IRVING HOWE 1920-1993
Walzer, Michael
Our friend and comrade Irving Howe is dead. The world knew him as the leading intellectual of the American left, a voice (often, a voice in the wilderness) for democratic and socialist...
...And the price of this freedom was Irving's sweat and blood...
...There SUMMER • 1993 • 275 was a lot of room—not always enough people to fill the room, but we were never crowded into a corner...
...His words were often cutting, but they left clean wounds...
...Worrying steadily, worrying with a purpose, for he was also, stubbornly and strangely and sometimes luminously, hopeful...
...Why the endless phone calls...
...I doubt that he possessed the common touch, but he had the necessary negatives: an absolute absence of pretension and arrogance, a deep dislike for political vanguards and ideological gurus...
...I often asked myself: why did a man of such high talent, so cultured, so insightful, who used the English language with such power, devote himself for forty years, day in, day out, to this political/ diplomatic/editorial drudgery...
...Some of us helped, now and then...
...And he did not only speak for us but also to us and with us...
...I know that he was a towering figure...
...Not by chance...
...And after the disagreement or the rejection or the editorial ruthlessness, there would be a note, a phone call, a lunch, an invitation to write again...
...it's in my bones...
...He exemplified what is in fact very rare, though it is much talked about: Antonio Gramsci's "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will...
...And here we are, his circle, postmodern now, decentered, but committed by our presence here to keep on arguing and worrying together...
...He acknowledged a grim reality and resisted it with high spirits—with wit, not rancor...
...when the language was flaccid, repetitious, dull, he cut and edited, insisted on revisions...
...I know that voice...
...Many people have spoken these last days about Irving's abrasiveness, no one about his diplomacy...
...no one stormed out...
...Why the stream of notes and postcards, suggesting projects, reminding us of deadlines, hammered out one after another, every day, while the essays he wanted to write and the books he wanted to read lay waiting...
...He never aspired to stand at the head of a party or sect, only in the center of a loose circle of people like-minded enough to argue and worry together...
...He lived, by choice, on the ground floor, with his friends and comrades—because he was a man of the left and a mensch...
...His abrasiveness came naturally, as naturally as his intelligence...
...But his own left was nonetheless tolerant and open...
...But he had an abiding kindness for the people (well, most of the people) behind the egos...
...Why the endless editing of other people's prose, which he could easily have handed off or neglected entirely as most editors of most magazines do...
...The diplomacy was work...
...Why the constant fund raising, which he was never good at and certainly never enjoyed...
...MICHAEL WALZER 276 • DISSENT...
...Individuals slipped away...
...Most of us, I suppose, never worried enough, because we always knew that he was worrying...
...In forty years of Dissent, forty years of political dissidence, there was never a split...
...I know that Irving Howe was a major literary critic...
...There were some wonderful, some not-so-wonderful battles, but no factional wars...
...we breathed free, without inquisitions, party lines, or ideologically correct positions...
...He was driven by a passion, not an ideology...
...The admiration (and the guilt) that they reveal would have embarrassed both of us...
...He never looked for disciples, only for friends and Michael Walzer gave these remarks at a memorial service for Irving Howe held in New York City on May 24, 1993...
...He defended not only a linguistic style but a morality of plain speaking...
...The world knew him as the leading intellectual of the American left, a voice (often, a voice in the wilderness) for democratic and socialist values...
...But he didn't live, so to speak, upstairs in the tower...
...It was a great joy to live there with him for a while...
...And he hoped for something better, his own utopia, nothing extravagant, only a world more attractive, and he spoke about that with a cheerful resiliency...
...Intelligence and culture brought no entitlement to withdrawal or quietude or contemplative leisure in Irving's world, not even in his more attractive world...
...it was his hardest and steadiest work...
...How did this happen...
...But I didn't have to ask them...
...What I want to talk about here is its tone and timbre and its message...
...I have dwelt on these affairs of every day because they are so important: the good life is in the details...
...He knew the awfulness of politics in the twentieth century, and he spoke about it with a clarity unmatched among left intellectuals, absolutely free of sentimentality and wishfulness...
...I never asked him those questions...
...Socialism," he and Lew Coser wrote in one of the early issues of Dissent, "is the name of our desire...
...Irving taught us to argue and to worry...
...So he worked and argued and worried...
...And when he was engaged in that defense, he had little respect for the tender egos of our motley crew of writers, academics, and activists...
...The answer is the man, a man of the left and a socialist, who knew that this work, exactly this work, was what we were here for, that we did not have to finish it but could not give it up, that someone had to pay attention even to the smallest matters—and if someone, then us, then him...
...I don't mean its ideological message, Irving's doctrine, for despite his Marxist training, he was never doctrinaire, never an ideologue...
...comrades—because he was a man of the left and a committed democrat...
...when an article was bad, he rejected it...
...he never stopped...
...I think that we spoke on the phone some two thousand five hundred times over thirty-five years, and that cannot have been a tenth, not a fiftieth of the calls he made: no wonder he never said good-bye...
...When leftist intellectuals made themselves into apologists for tyranny, or when they broke the ties that bind us all to people in trouble and became apologists for privilege and power, Irving was ready enough with contempt and condemnation...
...He was politically committed like a man in love: attuned to the needs of the hour, to the actual experience of political life...
...We knew him differently...
...When he disagreed, he said so...
...He was our voice (it's our wilderness...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
