“The joy of being toss’d in the brave turmoil of these times.”
—WALT WHITMAN, Democratic Vistas
I began On Native Grounds on a kitchen table in Brooklyn, 1938, and completed it in Long Island City, 1942, expecting a call from my draft board at any minute. The dates are essential to any understanding of the book, to its survival for over fifty years and its continued influence. There is no excitement for a writer like that of living in rebellious times. At least before World War II broke out, my work in progress was very much the product of and a response to the social crises of the ’30s. The massive breakdown of the American economy in the depression was the greatest national crisis after the Civil War, and I lived in its very midst, tossed up and down in the stormy ocean of the times by the suffering of my unemployed working-class parents, the mass social protests all over the country, the triumph of Fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and the extremism in America itself of Communist and Facist ideologies in violent conflict.
What Whitman wrote about the Civil War in “Drum-Taps” could have been said of the ’30s:
Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn’d from joys and prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children enmasse really are...
A history of modern American prose literature begun in such a period and continued out of a sense of social crisis during the great global war against Fascism! The literary significance of this is that I believed in what William Hazlitt called the “spirit of the age”—meaning that this age we were living in had a character all its own and could be related to other ages and periods, thus constituting a historical scene in which a period was known through its writers and its writers through their period.
Of all my books, On Native Grounds was the easiest to write. I felt what I have never felt since 1945—that the age was wholly with me, that I was appealing to “the spirit of the age,” that the writers as characters in my book were friends and the most encouraging people in the world to write about. I was writing literary history, a genre long abandoned by critics and now suspect (history can no longer be characterized and summed up as confidently as it was in the ’30s and early ’40s by the young man who wrote this book). This means that I saw connections everywhere between history and literature—between the populism of the 1890s and the realism in Howells, Dreiser, and Wharton; between the first expatriates in the 1890s and the alienation that led the Hemingway generation to what Henry James had earlier called “the conquest of Europe.” I saw connections between the writers themselves as fellow-spirits and artists relating to the pressures of American life.
My subject was the emergence of the “modern” in an American literature obviously unsettled by relentless new forces in every sphere: social, intellectual, and religious. My perspective, so natural in the turbulent ’30s, was based on a spirit of social protest I shared with almost every writer in my book, from William Dean Howells, whose move in 1891 from Boston to New York opened my narrative, to the Southern Agrarians (Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom the best known), who in 1938 still thought it possible to create a preindustrial society on the pre-Jeffersonian model.
There was nothing strange or unexpected in 1938 about my being both critical of “the system” and crazy about the country. What drew me to the serious study of American literature within a historical context was the narrative it suggested on every hand. America from its beginnings as “our rising empire” (Washington) embodied a purposeful form of historical movement, unprecedented on such a continental scale, that cried out to be written as a great story. In the background of the particular story I was writing was the sense, which was everywhere at the end of the nineteenth century, of a new age. What struck me from the first was the astonishment with which American writers confronted situations as new to themselves as to the Europeans who were often reading about America for the first time.
What gave me the confidence at twenty-three to begin a book like this? The age, the insurgency of the times, but above all On Native Grounds represents my personal discovery of America. The first native son in my immigrant family, brought up in a Brooklyn ghetto by parents whose harshly enclosed lives never gave them a chance even to learn English, I was crazy about the America I knew only through books. And it was such an idealistic, radically Protestant America, defined by its purest spirits, from Audubon and Jefferson to Emerson and Thoreau, to the Lincoln who had saved the Union, to the great democrats of philosophy John Dewey and William James, and to the Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Carl Sandburg who brought home the Middle West to me as the valley of democracy and the fountainhead of hope.
There are critical judgments in my book I have long been dissatisfied with. Howells was a realist of great sensitivity and a historically significant novelist, but hardly a great one. I made him altogether too loveable by signifying his instinct for changes in the literary weather and his old-fashioned sense of outrage at the depredations of the iron age in American capitalism.
I was still afraid of Faulkner when I wrote about him in the limiting terms then so conventionally used in discussions about this great artist. My sensitivity to Faulkner’s passion—and it is a historical passion both as subject and achievement—was so acute that my style became equally extravagant; I unconsciously imitated a style I pompously disapproved of! Since then, in one essay and book after another, I have written in full appreciation of a man I believe to be the greatest of twentieth-century American novelists—the only “modern” equal to Melville in narrative intensity and philosophic force.
I undervalued Richard Wright, for me the most gifted, honest, and evocative American black novelist. Since I was not writing about poetry, I was hardly fair in describing the Southern formalists and “New Critics,” poets most of them and with poetry as their chief interest.
If On Native Grounds, for all its youthful brashness and the many brickbats that have been hurled at it, has remained a book hard to get rid of, let me suggest a few things about it as a work of criticism that are still unusual. It was written as a consecutive narrative, and this in the belief that a history of literature can display a pattern evolving from actual historical circumstances. And for all its historical background, it was written out of an old-fashioned belief that literature conveys central truths about life, that it is indispensable to our expression of the human condition and our struggle for a better life.
I wrote about American literature before the study of it became the industry it is today. It was a time when there were almost no separate professorships of American literature, no departments of “American Studies,” and above all no belief that American literature constituted a tradition for writers newly coming up. The people in my book still thought, like Emerson, that they were creating American literature. It was this lack of what used to be called “a usable past” that made so strong and independent the writers of the first half of the century. They thought they were pioneers and that the rise of the United States in this period was the greatest possible subject for a novelist.
Think now of how much Ralph Ellison and William Styron owe to Faulkner, John Updike to Howells, Jean Stafford (and thousands of others) to Henry James. James and Faulkner knew they had no predecessors. Their relative lack of popular success in their own time was a painful tribute to their arduous originality. No one else before them wrote like Sinclair Lewis or Ring Lardner or Willa Cather—and certainly not like Theodore Dreiser! Like Lincoln and Rockefeller and Debs they were sui generis in the old American tradition. Each created his and her own tradition. It is easy for a cloistered translator of Plato like Allan Bloom in The Closing of The American Mind to deride Mencken as a “buffoon,” but it was rough guys like Mencken, clumsy fellows like Dreiser, terrible spellers like Scott Fitzgerald who created the bold new literature that would soon sweep the world.
I am glad to think that On Native Grounds caught the times, the passion, the America that made such writers possible. It is all there for me still as I go back to the book. My subject had to do with the “modern” as democracy; with America itself as the greatest of modern facts; with the end of another century just a hundred years ago as the great preparation. In lonely small towns, prairie villages, isolated seminaries, dusty law offices, and provincial “academies,” no one suspected that the obedient-looking young reporters, law clerks, and librarians would turn out to be Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Marianne Moore.
ALFRED KAZIN
New York, New Year’s Day, 1995