Irving Howe-Selected Writings:1950-1990

...There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists," he muses...

...If anything, his critique of Eliot and Yeats, Kafka and Lawrence et al...

...later a character involved in the wedding finds herself obsessed with the throngs of homeless in the East Village...

...PICTURES OF BILL GRAY MA0 II Don DeLiilo Viking, $19.95,256 pp...

...Some people will only be saved by a certainty...

...He is a committed democratic socialist, and the present volume is dedicated to the memory of Michael Harrington...

...Thus, whereas some conservative and Marxist critics alike condemn the modernist writers as amoral aesthetes, Howe finds in them a moral vision he doesn't like...

...The first task of the novelist," he believes, "...is to create an imaginary social landscape both credible and significant...

...A certain sect of Jewish mystics believed that only after every conceivable sin had been committed would the Messiah appear to redeem the world, and they devoutly set about hastening his arrival...

...Narrative has never particularly engaged DeLillo, and the plot here is straightforward enough...

...The best virtue of the greatest critics is that they proceed under the power of their own minds...

...Lee S i e g e l rving Howe's writings continue to enact the tension between thinking and doing, cerebral play and social responsibility, that has been the public trial of the modem, urbanbased intellectual...

...Mark Feeney n Don DeLillo's previous novel, Libra, a CIA operative assigned to write the secret history of the Kennedy assassination comes to realize that "his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms...

...Howe will let stand no postulate about human nature or social policy until he has mined it for every nuance of fairness he can, until he has subjected it to all manner of analytic and emotional logic...

...masterly cultural history in "The New York Intellectuals...

...That said, there exists an artistic imagination and an ethical imagination, and Howe's explorations of the places where they conflict or converge are rare and gratifying occasions in American letters, and sometimes, fruitful provocations...

...Hands across the water, the pen is mightier than the sword--and generous publicity for all concerned...

...And as for the practical effects of modernists and their work, it was John F. Kennedy, not Hitler or Stalin, who enjoyed reading Malraux's "haughty authoritarianism," as Howe calls it...

...He favors the great realist writers, who reveal the flesh, blood, and bones of human travails, over the literary modernists, in whose work, "the problematic nature of experience tends to replace the experience of human nature...

...More effective as antimodernist statements are his intelligent and eloquent defenses of writers working in a traditional vein, such as his superb essays on Zola and Dreiser...

...Everson's organization has reached a tentative agreement with a terrorist group for the release of a young poet being held hostage in Beirut...

...No serious person reading these brilliant essays on literature, culture, politics, and society will fail to admire the range of Howe's interests and expertise, or to be moved by the impassioned judgments he expends on what he sees happening in the world before him...

...Howe himself dubbed the most influential generation of those--now mostly erstwhile--virtuosi of opposition the "New York Intellectuals," a loosely cohesive group that during the calamitous thirties began cutting its literary and polemical teeth...

...He's sixty-three, alternately dismissive of the novel he's been working on for twenty-three years, and terrified at the prospect of publishing it...

...Lawrence (of Arabia), one of those intellectuals of action who, like Trotsky and Malraux, haunt one comer of Howe's imagination...

...His old editor, a man named Charlie Everson, heads a human-rights group...

...reading Howe you feel that he hopes for the certainty and freedom of an ultimate contradiction...

...A last remark about Howe's literary presence...

...shows Howe's modemist roots in the way he overestimates the capacity of modernist imaginations to do harm...

...like most of them he at one point revised his enthusiasm for modemism's often antihuman energies...

...Howe has coined the term "style of brilfiance" to characterize the "free-lance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knockabout synthesis" that flew from the pens of the New York writers...

...Let people of determination, steady workers with some humor and no fanaticism, keep saying: 'This is not what America is supposed to be, this is not how human beings should live.'" Howe's major preoccupations are well represented in this volume: literary essays on Faulkner, Pirandello, Dreiser, Frost, Zola, Dickens, and Solzhenitsyn, among others...

...The difference in perspective underscores a difference in the breadth of critical reach...

...Involving himself in Everson's project is a way of escape...

...On the contrary: himself expert in using irony and paradox as critical strategies to liberate the human element from ideological dross, he has grown disillusioned with writers who employ the same strategies to liberate existence from the human element...

...He has crowded his books with solitaries: the math-prodigy hero of Ratner's Star, the reclusive rock-star hero of Great Jones Street, Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, even (briefly) Adolf Hitler immured in his Berlin bunker in Running Dog...

...In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and 490: Commonweal...

...As well as being a distinguished literary critic and social historian, Howe is coeditor of the quarterly journal Dissent...

...The book's protagonist, Bill Gray, is an acclaimed novelist who takes intricate pains to preserve his anonymity...

...Yet I hope Howe would concede that the memory of an imaginative truth which was hostile on the page to ordinary experience might help independent spirits breathe when they are on the street...

...His own prose is robustly elegant, gracefully sober, swift and lucid, precisely anchored to the object of discrimination...

...so it is when a genuine personality strikes words onto the page...

...As against these singledout individuals, there is the equally disturbing spectacle of identityless crowds (the book opens with the famous Moonie mass wedding in Yankee Stadium...

...To catastrophe, Howe is as sensitive in 9 August 1991:489 literature as in life...

...My belief," Howe writes in the preface to this selection of his work, "is that it should be possible for a serious person to hold more than one interest, or one idea, at a time...

...Maybe that's why I have often found Howe's qualifications of modernism too illuminating of their subject to be entirely convincing arguments against it...

...Having rejected epistemological despair, he fias retained / a marginal challenge to the status quo...

...it was Malraux who fought against fascism in Spain and the Nazi armies in France, not Eliot or Yeats who took arms against democracy in Great Britain...

...There is an intriguing rumination on T.E...

...For the Russian writers who inhabit another special comer of Howe's mind, pessimism has always sheltered hope from despair...

...Gray surprises both men and agrees to Charlie's proposal...

...he ruefully concludes that socialism had to fail here, and that verdict serves as a warning to anyone naive or callous enough to mire the whole enterprise in an abstract fervor...

...The collection begins with a trenchantly dismissive essay on Louis-Ferdinand Crline, the French nihilist writer par excellence, and ends with a judiciously hopeful meditation on socialism and the future...

...but socialism, he adds, did and does not have to fail in such a big way--and that is a comforting rebuke to anyone weak-hearted enough to be discouraged by Howe's own rational skepticism...

...Like other New York intellectuals, Howe was nourished and instructed by political radicalism on the one hand and cultural modernism on the other...

...Familiar steps strike the ground with the weight of an unmistakable temperament...

...Yet in no other DeLillo novel have so many of them filled so many rooms...

...His political writings wield abundant complexities, so much so that while asserting politically radical values he seems to be making sure that they remain inhospitable to arid theoretical interests...

...For if he has soured on heroic modernism, he has persisted in calling for a heroic antimodemism...

...In the essay, "Why Has Socialism Failed in America...

...The juxtaposition is a pointed one...

...For Howe, wise to the conditions of what is in the West an approximately reverse historical situation, optimism has to break its way through frozen seas of catastrophe before it may earn the fight to persuade...

...Now that modemism's "terrible beauty," its shocks and its terrors, have been institutionalized as cultural norms, Howe seeks an avant-garde of decency, an adversarial humanity...

...If a theme circulates through these writings, it is Howe's characteristically complex belief that on one side, the nihilistic bleakness he sees as a still vibrant remnant of cultural modernism has to be chipped away at by people of good will, and on the other, that no conscientious modem person can pretend to be unmoved by nihilism's appeal...

...Mao H is a book about writers, terrorists, and hostages--menprofessionally located in small rooms---chained to a typewriter, chained to a conspiracy, or chained literally...

...The agreement is to be announced at a London news conference, and Everson has hit upon the media-pleasing idea of having Gray appear at the press event to read a selection of the hostage's poems...

...To modify a famous term from T.S...

...It is a sort of honesty...

...unlike all of them he has held courageously to a belief in a democratic radicalism...

...His method might be subtle, vigilant, and fastidious, but his aim is simply expressed: to create a just society...

...appreciations of Jewish literary figures such as Sholom Aleichem, and of literary figures who happened to be Jewish, like Isaac Babel and Delmore Schwartz...

...A veteran of ideological wars, Howe is well aware that to make a political agenda humane, you have to welcome paradox and ambiguity, and that to assure its exclusive success you have to lock them out...

...It's the only kind of optimism you can be persuaded by...

...Eliot, Jewish-American intellectuals have usually required an objectionable correlative...

...so it has been with this immediately recognizable voice, which kindles reasonableness, idealism, and humane feeling in selfish times...

...Hyperconsciousness or the loss of self--these are the alternatives Mao H offers...

...Those last four words accurately reflect DeLillo's tenth novel, Mao H. Of course, men in small rooms have figured throughout DeLillo's fiction...

...The lightly ironic tone should not be necessary...

...He is sometimes accused of a lack of sympathy for the modernist style...

...and seminal literary history in "The Idea of the Modem...

...And in "Writing and the Holocaust," Howe approaches the problem of applying critical standards to Holocaust literature--the argument is unique of its kind, so far as I know, and important to read...

...they approach literature as a consequential event, and analyze social and political events as if they deserved the attention of great literature...

...pieces on Whittaker Chambers, Lillian Hellman and the McCarthy years, and the New Left...

...The fineness of Irving Howe is that in his writing a powerful critical mind draws its independence from an unabashedly stubborn heart...

...It also feeds into his own growing misgivings with the writer's enterprise...

...During the Reagan administration's reign of apocalyptic optimism, Howe wrote in a bristling essay included here: "Criticism and more criticism--that's the need of the moment, the need for tommorrow...

...A bit of an anarchist himself, Howe would probably agree with the anarchist, social reformer, and protomodernist Shelley, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of at least a certain sector of humankind--unlike Shelley, he fears the consequences of some of their legislation...