240
PARTISAN REVIEW
Bolshevik world, the parents' dream of worldly success was driven
more and more underground (who dared confess it in the pit of the
Depression! ), and the Soviet Union more and more replaced America
as the visible image of freedom. There began a looking back eastward
over one's shoulder for the vision that had once glimmered on the
western horizon; and it was no accident that some of Kazin's friends
sailed back over the tracks of their parents to die in the Spanish
Civil War. There has always been in American Communism, so much
the product of the children of East European Jewish immigrants, this
exasperation at the mirage of hope appearing in precisely the place
one has just left, and consequently the general air of one running
frantically from line to line before a post-office. window, as the line
one is
not
in seems always to move faster toward its goal.
But the young "Bolsheviks" of the second generation (Kazin him–
self remained a "Socialist" though one attracted toward the pole of
the Soviet Union) entertained a contradiction as deep and unper–
ceived as that of their parents: a loyalty to the unorganized fraternity
of the "isolated" artists of all times and places and beliefs: Whitman,
Eliot, Beethoven or Emily Dickinson, along with an allegiance to the
working class and its Party to which loneliness was the unforgivable
sin. When that odd and untenable amalgam fell apart for Kazin,
it was toward the "isolatoes" that he turned in his typical develop–
ment; but not before some of his friends had sailed off in search of
barricades with the
Waste Land
in their pockets.
The key image of Kazin's book is walking, alone or with a girl, but
chiefly alone: the erratic, desperate exploration of his world by a young
man, moving beneath the walls he cannot believe will ever open to
him, but moving at least to his own internal music (the music, one
recalls, to which Ulysses also unfolds, a characteristic modern music).
Here is no marcher in a parade, no comrade lost among the millions
in the "march of history," but the unredeemably lonely walker in
the City. The City, with its parody of sociability, its interposition of a
false fate of
things
between man and his destiny, is the proper end
of the pilgrimage to America. No modern mythology is possible that
is not an urban mythology, from the image of the Artist as Stephen
Dedalus to the avatar of the Hero as Captain Marvel; and it is finally
just that the individual finding his own and our America should have
come the long way from Walden Pond to Brownsville.
It is because the young Jew as writer and thinker is the very
symbol of our urbanization (as also our ambivalent relationship to
Europe, the atomization of our culture and our joyful desperation)
