05/21/1984: On trolley cars

"Why I miss trolley cars. Because unlike everything and everybody else in the U.S. they did not swerve from their ancient path. And because as a boy (thousands of years ago) I went to Coney Island in a trolley car, and saw green grass growing between the tracks and because it was an open trolley, with the conductor on the side hopping from row to row to collect his fares (his left arm holding the rail as he hopped) and because it seemed to me then (as does not happen now on the bus) that the other passengers were all my family, all Brooklyn. And because as we neared the sea, and could see its blue glare on the surface, everyone (at least in the back row) burst out singing."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

"painfully funny"

Talented writer, editor, and publisher Gordon Haber tweeted "five stars" for Auggie's Revenge, so that was nice. Please do consider his new collection of poetry and prose, 2020: Good Writing from a Bad Year.

12/27/1968: Kazin Eyes SDS at MLA

"MLA convention at the Americana. A bunch of over-age SDS's broke up the American literature meetings repeatedly with utterly phony, trumped-up charges of police terror. How these guys like the atmosphere of confrontation. I'll not soon forget the line of young instructors forming before the stage while old, gray, bald Henry Nash Smith made his weak remarks. Pour la reste, I listened to Dick Poirer reading the bad, new critical prose over the question of Chicago and thought, what a phony.

"This was a wholly provoked incident, based on a few posters in a hotel lobby, and leading to deliriously self-righteous rant on the part of Lauter and his wife Florence Howe and the others. I watched all this with the greatest contempt. My soul cannot live on this pseudo-revolutionary fare."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

10/20/68: On Lionel Trilling

"[Lionel] Trilling. I thought that my own feelings were bad enough, but it turns out that his animus against me is even worse. And what has it been about all these years? T[rilling] cannot stand my temperament—he cannot stand the ghetto Jew in me—he cannot stand my vitality. L.T., the would-be gentleman—the little gentleman."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

2020: Good Writing from a Bad Year

Gordon Haber's Dutch Kills Press releases 2020: Good Writing from a Bad Year!

*Scroll to the bottom of the press homepage for the list of contributors.

12/20/1963: Christmas in New York

"All those new office buildings of glass were lit up. [Park] Avenue was sparkling with Christmas lights, and the effect was stunning in its brilliance—as if the heart of the city, the imperial avenue was literally made of light. . . . Christmas in New York with all the nostalgic old-American gestures toward the star and the tree, is really [the] celebration of the city's wealth. And this Friday evening before Xmas on Park Avenue, this wealth is experienced in light. Every window gleamed as a showpiece. . . . If a native is so astonished, a stranger would be blinded."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

I've never felt like an American

 "But no one can tell me that Edmund Wilson feels like an immigrant's son. Bill Gibson and his wife asked people at the Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s house the other day—have you always felt like an American? And I said—I've never felt like an American. But that's because I've given up trying to feel like an American. The lack of tradition is the lack of familiarity in many basic associations—and I know that I am outside them, trying to figure out what to do and what to think in relation to many basic American traditions. . . Yet meanwhile the 'Americans' feel deprived of what they all had. They feel that it's no longer their country."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

good critics

"All good critics are frustrated writers. They are frustrated about the skill they are able to suggest so well because they work close to it without being of it. They are parallel to it and hence can see it in the most marvelous detail without being of it. I understand why Edmund [Wilson] works so hard at his journals. They are his living novel, his unending book of life."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

Kazin on 14th Street

 "This old-fashioned house. Studios. Man downstairs playing Bach. Only on the bottom, on greasy, broken down 14th Street are people at home on Memorial Day playing Bach. Like something out of Willa Cather's Stories of Washington Square."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

Kazin on JFK

"It takes nerve to be president, and once you are in, it takes more nerve to keep from being pulled into extreme positions. Kennedy, the intellectual in his speeches, showed all the signs of being a liberal like us. Now that the 'revolt' in Cuba has ended in a disgraceful loss for us as well as for the rebels, he is no longer the man in the middle (us) but the defender of the West in extremis, taking a 'tough' line. [Barry] Goldwater is please, David Lawrence is pleased, The [New York Daily] News and New York Daily Mirror are pleased. I am full of doubt and wonder. As an intellectual pur, nothing but an intellectual, as it often seems to me, I find myself wondering more and more how long it is possible to remain in the middle. The pull of political gravity these days seems physical in its force. All of us liberals and intellectuals, so firmly in the middle, committed to 'principle,' like Kennedy, find ourselves being pushed and pulled."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook