For Michael Harrington

...Between all those speeches and meetings...

...He would smile . . . yes, the next one...

...I think so, and I know from conversations that he thought so too...

...For a moment, it seemed as if all the shame and defeats of our century were erased, and the soaring hope of early socialism rang clear...

...I never tired because I knew that this was a deeply serious and thoughtful man, but still more, a really good man in whom humane values and fellow-feeling for all who suffered were vibrantly alive...

...And how was it that in all the thirty-five years of Dissent, whenever we would ask Mike for an article, he always came through...

...He wanted to live because he still had work to do on this earth, because he still had words to speak and thoughts to put on paper...

...For me, it was a pleasure to watch—especially FALL • 1989 • 417 after our earlier years of formulas and rhetoric—how Mike gave the socialist argument a foundation of authority and knowledge...

...Mike had to carry a double burden...

...Why don't you pace yourself a little...

...And where, I used to wonder, where did he get the time...

...When Mike became the leader of what remained of the American socialist movement, now no longer pretending to be a party but frankly describing itself as an association of like-minded thinkers and activists, he inherited a crisis of thought which, we all knew, would last through and beyond our lifetimes...

...I felt that he was experiencing, even during his sufferings, a triumphant revival of powers, in fact, a mastery of thought and speech he had never before reached...

...But as he took on greater responsibilities, Mike imposed on himself a severity of selfdiscipline that was amazing, sometimes even a little troubling...

...He had to hold together a small group of comrades and he had to work on his own intellectually, trying to reassemble some elements of the socialist tradition...

...In the books he wrote during his fifties, there was packed information and acute thought, but a certain slackening of style, at least by comparison to his earliest work and, it's a great pleasure to add, by comparison to his very latest work, in which he seemed miraculously, during the days he was battling his cancer, to recover his earlier elegance of language...

...He used to make himself a rudimentary outline, with a few subheads, and then out would roll those formed and pithy sentences, those structured paragraphs, those skeins of argument, those climaxes of reasoned passion...

...Farewell...

...When I first met Mike after the Second World War, he was a remarkably bright and articulate youngster, with a ready pen and a quick tongue...

...Save something for the next one, I said to him...

...When we disagreed once in a while, as we did in Dissent about tactical responses to the Jesse Jackson movement, we each spoke our minds and remained the easiest and closest of friends...

...Something of his youthful easygoing quality faded...

...He would smile, he knew that in some sense we were "right," yet he felt also that we were "wrong...

...He did not yield to death...

...Let me end with a personal word, since others will surely want to add their voices to this memorial: In the forty years that Mike and I were close political collaborators, we rarely exchanged a "personal" word...

...Mike became the first major socialist figure in America—even more than Norman Thomas—who made himself, through tireless work and intense study, an expert in social policy...

...At times, I think, his gentleness seemed almost a flaw...

...He lacked—and this was one reason I loved him so much—the "hardness" of the political leader...

...it kept prodding him into revisions of thought and perspective...

...He tended to do many things himself rather than inflict them on others...

...He had—younger friends may find this hard to believe—a streak of bohemianism: it was very charming, very winning...

...Irving Howe In our next issue, there will be other memories of and tributes to Michael Harrington.—EDs...

...Perhaps that was a fault of our milieu, of our moment, of our gender...

...As we remember him and pledge ourselves to continue in his path, I think it important to know that even at the very end Mike wanted desperately to live...

...He wanted to live because he enjoyed life, he believed in life...

...His socialism was never ascetic or puritanical: it was good-spirited, buoyant, the belief of a man who enjoyed things in life, good food, tennis, conversation, all the things that make this earth bearable...

...One of the most remarkable aspects of Mike's career was his ability to live, no doubt with considerable tension, in accord with both needs...

...He wasn't the kind of leader who imposed his will...

...He reached out beyond the left, to study and to learn from those who did not always agree with us—for he knew that no one has a monopoly of truth...

...An even greater pleasure was to watch Mike's growth, his quiet but systematic process of selfeducation...

...He found it hard to criticize or correct his comrades...

...He could give close attention to daily organizational problems, listening to collaborators involved in political actuality, while at the same time maintaining a deep and active concern with political theory...

...Some of us would sometimes say to Mike, "Why do you accept speaking engagements that can bring little political or intellectual or even personal gain...

...What remained usable, what did not...

...Not that Mike didn't live, every minute of his days, with a full consciousness of how terrible this century had been...

...Still, he had the extraordinary capacity—it almost seemed a gift of nature—to lift the concerns of daily realism into a transcendent realm, the optimism of a man who has blinked nothing, yet, as a tempered democrat, lives by his margin of hope...

...Didn't he also pay a certain price for this remarkable self-discipline...

...He liked to hang out in a bar in the West Village, drinking and talking with friends...

...that consciousness bore down upon his every opinion and decision...

...He read the socialist classics systematically, even struggling with that impossible language, German...

...Mike was at his best as a speaker...

...When Mike Harrington rose to speak, in that piercing alto of his, we all felt that the familiar language of socialism took on the complexion of youth, the freshness of truth...

...For who could say which seeds would sprout...

...My only important criticism was to suggest that he was trying to pack too much into one book...

...Yet I always felt that our relationship was intensely personal, intimate, and close beyond words...

...He knew the work of recent European leftist writers...

...Being the leader of a small and vulnerable movement is not an enviable role...

...Stephanie, his wife and staunch companion, told me that in the hospital he kept thinking about the next one...

...Who could say in these difficult years which speech was urgent and which was not...

...I had the honor to read the chapters of his last book, as they kept pouring out with miraculous smoothness during the years of his fatal illness...

...The things we talked about in a general sort of way, Mike knew in precise detail...

...You have to raise money, you have to provide "answers" even if you don't always have them, you have to solace comrades, you have to look for political openings...

...Our voice, our hope, our pride...

...We often talked about this, musing over the turns of fate that lift some to the crest and drop others to the ebb of history...

...Unburdened by office or power, Mike was free to devote himself to thought, and his mind roamed eagerly, happily...

...I suppose that, like many of the people reading these lines, I heard Mike speak at least a hundred times, maybe more...

...but I never tired, even when I could guess what would follow: the three points, the slightly ironic turn, the mildly yet really good-natured polemical twist, the ringing call to hope...