by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Howe’s personal voice, his refusal to rest or desist, brought him back into fashion as a critic in the same way that he became the political conscience for many in the younger generation. Just as he lived to witness the end of the Reagan revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, he saw the beginning of a tectonic shift in the world of literature and criticism. Thanks mainly to the humiliation of the left in the culture wars of the late eighties and early nineties, a new fascination with the public intellectual challenged the long dominance of theory, with its arcane professional languages. In an obituary tribute to Trilling written many years earlier, Howe recalled asking Trilling whether he wasn’t terrified of the new methodologists who were taking over the field. (Trilling responded puckishly that he was terrified of everything.) By the time Howe died the theorists had more or less had their day, and Howe himself became an important model for young literary scholars like David Bromwich and Ilan Stavans who were as interested in politics as in culture, and were eager to write for larger audiences without intellectual compromise. For me he had always been such a model, ever since I began reading him as an undergraduate around 1960. When I published my first piece in Partisan Review in 1962, I got a complimentary note from Howe, always on the lookout for young talent. He invited me to write for Dissent, something I didn’t actually get to do until twenty-five years later. I didn’t meet him until the early seventies, and disliked the fire-breathing pieces he wrote in the interim about politics and the arts in the uninhibited climate of the 1960s. It amazed me that he could write a sympathetic essay on Berkeley’s Free Speech movement one year, then publish his furious onslaught against the New Left barely a year later. When Philip Rahv criticized him for setting up “anti-Communism as the supreme test of political rectitude on the Left,” when Raymond Williams attacked the “rancor” of his tone, its sense of “unjustified superiority,” I completely agreed, though Rahv had scarcely earned the right to attack him from the left and Williams’s position boiled down to the hoary dictum “No enemies on the Left.”
Howe escaped from politics, as he had done since the fifties, through his invaluable work on Yiddish literature, editing a series of anthologies, with superb introductions, that brought this largely invisible body of work into the American mainstream. Toward the end of the decade he also wrote two seminal essays summing up the culture of modernism and the world and style of the New York intellectuals, essays that showed not only his wide purview and bold synthesizing powers but his rueful sense, perhaps premature, that these chapters of cultural history were more or less over. Just as Howe saw himself as a latecomer to Yiddish literature, which paradoxically made him a pioneer in its dissemination to an English-speaking audience, he felt a sense of belatedness in both modernist culture and the fractious circle of the New York writers. Caught between vigorous engagement and an elegiac sense of farewell, he became the boldly assertive chronicler who brought each subject into focus, as he had done with the work of many individual writers. Yet he also believed that cultures could flourish brilliantly in their moment of decline, as I. B. Singer, Chaim Grade, and Jacob Glatstein had shown in the waning days of Yiddish literature, as Southern writers and Jewish-American writers had done when their cultural roots were (in his view) already disintegrating.
Not long after I met Howe I joined his department, the doctoral program in English at the City University of New York, and very soon the wariness between us dissolved. In the face of rising neoconservative influence, he had turned left again in the early 1970s, bringing his Dissent colleagues along with him. In a little-known but momentous essay from 1971, “What’s the Trouble?,” he took the malaise of the young more seriously as a “crisis of civilization.” Previously, he had debunked their rebellion as a matter of style, a set of deliberate provocations. He resented their reducing “differences of opinion to grades of moral rectitude.” Behind their deep alienation, he now saw a more metaphysical question: “How shall we live?” It was a crisis of meaning, marked by “residual sentiments of religion and vague but powerful yearnings toward transcendence,” something he had rarely acknowledged earlier.
As an old Marxist, Howe must have felt uncomfortable about such ruminations, which may explain why he did not reprint this essay, but it was striking that he found himself thinking along these lines, among the most eloquent lines he had ever written. “Who, looking upon the experience of our century, does not feel repeated surges of nausea, a deep persuasion that the very course of civilization has gone wrong?” He suggested that “we live at a moment when problems beyond the reach of politics—problems that should be beyond the reach of politics—have come to seem especially urgent and disturbing.” This recognition would eventually lead him to grapple with the Holocaust and its literature, as in his review of a Warsaw ghetto memoir, published only days before his death in 1993. He could even forgive the young their utopianism, their cherished innocence. “We have learned that the effort to force men into utopia leads to barbarism, but we also know that to live without utopia is to risk the death of imagination.”
As his colleague at the City University, twenty years younger, I had a certain awe of him and kept my distance. He tended to be abrupt and impatient with everyone, which often made me feel I was keeping him from more important business, indeed, from getting his work done. The publication of World of Our Fathers in 1976 made him a household name in a way he never expected to become, and it also increased demands on his time. He had little small talk, and our conversations were swift, amusing, and often practical—a student to be examined, a wrinkle in a writer’s work to be ironed out. (I remember one phone call in which he questioned me about the shifting names of the protagonists in Delmore Schwartz’s mesmerizing stories.) I admired his political probity, literary intelligence, and scorching wit, and felt he was someone I would never really know well but was glad to have on my side. I came to know him better through his writing, which never failed to engage me, and through his public appearances, where he was always a master of argument, than through our snatches of conversation, which often seemed truncated. I find today that I annotated almost every page of his 1982 memoir, A Margin of Hope, agreeing and disagreeing more vigorously than I ever did when he was in the room. Yet when he died I felt a gap in my life that has never really been filled.
On an impulse, Howe retired from active teaching in 1986, but continued writing, editing, and lecturing until his death. In his reviews he often praised his subjects for staying the course, getting the work done, even in the face of defeat, discouragement, aging, and illness. “The years of my life coincided with the years of socialist defeat,” he wrote near the end of his memoir. He says of Edmund Wilson that “his career took on a heroic shape, the curve of the writer who attains magisterial lucidity in middle age and then, in the years of decline, struggles ferociously to keep his powers.” In describing his flawed heroes, Howe often enriched the portrait by projecting his own fears. The illnesses of his last years often left him depressed, and more than once I heard him wonder whether the world really needed another book from him. But he enormously admired Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate, for sticking to his political mission, and even for his eloquent style in debate (“he knew more, he talked faster, and—miracle of American miracles!—he came out with comely sentences and coherent paragraphs”). He described Thomas as “the only truly great man I have ever met.” Howe reserved his contempt for the former radicals from his City College days who had grown up poor but turned comfortable and conservative, losing their feeling for the world they left behind and enjoying their new access to wealth and power. Another hero of his, a figure of genuine moral authority, was the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, “the least bitter of ex-Communists, the most reflective of radical democrats,” whose later books were nonetheless weakened by “his exhausting struggle with his own beliefs, the struggle of a socialist who has abandoned his dogmas yet wishes to preserve his animating values,” something Howe himself experienced as well. Those who clai
med to be exempt from such “crises of belief,” he wrote, “were mere fools passing through the twentieth century without experiencing it.”
It’s hard not to see the touches of self-reflection in Howe’s portraits of Wilson and Silone. Howe had begun redefining his socialism as early as the 1950s, transforming it from historical dogma to moral critique—“the name of our desire,” as he called it, using Tolstoy’s phrase. Eventually it became a more forceful extension of liberalism, an unwavering commitment to the labor movement and the welfare state, and a branch of the left wing of the Democratic Party. The very word, socialism, became a mantra for persistence and determination; it was his link to the radical past even as he was adapting it to the needs of the present. In the introduction to his 1966 collection of political essays, Steady Work, he described himself as “a man of the left, in dialogue with himself, asking which of his earlier ideas should be preserved, which modified, which discarded.” This tentativeness was on view not so much in the essays themselves, which are never less than emphatic, but in the unresolved conflicts between them. This was especially the case with his essays on the New Left, marred by his impatience with a generation he clearly hoped would follow his political lead. Howe could be polemical, at times even infuriating, without losing his grasp of the complexity of the subject. Echoing Trilling’s well-known critique of liberalism in The Liberal Imagination, he described a commitment to socialism in the mid-twentieth century as “a capacity for living with doubt, revaluation and crisis,” yet also called it “an abiding ideal.” Socialism for him became a politics of conscience rather than a specific program or a set of goals; he came to admire figures who put their conscience, as well as their powers of observation, before their theories and ideas.
Howe saw Orwell, like Silone, as a writer trying to live by a consistent set of values after they had lost their ideological underpinnings. Howe’s stirring 1968 essay on Orwell can also be read as a self-portrait. He describes Orwell as someone who kept his head, “wrote with his bones,” through the worst political episodes of the twentieth century: “the Depression, Hitlerism, Franco’s victory in Spain, Stalinism, the collapse of bourgeois England in the thirties.” Howe writes that “for a whole generation—mine—Orwell was an intellectual hero.” He saw in Orwell many of the qualities he aspired to or regretted in himself. Like his other heroes, including Wilson, Orwell was an irascible, even “pugnacious” man, whose essays are rightly admired for their “blunt clarity of speech and ruthless determination to see what looms in front of one’s nose.” He notes, without really complaining, that Orwell “is reckless, he is ferociously polemical,” even when arguing for a moderate position. In the face of those who see him as some kind of secular saint, he doubts that Orwell “was particularly virtuous or good.” Although Orwell “could be mean in polemics,” he sometimes befriended those he had criticized, for he was driven not by personal animus but “by a passion to clarify ideas, correct errors, persuade readers, straighten things out in the world and in his mind.” He admires Orwell’s “peculiar sandpapery humor” and the “charged lucidity” of his prose, which nicely describes his own. Like Howe, Orwell “rejected the rituals of Good Form” and “turned away from the pretentiousness of the ‘literary.’” He notes that Orwell “had a horror of exposing his private life,” a theme that surfaces repeatedly in Howe’s pieces (on Joyce, for example, and on Salinger) but also sets parameters for his own memoir. Finally, Howe examines the formal features of Orwell’s essays, especially their superb endings. Beginning with Orwell as a moral exemplar though a less than perfect man, in fact a difficult man, he ends by scanning Orwell’s great essays for lessons on how to write. In Howe’s final work, A Critic’s Notebook, he is still searching and still learning.
The best responses to Howe’s work were as attentive to his style as he was to the language of those he reviewed. A few reviewers took due note of his remarkable growth as a writer. Early on, in 1964, Ted Solotaroff observed how the critic and the socialist intellectual converged in him, not only in his sense of cultural crisis but in “his crisp, meticulous prose, his skill at literary description, his grasp of the relevant issue quite equal to any serious book or audience. He is almost always telling you something sound and worthwhile and he is almost always as clear as glass.” In Howe’s earlier work this could be a defect. His literary essays sometimes read like position papers, and one could almost discern a shadowy list of points, the skeleton of the argument, behind the merely efficient surface of the writing. This is even truer of political essays like “New Styles in ‘Leftism,’” the description of a type that elides individual difference, an inventory of bullet points, each of them like a jab to the ribs or an uppercut to the jaw. But as Howe’s politics and even his temperament lost their sharp edges, his feeling for the aesthetic, his exhilaration with the language, blossomed. Rereading the large body of Orwell’s essays, he is surprised to find that “the sheer pleasure of it cannot be overstated . . . Orwell was an even better writer than I had supposed.” In his review of Howe’s 1973 collection The Critical Point, Roger Sale made a similar discovery about Howe himself—that “he seems to have grown over the years, and his prose is sharper, the insights more precise and flexible.” He concluded that Howe “seems to be trusting his human and literary instincts more than he once did.”
By attending to the touch and feel of a text, he became more of a genuine essayist. As Howe mellowed, the nuances, reservations, and exceptions that complicated his case became as important as the argument. He came to love the New York City Ballet, where he learned to appreciate Balanchine’s dancers for their eloquence of the body, an eloquence beyond language. He soon found himself increasingly valuing literature as a source of “ease and pleasure,” not simply of moral critique, “for me the equivalent of those paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard I had come to love.” From the gifted historian Richard Hofstadter, from Trilling, he “learned about a life of the mind that can keep some distance from competitiveness and clamor.” The felicity of his own prose, once merely workmanlike, burgeoned along with its complex powers of description. Struck by phrases like Howe’s description of the “high radiance” of Frost’s greatest poetry, Roger Sale remarked that “only the best critics are generous enough to find the right words for their authors.” This laconic verbal precision, itself very literary, contrasts with the tedious elaboration that disfigures academic writing, in which every point must be spelled out, every remark illustrated by five examples. Howe later paid tribute to the deeply troubled Delmore Schwartz as “a wondrous talker, a first-rate literary intelligence—the sort who can light up the work of a poet or novelist with a single quick phrase.” For a true critic this is a talent as basic as breathing.
Howe never became as fluent a writer as Trilling or Alfred Kazin, or as direct and uncluttered as Orwell and Wilson, those masters of the plain style. Working rapidly, he developed a better ear for his subjects’ prose than for his own. He had one gift absolutely essential to a critic—the power of discrimination, the gift for striking the right note, and for getting under the writer’s (and the reader’s) skin. His literary judgment, his intuition, could create a benchmark, a point of reference for serious readers, even those who disagreed with him. It could reach the writers themselves, as his well-known attacks touched a nerve in Ellison and Roth, galvanizing Ellison to an eloquent defense and moving Roth in a subtly new direction, toward novels of greater historical scope and moral urgency.
As a writer himself Howe acknowledged that his talent for metaphor was limited. I’ve always been struck by a certain clumsiness in his account of his “reconquest of Jewishness” in A Margin of Hope. But “Jewish Quandaries,” the chapter in which this odd, soldierly phrase appears, is a penetrating essay (with illustrations from his own life) on the struggle of Jewish intellectuals with their ethnic background; it is also a frank analysis of how his own feelings had changed over the years. Speaking for many cosmopolitan radicals who once disdained merely tribal loyalties, he
writes ruefully that “we had tried to ‘make’ our lives through acts of decision, ‘programs’ that thwarted the deeper, more intuitive parts of our own being.” Embarrassed by the immigrant poverty and parochialism of his early years, indoctrinated by the universalism of his later Marxist faith, with its trust in collective movements and contempt for bourgeois individualism, Howe never found it easy to talk about himself. It went against the grain. Yet his memoir, if rarely intimate, showed how well he could think about himself, trusting his human and literary instincts as he had increasingly done in his criticism. As early as 1946, in an essay for Commentary called “The Lost Young Intellectual,” and in later essays like “Strangers” in 1974, he channeled his own story into composite portraits of his generation, the twice-alienated children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who confounded their parents by pulling up their roots and turning into intellectuals. In World of Our Fathers he projected this deeply felt experience onto a broad historical canvas, rich with feeling and detail.
