Remembering Irving Howe

...The worse things got, the lonelier I felt in a world where the progress of Irving Kristol from the Trotskyist alcoves at City College to the boards of leading American corporations marked the cynical possibilities of ex-Marxist opportunism...

...But that was enough for me...

...And that was certainly one big reason for our uneasy relationship...

...I was not only not a socialist, I didn't even believe in Irving's socialism except as moral energy and fearless criticism of the extremes in politics and academia...

...No wonder Irving became such a stirring symbol, and as the stirring turnout at the 92nd Street Y showed on May 24, an American leader...

...But of course we did have similar "experiences," while never really approving of each other's temperament and ideas...

...Irving and I were finally in the same humanist camp, with the same heroes and enemies...

...When Irving finally shook off Trotsky and became a leader of "democratic socialism" in America, I admired him and was grateful to him for standing up to all our many enemies on the left and the right...

...I was not an activist, was indeed a good deal of a moralist...

...Both from immigrant Yiddish-speaking homes, both from City College, both began as free-lance critics in the depression and became university professors without the Ph.D...

...But I now looked to Irving Howe to uphold a fundamental standard of decency...

...My politics, such as they were, never impressed even me...

...God damn it, Alfred," he muttered, "why must we always have the same experiences...

...It meant nothing to me as a possible political force...

...this "greatest of opportunities was the worst of influences...

...But while autodidacts like us often made influential historians, political analysts, philosophers, and wisdom figures on the stock market, the heavily traditionalist New Critics, especially those at Yale, found us unacceptable by the lights of their tradition...

...He got up very disgruntled...

...Only five years apart in age, here were two Jewish literary critics with the obviously strong interests in the social implications of literature that Jewish intellectuals tend to have...

...Jews might perforce be accepted in science, medicine, law, even in Congress, but surely they were not seasoned enough in the English language and its literature to be taken seriously as judges of fine effects, of creative subtlety...

...The more the baby PC critics—academic and conformist in every way, the only record of their scholarship usually the Ph.D.—showed their contempt for learning as they bullied their agenda on helpless minorities (not students for them but disciples), the more I looked to Irving to remind a negligent administration of a teacher's duty to stimulate the mind, not to flatter the helpless...

...and no Jewish radical he, even if he came from a working-class home in the Bronx, infuriated the high priests at Yale to the point where one professor's wife told me that her husband was in church, on his knees, "praying for the death of Harold Bloom...

...We had to grope our way in near darkness...

...Of course Irving and I were essentially autodidacts, even the first English speakers in our families...

...Alas, our common circumstances were never enough to bind Irving and me...

...Even a Wunderkind like Harold Bloom, a Yale Ph.D...

...It is bitterly hard to think of the American scene, of American thought, without him...

...I was walking slightly ahead of Irving, didn't see the slight parapet right ahead of me, and fell right over it...

...Ignorantly and (I thought) snobbishly, people tended to link us together...

...By the time all this was over and Irving was waiting to show me my room for the night, there were hardly any lights on the campus...

...But having grown up in the old American socialist movement without much faith in it, I could no longer see anything in socialism...

...This supposedly "most religious nation in history" was also the most violent...

...They were in their youth too poor, perhaps too engage, even too busy writing for a living, to worry about "higher degrees...

...And it took an audodidact to do that...

...Socialism as a political movement had long outlived its insurgency, even its routine analysis of capitalism in a country where the working class and "minorities" were sunk in the same degraded television culture, the same crass interests and ambitions as everyone else...

...What I admired was Irving the reader, his heroes Silone, Orwell, Camus, Dickens—Irving the teacher faithful to the much-derided canon—Irving the Jew bringing Yiddish literature back and not only into Jewish lives—Irving faithful to the political hopes of his youth at a time when the familiar political fanaticism of Jewish intellectuals as a class was now 536 DISSENT spending itself on Reagan and Bush, on extreme nationalism in America and Israel, on a lust for power in Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, the leading universities and scientific institutes...

...I saw it, as I did certain religious groups and personalities, as a last desperate appeal for human cooperation in this most individualistic, most heedlessly competitive of capitalist societies, where failure was a norm less accountable than success...

...This was a line all too familiar to me, one I had long detested in the mouths of other people, and now that the man himself had said it, I happily retorted— "Irving, I assure you, we don't...

...It was not lost on me that all too often we were being put together simply because we were Jews...

...Irving didn't see it either, and he too fell over it...

...I was once shanghaied into an acrimonious discussion with him on American writing at some terrible hall off 14th Street when Irving was still a Trotskyist...

...I miss his presence, his integrity, his stubbornness, his plainness...

...Although some of my best friends had been admirers of the late Lev Davidovich Bronstein (as he was born), I never understood the cult and liked to remember the Russian Jew who lamented, "The Trotskys make the Revolution and the Bronsteins pay for it...