[Alter is an American translator, author, and critic. In the following review, he offers a laudatory assessment of A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment.]

In over half a century of activity as a writer, Alfred Kazin has often been associated with "the New York intellectuals." In some minds, Kazin-Howe-Trilling-Rahv and company form a continuous blur. Kazin himself has intermittently acted as their chronicler in four memoiristic volumes. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment offers a very different mode of self-presentation from his sundry memoirs, and it makes clear that in some fundamental ways he is quite unlike the secular, worldly, politically minded literary critics with whom he is usually linked.

This new book of diaries, it must be said, is a slippery book in regard to genre, because the nature of the selecting and the editing announced in its subtitle remains elusive. There is no indication of what proportion of the actual journals is reproduced here; and in any case "reproduced" may not be the right word, for there are signs that at least some of the journal entries have been retrospectively altered to incorporate the wisdom of hindsight. Even the chronology is a little uncertain: the book is arranged in five chronological units of greatly varying spans, from 1938 to 1995, but individual journal entries are undated, and, within each larger unit, quite a few of the entries appear to have been rearranged thematically, out of chronological sequence. It is surely a writer's prerogative to reorder raw auto-biographical materials in this fashion, but readers should be forewarned that what they will encounter here is not a gathering of untouched candid-camera shots from early manhood to old age but a composed self-portrait. A Lifetime Burning presents the image of the writer's inner life that the writer chooses to present to the world.

Some aspects of that image are perfectly consonant with what one knows of Kazin from his previous books. He repeatedly conveys the sense of a man who lives constantly and passionately with literature, which is an increasingly rare aptitude when so many of those who profess literature in the academy seem to have little use for it. In Starting Out in the Thirties and New York Jew, Kazin demonstrated deft skill in portraying the writers he met whose work engaged him. In these journals, with the focus more on the observer than on what he observes, the confessions of enthusiasm sometimes sound like notes of an intellectual groupie, such as this comment on first meeting Hannah Arendt in the 1940s: "Darkly handsome, bountifully interested in everything, this forty-year-old German refugee with a strong accent and such intelligence—thinking positively cascaded out of her in waves—that I was enthralled, by no means unerotically."

Kazin is an enthusiast. He is for or against. His observations on the books he has been reading are alternately an expression of excitements and an attempt to get writers in proper focus, and also a reveling in the pleasure of that very effort of discrimination. Some of this is no more than a restatement of commonplaces: "If Kafka became the head and symbol of 'the age of anxiety,' Orwell was the hero of whatever fight literature in our ghastly time has put up against totalitarianism." "The tyranny of love in Proust fills all the spaces once occupied by custom, law, religion." But elsewhere his formulations show real critical edge, as when he remarks of Harold Brodkey, "I see him not as an author in command of his material but as a character looking for an author to do him justice."

Kazin is even sharper on the other Harold: "What he does is to put the head of Harold Bloom right down on the poem, imprints on it his own mental formation, his signature invocation of Emerson-Whitman-Nietzsche-Pater…. I do not understand what this inspiring procession of names in Bloom's special code refers to outside of his need to be one of the procession." This last objection flows from Kazin's underlying sense of the purpose of criticism, which is to register a deep, open attentiveness to the imaginative authority of the particular work. His lapidary comment on Emily Dickinson nicely illustrates this attentiveness: "An explosion of concentrated material for a moment … that makes a wholly new myth and mental order of things. You see life her way and not in the old way, yours."

What, for Kazin, is the point of writing about such things, or about anything? Like everyone who writes for publication, he is surely interested in audiences and approval, is actuated in party by, let us say, professional motives. But what this selection of his journals highlights is that writing is, for him, before all else a vocation in the strictly theological sense. "Writing is my life, the one steadiness I have," he observes in 1946, at a moment when he is suspended between marriages and between phases in his life. The feeling of steadiness comes from his conviction that writing (and the reading that is necessary for writing) is his ordained task, the thing he has come into the world to do. Thus, after the breakup of his second marriage: "I will not give up on my book, my son, on all those people I love and who love me. I have work to do … God, my God, there is nothing to do with this life but to think, to understand, to be aware—to love the predicament of being alive." Actual prayer occurs in these journals with surprising frequency, sometimes, as here, in moments of resolution and affirmation, sometimes out of acute pain and loneliness. ("In this monotonously anguishing world one needs another language. One is desperate for grace.")

The writer who emerges from Kazin's selected journals is, unlike anyone else associated with the old Partisan Review (except perhaps Saul Bellow), a man steeped in reverence for the sensory world, for the eternal order of things behind it and for literature as the tentative articulation of a bridge between the two. Though the title of Kazin's new book is taken from T. S. Eliot's "East Coker," the vitalistic faith it expresses sounds closer to D. H. Lawrence: "But if God is life, a great blaze of life, a surcharge … If you believe in God, you are continually exposed to and can never deny this great and terrible radiance of sheer being—everywhere."

Kazin's books repeatedly, stridently, deliciously affirm his identity as a Jew, but it is interesting to observe that the affirmation of that identity is virtually irrelevant to the religious vision of A Lifetime Burning. Treading in the ashes of European Jewry at the end of the war, he is recurrently troubled by the Holocaust, often reflects on the peculiar fate of the Jews at the crossroads of history, and several times comments with approval on tivated by Jews. Kazin responded to the ghastly fate of Europe's Jews long before most of his contemporaries saw fit to address the subject, and this is surely admirable. But his journals, or at any rate the selection of them that he has chosen to present to the public, reveal a writer engaged only episodically in the contemplation of history and political events.

The predominant objects of his interest are his sundry aesthetic and intellectual enthusiasms and, above all, his quest for a way to reach out to God. Though he thinks of himself as a believer, "I have trouble knowing why I believe (when I do)…. I do not share the confidence of Jews who arc sure of the Covenant, of Christians sure that Jesus incarnates the word made flesh." In a later entry, he states this predicament of a purely personal belief more extremely: "Being religiously 'Jewish' in this 'Christian' society can be so private as to be almost inarticulate." There is something a little odd about this remark. For all its deficiencies and inauthenticities, American Jewry has developed vigorous and even original forms of religious expression. But Kazin, evidently by choice, has remained apart from Jewish collective experience, and he has not much informed himself about the Jewish heritage. His friend Edmund Wilson, when he was busy acquiring Hebrew, once chided Kazin on his lack of Jewish knowledge.

There are many comments in these journals about individual figures, groups and politics that one might want to debate, but for a book chiefly conceived as a testament of faith, debate seems beside the point. Indeed, A Lifetime Burning compels one to revise certain preconceptions about what it means for Kazin to be a critic. If the task of the critic is to make discriminations, to pronounce judgments, to argue for particular interpretations, the self-portrait in these pages is rather of a man who uses the instruments of writing to try to make sense, first, of the very gift of consciousness in himself and, then, of how writers have variously sought to articulate their own consciousness of the world against the background of eternity.

The last entry in the book is a reflection on how literature, in distinction to science and its dedication to objective demonstration, avails itself of a "cardinal human loneliness." It does this, Kazin remarks, drawing on his own lifetime of struggle with the medium of writing, "with language that is always failing and stumbling, breaking the writer's heart with its mere approximations to the thing in his mind. Besides, language is a halting servant but can be a terrible master," This is powerfully resonant, but it is a little bleak.

It becomes bleaker still when he goes on to speak of the failure of expectations and the "all too real fall of man" that each of us is said to experience in introspection. Like most religious views of literature, this has the effect of giving short shrift to the social (and comic) functions of literature, just as the understandable stress on the inevitable, heartbreaking inadequacy of all writing does not do justice to the great masters who miraculously get it just right—Pope, Proust, Mallarmé, Yeats—and who revel in the sheer exuberance of linguistic invention—Rabelais, Joyce, Nabokov and, above all, Shakespeare.

There are, of course, central writers in our tradition who are obsessed with a transcendent realm (Blake, Dickinson) or, failing that, on a realm of negative transcendence (Melville, Kafka). But any literary criticism enamored of the transcendent can scarcely accommodate the bracingly secular and worldly impulse Fielding, Diderot, Stendhal and Henry James explore the quandaries of men and women living in the here-and-now of society, with the limitations and the resources of their imperfect human intelligence, and without resort to divinity. Indeed, modern literature has long been the most subtle vehicle for skepticism, and in our own century, certainly, the skeptical uses of imaginative literature have been pushed to a variety of extremes.

Yet A Lifetime Burning is scarcely intended as a comprehensive account of the meaning of engagement in literature. What it does evoke, quite poignantly, is how writing and reading and writing about reading can serve the most serious spiritual ends for this post traditional Jew, who is a kind of hidden stranger among his New York intellectual peers.