BOOKS
MEMORIES OF SOME THINGS PAST
STARTING OUT IN THE THIRTIES.
By
Alfred Kedn. Atlentic-Uttle, Brown.
~.95.
Alfred Kazin's latest book summons up some interesting and
important personalities from the period of the thirties when he was
getting started as a literary critic. John Chamberlain, who "looked like
a Yale man's idea of a Yale man," Malcolm Cowley, who "resembled
Hemingway in much the same way that matinee idols once resembled
Clark Gable," V. F. Calverton ("a round, kindly, swarthy, eager man,
curiously distracted, with flowing energy") and a "crisp Vassar girl with
[an] Irish jaw" named Mary McCarthy are all recognizably here, along
with a number of their radical friends and enemies, husbands and
mistresses. Yet if Kazin's word-sketches are unfailingly recognizable, they
are also disappointingly predictable. Almost never do they extend our
previous understanding of the people whom they depict. The evocation
of John Chamberlain is only a diluted imitation of Mary McCarthy's
brilliantly acid "portrait of the artist as a Yale man," while Kazin's
Calverton is a more friendly but far less memorable character than the
literary commissar named V. F. Calvert who stalks the pages of John Dos
Passos'
Most Likely to Succeed.
The summary estimate of Mary
McCarthy as "a wholly destructive critical mind" merely echoes a
cocktail-party cliche of the late forties and early fifties. The portrait of
Cowley briefly promises a greater subtlety and freshness, but by the time
Kazin moves from his early awe of Cowley's well-tailored Harvard
manner and literary assurance to the confess:on that he did not like
this man, he has unaccountably lost interest in Cowley and does not
spell out the reasons for his aversion-which is too bad, because the
opportunism of Cowley's career, his uncanny ability (rivaled only
by
Archibald MacLeish's) to be with the right cause at the right time, has
long cried out for critical attention.
The honesty and the beauty of Kazin's memoir emerge only when
he turns away from the luminaries of the New York intelligentsia and
