Remembering Irving Howe

...Seeing the comment in manuscript I offered a defense: that the defiant words against philanthropy had their motive in a hatred he should admire, hatred of the very idea of turning conscience into a drudge...

...We went out to a party one evening and Irving dutifully came along...

...a few days later a postcard came back that was not a rejection, not a formal letter of some kind, but a postcard from Irving Howe in Truro saying it was good work: he couldn't use it since a review of the book was already commissioned, but would I like to write something for Dissent —on some movies about campus radicals, if I was interested in movies...

...His first impulse was not to rise to the bait...

...11 obody knew better how to keep to himself...

...His stake in the argument, it later occurred to me, was a piety so instinctive and personal as to be an inseparable condition of his life...

...This was a deep virtue, and a public one: for the causes he stood with, Irving had an astounding patience...

...I don't know if Irving would ever have said that he lived for these gatherings with political friends and associates—many of whom began by having in common chiefly their separate friendships with him—but this was a company in which he seemed to me totally alive...

...Then he went back and reread "SelfReliance," and a lot of other essays, and then like an intellectual he wrote a book about his ambivalence —a patient book that was still changing its mind when he finished it...

...With the average ingenious reader, a candidate for the secret might be, "Every other word is a pun in Greek," but what Irving told me was: "He always says a thing twice, he doesn't let the other guy rest...

...We met at the end of the summer at his apartment on Riverside Drive, and I don't remember much of our conversation, most of which must have turned on politics, but at one point after hearing a string of allusions and prejudices he said, "You're a literary critic...

...You can't explain it away...

...because the words come out of a life of speaking and listening, and create for others a fresh possibility for speaking and listening...

...Close to the same feeling was another impression, of a living substantial figure whom the words defended, and who was capable of defending them...

...He had a great gift for friendship and he had the gift (he wouldn't have called it a burden) of solitude...

...There were the words and there was the man...

...That was a lucky hit for both of us...

...I remember just as much his impatience—a protective trait in part, helping to keep him clear of sham artists, intellectual nuisances, or the fag-end of a conversation trailing off in gossip...

...Irving heard out this apology, but he wouldn't have it, or not all of it...

...the word is his, from the fine unglamorous title Steady Work, and what the writers mean by steadiness is consistency of opinion...

...A touch of irony was in it along with the warmth of palpable pleasure...

...The room was crowded with graduate students and professors, few of whom he knew—I must have introduced one or two, but they didn't stay with him long...

...When we talked it was usually about literature — mostly literature written in English, owing to my limitations, not his...

...I used to type out passages of Hazlitt's prose and send them with letters to Irving about other things...

...One night on the phone he said, "I've discovered Hazlitt's secret...

...We argued a long time about the famous passage that starts with the question, "Are they my poor...

...it mattered that both were there...

...How he loved those long quotations, and how he railed against them...

...It is true that the scandal and the charm of writing is that the words are dead on the page—that, literally, they can't give an account of themselves, any more than they can change their minds...

...The eulogies I have read all speak of his "steadiness...

...but there surely was some connection...

...You know, when you read Hazlitt you sometimes feel there's no point in writing anything further...

...and a few minutes later I noticed Irving standing in a characteristic attitude, some way back from the refreshment table where everyone was clustered, his attention mildly taken up by the sounds of murmuring and laughter, as if they were sounds a long way off...

...His impatience was also a form of temperamental resistance: it stemmed from the difficult contact he wanted to maintain between his imaginative reach and his moral commitments...

...Of course, Irving knew that Emerson knew that someone like Irving Howe would be reading those words one day—they were an unabashed incitement, absolutely geared to set him off...

...The senior members of the group (some of whom Irving admired tremendously, hiding his veneration with gruff command and efficiency) spoke not just in periods but paragraphs...

...There are writers who are unimaginable as persons...

...Socrates in the Phaedrus speaks of the good of "words founded on knowledge, words which can defend both themselves and him who planted them, words which instead of remaining barren contain a seed whence new words grow up in new characters...

...There's something there that grates, and it's meant to...

...He was a good interrupter, a skirmisher, as he remained to the last on one whole side of his writings...

...This was presented as a piece of empirical science, which doubtless it was not, but what an appropriate discovery it was, considering from whom it came...

...he comes back for a second punch as hard as the first, maybe harder...

...Another picture comes back to me, of quite a different kind, from the year he spent at Yale sharing college quarters with Nick...

...but the sheer pleasure of being unpredictable had its limits, and he observed that the sentences in question, while they possessed a certain astringency, also betrayed a pinched quality of Emerson's social imagination...

...He was impatient with Emerson, whose idea of self-reliance seemed an impossible match for American socialism, in any possible world...

...Now we have the words, which persist, and the memory of the man...

...Irving was not the most eloquent speaker on these occasions, but he was the sharpest—the most concentrated and the cause of concentration in others...

...No thinker (he believed) ought to permit himself to spin out a train of thought that could plausibly be taken to justify selfishness...

...It's unnerving...

...his hands marking time in the air like a man conducting an orchestra, as if the people there and the mood they shared were in that moment entirely satisfying to him...

...I decided to write a book about William flazlitt, the great romantic critic, essaywriter, and political journalist...

...Socrates was attacking the pretensions of writing, all writing, and he appealed instead to the nobility of spoken thoughts, the give and take of people whose community aimed at a different kind of permanence...

...they were earnest in their grasp of history and precedent, fierce in their expectations of each other, and had built their convictions on a solid footing of information that seems as impressive as ever looking back...

...And how much it matters that we have both...

...and writers who live so close to the pulse of their work that one hardly feels a transition in passing from the words to the man who wrote them...

...At the time I wouldn't have said so...

...It turned his wit to humor, his nervous demand on himself to a thriving gregariousness...

...But there have been writers, a few, in reading whom one feels that one is encountering words that do defend themselves...

...The idea was to entertain him (not always an easy thing to do), to prove that I was hard at work, and also I'm sure to inspire envy...

...You could have made a decent chamber of parliament for a small European country from the FALL • 1993 • 523 talents and the voices at those meetings...

...a blend very common in Irving, and also unique to him...

...Did the choice have anything to do with Irving?—his energy and example, and the atmosphere of passion and belief one naturally associated with him...

...The photographs on his books tend to place him in a sociable light—at the blackboard, on the telephone —so one imagines a room with him in it must have been a room full of people holding forth...

...there was nothing at that time that interested me more...

...writers who when you meet them surprise or disappoint, from the obvious disparity between the words and their ostensible cause...

...Pomposity in his presence lost half its heart before it could even stand on tip-toe and raise its hand...

...I was impressed when I read almost anything by Irving that the words had a life on the page...

...The tone was as if to say, How amazing and interesting that literary critics are still coming into the world...

...On the last count it worked...

...In the next few years I would see him on occasional visits to the city, often at editorial meetings of Dissent, where he was the presiding energy...