Aged twenty-seven, Kazin had published his study of realism in American literature, On Native Grounds (1942), a feat almost but not quite as precocious as William Empson’s completing Seven Types of Ambiguity while still an undergraduate. Over the next fifty-five years, Kazin published some dozen books, and countless articles and essays. While it has been suggested that his Journals, of which this collection represents but a small proportion of those held in the New York Public Library, all previously unpublished, are his pre-eminent contribution to American letters, I would recommend two autobiographical works, A Walker in the City (1951) and New York Jew (1978). It was through the latter, purchased in Manhattan, that I first made a reader’s acquaintance with Alfred Kazin.

But who, little more than a decade after his death, has heard of Alfred Kazin? This is not merely some ‘velveteen, work-shy, marxist toad’ (thank you, Flann O’Brien) of a rumination, some limp-wristed ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ speculation. It is rather to invite consideration of the fate of the critic, especially the reviewer-critic. After a life which was in more ways than one an act of the will, a triumph over circumstance, devoted to literature and criticism, what remains, especially in what many jeremiahs insist is a post-literate age? Have we proceeded – hardly progressed – from the eighteenth-century’s Grub Street (see Pope’s Dunciad), through Gissing’s ‘New Grub Street’ unto – to stay Down Under, where the current crop of readers and writers is less likely than those in New York to have heard of, let alone read, Alfred Kazin – unto ‘Newest Grub Street’ as personified by Peter Craven from an older generation and Geordie Williamson in another, honourable reviewer-critics both. Have they kept their journals as hostages to fortune?

One should not be too severe on the supposedly post-literate young, surfers of the electronicsphere, when their eminent elders admit to ignorance of Kazin. Worrying away at this piece over three months and more than a thousand pages, I cornered two of my close friends, each eminent in his own sphere of Australian letters, at separate dinner tables, asking whether they were familiar with Alfred Kazin. Both professed ignorance, but both, when I contextualised Kazin in the Jewish intellectual scene in New York in the middle of last century and went on to pose the same question about Kazin’s contemporary, Lionel Trilling, said ‘Of course’. Which would have galled Kazin, as he and Trilling were almost lifelong antagonists, Kazin being convinced, justly or not, that Trilling, as professor of literature at Columbia University, had kept him, Kazin, out. Kazin would have been further galled by Adam Kirsch’s recent book Why Trilling Matters (also Yale University Press, 2011). There are, however, Kazin’s Journals to pit against Kirsch’s defensive celebration. They are an implicit defence of Why Kazin Matters.

But I wanted a story, an anecdote, to convince my friends, and you readers, of Kazin’s high profile in his own time. The following, which will doubtless offend the Morally Serious among you, seems to me a clincher. On 28 November 1966, Truman Capote held his famous Black and White Masked Ball at the Plaza Hotel, New York, to celebrate the success of In Cold Blood, the ‘non-fiction novel’ about which Kazin had serious reservations. Capote said that he invited the five hundred most famous people in the world. One of the five hundred was Kazin, mere literary critic, Jewish boy from Brownsville, son of immigrant Polish Jews, his mother a seamstress, the Julian Sorel of mid-century Manhattan. The invitation was not merely a consummation devoutly to be wished, but one worthy of Truman Capote himself. Or Jay Gatsby. It is indeed a quintessentially American story. In his journal for that day, Kazin wrote:

At Truman’s ball, the slithy, slender young ladies in blond cascades and white dresses and jeweled masks and fans – at Truman’s ball, the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Dancing with Jean Van Den Heuvel [editor of the Paris Review], I felt all that slenderness in my hand, that cup of skin in my hand […] Truly, pleasure and the fate of pleasure? The bitterness rises in my throat – the sense of never coming near enough to beauty, of never having enough. Thank God for the candle that burned all that evening behind Lou’s head when I fucked her! Thank God for Carol and Carla and Rose and Jean, for Celia and Elsie and Sylvia and Rosalind, for Alice and Vivienne – for the other Sylvia, for Lou, Lou, Lou! Quite a party, quite a party, but it’s not yet over – All the lithe, young matrons at the part [sic], draw a single curve –

Kazin’s oft-mentioned undescended testicle may have kept him out of World War II, and may have caused him concern, when younger, about his fertility, but it didn’t prevent him from leading a hyperactive sex life.

Why should we attend to Kazin now? Both New York Jew and A Walker in the City are masterful non-fiction fictions. On Native Grounds is such an impressive study of American literature that Clem Christesen ‘borrowed’ its title for his ‘selections from Meanjin’ (1968). But the ‘selected’ Journals are a triumphant witness to the times, to America and particularly to New York and its Jews, its Sidney Hook and Norman Podhoretz and Susan Sontag, and many, many others from 1930 through 1990. It is evidence for what Irving Howe, another prominent New York Jew, called ‘The World of Our Fathers’. It is a record of, and a tribute to, friendships made and friendships dissolved – with, for example, Saul Bellow, Shirley Hazzard, Francis Steegmuller, Ralph Ellison. Gertrude Stein famously said, ‘Remarks, Hemingway, are not literature.’ But the remarks that constitute these Journals surely are.

Another thing. I may never again complain about the quality of Australian book-editing given the howlers in these volumes from an eminent American academic press. Shirley Hazzard is referred to as an Austrian novelist; Allen Ginsberg becomes Ginsburg passim and in the Index; Katherine Mansfield is correctly named in the text, but in a footnote on the same page becomes ‘Kathleen’, and is turned into an ‘English’ writer. Not good enough, Yale!