Remembering Irving Howe
Fox, Paula
I have tried these last weeks at all hours of the day to evoke Irving's voice, its cadence, its fluency, and a freshness of tone that the years never made stale. There were moments when I would...
...The private Irving often regarded the public Irving with a certain wryness, as though to say—what had all that to do with the hard work, the hard thinking, to which he devoted so much of his life's energy...
...a modest man...
...On the day of his death, while I was at his apartment, I had to go out on an errand...
...He liked personal stories if they were not too long or too lugubrious, and he took an intense delight in jokes...
...Those notes have sustained me over three decades...
...There were even times when I could get him to extend, by a few minutes, his famous, abruptly ended phone calls if I said I had remembered a joke...
...In a review published shortly after his death, he asked, after suggesting a similarity between two Italian writers, "[A]m I just imagining this...
...He did not praise too quickly or too easily...
...That is a second death...
...That unpretentiousness in him, along with his awareness of how he might be seen by others in the several worlds of his reputation, could take a comic form...
...It was my delight to collect them for him...
...In truth, he was diffident...
...So did I. Now that laughter is stilled...
...When Irving talked about writing, and about the writers and poets whom he loved, it was with the ardor and innocence of a great reader...
...That was so characteristic of him—not to be tentative, but to be, where literature was concerned, open and selfquestioning...
...And in his face, when he spoke about them, I thought I could glimpse the youth he had been when he first began to feel the passion for literature...
...The FALL • 1993 • 529 doorman, after a formal expression of regret, said suddenly, spontaneously, "I loved to make Professor Howe laugh...
...Many years ago, my son and Irving's stepson were in the fifth grade together...
...And I think of the Emperor Hadrian's words as he lay on his deathbed: "Little soul—where will you find a home—poor naked little soul, without your old power of joking...
...They, too, were fluent and held his unique freshness of view...
...But there was no meanness of spirit in him, no pettiness...
...He took an austere pride in his work, but I've known few people with so little vanity...
...He paused a moment, then replied, dryly, "B...
...It is not only Irving whom we have each lost, but his particular way of seeing each of us...
...They were given one of those vaguely cosmic assignments with which teachers sometimes fob off their obligation to teach...
...A week or so later, I asked Irving: "What grade did you get...
...And he did not have a touch of that raging selfimportance and complacency that are, so often, afflictions of notability...
...He was tough-minded, sometimes obdurate...
...The children were to write the entire history of Spain, or some other country, without recourse to any encyclopedia...
...For he honored the effort a writer must make with every book...
...How on earth were we to go about writing compositions that were supposed to be the work of ten-year olds...
...Irving and I were obliged to help the dismayed boys...
...There were moments when I would listen so closely to his voice that I would lose track of what he was saying...
...But we did, somehow, and sent the children off with their reports that were mostly ours...
...We had frequent telephone conferences marked by exasperated laughter...
...A slow, steady accumulation of affection grew in me over the more than thirty years I knew him...
...After I told it, there might be a wild burst of laughter...
...I had barely realized, until Liana Howe called with the news of his death, what it all added up to—that I loved him, that he is irreplaceable...
...When I sent him a manuscript or a published book, he always wrote me, sometimes a card, sometimes a letter...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
