Irving Howe: A Triple Perspective

...neither the fiction of Crawford Power and John Williams, nor the poetry of Frederick Tuckerman and Isaac Rosenberg is truly redeemed or resurrected by his revaluations...

...Harry Levin displays endless erudition combined with virtuoso wit in every Astrodomelike paragraph...

...Nonetheless, Howe is one of the important critics we have left at a time when the deaths of Wilson, Trilling, Tate, Rahv, Hyman and a few others have decimated the never very numerous ranks...

...The first member is a Jewish belletrist, a student and translator of Yiddish literature, but also very much a New Yorker and an important pillar of the New York literary world that, for whatever reason, is preponderantly Jewish...

...Withgood, practical shrewdness, Howe recognizes, in another review, that "modernism" need not have either a "phoenixlike renewal" or a "total disintegration"—that there is "in the realm of culture, the third possibility...

...This sort of thing is good, but rather too abstract...

...It is rather facile to say, speaking of Nietzsche's phrase about the "weightlessness of all things," that it is "quiteas if [Nietzsche] had foreseen California...

...it features the clear perception that we expect "the great modern writer [to] be not merely a portraitist of life but also a self-af firmed prophet, a moral revolutionist, an agent of transcendence...

...Concerning an author whom he likes (Delmore Schwartz), Howe will say, "a writer must be judged by his strengths, not the necessary failures along the way...

...Howe tells us that Cozzens "is not much concerned with the idea of the self...

...This has something to do with sheer objectivity: Howe is too scrupulously rational to overstate his pleas...

...There is wit in Howe's review, and correct assessment of the "philosophy" of never trying to piss against the wind —the novel's supreme existential insight...

...Indeed, if a Howe divided against himself does not fall, it is because each interior man is perceptive, lucid, and articulate...

...Macdonald seems to have read every encomium of By Love Possessed, and can make fun of the state of our criticism...

...Though I could go on citing bull's-eyes, I must now advert to some misses...

...It is literature or it is nothing...

...An excellent discussion of Pirandello's stories is equally aware of the Italian master's strengths and limitations...

...A fright-eningly intelligent computer or a miraculously endowed owl might exhibit such a tone...

...It is not that other men of letters have lacked significant careers as political writers—one thinks immediately of Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald...

...It is all part of a literary pose . . . ." How, we wonder, is this Cozzens stance or pose different from Hemingway's silly mask...

...But Howe, though capable of pungent humor, lyrical cadences and a good deal of passion, is so permeated by a fine yet slightly prosaic theorizing that it is an almost impersonal levelheadedness that ultimately characterizes him...

...This perception is magisterially elaborated in another of Howe's books, Decline of the New...

...A couple of pages later, though, Howe speaks of this as "a stance for which one cannot even claim the spontaneity of genuine prejudice...

...How much more helpful is Macdonald's "the author is guilty of the unforgivable novelistic sin: he is unaware of the real nature of his characters, that is, the words and actions he gives them lead the reader to other conclusions than those intended by the author...

...of a slow and triumphantly 'successful' degeneration, a modernism popular, fashionable and inauthentic...

...There is something both inspiriting and even physically invigorating in Howe's quixotic but magnificent overestima-tion of the sociopolitical importance of literature...

...I suspect that he would regard the whole notion of personality—which in modern literature often means the capacity of the self to mold at least part of one's social being—as a positive nuisance...

...To protect his flank, Howe sticks in that "necessary," but he never explains how a common garden-variety failure differs from a respectably "necessary" one...

...Though he tries to keep them apart, the esthetician may undercut the political chap, or vice versa...

...A focus may be too narrow, but never, as this suggests, too sharp...

...But they were more or less in Howe's own field, and thus competitors...

...And for all the cogency of Howe's review, there is nothing in it as devastating as Macdonald's "But Cozzens here isn't writing down, he is obviously giving it the works: By Love Possessed is his bid for immortality...

...when Cozzens tries to show how hard-bitten and illiberal his attitudes are, he can be very convincing...

...Leslie Fiedler has managed to perfect a hyperbolic style of pseudojudicious outrageousness...

...As for the Jew, he can, between faithfulness to his roots and striving for assimilation, be at odds even with himself...

...But there is also a certain lack of sharpness...

...That last formulation is very fine, downright lapidary...

...or that Jewishness has not loomed conspicuously on the critical landscape of other litterateurs—Philip Rahv, for instance, or Alfred Kazin...

...But are we to remember Howe as the author, say, of World of Our Fathers, a history of Jewish immigrant struggles and culture...

...This is particularly apparent in an essay like the one on Frost as a poet "who bends his gift to the sincere misapprehensions of his readers...

...But, unfortunately, some sort of impassioned excess is usually needed to countervail decades of concerted indifference...

...While Howe does perform one of the most useful critical tasks, the rediscovery of neglected or forgotten writers, he often fails to make his case strongly enough...

...Celebrations and Attacks also uncovers a genuine weakness here: Howe sometimes lacks the gift of concise, penetrating demonstration, of juxtaposing a pellucidly expressed apercu with the apposite clinching quotation...

...The reason Howe's persona is more confusing than theirs is precisely that Howe has served all three of his voices so well—that even when one or the other clearly overmasters the rest and there is no significant overlapping, we begin to miss the silent partners...

...Forthwith he lambastes Leslie Fiedler in ways that make scant allowances for his intermittent accomplishments, and shatteringly excoriates his lapses as lacks of character and conscience, which he perceives as major critical sins...

...This Pirandello refuses to offer, but "the stories do not threaten the reader with a vision of the human lot as beyond comprehension or as open to so many meanings that there must follow a paralysis of relativism...

...In a piece on Flannery O'Connor, whom I admire enormously, Howe actually manages—without denying the writer's great gift—to implant some usable doubts in my mind...

...Compare, for example, Howe's and Dwight Macdonald's reviews of James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed, to be found in The Critic as Artist (edited by Gilbert Harrison) and Against the American Grain, respectively...

...In The Critical Point, Howe expressed the belief that his criticism can significantly contribute to "the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism...

...whichever gains the upper hand offers us—at the price, perhaps, of a little diffuseness of identity—a voice worth listening to...

...yet such a faith in the political import of literature, whether right or wrong, cannot but endue a critic with a passionate earnestness that constitutes a rich, albeit paradoxically apolitical, legacy to his readers...

...Both reviews are overwhelrningly and justly negative...

...The second member is a Socialist, or radical Social Democrat, who prides himself on having steered a true course between Left and Right extremes, and whose writings are generally closely related to his politics...

...Unfortunately none of the reviewers has seriously considered the second alternative...

...a reviewer, after all, has two eyes: one for the moment, another for the broader vistas of past and future...

...A short piece on Sarah Orne Jewett is informed by pioneering common sense and arrives at the splendid conclusion that this is "a country where minor works are underrated because major ones are overrated...

...In justifying what may have been overpraise of The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Howe opines in a postscript that "a reviewer of contemporary writing ought not to have his eye on ' the ages.'" This seems to me excessively unambitious...

...We look in vain for an answer...

...I seriously doubt whether any writer was needed for, or demonstrably instrumental in, the creation of an intolerable world...

...Such justified ethical concern makes all the more painful a certain moral fuzziness in Howe's own studied indifference, "Pick up the first issue of Dissent . . . and you'll find an opening piece—either by Lew Coser or myself (where, incidentally, "or by myself would be grammatically correct...

...It is no less informative to be told that in the fiction of Delmore Schwartz we hear "a voice at home with the speech of people not quite at home withEnghsh speech," and that Schwartz could write "as if he were somehow a detached student of the art of misunderstanding...

...Macdonald has the advantage of much more space, Howe the benefit of writing after and profiting from Macdonald's critique...

...or as author or coauthor of books about Trotsky, the American Communist Party, and the United Auto Workers and Walter Reuther...

...For example, a thoughtful overview of Philip Roth's oeuvre reverses to some extent an earlier enthusiastic evaluation, without retracting the praise for Roth's initial work...

...Significantly, of the 12 items from the '50s, six are largely concerned with Jewish writers or matters...

...A trope or analogy can be unilluminating, as when a novelist snaps pictures "as if taken through a slightly over-focused camera...

...Sometimes, too, Howe's style stumbles badly—as his grammar, alas, does even more frequently...

...The book contains far more celebrations than attacks—not a bad thing in a critical collection—and the pieces are happily not so simplistically pro or con as the title implies...

...Edmund Wilson has a seductive urbanity, a suave worldliness that shimmers on the ripples of his prose...

...In a postscript, Howe makes the just observation that "nowhere is it written that critics cannot modify their opinions as time goes by...

...and, again, the false modesty of "Miss Hell-man ought to look at a recent book called World of Our Fathers...

...later, this emphasis thins out...

...The third member is a literary critic, and a good one, for whom esthetic considerations matter supremely, as they certainly should...

...or of studies of writers as diverse as Hardy, Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson...

...In her work, says Howe, one often misses the revelation stemming from the writer's being "shaken by the demands of his own imagination, so that the material of the story'acts back' uponhim...

...Several of the reviews have postscripts here, their effect ranging from useful amplification through needless apology to unpleasant self-exoneration...

...Lionel Trilling may favor artificial verbiage and strained constructions, but uses them with an impressive air of omniscient discrimination, forever weighing, measuring, sifting, and qualifying...

...Howe's style is, above all, plain, perspicuous, sensible, and its blameless owner may be paying the price of his virtues...

...The difficulty with triumvirates, as exemplified by Roman history, is that the triumvirs always get into one another's hair, and the three men inside Howe are no exception...

...Yet the problem may be more basic...

...More troubling yet is an occasional harsh refusal of generosity...

...Howe has read more of Cozzens' previous novels, and is able to be fairer to the novelist's modest but genuine early achievements...

...Let us, however, get to Howe's new collection, Celebrations and Attacks (Horizon, 256 pp., $14.95), a selection from reviews of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, with two longer essays added...

...If I began with the defects of his virtues, it is only fitting to end with the virtues of his defects...

...in Celebrations and Attacks, he speaks of antiliberalism as "the terrible mistake of a good many writers . . . which was to help create an intolerable world...

...Most disturbing in its ungenerousness is a statement like, "Norman Thomas was the only great man I have ever met," when, on the evidence of Howe's writings, there have been meetings with other great men...

...Thus Howe writes: "When Hemingway struts about to show how tough he is, he usually irritates us with his need for wearing a silly mask...

...many first-rate perceptions notwithstanding (e.g., "Quiet these lyrics may be, 'sensible' they are not"), the aforesaid stricture is never fully brought home...