Age of Hope & Plebes

STARTING OUT IN THE THIRTIES by Alfred Kazin. 166 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $4.95.

Good autobiography is often not so much a self-portrait as a chronicle of the times. Such is Starting Out in the the thirties, a chatty tour of the Depression in New York and the generation of radical writers--John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, James T. Farrell, Robert Cantwell--who, like Author Kazin, were starting out in the Thirties. An essayist, critic and anthologist (F. Scott Fitzgerald: the Man and His Work; The Portable William Blake), Kazin was born in a Brooklyn slum, the son of an immigrant Polish Jew. He got his first job, as a part-time book reviewer for the New Republic, in the summer of 1934 --"that bottom summer when the first wild wave of hope under the New Deal had receded." It was a thin time, and Kazin recalls that "there were so many of us" who depended on review assignments to live that Editor Malcolm Cowley "would sell the books there was no space to review and dole out the proceeds among the more desperate cases haunting him."

Like most young New York intellectuals of his day, Kazin considered himself a socialist. "I thought of socialism as orthodox Christians might think of the Second Coming," he says, "a wholly supernatural event which one might await with perfect faith, but which had no immediate relevance to my life." Like most of his friends, he spent much of his free time in passionate discussion of the decade's great storms: the Moscow purges, the rise of fascism, the Spanish civil war.

But, he says, "what was new about the writers of the Thirties was not so much their angry militancy as their background. When you thought of the typical writers of the Twenties, you thought of rebels from 'good' families --Dos Passes, Hemingway, Fitzgerald Cummings, Wilson, Cowley. The Thirties were the age of the plebes--of writers from the working class, the immigrant class, the nonliterate class, from Western farms and mills--those whose struggle was to survive."

In a way it was an uncomplicated age. There were bad and good, rich and poor, oppressors and liberators, fascists and socialists. The dreams of the revolutionary idealists were shattered in 1939 when Stalin signed his nonaggression pact with Hitler. From then on, says Kazin, the role of the intellectuals was forever changed: "The elan of their lives, revolutionary faith in the future, was missing. History was now a tangle of meanings, without clear-cut issue. What would never come back, in this most political of ages, was the faith in a wholly new society that had been implicit in the revolutionary ideal."

Is this bad? Amidst his lively reportage, Kazin seems to think so. But although the intellectuals of today might not be as happy as they were in the Thirties, they are at least facing the real, muddy problems of a pragmatic, compromising world.

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