The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers

by Alfred Kazin

One of America's foremost literary critics presents twenty-eight essays on American and European writers, including Joyce, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner.

Genres: Literary Criticism

273 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic, many of whose writings depicted the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America.

Kazin is regarded as one of "The New York Intellectuals", and like many other members of this group he was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and attended the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. He wrote out of a great passion-- or great disgust -- for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of history, both literary history and politics and culture. He was a friend of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for literary criticism.

His son is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin.

(from wikipedia.org)

Reviews

[Nasar · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is not natural for a man to write this well everyday. Only a man who had no other life but to practice a particularly intense and truthful kind of prose could have done it - a man for whom all walks finally came to end in the hard athletic sentence that would recover all their excitement. Other writers have been lonely, and have learned to accept their loneliness; have felt yearnings toward God that their distrust of churches could not explain; have dissected their solitary characters down to the last bearable foundation in human self-analysis; have, atleast in the privacy of a journal, scored off at last the obtuseness of their neighbours, the insipidity of their contemporaries and the unfeelingness of the age. And of course all writers of memorable journals have made characters out of themselves; you have to be thoroughly suffused in yourself before you can break away and take a good look back. Thoreau did all this, and something more. For in and through his Journal he finally made himself a prose that would fully evoke in its resonant tension and wildness the life he lived in himself every day."

The essays on Blake, Kafka, and Dostoevsky shine with brilliance on every page, indeed on every paragraph. Essays on Thoreau's life in his journals, or the letters of Flaubert, or the odd relationship between the elder Tolstoy and the young Gorky are all cast in the same mould of memorability. Kazin writes with a style where language never has to drag itself to do the work of thought. Rather, it is thought married to keen perception that drives his prose. And what remarkable results ensue!

Here is a taste of him, writing about Flaubert's anger in his letters:
"Flaubert's anger is extreme, not because other men of the same stamp have not felt such anger but because he was struggling with the final human powerlessness to lift art itself up to a height that would have the effect of absolute permanence, that would give some unmoving, unyielding embodiment to what he saw. The gap between human mortality and the nonhuman ideal; the desire to give the effect of lastingness, hardness, unchangeability to one's works; a man's need to round out his puling little days, his nervous, fretful efforts, his everlasting concern with himself, into something that would have the permanent splendor of the gold and the ivory Flaubert loved - this is what makes his anger in his letters so profound and moving an expression not merely of our general quest for immortality but of the artist's aim to show in the actuality of his work the possible joining of his life to eternity."
A little further, he writes:
"Anger is a great quality, a classic quality, and one rarely evident today, for what most people feel just now is usually resentment and bitterness, the telltale feelings of people who consider themselves imposed on, who know that they are not getting their due, who feel small. Flaubert's anger, on the contrary, is that of a powerful caged beast (how often the image of the lion recurs in his work), of a man who, feeling his strength to the uttermost, is continually outraged by the meanness, the self-seeking, the lowness, the vulgarity around him. It is because he feels his strength - unlike most of us today, who feel only our weakness - that he is so magnificently angry."

Pondering on the difficulty of Kafka, and the kind of worshipful literature that has erupted in the wake of his writings, Kazin reflects:
"Now Kafka is difficult, as only a great writer can be, and we certainly need elucidation of his work. But the difficulty is not resolved, it is not even named, by reducing him to a system of symbols. It lies in our ability to accept and to share his sensibility; to take him for what he is, a writer who saw the world from below, and meant what he wrote to be the bottom-most vision of reality. Kafka is difficult not because 'he really meant' to say this or that about the nature of contemporary existence, but because he saw in his private and contemporary agony that part of us all which is more real than the public 'reality.' Just as religious doctrine can be a way of muffling the religious ache in people, so Kafka saw below man's institutions and formal learning the essential unappeasable loneliness of man in the universe, man's longing to know the meaning of his existence and the unbreaking struggle with his own nature. We do not like to face those facts in themselves, and in reading Kafka we immediately assume that the world he presents is constantly a reference to something other than itself. This is why we find him difficult, for we are always trying to find out what hidden suggestion is buried in his work. Hence our desire to explain him, for our purposes, rather than to experience him. For to take that experience undistractedly, to see it for what it is, is to admit that his vision is real."

Alfred Kazin is unjustly forgotten. He deserves to be read, not particularly for the correctness of his judgements, but for the illuminating path through which he arrives at them. Highly recommended!

[Sketchbook · Rating 1 out of 5]

The dullest, most limited "Lit critic" NYC produced.
Go to Edmund Wilson or Malcolm Cowley.