Online NewsHour: A Dialogue with Alfred Kazin -- January 14, 1998

RELIGION AND WRITING

January 14, 1998

NewsHour Transcript

David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Alfred Kazin, literary critic, author of "God and the American Writer."

DAVID GERGEN: Alfred Kazin, you began writing for the "New Republic," reviewing books over 60 years ago at the age of 19. Within a decade you became one of America’s foremost men of letters with the publication of your book on native grounds. Thank you very much for joining us. And tell us, please, sir, why you wrote this book now about God and the American writer.
ALFRED KAZIN, Author, "God and the American Writer:" Well, I’ve always been interested in religion. I’ve always been interested in what writers think of religion. There’s a very special connection between religion and literature. All the great books of the Bible in many ways are literature and owe their fantastic survival to the fact they’re so beautifully written. And it was that sense of religion with literature being connected from the very first that got me. And then in the course of time, over the years which I’ve been writing, I came to realize that especially in the 19th century religion became an extraordinarily important, vibrant thing to the greater writers we had, starting with Emerson, who thought he didn’t need anything and was his own church and was really, as someone said about Spinosa, God-intoxicated; and going on to people like Melville, who couldn’t make up his mind, was tortured by religion, but was a real believer without a church; and Emily Dickinson, for whom the idea of God was something to toss around seriously, and who belonged, of course, to that great New England culture. She came at the end of it, but she absorbed all of it by the time she had started to write. And, of course, I make a great point in my book of the effect of religion upon the great anti-slavery and pro-slavery arguments of the 19th century. There’s no question that abolition, for example, and also pro-slavery arguments were all directed by religious faith in one way or another.
DAVID GERGEN: You said, I think, that many of the writers were also swimming in religion of the 19th century.
ALFRED KAZIN: Yes, they were.
DAVID GERGEN: This was a very religious country at that time.
ALFRED KAZIN: Well, publicly, it’s still a religious country, though I have my doubts about how religious the religious culture is. I think it’s been politicized very much. But there’s no question that in the 19th century there was a tremendous fight going on in people’s souls about whether they could still hold on because science was already telling people another story from the one told in the Bible. It happened in Europe, too, you know. Tolstoy, the greatest novel from the 19th century in many ways, at the end of his life stopped writing. He felt it was irreligious. He felt his own aim was to be a saint, and sainthood was something really important. In America, I think, Henry Thoreau tried to be a saint. He began by, of course, not being married, which is always very helpful in this respect, but he was--he did try to be a saint. And Tolstoy at the end of his life did try and when someone asked him, the great writer, Maxim Gorky, why he was so interested in the subject, because he was on his own--he had been expelled by the Holy Richard Synod as a heretic--and he said, "God is the name of my desire." And that beautiful statement, you might say, was the motto of a lot of American writers who whether they made--whether they found God through their desire or not, did have that wish in their hearts, no question about it.
DAVID GERGEN: You distinguish America from other countries in Western Europe by saying we did not have these religious--we did not have this religious heritage that many writers did in Western Europe. And it seemed almost as if many of the writers in the 19th century were wrestling with God, just as Jacob wrestled with the angel; and that they almost appeared to be rivals, that they were not--they didn’t accept God necessarily as an authority and as something they looked up to, but, rather, they were trying to sort of come to grips, or almost saw God in themselves, as Emerson did.
ALFRED KAZIN: Well, that’s exactly right. Jacob didn’t realize when he wrestled with the angel that the angel was really God. And a lot of the people in my book were interested in religion not so much personally. That’s true, for example, of Hawthorne, with whom I begin my book, and with Faulkner, the greatest Southern writer of all at the end. Both these gentlemen--true New England and true South--were not personal believers. But they wrote about their cast of characters, the world they knew from birth on was deeply, completely religious, the Puritan background on the one hand, and, of course, the South, itself.
DAVID GERGEN: But there seemed to be a distinction between the 19th and the 20th century and William James in some ways represented that transition from looking inward for religion, for God, for some spiritual sensibility, for enlargement, as James called it, to now being, looking inward for psychological purposes.
ALFRED KAZIN: That’s exactly right. Williams James is a fascinating creature because he’s the first American thinker, you might say, who believes in religion for psychological reasons and not for reasons which are evidence of his own heart. You remember that his father came out of the Presbyterian, rigorous Presbyterian belief out in Northern Ireland, and you know what Irish Protestants are like these days. And what he discovered, which is amazing, it’s really a modern discovery and one which allies him with Freud in many ways--which is that the truly religious person is in the best sense of the word a psychopath, someone who’s driven to extremes. James recognized this quality in himself and his great book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," he was really getting at this feeling which he described perfectly as the feeling there’s something wrong with us as we stand. And for me the only solution, the only reformation could be going back to religion. At the same time--this is the fascinating thing--he couldn’t in all honesty say he believed in the individual personal God whom his fathers had believed in. In other words, it was a form of consolation, and it also, as he put it, "necessary prayer," whether you believed it or not.
DAVID GERGEN: I’m afraid we’re running out of time, but let me ask you, God seems to recede in the writings of 20th century American writers that you write about. Do you see any evidence of--in our most recent writers--say a lot of the black women writers of today--the Toni Morrisons--any evidence that God and religion are becoming more important again? The country is--
ALFRED KAZIN: No. I don’t. I don’t. Toni Morrison very movingly reminds people, and I quote this in the book, that the only thing that a slave had was a feeling that there was a God who would eventually pardon him and console him and free him. And love was the big element there because if God didn’t love the slave, surely no one else did in many ways. That’s the point she made. But, generally speaking, the thing that strikes me most is that in the 20th century there’s none of that anguish about religion which you find in the 19th century. In my book I quote such talented writers as John Updike and John Ashbury and others, Thomas Pynchon, one of my favorite writers, who all regard the thing rather sort of--sardonically. They’re saying, you know, it’s amusing to think about it and the rest of it. In the 19th century no one asked, "Was God responsible for the terrible things that happened?". God was going to be the deliverer. In the 20th century, people can’t help saying, certain people can’t help saying, "After all the terrible wars and the Holocaust and everything else, how can one possibly believe in God?". Well, there’s only one answer to that. I know, as a Jew, that the worst things get for Jews and the tougher they get, the more they cling to their belief. Ironically enough, instead of losing faith in God, they cling all the more to their ancestral idea of God because that’s where they are; that’s what’s left of them in a world of opposition and prejudice.
DAVID GERGEN: Alfred Kazin, still going strong after 60 years, and one of America’s foremost men of letters. Thank you very much.

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