BOOKS
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that
A Walker in the City
takes on an additional weight, seems central
to our plight. It is his sure sense of this
central-ness
of his experience
which saves Kazin from the temptation to cheap exoticism inherent
in his material. It would have been only too easy to have submitted
to the familiar I-remember-momma-over-the-lox-and-bagels routine,
and to have become the Molly Goldberg of the anti-television set; in
the world of enlightenment and good will, everyone is eager to chortle
warmly over the difference of the immigrant Jew, when it is precisely
his sameness which matters. Yet Kazin does not deny himself com–
pletely the warmth inherent in his material; avoiding the more ob–
vious uses of irony, he dares risk exploiting the "soft" sensibility which
this century has taught us to regard as inherently false.
It is the
seriousness,
the religious tone (if one can use the adjective
without implying mawkish piety) of the book which overcomes its
various temptations: sentimentality, local color, and finally the im–
pulse to become just another "first novel," the pseudo-fictional con–
fession which is a bore before it is told. We have here, to be sure,
another portrait of the artist as a young man, and one, indeed, which
is constantly reminding us of the Joycean prototype. But Kazin has
not, in the typical loss of nerve, retreated back to older fictional forms
from Joyce's almost total demolition of all that makes the conventional
novel. He has rather pushed on into a kind of non-novel, whose pos–
sibilities Joyce made apparent in his
Portrait,
but from which he him–
self turned at the very last minute when Stephen's ultimate vision
showed him only a way back into art. Kazin's book, being a religious
one, becomes in a way a reversal of the Joycean procedure (I do not
mean, of course, to suggest that Kazin's book is the peer of Joyce's, or
on the other hand, to overshadow him by evoking the great ghost,
but the comparison demands to be made); Joyce is attempting all
the time to show that so-called moments of mystical insight are,
when they are genuine, "aesthetic," while Kazin seems to me to be
attempting to redeem the Joycean "epiphany" from literature to some–
thing more like the traditional meaning of religion.
A Walker in the City
is, in the end, the account of a series of
illuminations, strung on a strand of reminiscence; the evocation of
deep intuitive experiences of unity with the otherness of nature and
man and God, which does not deny but in an unforeseen way fulfills
loneliness. And this also is an America, discovered, as it were, inadver–
tently by a boy from Brownsville in search of a much simpler belong–
ingness.
Leslie A. Fiedler
