Remembering Irving Howe

...Yes, the same ones who today, without going to the trouble of explaining their transformation to us, have become fervent supporters of the free market and democracy...

...I met Irving in 1970 at the home of Richard and Jeannette Silver, who were my publishers at that time...

...From the beginning, he was a contributor to Plural, and later to Vuelta [in Mexico—Eds.], He participated brilliantly in the conference organized by Vuelta in 1990 on the central issue of our century: freedom...

...Certain of his essays on the modern novelists are models of penetration and limpidity...

...Irving Howe never gave up his youthful belief in social democracy, or his moral integrity...

...One sign of his moral breadth and literary probity: Howe recognized greatness even in writers whose ideas were the opposite of his own, such as Kipling, on whom he wrote some memorable pages...

...He belonged to a generation that first made itself known in the pages of the Partisan Review, one of the great magazines of this century in Europe or America...

...True criticism is always born from the corps a corps, half embrace and half combat, between the text and the reader...

...For him, literature and politics were related but separate activities: two forms, one aesthetic and the other moral, of sympathy, a stoic virtue in an ignoble time like our own...

...For a brief period, Partisan Review symbolized the alliance between political and aesthetic radicalism, between revolutionary thought and the artistic avant-garde...

...It was a clearly leftist magazine that dared to criticize, with exemplary rigor but without rancor, both the "old left," still bogged down in the Stalinist mire, and the "new," made up of young intellectuals who were frivolous ideological tourists among Latin American, Asian, and African tyrannies half-hidden behind the mask of "socialism...

...Irving had just published a lengthy and generous article in the New York Times on two of my books that had recently been translated into English...

...Besides being a free and lucid conscience, Irving Howe was also, and above all, an excellent literary critic...

...He was an uncomfortable witness for both sides because with the same fearless intellect he reproached the imperialist policies of his own country and condemned the horrors of the Soviet regime and its satellites...

...TRANSLATED BY ESTHER ALLEN...

...But long before our first meeting I was aware of Irving's work and admired both his literary criticism and his political essays...

...Here at Vuelta we remember our friend with affection, gratitude, and melancholy...

...On the recommendation of my friend the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, I had become a faithful reader of Dissent, the magazine Howe edited, which was the black sheep of North American literary publications...

...This was the criticism Irving Howe practiced, made of love and rigor...

...He never confused literary theory with criticism, nor did he take up the outlandish neologisms that have made literary criticism into a genre that alternates between the stony ground and the swamp...

...We quickly became friends: we were of the same camp, united by similar disappointments and hopes...

...He defended his political philosophy—social democracy—with intellectual bravery and great clarity of exposition...

...The alliance didn't last long, and Partisan Review became one of the battlefields on which the intellectual war of the second half of the twentieth century was waged: a political and philosophical dispute that was, as well, a fight in defense of the freedom of literary expression and against oppression and lies disguised as "socialism...

...He wore FALL • 1993 • 545 neither the ideological blindfold nor the pedant's thick lenses...