Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks

5. Irving and the New Left: From Fighter to Leader

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [57], (1) Lines: 0 to 3 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [57], (1) 5 Marshall Berman Irving and the New Left: From Fighter to Leader Marshall Berman: born, Bronx ny; displaced by Cross-Bronx Expressway; ny public schools; Columbia (Lionel Trilling, Steven Marcus, Daniel Bell, Peter Gay, Jacob Taubes, Susan Sontag); Oxford (Isaiah Berlin, James Joll, Iris Murdoch, Norman Birnbaum); Harvard (Mike Walzer, Judith Shklar, Barrington Moore, Stanley Hoffmann); New Left, especially movement against Vietnam War; tear gas, arrest, overall sense of pride—“my generation stopped an imperial war”; taught since 1967 at ccny and cuny, distinguished professor since 2001; visiting professor at Stanford, New Mexico, Harvard; author, The Politics of Authenticity (1971), All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982, 1988), Adventures in Marxism (1999); working on new book, One Hundred Years of Spectacle: Metamorphoses of Times Square; dozens of articles on culture and politics, on New York and urbanism; helped write and appeared on pbs documentary History of New York (1999, 2001); worked on editorial board of Dissent since circa 1980. I first met Irving in 1965, after he had invited me to expand a letter to Dissent into an article—I thought, “Once in a lifetime, how can I go wrong?” We met for coffee at one of Broadway’s many vanished cafeterias. Irving liked what I wrote, was personally very nice (he even gave me a Ninety-second Street “Y” ticket that he couldn’t use for the great Yiddish poet Glatstein), but he couldn’t seem to stop hectoring me and “my generation”: he said, You’ve all grown up all wrong. I had grown up on Dissent, so I felt pretty let down. The late 1960s were not good years for Dissent. The editors seemed more upset about kids at antiwar demos carrying Vietcong flags than about 58 Marshall Berman 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [58], (2) Lines: 34 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [58], (2) American bombs ravaging Vietnam. I thought Irving and his intimates had wholly lost the sense of balance and proportion that they were always (quite rightly) urging on others. I even let my student subscription (was it two dollars?) lapse. I did what I had to do—tear gas, court appearances, and so on—but I felt sad. Then, in 1971 or so, Irving published a piece about the New Left and “the crisis of civilization.” It argued something like this: Now that the New Left is safely dead, we can admit what it and we had in common. Indeed, we can even admit the ways in which it surpassed us. New Leftists were like the best Russian intellectuals of Dostoevsky’s day: their politics, even when misdirected, was part of a passionate search for meaning in life; we tended to act as if all questions of meaning had been decided already. We were wrong, he said, and the social democracy of the future will have to incorporate the quest for meaning into its politics if it is to stay alive. I called Irving up, told him how moved I was by his piece, how great I thought it was, how I wanted to stay in touch. Then, as often, he was embarrassed by naked emotional display, but he said he was glad I had called, and “now maybe you can write for us again.” In 1978 he gave me what I knew was an unusual amount of time and space for a long Dissent piece, on Marx and modernism, which ever since that moment has played a central role in my life. Irving Howe often drove me crazy, but he also inspired me. He stood up for the best human values at times when hardly anybody did. And he reached out and stood up for me. I’ll always be grateful, and I hope I can always keep on giving back. The hymns of praise that followed Irving’s death overlooked one of his most special qualities: his capacity to change and...