by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
We came across an extraordinary story by a writer who was then totally unknown, Isaac Bashevis Singer, called “Gimpel the Fool” and we tried to think—you see, translation is like matchmaking, you try to find the translator who will fit the writer. And the one who seemed best to fit Singer was Bellow, and at that time he was not yet the great man that he’d become, and he was delighted with the opportunity to do this.
Bellow has a pretty good command of Yiddish. We sat him down in Greenberg’s apartment on East 17th Street and he banged out this translation at enormous speed in a couple of hours. Greenberg would read the Yiddish to him; Saul would type it out in English. Once in a while Bellow didn’t know a word and Greenberg would translate it for him and I just sat watching the whole thing completely entranced. And then he took it and fixed it up a little bit. And that was it. And it turned out to really be a classical translation, and it was the beginning of Singer’s career in the English language.
Q [LEWIS]: To hear you talk of this period, of the 1940s and 1950s, is to hear about a period of renaissance in intellectual and literary thought which one does not feel in the late 1970s, early 1980s.
A [HOWE]: It may be that there are young people around who have groups and are doing exciting things and we don’t know about them yet. I suspect that what you say is true in this sense. If you look at the cultural situation in America today, there is an enormous amount of talent. A lot of gifted younger writers, I could name some. Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, a whole host of others. But somehow it doesn’t add up to an interesting literary situation.
There is another reason for this. A lot of us have gotten into the academy, who never thought we would end up as professors. That is good from one point of view, because even intellectuals have to eat, and we eat more regularly when we have regular jobs. But for intellectual life there have been some disadvantages to this.
At that point, if you were a young writer, you naturally thought of coming to New York, getting a little place in the Village, and eking out a livelihood by doing book reviews and odd chores. Now, in a more affluent society, it is impossible to live the life of what Paul Goodman once called “respectable poverty.” So writers have to get jobs, often in universities. There was a mass expansion of higher education in America after the war with largely good, some bad results, and as a consequence, the universities were willing to hire oddballs like us who didn’t have Ph.D.s. The intellectual community is now scattered across the country.
This may be good for some regional culture, though it makes for a great deal of loneliness. But there no longer is that concentration, that focusing of energy, that makes for an intense creative life, so that you learn the situation today, where you can pick up a book of short stories—for some reason the short story is especially thriving in America—by this or that writer, and it really is very good writing. But you cannot say that you feel you are living in an intense and vivid and exciting cultural moment.
[LEWIS]: It must seem quaint, strange, curious, surreal to some of the audience to hear all of these references to Stalinism and fellow travelerism and Trotskyism and these arcane ideological truths which possessed the lives of intellectual and literary figures in the thirties, forties, and early fifties. And yet it was tremendously real for them. And it honed an analytic skill, writing skills, argumentative skills, which served people like Irving Howe wondrously in the years that followed.
We also today think of the fifties as the era of McCarthyism. McCarthy was representative of two truths. One, the shift to the right in American society, which made a lot of these people uncomfortable, and the other, the gradual deterioration of those schizophrenic, left-wing commitments. What did Howe call it? “Extracting himself from the dead end.” And so he established, as part of another community, of those who were creating something new, he established the magazine Dissent.
If I can be personal for a moment, in my day, in the university days of the late fifties and early sixties, Dissent to many of us on the Left was everything, it was a Bible. When we wanted to learn about NATO, we read Dissent. Or German rearmament, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, we read Dissent. It was central to the development of our own ideology on the Left both in Canada and in the U.S., and I suspect for a lot of British Socialists as well. And it was a growing counterpoint to the right-wing emphasis of Commentary and Encounter, and people like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, because Dissent had Richard Wright, C. Wright Mills, Erich Fromm, etc. It was developing psychoanalytic views of human behavior as well as Marxist views of human behavior.
So there was a whole Socialist framework on the one hand that Howe created and sustained against the gradual right-wing development. The Socialist group was partial, tentative, ever more modest in numbers. And that was very distressing for some of the literary figures whom Irving Howe enumerates. They simply lost their political commitment entirely and went off to pursue cultural and literary careers.
Q [LEWIS]: We constantly hear right now comparisons with the fifties. I think that there are cyclical realities that keep repeating. And the beauty of your life is that it encompassed all of it and speaks strongly and feelingly with discernment, which is essentially that we have been moving steadily to the right for some time.
A [HOWE]: I think that the dominant secular line in the postwar years has been toward the right. I don’t like it but I must admit it to be a fact. But this was interrupted during the sixties by the early Kennedy period, then interrupted by the Vietnam War, which split the country right down the middle, and also split the intellectual community and some of my old friends were now new enemies or new opponents. And then of course there were certain unfortunate incidents during the administration of Mr. Nixon which caused a certain amount of shame on the right, something called Watergate and things like that. But the basic drive, the dominant energy in American intellectual life, has been that of the conservatives. I don’t think the best thinking—but there is a difference between the best thinking and the dominant energy.
Q [LEWIS]: Do you see a fairly straight line between the emergence of the Right in the fifties and the neoconservativism of today? I remember you saying at one point that what occurred in the fifties was as though it were a restoring of the balance, that for the first half of the century, certainly since 1917, that we had been preoccupied with left-wing analysis and thought, and that it was only natural that civilization would make that shift.
A [HOWE]: I think that is largely true. Now this again may be nostalgia; it may be that I like old conservatives better than young ones, or dead ones better than living ones. The fifties, as it seems to me now, had a conservatism that was much more qualified. Much more reflective than the neoconservatism of people today. The conservatism of the fifties, for example, was not breathing fire to push the cold war. The conservatism of the fifties would have felt embarrassed at the thought of supporting someone like Ronald Reagan.
Today, neoconservatism is much more crude and blatant and ideological. One of the interesting things, and surely you’ve encountered this in your own experience, about ideological politics is the way it takes on a life and a rhythm of its own. In, for example, Commentary magazine, which is one of the centers of neoconservativism, it is as if each month that magazine has to take a more extreme position in order to justify itself to itself because it exists on its own excitation. Just the way the New Left did in the late sixties. And so Norman Podhoretz comes out for sending American troops to Central America, an utterly disastrous idea, which even the Reagan Administration hesitates to say in public.
I think that what is going to happen is that this is going to burn itself out. There is something about ideological politics which leads to self-immolation, to going up in smoke and flame. With one significant difference between this experience and that of the New Left, and that is, that in America today, I don’t know if this is true in Canada, the big corporations have discovered the uses of ideology. And they are pouring a lot of money into the magazines, and the institutions
, and the think tanks of the neoconservatives. Until about ten years ago, most American corporations thought all this intellectual talk was just nonsense and of no importance, and they simply went about their business of making money. But they discovered that in the welfare state, or the truncated version of the welfare state that we have in America, there is a conflict of ideas which is of crucial importance to them. It is just as important to Exxon as it is to the AFL-CIO.
So you have a new interpenetration between the corporate world and the intelligentsia. And you have this comic spectacle of someone like Irving Kristol, whom I recruited into the Young People’s Socialist League in 1939, one of my biggest mistakes, who now sits on many corporate boards. He is a very nice and amiable fellow, but the thought of him now being a spokesman for Republicanism really raises whatever few hairs I have left. Therefore, it is possible that the neoconservatives, even if they burn themselves out intellectually, will have an institutional base that will enable them to persist.
Q [LEWIS]: You surely don’t engage in self-flagellation over Kristol. One never knows in this world how quickly people will move from left to right, incorporating the new fanaticism.
A [HOWE]: As a matter of fact I sometimes think that my own intellectual career consists of constantly turning my head from left to right, watching people who had attacked me from the left as they move toward the right.
Q [LEWIS]: About ten years ago on the left in Canada there was the emergence of something called the Waffle Group, which was intensely nationalistic and ideological and left-wing and given to all of the traditional nationalization and other programs. Now of course many of them are respectable junior executives for the equivalents of IBM, and one sees in a mere decade a most remarkable shift.
A [HOWE]: If you can’t nationalize the industries, you join them.
Q [LEWIS]: They would say, in a spasm of self-defense, that you bore from within. I take it that the description that you have of the current neoconservatives and their extremism was really the kind of feeling that you had of the excesses of the New Left in the 1960s. Fundamentally, that is, what divided the Old Left, if I may put it that way, and the New Left, were the terrible authoritarian touches.
A [HOWE]: With an important emotional difference: when I see what is going on now with neoconservatives, it raises an impulse to combat. I want to go in and start fighting. But, with the New Left in the late sixties, I had feelings of sadness and frustration because I saw once again the waste of energy which has been characteristic of American left-wing experience. I felt at the time that once again there was a terrible waste on our side. Now, about some of the New Leftists, I no longer felt that there was any real connection between them and me. They had gone too far and become Maoists and terrorists, and I felt that some of them, the Weathermen, were semi-fascists. But there were a lot of people within the New Left, who, driven crazy by the madness and the evil of the Vietnam War, pushed themselves into sectarian positions from which they could not retreat. Some of them have since come around and become relatively friendly with the kind of politics that I espouse, but there was a terrible waste, so that emotionally—I don’t know if you’ve felt this in your own experience—I still find it harder to argue with people to my left than people on the right.
Q [LEWIS]: That’s really interesting. I must admit I don’t. But then it isn’t the same experience because we’ve had an active political party in Canada, and so [I] resent the people on the left and the impact they have in undermining what [I] think to be the legitimacy of social democracy.
A [HOWE]: You know the story, the wonderful story, I think it is a wonderful story, about Cohen. I was at Stanford in California in 1969. I was not at the university, but I was near it. My wife at the time was teaching, was working on the campus, and I would come for lunch. And there was a gang of New Left kids who would follow me shouting slogans, harassing me in the most absurd way, a childish kind of thing. And I should have known better, and not let it get to me but of course it did get to me, since I am only human. For a number of days I kept quiet, and tried to pretend that I was above it all, but finally I lost my temper and I turned around to this very bright boy named Cohen, who was the leader of this gang.
And I said to him, “Cohen, you know what you are going to be when you grow up, when you get older, you are going to turn out to be a dentist.” And he turned pale, because you know, for some reason that is not entirely clear to me, the idea of a dentist around the radical world has always been associated with philistinism and petit-bourgeois life. He felt that this was the most dreadful insult that I could have given him.
Well, I got two or three letters from various people claiming that they knew who this Cohen was and what had happened to him. One report had him as an assistant professor at Cornell, another report said he was a corporation lawyer in Los Angeles, none of them made him quite literally a dentist, but all of them suggested that he had found a very comfortable place in the world of the status quo. And so it was very hard because it was like seeing your own children going off the deep end and rebelling.
Now the point you made before is absolutely right. If there really were a structured, coherent social democratic party in America, such as the New Democratic Party here in Canada, then one could feel that these people were doing it terrible damage by destroying its possibilities to win an election or to rule a provincial government or whatever the case may be. But with us, where left-wing politics has a much more chaotic, abstract form, it was sort of like a free-for-all. It was very hard in the late sixties, very hard.
Q [LEWIS]: Your most recent publication is the editing of a collection of essays on Orwell. We are doing this interview in the latter part of 1983; 1984 is upon us. I take it that this is quite visceral with you. That for many, many years Orwell has been central for you. I even recall that at one point you attempted to model your literary writing on Orwell, some of your journalistic writing.
A [HOWE]: Yes, Orwell has been for me a very important figure. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work of admonition, a work of warning and as such, it has played an enormous role. I now think that the greatest contribution that it made was toward the cleansing of the English language. When, for example, I hear Ronald Reagan say, “We are going to go into Central America in order to defend democracy” and in none of the countries that he wishes to go into is there any democracy, then the first adjective that comes to mind is that this is an Orwellian expression. It is a version of Newspeak.
Now fortunately, when one lives in a democracy, one can criticize this, and I think that the people who say that we have reached a condition at all like that of Nineteen Eighty-Four are being very foolish. Because the mere fact that they can say it proves that it isn’t true. The whole thing of Newspeak and doublethink—this was such an extraordinarily brilliant innovation. When you read for example that in the Soviet Union, subscribers to the official encyclopedia get sets of new pages from page 428–32 to replace the existing entry with another one which changes it entirely, and they are supposed to cut out the pages and paste in the new ones, you say to yourself, Orwell was simply describing common reality.
You know the famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which every politician should be made to read at least once a year on a day of penance, I think on Yom Kippur. All the Jewish and the goyische intellectuals and politicians should be made to read “Politics and the English Language.” Would you introduce a bill like that if you were in the provincial parliament again?
Q [LEWIS]: We will make it mandatory in 1984 [laughter]. It seems to be appropriate.
Indeed, after 1984, I imagine we can expect from Irving Howe exactly what we’ve had until now. He’ll be writing and fighting and arguing and believing, making a magnificent intellectual and literary contribution. I think one expects from him his own phrase, I noted it down: “Living the intense creative life.”
Sources
“This Age of Conformity.” From Partisan Review 21 (January–February 1954): 1.
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br /> “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” From The New Republic 130 (May 17, 1954), 24.
“The Stories of Bernard Malamud.” From Midstream (Summer 1958): 97–99.
“Doris Lessing: No Compromise, No Happiness.” From The New Republic 148 (December 15, 1963).
“Life Never Let Up,” review of Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, with an afterword by Walter Allen (New York: Avon, 1964). From The New York Times, October 25, 1964.
“New Styles in ‘Leftism.’” From Dissent 13 (Summer 1965): 3.
George Orwell: “As the Bones Know.” From The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).
“The New York Intellectuals.” From Commentary (October 1969): 4.
“A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson.” First published as “Tribute to an American Poet,” Harper’s (June 1970).
“What’s the Trouble?: Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both.” From Dissent 18 (October 1971).
“The City in Literature.” From Commentary 51 (May 1971): 5.
“Tribune of Socialism.” From New York Times Book Review (November 7, 1976), SM35.
“Strangers.” From Yale Review 66 (Summer 1977): 4.
“Introduction: Twenty-five Years of Dissent.” From Twenty-five Years of Dissent: An American Tradition, compiled by Irving Howe (New York: Methuen, 1979).
“Introduction to The Best of Sholom Aleichem.” From The Best of Sholom Aleichem, edited by Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse (Washington: New Republic Books, 1979).
“Mission from Japan,” review of The Samurai by Shusako Endo, translated by Van C. Gessel (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). From The New York Review of Books 29 (November 4, 1982): 17. © 1982 by Irving Howe.
“Absalom in Israel.” From The New York Review of Books 32 (October 10, 1985): 5.
“Why Has Socialism Failed in America?” From Socialism and America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).
