Literary biography is a genre that it is always safe to disdain; everyone knows the charges regularly brought against it by its accusers. Gossip about a writer’s misbehavior distracts us from the nobler self projected in his work; the biographer is always tempted to draw simplistic correspondences between a writer’s life and his creations; the reverence owed to genius is eaten away by gossip like a palace by termites.

No one who reads literary biographies can deny that all these accusations are often true. By definition, a biographer is almost always a lesser writer than the man or woman who he is writing about — a situation designed to breed envy, competitiveness, or sheer incomprehension. No wonder the biographer who comes to hate his subject, or simply wants to cut him down to size, is a familiar type, in life and literature. Philip Roth even made the villain of his latest novel, “Exit Ghost,” an ambitious young biographer, determined to smear the venerable writer E.I. Lonoff with the scandal of incest.

When everything that can be said against literary biography has been said, however, it remains true that, for modern readers, knowing about a great writer’s life is an integral part of his knowing his achievement. To believers in the religion of art, a book may be a Platonic abstraction, to be treated as though it had given birth to itself. To the humanist reader, on the other hand, art is valuable mainly as an interpretation of life, and must take its place in the context of life in order to attain its full stature and power.

The biography of its author is not a literary work’s only context, of course — if it were, the work could not be literature. But it does not diminish the stature of a poem or novel to understand it as an event in the author’s life, emerging from certain circumstances and responding to certain needs. One definition of a great writer, in fact, might be that his work and his life enhance one another.

“Alfred Kazin: A Biography” (Yale University Press, 452 pages, $35), by Richard M. Cook, prompts reflections such as these because it is a good example of what happens to literary biography when a writer’s life and work fail to cohere. If the book leaves an unsatisfying impression, even an unpleasant one, it is not because Mr. Cook, a professor of American literature at the University of Missouri, fails to do his job properly. On the contrary, Mr. Cook has a judicious appreciation of Kazin’s work as a memoirist and literary critic, and he has mastered the tempestuous literary-political milieu of the New York intellectuals to which Kazin uncomfortably belonged. Thanks in part to Kazin’s lifelong diary-keeping, Mr. Cook is also able to shed a surprising amount of light on the writer’s intimate life: his three failed marriages and his happy fourth, his distant relationships with his son and daughter, his friendships and rivalries and enmities.

Yet “Alfred Kazin: A Biography” ends up feeling like a book that should not have been written. This is because, on Mr. Cook’s own showing, Kazin’s life and writing seldom harmonized in the way a great writer’s does. As a result, when we read about Kazin’s humiliations and sufferings, they do not seem edifying; they are simply pitiful, in the way ordinary unhappiness is pitiful, and they seem to cry out for privacy. When his miserable marriage to his third wife, Ann Birstein, collapses in what Kazin called a “big suicide drama that ended up with the police in our bedroom demanding that I commit her or ‘accept the responsibility,'” we feel sorry for both husband and wife, but we have not learned anything useful to understanding Kazin’s work. Likewise, when Kazin rejoices in his conquests — “Thank God for Carol and Carla and Rose and Jean, for Celia and Elsie and Sylvia and Rosalind, for Alice and Vivienne — for the other Sylvia, for Lou, Lou, Lou!” — it is hard to feel that this is more than just bragging, or that Kazin’s lusts were redeemed by his art, the way that, one can argue, Saul Bellow’s were.

There is only one phase of Kazin’s life that proves an exception to this rule. This is his youth and early manhood, when he fought his way out of the poverty and insularity of Jewish Brownsville to become a major critic of American literature. In these years, Kazin was in sync with his generation and with literary history in a way that gives his story a more than personal significance. It is no wonder, then, that Kazin’s life in the 1920s and ’30s is the most interesting part of Mr. Cook’s biography, and the period that Kazin himself drew on to create his best books, the memoirs “A Walker in the City” and “Starting Out in the Thirties.”

Born in 1915, to a hardworking, emotionally turbulent mother and a depressive, emotionally absent father, Kazin grew up in the kind of Jewish-immigrant household that only the distance of three generations makes it possible to sentimentalize. Mr. Cook’s account of his subject’s early years is inevitably desiccated by comparison with Kazin’s own moving, unsparing portraits of his childhood, whose miseries and pressures he never fully escaped. As Kazin wrote in “A Walker in the City,” his love of literature, his longing for a freer and richer life, and his wary love of Gentile America all coalesced into a single dream of what he called “Beyond,” a fairyland whose address was Manhattan:

Why did they live there and we always in ‘Brunzvil’? Why were they there, and we always here? Why was it always them and us, Gentiles and us, all rightniks and us? Beyond Brownsville was all ‘the city,’ that other land I could see for a day, but with every next day back on the block, back to the great wall behind the drugstore I relentlessly had to pound with a handball. Beyond was the strange world of Gentiles, all of them with flaxen hair, who hated Jews, especially poor Jews … To be a Jew meant that one’s very right to existence was always being brought into question.

Kazin’s genius was to be able to pose this dilemma so movingly; his fate, Mr. Cook shows, was that he could never resolve it. The turning point in his life, and his one unambiguous victory, came in 1942, with the publication of his first book, “On Native Grounds.” Kazin had been working on this magisterial history of modern American fiction for the previous four years — years of steady labor in the reading room of the New York Public Library, which he would look back on as the happiest he ever knew. “There was something about the vibrating empty rooms early in the morning — light falling through the great tall windows, the sun burning the smooth tops of the golden tables as if they had been freshly painted — that made me restless with the need to grab up every book, press into every single mind right there on the open shelves,” he recollected.

“On Native Grounds” shows how well he succeeded in penetrating those books and the minds that created them. A critical history that touches on all the important American writers from William Dean Howells down to William Faulkner, it is remarkable not just for the confidence of its judgments and the breadth of its coverage, but for Kazin’s passionate appropriation of the whole American cultural tradition. In the very first sentence of the preface, Kazin refers to “our modern American literature,” and the book can be read as a long justification of that pronoun. “I have never been able to express the pleasure I derive from the conscious study of Americana … I love to think about America,” he wrote in his journal as he worked on the book. Kazin led the way for generations of Jewish writers to claim American literature as their native ground. Certainly, with the book’s triumphant publication — according to the New York Herald Tribune, it was “not only a literary but a moral event” — the doors of culture seemed to swing wide open for the 27-year-old Kazin. He immediately got a job as literary editor of the New Republic, then left it for a more glamorous one at Luce’s Fortune. For the rest of his life, Mr. Cook shows, Kazin would have his pick of writing and editing jobs, visiting professorships, Guggenheim grants — all the largesse mid-century America showered on its intellectuals.

Yet Mr. Cook titles his chapter about the aftermath of Kazin’s triumph “The Break,” and it is true that, once his magnum opus was finished, he was never again as secure, as focused, or as productive. The problem, as Mr. Cook makes plain without engaging in high-handed judgment, was that Kazin’s deep insecurities — about Jewishness, women, writing, success — could never be assuaged. In fact, they only became more acute as his reputation grew. Again and again in his diaries and published memoirs, we can see Kazin’s extreme touchiness toward anyone he imagined as “classier,” more established, more confident than himself.

Edmund Wilson, whom he greatly admired, he described as “tyrannically correct with himself and officiously correct about everybody else”: “Why did I always feel that I had to shout in order to reach him?” Kazin broke with Francis Steegmuller, after many decades of friendship, on account of what he perceived as the genteel writer’s “snubs and little faggy airs of distaste.” In 1982, when he was 67 years old and one of the most eminent writers in the country, Kazin could still brag in his journal, “I have made more breaks with the gentry than they have with me.”

But Kazin’s bitterest breaks came with fellow Jews who he perceived as having joined “the gentry,” turning their backs on Brownsville and all it represented. Lionel Trilling, for instance, was a longtime hate-figure: “there was an immense and cavernous subtlety to the man, along with much timidity, a self-protectiveness as elegant as a fencer’s; my first meetings with Trilling were just too awesome … He seemed intent on not diminishing his career by a single word.” Mr. Cook reports that Kazin blamed Trilling for his failure to be hired by Columbia University, on the grounds that Trilling “would never have wanted me, another Jew at Columbia.” This kind of suspicion verging on paranoia came into full blossom in the 1980s, when Kazin found a new calling denouncing Jewish liberals turned neoconservatives. Norman Podhoretz, one of Kazin’s chief targets, wrote, “I thought sometimes that Alfred was ‘crazy’ — even thought that I had driven him crazy.” This was an exaggeration, of course, but there is a grain of truth in it. Kazin’s hatred for the neoconservatives was motivated more by psychology than by politics. In fact, as Mr. Cook shows at some length, Kazin’s own views on Stalinism, Vietnam, and the New Left were not so far from the neoconservatives’. What really infuriated him was that they had cast off the vague socialist idealism he considered the mark of authenticity for a Jewish “outsider.”

This perpetual need to identify himself as an outsider, long after he had become an establishment figure, was what allowed Kazin to evoke the world of his Brownsville childhood with such immediacy. But it was also, Mr. Cook shows, what prevented him from achieving personal tranquility, or sustaining friendships, or focusing singlemindedly on any one of the many projects he continually invented and postponed. In short, Kazin remained the victim of his dilemmas, instead of making himself their master. By making this clear, “Alfred Kazin: A Biography” does not diminish what Kazin achieved in his finest books, but it also cannot bring to his story the catharsis that the best literary biographies achieve.

akirsch@nysun.com