Joseph Clark
Howe, Irving
You might say that my first encounter with Joe Clark was not entirely friendly. He was speaking at a Communist rally in the Bronx, and several young Socialists, I among them, went with the...
...A big smile broke out across his face, a journey had been completed...
...Manny Geltman told me, in 1956 or 1957, that Joe, his childhood friend, with whom he had not spoken for years, had haltingly approached for political conversations...
...We found him, both morally and aesthetically, wonderfully different from the sort of ex-Communist who burns with bitterness, who hurls himself from one extreme to another, who retains the bad habits of his youth in the hard persuasions of age...
...Many years passed until we met again...
...So—I recall this as if it were yesterday—I approached Joe and said, "No more ex-foreign editor...
...Joe had already broken from the CP, but these deep changes of conviction can be heart-wrenching, and it takes a long time before your words catch up with your feelings and thoughts...
...The key word here was liberal, that word which in the past Marxists had held in such extravagant contempt...
...Joe began to approach the Dissent group, somewhat nervously—as you might expect, for we were old antagonists...
...At first, whenever Joe wrote for us, he insisted that he be identified as the former foreign editor of the Daily Worker...
...Joe was a liberal man...
...IRVING HOWE SPRING • 1989 • 285...
...he had behaved with candor and honesty...
...My next encounter was at City College, where, by 1939, I was part of a Trotskyist student group that was pecking away at the far larger Young Communist League—that is, we won over a few of its members...
...We admired their courage and dignity: we were proud to think of them as our friends...
...Honor required that he not deny his past...
...One of the notable early pieces Joe wrote for us was, in 1967, a "Letter to My Son," praising much of the militancy of the young but pleading for an unqualified acceptance of democratic values and against ideological fanaticism...
...he had suffered during his change of mind...
...You might say that my first encounter with Joe Clark was not entirely friendly...
...The two of them met a number of times, renewing friendship, testing ideas...
...Perhaps not, since we came from a generation where the men found personal conversation difficult...
...Did he know how much...
...Joe would argue and then break into a delighted laugh, as if he knew, as we were all learning to know, that truth was no one's sole possession and that it is only through exchange, if even then, that we can test our convictions...
...We valued him and loved him...
...Somewhere Ignazio Silone has said that the fundamental act of life is one's choice of comrades...
...We, from our past, were trying to do that, and Joe soon found himself in harmony with our effort...
...He was speaking at a Communist rally in the Bronx, and several young Socialists, I among them, went with the intention of heckling...
...and we who were his comrades these past twenty-five years knew that here we had found that rarity, a good and true human being...
...They (the young) should make their own mistakes, not repeat mine— this was Joe's theme...
...How we chortled at this sign of our dialectical powers—but alas Joe did hold the line, and in the war of the alcoves, we could claim at best a draw...
...In middle age...
...We all knew how deeply Joe and Ruth suffered in recent years, and there wasn't always something to be said by way of solace...
...The Joe Clark who was our friend and colleague this past quarter century was a man who kept a good share of his old radical passions, his feelings of outrage whenever he encountered injustice...
...We tried, but had to admit we had met a skillful opponent...
...In those days Joe was pure flame, quick, fierce, with the self-assurance of someone who had a system explaining nature and man...
...Joe had a booming voice, and when he spoke at our board meetings I would sometimes close my eyes and suppose I was hearing the young Joe again—but no, I was wrong, the words, the melody were different...
...Dismayed, the YCL sent Joe down to hold the line...
...It meant to open one's mind, to be receptive to other opinions, to accept a pluralism of voices...
...I don't know how his son responded to Joe's article, probably not with unqualified enthusiasm, but these things have a way of lodging in one's mind, becoming part of one's consciousness almost unawares...
...Now, in the most humane sense...
...Soon, however, he had made a complete break and declared himself a social democrat or a liberal socialist...
...from now on you're a writer for Dissent like all other writers...
...So we retreated, grudgingly...
...That seemed right—until a point was reached when we felt that enough was quite enough...
...Joe made a choice...
...But at the same time there blossomed in him a lovely humor, a lovely spirit of tolerance, an easy comradeship with those he might not always agree with...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
