Remembering Irving Howe

...But I think that each of the many thousands of pages he wrote during his long life as a socialist—a life of writing that ran for more than fifty years and included not just the big books but also numberless op-ed pieces, reviews, bits for Dissent, forgotten dispatches from the front—that each of these pages drew on this same story...

...in an irony my father found delicious, these buffalo descend from a few that had been shipped out to Oklahoma in 1905 from the Bronx Zoo...

...And a final unorthodox note: It is generally said that Whitman declined in poetic power after the Civil War...

...In his very old age he wrote a twelve-line poem called After the Supper and Talk in which he describes his reluctance to leave—we need hardly be told what it is that he must leave: After the supper and talk—after the day is done, As a friend from friends his final withdrawal prolonging, Good-bye and Good-bye with emotional lips repeating, (So hard for his hand to release those hands—no more will they meet, No more for communion of sorrow and joy, of old and young, A far-stretching journey awaits him, to return no more...

...it was the question he asked wherever he traveled: "How do people make a living here...

...Garrulous to the very last...

...he was haunted by it in Oklahoma or New York, Italy or Israel...

...Let me read to you the closing paragraph of an essay he wrote in 1955 about Walt Whitman, a poet he loved for his egalitarian sympathies and his New York stories...

...As we sat in the November sun eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, my father talked of the landscape and the way its hard vastness evoked fundamental qualities of American life...

...He wrote about them with a comrade's voice that you can hear most beautifully in the sentences about Ignazio Silone that run like a bright thread through many of his books...

...His love of stories, his hope that he might make some sense of the world through them, gives me a way of talking about his complexity and yet also his simplicity as a man and writer...

...It was his way of telling me he understood...

...he reserved as his favorite word of praise "delicious...

...But among the later pieces there are some with the most subtle refinement and humor...

...To which they respond, "Yes, the pay is low...

...Rowe Gazing at the scene, savoring its story, smiling at our being together there of all places in the world, my father turned to me and said with wonder: "It's straight out of Flannery O'Connor...

...Some ran stores that served the outlying district...

...If he seemed out of place there in his city clothes and his New York quickness, the place itself was not alien to him...

...But he also knew that his life was sustained, in a phrase he took from a Hasidic story, by the steady work of waiting...

...These mountains are part of a wildlife refuge that has, among other animals, a vast herd of buffalo...

...532 • DISSENT owing kyle...

...After lunch, we drove deeper into the Wichitas and visited Holy City, a stage set made from native red granite where the locals put on a passion play each Easter...

...he knew that pleasure mattered, and he found it most deeply in listening to music...

...This is true in a way, the poems of the later years being obviously more fragmentary and short-breathed than those of the earlier ones...

...My father knew that any messiah who was likely to appear this late in the twentieth century would only betray those who followed him...

...And many, I said, had no work...

...The story of the place tells of an emigre Austrian pastor who was sent out to tend the souls of Indians and who came to feel, in a moment of hallucinatory loneliness, that the landscape of the Wichitas bore an exact resemblance to that of Judea...

...As we drove back to Norman that afternoon, we passed through a series of small towns that seemed to be losing their place in the landscape...

...With this love of stories, he welcomed my wife, Georgina, into the family, surprised but always delighted to have a novelist for a daughter-in-law...

...With liana, he collected the shortest of stories and together they made an anthology—Short Shorts—unlike any ever done: one that could satisfy his belief that very few pieces would not be better if cut by 20 percent...

...he had grown up in the East Bronx of the thirties and knew the smell of poverty wherever he encountered it...

...they were roughnecks in the oil fields...

...He did not always write about these humiliations...

...He knew that he could only wait and write and hope for something much more modest—for a world more attractive...

...No praise is needed [my father ends], nor could any be sufficient for the frank pathos and relaxed gaiety of that final line...

...The last words tonight should be my father's...

...This is the way a man, and a poet, should end...

...they raised wheat or cattle...

...it had for years been part of his imaginative landscape...

...My father was a socialist—and make no mistake about his allegiance—because he understood the humiliation that comes to those without work, to those without the bare security of a decent living...

...Lawrence and Pirandello, Delmore Schwartz and Raymond Carver, Tolstoy and Umberto Saba—the list amazes as much for its diversity as its length...

...One glance down empty main streets told him as much...

...In the tale, of course, the watchman of Chelm waits for the Messiah and complains to the village elders that his pay is too low...

...Shunning, postponing severance—seeking to ward off the last word ever so little, E'en at the exit-door turning—charges superfluous calling back—e'en as he descends the steps, Something to eke out a minute additional—shadows of nightfall deepening, Farewells, messages lessening—dimmer the forthgoer's visage and form, Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness—loth, 0 so loth to depart...

...The story he wanted to hear was about those without work...

...For the rest of the year, the Stations of the Cross stand gaunt and eerie against the blue Oklahoma sky...

...In the fall of 1986 he came to visit me in Oklahoma and we took a road trip to the Wichita Mountains, about two hours southwest of Norman, where I then lived...

...So let me tell you a story about him, a story that helps me understand the wholeness of his life's work...

...Oklahoma was then in a bust...

...I tried to answer as best as I could: they worked in the feed mill or the grain elevator...

...He wanted always to know how people in a place managed to escape the humiliation of being without a job, of being without the simple but sustaining dignity that comes with work and the ability to provide food and shelter and perhaps a bit more to those we love...

...FALL • 1993 • 533...

...But consider, the work is steady...

...My father asked the same question as we passed through each of them...

...And yes, there were writers who told this story, who knew it as well as he did...

...These mountains rise up from a prairie that matches the mind's-eye view of Oklahoma: flat, dry, windswept, treed with a scattering of cottonwood and blackjack oak...

...the price of oil had dropped by more than 50 percent a few years before, and these towns were deep in depression...

...I never felt closer to him than at that moment, for with that one sentence he gave me the story that would help me live in that alien landscape...

...he wrote about those of Faulkner and Hardy, Anderson and Wharton, Dreiser and Sholom Aleichem, Leskov and George Eliot, T.E...