GOD AND THE AMERICAN WRITER. By Alfred Kazin. Knopf. 288 pp. $25

At last summer’s University of Mississippi conference honoring the centennial of William Faulkner’s birth, I happened to be waiting for a shuttle bus alongside a Faulknerian from Portugal and a Hawthorne specialist from Japan. "Maybe you can answer a question for me," said the Faulknerian to the Hawthornian. "We in Portugal find this American Calvinism very confusing. Would it be right to say the Presbyterians are Calvinists? They are the same as Protestants, no?" The Japanese scholar replied, "I don’t know, exactly. I find it confusing too."

Alfred Kazin, alas, was not with us at the bus stop. Had he been, aside from answering the question, he would have been pleased at such direct evidence for his view that American literature is the last place to look for an explanation of religious orthodoxy. In his deeply informed and passionate God and the American Writer, which, coincidentally, begins with Hawthorne and ends with Faulkner, the distinguished critic argues that America’s greatest writers, "these strange minds"—the quotation is from Emily Dickinson—are as far as possible from endorsing any sort of "official" religious belief. Instead, they slug it out with the Deity from a position of autonomy, almost one of equality.

In the introduction, Kazin declares that his interest lies "not in the artist’s personal belief but in the imagination he brings to his tale of religion in personal affairs." This turns out to be only half true. The author proves to be curious about a collective literary experience of God in the United

States, which invariably requires reference to a writer’s own beliefs. And as the half-guilty disclaimer makes clear, he knows that any such description requires inference and ventriloquism. It risks becoming reductive or, worse, manipulative— pressing the complex writer’s complex beliefs into shapes that the lover of the work finds congenial.

In this regard, Kazin’s lifetime literary intimacy with the figures he treats here—he dealt with most of them at length in his On Native Grounds (1942) or An American Procession (1976), or both—poses dangers. It is hard not to suspect that his fondness for a writer sometimes tempts him to see doubt or conflict where there is none, to overdraw the parallels between the religious thought of a Harriet Beecher Stowe (to take one case in which a stretch seems most painfully obvious) and the restless, relentless struggles over religion expressed so vividly in Kazin’s own published journals. A few writers whom Kazin admires display in these pages just the sort of certainty that he considers outside the major American tradition. Saul Bellow falls in this category; so, more famously, does Flannery O’Connor, whose celebrated exchange with Mary McCarthy on the subject is duly noted. (McCarthy had told O’Connor that as a lapsed Catholic she considered the Host a symbol, to which O’Connor replied, "Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.") Kazin quotes O’Connor wistfully—if only this were the American experience, this conviction!—but sticks by his belief that theological and moral sparring is the American writer’s more traditional earmark.

For Kazin, Emily Dickinson manages to combine the struggling mode with the serene transcendentalist one, "absorbing a tradition without having to obey it," and telling a correspondent that "it is true that the unknown is the largest need of intellect, although for this no one thinks to thank God." A Dickinson quotation serves as the book’s epigraph: "We thank thee, Father, for these strange minds that enamor us against thee."

Dickinson’s importance is matched for the author by that of another key figure: Lincoln, depicted as a doubting man, facing the mutually exclusive but passionately held convictions of North and South about the will of God, forced to build a conception of his own. This vision of Lincoln is evidently fundamental to Kazin’s idea of the book. In his published journals and in a 1996 preface to the 20thanniversary edition of his An American Procession, Kazin talks about a book he is working on called The Almighty Has His Own Purposes—a phrase from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address—which has become God and the American Writer. In this preface, Kazin suggests that slavery and the Civil War, more than any other factors, are responsible both for Americans’ deep religiosity and for their inability to accept any theological answer as final. "On this terrible subject," he writes of slavery, "all true and ancient believers outdo the Biblical Jacob—they wrestle with Him forever."

This idea, though elegant, has problems, and the book’s change of title may reflect their belated surfacing. The trouble is not the inclusion of Lincoln (or Jefferson) in the procession of American literary writers; this is hardly unprecedented, though it does produce complexities. (For all its eloquent reflections on divine will, Lincoln wrote the Second Inaugural to fulfill a public end, not a private vision.) The problem lies elsewhere. To begin with, the view that American theological independence flows from slavery, or from agony over the competing certainties about slavery, contradicts and in some ways trivializes Kazin’s category of unconventional but confident writers—those who hold their ground before orthodoxy, whose self-assurance is the wellspring of their religious enthusiasm, and whose insistence on calling God as they see him is bound up in what is most American about American life.

Does the Second Inaugural show a would-be believer in agony before a divine will that seems unfathomable? Kazin draws our attention to a key sentence: "If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?" Faith versus doubt does not seem exactly the right framework here. Lincoln’s analysis of the moral situation is entirely consistent with a religious view of history. And, having asked the question, Lincoln famously answers it: "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by anoth-er drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ "

These words—magnificent and familiar—do not support Kazin’s notion that the Civil War threw faith radically and irremediably into doubt. Instead, they support another of his arguments: that the American tendency to moral assurance, especially in the hands of a great creative intelligence, could respond to unprecedented American travails such as slavery with a gripping and individual theology. Kazin tries too hard to tie race, the moral struggle that looms largest in American history, into the very different question of why Americans, set free of compulsion, stick enthusiastically to God and religion. Some writers who agonized over the slavery question did experience it as a challenge to their views of the nature of God, but others did not. One of Kazin’s weaker moments is his attempt to complicate Stowe’s theology in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) into "a continuing Christianity all her own," merely because she saw that the organized church had fallen short.

It seems finally somewhat reductive of religion to argue that the urgency of its appeal can be felt only in times of public moral crises that rise to the awful heights of the Civil War. So high a standard for God wrestling also keeps Kazin from seeing anything akin to his writers’ questing sensibilities in today’s public discussions and expressions of faith that so infuriate him. Were American religion, then or now, radically public and conventional, the space would be much reduced for the kinds of bold theological excursions honored in this book. Fortunately, Kazin’s own analysis offers ample evidence that such is not the case.