BOOKS
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critical discourse over the past two or three decades may itself be a
reaction to the times . For is there not a kind of embattlement in the
stance itself of meditating upon a "great tradition," a procession of
writers valued and cherished in the old modernist way?
The procession seems the obvious one, embracing the "classic"
writers. But unacknowledged in the book is the fact that just such an
"American procession" has been under severe criticism recently, on
grounds not necessarily literary. Except for Emily Dickinson, Kazin's
major figures are all male, all white, all native born. Does it not
seem reasonable to ask, though few were asking in 1961, why no
black writers appear in a study of a "crucial century" which includes
the literary careers of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, Jean
Toomer, Langston Hughes and other Harlem writers of the 1920s?
Or why major woman writers like Edith Wharton and Gertrude
Stein appear only as pendants to a more prominent male writer?
True, also among the missing are Frost, Stevens , Hart Crane,
William Carlos Williams, Eugene O'Neill. The book deals with
figures, not movements, with individuals rather than categories.
The issue is not who is in and who is not, but what the unstated
measure of selection and exclusion might reveal about the role of the
writer-critic at the present time.
This is not to berate Kazin, I hope it is clear, for failing to obey
an obviously inappropriate principle of affirmative action in literary
criticism. Few critics have been as eloquent as he in defense of
democratic values. The questions I raise point instead to something
less crude and obvious: the absence in the book of direct reflection
upon itself, upon its own principles, its assumptions about litera–
ture, upon the predicament of criticism under conditions that prevail
today . And the absence too of overt signs of that essential "struggle
with oneself' of which Kazin speaks in his 1962 essay: "Any critic
who is any good is going to write out of a profound inner struggle
between what has been and what must be, the values he is used to
and those which presently exist, between the past and the present
out of which the future must be born."
Do we expect too much?
An American Procession
seems to con–
struct a hedge against an encroaching history, a line of writers
through whom Kazin himself has obviously come better to possess
and understand his own relations to the place and the idea called
America. The book is remarkable for its considerable artistry: the
way, for example, its argument regarding "ruling by style" and the
personal element in American writing makes room for itself within
