Remembering Irving Howe

...But shut your eyes for a minute, listen to the earth, listen to your nerves...

...it was an image of democratic, egalitarian humanism...

...He insisted on living through complications without imposing false syntheses...

...But in the ensuing decades Irving Howe continued to seek America—an America through which "democratic utopianism . . . runs like a bright thread," as he wrote in the last article he saw published in Dissent...

...Ryzhik speaks in political terms, but then Marenko says, "I am a Marxist too...

...Irving Howe was, in one way or another, ever in search of America...

...As a maturing intellectual in the 1950s, he railed against an age of conformity, against intellectuals who made themselves comfortable in it...

...How true this was of Irving...

...He remained, resolutely, a man of the left, all while castigating any authoritarian who spoke in the name of socialism...

...He recounted that nobody in Clyde wanted to speak of Winesburg to him...

...as an American, he criticized incisively this country's copious warts, all while refusing any form of anti-Americanism...

...Writing of Ignazio Silone in Politics and the Novel, Irving provided his own self-portrait: "in some vague and indestructible way he remains a socialist, indifferent to party or dogma, yet utterly committed to the poor and the dispossessed...

...Moral passion...

...Four decades earlier he had written a book about its author, Sherwood Anderson...

...it was a word embraced by the Debses, the Thomases, the Harrington—those who, for him, were the best America has brought forth...

...Ryzhik, an imprisoned Old Bolshevik who stubbornly retains his idealism and refuses to submit to Stalin, is being taken to Moscow...

...a qualitatively better America remained the regulative idea of his politics...

...His own lucidity came, partly, of refusal—refusal to turn his eyes away, refusal to find refuge in obscurantism or jargon, refusal to conceal what ought not to be concealed or to hide or to fudge what had not been thought through...

...He knew too well its murkiness, but rebelled against internalizing it...

...In recent years, while so many Americans spoke of "limits," Irving Howe spoke, as he always had, of "possibilities...

...There is a passage in Victor Serge's novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev that especially moved him...

...Over and again, throughout the 1980s, I heard him use that word— "meanness," the "meanness" of it all...

...Irving once wrote of a friend that he could think of no greater praise than a remark made of Thomas Hardy—that the world's slow stain had not rubbed off on him...

...And before that, as a soldier, on the eve of World War II, young Irving Howe, on his last weekend leave, made his way to Clyde, Ohio, were Anderson spent his youth and that was (partly) the model of Winesburg...

...He later wrote: "A New York City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent time in the small towns that lay sprinkled across America, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes of wasted life, wasted love—was this the 'real' America...

...No need to fathom the relation between lucidity and moral passion to grasp why their entwined presence in this passage so struck Irving Howe...

...Moreover, he was never satisfied denouncing those who veiled their villainy behind left-wing language —though his wrath against them was furious, unflinching...

...But he believed that the effort had to be made, even if one failed, to see and think and write straight...

...He meets a friend, another old oppositionist named Marenko, in a cell, and, after embracing, they enter into a discussion about the fate of socialism and themselves...

...Irving Howe denied the Stalinist and neoconservative alike—and they were quite alike in this regard—any right to define what he called the image of his desire, socialism...

...The book had resonated in this Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants...

...He knew that nowadays all glasses have fissures...

...In a preface to the republication of Politics and the Novel, written shortly before his death, he remarked that nowadays, "when critical writing is marked by obscurantism and jargon," he aspired to prose "so direct, so clear, so transparent that the act of reading comes to seem like looking through a glass...

...He scorned turbidity parading as profundity no less than false lucidity—the reduction of complications to simplistic schemes...

...He was, indeed, steady—committed fiercely to certain basic values...

...as a literary critic, he was able to admire profoundly authors whose politics appalled him (and he loved and read and wrote of literature as literature, not as a means to parade theoretical pseudo-acumen...

...Last year, while recovering from three operations, he wrote a preface to a new edition of Winesburg, Ohio, that remarkable portrait of small town America, of a limited world...

...What's the relation between moral passion and lucidity...

...He refused to rationalize this bitter fact, and, more painful, he insisted on learning from it...

...The penultimate line, he proposed in Politics and the Novel, was as good a prescription for a political novel as he could find...

...Which is why, until the end of his days, he insisted that he be called a socialist...

...It has been debated by philosophers since philosophy began, and despite his insistence on lucidity, Irving had a mistrust of philosophical systems...

...And I want an International of good people...

...Unlike many others, Irving Howe would not yield socialist ideals to their Stalinist kidnappers...

...No wonder that living his last years in what has been called Reaganism bis—the hollow estate of George Bush—Irving Howe was preoccupied with "the moral passion of the older Tolstoy...

...As an aging intellectual in the 1980s, he fumed about the sheer "meanness" of Ronald Reagan's world, and about the smug, "swaggering" acolytes who sought to give meanness an intellectual halo...

...He was, after all, a man whose youthful dreams of a better world were abducted when he was still young...

...And to be politically straight...

...in "his humorous irritability, his effort to speak without rhetoric or cant, [he became] a kind of moral hero for those of us who have been forced by history to put aside many of the dogmas of social radicalism but who remain faithful to the rebellious and fraternal impulse behind the dogmas...

...The theory of surplus value had long paled beside deeply human outrage: how can people treat people like that...

...Well, as Irving might say, a 526 • DISSENT complicated one, of course...

...and as a Jew, he retained a deep bond to Jewry even though there was little left in American Jewish life that he found alluring (and he was supportive of the Jewish state all while he was critical of Israeli policies...

...He wasn't "postmodern...

...Not that the world was so direct, so clear, so transparent...

...In the coming years, as we at Dissent continue to dissent, as we try to further some very human values in an America not so receptive to them, in a world still not so attractive, the spirit of Irving Howe, that very human exemplar of the politics of integrity, will, I hope, continue to grace our pages—perhaps whispering to us the words of Isaac Babel's "Gedali": "The International—we know what the International is...