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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] [117], (1) Lines: 0 to 4 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [117], (1) 13 John Rodden “My Intellectual Hero”: Irving Howe’s “Partisan” Orwell John Rodden has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell (1989) and Scenes from an Afterlife:The Legacy of George Orwell (2003) and the editor of LionelTrilling and the Critics (1999), among other books. I George Orwell was a major influence and near-constant presence in Irving Howe’s life for almost a half century. But Howe’s intellectual relationship to Orwell deepened over time and was strongly conditioned by Howe’s ideological evolution and by contemporary political and social events. His history of reception of Orwell can be roughly demarcated into four phases. Howe first met Orwell in his quarterly “London Letter” (1941–46) in the pages of Partisan Review. An antiwar Trotskyist, an editor of a Trotskyist weekly, and a contributor to the theoretical organ of Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League (isl),The New International, Howe castigated Orwell in its pages as “pro-imperialist.” Orwell’s wartime support for the Allies and his insistence in pr in 1942 that pacifism was “objectively profascist ” outraged the twenty-two-year-old Howe. By 1949, however, when he read Nineteen Eighty-Four, Howe was drifting away fromTrotskyism. Nevertheless, though the Partisan and isl circles moved in overlapping orbits (already by 1947 Howe was writing for Partisan ), Howe still saw himself chiefly as a political man, and his primary reference group was the Shachtmanite sect. Howe was “half in . . . and half out” of “our little group” of dissident Trotskyists—isl membership in the mid-1940s hovered around five hundred, a tiny faction within a 118 John Rodden 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 [118], (2) Lines: 48 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [118], (2) faction of the American Left—and his primary reference group in the late 1940s was not the Partisan writers but the Shachtmanite sect, which had split with the mainline Trotskyists in 1940 over whether Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution deprived the Soviet Union of its status as the workers’ fatherland. Trotsky said no, blaming Stalin alone for its Stalinism; the Shachtmanites insisted yes, arguing that the real revolution had not yet happened.1 It was in the context of these intramural Marxist disputes and practical problems of revolutionary action that Howe responded to Nineteen EightyFour , unlike Orwell’s other vocal Partisan admirers (e.g., Lionel and Diana Trilling, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, Dwight Macdonald, Arthur Schlesinger).2 Although many of the older Partisan writers were Trotskyists in the 1930s (and Macdonald and Isaac Rosenfeld were Shachtmanites in the early 1940s), they had already shed their revolutionary socialism and Marxist scholasticism for social-democratic politics; Howe was responding to Orwell from a stance the Partisan writers no longer shared. Howe’sessay-reviewofNineteenEighty-Four—publishedinNewInternational in November–December 1950—was largely a meditation on whether, deliberately or inadvertently, socialism could be “twisted into something as horrible as ‘1984,’ ” even by “we, the good people, the good socialists.” Howe concluded that Orwell had answered, somberly, in the affirmative. Howe emphatically agreed. Nineteen Eighty-Four was a ghastly picture of what socialism could become, “not merely from Stalinism” but even from “genuine socialist efforts.” The lesson of Nineteen Eighty-Four, said Howe, concerned precisely how to conduct the transition to socialism. Orwell’s valuable warning was that democratic practices could not automatically be taken for granted after a revolution. Democracy would more likely be preserved during the transition to socialism if workers shared political and social power with other classes.3 Still, Howe also noted his “numerous disagreements” with Orwell’s democratic socialism and approved Lenin’s criticisms of gradualist Eduard Bernstein.4 Yet even in 1950 Howe was moving toward his conclusion of a few years later that workers had much more to...

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