Remembering Irving Howe
Wrong, Dennis
I first met Irving in Princeton in 1949 when we were both still in our twenties. We met through the group or network that nearly twenty years later he christened the "New York Intellectuals." He...
...He was already moving to the very center of the group while I was an obscure hanger-on, but our identification with it was the basis of our friendship...
...Another thing we shared back in the fifties was a strong admiration for George Orwell...
...Schlesinger's "vital center" also appealed to me, as did elements of the "end of ideology" argument (although a few years later, in Dissent, I became one of the first critics of that notion...
...We both shared the hopeful spirit of the early sixties that he so well recalls in A Margin of Hope...
...He also stood for the autonomy of the imagination expressed in literature...
...All of these tendencies were among Irving's targets in the PR article...
...q FALL • 1993 • 549...
...His still somewhat doctrinaire politics and his sense of isolation in Princeton, reported in A Margin of Hope, obscured these qualities a bit when I first knew him, although his intense and selfless commitment to ideas, to literature, and to democratic values was fully evident...
...Someone who knew him well then and had not seen him for years remarked the other day that he was "never mean or small or cheap...
...I had come to believe that the emerging Keynesian-welfare state liberalism of the day had reduced both the need for and the likelihood of socialism...
...I wrote an article analyzing McCarthyism that appeared in Dissent's first year and was my own first full-length article on politics...
...He was still a member of Shachtman's Independent Socialist League and a firm, if highly sophisticated, Marxist...
...As a result of our agreement I was almost literally "present at the creation" of Dissent when Irving and I and our then wives met with the Buttingers, whose pledge of a financial contribution, in what is by now an oft-told tale, put Dissent in business...
...Irving hardly needed me to talk to about literature with Blackmur, Berryman, Schwartz, and Bellow all present in Princeton during those years...
...Knowledge of the traditions of the left, cosmopolitanism, an acute sense of the historical moment, a passionate belief in the power of rational argument, highbrow literary standards, especially a taste for modernist writers—these were 548 • DISSENT Remembering Irving Rowe the traits virtually definitive of what it meant to be an "intellectual...
...When a few years ago we attended a private advance showing of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, he did not hesitate to deplore in the intermission the outpouring of "Holocaust kitsch" that stood in such contrast to the depth and seriousness of Lanzmann's production...
...Over the years Irving's personal quality that most struck me was his enormous generosity of mind and spirit and how it grew and deepened over time...
...Arendt's great book stirred both of us deeply, and I have always appreciated that forever afterwards Irving understood that, although I am not Jewish, I shared entirely his feelings about the Final Solution and his judgment of its surpassing significance...
...His seriousness and his generosity made him a real "role model," to use a much abused term, to the young, even to those who did not share his political commitments, to a degree that surprised me in the memorials for him...
...We used to argue a lot about politics, especially when Irving was writing his "This Age of Conformity" piece for Partisan Review...
...Politics and social criticism were another matter—I remember our reading, discussing, and both of us sometimes reviewing, Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, Mills's White Collar, Milosz's The Captive Mind, and Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism...
...It shouldn't have, for, though only a few years younger, I was myself drawn into his orbit and a few years in one's twenties or early thirties are equivalent to a decade or two in later life...
...I think it was his literary sensibility that powerfully contributed to his generosity of mind and spirit...
...Irving lent me his review copy from Time of Ellison's The Invisible Man, insisting that I read it at once...
...More specifically, Irving stood for memory, for the importance of not forgetting the historical or personal past, a signal value in this obsessively present-minded country and age...
...Generally, he stood for, even incarnated, the best traditions of liberalism, socialism, and Jewish emancipation...
...It was not just that he was capable of valuing reactionaries like Dostoevsky, James, or Eliot as great writers: he was able to see that they were great writers partly because of their reactionary perspectives on modern life...
...We both would have applauded Philip Rieff 's contemporary description of Orwell as "our dear, dead secular saint of the Left...
...One thing we totally agreed on, however, was the threat to civil liberties posed by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the failure of the leading New York intellectual organs to take it sufficiently seriously...
...But because I was not sure that I considered myself any longer a "socialist," I did not join the editorial board until nearly a decade later when Irving once again invited me, and other good friends were prominent on the masthead...
...Orwell was given to understatement, but Irving would understand the tribute I mean to pay him in writing of him what Orwell wrote of Gandhi: "How clean a smell he managed to leave behind...
...Irving stood for something, and I don't mean just for socialism, the literary avant-garde, the New York intellectuals, or even respect for the world of our fathers (who were not, of course, my fathers...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
