Abstract
This essay describes the eminent Americanist, critic, and New York intellectual, Alfred Kazin’s creation of a Lionel Trilling “character” in his 1978 autobiography, New York Jew, and his use of that character to critique significant features of the country’s Cold War literary culture. Among these are: the narrowing and hardening of intellectual discourse in a cultural-political climate dominated by the “liberal consensus,” the discrediting of the progressive impulse in American writing, the subordination of “class” to “culture” in evaluations of American writers, and the changing status of Jews and Jewish writers in post-war America. Tapping into strong personal feelings, Kazin creates in Trilling a harsh, thoughtful and compelling portrait of an era.
Highlights
Knopf published New York Jew, the third autobiographical work by the eminent literary critic and Americanist, Alfred Kazin
A look back at the portrait and some relevant entries from both writers’ diaries together with a brief review and discussion of their relationship will indicate some of the personal and political sources of Kazin’s difficulty with Trilling and why he chose to make him a pivotal figure in his chronicle of the post-war years. They shed new light on some of the personal/ideological tensions and disagreements at work in the forties and early fifties that rarely broke the surface of the so-called Cold-War Bliberal consensus.^ Staunchly anticommunist and centrist in its politics, that consensus, perhaps more accurately labeled Bliberal conservatism,^ discouraged the kind of intellectual dissent that had characterized the pre-war and progressive years (Hodgson 1976, 72)
Soc (2018) 55:506–511 years and, and personally, his feelings about a writer whom he admired, distrusted, and resented and who more than any other single figure shaped the literary culture of an era he (Kazin) had found constricting, frustrating, and alien – BI feel I do not belong to any of it^ (Journals, 6/27/55)
Summary
Knopf published New York Jew, the third autobiographical work by the eminent literary critic and Americanist, Alfred Kazin. A look back at the portrait and some relevant entries from both writers’ diaries together with a brief review and discussion of their relationship (or non-relationship) will indicate some of the personal and political sources of Kazin’s difficulty with Trilling and why he chose to make him a pivotal figure in his chronicle of the post-war years.
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