Author Unstoned

CONTEMPORARIES (513 pp.)--Alfred Kazin--Atlantic-Liftle, Brown ($7.50).

A SAD HEART AT THE SUPERMARKET (211 pp.)--Randall Jarrell--Atheneum ($4.50).

Regret is the modish literary emotion this spring; rue is back in fashion; hope's hemline has been let down to fit the century's middle age. So it seems, at any rate, on the evidence of two collections of criticism published this week.

It is the U.S. cult and culture of the consumer that saddens Poet-Professor Jarrell, and in several speeches to academic audiences (the book is a sheaf of speeches and book introductions--the sort of collection that writers publish when they haven't written anything), he makes most of the familiar complaints. The intellectual is homeless; the poet is campus-bound; today's grammar-school education is flaccid; the American is merely a well-trained product buyer who knows, when in Weimar, "how to buy a Weimaraner." JarrelFs lectern jokes are rather good ("People who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks"), but his lamentations over the mass culture seem conventional and perfunctory, the kind of thing one serves up so that undergraduates can practice their wry smiles.

But Jarrell writing about writers is another matter; his virtues are exactly those that Alfred Kazin lacks. Jarrell understands that what is serious need not be solemn. The scales of justice are part of his equipment, of course, but they are a lighter model than the vast, slow-swinging mechanism that burdens Kazin. After following Jarrell's ardent and scholarly puffs for the short stories of Kipling or the poems of Eleanor Taylor, the reader feels that life will not be supportable without these stories or these poems. Kazin's approval of a writer, however well thought out, inspires the sort of emotion that one feels on hearing that the World Bank is doing an excellent job.

Kazin's solemnity may be the result of his status in what is usually a two-level hierarchy of book reviewer (bottom) and book critic (top). Kazin is in the middle, looking wistfully upward. He charges that book reviewing is wretchedly done in the U.S. and deplores "the professional philis-tines" of the daily press. He complains of the New York Times's Orville Prescott, for instance, that it is no longer possible to tell what book Prescott is reviewing, since all his reviews sound as if he had written the books himself. The trouble with Kazin, who writes for the weekly and monthly press, is that although his judgments are consistently shrewd and sound, his pieces read as if the books they discuss had been written by Immanuel Kant.

Readers compliment him on articles, but seldom argue with him, Kazin admits, solemnly regretting the middle-brow docility of his congregation. In the course of letting some of the air out of Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan, Kazin discovers a maxim he himself would do well to follow. The British writer's rule, he reports, is "rouse tempers, goad, lacerate, raise whirlwinds." Kazin does none of these things as he dolefully doles out justice.

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