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7. The Old People's Socialist League [Includes Image Plates]
- University of Nebraska Press
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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] [64], (1) Lines: 0 ——— 6.5pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [64], (1) 7 Joseph Epstein The Old People’s Socialist League A master of both the familiar and the literary essay, Joseph Epstein is also well-known as a provocative social critic. In 1997 Epstein stepped down as editor of the American Scholar, which he had edited for more than two decades. Epstein is known for his accomplished writing style and subtle wit. His characteristic self-portrayal in his essays is that of an ingenuous and often befuddled bystander. Like Irving Howe, Epstein is a strong admirer of contemporary Russian and East European anti-Soviet critics. Nonetheless, although Epstein wrote for Dissent in the 1960s (and even introduced The New Conservatives, a 1974 Dissent collection edited by Howe and Lewis Coser), he occasionally became a vocal critic of Howe’s politics by the 1980s, as the following negative assessment of Howe’s career evinces. A wonderful man, Irving Howe. He’s done so much forYiddish literature and for me. But he’s not a youngster any more, and still, still with this socialist meshugas. – Isaac Bashevis Singer, television interview, 1981 All things considered, the literary critic and political intellectual Irving Howe is having a good afterlife. Since his death in 1993 his reputation, at least in certain quarters, seems only to have grown greater. Every so often one reads a worshipful word about him in the New Yorker or the New Republic or the NewYorkTimes Book Review. In a recent book, Achieving Our Country, the philosopher Richard Rorty comes very near to apotheosizing Howe,rankinghisessayswiththoseofGeorgeOrwellandEdmundWilson; praising “his incredible energy and his exceptional honesty”; and closing with the thought that, although “Howe would have loathed being called a warrior-saint, . . . this term does help catch one of the reasons he came to play the role in many people’s lives which Orwell did in his.” The Old People’s Socialist League 65 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 [65], (2) Lines: 45 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [65], (2) And then there is the documentary film Arguing the World. This film chronicles the undergraduate careers of four New Yorkers—Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Howe—and follows their political peregrinations since college days. In it Howe seems to appear on-screen more than any of the others and to be talked about more admiringly; the last word is his; and, by virtue of the fact that he traveled the least far from his early political radicalism, he is subtly made to seem the hero of the story. Howe is usually counted among the central figures of the group known as the “New York intellectuals”: a circle of writers and critics who gathered around Partisan Review in the 1930s and later around Commentary. Born in 1920, he was in fact a bit younger than the main figures in the group and seems also in many ways to have been a psychologically less abstruse and more clearly driven character. Suffering no known writer’s blocks, never (apparently) an analysand, he was an immensely productive writer—the author and editor of more than thirty books—as well as, starting in the mid-1950s, one of the founding editors of and the main force behind the quarterly magazine Dissent. Before going on to consider his career, though, I need to acknowledge a debt to Irving Howe, who encouraged me when I was a young writer. For a special issue of Dissent on blue-collar lives Howe asked me in the early 1970s to write an article on the town of Cicero, outside Chicago. I was freelancing at the time, and the fee, five hundred dollars, seemed to me rather grand, especially given the proletarianized look of Dissent. Although Howe was not an impressive editor—Dissent, then as now, had a fairly high unreadability quotient—he did see it as part of his job to bring along younger writers. Certainly he attempted to do so with me. I wrote three or four more...