Remembering Irving Howe
Lukes, Steven
Once I had met Irving, I never visited New York without calling on him. Unfortunately, I respected him to excess. Foolishly, I never stayed very long, not wanting to tie up his valuable time. I...
...But it was in the domain of political sympathies that I found his attitudes and his biography most congenial and most reassuring...
...We also shared the same impatience with the latest fashionable absurdities...
...I now nurse the futile belief that, had I been bolder, we would have become real friends...
...There was a twinkle to his wisdom, which, I was glad to see, survived his FALL • 1993 • 541 painful health problems...
...On the miserable topic of overcoming illness, about which we shared our experiences, I found him as humorously insightful as ever...
...Not that he ever in the least encouraged my reluctance to disturb him...
...That, I am convinced, would have been the occasion when our friendship would have become real...
...One essential aspect of this sense of proportion was his sense of humor...
...He had the gift of welcome...
...I would seek and follow his advice about what was best among what had lately been published...
...He was always immediately warmly engaged and full of questions, as though gaps of months or years did not exist...
...I invariably felt that we were instantly on the same wavelength across the many topics on which we touched, from gossip about mutual friends (which I am glad to say he much enjoyed) to the latest turn in international politics...
...He always resisted the ex-Marxist anticommunist rightward trajectory of so many of his generation and milieu, and retained, as an individual and editor, an admirable sense of proportion that was always rooted in radical and socialist traditions, movements, and writers...
...For his lifelong critical loyalty to the left is an object lesson in what living by principles means...
...Sadly, a letter arrived at my home in Italy the day after I read his obituary in the Herald Tribune, in which he took up a suggestion I had often made that he visit us in Tuscany...
...I recall, on my last visit, his scorn for what we both agreed to be a (here nameless) instance of postmodernist charlatanism...
...He would never fail to urge me to write for Dissent...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
