoundest sense. I loved to think of America as an idea, to remember the adventure and the purity, the heroism and the salt.

“Of course I love all this from the outside, as the first native son after so many generations of mud-flat Russian Jews who never saw the United States. But my personal need is great, my inquiry is urgent.”

The individual entries in Kazin’s journal are not dated, but this passage seems to come from about 1938, when he was 23 and commencing work on his great American love song, On Native Grounds (1942). Two themes run consistently through his journals – what it means to be an American and what it means to be Jewish. In a passage probably from the 1950s in which Kazin discusses the search for cultural roots by Jewish intellectuals, he writes:

“But look who’s talking! No one could love America’s Protestant thinkers – Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Lincoln, et al. – more than I do.”

In the Bicentennial year, while writing An American Procession (1984), Kazin composed this lovely reverie:

“How they struggle in, the members of my procession, my American congregation. How they fall in around my typewriter to show themselves a family. I keep seeing Willa Cather on that train doing the long trek homeward to Nebraska, and those lonely reporters from Mark Twain to Ambrose Bierce, Hemingway, and Ring Lardner, hunched down in the dead of night in small-town newspaper offices with the tawny yellow shades drawn against the one street light.”

In 1990, when Lewis Mumford died at the age of 94, Kazin noted:

“In 1931, with The Brown Decades, Mumford changed by life by documenting what by instinct had long been my favorite period of cultural history in America – from the Civil War to the nettlesome nineties. The book brought home to me the painters Thomas Eakins, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Winslow Homer, and George Fuller; the poet Emily Dickinson; the architects Louis Sullivan, Henry Hobson Richardson, and John Wellborn Root. Best of all, his book instructed me in the building of Brooklyn Bridge, from boyhood an icon in my life.”

And, from his final decade (Kazin died in 1998), he left this freestanding sentence:

“America the mix, the grand mix, the mixed-up kid.”