I know it’s a lot of territory, but Seymour Krim is a fascinating postwar literary figure for anyone interested in intellectuals, writers, Saul Bellow and, it should go without saying, Jews.
Krim’s lead essay in his 1961 Cannoneer collection was “What’s This Cat’s Story?” an intellectual autobiography that takes to task the insane heights of hubris that governed intellectual life in postwar New York. No wonder Bellow grabbed it for his journal, The Noble Savage. Krim’s essay was practically an early outline for Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift.
Lovable but mad Humboldt, who kept friend Citrine awake all night with a manic disquisition on politics literature history psychoanalysis and what-have-you finishes up with a slightly sheepish, “so you can see why it’s so important for the government to have someone who understands this worldwide process. Somewhat.”
I’m not quoting quite right but I want to get to Krim. In “Cat’s Story” he caught this careening, out-of-control culture of mind veneration maybe earlier than anyone. It was “a monstrously inflated period” when the pressure was on to “synthesize literature and politics and avantgarde art of every kind.”
Yeah, that’s the ticket. That synthesis. It was that Siren that drove Humboldt to distraction. “He brought Coney Island into the Aegean and united Buffalo Bill with Rasputin. He was going to join together the Art Sacrament and the Industrial USA as equal powers.”
The overlap with Krim’s realization of his own predicament and eventual crack-up is uncanny.
“I kept adding the one on top of the other without restraint until I too thought I carried the entire world in my head and felt that I was the living embodiment of the modern god-writer, the omniscient one, the heir of all the ages and the true king of the present—out of my way slobs!”
Krim’s essay is a goodbye to all that. He tried to make peace with his smaller but saner fate as a writer (not quite managing it). In a terrific essay about a friend, the poet Milton Klonsky, Krim covers the same ground and shows how damaging the intellectual culture was for writers.
But Krim did not forsake the essay’s focus on Jews. He kept at it. It was the need to escape the Jewish label that drove the intellectuals “to try and triumph over this blotch of birth by transcending it in brilliant individualism.”
There’s something to it. What say you?
Comments