A Voice Still Heard

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

  It seems to me beyond dispute that, thus far at least, in the encounter between high and middle culture, the latter has come off by far the better. Every current of the zeitgeist, every imprint of social power, every assumption of contemporary American life favors the safe and comforting patterns of middlebrow feeling. And then too the gloomier Christian writers may have a point when they tell us that it is easier for a soul to fall than to rise.7*

  Precisely at the time that the highbrows seem inclined to abandon what is sometimes called their “proud isolation,” the middlebrows have become more intransigent in their opposition to everything that is serious and creative in our culture (which does not, of course, prevent them from exploiting and contaminating, for purposes of mass gossip, everything that is serious and creative in our culture). What else is the meaning of the coarse attack launched by the Saturday Review against the highbrows, under the guise of discussing the Pound case? What, for that matter, is the meaning of the hostility with which the Partisan Review symposium on “Our Country and Our Culture” was received? It would take no straining of texts to see this symposium as a disconcerting sign of how far intellectuals have drifted in the direction of cultural adaptation, yet the middlebrows wrote of it with blunt enmity. And perhaps because they too sensed this drift in the symposium, the middlebrows, highly confident at the moment, became more aggressive, for they do not desire compromise, they know that none is possible. So genial a middlebrow as Elmer Davis, in a long review of the symposium, entitled with a characteristic smirk “The Care and Feeding of Intellectuals,” ends up on a revealing note: “The highbrows seem to be getting around to recognizing what the middlebrows have known for the past thirty years. This is progress.” It is also the best possible argument for the maintenance of the avant-garde, even if only as a kind of limited defense.

  Much has been written about the improvement of cultural standards in America, though a major piece of evidence—the wide circulation of paperbound books—is still an unweighed and unanalyzed quantity. The basic relations of cultural power remain unchanged, however: the middlebrows continue to dominate. The most distinguished newspaper in this country retains as its music critic a mediocrity named Olin Downes; the literary critic for that newspaper is a philistine named Orville Prescott; the most widely read book reviewer in this country is a buffoon named Sterling North; the most powerful literary journal, read with admiration by many librarians and professors, remains the Saturday Review. Nothing here gives us cause for reassurance or relaxation; nothing gives us reason to dissolve that compact in behalf of critical intransigence known as the avant-garde.

  No formal ideology or program is entirely adequate for coping with the problems that intellectuals face in the twentieth century. No easy certainties and no easy acceptance of uncertainty. All the forms of authority, the states and institutions and monster bureaucracies, that press in upon modern life—what have these shown us to warrant the surrender of independence?

  The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.

  Notes

  1* The Smith Act, passed in 1940, was a loosely worded piece of legislation that made it unlawful to “conspire to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.”

  2* It must in honesty be noted that many of the intellectuals least alive to the problem of civil liberties are former Stalinists or radicals; and this, more than the vast anti-Marxist literature of recent years, constitutes a serious criticism of American radicalism. For the truth is that the “old-fashioned liberals” like John Dewey and Alexander Meiklejohn, at whom it was once so fashionable to sneer, have displayed a finer sensitivity to the need for defending domestic freedoms than the more “sophisticated” intellectuals who leapt from Marx to Machiavelli.

  3* It may be asked whether a Stalinist’s “nonconformism” is valuable. No, it isn’t; the Stalinist is anything but a nonconformist; he has merely shifted the object of his worship, as later, when he abandons Stalinism, he usually shifts it again.

  4* This may be true of all critics, but is most perilous to those who suppose themselves free of ideological coloring. In a review of my Faulkner book—rather favorable, so that no ego wounds prompt what follows—Robert Daniel writes that “Because of Mr. Howe’s connections with . . . the Partisan Review, one might expect his literary judgments to be shaped by political and social preconceptions, but that does not happen often.” Daniel is surprised that a critic whose politics happen to be radical should try to keep his literary views distinct from his nonliterary ones. To be sure, this is sometimes very difficult, and perhaps no one entirely succeeds. But the one sure way of not succeeding is to write, as Daniel does, from no very pressing awareness that it is a problem for critics who appear in the Sewanee Review quite as much as for those who appear in Partisan Review.

  5* Writing about Wuthering Heights Mark Schorer solemnly declares that “the theme of the moral magnificence of unmoral passion is an impossible theme to sustain, and the needs of her temperament to the contrary, all personal longing and reverie to the contrary, Emily Brontë teaches herself that this was indeed not at all what her material must mean as art.” What is more, if Emily Brontë had lived a little longer she would have been offered a Chair in Moral Philosophy.

  6* Randall Jarrell, who usually avoids fashionable cant: “Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong; that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps.” Which chains were knocked off in Germany to permit the setting up of death camps? And which chains must be put up again to prevent a repetition of the death camps?

  7* Thus Professor Gilbert Highet, the distinguished classicist, writing in Harper’s finds André Gide “an abominably wicked man. His work seems to me to be either shallowly based symbolism, or else cheap cynicism made by inverting commonplaces or by grinning through them. . . . Gide had the curse of perpetual immaturity. But then I am always aware of the central fact about Gide—that he was a sexual pervert who kept proclaiming and justifying his perversion; and perhaps this blinds me to his merits . . . the garrulous, Pangloss-like, pimple-scratching, self-exposure of Gide.” I don’t mean to suggest that many fall so low, but then not many philistines are so well educated as Highet.

  Review of The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

  {1954}

  SARAH ORNE JEWETT was a writer of deep pure feeling and a limited capacity for emotional expression: there is always, one senses, more behind the language than actually comes through it. In her best work she employed—it was an instinctive and inevitable choice—a tone of muted nostalgia. She knew that the Maine country she loved so well was slowly being pushed into a social impasse: it could not compete in the jungle warfare that was American life in the late nineteenth century. But even as this knowledge formed and limited her vision of things, she did not let it become the dominant content of her work, for she understood, or felt, that the obsolete also has its claim upon us. She was honest and tactful enough not to inflate her sense of passing and nostalgia with the urgencies of a heroism that could only have been willed; in her bare, linear stories about country people struggling to keep their farms alive, she made no false claims, for she saw that even when one or another figure in her Maine country might be heroic there was nothing distinctively heroic in the spectacle of a community in decline, a way of life gradually dying. But she knew—it was an enviable knowledge—that admiration and love can be extended to those who have neither the vocation nor the possibility for heroism. She paid a price, of course. In a country where literature has so often been given over to roaring and proclaiming and “promulging” it was nearly impossible for so exquisite an artist—exquisite precisely because she was, and knew she was, a minor figure—to be properly valued.

  At first glance The Country o
f the Pointed Firs bears a certain structural resemblance to Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. In both books a young woman who has tasted urban knowledge returns to a quaint, outmoded village which represents preindustrial society, and there observes the manners of its inhabitants with a mixture of fondness and amusement. But charming as Cranford obviously is, it does not seem to me nearly so good as Miss Jewett’s book. Too often Mrs. Gaskell is content to bask in the soft glow of eccentricity and oddity, so that her narrator leaves Cranford pretty much the person she was. But Miss Jewett’s “I” registers the meaning of Deephaven with an increase of force and insight that is beautifully arranged: for her the experience of arriving and leaving becomes an education in mortality.

  The people in The Country of the Pointed Firs are eccentrics, a little gnarled by the American weather and twisted by American loneliness; but it is not for a display of these deformities that Miss Jewett presents them. She is interested in reaching some human core beneath the crusted surface and like so many other American writers, like Anderson and Frost and Robinson, she knows the value and pathos of the buried life. That is why it is harmful, despite the fact that her stories are set in the same locale, to speak of her as a regional writer; for regional literature, by its very premise, implies a certain slackening of the human measure, a complacent readiness to accept the merely accidental and quaint.

  Miss Jewett moves her light from one figure to another: the shy fisherman William who late in life returns to the interior country to claim his love; the jilted Miss Joanna Todd who in the immensity of her grief cuts herself off from humanity and lives alone on a coastal island; the touched sea captain who remembers journeys to places that never were; and most of all, Mrs. Almiry Todd, the central figure of the book, sharp-tongued, wise, witty, a somewhat greyed version of George Eliot’s Mrs. Poyser. (As Mrs. Todd recalls her dead husband, “She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain. . . . An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.”) The book is set in a dramatic present that is necessarily somewhat fragile, but it resounds with full echoes of the past: tradition lives as an element of experience, not a proposition of ideology. (“Conversation’s got to have some root in the past,” says an old lady, “or else you’ve got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.”)

  The Country of the Pointed Firs gains organic structure from its relaxed loyalty to the rhythms of natural life. The world it memorializes is small and shrinking, and the dominant images of the book serve only to bound this world more stringently: images of the ranked firs and the water, which together suggest the enclosing force of everything beyond the social perimeter. But meanwhile a community survives, endowed with rare powers of implicit communication: to say in this world that someone has “real feelins” is to say everything.

  Finally the book is a triumph of style, a precise and delicate style such as we seldom find in nineteenth-century American prose. The breakdown of distinctions between prose and verse which occurs under the sponsorship of romanticism and for a variety of reasons is particularly extreme in America, where it produces two such ambiguous figures of genius as Melville and Whitman—this breakdown hardly affected Miss Jewett. Very probably this is one reason she remained a minor figure while Melville and Whitman were, occasionally, major ones. But at the moment there is much to be gained from a study of her finely modulated prose, which never strains for effects beyond its reach and always achieves a secure pattern of rhythm. Listen to this sentence with its sly abrupt climax: “There was something quite charming in his appearance: it was a face thin and delicate with refinement, but worn into appealing lines, as if he had suffered from loneliness and misapprehension.” Or to the lucid gravity of this sentence: “There was in the eyes a look of anticipation and joy, a far-off look that sought the horizon; one often sees it in seafaring families, inherited by girls and boys alike from men who spend their lives at sea, and are always watching for distant sails or the first loom of the land.” Or to the wit of Mrs. Todd as she places her minister: “He seemed to know no remedies, but he had a great use of words.”

  The Country of the Pointed Firs is not a “great” book; it isn’t Moby Dick or Sister Carrie or even The Great Gatsby. It cannot sustain profound exegesis or symbol hunting. But living as we do in a country where minor works are underrated because major ones are overrated, it is good to remember that we have writers like Miss Jewett calmly waiting for us to remember them.

  The Stories of Bernard Malamud

  {1958}

  IT IS VERY HARD to describe the stories in The Magic Barrel with any sort of exactness—and not because they are so weird or exotic but because they are genuinely original. Part of the shock of pleasure in reading them comes from the discovery that one’s initial response is mistaken. One reacts, first of all, to Malamud’s painfully familiar setting: the Jewish immigrant neighborhood of the depression years. Here, predictably, are the Jewish grocery-man dragging in cases of milk each morning, the Jewish baker slowly expiring over his ovens. Somewhat later in time comes the Jewish graduate student fumbling his way through Rome, eager to grasp knowledge of the Gentile world yet perversely oppressed by a strange Jew, an archetypal nudnik, who in his unqualified shamelessness represents the claim that each Jew has on all others: the claim of trouble.

  Malamud’s stories bring back, for a page or two, memories of half-forgotten novels: the cramped, grey, weepy aura of “American Jewish” fiction. But then one learns that Malamud is not so easily “placed,” and that if it is legitimate to admire the care with which he summons the Jewish immigrant world, an important reason is that he treats it as no writer before him—except perhaps Daniel Fuchs—has ever done.

  For in each of Malamud’s best stories something surprising happens: it is as if the speed of the movie reel were crazily increased, as if the characters leapt clear of the earth, as if a Chagall painting snapped into motion and its figures, long frozen in mid-air, began to dip and soar. The place is familiar; but the tone, the tempo, the treatment are all new.

  In what way? Malamud, as it seems to me, moves not to surrealism or fantasy but to a realistic fable in which the life cycle is exhausted at double-time: a wink, a shrug, a collapse. Everything—action, dialogue, comment—is sped up, driven to a climax in which a gesture compresses and releases an essential meaning, and the characters, hurtling themselves across a dozen pages, rise to a fabulous sort of “Yiddish” articulateness of gesture and speech.

  Now, in any obvious sense this is not realism at all: the stories seldom plot along accumulating incidents, and they frequently diverge from strict standards of probability in order to leap-frog to dramatic moments of revelation. Nonetheless, their essential economy, the psychological pattern to which they remain loyal, can be called “realistic”: for they aim at verisimilitude in depth, they are closely responsive to a serious public morality, they wish ultimately to indicate that this is the way things really are. Malamud spurs the realistic story to a pace so feverish as to leave behind the usual stylizations of realism, but the moral and psychological intentions that are typical of realistic stories continue to operate in his work.

  This is a procedure with obvious dangers. Partly they are inherent ones, since his stories usually involve gambling everything on one or two paragraphs; partly they seem the result of a manner that Malamud shares with a good many other recent American Jewish writers: a jazzed-up, slap-dash, knock-em-down-and-hit-em-again approach to language and action. In his inferior stories Malamud depends too much on hard and flashy climaxes, so that the most beautiful aspect of his novel The Assistant—its hum of contemplativeness, its quiet humane undertone—is not to be found here. And too often Malamud’s stories seem excessively brilliant on the surface, a ruthless dash for effect, and then one has the feeling that one is being bullied and blinded by a virtuoso.

  But
these are incidental faults, and at his best Malamud has worked out for himself a kind of story that is spectacularly successful. In “The Loan,” Kobotsky, an impoverished Jew, comes to his old friend Lieb, an aging and harassed baker, to ask for some money. Years ago they had quarreled, but still a spark of feeling survives. Among his other troubles Lieb now has a second wife, Bessie, who shares with him the tears of poverty and adds some salt of her own. Kobotsky begs for his loan on the ground that his wife is sick, but Bessie, who must make the final decision, remains unmoved; then Kobotsky tells the truth, his wife has been dead for five years and he wants the money to buy a long overdue stone for her grave. Bessie, who can identify with a wife in a grave more easily than with a wife in a hospital, begins to weaken. Gathering force and lyricism, the story now speeds along to its climax: through a device I shall not disclose, Malamud achieves another reversal, this time to show that Bessie’s heart has again hardened and Lieb will not be able to help his friend. The last paragraph:

  Kobotsky and the baker embraced and sighed over their lost youth. They pressed mouths together and parted forever.

  Now by any usual standard this ending is melodramatic and most improbable: Jews like Kobotsky and Lieb do not press mouths together. But in the story the ending works, since it embodies what Malamud could neither have represented through ordinary realism nor risked stating in his own right: the beauty of defeat as a kind of love. And the reason it works is that Malamud has prepared for surprise by leading us so surely from one moment of suppressed intensity to another that the burst of pressure which creates the final excitement also dissolves any lingering expectations of ordinary realism. It is for similar reasons that one does not find it disturbing that in the superb title story a matchmaker who has arranged for a meeting between a rabbinical student and his (apparently) sluttish daughter should watch them on the sly, chanting “prayers for the dead.” Such incidents, in Malamud’s stories, are not symbolic; they are synoptic.