A Voice Still Heard

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

  To deride the epigones of modernism who have reduced it from a vision to a fashion is no great intellectual risk. We should go farther and ask whether the masters must, in some sense, be held responsible for their corrupted followers, if only insofar as the corruption may point back to some little-noticed or half-hidden flaw in the world-view of the masters. Our problem then becomes to ask whether the visions of the great modernist writers can retain for us the moral urgency and emotional command they so powerfully exerted only a few decades ago.

  Clearly this is not a question to be answered in a few paragraphs, though I have tried on an earlier occasion to indicate some opinions.2* What matters, in behalf of a serious confrontation with our dominant literary heritage, is to move past (which is not to say abandon) both the authentic pieties we retain from an earlier moment and the false ones that have followed them.

  I propose a hypothesis: We have reached the point in our cultural history where it seems both possible and useful to remove ourselves from the partisanship that cultural modernism evoked throughout the past century. Modernism is no longer threatened, nor in question. Its achievements are solid and lasting, its influence is incalculable. It is beginning to take a place in the development of Western culture somewhat like that which Romanticism can be said to have taken by the last two or three decades of the 19th century. Modernism is beginning to become part of history, and thereby, for those of us responsive to history, a complex of styles and values we can accept through the mediation of its classical works. Modernism can now enter our moral experience complicated by that awareness of historical distance which is a mark of a cultivated sensibility, and thereby it remains a crucial part of our experience, as Romanticism does too. But if we ask ourselves questions as to the truth of the vision of a Lawrence or an Eliot or a Yeats—and I have some awareness of how tricky such questions can be—then we are no longer likely, and younger people are certainly no longer likely, to answer them with an unbroken passion, that total assent or denial elicited by a cultural movement both contemporary and embattled.

  If we lose much by no longer seeing modernism as a contemporary cultural presence, we may gain something too. We may gain a certain detached perspective upon its nature and its achievements, as in recent decades, through discovery, polemic, and reassessment, we have been gaining such a perspective upon the nature and achievements of Romanticism. And if we do approach modernism in this way—as a major component of our culture which the motions of history are transporting into that segment of our experience we call the past—then we may discover that a good many of our earlier enthusiasms will have to be qualified. Not repudiated; qualified. The famous “revolutionary” aspect of modernism may come to have for us an ambiguous value: in part an authentic response to the terribleness of the age and in part a nostalgia for a historically unlocatable and morally dubious “organic past”; in part a profound engagement with the inner nerves of city life and in part a snobbism of the fastidious embraced by those who look down upon the commonplace desires of commonplace mankind; in part an assault upon the calculation that lies at the heart of the bourgeois ethic and in part a cruel dismissal of those fragmented solutions and moderate comforts which it has become easy to dismiss as bourgeois. And we may then have to conclude that the now established hostility to the idea of the city, which is one portion of the modernist legacy, will no longer serve as well as in the past. The vision of the city we inherit from Eliot and Baudelaire, Céline and Brecht—with its ready nausea, packaged revulsion, fixed estrangement—will have to be modulated and itself seen as a historical datum. If we ask ourselves whether we accept the ideas of Shelley or the vision of Blake, their very distance allows us to answer with a sense of ironic qualification that would be difficult to summon for an embattled contemporary. Something of the sort should soon be true in regard to the great figures of modernism.

  To remain faithful to its tradition means to call it sharply into question. Can we not, for example, say, yes, the city remains the pesthole and madhouse, the prison and setting of spiritual void that you have shown it to be; nevertheless we can no longer be satisfied with this perception and this perception alone.

  Nor is it as if we lack an inspiring model from within literary modernism itself. No writer has portrayed the city with such severity as James Joyce. Every assault that the modernist literary tradition can make upon the city appears in Ulysses, magnified in scope and feverish with intensity. Yet that assault is also, in Ulysses, transcended through a skeptical humaneness, a tolerance beyond tolerance, a recognition that man was not put on this earth to scratch his eyes out. Of all the writers who render the modern city, it is Joyce who engages in the most profound struggle with nihilism, for he sees it everywhere, in the newspaper office and the church, on the street and in the bed, through the exalted and the routine. Joyce, says Richard Ellmann, shows that “the world of cigars is devoid of heroism only to those who don’t understand that Ulysses’ spear was merely a sharpened stick . . . and that Bloom can demonstrate the qualities of man by word of mouth as effectively as Ulysses by thrust of spear.” The theme of Ulysses, says Ellmann, is simply that “casual kindness overcomes unconscionable power.” Does it? In reality? In Joyce’s book? I hardly know but cherish Ellmann’s sentence, as I believe Joyce would have too.

  We may destroy our civilization, but we cannot escape it. We may savor a soured remorse at the growth of civilization, but that will yield us no large or lasting reward. There is no turning back: our only way is a radical struggle for the City of the Just.

  The City of the Just . . . the phrase rings a little hollow right now, so far do we seem to be from it. Still, we shall create genuine cities, which means vital civilizations, or we shall perish. We shall create a high culture, serious and gay, or we shall sink into a rocklike, mainline stupor. Assault upon the city is now to be valued only when understood as the complex play of men who live in cities and would live nowhere else. It is too late for tents and sheep and lutes, or whatever surrogates we may invent. “Perhaps the best definition of the city in its higher aspects,” says Lewis Mumford, “is that it is a place designed to offer the widest facilities for significant conversation.”

  So we must turn again, to build the Just City where men can be decent and humane and at ease, that ease Wallace Stevens speaks of:

  One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths,

  One’s tootings at the wedding of the soul

  Occur as they occur . . .

  And what will we do in the city? Take our Sunday baths, toot at “the wedding of the soul,” read Colette, marvel at Balanchine, and with proper modulations of irony, realize the claims of pastoral, that indestructible artifice of the urban imagination. More than 400 years ago Barnaby Googe understood it all: “God sends me Vittayles for my nede, and I synge Care awaye.”

  Notes

  1* Let me here record my debt to the brilliant writings on the theme of the city and literature by Donald Fanger and John Raleigh.

  2* In my essay “The Culture of Modernism,” Decline of the New.

  Tribune of Socialism: Norman Thomas

  {1976}

  W. A. SWANBERG HAS WRITTEN an old-fashioned biography of Norman Thomas, and mostly the book is the better for it. No strands of. political theorizing, no dips into Freudianism, no lumps of sociology. All is narrative—the story of a splendid man told simply and with a controlled affection.

  Swanberg has understood that a lifelong devotion to the poor and the exploited is not something that needs—in the style of current sophistications—to be “explained.” The kind of life Norman Thomas led is always a possibility for us, and the biographer need only show it forth as an exemplary instance. If this book has some pedestrian pages, if it rarely breaks into eloquence or profundity, the story it tells is nevertheless a deeply moving one.

  The pedestrian pages come at the start, in sketches of Thomas’s early years in a high-minded Presbyterian family. The earnestness of young Norman preparing for the ministry,
his search for a social vision that might give substance to his ethical-religious sentiments, his turn to pacifism in World War I and then to a larger social rebelliousness—these are described with a shade too much detail and stolidity of tone. But once Thomas shifts in the early 1920s from Social Gospel to Socialist Party, trying to pull together a movement ripped apart by Government persecution and Communist defection, the story comes entirely to life.

  Ferociously energetic, endowed with a loud crackling voice, quick in debate and wonderfully free of the public man’s self-importance, Thomas now became both the leader of his floundering party and an all-American circuit rider. He ran for office again and again, speaking at street corners, union halls, and universities, and touring the country in a beat-up car with his wife Violet, a patrician lady who gave her heart to her husband and his cause. (In one campaign they barnstormed through New England for 10 days—at a grand cost of $55.45!) Old-party spokesmen learned to avoid Thomas in debate: he knew more, he talked faster, and—miracle of American miracles!—he came out with comely sentences and coherent paragraphs.

  Wherever there was injustice, Thomas spoke up. Boss Hague in Jersey City tried to institute a vest-pocket fascism? Thomas was there to challenge him, suffering rough treatment and jail. Gov. Paul McNutt of Indiana proposed informally to repeal the Bill of Rights? Thomas was there to say it couldn’t be done. Some of Mr. Swanberg’s best pages concern Thomas’s one-man crusade to help the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, formed in 1934 by desperately poor sharecroppers in Arkansas. Thomas kept going down there, risking his neck, defying vigilante terrorists, winning the affection of farm workers who had never before dared speak for their rights. And up North, Thomas kept needling Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace (later the fellow-travelers’ darling) to do something for the Arkansas sharecroppers, but Wallace steadily refused to meet with him and, instead, made a shameful speech saying the trouble in Arkansas was due to “Communistic and Socialistic gentlemen” who “have gone in to stir up trouble.”

  In the late 1930s, Thomas tangled with President Roosevelt (who nevertheless seems to have liked him). He tried to persuade the president that his embargo on arms to Loyalist Spain was enabling a major fascist victory in Europe, but as Thomas caustically reported, Roosevelt “in his own inimitable way changed the subject.”

  As a man who tried to bring together the imperatives of morality and the devices of politics, and as leader of a small socialist party who felt keenly the intellectual crisis that socialism was undergoing throughout the world, Thomas made a lot of mistakes. He let himself be excessively influenced by the sectarian-academic Marxists of the 1930s. He came too close to the isolationists during the years before World War II.

  Thomas was a superb tribune for socialism, but an indifferent party leader. Partly this was due to his temperament, which drew him more strongly to the rostrum than the desk. But mostly it was a result of overwhelming, perhaps insoluble, problems that the socialist movement was facing in the mid-30’s and later.

  The failure of the German Left to fight against Hitler’s seizure of power seemed to the young radicals gathered near Thomas evidence that social democratic reformist policies were futile and that more militant methods were needed. Thomas half agreed, though he also sensed that in the United States revolutionary policies could only lead to the hermeticism of the sect. The right-wing Socialists, the Old Guard that was dug into the Jewish garment unions, welcomed F.D.R.’s New Deal as a partial fulfillment of the demands they had long been making. Thomas half agreed, though he also argued that the New Deal provided no more than minor palliatives to a sick society.

  Meanwhile, the Communists had turned rightward and were barraging the Socialists with appeals for a “united front.” The Old Guard distrusted the Communists on principle, and often with good reason, while the left-wing Socialists felt that the threat of fascism warranted at times the risk of limited blocs with the Communists. Thomas saw justice in both views, so much so that some of his friends, on both left and right, made the mistake of seeing his intelligence as indecision.

  Retrospective wisdom (in which we’re all rich) suggests that the Socialists might have supported New Deal reforms as far as they went while not abandoning their basic critique of our society. Or it might have been possible to recognize the need for militant struggle against European fascism while also grasping that American circumstances did not lend themselves to the revolutionary outlook.

  But Thomas suffered from the defects of his virtues. He wasn’t single-minded or devious enough to be a strong party leader; he couldn’t content himself with easy formulas, left or right. The result was that his party, which had grown encouragingly in the early 1930s, was destroyed by splits and defections. The Old Guard settled into a passive friendship with the New Deal; the left-wing got cut up in a romance with the Trotskyists; ordinary members quit in disgust. Thomas remained, loyal to the end, but increasingly a leader without followers.

  Yet it was in these last years that he reached his peak as a public man. Aging, sick, lonely, he was always on call, always ready to speak, write, debate, picket, organize. He rethought some of his ideas, writing a friend that “various grim experiences, including the record of the Russian Revolution, make me far more doubtful of easy collectivist . . . alternatives,” and his socialism now consisted of a rather loose democratic egalitarianism. His mind grew more subtle, he cut away the barnacles of dogmatism.

  And he kept his sense of humor. A lady told him he’d been running for President since she was a little girl. “Madam,” he replied, “I’ve been running for President since I was a little boy.” Once, as Mr. Swanberg tells it, “Thomas made histrionic use of his aches . . . he seated himself at the far end of the platform so that when he was introduced he limped very slowly to the podium, cane in one hand . . . then turned to the audience and rasped, ‘Creeping Socialism!’”

  Among those who had abandoned him politically, it became the custom to honor him with sentimental tributes, sometimes even speaking of him as a saint. He was nothing of the sort. The few of us who remained his political friends in the 1950s and 60s knew him as something more than saint—we knew him as a passionate, troubled, eager, sometimes irascible man. He could be impatient with fools, especially the sort who bored him with elaborate introductions when he gave a speech. He could twist your arm if he wanted you to do something for a cause. He could be sharp and sour: after debating William F. Buckley Jr., he did a very funny imitation of Buckley’s self-adoring superciliousness. His sight failed, but his voice kept booming out. (“I’m a tottering wreck, and it’s annoying.”)

  Here he is, close to the end, as Dwight Macdonald describes him speaking at a SANE rally against the Vietnam War:

  “So now he is 82 and he has to be helped to the speaker’s stand, but once there, in the old, familiar stance, facing the crowd—they are on their feet applauding, calling out to him—he takes a firm grip on the rostrum, throws his head back, and begins to talk in a voice that is quavering. . . . For ten minutes he baits the President, modulating from irony to polemic to indignation to humor to fact to reasoning, speaking in a rapid businesslike way without rhetorical effects. . . .

  “He winds up briskly, professional brio, as how many times, how many times? We get to our feet again to clap, to cheer timidly, to smile at one another as members of the same family do when one of them acquits himself well in public. The old man endures the applause politely for a reasonable time, then begins to make his way back to his seat. . . .”

  Norman Thomas was the only great man I have ever met, and if I never meet another I will not feel deprived.

  Postscript

  I’m not sure this piece fits into the scheme of this book [Celebrations and Attacks]. But it gives me pleasure to say these words of tribute to a wonderful man, and so I say them.

  Strangers

  {1977}

  BEING AN AMERICAN, we have been told repeatedly, is a complex fate, and being an American writer still more so:
traditions ruptured, loyalties disheveled. Yet consider how much more complex, indeed, how utterly aggravating, it could have been to grow up in an American subculture, one of those immigrant enclaves driving itself wild with the clashing hopes that it would receive the New World’s blessing and yet maintain a moment of identity neither quite European nor quite American. The rise and fall of such subcultures is said to be intrinsic to the American experience, and no doubt it is. But when one looks into conventional accounts of our literature, it is hard to find much evidence that our writers ever felt themselves to be strangers in the land—though about their estrangement from the cosmos everyone speaks. It is hard to find evidence of that deep, rending struggle which marked those writers who had to make, rather than merely assume, America as their native ground.

  The whole of our literary history for the past century might be reworked so as to encourage a richer sense of what cultural influence really signifies—a sense, for example, that it is not enough simply to trace lines of continuity, since these lines are blocked, distorted, and even obliterated by recurrent outcroppings of transported Europe. Toward such a history I would here offer a few words, based not on hard evidence, of which we have little, but on recollections of the experiences shared by a generation of American Jewish writers. I will use the first person plural, though with much uneasiness, since I am aware that those for whom I claim to speak are likely to repudiate that claim and wish to provide their own fables of factuality. Here, in any case, is mine.

  Lines of connection from writer to writer are never as neat or as “literary” as historians like to make out. Between master and disciple there intervene history, popular culture, vulgarization, organized forgetting, decades of muck and complication. Still, if only to ease my argument, we may agree that for writers like Robinson and Frost, Ralph Waldo Emerson towered as an ancestor imposing and authoritative, sometimes crippling, and that he figured for them not merely through the books they picked up at home or had to read in school, but through the very air, the encompassing atmosphere, of their culture. How much of “transcendentalism” remains in their writing everyone can estimate on his own, since no one has yet found a scale for weighing weightlessness; but that the pressures of this weightlessness are at work upon their writing seems beyond dispute. Despite inner clashes and discontinuities, American culture moves from the generation of Emerson to that of Robinson and Frost, as a bit later, that of Crane and Stevens, with a more or less “natural” or spontaneous rhythm. There is a passing on of the word.