Remembering Irving Howe
Kuttner, Robert
Sudden deaths of friends still leading vital lives are always shocking. I suspect we were especially shocked by Irving's death because we assumed, despite his deteriorating physical health, that...
...To curl up with manuscripts that need an editor's touch is either an act of immense ego or of great generosity...
...He was a champion of public and private civility...
...He was too intellectually generous, too curious about what he could learn from other minds, and too secure in his own moorings...
...Those too young to have known Irving Howe except through his writings will find it hard to believe that a man of so many parts could have existed...
...He was uncorruptible by fashion, or anything else...
...Little magazines are special because they are communities of the intellect...
...There was much about Irving that was oldfashioned, in the best sense...
...I suspect we were especially shocked by Irving's death because we assumed, despite his deteriorating physical health, that he would somehow live forever...
...Yet he managed to avoid the sectarian quarrels that represent the left at its worst...
...In the process he helps create a coherent larger literary and political whole out of disparate parts...
...He lived simply, and though he was perhaps the quintessential New York Intellectual, he was the antithesis of the celebrity intellectual...
...He had little patience for cant or ignorant indignation, whether of the left, center, or right...
...His was a left of thoughtful idealism and search for insight, never of diatribe...
...Lunch with Irving was never at cafes favored by literati, much less at palaces of high cuisine...
...Unlike bad editors, Irving never competed with his writers or tried to impose his views on theirs...
...He was a monument to a range and a depth almost impossible to imagine in one human being, combined with a quiet decency...
...He was a man of books and of journals, not of "media...
...Irving never sought what was trendy but followed his formidable intellectual curiosity and his reliable intuition...
...He nurtures, inspires, befriends, notices connections, but never homogenizes...
...He appreciated, above all, human complexity...
...Dissent, to Irving, meant not just dissent from establishment fashions but respectful and clarifying disputation among his own peers...
...But now that he is gone, I find it utterly daunting to imagine myself or any of my contemporaries filling his extraordinary shoes...
...An editor like Irving helps writers to realize what they know but haven't quite grasped...
...That is why a large man sometimes dwells in a small magazine...
...Particularly for those of us who came of age during the relative calm of postwar America, Irving's several worlds seem of another era...
...His magazine is perfectly titled to reflect those values...
...In Irving's case it was entirely the latter...
...Irving knew better...
...I often found it hard to believe that the quiet man at the end of the phone gently asking me to do another piece was the same giant whose books I had been reading since my undergraduate days...
...Too few citizens possess the towering civic and humanistic virtues that Irving lived...
...To be an editor of such a magazine requires a rare blend of range, confidence, and humility...
...In an age of superficial jingoism, he was a patriot...
...His values expressed a socialist republic of which one would actually want to be a citizen...
...He was of a generation that had life experiences that simply can never be lived again...
...Most important to the Dissent audience, Irving was an exemplary man of the democratic left...
...Irving died at a historic moment when a rather weak form of liberalism was reviving on the ashes of a failed conservatism, and the fall of communism was being scored, erroneously, as a simple victory of laissez-faire...
...He was astonishingly well educated...
...And they will be impoverished for not having known him...
...As a progressive editor and writer a generation younger than Irving, I have long looked to him for inspiration...
...Yet his prodigious gifts came wrapped in a package with a nice, unpretentious human being...
...To know Irving and to appreciate something of his several worlds was to know that one could stretch one's own limits, yet to be entirely in awe of what he had achieved...
...He was not a composite of research assistants and public relations packagers but of his own far-flung endeavor...
...538 • DISSENT The subculture has largely vanished that could produce a single man who could play so many roles, with each enriching the other and no sense of the dilettante...
...He knew the real America, of Emerson, of Faulkner, of the immigrant experience, far better than the cheap patriots who tried to appropriate what America stood for...
...If the democratic socialism that Irving imagined cannot be attained in our lifetimes, or in this life, perhaps the problem is not Oscar Wilde's claim that socialism would require too many evenings but rather that it would require too many virtues...
...Irving was such a towering figure that we understood him as a kind of monument...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
