Remembering Irving Howe
Bensman, David
Irving Howe invited me to write for Dissent in 1972, when I was a graduate student. My main qualification was my participation in a socialist youth group. This was one of Dissent's first...
...Writing for the magazine of my fathers seemed like an act of hubris, or at least, chutzpah...
...All the time we were in graduate school and serving our apprenticeships as assistant professors, academia pressured us to narrow our field of inquiry, formalize our presentations, bury our ideas in a welter of detail...
...Each quarter, when I found the envelope with Irving's editing in my mailbox, I was filled with terror...
...Irving through his writing, his editing, and his very conduct of Dissent editorial board meetings, helped us resist this academicization by giving us confidence that our steady work was possible and would make a difference...
...My assignment was to write about interesting articles in other magazines...
...During the 1970s and 1980s, dozens of my friends on the left benefited from the same education...
...Mostly his work took the form of slash marks that sharpened my points and intensified my arguments by excising the excess verbiage...
...In an effort to be fair and generous, or perhaps sophisticated, I filled my writing with circumlocutions and apologies...
...Rarely did Irving write much, but when he did, his one or two sentences extended my arguments in ways that I had only been grasping at...
...In the end, I found it was far more comfortable to make my own arguments clear than to have Irving do it for me...
...Through Irving's efforts, Dissent has succeeded in making a generational transition that seemed impossible two decades ago...
...It was not just fear of outright rejection...
...Equally important, Irving taught us young socialists what it was to be an intellectual—not only to take ideas seriously, but to take on the responsibility of trying to understand how our world was changing...
...I knew that Irving's editing made my essays livelier, more interesting, more readable, but I wasn't always sure that I completely agreed with the argument I had made with his help...
...my mission, which Irving never spelled out, was to find my political voice against the backdrop of New Left sentimentality and neoconservative heresy...
...Simply making sense of Irving's black marks was the best education I ever received in writing and thinking clearly...
...This was one of Dissent's first moves toward generational reconciliation, but given my membership in a family of Dissentniks, it was a tentative one...
...I also knew that Irving's black marks would make my voice far more definite than I had dared to be, and I feared not being able to live with what he had made of my cautious efforts...
...At the same time, without Irving, Dissent, and indeed the democratic left, will never be the same...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
