Remembering Irving Howe

...Revolutionary questions, from the theoretical to the practical, convulsed the Alcove: would the capitalist class peacefully surrender power if the working class won an electoral majority...

...Silone's essay, "The Choice of Comrades," which Irving printed in Dissent, elaborated that point...

...And, at the end of these convoluted logomachies on strategy and tactics, the crushing retort in the factional debates was always: "You know what Trotsky has to do...

...Lthese disputes, especially between Irving and the Shermanites, citations, footnotes, and arcane instances (for example, the "crucial" debate at the Tenth Party Congress of the Russian party, where Lenin denounced Shliapnikov and attacked "leftwing communism" as "an infantile disorder") were exchanged furiously...

...Irving was then a Trotskyist...

...Sherman was Philip Selznick, later the professor of sociology at Berkeley...

...We are now back at City College...

...Irving was concerned primarily with a gathering split (splits are, after all, the only permanent revolution on the left) with the "Shermanites," a group that was beginning to question and pull away from Trotskyism...

...Just a mensch...

...A sweet mensch...

...At City College, I would flash my steel at the Trotskyists and shout: What about Kronstadt...

...Remember Kronstadt...

...H and I as the transposition of initials...

...No longer a commissar...

...The writer Irving admired most, Ignazio Silone, had broken with the Communist party (as exemplified in that fine novel Bread and Wine) because of his understanding of personal sin, as against his erstwhile comrade, Pahniro Togliatti, who remained a Stalinist...

...And I replied: Irving, you are one of the few people I know, not only whose ideas, but whose temperament, changed...

...In the end, he did not...

...Recalling many of our old debates, and his changed political views, Irving once asked: What about me...

...A number of years ago, after Irving and I had become good friends, and sometime political allies, I said to him: Irving, I am less interested in what FALL • 1993 • 517 people say, what ideas they hold, but the way in which they hold their ideas...

...Still Horenstein (in class), he was using the party name of Hugh Ivan...

...This was part of the romanticism of the time...

...The leaders of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, such as Imre Nagy, had been communists...

...Along with Isadore (Jack) Rader, I was moving "left," until some anarchist cousins, appalled at the thought, gave me some pamphlets by Emma Goldman ("The Truth About the Boylshiviki" [sic!]) and Alexander Berkman about the Kronstadt uprising in 1920, when Trotsky had ordered the shooting of the gallant sailors whose first volleys had, earlier, initiated the Russian revolution...

...Earl Rabb (who directed Jewish organizational affairs in San Francisco and coauthored a number of books with Lipset...

...The analogy, however, is not meant just as City College repartee, for what Joseph Knecht learned, in Herman Hesse's novel, was a measure of humility and, as the necessary condition for maturity, a sense of tragedy...

...I go into these details not only for their intrinsic interest, as footnotes to the history of the New York intelligentsia, but to show how the japes and debates in this little hothouse played themselves out later on the wider shores of American social science and culture—especially since each of us, later, edited magazines...

...and no longer Herr but Knecht...

...Trotsky lost, and we had the gruesome victory of Stalin...

...Martin Eden" was Martin Diamond, the Straussian professor of political philosophy who suffered an untimely death more than a decade ago...

...I had joined the Young People's Socialist League in 1932, at the tender age of thirteen...

...There was also Melvin J. Lasky, who became the editor of Encounter...

...The interesting fact was that almost all the Shermanites were Jewish, and therefore took gentile party names...

...Temperament of individuals, I said, is more important than ideology...

...Or Hugh for the English gentleman that Irving absorbed from the novels he read and Ivan as the Russian muzhik, the earthy peasant they all admired...

...how could one organize a revolutionary insurrection since there were no cobbled streets in New York, as there had been in Paris in 1789...

...And I know what Trotsky has to do...

...But does Trotsky know what he has to do...

...But would Trotsky have been better...

...But he was, then as now, a party of one, or rather, two halves of one, half Trotsky and half Lasky...

...I was not, then, very friendly with Irving...

...Aficionados will recognize in all this "the Bead Game," and in this, Irving became Magister Ludi, the master of the play...

...was "bourgeois democracy" a sham...

...Rabb and Kristol took the party names of "Perry" and "Ferry," because James P. Cannon, the maximum leader of the Trotskyists, used to denounce the pettybourgeois students from City College as being (in his inimitable pronunciation) on the "perry-ferry" of the movement...

...And he defended Trotsky's action as "historical necessity...

...Irving knew...

...and Irving Kristol, who later mugged all the liberals so that they should understand reality...

...And not, in reaction, a yogi...

...After all, Ulyanov had become Lenin, Bronstein transfigured as Trotsky, Dzhugashvili metamorphosed as Stalin, and so on, and so on...

...The only one who was not, Peter Rossi, took a Jewish party name, Rosenblatt...

...Why Hugh Ivan...

...I was a right-wing social democrat, a Menshevik opposed to the Bolsheviks...

...Who becomes a Dubcek and who becomes a Ceausescu is not dictated by ideology but by temperament...

...Irving was then a commissar of the revolution and the "theoretician" of the Trotskyists...

...And they would reply: Where's Kronstadt...

...I had never believed in the monolithic image of "the Bolshevik...

...And others were "Martin Lewis," or Seymour Martin Lipset, professor at Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, and other places...

...And it had...