Remembering Irving Howe
Avishai, Bernard
Irving Howe, founding editor of Dissent, died this past May. In the following pages we present thoughts, comments, and remembrances of this remarkable, versatile intellectual by his colleagues,...
...He was not always there with the praise you wanted...
...They suggested, insistently but gently, that so long as writers can pair words unexpectedly, new worlds are possible and orthodoxy is futile...
...Nor were kindnesses lost on him...
...they met me in Penn Station late, at odds...
...You find "some" instead of "all," "a certain" (as in "a certain gallantry") instead of a more categorical adjective, a rhetorical question when he might have permitted himself some stridency...
...We younger men and women who loved Irving, and claimed him, cannot write of his death without feeling somewhat preempted by that show of impatience...
...You could not argue Bounderby into wanting Stephen Blackpool's welfare...
...His voice suggested what he once called (describing another's voice) "moral tact...
...A final point about missing him...
...No pilgrim to Lourdes ever looked more enchanted than Irving at that moment...
...Once, I was on a panel with him, and he chided me afterward that my talk had lacked a center...
...It was not that Dissent's politics reflected any canon, certainly not any faith in the course of history...
...Indeed, arresting phrases like that—"moral tact," "dignity of emotion," "heroism of tiredness" —were themselves groundwork for his "religious" sort of radicalism...
...Rather, it was that the socialist ideal, with all of its nuances and limits, had to be grounded in the desire to do right by another person...
...Reading Irving calmed me: no other writer except for Orwell has had this effect...
...It had what Henry James called a 'misplaced middle,' " he laughed...
...When people are angry, you buy food," she said...
...How do you eulogize a person you imagine poised to pounce on the slightest oversimplification...
...Suddenly liana left us standing in the middle of the platform—only to return a few minutes later with a bag full of rolls...
...he was almost always there with the help you needed, help with a job search, a letter, an opinion—a drink...
...Lawrence, or Mailer, or Alec Nove...
...It can prompt guilt (and the excesses of guilt) almost as quickly as generosity...
...This desire was, Irving lamented, "mysterious...
...Of course, intense fellow-feeling can be a mixed blessing...
...but I don't think this man can appreciate any longer how he is right...
...If anything was sacred to him, it was the mystery and density of a good man's life...
...As far as I could judge it, Irving made his peace by focusing on kindnesses that were practical, as much in his friendships as in his work...
...Irving was a man of many arguments, but I shall miss, more than the conclusions he drew, the way he drew them...
...I recall traveling with him and liana to Washington back in 1979...
...Just after A Margin of Hope was published, I found Irving exasperated because a neoconservative critic had mocked him for a socialist position that had, in the words of the critic, become a "religion" for him...
...Some time ago, in an impatient review of Fiddler on the Roof, Irving wrote that the people who, one by one, made up Yiddish civilization in Eastern Europe were to be mourned—not with sentimental homage—but rather with "dignified silence...
...You remember, I suppose, that certain things were sacred to him...
...Look at his essays on T.E...
...The annoying thing is that the observation is, in a way, right," Irving told me (his anger turned to exasperation when it collided with his sense of irony...
...That is what we all have now...
...Some of the longer pieces were presented originally at the memorial for him in New York on May 24, 1993.—EDS...
...In the following pages we present thoughts, comments, and remembrances of this remarkable, versatile intellectual by his colleagues, family, and friends...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
