Remembering Irving Howe

...It's too long," Irving wrote back...

...It was at a party up in New Haven—a young woman said she was from Somerville, and so I took a chance and asked if she knew you...

...He was sitting on a stage at Harvard University, where he'd just finished giving the first of his lectures on Emerson that were later published as The American Newness...

...I told Irving of the connection the first time I met him, several weeks after the arrival of that letter with the terse advice and the home phone number...

...One man claimed that the fall of communism, which was happening that very moment, would mean a revival for democratic socialism all over the world, including in the United States...

...They had known each other briefly when Irving was out at Stanford University, battling New York alienation and New Left hostility and future dentists...

...Irving said...

...He included his home phone number and said to call collect if I wanted to talk further...

...There was a limit to that availability, I came to learn—Irving was also famous, among his friends, for how fast he could get off the phone, for how tight you needed to edit even casual conversation with him...

...I was certainly the least serious person this very serious man had ever had drinks with...

...He came from a world very like—though not exactly the same as—my father's, who was also Jewish and five years younger, though he died much sooner...

...It gives me an eerie feeling to see you standing here...

...We once went for beers at his neighborhood bar in New York...

...inasmuch as there was no need to rebel, he was simply editor, mentor, and, I hope, friend...

...She said yes—you just dropped her roommate like a hot potato...

...I half-assumed this meant the drinks were off...

...544 • DISSENT We were turning up Madison Avenue, and I was looking for a way to disappear into the dirty pavement...

...A year later I saw him at a DSA national convention in Baltimore...

...He gave the main address, a gloomy, chiding speech in which he told the gathered democratic socialists that they had two years to reconstruct DSA, two years of hard work to turn themselves into the experts on social policy, the tireless activists and writers that Mike had been, or else DSA would become a collection of nice, irrelevant people who liked to get together once a year or so...

...But it was striking that this man who was famous for his skill at intellectual street-fighting, a skill that seemed to die out around 1950, was also capable of a moment of emotional availability with a total stranger forty years younger...

...There must be many people for whom Irving was far more important than we were for him...

...There's no charge," Irving replied at once...

...You know," Irving replied, with a look of mischievous pleasure, for he was about to get the better of a young wiseguy, "I ask the same thing about myself...

...I have spent my life looking for that principle," Irving said, in that voice that mixed cultivation and Bronx, "and I must confess that so far it has eluded me...

...By the time I met him outside his building my mind was blank...

...And the first contact I ever had with him was a reply to another article I had mailed to Dissent, out of the blue...

...a few months before Michael Harrington had died...

...After the lecture I went up, my self-serving eagerness somewhat dampened by the brilliance of what he'd just said, and introduced myself...

...I had my own question for him...

...Beforehand I kept running through the likely topics, as if I was getting ready for an oral exam —DSA, Dissent, George Bush, Saul Bellow, maybe some of the South African writers...

...His eyes moistened—to this day I don't quite know what feeling had seized him, since he and my father hadn't known each other well...

...But since my own father was long gone, victim in a certain way of the campus wars of the sixties that wounded Irving without killing him, the little openings I was afforded once a year or so were more than enough...

...I pointed out that socialism has been in decline since before I was born—since before he was born...

...The Berlin Wall had fallen that week...

...I just met someone who knows you," was the first thing Irving said...

...My friend," Irving said, "you are living in a dream...

...I doubted my ability to be articulate for an hour straight...

...Inasmuch as it was his respect I wanted more than anyone's, I would say he became a sort of father figure...

...What I remember best about that lecture was Irving's allusion to what Emerson called some human or divine principle of leveling...

...You're Herb Packer's son...

...It was the first—and only—time I spent more than fifteen minutes with Irving, and I was terrified...

...When he took our questions, some of them were quizzical, some plaintive, some truculent...

...It might have been the smartest thing you ever did...

...In the eight years of our acquaintance, in which I never saw him more than once a year, these two qualities remained as constant as the man himself—his critical honesty, which inspired me even when it deflated me, and his generosity, which was at least as rare...

...Cut it and we'll publish it...

...I'm trying to think how to defend myself," I said...

...Why did it have only two more years to decline...

...Irving, stooped, white-maned, looked not just travel-weary but grief-stricken...

...You decline and decline, and then one day you just stop...