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

December 25, 1942

"What has the Socialism of intellectuals ever to do with the people? Think of Edmund Wilson's socialism so humanist, meditative, and the rest--but it is as self-consciously personal as Flaubert's hatred of socialism; both artists merely talk about their particular vision of the world and their horror of it."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, entry from December 25, 1942