Because the avalanche of books and movies that marvel at the Olympian minds that once ruled New York – you know the list: Prodigal Sons; The New York Intellectuals; Arguing the World; The Rise of the New York Intellectuals — obscures a powerful countertrend. Lots of smart Jews hated that scene.

Norman Mailer felt that his "deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics." Saul Bellow loved the life of the mind but felt that "the intellectuals one meets are something else again." And in Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character tries to sneak a quickie with his wife during a party packed with intellectuals. "It’ll be great," he tells her, "because all those Ph.D.’s are in there, you know, like … discussing models of alienation and we’ll be in here quietly humping."

Not many hated the intellectuals as much as Seymour Krim. But not many people could get angry like Seymour Krim.

Some of Krim’s gripes were sour grapes. Before he came out swinging with Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, his 1961 breakthrough collection of essays, he was a wallflower on the Greenwich Village intellectual scene. But Krim soon realized that his outsider position gave him a good view. From the edges he could see how intellectuals misled people like himself-educated Americans interested in the life of the mind but not sure how to get there.  In the 1950s, Krim had asked for directions to the life of the mind and got lost among the intellectuals. Though he had started out wanting "to be a big stubborn writer in the grand tradition that laid waste to crap and lying everywhere," he ended up writing literary criticism that was destined for oblivion upon publication. Here’s a sample sentence from the Hudson Review.

"Considered in a broader perspective for a moment, Miss McCarthy might be taken as a not entirely fair example of a school of fiction-writers which Partisan Review has, by its temper if not its express wish, encouraged, and whose self-conscious"-but that’s enough.

Does it sound like what you wrote in last semester’s Advanced Seminar on the Novel? Or maybe how your cousin is talking lately? Then pay attention.

When Krim looked back on his intellectual period in "What’s This Cat’s Story?" he saw that a culture of genius worship made him hate himself for possessing more modest talents, which were nevertheless crucial to his only chance at success and happiness.

"I was committing myself to impossibly high standards that made me feel less like giving out with my own untested jazz than ever," Krim wrote. "Seen coolly it was disgusting self-murder but there was no one to tell me this because almost all of my friends were caught up in the same narrow pocket, becoming increasingly more exacting, fussy, competitive, fanatical, less human in their writing and standards."

Even geniuses fall into this trap, as Krim realized in his remembrance of his friend Milton Klonsky, a promising but failed poet. His loving tribute to Klonsky is one of Krim’s greatest and most moving essays. It is a miniature Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow’s fictional portrait of Delmore Schwartz, another brilliant, destructive and doomed poet.

For Krim, Klonsky was the man who could do it all. Village poet, intellectual, ladies’ man, brass-balled Jew and champion joint-roller, Milton Klonsky was Krim’s hero, his ideal, the world-historical individual who expressed what the mental and sexual energies of New York’s Jews were yearning to become. And, if not, it was certainly what Krim was yearning to become.

Krim swooned when he saw that Klonsky knew "the most formidable of the contemporary headachemakers like Kafka, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Joyce, Yeats, Stevens and critics like Coleridge, Blackmur, Tate, I. A. Richards (with a Trilling read for mere entertainment like a mystery). Klonsky’s mind seemed to contain the entire hip literary-intellectual university."

You had me at April is the cruelest month, is how we’d say it today.

But that was just for starters. Klonsky was a "hard-driving stud also," and it always gave Krim a "feeling of reassurance, of the world spinning right, when I looked over my shoulder and saw Milt stroking a soft palm and purring out his line of mesmerizing jive."

More important than all of that, however, was how Klonsky had worked out being a Jew.

Krim knew Klonsky in the late 1940s and early 1950s, long before public displays of a cool Jewy style. The whole problem of how American-born, English-speaking Jews were going to formulate a public Jewish personality was a real problem. Anti-semitism was a common fact of life. When he met Klonsky, Krim was trying to evade his Jewish self, "wipe out the ‘Oy vey’ self-sneeringness, awfulness, shameness, strangeness, which had vomited all over my psyche after I got my first dose of lipsmacking anti-kike contempt."

But Klonsky didn’t suffer from a "sense of Yiddish shame." He "acted like a man, not someone castrated and squirming because of their racial unease." And to Krim Klonsky’s secret was that he didn’t come from the more assimilated world that had formed Krim and that had weakened his "manhood in order to ‘get in’, to be white Anglo-Saxon imitations."

Unfortunately, despite all of Klonsky’s mesmerizing attributes, he too was eventually crushed by his unrealistic insistence that his poetry intimidate and conquer, vanquish all competitors and exalt the age. The result, as Krim realized, was that Klonsky wrote mostly in his own mind, which rejected "the unfinished feats of poetry that his creative monster threw up for inspection."

Schooled on the greatest stuff ever written, Klonsky fell into the trap of not being great enough for himself.

Still want to be an intellectual?

Mark Cohen is the editor of Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Kim.

The post Seymour Krim and Intellectuals appeared first on Jewcy.

But before we close up the factory and lay-off all the workers, can we spare a moment for the overlooked Beat writer Seymour Krim? Like an eccentric tech pioneer tinkering alone in his garage, Krim practically started the whole black-Jewish thing in the late 1950s in his Greenwich Village studio apartment. Then, years after his death in 1989, this highly talented flake gets mangled in the official history of the whole period.  A little justice, please.

Buddy, can you spare some tikkun olam?

I mean it would be one thing if Krim was mistakenly dismissed in one of the many doomed-to-the-stacks volumes on the subject, but Eric J. Sundquist’s Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, published by Harvard University Press, won the 2007 Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Book Award and was called the "definitive study."

In other words, this might be it.

And what happens? In a discussion of Krim’s 1957 Village Voice article, "Anti-Jazz," and his 1959 follow-up, "Ask for a White Cadillac," two of his earliest I-can’t-believe-he-just-said-that essays on black life and its white imitators, Sundquist gets it wrong.

He just goes ahead and assumes that James Baldwin, the black novelist and uncontradictable authority on black anger at that time, would have dismissed Krim the way he did Mailer. Baldwin condescended to Mailer’s controversial 1957 essay, "The White Negro," by calling the writer a "real sweet ofay cat." Sundquist adds, "Baldwin might just as well have directed his ire at Seymour Krim."

But Baldwin did not. In fact, in Baldwin’s Village Voice review of Krim’s 1961 Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer collection, which included his essays on blacks, Baldwin called Krim, "God bless him, almost the only writer of my generation who has managed to release himself from the necessity of being either romantic or defensive about Negroes." And Krim’s "Anti-Jazz" made Baldwin exclaim, "Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, King Oliver, and my mother and my father thank you, baby."

Let’s find out why.

lIn 1957, Krim’s "Anti-Jazz" and Mailer’s "White Negro" both treated the same subject of black influence on white behavior. Mailer clearly won the marketing contest. "The White Negro" was a brilliant formulation. But Mailer took the romantic view that the influence was profound, that white hipsters "had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro." Krim saw a lot of ignorant white people playing dress-up.

These people, the white jazz-lovers, hear only the extract of the kind of life that produced this music; its sensuality, rhythm, humor, passion, even closeness and intimacy. It is especially attractive to young people who are disillusioned with the values of white society. But no matter how beat they are themselves, the majority have literally no idea of the conditions of life that lie behind this music.

What did the white listeners have no idea about? Well, Krim spelled it out. And these lines are what made Krim, as Baldwin noted, neither romantic nor defensive about black life.

Does the reader think that jazz, that great beat, those beautiful melodies, the way a blues singer belts a song, the way a sax man raises up on that platform like an athlete and lets the combinations fly and flow from his horn are anything but Negro in their central heart? They are the Negro in America thus far, the humor, wit, easy stride, subtle rhythm, great power; but also, which is harder to accept, the awful ignorance, poverty, violence, lack of constancy, me-firstism, and all the other facts that open-minded people who know Negro life well-the inner lower-middle-class communities of Harlem, or Newark, or Durham, North Carolina-see all too often. And that too is part of jazz.

It’s not hard to see how politically incorrect this would be if written today, but it also turned out to be politically incorrect in 1957. Even Baldwin’s defense did not quiet Krim’s critics in the Village. So in 1959, Krim revisited the topic in "Ask for a White Cadillac," which appeared in a little magazine called Exodus, published by Greenwich Village’s very hip – and still impressively progressive – Judson Memorial Church.

But if Krim’s Village detractors were hoping for an apology, they did not know Krim. In fact, in 1959, nobody did. He was 37 years old that year and still just starting to turn out the personal, subjective, proto-New Journalism articles that would win him his scattered but passionate and sturdy fans. Even Krim did not know Krim. The excitement of his essays is in traveling alongside him as he discovers his own mind; undaunted if not unafraid to follow his thoughts wherever they led him.

They led him into some dangerous mental neighborhoods.

In "White Cadillac," Krim recounts his own youthful admiration, infatuation, and eventual disillusionment with 1940s Harlem. Like an excited tourist who experiences a personal liberation in a new land Krim felt that, yes, this is my true home! This is where I belong. "Here was the paradise of sensuality (to my thirsting eyes) that I had dreamed of for years," he writes. "The streets hummed and jumped with life right out in the open, such a contrast to the hidden, bottled-up phobias that I knew so well."

But his time in Harlem also revealed to him his participation in American racism and how it transformed him in ways that were uncomfortable to discover. He even saw that racism released him from certain problems of Jewish identity that confronted him elsewhere.  "For the first time in my adult life I felt completely confident and masterful in my relationship to both sexes because society judged me the superior, just as in a different,

Irish-bar-type scene it made me stand out unto myself because of the Yiddish bit," he wrote.

In Harlem, the Jewish Krim was simply white, and he briefly experienced life "like a southern white, understanding for the first time the tremendous psychological impregnability to the cracker (every white man has a built-in colonel-kit!) in having an "inferior" class beneath him. It was an astonishing revelation to realize that you could be a better person-more attentive, calmer, happier, and that last word is the truth-for the wrong reasons."

These revelations about himself, and equally uncomfortable revelations about black life in Harlem, ended Krim’s sojourns there.  But they are exactly why we should give Krim a job on the dayshift of the black-Jewish relations industry.

The post Black, Jews, and Seymour Krim appeared first on Jewcy.

I was trolling through the web looking for things to get me going when I found a review of The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, a novel about a Jewish gangster, his protégé, and a host of lovable Yiddish-speaking characters set in 1963 Brooklyn. And that made me think of "Wonder Bread," the 2007 American Scholar article by the no-nonsense Melvin Jules Bukiet that fried such novelists for serving up a dream Brooklyn of the past.

Bukiet accused them of a writing crime Krim never committed:

"They’re sheep in wolves’ clothing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good." 

Bukiet explained what’s wrong with that:

"What is, is. The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience."

Krim, that’s your cue: let’s hit them with the opening line of your 1969 "Epitaph for a Canadian Kike."  That will set the tone nicely. 

"How much of what I’m going to say about Sam Goodman-yes, Sam, I’m trying to come to terms with you at last, you prick, you enduring pain in the world’s ass!-is "true," actual, the way it really was, and how much is my own anxiety-specked creation I don’t know, ultimately; but if God existed and he wanted a view of Sam on earth (or Sam on concrete since I only knew him in N.Y.), as heaving and personal as anyone else’s protests today, I would tell him what I am about to tell you and, in working it out, myself."    

That’s not the voice of a man who had any trouble admitting that what is, is. Krim can pass Bukiet’s test without studying or cheating. He was a natural.

On the first page of "What’s This Cat’s Story?" Krim’s intellectual autobiography and the lead essay in his debut Cannoneer collection, he announced a writing manifesto that equaled in passion and verve the pledge Saul Bellow had made years earlier on the first page of his first novel. Bellow’s Dangling Man threw over reticence in favor of candor and talking nonstop as if he had "as many mouths as Siva has arms." Krim declared that the essays in his book were "actually grapplings with life, desperate bids for beauty and truth and the slaking of personal need, hot mortal telegrams from writer to reader."

The "slaking of personal need" that marked both writers’ appearance was no coincidence. Both participated in the same post-WWII release in writing of American Jewish energy, imagination, frustration, ambition, and self-definition. And though this Bellow fanatic would never let his enthusiasm for Krim equate their importance, the danger today is underestimating Krim, not overestimating him.

Krim first published his personal, explosive, honest essays in 1957 in the Village Voice, and he credited Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for showing him a way to break free from the polite literary criticism he had been writing for years. Those credentials and signposts allowed Krim to find his first literary home with the Beats. But he’s been evicted. In the 20 years since his death, every Beat anthology has excluded him.

Meanwhile, Krim has retained the Jewish fans he had from the beginning and added more. Mailer’s foreword implicitly identified Krim as a Jewish writer when he hailed him as "the child of our time, he is New York in the middle of the 20^th Century, a city man" whose writing exhibited "shifts and shatterings of mood as screeching and true as the grinding of wheels in a subway train." Bellow published Krim’s "What’s This Cat’s Story?" in a 1960 issue of his journal, The Noble Savage. It wasn’t a slip-up. Forty years later the piece reappeared in a collection of the best articles Bellow-the-editor ever published. The novelist and critic Phillip Lopate remains a dedicated supporter, and Vivian Gornick called Krim "a Jewish Joan Didion." She also put Krim’s gut-wrenching essay on winning and losing, "For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business," on her list of The Ten Greatest Essays, Ever.

Part of the reason for this fan club becomes obvious once the Beat-colored glasses come off. Jewishness appears everywhere in Krim’s work.

Mailer fascinated Krim as a "New York Jewish novelist who had crashed out of the parochial" scene into "the splendid chaos of everyone’s U.S.A." Mario Puzo enjoyed an unbroken link with Italian peasant culture while Krim had weakened himself because he "wiped the ancient Hebrew out of myself to become an American." The poet Milton Klonsky was one of those "bitterly slanted and harsh-talking Jewish boys" who offered Krim an example of streetwise Jewish manhood.

But just as important as these Jewish topics is Krim’s writing style, which delivers the "rapid, nervous, breathless tempo" that for Irving Howe was a hallmark of the Jewish-American writing style. Howe took no notice of Krim, but another Irving did. Literary critic Irving Malin called attention to Krim’s "brilliant, energetic prose rhythms" on display in sentences such as this one from "The American Novel Made Me":

"Do I therefore mean, to hit it squarely, that writing fiction for me and my breed was a pimply kind of revenge on life, an outcast tribe of young non-Wheaties failures getting their own back, all the shrimpy, titless, thicklensed, crazyheaded dropouts and sore losers of American youth resolving in the utter misery of the dateless Saturday nights to shoot down their better-favored peers in the pages of a novel?"

That freedom-loving, high-octane, testosterone-spiked says who? voice is the voice found in some of the great works of Jewish-American literature, a voice that has remained at the center of Jewish writing until today. Not a straight line but a jagged,

cardiac-arrest line of passionate spikes and depressive dips connects Krim to J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Joseph Heller’s Yossarian, journalist Sidney Zion, Norman Mailer, playwright David Mamet, and also to the authors of today’s comic and often frankly autobiographical Jewish screeds produced by Michael Wex (Born to Kvetch), Shalom Auslander (Foreskin’s Lament), and Steve Almond (Not That You Asked).

Mark Cohen is the editor of Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim.  You can read more at his blog Stumbling Into Jews

The post A Roundabout way to get to Seymour Krim appeared first on Jewcy.

Oh, it’s been building for a while, this obsession the Times and I have with covert operatives who turn out to be Jews. It started twenty years ago, in 1988, when the Times latched onto the tale of Trebitsch Lincoln–the early twentieth-century Christian missionary, British MP, German spy, Buddhist monk and–surprise!–Jew.

The post Bournstein? appeared first on Jewcy.