Remembering Irving Howe
Coser, Lewis
Lionel Trilling once told how he had been looking for an appropriate word to characterize George Orwell, whom he wished to eulogize. It finally seemed to him that a very old-fashioned word...
...His commitment to the life of Dissent was indeed a virtuous undertaking...
...When Irving and I would talk about the chances of creating a magazine of the democratic socialist left during the McCarthy years, we both felt that its chances to live for more than a year or two were very slim...
...Take his heroic effort to transmit the heritage of Yiddish literature to a generation of both Jews and gentiles to whom it was, by and large, a dead tradition...
...The adolescent Irving Howe read Milton and Wordsworth more assiduously than he read Yiddish writers, but the mature Irving Howe succeeded in making the American literary public aware of the greatness of Isaac Bashevis Singer and other Yiddish writers because he felt it to be a moral duty to help preserve Yiddish culture, at least in its literary manifestations...
...And try he did for over forty years...
...He was a virtuous man, one who tried to live up to self-imposed moral standards and moral duties...
...Irving believed it was the duty of people like himself to serve as a transmitter between the world of Yiddish and the modern world...
...One cannot calculate exactly how much time Irving spent on FALL • 1993 • 527 editing Dissent because in a sense he was preoccupied with Dissent almost all the time...
...When I would call him from Boston about some other matter he came back to Dissent almost instantly...
...But Irving argued that it was worthwhile to devote a big chunk of his time to the magazine, much more than any other editor including myself, because the idea of socialism should remain an image of our desire even though the reality of socialism, in the East but also largely in the West, was not something that could inspire a new generation of intellectuals and activists...
...George Orwell, Ignazio Silone, and a few contemporary and near-contemporary writers who stood very high in Irving Howe's pantheon won his admiration not solely because of their sheer literary merits but also, perhaps above all, because they provided guidelines of how to behave in a dismal world with virtuous commitment to moral standards...
...Whenever my telephone has been ringing in the last few weeks I have imagined for a second that Irving was at the other end of the line to talk about the problems of the next issue...
...In any case, I don't think it is exaggerating when I say that at least two days of the seven-day week Dissent engaged Irving's full attention for something like forty years...
...It finally seemed to him that a very old-fashioned word was most appropriate, the word virtue...
...As an editor of Dissent, so it would appear to me, Irving Howe also felt the moral duty to evoke the spirit of socialism just because it was not fashionable and the thing to do in the miserable nearly half a century in which the magazine has been in existence...
...This word seems to me also most appropriate to characterize Irving Howe...
...World of Our Fathers is likewise above all an evocation of a dying world by an author who does not inhabit that world but feels a duty to describe it so that it will not be obliterated by the march of time...
...He was aware that Yiddish would soon become a dead language, yet he spent innumerable hours to help preserve its masterpieces in translation, even though he himself lived in a very different cultural universe and even though his devotion to Yiddish brought no material benefits...
...He will be thoroughly missed...
...And all this without any material rewards whatsoever and an often exhausting schedule of teaching, writing, and addressing a variety of audiences, be it among Democratic Socialists of America or elsewhere...
...There will be an empty chair where he once sat at our editorial meetings—but we shall continue, of that I am sure, to carry on in his spirit, and the idea of democratic socialism, as he argued, will continue to be the image of our desire...
...There will no longer be his voice on the line, yet there will remain our collective memory of what he did, how he behaved, and how he inspired all of us to emulate his moral standards...
...One had to try...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
