God and the American Writer

National Review, Dec 8, 1997 by Jeffrey Hart

LET us begin by praising Alfred Kazin. Now in his eighties, he has lived long with books, and literature matters greatly to him. All that he has written since On Native Ground (1942) testifies to that. Today, if you drop in on an English-literature class, you are likely to hear a lecture on kinky sex, amateur epistemology, Marxism, racial oppression, the Third World, or the atom bomb. What a relief to turn to Mr. Kazin.

In the present volume, he has chapters on a dozen American writers who matter: Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, William James, Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, Frost, Faulkner -- and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who matters historically. He has things to say about many other writers along the way. His organizing question here is: What did each of these writers believe about God? What we get, broadly speaking, and with the signal exception of T. S. Eliot, is a religious landscape very late in the history of the Reformation.

The Protestant principle, as Matthew Arnold said, is individual judgment. The exercising of individual judgments led first to great religious fissures, then to the multiplication of sects, and finally to the ultimate sect -- that is, the individual human being on his own, at once the preacher and the congregation, who allows himself to be overheard by an audience outside his sect of one. This church of one leads quite naturally to problems with form. Form is a restriction and not welcomed by the Imperial Self of late Protestantism.

It is not surprising that the sect of one produced extraordinary garrulousness. Mr. Kazin deals, of course, with Whitman, whose many luminous passages he rightly admires, but who did not know (Mr. Kazin doesn't stress this) when he was great and when he was just a windbag. Other sects of one include William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Such poets cannot stop talking. Who is to confine individual judgment, that Protestant absolute? If Pound equally honors the economics of C. H. Douglas and the poetry of Cavalcanti, well, that has to be fine, because he said it, and he is the final authority in his sect of one.

Emerson was a stunningly gifted writer, but also believed that he himself was the Cosmos. He internalized the All, and spoke confidently from the perspective of that authority. The cosmic Eye was I. His orphic sentences, though they often seem highly challengeable, march along as if they were self-validating. One sentence does not even follow from the preceding one, and no need is felt for argumentation or evidence. Each sentence is true because he, the Cosmos itself, said it. By all accounts he was a helluva lecturer, serene, radiant, certain, inspired.

Of course some of these writers did have individual techniques of control: Hawthorne's distancing and cool syntax, Dickinson's deliberate solitude, Frost's skeptical edge, and so on.

Mr. Kazin's approach has its own problems. He wishes to answer his question about God and these writers and, more broadly, deliver or sum up each writer's world view. But the writing itself keeps jumping out of the box he is trying to construct for it, and this leads him to much mangling of the texts. For example, he wishes to say that Frost was this-worldly, a poet of the here and now, not transcendental. This leads Mr. Kazin to botch his reading of the major poem "Birches." He cites what he calls its great line: "Earth's the right place for love." But he does not consider what follows immediately after that: "I don't know where it's likely to go better." Frost is more complicated than Mr. Kazin wants him to be. Frost very carefully does not reject the possibility of a love that is not of this earth. He just does not "know" where it's "likely" to go better. He does want to swing on that birch "toward" Heaven. Indeed, the "pathless wood" he is in deliberately recalls and plays off Dante's "dark wood" at the beginning of the Inferno. Mr. Kazin also misreads "Stopping by Woods" and much else in Frost, and in other writers.

In Eliot he rightly admires much in the poetry, especially the Cape Ann and river passages, where he perhaps excels Whitman. When important passages in Eliot do not appeal to Mr. Kazin however, he just quits: The "'religious' warnings of dissolution ending The Waste Land in thunder meant less to Eliot's admirers than to him." What? Those lines are of great importance to Eliot's subsequent poetry. What kind of "admirers" are we talking about?

Mr. Kazin does not seem to see the large problem posed by his subject, the late history of Protestantism. The Reformation was utopian, and it became, in Dryden's phrase, a "downhill Reformation" because in due course the individual person whose judgment was the basis of Protestantism did not do the hard intellectual work necessary to make responsible judgments. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley would have been horrified to think that their followers would forget the key Biblical texts, remain ignorant of the strong evidence and arguments for Biblical truth -- become so bemused, for instance, as to think Darwin and paleontology constituted a threat to Genesis 1, or even think the six days of creation were 24-hour solar days (when the sun was not created until the third day) -- and not even know, much less refute, I Corinthians 15. The individual person whose judgment was projected as the basis of Protestantism merely heard that someone, somewhere -- Darwin? T. H. Huxley? H. L. Mencken? --had refuted all the arguments and ruled out the evidence. Thus emerged a new style of unconvincing preaching, either depending upon vehemence and enthusiasm or else sinking into mere secular politics -- a far cry from the tightly reasoned sermons of, for example, Wesley or Newman.