A Voice Still Heard
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A Voice Still Heard
A Voice Still Heard
Selected Essays of Irving Howe
Edited by Nina Howe with the assistance of Nicholas Howe Bukowski
Foreword by Morris Dickstein
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2014 by Nina Howe.
An earlier version of the Foreword by Morris Dickstein first appeared as an Afterword in Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks, edited by John Rodden (University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 2005, 2014 by Morris Dickstein.
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Excerpt from the poem “The Fall of Rome,” by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1947 by W. H. Auden and renewed 1975 by The Estate of W. H. Auden; from W. H. Auden Collected Poems, by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.
Photograph of Irving Howe by Jill Krementz © Jill Krementz. All rights reserved.
For Irving’s Grandchildren Anastasia and Nicholas Howe Bukowski and to the memory of their Uncle Nick
Contents
Foreword, by Morris Dickstein
Introduction: A Voice Still Heard, by Nina Howe
The 1950s
This Age of Conformity (1954)
Review of The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett (1954)
The Stories of Bernard Malamud (1958)
The 1960s
Doris Lessing: No Compromise, No Happiness (1963)
Life Never Let Up: Review of Call It Sleep (1964)
New Styles in “Leftism” (1965)
George Orwell: “As the Bones Know” (1968)
The New York Intellectuals (1969)
The 1970s
A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1970)
What’s the Trouble? Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both (1971)
The City in Literature (1971)
Tribune of Socialism: Norman Thomas (1976)
Strangers (1977)
Introduction: Twenty-five Years of Dissent (1979)
Introduction: The Best of Sholom Aleichem, with Ruth Wisse (1979)
The 1980s
Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai (1982)
Absalom in Israel: Review of Past Continuous (1985)
Why Has Socialism Failed in America? (1985)
Writing and the Holocaust (1986)
Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times (1986)
The 1990s
Two Cheers for Utopia (1993)
The Road Leads Far Away: Review of A Surplus of Memory (1993)
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf (1994)
Dickens: Three Notes (1994)
Tolstoy: Did Anna Have to Die? (1994)
Personal Reflections
Reflection on the Death of My Father (1982)
From the Thirties to the Rise of Neoconservatism: Interview with Stephen Lewis (1983)
Sources
photographs to follow page 124
Foreword
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
IN ANY CONSIDERATION of the man of letters, political critic, or the public intellectual in the second half of the twentieth century, it would be hard to find a more exemplary or embattled figure than Irving Howe. Since Howe’s death in 1993 at the age of seventy-two, his work and even his personal aura have had a vigorous afterlife. Literary criticism, though less topical than political writing, also fades with time. Once off the scene, the writer can no longer bring old ideas up to date or lend them coherence by sheer force of personality. Irving Howe, on the other hand, remains a real presence, not simply among those who knew him well. He remains one of my intellectual heroes, as Orwell was for him. His views were always strikingly formulated, and he is as frequently cited as any other critic of the period. Looking at writers and issues in a wide context, sharpening his arguments to make them hard to ignore, he could turn a book review into a general essay, laying down a challenge to any future writer on the subject.
Howe’s death was followed by many memorial tributes, along with attacks by prominent neoconservatives who saw him still as a thorn in their side—too smart a writer, too biting a critic to be easily set aside. More comment followed when his son, Nicholas Howe, brought out his last and most literary work, A Critic’s Notebook. With his sharp-tongued humor and debater’s edge, Howe played a central role in an excellent documentary about four New York intellectuals, Joseph Dorman’s Arguing the World. A leading professional journal, American Jewish History, devoted a whole issue to a not altogether friendly reconsideration of Howe’s masterpiece, World of Our Fathers, which lies like a lion across the path of historians of Jewish immigrant life. There have been two well-researched intellectual biographies, one by a militant conservative, Edward Alexander (1998), who is critical of Howe’s politics, early and late, the other by a sympathetic liberal, Gerald Sorin (2002). John Rodden, a leading Orwell scholar, has edited several engrossing volumes taking the measure of Howe’s influential legacy.
I suspect I’m not the only writer who still hears his voice echoing in my head, wondering at times what he might have thought of this book or that political twist or turn. Dissent, the social democratic journal he founded with Lewis Coser in 1954, remains intellectually robust at sixty—an ecumenical magazine of the beleaguered left, as flexible in its social criticism as he became in his lifelong commitment to socialism. Howe and Coser knew from their own experience how much the left had suffered from sectarianism, dogmatism, an insistence on ideological purity. Dissent was conceived as a broad-gauged alternative. In his cogent reflections on it after twenty-five years, Howe wrote that “we had to learn to work piecemeal, to treat socialist thought as inherently problematic, and to move pragmatically from question to question.” He knew this kind of “steady work” could be boring; it was certainly not the best way to fire up the troops.
Howe saw himself as a perpetual dissenter, but there were always others ready to follow where he led. His socialism seemed an anomaly in the 1950s as American power grew and intellectuals grew more complacent and self-satisfied. Yet he also felt shunted aside by the young leftists of the 1960s, and responded with a barrage of criticism so intemperate that it might have permanently alienated him from those who shared his deepest aims. Like Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution when it was still in its infancy, Howe’s assault on the New Left was telling but premature, only to be borne out, at least in part, when the movement violently imploded four or five y
ears later. By making his peace with the aging radicals of the sixties generation in his last decade, though he didn’t always approve of where they stood, Howe insured that the magazine would not only survive but flourish, even as the world’s political agenda dramatically shifted.
Today, in the face of an intransigent conservatism energized by unlimited money, grass-roots support, and a vast media presence, liberals feel thwarted, reduced to defending old gains rather than enacting new programs. As in the 1950s, this makes an inclusive journal, committed to both democracy and social change, all the more valuable. Howe and his fellow dissenters have served as a model for intellectuals who combine hopes for greater economic equality with a stubborn faith in democracy, who criticize their country for falling short of its ideals but refuse to see it as the root of evil in the world. For political writers like Richard Rorty, Michael Walzer, Todd Gitlin, George Packer, and Paul Berman, as well as a brace of younger writers in Dissent, he vindicated the figure of the activist thinker who somehow escaped the clutches of what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the twentieth century, very much as his old antagonist, the protean Ralph Ellison, became the unlikely model for a generation of black intellectuals who had outgrown the ideologies on which they cut their teeth, including black nationalism and Marxism.
The changing fortunes of Howe as a literary critic tell a similar story. The rise of theory, including deconstruction, academic feminism, ideological critique, and postmodernism, isolated him even more dramatically than the waves of conservatism and radical leftism. His style as a critic was marked by the vehement clarity of someone schooled in political argument, who had also learned his craft in the late 1940s as a rebellious protégé of Dwight Macdonald and an anonymous book reviewer for Time magazine. Even in his longest literary essays Howe remained a working journalist who made certain to give a clear, vigorous account of a writer’s career, a book’s texture and style, a character’s human density, and a work’s compelling claim on the reader. He invariably quoted well, a cardinal test of a good critic as well but also a generous gift to the reader. This approach went out of fashion in academic criticism after 1970 as theory and method came to the fore.
Howe saw this happening even earlier. In a stinging attack on Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, he anticipated what would later be called “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” the critic’s search for a buried subtext that could reveal the writer’s unconscious motives or be used to arraign the work itself. “Like a mass-culture imitation of a psychoanalyst, Fiedler refuses on principle to honor the ‘surface’ events, characters, statements and meanings of a novel. . . . He engages not in formal description or historical placement or critical evaluation, but in a relentless and joyless exposure. The work of literature comes before him as if it were a defendant without defense, or an enemy intent on deceiving him so that he will not see through its moral claims and coverings.” Writing in 1960, Howe had little inkling of how fashionable this adversarial posture would become for later academic critics. Even earlier, in his landmark essay “This Age of Conformity” (1954), he foresaw how a concern with theory and method could displace an immediate response to a writer’s work. “Learned young critics who have never troubled to open a novel by Turgenev can rattle off reams of Kenneth Burke.” They would not suppose that literature “is concerned with anything so gauche as human experience.”
Beginning with his first major work, Politics and the Novel (1957), Howe made his reputation as a social and political critic of literature, not a strictly aesthetic one. The academic exegesis of the day he found narrow and dull, marred by a lack of both “literary tact,” an indefinable feeling for a literary work, and an “interest in represented experience,” the human element. But in trying to connect intimately with the literary text and make sense of it to a broader public, he cast his lot, surprisingly, with the formal critics, both New and old, whose approach was already going out of style. After a period of “painful soul-searching” around 1948, he reacted sharply against his own sectarian background and the Marxist criticism it had fostered. He felt a growing delight in literature itself, apart from its ideological tendency. Fiedler’s imperious psychoanalytic method, he says, “disregards the work of literature as something ‘made,’ a construct of mind and imagination through the medium of language, requiring attention on its own terms and according to its own structure.” We rightly think of Howe as a historical critic, yet he always grounds his commentary in a writer’s language and style, the emotional patterns revealed in the work, and the unique or familiar ways the writer remakes the world.
Howe’s range of subjects remains little short of astonishing, even on literature alone. Nina Howe’s excellent selection gives full play to broad general essays, reviews of individual works, and overviews of a writer’s full corpus. Who would have expected him to respond so warmly to that minor masterpiece, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, or to the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson? When he liked a book, no one was better at “selling” it—at laying out its way of seeing, and carrying his readers along. His review of the paperback edition of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep singlehandedly revived a great novel that had languished, nearly forgotten, for thirty years. By the 1980s, as this selection makes clear, he found himself intrigued by other work—from Japan, from Israel—that added to his lifelong project of self-education.
For many years the clarity of Howe’s prose, along with this focus on the individual author, the individual work, made him seem like an old-fashioned figure on the critical scene, more the journalist and omnivorous reviewer than the full-fledged critic. Yet on writer after writer as different as T. E. Lawrence, Sholom Aleichem, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, I. B. Singer, Edith Wharton, Isaac Babel, and Theodore Dreiser, his essays were often the first place the general reader might turn for critical illumination. As a sometime radical with a deep, abiding sense of privacy, Howe did not reveal much of himself in these essays. Yet his grasp of these writers was so immediate, so personal, so determined to find the living pulse of their work—and to articulate something almost unsayable in his own visceral response—that we come to feel we know him intimately. His sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny voice is no doubt indebted to his political writing but also reenacts his probing, jabbing way of reading. Even his longtime antagonist Philip Roth acknowledged that Howe was a real reader, one of the chosen, whose criticism could cut to the quick.
Like Lionel Trilling, Howe took every literary work, as he took many political issues, as a moral challenge, a set of embodied convictions on how to live. This led him into sweeping polemics in which he would play the provocateur, evoke passionate controversy, but at times go badly astray. It was the outraged moralist in him that led him to attack James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for betraying the legacy of rage in the work of their mentor, Richard Wright, and to revile Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint for putting his talent “to the service of a creative vision deeply marred by vulgarity.” The same puritanical streak led him to travesty the “new sensibility” of the 1960s as a toxic dose of primitive innocence, a form of moral anarchy, and to wonder “whether this outlook is compatible with a high order of culture or a complex civilization.” Despite a lifetime’s work fighting for social justice, Howe, like other Jewish writers (including Freud and Trilling), found himself caught up in a tragic vision that stressed an almost insoluble moral tension, an irreconcilable conflict.
In a brief essay on Isaac Babel, he picks up Trilling’s cue that Babel, riding with the Red Cossacks through territory dotted with his fellow Jews, “was captivated by the vision of two ways of being, the way of violence and the way of peace, and he was torn between them.” But typically, Howe, speaking out of his own sense of the conflicts between politics and art, gives a historical coloring to Trilling’s timeless observation, seeing the soldiers’ brutality in political terms: “Babel understood with absolute sureness the problem that has obsessed all m
odern novelists who deal with politics: the problem of action in both its heroic necessity and its ugly self-contamination.” In other words, though radical goals may be admirable, the means at hand to realize them could easily prove offensive, unpalatable. In one story Babel’s protagonist, part journalist, part combatant, is bitterly berated by a Russian soldier for riding through battle without cartridges in his revolver. “Crouching beneath the crown of death,” the writer ends up “begging fate for the simplest ability—the ability to kill a man.” In another story he meets an old Jew who feels as abused by the Revolution as by the feudal Polish landowners who are fighting against it, who longs for something “unattainable,” a “sweet Revolution,” the “International of good people.” Characteristically, Howe shows how this tension is enacted in Babel’s famously laconic style, where it becomes a tremendous source of energy. He finds something similar in the speed and intensity of Bernard Malamud’s stories, so different from the drab Depression tales of Jewish life: “The place is familiar, but the tone, the tempo, the treatment are all new.” Taking up John Berryman’s comparison of Babel with Stephen Crane, he writes that “in both writers there is an obsessive concern with compression and explosion, a kinesthetic ferocity of control, a readiness to wrench language in order to gain nervous immediacy. Both use language to inflict a wound.”
This is no casual insight, no imposed melodrama, but a remark dredged up from deep inside the critic’s own psyche. Trilling and Howe, both conflicted Jews, respond strongly to the ambivalence about Jews, about violence, about revolution that makes Babel’s Red Cavalry so starkly effective yet would one day make the author one of Stalin’s victims. This personal identification gives power to Howe’s essays, which are often obliquely autobiographical. In a memoir of one of his mentors, Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv, with whom he later quarreled, Howe describes how Rahv turned cautious in the conservative climate of the 1950s, provoking others (including Howe) to write the provocative critical essays Rahv himself might have written. By holding back, Rahv lost his “elan, his nervousness”: “He could still turn out a lively piece full of the old fire and scorn, but he had made an estimate—politically mistaken, morally unheroic—that this wasn’t the time to take chances. And by not taking chances (they didn’t turn out to be such big chances either), he allowed his energy to dribble away, his voice to lose its forcefulness.” Howe himself, at Rahv’s urging, wrote the polemical essay “This Age of Conformity,” one of the key dissenting texts of the decade, which Rahv then published in his magazine. In Howe’s account, Rahv’s cunning and timidity did him in; as Howe sees it, personal authenticity, keeping faith with one’s convictions, is inseparable from political and moral daring. Rahv’s flaw, his failure of nerve, gives Howe’s portrait of him its tragic cast at the same time it justifies Howe’s own zeal for controversy, his take-no-prisoners approach to public argument, his lifelong persistence as a political campaigner, and the peculiar nervous intensity of his own style.