BOOKS
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performance: the critic in the act of self-discovery, working out his
own responses, finding the properly evocative and suggestive
language whereby to ground the effect of a literary work in a specific
reader's experience.
Indeed we might say that the book consists more of a voice, the
articulation through a set of responses of a moral point of view, than
of an explicit argument. Not that what it says about its subjects can–
not be summarized and appraised: its thematic emphases on "self,"
on "history," on "style," for example . These terms point to the con–
ceptual substance of Kazin's point of view, what he has to say about
American writers in the hundred-year period covered by the book.
The insights are never trivial or inconsequential. But what invites a
higher regard, is the very fact of such a book at such a time.
It
is as if
hearing a voice from another place, another discourse, refusing to
keep still.
Criticism matters for Kazin only to the extent that it recounts
and reconstructs the experience of reading- not as a narrow event of
literary analysis but a more fully biographical event : not so much
"personal" as
individual,
belonging to someone who far from keeping
himself out of the picture makes himself, his reactions, his enthu–
siasms the very center of the composition .
It
is not a question of
egotism but of consciousness and of history. Like Eliot, Kazin has
insisted that the critic must write with a "sense of the age in his
bones." Criticism matters, as he wrote almost twenty-five years ago
in an homage to Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism To–
day, " because only the critic registers and makes articulate the
challenge to consciousness in "that new balance of forces that is a
work of art. " And he does so only insofar as he is "always a writer,"
serious about his own craft, committed to serving as the medium
whereby art meets its future. "The critic who writes well," Kazin
argued movingly, "is the critic who lives in literature, who is involved
himself and therefore sees the involvement of literature in our con–
duct, our thinking, our pleasures, our human fate ." And "he writes
to convince, to argue, to establish his argument in a way that pure
logic would never approve and pure scholarship would never under–
stand, but which is justifiable, if it succeeds, as a moral argument in
the great tradition of literature ."
It
is a high office, this notion of criticism, and Kazin is one of
the few surviving masters of the genre . He writes on terms of in–
timacy with the lives as well as the works of his figures, with incon–
spicuous but telling social detail as well as the largest patterns of
