Remembering Irving Howe
Woll, Josephine
For Irving, Orwell was the model of a writer. For me, Irving was. They had much in common: passion, commitment, clarity, an eloquent simplicity. Both were plainspoken. Both trusted...
...He had no patience for literary fashions, just as he had no sympathy for doctrinaire politics...
...I admired his mastery of language, his effortful rewritings that produced, ultimately, an impression of effortless ease...
...He knew how to read...
...He read new books and new authors with an openness and, if they pleased him, a generous delight that coexisted with rigorous taste...
...When I hit on a phrase I especially liked, a particularly felicitous combination of adjective and noun, it was his eye and his ear, more than anyone else's, that I wanted to please...
...His praise was by far the sweetest...
...And he knew what he could do...
...Both trusted their instincts and judgments, and did not confuse emotion with prejudice...
...Even more, I admired the way he came to a book...
...Hardly a humble man, Irving approached great literature with humility...
...That was part of his mystery, and magic...
...I don't know how he did it, and can't hope to emulate him...
...He could appreciate cleverness and wit, but he was hard to fool, and didn't mistake either one for understanding...
...He might be the equal, intellectually, of any author—Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy...
...he knew that too, and appreciated the difference...
...He never lost sight of the people politics were supposed to speak for, and he never lost sight of the text, so often obscured by one -ism or another...
...I usually wrote with him in mind, my ideal reader as well as ideal writer...
...But theirs was the mystery that turned thought and feeling into power and beauty, that endowed insight with grace and life...
...Indeed, he was the intellectual superior of many, and knew it...
...He would not impose any ideology or scheme on what he believed was a piece of art...
...He mistrusted intellectual constructs, knowing that art would be shoved and squeezed and snipped, and would inevitably be diminished to be made to fit...
...He could, with what seemed unerring intuition, tease out the pulse of a book and make those of us with thicker fingers feel its beat...
...He reread books and authors he knew well with a receptivity that was never made cynical by experience, that was rather enriched by it, by his compassion and his wisdom...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
