Reviewing Irving Howe

...This struggle for a decent life, one in which human desires could be articulated freely and with some hope that they might be satisfied, was at the heart of his politics...

...Why Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Thomas Hardy rather than Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad...

...It extended as well, though on a different scale, to the history he wrote in World of Our Fathers...

...That discipline explains much about his life and not simply his productivity...

...There would occasionally be a question mark beside a historical reference or foreign word, a signal (I take it) that he left for himself to go back and look something up...

...At the mention of "writer's block," he would scoff and say simply that writers were writers because they sat down each This article is taken from the introduction to The Worlds of Irving Howe, a collection of essays and reviews of Irving Howe's work edited by John Rodden, forthcoming, Nebraska University Press...

...The rural setting mattered, I think, for my father in each case because it limned that transition more evocatively than might have been otherwise possible...

...His recognition of that kinship was the basis for his socialism and kept him from renouncing it even as it became less an actual politics than the name of his desire...

...As for the question that seems to have most intrigued those who have written about him— what was the relation in his mind between politics and literature?—the best answer would be in the practice of his life's work...

...Rephrasing my earlier characterization of Anderson, Faulkner, and Hardy would make my point clearer...

...Reviewing, he used to joke, was a way of putting shoes on his kids...

...Reading through the reviews in this volume thus posed a question for me, one that offers a more oblique approach to understanding the shape of my father's career...

...These writers were not so much rural and traditional (as opposed simply to urban and modernist) as they were chroniclers of the passage from some form of traditional life into the crisis of modernity...

...The reviews that pleased him most, beyond those (naturally enough) that agreed with his position or argument, were those that praised his writing as direct and lucid...

...both are removed from manual labor but neither is fully able to realize his creative yearnings and satisfy his ambitions...

...Some of these pieces, he would say, he could have written himself—especially those by his political opponents...

...Howe is an easterner and a city dweller, not a townsman...

...I I IKE ANYONE who wrote reviews, my fa ther also read reviews of his own work...

...transplanted into the Wessex world...

...The waste AFTER MY PARENTS divorced in the early that each evoked for my father was not just of 1960s, my father left many of his books love...

...Sometimes he would add, wickedly, he could have written them better...

...There was a vision of politics in such prose...

...It explains as well his understanding that among all of the books and articles of any working critic, some written out of a long life of reading and others fired off in response to that morning's headline, most would fade but a few would, with luck, remain vital and survive...

...I choose these three counter possibilities because he was sufficiently engaged with them to have written a strong essay about each...

...But the act of writing, day in and day out, mattered to him in ways that breathing and eating matter to other people...

...He has little feeling for the rhythm of sentences and none for the shape or color of words...

...Praising Zola's Germinal, for example, he said that it "releases one of the central myths of the modern era: the story of how the dumb acquire speech...

...And were so proud to have seen...

...For all the truth in these claims, they seem too retrospectively clever, if not too convenient, in reducing the intellectual work of almost fifty years to covert autobiography...

...As my father wrote, "Jude is Hardy's equivalent of the selfeducated worker: the self-educated worker tual life because of their background...

...These attacks seemed a kind of betrayal in their condescending insistence that he had yet to see the light that they—now ex-socialists creeping toward the right—had seen...

...A New York City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent time in the small towns that lay sprinkled across America, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes of wasted life, wasted love—was this the "real" DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 71 IRVING HOWE America?—that Anderson sketched in Winesburg...

...That explanation is too limited, precisely because it does not engage with his belief in literature's power to transform the imagination...

...And, as the reviews in this volume show, there was a great deal of work...

...I suspect that the most revealing way to track his development as a writer would be to map the books he reviewed year in and year out, and then consider how those reviews influenced books and articles he went on to write years later...

...Good prose was not an absolute value in itself, but writing clearly and directly about even the most complex of topics spoke to a shared value of openness and respect for the reader...

...But how did he get to be a New York intellectual...

...Perhaps because my relation to my father grew more from literature than politics, I want to begin with a different response to his life's work than the one I sketched at the start of this piece...

...but rather to suggest how even a wonderfully astute literary critic like Cowley—and one my father admired deeply for his work on Faulkner—could have been so sure at first encounter that Howe was nothing more than what he seemed: a Jewish socialist from New York with European tastes...

...it was also a waste of the mind, of gifted behind in our house...

...Reading through the reviews in this volume offers a vivid way to hear how that voice was heard during the second half of the twentieth century...

...I grew up reading people denied entry into a world of intellec 72 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 IRVING HOWE novels with his marginalia, his underlinings, his traces...

...Put simply, why were all three of Irving Howe's books about individual authors devoted to figures who were far more rural or traditional in their subjects and settings than they were urban or modernist...

...And neither I nor my sister, Nina, ever went shoeless...

...Had it not been for a tuition-free City College of New York, he might well himself have been such a figure in the Great Depression years of his youth...

...That book may not be principally about how the dumb acquire speech, but it certainly is about how uneducated immigrants groped toward a new sense of life...

...If today the story of immigrant Jews who spoke Yiddish and struggled for a new life seems as much a part of the national experience as does the story of native Ohioans who spoke American and struggled to make their way to the city, then at least some of the credit belongs to him on both scores...

...Or, perhaps it would be truer to say, he wanted as a writer to have the best of each: the learning of the serious scholar without the pedantry, the engagement of the independent journalist without the superficiality...

...In the last fifteen years of his life, we exchanged our writing for each other's criticism and came to trust each other completely as readers...

...Whatever else went unsaid between us, we could speak with absolute honesty and frankness about each other's prose...

...Only many years later did I also come to understand that these markings were the signs of his self-education...

...But not a book...

...They speak different languages and belong to different nations of the mind...

...he grew up as a teenage socialist in the Bronx, so inevitably he edited Dissent and wrote books on the American Communist Party, Trotsky, and socialism in America...

...He was something in between, and that meant leaving himself open to attacks and celebrations from all parties...

...And in ways that a reader of his book on Faulkner can imagine, they apply to that novelist as well...

...Faced with the range and quantity of his life's work, writers have tried to make sense of it all through claims of the inevitable...

...70 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 day and wrote just as other people went to work each day...

...He had the right to claim kinship with Jude Fawley just as he also had the obligation to recognize that his own life was better because there were available to him such things as free public colleges in times of economic crisis...

...There is another element to consider here, and that concerns the fictional characters who struggled with this transition—some making it successfully, but many more being wounded or destroyed in the attempt...

...But those conversations taught me to wonder how it was that anyone comes to a subject and then spends years working on it for a book...

...And if reading these reviews sends some of our contemporaries back to the books themselves, then they will have done what reviews are meant to do...

...In suggesting that Howe was not by temperament or background attuned to Anderson's work, Cowley all but pronounces that one must be a townsman from the Midwest to be so attuned...

...The books alone make a considerable pile when stacked together on a desk, and there was much that Howe chose never to reprint in a book: reviews, political articles, op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, all of them part of a writer's daily life...

...We also spoke frequently about ideas we had for new IRVING HOWE projects, most of which remained in the realm of talk...

...That routine was how one learned to write well...

...That Cowley should have said, "Essentially, he doesn't like uneducated men who grope and fumble for a new sense of life," seems in retrospect an almost willful misreading...

...Books he used for teaching often had their endpapers covered with page numbers, references, and brief comments...

...0 0 N THE FACE Of it, the choice was anything but predictable...

...Or at least the rural setting helped him see that transition more starkly than he might in novelists of urban life who would, perhaps paradoxically, have been too familiar in their terrain to allow him that sort of recognition...

...It was, more seriously, a way of scanning the landscape to learn what was being written and what was being discussed...

...Who has ever heard of a private intellectual...

...Gripped by these stories and sketches of Sherwood Anderson's small-town "grotesques," I felt that he was opening for me new depths of experience, touching upon halfburied truths which nothing in my young life had prepared me for...

...Writing reviews was for him another form of self-education, an equivalent to those marked-up books of his...

...To have been a voice that mattered for forty years and more in a nation's cultural and political life is a rare achievement...

...he was too engaged, too polemical to remain that aloof...

...Reviews of his literary books by academics that complained he was insensitive to the play of language or the pleasures of the text or that accused him of being a naive, untheorized reader could also annoy him, but he had grown accustomed to them over the years...

...these jottings formed his working index, a set of notes that would never be separated from the book...

...In one of the most personal paragraphs he ever wrote about literature's power to shape the reader beyond the circumstances of background and experience, my father evoked his boyhood encounter with Sherwood Anderson: I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio...

...Attacks by old comrades who had changed their politics always angered him...

...His commitment to socialism was grounded not so much in ideology as it was in experience...

...Certainly not every piece was for the ages, nor was everything even to be published, and anything (he would always add) could be improved if it were run through another draft and cut by at least ten percent...

...NICHOLAS HOWE, professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley, edited Irving Howe's posthumous A Critic's Notebook...

...Howe has no sympathy for [Anderson's] method and I doubt that he understands it...

...Those markings he left in books can be read as his version of graduate school...

...Anderson, the Midwesterner, is simply out of his orbit...

...No doubt Irving Howe was a Jewish socialist from New York with European tastes, so much so that he came to represent the species of the New York Intellectual in the American press, or at least in the part of that press that cared about such matters...

...There was more to him than his background, and the failure of many critics to see that in him explains, I think, their partial understanding of him and his work...

...Reading one of those books, often an old hardcover Modern Library volume, I would sometimes be distracted by his pencilings, but would usually stop to reread the passage he marked because it was a way to learn from him...

...Reviewing his book on Anderson, published in 1951, Malcolm Cowley argued in no uncertain terms that my father lacked the imagination and experience to understand such an author: [Howe] would have done a better job with Goethe or Gandhi...

...In ways that Cowley could not have foreseen, and probably would have found alarming, these sentences anticipate a style of criticism associated with identity politics that flourished in American literary study in the late 1980s and 1990s...

...Howe thinks in terms of concepts...

...And when that praise came from someone he admired as a writer, then it was all the more delicious...

...So let me go back to Anderson, Faulkner, and Hardy...

...IN CRITICAL REVIEWS and essays about my father, Irving Howe, one frequently encounters a certain neat formulation that declares he was a man who wrote about what he lived and knew.* He grew up with Yiddish as his first language, so inevitably he edited many volumes of translations from that language and then wrote World of Our Fathers...

...Howe had grown up among men and women who were uneducated or barely self-educated, who groped and fumbled for a new sense of life...

...He likes clear ideas, solid constructions based on European culture...

...It was also a way of continuing to grow as a reader, of searching for new writers to read and new things to say...

...He published these words in 1993, the last year of his life, and they seem to me some of the most revealing he ever wrote because they speak to his beginnings as a reader and thus as a writer...

...It extended as well to his response to certain novels...

...One admirer went so far as to call him, after his death, the last of the Russian intellectuals...

...It was not simply, I think, by having been born a city boy in the Bronx in 1920...

...He has a philosophic mind, thinks in terms of concepts (rather than terms of things or feelings), uses a great many abstract words, and is not afraid to make dogmatic judgments...

...George Willard, the narrator of Winesburg, and Jude Fawley, the central character of Hardy's novel, are both young men striving toward an intellectual life located in an urban center beyond the villages of their boyhood...

...It was his fate, he knew, to be categorized as a political critic, and then it became his fate later in life to be ignored as a political critic when a theoretical and ahistorical Marxism returned as academic fashion...

...He told me sometimes that he regretted his lack of formal literary training, and he always spoke admiringly of serious scholars, most obviously of art historian Meyer Schapiro, but he also knew that his place as a writer was defined by a certain distance from both academic and journalistic writing...

...The shape of an intellectual's career is always more clearly marked in retrospect than it is in the present precisely because so much of his or her work is devoted to the moment...

...he entered into a world of ideas about literature around Partisan Review that was more European than American in taste, so inevitably he wrote about Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Stendhal...

...Rarer still is to have been such a voice on so many issues that some wondered if "Irving Howe" designated a syndicate rather than an individual...

...The phrases in this paragraph that immediately engage me speak of "wasted life, wasted love" because they apply directly to both Anderson and Hardy...

...For he was neither a trained academic with a Ph.D., nor simply a journalist who reviewed new books or wrote about current events...

...essentially, he doesn't like uneducated men who grope and fumble for a new sense of life...

...He was not the sort of writer who claimed never to read notices of his books...

...What counted was staying engaged with politics and literature, sometimes more with one than the other, sometimes fleeing from one to the other, but always thinking about both...

...I quote from this fifty-twoyearold review, however, not to settle old scores on my father's behalf...

...Anderson feels in terms of tangible things...

...Or, in another way, the answer could only be that the relation was never fixed but continually shifted, depending on a new novel he was reading or the political events of the moment or a rereading of one of his necessary writers such as Stendhal...

...Even for a prolific writer of books, it matters that he should have devoted three to the likes of Anderson, Faulkner, and Hardy...

...That is why the adjective "public" when placed before "intellectual" as a noun seems so needless...

...This change may have had something to do with his mellowing as a person, but it was also a way of continuing to struggle and even to grope toDISSENT / Spring 2003 n 73 IRVING HOWE ward a new sense of life...

...Occupying a place between academic and journalistic writing meant that no one could predict what would interest him next...

...In those days only one other book seemed to offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure...

...That his politics was grounded in a memory of lives thwarted and denied kept him on the left, unlike those old comrades who were able to trade off one ideology for another as they became neoconservatives...

...Reading the prose from his first book, Walter Reuther and the U.A.W, to the final essays in A Critic's Notebook, one feels an obvious loosening of pressure, a greater pleasure in the resources of the language...

...Both are on the periphery of a larger intellectual and cultural world, one as a reporter and the other as an architect's draftsman...

...74 n DISSENT / Spring 2003...

...He was not a heavy annotator of books, but worked instead by scribbling a key word or two in the margin or, more frequently, by drawing a series of vertical lines and checkmarks (the more lines or checkmarks, the more noteworthy the passage seemed to him...

...There was one aspect of the writer's life my father did not understand and could be harshly dismissive about...

...And to some it could seem regrettable...