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PARTISAN REVIEW
aspiration and inner conflict. Consider what he makes of a detail like
Henry Adams's surprise that his black butler, brought along to Chi–
cago in 1893 to cook for his boss's party, had been too busy to take in
the World's Fair. The remark helps construct the complex picture
which makes of Adams one of the book's key figures, one of Kazin's
triumphs of portraiture. Or his pleasure in his own figurative lan–
guage, as this description of Ralph Touchett, "dangling from the tree
of his father's millions like a withered apple about to fall." Or his
description of Hemingway's style: "To read Hemingway was always
to feel more alive. The spontaneous reaction was pleasure from the
cunning way sentences fall, from the bright echoing separateness of
the words, from every picture a passage put into the mind. One was
brought close to some exceptional vividness."
And yet there is something disquieting about
An American Pro–
cession.
For Kazin writes as if nothing has changed in the twenty or
more years since he began this book as the Christian Gauss lectures
in 1961, as if his belief in the authority and power of literature re–
mains an unquestioned principle. "Russian literature of the nine–
teenth century made the revolution possible," he wrote in his 1962
essay on the function of criticism, and quotes Randall Jarrell's re–
mark that "in America today many intellectual couples turn to
criticism for the sort of guidance they used to get from a minister."
Indeed Kazin's high-minded version of criticism derives from that
moment when it seemed, in light of the failure of ideologies and
revolutions, that writers were all we had to rely on for guidance, for
consolation, for reliable insight. In 1962, with Lionel Trilling and
Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv and RandallJarrell and Kazin himself
as living examples, it seemed no more than commonplace to remark
that "the critic who teaches literature is now the focus for values and
influence that in other cultures are furnished by the family, religion,
political ideologies."
How to account for the decline in prominence and influence of
the humanist writer-critic is not to be ventured here. Surely there
will be no disagreement that for better or for worse current literary
theorizing represents only a symptom of a more fundamental shift in
the status of literature, not to say of literacy itself.
It
comes with
something of a jolt to realize that Kazin's book, begun in the early
1960s, shows no overt signs that anything has changed in "the func–
tion of criticism," let alone in the notion of "major writers."
A curious lapse, for one might have expected polemic. To be
sure the apparently unroffied assumption we find of a continuous
