Alfred Kazin - God and the American Writer

Acclaim for ALFRED KAZINs

God and the American Writer

Kazin [writes] the kind of literary criticism everyone wants to read but so few seem willing to write.

Christian Science Monitor

God and the American Writer does more to illuminate the fundamental purposes and motivations of our greatest writers than any study I have read in the past 55 yearsthat is, since the same authors On Native Grounds.

Louis S. Auchincloss

The American writers struggles to reject, accept, sublimate, or ignore God is the stem around which Kazin has wound his fascinating insights. It is a profound pleasure to read such inspired good sense.

Arthur Miller

Americas best living writer on American writing. You get writing of muscular grace, writing that rises to the level of literature itself.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Our foremost literary critic shows how our finest literature was shaped by writers ecstatic with love of God, haunted by the death of God, or determined to create God in their own image.

Russell Baker

ALFRED KAZIN

God and the American Writer

Alfred Kazin was born in Brooklyn in 1915. His first book of criticism, On Native Grounds (1942), was a groundbreaking study of American literature that changed radically our way of looking at it, and established him overnight as a major figure. In a series of books of his own since then, and in many critically edited texts of classic American literary works, he established himself as our preeminent man of letters. He taught widely at Harvard, Smith, Amherst, Hunter College, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and elsewhere. In 1996 he received from the Truman Capote Literary Trust its first Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism (in memory of Newton Arvin). He died in June of 1998.

Books by ALFRED KAZIN

God and the American Writer
A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin
Writing Was Everything
Our New York ( WITH DAVID FINN )
A Writers America: Landscape in Literature
Bright Book of Life:
American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer
An American Procession
On Native Grounds
Starting Out in the Thirties
The Inmost Leaf
New York Jew
Contemporaries
A Walker in the City

EDITOR

The Viking Portable Blake
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work
The Stature of Theodore Dreiser ( WITH CHARLES SHAPIRO )
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Emerson: A Modern Anthology ( WITH DANIEL AARON )
The Works of Anne Frank ( WITH ANN BIRSTEIN )
The Open Form: Essays for Our Time
Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1998

Copyright 1997 by Alfred Kazin

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.

Owing to limitations of space, all permissions to reprint previously published material may be found in .

Some of the material in this book first appeared, in slightly different form, in The New York Review of Books, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, and the 1989 Conference on Faulkner and Religion published by the University Press of Mississippi.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Kazin, Alfred.
God and the American writer / Alfred Kazin.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5122-1
1. American literatureHistory and criticism. 2. Christianity and literatureUnited States. 3. Puritan movements in literature. 4. Religion and literature. 5. Theology in literature. 6. God in literature. I. Title.
PS166.K39 1997 97-2993
810.9382dc21

eISBN: 978-0-8041-5122-1

www.randomhouse.com

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FOR AN ABSENT FRIEND

RICHARD HOFSTADTER
(19161970)

I have sometimes asked Americans whom I chanced to meet in their own country or in Europe whether in their opinion religion contributes to the stability of the State and the maintenance of law and order. They always answered, without a moments hesitation, that a civilized community, especially one that enjoys the benefit of freedom, cannot exist without religion. In fact, an American sees in religion the surest guarantee of the stability of the State and the safety of individuals. This much is evident even to those least versed in political science. Yet there is no country in the world in which the boldest political theories of the eighteenth-century philosophers are put so effectively into practice as in America. Only their anti-religious doctrines have never made any headway in that country, and this despite the unlimited freedom of the press.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
The Old Regime and the French Revolution

We thank thee, Father, for these strange minds that enamor us against thee.

EMILY DICKINSON

I N THE BEGINNING at New England our writers were Calvinists, absolutely sure of God and all His purposes. He created man to glorify Him forever. But never sure of his obedience, distrustful of his innate disposition to sin, God kept man forever under His eye. Each claimed to know the other because there was a covenant between them, a contract. Each was eternally watchful of the other, each apparently needed the other. Nothing in the world around a Calvinist counted so much as his dependence on God, his knowledge of God, his standing with God. And God was as eternally occupied with man as man was with God. They were so bound to each other that to the Romantic poets and scientific rationalists who came in with the Age of Reason, God and man seemed born of each other. No wonder that the Puritans in the wilderness, lacking everything but God, were confident to the last that they knew Gods mind.

The people who were soon to distance themselves from primitive New England, to call themselves Americans and to expand until they were all over the continent, had to be restless optimists, boosters and boasters always on the go. The writers who stood slightly apart inherited Calvinism with their distrust of human nature. They were Puritanscertain of the next world but never sure of man in this onethus inaugurating a split between writers occupied with humankinds self-deceiving ways and a populace afraid of too much self-questioning.

Calvinism held to the unquestioned omnipotence of God and so to belief in predestination. While the latter could make you anxious about your chance for salvation, the former gave you assurance that God was always there. This was behind the individuals high sense of himself so famous in the American character. By nourishing in every individual the highest raptures and ecstasies of devotion, David Hume observed of Scotland under Calvinism, it consecrated, in a manner, every individual; and in his own eyes, bestowed a character on him much superior to what forms and ceremonious institutions could confer.