BOOKS
127
tells us about his mother, his cousin Sophie and himself. "With my
mother," Kazin writes in a passage that with the exception of E. E.
Cummings' famous letter about his father is the most moving tribute
to a parent in modern American writing, "every morsel of life was paid
for in fear. You calculated the price of every$ing before you bought
it,
and even if you bought it, you could not enjoy it for thinking how
much it had cost you. . . . In my mother's world no one ever shrugged
her shoulders; no one was ever bored or lazy; no one was ever cynical;
no one ever laughed. She was an indentured selVant of the emotions,
and always a slave to other people.... I seemed always to see her bent
to
someone's service. . .." The "proud and flashing loneliness" of Sophie,
wasting her days in vain wait for a suitor to carry her out of her unwed
misery, is also tellingly conveyed. And from the very first sentence of
the book, in which Kazin describes himself as "desolately" on his way
home to Brooklyn after having completed his course at City College,
Starting Out in the Thirties
registers a devastating sense of personal
isolation. Socialism, Kazin says, was an article of faith for him and for
everyone he knew, but if he dreamed of a new community, if he pas–
sionately responded to the acts of personal solidarity that Silone was
describing in
Fontamara
and Malraux in
Man's Fate,
Kazin neverthe–
less inhabited a world in which he felt as useless and driven "as an
alley cat," in which reading novels and going to newsreel theaters
defined his relationship to the forces of history, in which emotional
hunger finally drove him into an "unspoken engagement" with a girl
named Nora whom he did not love and into marriage with a girl named
Natasha whose own "immense loneliness" matched his own, but whose
heart he admits he was ignorant of.
Yet within a paragraph of Kazin's magnificently candid and reveal–
ing assessment of the terms of his first marriage, his narrative suddenly
and inexplicably clams up. With a truly Hawthomesque evasiveness,
Kazin
says it was during this period (1938-1939) that he began work,
"at the instigation of Carl Van Doren," on a book on modem American
writing. No other motive for the creation of
On Native Grounds
is of–
fered-and subsequent allusions to the book cast no light whatsoever
on what was surely the most important intellectual and emotional com–
mitment of Kazin's young life, involving the profoundest issues of per–
sonal and social identity. Such issues have been at stake in the careers
of other literary critics of our time who have chosen to focus their
energies on American literature, and the fact that a great deal more
than
intellectual curiosity or literary taste has been involved in their
choice has lent to the modem criticism of American literature its special
