by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
No, Anna does not have to be killed. She had only to be defeated in the central adventure of her life; after that, the killing hardly matters.
Personal Reflections
Reflection on the Death of My Father
{1982}
THE DAY MY FATHER DIED I felt almost nothing. I stood near the hospital bed and stared at the shrunken body of this man who never again would greet me with an ironic rebuke. I saw nothing but inert flesh, a transformation beyond understanding. Then came a sequence of absurd tasks—notifying my father’s landsmanshaft (fraternal society) to arrange for a grave; deciding whether to buy the more expensive coffin, ornately carved, or the bare wooden coffin that my father would have chosen, sullenly, while preferring the expensive one. These rituals which, honor them or not, I had to get through, served at least to blunt grief.
Even before my father died I had made him into a myth. Myths are wonderfully convenient for blocking the passage between yourself and your feelings. Now into his mid-eighties, my father steadily grew feebler and complained, even whined, a good deal—I judged this to be a “weakness,” partly out of fear that I shared it with him. To see your father lose masculine force is an experience profoundly unnerving, like watching your own body disintegrate. To see him fall because he could no longer walk was unbearable, and then I would berate myself for the cowardice that kept me from bearing it. Had my father become senile it might have been easier. But his mind grew keener as his body decayed, and he would describe his plight with a self-pitying exactitude.
What did he want from me? To move in with him, yielding entirely to his needs? No, he said, he didn’t want that at all. He wanted nothing from me, there was nothing I could do for him, his complaint was not directed to me or indeed to anyone. He sat there in his apartment in Co-Op City, staring at the walls but still—I knew him as I knew myself—fearful of death. Had my father used my kind of language, he would have said all this is simply in the nature of things and there is nothing to do but submit. Submit, yes, but not without some noise.
When I took him to the hospital, he still had enough strength to argue against my proposal that we hire a private nurse. He didn’t need one. And what could a nurse do, make him young again? His eyes glinted as he said this, waiting to see if I would record his last stab at paternal irony.
Oh, the unmeasurable willfulness of these immigrant Jews, exerted to their last moment in the service of self-denial! My father had saved, literally from years of sweat, some forty thousand dollars, but that had to be kept . . . for what? He didn’t say, but didn’t have to. I understood: the night cometh when no man can work. The last dike against helplessness is a bankbook.
So he was right again, my sardonic Pop, as so often he had been about my ways, my women, my life. I hired a private nurse and, to no one’s surprise, my father accepted her without protest. His obligation had been to argue against hiring her, mine to hire her. It was my turn to pay. He had never before allowed it, but now it was all right—no, it was right.
I did my duty. I ran up to Co-Op City in the northeast Bronx, to Montefiore Hospital in the northwest Bronx. I did all a son is supposed to do, but without generosity, without grace. It would take me three hours to get to and from the hospital, but in the hospital itself I could not bear to stay more than twenty minutes. I spoke to the doctors, scheduled the nurses, brought my father food, and all the while could not look at his wasted body, for I knew myself to be unworthy, a son with a chilled heart.
I could not speak words of love because I did not love my father as a man. I had discovered, long ago, that he was “weak,” too dependent on women—an affliction that seems to run in our family. Yet I was overwhelmed with emotion at the thought of his decades of suffering and endurance. Even while still breathing he had become for me a representative figure of the world from which I came, and I suppose a good part of World of Our Fathers is no more than an extension of what I knew about him.
Close to the end he told my son that finally I had been a good son. He did not say a loving son. Was there a difference in his mind? Could I doubt his gift for discriminations? Whereas he, perhaps not such a good father, had been a loving one, always ready, after his opening sarcasm, to accept my foolishness and chaos. The words he spoke in praising me, which I knew to be deeply ambiguous, finally brought the tears long blocked by my hateful addiction to judgment.
I knew the end was close when one day I came to his room and saw he no longer troubled to cover his genitals. Like most immigrant Jews, he had been a severely respectable man, shy about his body, even wearing a tie and jacket in the August heat. Now it no longer mattered. I could pay for the nurse, he could leave himself exposed.
In death he seemed terribly small, and I kept thinking back to all those years he had spent over the press iron, the weariness, the blisters, the fears, the subways. In the space that circumstances had thrown up between us there still remained a glimmer of understanding, a tie of the sardonic. To make a myth of the man I should have mourned as a father, to cast him at the center of the only story I had to tell, was to reach a kind of peace between generations.
From the Thirties to the Rise of Neoconservatism: Interview with Stephen Lewis
{1983}
IRVING HOWE IS NOT JUST ONE of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century; he is the complete eclectic. He is rooted in the East European Jewish tradition, which migrated to the United States, and in particular, to New York City at the end of the nineteenth century and which put its roots in scholarship and the trade union movement. The amalgam produced a tremendous literary and social culture of which Irving Howe became one of the chief exponents. His migration, the pattern of migration of his people, was mirrored in his wonderful book, World of Our Fathers, a cultural and social history of East European Jewry, which covers from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. It won the National Book Award in 1977.
The high points of his career, Howe’s trade union experience, the Socialist experience, the Jewish experience, came together in active politics, anti-Stalinist, anti-Soviet, Trotskyite in nature particularly in the late 1930s and 1940s. He spent his life in passionate scholastic, dialectical debate. And then, as he developed his political arts, he became more and more academic, and more and more literary. And in the latter forties and early fifties he became part of that intellectual community that surrounded the journal Partisan Review, part of the most vibrant intellectual community that the United States produced in the postwar period, which has since largely disintegrated. When Socialism itself dismembered, he became founder and editor of a quarterly journal called Dissent in 1954.
Howe is better known as a literary critic and a political commentator. The two were inseparable for him. He is a great Yiddishist in the sense that he translates a lot of Yiddish into English that gives Socialist culture an almost folklore view of history. He is an apostle, in a way, of Trotsky and has published the selected works of Trotsky. He is a literary critic of extraordinary dimensions. He’s written critical biographies of Thomas Hardy, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner. He brought together the literary and the political in a fashion that has rarely been achieved in the United States.
Howe is cherubic, gentle, and principled. He speaks with anecdotal passion and in the reverberation of the voice is a constant intellectual depth.
Q [LEWIS]: Tell me about your strong early Jewish working class antecedents.
A [HOWE]: I cannot walk by a small store in any city in America or Canada without asking myself, “How does he remain in business?” Because it reminds me of my own father’s experiences. He ran a little grocery store and he lost it during the early years of the Depression. And to me a small store is immediately a focus of anxiety.
And this, I’m sure, is characteristic of many people who come out of a Jewish background. Whenever I hear somebody, a professor at a faculty occasion, start ranting against trade unions, it immediately arouses in me an absolute uncontainable fury. Because I remember that after my
folks lost their little store, they both became garment workers in the New York garment district. My mother’s first job was for $12 a week, my father became a presser, and in 1933 the International Ladies Garment Workers Union called a strike, which was then a very risky business, and suddenly my mother’s wages, when the strike was successful, went up to $27 a week. Now that was a significant change. And suddenly there was meat on the table and I could have a shirt for a birthday present and things of that sort.
My parents were not political people. They were like the ordinary people, what we call in Yiddish the “folksmassen,” they were neither religious nor political. They always voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt, but that was just part of being Jewish, and they were good trade unionists, but they never went to a meeting. They paid their dues. If there was a strike called, you went on strike. To scab was equivalent to apostasy, and the idea of the value of a trade union was sort of built into my life as a result of that.
Q [LEWIS]: In your own terms, the genesis of your Socialism was rooted in the Jewish community of New York and its internationalist background. It wasn’t sectarian in that sense. It was almost universalist.
A [HOWE]: Well, I grew up in the East Bronx, now called the South Bronx. And, at that time this was an entirely Jewish neighborhood. You could get by, almost completely, with Yiddish. And the Socialists at that point were the second party in local elections behind the Democrats. Radicalism of one or another sort was very pervasive in the immigrant Jewish community. The Communists were very strong, probably the best organized group, and so this was simply accepted as part of the secular inheritance of the immigrant Jewish community.
The trouble was we could never get beyond certain ethnic boundaries. We couldn’t break into other kinds of communities. We couldn’t break into, for example, the Irish neighborhoods. When I grew up, the Roman Catholic Church was looked upon as a bastion of reaction. And one of the most astonishing experiences of my life and from my point of view, very encouraging, has been to see the way the Catholic Church in America has opened itself up, has become much more liberal. In fact, at the moment, decidedly more liberal than the Jewish community. The milieu in which I grew up, the immigrant Jewish milieu, which was largely secular, leftist, etc., has almost entirely disappeared. There are only a few old-timers. You can imagine [how old] that is if I am still considered one of the young ones.
Q [LEWIS]: I can imagine. I am an expression of it myself, because although I understand a great deal of Yiddish, I don’t speak it. And one of the things that almost brings tears to one’s eyes is to go and speak to a meeting of the Workman’s Circle, and there are loving remnants. There are fifteen or twenty people now, very old, who ask you questions in Yiddish, which you answer in English. In your own life, in the latter thirties, the inability to break into the broader community, to some extent I take it, resulted in the—retreat perhaps isn’t a fair word, but I’ll use it—an intense scholastic internal anti-Stalinist but post-Trotskyist debate.
A [HOWE]: Yes. Well, you see, in the American intellectual community, and in the Left in general, Trotsky played a role, which he did not play, I think, in any other country. The intellectual world in America in the thirties was very heavily under Communist, or as we called it then Stalinist, domination. The majority of American leftist intellectuals, for example, supported the Moscow trials and believed that the trials were legitimate. Those of us who were anti-Stalinist and who were beginning to see the terrible things going on in the Soviet Union, tended to gravitate to the image of Trotsky because he was so eloquent and so forceful and so forthright, and unyielding, uncompromising in his opposition to Stalinism.
The negative side was that, as it regarded American politics, it led us into a dead end from which some of us extracted ourselves only after a certain number of years. And indeed the formation of Dissent began as part of that process of pulling out of that sectarianism. But the appeal that Trotsky had, for a little while, for a few years, has to be understood in terms of the special situation of American intellectual cultural life in the late thirties. He was the counterforce against the deceit and the mediocrity of Stalinist influence.
Q [LEWIS]: Before Dissent came, you had this minor and inconsequential aberration of writing briefly for Time magazine and then you went on to become part of that wonderful greatness of the Partisan Review. Can you nostalgically reflect on those days?
A [HOWE]: Yes. In those days, Partisan Review, though it had a circulation of no more than six or seven thousand copies, was surely the most influential cultural magazine. You see, we won the intellectual war against the Stalinists and fellow travelers by the early forties. In France, presumably a much more advanced country, this took at least another thirty years. We won it because there was a greater spirit of independence, the tradition that goes back to Emerson and Thoreau of standing on your own feet among American intellectuals, and people like Edmund Wilson, James T. Farrell, Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, many others, broke away from the Stalinist influence during the thirties and they gravitated around this small magazine.
It was a magazine which tried—not I think with entire success but for the moment very interestingly—to combine two impulses, anti-Stalinist leftism and the defense of cultural and literary modernism. Two avant-gardes. As it turned out, the avant-gardes were moving in opposite or different directions. Nevertheless, for a short while, the union of these two things had a great impact. It also developed a style of its own. Freelance, polemical, aggressive, with a great concentration on bravura and brilliance. It perfected the essay as a literary mode. It didn’t do so terribly much in regard to fiction [or] poetry, but for the combative brilliant display essay, it really was an extraordinary phenomenon.
Well, I came along in the late 1940s. I was born in 1920, so when I got out of the war in 1946, and I began looking around and to develop literary ambitions, and I decided that the revolution was not going to come in America, and I had no particular place in organizing it, since it wasn’t going to come, I developed more literary interests and I made contact with the editors of Partisan Review. In typical leftist fashion, you’ll surely appreciate this, my first overture to them was to send them an attack on their magazine. And Philip Rahv, who was the editor, also knowing something about the psychology of this, roared with laughter and said, “You don’t think we’re going to print this?” I guess I really didn’t expect him to. But it began a friendship. You begin a friendship on the left by attacking somebody. It began a friendship and then it continued.
Q [LEWIS]: Are you good at thumbnail sketches? Let me throw some names at you. Edmund Wilson.
A [HOWE]: I first met Wilson in 1951 or 1952. I was doing a book on Sherwood Anderson. Wilson had known Anderson when he was younger. I went up to Cape Cod to talk to him about Anderson. He was then younger than I am now, but I thought of him as [a] great man, he was a great man in a way. He was fat. He looked like a mixture of Herbert Hoover and W. C. Fields, and little bit of Henry James thrown in physically. And we sat down to talk presumably about Anderson.
But Wilson had this omnivorous hunger for information. He found out that during the war I had been stationed in Alaska. Instead of my learning about Anderson, he learned about Alaska. I left him about one in the morning, and he was a tremendous drinker. And from the background that I come from, you don’t really learn to drink. And he was terribly scornful. He was greatly amused at my inability to match him in scotch. Now the truth is, most of the gentile intellectuals couldn’t match him either.
Q [LEWIS]: What about the essayist Dwight Macdonald?
A [HOWE]: Dwight Macdonald was this gangling skinny chap who afterward developed a potbelly. When I first knew him he was a member of the small left-wing group that I belonged to for a time. A group led by a man named Max Shachtman, and then he [Macdonald] dropped out. And he started putting out a magazine called politics, a very brilliant left-wing magazine . . . very open, lively. I came out of the army and needed work, and Dwight hired me as a part-time a
ssistant on politics for the munificent salary of $15 a week. I used to do a magazine chronicle for Macdonald and he gave me a pen name of Theodore Dryden, who he said raised ferrets on Staten Island! I suppose some future historian is going to be searching the population of Staten Island for this ferret breeder.
And afterwards we tended to drift apart, not so much because of political differences, but the notion that there was this intellectual community in New York was at one time true. But by the time word got out about it, it was no longer true. In general, I think that you can make that as a useful summary. When the word is out about something in Newsweek, it no longer is true.
Q [LEWIS]: When did you meet Saul Bellow and collaborate with him?
A [HOWE]: Saul Bellow I met in the late forties at the house of a friend of his. By the time I met Bellow, he was an aspiring novelist, terribly thin-skinned, very handsome, and rather rude in manner. And then I knew him for a time when I was living in Princeton in the late forties and early fifties when he was part of a quite brilliant little group, [including] Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, and some other young writers.
My first close relationship of a literary kind with Bellow came in the middle fifties, it must have been 1955, the year isn’t exact in my mind. I was then working on a volume called A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, together with a Yiddish poet, Eliezer Greenberg, and we were doing translations, or editing translations of Yiddish fiction, the first such serious volume in the English language.
