A Voice Still Heard

by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)

  As with all the best critics, his work has a strong personal stamp. His tone was inimitable, unmistakable, and he himself comes through on every page—awkward, funny, impatient, at moments ruthless, yet with an uncanny ability to get to the heart of the matter, to highlight what really counts. More than a decade younger than Trilling, Rahv, and their generation, he always felt like a latecomer, a brash young man among the grownups, but as a critic and cultural historian he was distinctly an original, a writer with sweeping powers of synthesis, whose political savvy, humane moral outlook, and keen feeling for art ultimately enabled him to find his own voice.

  Introduction: A Voice Still Heard

  NINA HOWE

  ALTHOUGH MY FATHER, Irving Howe, died over twenty years ago, hardly a month goes by without at least one “Irving Howe sighting.” Family and friends will mention that they have spotted references to his work or ideas in newspapers, magazines, books, interviews, and other media. These references might be about his work in literary or social criticism or in Jewish history. In spite of the passage of time since his death, my father’s voice remains strong and his observations and comments continue to be current, relevant, and important. His work is still a source of inspiration and guidance. This book was assembled to represent and to revisit the breadth and depth of his work as an engaged and engaging scholar who spoke to multiple audiences on many topics.

  The pieces in this collection are drawn from the multiple domains in which my father worked across the several decades when he was an active writer and critic. Choosing the pieces to include in the present volume was initially a daunting task given the vast number of reviews, essays, and pieces of criticism that my father published during his forty-five-year career. To help choose which pieces to include, I enlisted the assistance of several individuals who proposed a range of suggestions that formed the starting point for the volume. There were some obvious pieces as well as some that my father had selected himself in previous books of collected essays (Celebrations and Attacks; The Critical Point; Steady Work; The Decline of the New; Selected Writings 1950–1990). Yet, I also wanted to include pieces that would enrich the reader’s sense of his accomplishments and ideas from a variety of print sources and decided to include some pieces that had not been part of previous collections of his work. Also, a decision was made to focus on essays and not chapters from some of his books, although there were some tempting choices that we might have included from books (e.g., Politics and the Novel; World of Our Fathers).

  Clearly, an organizational scheme was required to make sense of the body of work for the reader, since it ranged over so many topics and over so many decades. Initially, a thematic approach appeared to make sense, and I attempted to separate the possible selections into literary, political, and social commentary pieces but quickly abandoned this scheme. As I read over the body of my father’s work, especially the pieces published during my childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s, I came to realize that literary and political themes were deeply intertwined in all of his writing. For example, in “This Age of Conformity” and “What’s the Trouble?,” the intersection of politics and literature is so strong that trying to separate the pieces thematically would have been an impossible venture. Given that my father wrote a book titled Politics and the Novel (1957), perhaps the notion of a thematic organizational scheme was naïve on my part. Fortunately, in reviewing previous books of his collected works (Celebrations and Attacks; Selected Writings 1950–1990), it was apparent that my father resolved the organizational issue by using a chronological approach. Given that this was his decision, I decided to follow his direction.

  The temporal approach also allows the reader to understand the chronological development of my father’s work and the contemporary ideas and issues that were of interest to him at any point in time. There were periods when the political themes appeared to dominate his thinking and writing and he produced a number of books (e.g., Essential Works of Socialism; Basic Writings of Trotsky). The literary themes were always present too, but often more apparent in book reviews and longer essays, although he did write full-length books on Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Thomas Hardy. It is clear that my father favored the longer essay form of writing, which allowed him to explore his ideas in more depth, and he perfected it in his political and social commentary and in his literary pieces. Accordingly, I have included a number of longer essays in addition to some shorter pieces.

  Each of the decades includes at least one major political or social commentary piece, which serves as the framework for my father’s contemporary ideas and perceptions regarding the world scene. Thus, we selected the following as representative of each decade: “This Age of Conformity” (1950s), “New Styles in ‘Leftism’” (1960s), “What’s the Trouble?” (1970s), “Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times” (1980s), and “Two Cheers for Utopia” (1990s). There are a number of other important political pieces that focus on socialism, and place my father as a leading political and social thinker of the late twentieth century. The piece on George Orwell (“As the Bones Know”) provides an historical and political critique of Orwell’s work that every student of history should read, along with a “Tribune of Socialism,” about Norman Thomas. My father’s early love of politics and socialism was his major preoccupation during his college years and a driving force throughout his life. Although he never wavered in his political beliefs and remained steady in his vision of democratic socialism, his recognition of what was realistic is apparent in many of his later writings (“Why Has Socialism Failed in America?”; “Two Cheers for Utopia”).

  It is well known that my father’s founding of Dissent with Lewis Coser in 1954 was just one expression of his belief in democratic socialism. Considering that Dissent served as an outlet for much of his own political writing, it is not surprising that several essays in the present collection originally appeared in this magazine. Although my father was joined by other co-editors in later years (Michael Walzer and Mitchell Cohen), it was clear that he was the main pillar at Dissent in producing a lively and important “little magazine,” as he called it. He was proud to publish a number of European writers for the first time in English (e.g., Ignazio Silone) as well as important American writers such as Norman Mailer. I would be remiss not to note the importance of Dissent in my father’s life work. His introduction to Twenty-five Years of Dissent is included in the present volume, where he articulates a broad social and political context and vision for the magazine. This piece is a fitting reminder of my father’s work as Dissent celebrates its sixtieth anniversary in 2014.

  Several pieces of social criticism are included here, and the present volume would be incomplete without them. One is the essay on “The New York Intellectuals,” which was recommended by all those involved in the selection process. Given its broad expanse and focus, this piece is considered by many individuals to be one of my father’s seminal essays. The essay titled “Strangers” is in some ways a companion piece to “The New York Intellectuals,” but it is a more personal account of how young Jewish American students growing up in the immigrant slums of New York in the 1920s and 1930s came to terms with American literature. How does one make sense of Ralph Waldo Emerson or Robert Frost when their experiences were so distant from that of the urban immigrant? My father explores these ideas in a relaxed and insightful way.

  Each decade is also represented by a number of literary pieces, which include short but always crisp book reviews and longer essays. Book reviews were the mainstay of much of my father’s writing. Across the five decades of his career, he wrote hundreds of book reviews. In fact, he started by writing anonymous book reviews for Time magazine sometime around 1950, which was a good source of income for a beginning writer. At the same time that he was toiling away within the Luce empire, he was also publishing book reviews in a number of other magazines such as Partisan Review. By the time my father started teaching at Brandeis University in 1953 (having barely set foot in graduate school!) he had giv
en up writing for Time magazine. Some of his early book reviews from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were reprinted in Celebrations and Attacks (1979), and later my father chose them for Selected Writings 1950–1990 (e.g., his outstanding review of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook). As I read my father’s essays included in Celebrations and Attacks, I realized that he had recommended so many of the same books to me over the years. For this reason, some selections for the current volume were guided by my personal memories of his recommendations and love of these books. One example is his review of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, a minor but wonderful gem of a novel about a part of the country that later in his life my father came to love. The range of books and authors covered in my father’s reviews was quite striking, including leading contemporary authors such as Doris Lessing and Philip Roth, as well as lesser-known authors including Henry Roth (Call It Sleep) and the Israeli writer Yaakov Shabtai (Past Continuous). His reviews celebrated and attacked various authors, to paraphrase my father’s title; he could be scathing in his criticisms, but he could also be generous, as apparent in our selections in the present volume.

  Although my father favored nineteenth- and twentieth-century American, European, and Russian literature, he was willing to move beyond this comfort zone into new territory. Once when I was visiting my father, a package of Japanese novels by various authors arrived unannounced from Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books. His first reaction was to send them back, but curiosity soon overtook him and he began to read the books. The review of The Samurai by Shusaku Endo reveals his attempts to understand the mind of the Japanese author and the literary themes of this body of work, which he indicated was not an easy, comfortable, or always successful process for him. Nevertheless, the book review is a compelling piece and reveals the breadth of my father’s reading and literary understanding.

  Beyond the book reviews, there are a number of longer literary essays on topics that captured my father’s attention, such as “The City in Literature” and “Writing and the Holocaust.” These are serious and deeply thoughtful literary essays, which illuminate his perceptive and brilliant mind and are free of jargon and flashy, self-involved, or narrow ideas. Nor are they confined by heavily scripted theoretical stances. My father once told me “write clearly and simply,” to which I would add “write with grace, insight, intelligence, humor, and passion”; these essays are a model of such writing. My father’s literary preferences were personal and never guided by the fashions of the day, as evidenced by his thoughtful essay on the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (“A Grave and Solitary Voice”) or his assessment that Arnold Bennett was sometimes a better writer than Virginia Woolf (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf”). Reading the latter piece spurred me to take Bennett’s books out of the library for a personal reassessment of these two authors, a journey which I hope that others will also take in the coming years.

  Yiddish was my father’s first language and became a major theme in his professional work, as is evident in the collections of Yiddish stories, essays, and poetry co-edited by the likes of Eliezer Greenberg and Ruth Wisse. The present volume would not be complete without some selections of Yiddish literature. The introduction to the The Best of Sholom Aleichem is an exchange of letters between my father and Ruth Wisse, which brings to light a number of the important themes of Yiddish literature in an engaging way. His interest in Jewish American writers is also recalled in the book review of stories by Bernard Malamud.

  In the last few years of his life, my father returned to literature, one of his first loves. As described by my late and beloved brother, Nicholas, in the preface to my father’s book A Critic’s Notebook, published posthumously, my father felt that he still had a number of things to say about literature that were best suited to the short essay. His choice of topics was certainly eclectic, but they were ideas that gave him joy and allowed him to reflect on the nature of literature and writing. Thus, there were pieces about some of his favorite authors (Dickens, Tolstoy), particular facets of writing or style (characters, farce, tone in fiction), and some questions that puzzled him such as the fads and fashions of literary preferences, for example, why Walter Scott fell out of the canon. It was a pleasure to reread this book. The choice of which pieces to include from this book in the present volume was not easy, but with the assistance of others I selected three pieces that reflect my father’s eclectic and delightful interests, ideas, and thoughts (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf”; “Dickens: Three Notes”; “Tolstoy: Did Anna Have to Die?”). In the piece about Dickens, my father explores ideas about “absolute goodness and the limits of fiction,” the role of minor characters, and “Becoming Dostoevsky” in Dickens’s late work. In the piece about Tolstoy, my father grapples with the central question about the fate of Anna Karenina given societal norms, Tolstoy’s personal views, and the fact that she is a character in a novel.

  Although my father was immersed in literary criticism, his deep interest in politics and social history remained to the end. As one of the anonymous reviewers of this collection noted, in one of his last political essays, “Two Cheers for Utopia,” my father provided an “autumnal” and highly nuanced perspective of his former Communist adversaries. His nearly last book review (The Road Leads Far Away: Antek and Warsaw Resistance) was a fascinating review of the history of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion that, of course, included a review of the book but also provided an insightful historical account of those events. It was published two days before his death on May 5, 1993.

  The final section of this volume includes two pieces that my father wrote in a more personal voice, which seemed a fitting way to end the book. He was a private person, but these pieces provide a glimpse into the world in which he grew up and some of his formative early experiences. The first piece is an excerpt from my father’s intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope, about the death of his father; it is a deeply poignant, conflicted, and touching piece. The second piece is an interview conducted by the Canadian social democrat Stephen Lewis, for a CBC radio program that took place when my father was visiting me in Toronto. I was present at the interview and was struck at how comfortable and relaxed my father was while talking to Lewis about his life and political views. These two pieces provide some insight into different aspects of his life, ideas, and work.

  Although the pieces in this book cover topics from different domains of thought and inquiry, the voice that runs through each of them is the same. Regardless of whether my father was writing about politics, social issues, a novel, or a moment from Jewish history, his voice emerged from his deep interest in the lives of ordinary people and their individual joys and struggles. He cared about people, how they lived, and how they dealt with the circumstances of their experiences. Across the breadth of these pieces, there is just one voice, a voice that is still heard. It is the voice I recall from my childhood with my father.

  I am indebted to a number of people for their assistance in compiling this volume. First, I thank Ilana Weiner Howe for urging me over several years to embark on the project and for her thoughtful suggestions for pieces, particularly of the literary kind. I am also very grateful to David Bromwich for his enthusiasm about the project, for his critical and thoughtful suggestions, and for his guidance throughout the publication process. Brian Morton and Mark Levinson made recommendations that sometimes coincided with those of David Bromwich, but they also brought forth important suggestions of their own. I am very grateful for their willingness to participate and for their excellent recommendations. Together, these four individuals helped to establish the core of the final selections. I would also like to thank Eric Brandt, my editor at Yale University Press, his assistant Erica Hanson, my agent Georges Borchardt, and his assistant, Rachel Brooke, for their help with the publication process.

  Three other individuals also provided invaluable recommendations that have made the book complete. I thank my husband, William Bukowski, for his recommendations and for remembering the Antek bo
ok review. His love, support, and patience during this project has been a source of inspiration for me. Finally, I thank my two children for their interest in this project and the opportunity to come to know their grandfather better through his writing. My daughter Ana’s deep interest in literature was an invaluable help in selecting pieces from A Critic’s Notebook, and her perceptive choices were most appreciated. My son, Nick, was an incredible assistant throughout all stages of this project, researching and reading all of the recommendations, especially the political and social commentary pieces, which fed into his interests in politics and history. Nick provided invaluable advice concerning the various recommendations and together we sorted through the lengthy list to compile the final selections. I could not have completed the project without him. Were my father still alive, I know that he would be very proud of his grandchildren and would have dedicated this book to them. Since he cannot do so, I take the liberty of dedicating this book to Anastasia and Nicholas Howe Bukowski.

  On a personal note, this has been an incredible journey for me. I have read more of my father’s work than I had ever in the past, particularly the work published in my childhood and adolescence. It has given me a greater appreciation for my father’s public work and for the brilliance of his fine and critical mind, for his sense of humor sprinkled throughout his writing, for his crisp and sparkling prose, for the range and depth of his interests and knowledge, and for his passion for literature, politics, social history, and above all, ideas. As the twentieth anniversary of his death has passed, I miss him more than I can say, but it is clear that many others miss his voice too. My hope is that this collection will bring his presence back to the fore for both older and new readers of Irving Howe. It seems fitting to end this introduction with my father’s own words from his seminal piece, “The New York Intellectuals.” Although he did not specifically write about himself in the piece, I think that the words he used to describe the driving ambition of the New York intellectuals, a group of which he was part, are most fitting: “What drove them, and sometimes drove them crazy, was not, however, the quest for money, nor even a chance to ‘mix’ with White House residents; it was finally a gnawing ambition to write something, even three pages, that might live.” We believe that Irving Howe’s voice still lives!