Remembering Irving Howe
Morton, Brian
Writers sometimes write a little differently after their reputations are made. Some become mandarins in their old age—wise, all too wise. Some let the belt out a few notches and settle into...
...Everyone knows he was a steady worker, but the word "steady" doesn't say nearly enough...
...In the end, there was winter in his prose, but not because he was an old man...
...a time, as he wrote in A Margin of Hope, that "has been marked by a special terribleness...
...It may be that after he had made his reputation, the claims of the self grew less insistent, and he no longer felt the need to dazzle...
...The sheer pressure of his intensity turned the most casual encounter—a quick lunch at the coffee shop near his house—into something electric, charged...
...And in a review of a book by a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, published less than a month before he died, he said that Yitzhak Zuckerman "speaks plainly, without verbal flourish or the wanton rhetoric that has disfigured some writings about the Holocaust...
...As he said of the prose of the New York Intellectuals, it was "the style of brilliance...
...I don't know why Irving's voice grew more austere...
...But I don't really believe it can be put down to personal reasons alone...
...When he'd hang up the phone without saying goodbye —his famous habit—I often found myself smiling...
...he gave of himself as deeply as anyone can...
...I miss his curiosity, his wit, the demands of his restlessness...
...I think he belongs to the small fraternity of writers who took the experience of our century into the way they saw the world, into FALL • 1993 • 543 the weather of their prose...
...His earliest work displays the tense lucidity that marked his prose for the rest of his life...
...He devoted himself to his calling with a matchless intensity...
...In an essay on Orwell he wrote that the "discipline of the plain style—and that fierce control of self that forms its foundation—comes hard...
...His voice on the page was so confident that you might have thought it came easily, but he said it didn't: he once said that he put almost everything he wrote through nine or ten drafts...
...In the last few years, he subtly remade his writing style...
...Some let the belt out a few notches and settle into verbosity...
...His earlier voice, though lucid before all else, had been bravura, self-consciously dazzling...
...The dryness of his voice as he recalls terrible events comes to seem a sign of moral strength...
...Now his work became even more spare, less adorned...
...He left hints about this change in two pieces he wrote for the New Republic...
...The chaste late voice was something like a voice of witness...
...A few, at the height of their fame, struggle to reinvent themselves or to refine their craft...
...Orwell, Silone, Primo Levi . . . a few others...
...In an article about the late works of Leo Tolstoy, he described him, "deep into old age," as a writer who had worked his way "free of literary posture and the sins of eloquence...
...These are the writers who win our admiration and our love...
...I think it had something to do with his lifelong meditation on the nature of our time—the century of Auschwitz and the gulag...
...I took pleasure in the thought of him turning quickly back to his desk, his task, his passion...
...Irving found his style very quickly...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
