Remembering Irving Howe
Mills, Nicolaus
When I think of Irving, I think of a Mets game we decided to go to on the spur of the moment one Sunday. It was a hot July day, Doc Gooden was pitching, and fifty thousand other New York...
...From the look on the man's face, it was clear that he wanted to hear more about DiMaggio, and so Irving began talking about him—how he always seemed to anticipate where a fly ball was going, how he would cover long distances in Yankee Stadium without appearing to be running hard...
...Irving didn't see teaching as something you did only in a lecture hall or between the covers of a book...
...Irving nodded, then softly replied, "But you should have seen Joe DiMaggio...
...Those who want to believe Irving's life began and ended with the printed page wouldn't have taken much interest in that seventh-inning conversation...
...The man was stunned, the way I had once been stunned when Irving told me the first game his father took him to was one in which Babe Ruth hit a home run...
...On a day in which Gooden was being pounded by the Atlanta Braves, our bad seats turned out to be a blessing...
...Then I stop wishing...
...When I think of all the obituaries on Irving that want to sanitize him—want to discuss his critical brilliance but downplay his socialism and his partisan battles—I wish for a moment the writers of those obituaries had been sitting in the row behind us that hot July day...
...By the seventh inning they were drunk...
...Our row was filled with a crew of construction workers from Long Island, and as the Mets fell further and further behind, they began drinking more and more beer...
...They would have missed the pleasure he took in talking about Joe DiMaggio, and they would have failed to understand that as far as Irving was concerned, genius—whether that of Joe DiMaggio or George Balanchine or Ignazio Silone—was never limited by time or place...
...It was a hot July day, Doc Gooden was pitching, and fifty thousand other New York fans had the same idea of where they wanted to be that afternoon...
...After the Mets' Mookie Wilson turned in a spectacular one-handed catch on what seemed like a sure hit, one of the men sitting next to Irving nudged him in the ribs and said, "Best center fielder in the game...
...It did not occur to Irving that he was giving a history lesson or talking about the transforming qualities of grace...
...We got to see more action than the fans in field boxes...
...Nor did he seem to care that his listener was slightly drunk and never would be an Irving Howe reader...
...You taught where you found shared interest and anyone willing to speak his mind...
...They would have thought Irving was just shooting the breeze, being nice to a friendly drunk...
...Friendly, full of life, they began striking up conversations about everything from the watered-down Shea Stadium beer to what was wrong with Gooden's fastball...
...The only seats we could get an hour before the game were out in left field...
...It was an ongoing enterprise for him, as natural as breathing...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
