Remembering Irving Howe
Brinker, Menachem
I met Irving for the first time in Israel during the summer of 1974. liana, his wife, introduced me to him, during a meeting with several friends, all peace activists. Our very long conversation...
...Our conversations extended beyond the issue of peace in the Middle East to literature, socialism, philosophy, and every other subject that interested us...
...How many of them took their inspiration from fiction or poetry...
...In 1974 I was a member of a small peace party, "Moked," and was preparing to publish a new monthly, Emda...
...Aestheticism too was an intellectual attitude as impossible for Irving as full-fledged cynicism or fatalism (with or without God...
...It was only with the establishment of Peace Now, the large and influential protest movement, in 1978, that Irving became convinced that other paths, outside Labor party politics, were open...
...Yet, his tastes in literature were liberal...
...My goal was to unite the factions of the Zionist peace camp and to clarify and defend our positions publicly...
...To me, Irving will always be the older and secular rabbi, drawing on his vast experience and well-earned prestige...
...And Irving was a sage...
...Suddenly he turned to me and said "Enough of socialism and peace...
...As a critic, he never argued with novelists...
...I do not wish to mislead the reader...
...He was open and receptive not only to different forms of fiction and criticism, but also to different human moods, outlooks, and attitudes represented in fiction...
...I always wondered at the mixture of elements that formed him: firm views and unambiguous sympathies and antipathies on political and social issues...
...New York for me was like Nineveh, "an exceedingly great city for God" and man, full of charms...
...Yet, I would not hesitate to say that it was the love of the creative in literature and art that ultimately was the driving force in Irving's life...
...We rejected his recommendation...
...While presenting his well-founded objections to small-party politics, he fully supported the journal...
...His commitment to define the intersecting points between the artist's aesthetic and moral sensibilities, the conditions of social existence and the demands of radical politics determined not only his field of study but also his own critical outlook...
...Our very long conversation that summer initiated a twenty-year dialogue...
...Visionary of a moral-social revolution that had not occurred, he refused to yield an inch...
...In one of our last meetings in Paris, I tried to reconcile him to thinkers we call today "postmodernist...
...I sensed that there was a deep conviction here, which I cannot help but call religious...
...During his last years, Irving felt that he had become estranged from the younger generation of political activists...
...I realized then that he still believed in transcending "our historical epoch" with a wholly different one...
...He maintained his singular integrity, even if this—in his own image— made him irrelevant to influential movements and trends...
...And then this unsentimental man of letters said, "One does not have to be afraid of full retirement and old age as long as one can still read Tolstoy...
...Irving immediately involved himself in our problems...
...I remained the curious attentive follower, eager to learn from the experience and views of the mature sage, but also fond of occasionally teasing him...
...We discussed this issue for two hours...
...He applied to fiction the comparative attitude of the wine connoisseur, interested in merits and achievements much more than faults and weaknesses...
...The argument that we carried on in 1974 set the structure for our talks in the future...
...He himself became a strong supporter of Americans for Peace Now...
...This is a philosophy," he said, "of a gray and wearisome historical period, when no one believes any longer in fundamental changes in life...
...I asked him if he would join the Democratic party in order to lead it "from within...
...At the end, he became more and more immersed in the elementary, not to say, primitive, powers of the creation of beauty in literature and other arts...
...Always speaking of political usefulness and expediency, he actually remained a lonely moralist...
...This year, in February when I saw him for the last time, he spoke very briefly about Israeli politics and Dissent...
...He asked whether I thought that Boris Eikhenbaum, the Russian formalist critic, was correct in his analysis of Tolstoy's achievement of extraordinary vividness in the depiction of the last days and death of old Bolkonsky...
...Despite this openness, two attitudes were unacceptable to Irving: sheer cynicism and fatalism...
...He described them with understanding and empathy...
...With the death of Irving, it has lost its greatest attraction...
...Friend of the "masses," he was never able to follow them in giving up revolutionary ideals...
...He argued that intellectuals should join the Labor party in order to lead it to more radical positions...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
