African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study Book

American literature prior to 1900 has always held little appeal for me. Hawthorne, Twain, Dickenson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman--maybe it's familiarity and contempt, maybe it's that they are hyped to the point where they seem familiar, and oversold to make up for lack of a long literary tradition. I don't know...but regardless of the cause of my disinterest, the fact remains that I've never cared to really look at them, preferring to be content with what I think I know about them. (Though I can definitively say that Charles Brockden Brown doesn't do anything for me at all)

So here comes Alfred Kazin, whose book The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers first got me to thinking about some of these writers in a way that was more accepting than I had been, and now God and the American Writer, which almost exclusively focuses on American literature of the 19th century (with only Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner outside of it), and makes me actually eager to read a few of these authors whom I really never thought I would bother with (Hawthorne, Dickenson).

I really don't know what the function of literary criticism if it isn't that--to open up possibilities where I might have thought none existed before. Cynthia Ozick may think the critics function is to act as a cultural guardian--to make distinctions between what we should and shouldn't read--and I suppose that can be part of it, though that idea seems to have some inherent pitfalls; but Kazin never sounds as if that is what he's doing (though, admittedly, I haven't read his most famous work, On Native Grounds.) He seems, rather, to be saying: Here is something worth considering.

God and the American Writer has a larger theme to tie it together, though, than simply Kazin's enthusiasm for a particular author. As the title implies, Kazin looks for the influence of God on a dozen writers, and he concentrates on that period of American literature that encompasses Hawthorne to Faulkner; or one might say from the beginning of the end of Puritan America to the end of the end. It is, at any rate, a transitional period, one that includes the Civil War, which may have been the final tipping point in the way Americans understood God. Or maybe not; defining labels and periods like this is too tricky for me--I wouldn't argue if someone disagreed.

Whatever the case, starting with Hawthorne and his Scarlet Letter and ending with Faulkner's oeuvre, Kazin examines the author's personal relationship with God, and how it affected their work. Because of the period covered, slavery becomes almost as important a topic as God, often because theology of the time both justified and rejected it. Interestingly, aside from Harriet Beecher Stowe, most of them were either indifferent to the subject or at most lukewarm.

Kazin is meditative here--I almost hesitate to call this criticism, though he uses all his critical knowledge gained over the years. Given that this was published in 1997 and Kazin died in 1998, maybe it's no wonder he was musing on God through the writers he'd studied for a lifetime. But he never makes it about himself (says the guy who can't help but make himself a character in his reviews), other than the unavoidable aspect of acting as the lens through which we view these writers in this particular light. And because he doesn't interject himself as the subject, he is able to transmit that enthusiasm one last time.