Remembering Irving Howe
Rustin, Michael
About ten years ago during a stay in the United States I was lucky enough to be invited to attend one or two meetings of the Dissent editorial board held (as I recall) in the living room of...
...It was as if one were visiting American relatives of one's parental generation, politically speaking, except that this group, unlike its British counterparts, had fortunately succeeded in sustaining its own project and its distinctive tradition...
...One sends one's heartfelt good wishes to those who are going to carry on his work...
...In the early 1960s, unfortunately, New Left Review changed direction and adopted its present aloof small-print format, hardly like Dissent at all...
...Irving Howe and his friends showed that it was possible to go on living and writing as socialists without undue disillusionment or bitterness, without breaking the faith and becoming persecutors of one's own deepest convictions...
...One was that this was the most New York of all the experiences I had, in my many visits to the city, above all in its vigorous, intelligent, ironic, and unruly good humor...
...We would have been stronger on both sides of the Atlantic if the quarrels between Old and New Lefts had been less bitter...
...The other was that I was seeing the American equivalent, thirty years on, of the original "British New Left," which had been formed in 1956, the year of Suez and Hungary, with the foundation of Edward Thompson's New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review of Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel, Charles Taylor, and others...
...Though there were differences, the comradely atmosphere, the unquestioned assumption of shared beliefs, and the enduring commitment to the political task, were as I had remembered from twenty-five years before...
...These few visits to Dissent made two powerful impressions on me...
...The close attention given by Dissent and in particular by Michael Harrington to European socialist ideas was often fruitful, however...
...This constancy of purpose has helped to keep the idea of socialism alive for another generation...
...Well there in New York in 1985 one saw what might have been, had the intimate political communities around the original British New Left journals survived intact...
...Here I was able to enjoy seeing Irving Howe presiding over his editorial board, composed so far as I could tell mainly of his old and some new friends...
...Although Dissent had no doubt at times been repetitious or self-righteous, over all these years it had essentially retained its openness to new ideas and people...
...But I think of it as a minor miracle that a socialist magazine like Dissent still enjoys the vigorous life it does in the United States...
...About ten years ago during a stay in the United States I was lucky enough to be invited to attend one or two meetings of the Dissent editorial board held (as I recall) in the living room of Simone Plastrik's apartment on the Upper West Side...
...Its founders dispersed to their various fields of creative work, taking some younger political orphans along with them...
...These journals were like Dissent in their determination not to be merely theoretical or academic and to give their political commitments a lively human voice...
...One should not pretend that those who made those discriminations in their lives did not show some scars from the experience...
...The two journals were soon to merge as New Left Review...
...It is a source of pride, and also of keen remembered enjoyment, to have known, if only to a small degree, Irving Howe, the main creator and lifelong animator of this project...
...Despite the different histories of these journals of the first British and American New Lefts, there are more similarities than differences in their achievements...
...What has been most fundamental has been to sustain in good faith both a rejection and denunciation of the corruptions of Stalinism and state socialism, and a continued faith in the possibility of another, democratic socialism...
...It was paradoxical to me that these democratic socialists (being Americans they usually called themselves that to distinguish themselves from the other kinds) so often referred to Europe and even (then) to Britain as if they represented the main grounds for socialist hope...
...Edward Thompson once pointed out that the New Reasoner had similarly enabled a generation to break decisively with the Communist party, while virtually all of its members remained on the left...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
