God and the American Writer.

Alfred Kazin Alfred A. Knopf, $25,272 pp.

When it comes to God and literature, every critic is a cultural critic; the writers who take care to distinguish between life as it is lived in the East Village and in the West Village, between eastern and western South Dakota, between the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish Publication Society edition of the Tanakh - those very writers will generalize blithely about the religious habits of the American people from olden times up to the present. There are those, like the Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco, who read American literature as "a kind of national spiritual biography" and like to think of the great writers as our unelected representatives. There are those, like the gay Episcopalian Bruce Bawer, who have gotten religion and in the same moment have become convinced that the rest of America has gotten religion all wrong. And there are those, like Gregory Wolfe, the editor of a magazine called Image and a miscellany called The New Religious Humanists (Free Press), who are desperate to find the "religious humanists" of today and who see "religious humanism" as the cure for what ails us.

Religiously, however, there is no "we the people." The religious habits of the American people are "extremely fluid," as Flannery O'Connor once said of religion in the South, and so are the religious habits of American writers. Alfred Kazin, who died last month, understood this, and his last book serves to remind us that our greatest writers are found slightly off center in American history, as bystanders and observers rather than representatives.

The title of the book has the air of a working title, a couple of three-by-five cards stuck together with a piece of scotch tape. That is about right for the book, and for its author. In the years before his death, Kazin was honored as "our last great man of letters" (as he calls Edmund Wilson here), but in writing about God and American literature and the "shining points" where they intersect, he was refreshingly free of a great man's pomp and cant. Of the many recent books that touch on the subject, Kazin's is the least conclusive, and the best.

Really, Kazin is interested in the American writer and God, not the other way round. Not religion, but God - whom Emily Dickinson, the heroine of the book, called the maker of "these strange minds that enamor us against thee." Not American literature but American writers - the great American writers, such as Hawthorne and Melville, whom the latter called "God's spies." Kazin's object of concern is the writer as a whole person: the masterpieces and the lesser works, the journals and biographies, the recollections of others, and the impressions the writer left on later writers.

Kazin called his previous book Writing Was Everything, meaning that he and his contemporaries in the 1930s were obsessed with literature; but the book itself was one more statement of his lifelong credo, that writing is "everything" in its appetite for the fullness of life as it is really lived, its response to all of experience, from the broadest social movements to the smallest particulars of our individual lives, and that because of this the literary critic has to be open to the writing as a whole person - has to bring a whole life to the page. That's what Kazin did as a critic for fifty-five years, and that's what he does here. Two of the strongest passages in the book are Kazin's imaginative, sympathetic brooding over Melville's journals of his visits to the Holy Land ("Desert more fearful to look at than the ocean," said the author of Moby-Dick) and a recollection of his own midnight walks with Robert Frost in Amherst in the 1950s: Kazin would walk Frost home and then Frost, "one acquainted with the night" but one terrified of being alone, would walk back with him again and again.

Kazin knows his subject by heart, and he gives it to us through aphorism, anecdote, quotation, close reading, comparison, and broad insight. He tells us that Edmund Wilson was descended from the Mathers, that nine generations of Emerson's ancestors were Congregational ministers, that T.S. Eliot's grandfather was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling town where Moby-Dick begins. Melville said he had written the novel "just to buy tobacco with," but he described it unforgettably as having "the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables & hawsers." We learn that Hawthorne's wife considered their sex life ample evidence of the divinity, and that Hawthorne himself thought Thoreau "ugly as sin." As for Thoreau, Kazin remarks, "He described Walden Pond as if he had baptized himself in its waters."

Kazin argues that the Civil War was the religious turning point in the history of the country and that Lincoln's "feeling for the Union amounted to 'religious mysticism," but he is more interesting on the ways in which nineteenth-century ardor gave way to twentieth-century hesitations. Of Melville, Kazin observes, "He retained faith even if he did not always know what and where and whom to believe," and adds laconically, "An agony in the nineteenth century, wistful confession in the twentieth." That is as good a description as any of the change in religious mores from that century to this, and the rest of the book can be read as a gloss on it. William James, we are told, saw "religion as therapy" and man as "a creature always in crisis," about which Kazin remarks: "Not 'ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free,' but just give up your anxious self for a moment." A little later he says, a trifle wistfully: "As things go nowadays, you might almost say that 'religion' as a subject of the most intense personal interest has replaced 'God,' which after all is or is not a matter of objective existence or truth - or so it used to be."

What did Kazin himself believe? When he tries to define religion, what he comes up with - "the axis of reality that goes through personal existence" - is brittle and unconvincing. Kazin's complaint about Eliot's religiosity is that it led to a bookish narrowing of his sensibility, rather than an expansion of it; and in the same way, Kazin is reduced by his own definition.

Better and more representative are his remarks about Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." For Kazin, the great poet's address to his future reader is a line thrown across the generations with the force of a biblical promise. "It is his constant call to himself to 'merge and merge again' - by no means just as a lover - that has won me all my life to Whitman's rapture here," he explains. "'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' brings together earth, water, and sky into a wonder of space that alternates time now and time future like the tidal rise and fall of the East River. As the future awaits the present, so there is something in looking that enables us to recognize our own soul....This is what we can at last call proof of an American religion."

As Lincoln felt about America, so Kazin felt about American literature. His feeling for literature amounted to religious mysticism. What did he believe? In a sense, he believed all the things in this book - the best that has been thought and said about God by the great American writers. In a lesser writer that would have been a slack and irresponsible position, but here Alfred Kazin, who not only knew American literature through and through but lived through it, makes literature, for the moment, something to believe in.

Paul Elie is a frequent contributor to Commonweal.