Remembering Irving Howe
Larner, Jeremy
In my freshman year, when this green kid from the Midwest met Irving Howe, I told him I had read Fathers and Sons that summer and could not understand how anyone could compare Turgenev...
...At the moment, my feelings were hurt...
...I'd fallen into a semi-doze when a bellow woke me with a jolt...
...Some of us judged Irving harshly for his sharp Ivy League clothes and mocked his habit of fondly curling and re-curling a forelock of hair with his index finger...
...The students lucky enough to be in that room learned that disagreement can be a way of taking people seriously, and that all tastes imply social and historical assumptions...
...As my self-described "Uncle," he began our long-running series of long-distance calls, clipping short each conversation at exactly three minutes...
...From Sachs, we heard how Irving was among the Trotskyist students who were physically assaulted by Stalinists every time they tried to speak on the City College campus...
...Then an hour's fierce argument burst out among some of the most compelling critics of their time, Irving and J.V...
...He didn't linger to smooth hurts, but unlike a few others, he was too high-spirited to teach by humiliation...
...Once again the manners issue arose, and one of Irving's staunchest defenders was Milton Sachs, a political scientist who ten years later appeared on television with maps and charts to justify Lyndon Johnson's escalations in Vietnam...
...Some students got the point...
...A few months later, I wondered if Fast, too, had been more shaken by Irving than he would admit—when he announced, in the New York Times, that suddenly the show trials and the Hitler-Stalin Pact had become too much for him, and he sadly left the one and only party...
...Professor Howe couldn't sit still, and passed me a note asking how long I was going to let this go on...
...In compensation, he presented a large target...
...Sachs did admit that Irving had a zest for polemics, earning him the college nickname, "Fang...
...He remained too quick to dismiss what he could not quickly define, and one wanted, at times, to kill him, if only to get his attention...
...Cunningham and Philip Rahv, as they disputed the nature of Joyce's genius, of realistic fiction, of Irish history and the decline of the West...
...I wrote Irving from UC Berkeley to tell him I was dropping my graduate fellowship to come to New York and take life on as a writer...
...I remember a public seminar of the English department that opened with a reading of Joyce's three-page story "Araby...
...You will," he replied...
...Howe I knew at Brandeis and the Irving I knew in New York through years when we each went through our personal troubles was not the Saint Irving I read about in a number of quasi-religious eulogies...
...We called Irving cold when he dismissed us...
...the rebels might be rightwingers or anti-Semites...
...Irving cried, rising to shoot quick, sharp factual arrows into Fast concerning American writers who turned history to the party line...
...These kinds of lessons prepared me poorly for a world in which my training at disagreement was taken as, yes, "bad manners...
...Brandeis—six years old in 1954, with perhaps a thousand students—was prematurely New Leftish in the intensity with which we watched our teachers to see if their manners and mannerisms matched their ideals...
...Irving at the time was thirty-four, writing busily and feeling his oats—though at seventeen, I thought him sadly limited by middle age...
...Though he himself had no advanced degrees, Irving wrote back in alarm, worried I could not possibly make a living...
...The source of Irving's coming mellowing could certainly be seen in his years at Brandeis...
...The Mr...
...Fast, belying his name, rambled on about something he called "scientific socialism...
...There was a brief pause as Joyce's magic settled...
...Irving demonstrated line by line, if need be, that a writer's politics, however important to understand, could not finally dictate the worth or power of his story...
...others felt that verbal "bad manners" were a sign of bad politics...
...Those who remember Adlai Stevenson as a voice of humane intelligence will be surprised by the acid tone with which Irving referred to him in, say, the Partisan Review—where he also published his classic essay on "This Age of Conformity," describing a society in which there was no room for dissent, for serious culture, or for recognition of human inequality and oppression...
...At the first meeting of the first class I took with him, the English Novel, Irving drew the only diagram I ever saw him draw—two concentric circles, with the outer one fuzzy and irregular...
...Could it be he had a more developed sense of what really finally mattered...
...You have blood on your hands...
...But his use of the Socratic method always led back to the books themselves and the problems they posed...
...The audience then exploded into diatribes, interrupted now and then by a tearful appeal for love and peace...
...With each eighteenth-century novel, Irving showed us what it was to be a reader, putting his own imagination at the disposal of the writer's world, engaging the book as he engaged his own reactions: finally, to gain the most palpable pleasure, as physical and playful as the absent-minded curling of a lock of hair...
...Herbert Marcuse explained that we would have to wait to analyze what was happening...
...He had little time for fools and delighted in drawing some piece of cant from a too-assured pupil...
...In New York in the sixties, when I saw the relish with FALL • 1993 • 539 NememWring Irving Nowe which Irving led Dissent meetings, I noticed how often he managed to slight a friend without knowing it...
...Their opinions were passionate, yet not meant to offend—and they duly conceded, as they went along, the points on which their opponents were better informed...
...I still find this model useful in making distinctions about what a given book is and does...
...But above all, Sachs challenged us, if murder and terror in the name of leftism weren't worth strong feelings, what was...
...There was an air of unreality about Brandeis in the fifties, where several hundred offbeat students (giddily but uneasily alienated, never imaging that blue jeans and pop rebellion would soon be merchandized) gathered with a group of brilliant maverick teachers to discuss every international crisis...
...Bohemian radical students were more than happy to embarrass the stream of celebrated visitors fawningly presented by Professor Max Lerner as examples of American success, especially Democratic politicians compromised by McCarthyism, and solemn journalists who 540 • DISSENT had given names to the Un-American Activities Committee...
...The inner circle represented coherence, all the ways in which a book fulfilled the demands of its own shape and style...
...He told us how every novel could be looked at as the overlapping of two attempts at order...
...In politics as well as literature, it was narrowness and meanness that offended him—and before the fifties were over, he made it clear that, for him, there could be no socialism without liberalism...
...I think as he grew older, the same imaginative sympathies that moved Irving to an appreciation of writers whose views of society and styles of expression were so different from his—novelists like Faulkner, Conrad, James, and Dostoevsky —moved him also in the area of politics to temper his scorn wherever he could find expressions of tolerance and generosity...
...In my freshman year, when this green kid from the Midwest met Irving Howe, I told him I had read Fathers and Sons that summer and could not understand how anyone could compare Turgenev to Dostoevsky...
...But it's hard to think of anyone over the years who better repaid attention, or anyone who could read and write and think and talk so much with so much delight...
...Irving and Lew Coser stood up to say that people were dying in the streets for their freedom—they needed brotherly support, not scholarly judgment...
...Students were too quick to take his ironic dismissals for mere snobbery...
...The outer circle stood for correspondence, the hard-to-define relation of the world of the book to the ever-larger, never-wholly-graspable universe of human experience...
...how could we now condemn his heat...
...I remember when the Russian tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956, a spontaneous free-form discussion lasted most of the night...
...His gift for quick categories did not always work as well with people as it did with ideas...
...It took a few years to realize he was also paying a compliment...
...We were more comfortable with Irving as an uncompromising critic of liberals...
...Fast professed himself scandalized, said he'd never before heard such invective...
...Shortly thereafter, I found myself moderating a student-sponsored discussion on politics and the novel, sitting between Irving and a guest speaker, Howard Fast...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
