Books
The Native Critic
ON NATIVE GROUNDS: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose
Literature. By Alfred Kazin. Reynal and Hitchcock. $3.50.
"The greatest single fact" about our modern American writing," Mr.
Kazin says in his introduction, is "our writers' absorption in every last
detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle
alienation from it." I do not know that the alienation has been very subtle;
but otherwise the statement seems to me true and enlightening. And it
applies to the native critic as well as to the native novelist and poet.
To the critic in fact it may even apply in a double sense. With Europe's
better developed culture as a standard, he sometimes feels estranged
not only from America at large but from much of its literature. The
critic is like those heroes of Silone or Graham Greene who are fugitives
both from the world in general and from their own unpopular sects.
I do not mean that imaginative writers are not also conscious of European
literature or that the creative and the critical faculties are not sometimes
combined in the same writer, but only that the critic as critic is neces·
sarily more preoccupied with comparative values in literature. Nobody
likes the sterile isolation and self-pity which often go with this situation.
And critics have more and more been occupying themselves with intensive
studies in American culture which might serve them as a bridge back to
the literature and the people. But even the friendliest intentions cannot
wipe out the still palpable discrepancy between America's greatness,
considered both quantitatively and as a human spectacle, and the manifest
incompleteness of her literary achievement. Some awareness of the dis·
crepancy continues to be latent, I think, in even the most passionately
affirmative of these cultural studies. The fervent literary archeology, the
artificial attempts to rehabilitate old reputations and unearth buried
masters, the very special poignancy of tone and overdramatization of our
literary history, above all the frank substitution of merely local standards
for international ones-all this originates, I believe, in the felt need to
compensate for radical deficiencies in the literature itself. Van Wyck
Brooks, for example, is clearly not writing about American books and
authors: he is invoking some trar.scendent national promise, some Amer·
ican Creative
~pirit,
which to him exists quite apart from any of its
actual manifestations in American writing.
In certain respects Alfred Kazin's fine history of recent American
prose belongs to the tradition of these cultural studies. It too is detailed
and scholarly, energetically inquisitive and exploratory. It too is oc·
casionally guilty of the consolatory rhetoric and overdramatization.
On
Native Grounds
seems to me, however, to be the best of all these studies
that I have read
(I
have not read Matthiessen's
American Renaissance
for example), and altogether a remarkable achievement. Brook's fairy·
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