Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks

Preface

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 [-19], (19) Lines: 386 to ——— * 17.11299pt ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: PageB [-19], (19) Preface I This collection addresses the achievements and legacy of Irving Howe (1920–93), a vocal radical humanist and the most influential American socialist intellectual of his generation. Howe was also a distinguished literary critic who wrote or edited works on Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, George Orwell, Yiddish fiction and poetry, and numerous other authors and literary topics; his most important critical study was Politics and the Novel (1957). Howe’s most successful works of nonfiction were World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the Eastern European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (1976), which became a national bestseller, and his intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope (1982). Although Howe taught in the English departments of Brandeis University , Stanford University, and Hunter College of the City University of New York (cuny) for four decades, he considered himself not an academic but an intellectual and literary-political critic (which included his editing of Dissent, a quarterly devoted to democratic socialism that he cofounded in 1954). He exemplified what has come to be known as the “public intellectual ” and made a significant and enduring contribution to American culture and literary studies. Irving Howe was the most prominent member of the second generation of New York intellectuals, the chiefly Jewish secular group associated with Partisan Review, which, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, became the leading literary-intellectual quarterly in the United States. Ultimately I believe it possible that, given his contributions to the revival of Yiddish literature, his founding of Dissent, and his rich oeuvre of literary and political criticism, Howe will come to be regarded as an even greater figure than the NewYork intellectuals of the elder generation, such as Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Harold Rosenberg, and Hannah Arendt. xx Preface 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 [-20], (20) Lines: 415 ——— 3.541pt ——— Normal P * PgEnds: [-20], (20) II Thebiographicalfactsmaketheliterary-politicalaccomplishmentsofIrving Howe all the more impressive. He was born in New York City, the only child of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants. Yiddish was the language spoken at home. He learned English on the street and in school. He grew up in the Lower East Side and the Bronx, and he graduated from City College of New York (ccny). Inspired by his grandmother, who had been a teenage activist in Europe, Howe was a committed Trotskyist in high school and an activist pamphleteer for the Shachtmanite sect by the time he entered ccny. Howe was, by all accounts, a polemical, dogmatic Trotskyist radical in his youth. However, his intellectual integrity enabled him, not long after World War II, to loosen and eventually break free of this ideological straitjacket. Irving Howe’s postwar literary-intellectual career can be demarcated in three broad phases. In the late 1940s and ’50s Howe was best known as the editor and sparkplug of Dissent; an activist critic and a member of the Partisan Review circle; and a contemporary historian, the latter distinction based on his much-admired volumes The uaw and Walter Reuther (1949, coauthored with B. J. Widick) and The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1957, cowritten with Lewis Coser). In the mid-1950s Howe met the Yiddish poet Eliezer Greenberg. They began to translate Yiddish prose and poetry into English. Eventually they published six collections of stories, essays, and poems, elevating Yiddish writers, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, to international attention. With the publication of A World More Attractive in 1964, the praise and castigation of Howe’s work intensified in both directions, opening up a second phase of his reputation. During the next decade Howe drew kudos from such Establishment figures as Lionel Trilling and hostile notices from New Left and counterculture voices. Howe also became better known as a literary and political essayist, always ready to comment on contemporary cultural trends. And yet, as generational tensions increased with the progress of the Vietnam War and American campus violence, Howe’s...