Michael Kazin: Says he's ambivalent about his status as son of a literary celebrity
A few weeks from now, a good university press will publish the first biography of Alfred Kazin. This should make me, his only son, happier than it does. Not that I have any complaint with the book itself. The author — Richard M. Cook, an English professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis — appraises my father's work with sympathy and insight. Inevitably, he describes the tumultuous relationships my father had with his four wives, several lovers, a few of his students, and many of his fellow authors, as well as my sister and me. "Only too much is ever enough," my father liked to say, attributing the line to John Updike. After reading his biography, one could conclude that even too much did not make Alfred Kazin happy. But these tales are too familiar to bother me, and they will not surprise anyone who knew my father or has read his three volumes of memoirs.
My uneasiness is due instead to artistic egoism. Ever since I began composing little editorials for my middle-school newspaper, people have asked, "What is it like being the son of a famous writer?" Once I started publishing articles and books about U.S. history, the question seemed to come at me every week or so. But in recent years, I've heard it less often. Perhaps that's because my father died in 1998, and the names of literary critics fade quickly from public memory. Or perhaps the people I meet tend to be historians or journalists who are as familiar with my work as with my father's. Or maybe they are just too polite to ask a question that might seem disrespectful to a gray-bearded academic. But now, thanks to Professor Cook, I will probably hear the question again.
So here's an answer: I'm utterly ambivalent about it, and reading his biography has helped me understand why. My father's influence makes me anxious, but it also gives me comfort. The anxiety is simpler to explain. He routinely wrote long pieces for The New York Times Book Review, and, on occasion, the identifying caption would read, "the critic and teacher Alfred Kazin." The authority of that definite article! Almost everyone who picked up the Book Review, the editors must have assumed, already knew who Kazin was. Anyone who didn't was clearly a newcomer to serious literary conversation and needed a quick, if subtle, lesson about who deserved a "the" and who did not.
High on the list of the deserving were the writers whom Irving Howe famously called "the New York Intellectuals." Besides my father, unofficial members included Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Clement Greenberg, Norman Mailer, Richard Hofstadter, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, and Howe himself. Saul Bellow headed up a one-man colonial office in Chicago, and Hannah Arendt and Edmund Wilson were revered, if somewhat distanced, sages....
Read entire article at Michael Kazin in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
My uneasiness is due instead to artistic egoism. Ever since I began composing little editorials for my middle-school newspaper, people have asked, "What is it like being the son of a famous writer?" Once I started publishing articles and books about U.S. history, the question seemed to come at me every week or so. But in recent years, I've heard it less often. Perhaps that's because my father died in 1998, and the names of literary critics fade quickly from public memory. Or perhaps the people I meet tend to be historians or journalists who are as familiar with my work as with my father's. Or maybe they are just too polite to ask a question that might seem disrespectful to a gray-bearded academic. But now, thanks to Professor Cook, I will probably hear the question again.
So here's an answer: I'm utterly ambivalent about it, and reading his biography has helped me understand why. My father's influence makes me anxious, but it also gives me comfort. The anxiety is simpler to explain. He routinely wrote long pieces for The New York Times Book Review, and, on occasion, the identifying caption would read, "the critic and teacher Alfred Kazin." The authority of that definite article! Almost everyone who picked up the Book Review, the editors must have assumed, already knew who Kazin was. Anyone who didn't was clearly a newcomer to serious literary conversation and needed a quick, if subtle, lesson about who deserved a "the" and who did not.
High on the list of the deserving were the writers whom Irving Howe famously called "the New York Intellectuals." Besides my father, unofficial members included Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Clement Greenberg, Norman Mailer, Richard Hofstadter, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, and Howe himself. Saul Bellow headed up a one-man colonial office in Chicago, and Hannah Arendt and Edmund Wilson were revered, if somewhat distanced, sages....