Reading Notes: Temptation and Commitment
One of the last things that I read during yesterday’s marathon of magazines was a piece by Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books (LV 10, p 54). A review of Richard Cook’s biography of Alfred Kazin, it began with a passage that felt like a glance in an unexpected mirror:
In both his life and his writings Alfred Kazin was divided between two ideas of what it meant to be a Jew in America. He was committed to one idea and tempted by the other.
Kazin was committed to the idea that a Jew was an outsider, with no special loyalties to any collective identity, not even that of other Jews, and that a Jew could therefore sympathize with other outsiders, regardless of their ethnicity, skin color, or other marker of identity. For him to be a Jew was to be an individual, with all of individuality’s responsibility, loneliness, and willingness to take risks, someone whose deepest concern was justice — justice for all other outsiders as well as for himself. Whenever Kazin lapsed from this commitment, he later returned to it with a sense of exhilaration at seeing clearly again.
He was tempted by the idea that a Jew was a member of a separate and unique group of people, loyal to one another and their history, with a collective experience that differed from all others. To be a Jew, in this way of thinking, was to share in a group identity to which individuality must ultimately be sacrificed, and to be concerned most deeply with power — power wielded by other groups against one’s own, and power that one’s own group can gain through alliances with those more powerful. Kazin slipped into this temptation whenever he most despaired about politics or himself.
If I substitute “member of the professional class” for “Jew,” I begin to have a pretty good explanation for the confusions of the first fifty years of my life. One other substitution is also required: “comfort” for “justice.” (In my book, justice, roughly conceived, is a lesser included element of comfort.)
The difference between the temptation and the commitment is nothing less than the difference between being a lawyer, whether practicing or retired, and a writer. I can never tell whether my youthful resistance to the prospect of being a writer stemmed from a lack of courage or from a deep sense of having, as of yet, nothing to say.