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Introduction: Irving Howe, Triple Thinker
- 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] [1], (1) Lines: 0 to 4 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [1], (1) Introduction Irving Howe, Triple Thinker John Rodden Irving Howe and the Critics focuses on Howe’s major works and the disputes they generated. Indeed, given the strong dissents across the ideological spectrum from Howe’s dissenting radicalism, this book could alternatively have been titled “Irving Howe versus the Critics” (or even—per the title of his 1979 essay collection—“Celebrations and Attacks on Irving Howe”).1 The collection spotlights the engagement of Howe’s critics with his life and legacy and pays Irving Howe the respect of challenge and even combativeness—precisely because ideas mattered so much to him.2 Serious was always a word of honor for Irving Howe. To be “serious” was, to his mind, a prerequisite for understanding and judgment. All his work exhibits this “seriousness,” manifested above all in a flair for organization and meticulous detail, whether Howe was writing essays,3 editing a magazine, or teaching a course.4 This volume honors Howe’s own frank, direct style by taking his work seriously. Irving Howe and the Critics features both Dissent contributors and those who have dissented from the Dissenters—on the Right as well as the Left. The collection includes, therefore, a few stern assessments of Howe from his less sympathetic critics, testifying both to the range of response— from admiration to hostility—that his work received as well as to his stature on the Left as a prime intellectual target of neoconservative fire. (But also radical fire: in some New Left circles Dissent was dismissed as an irrelevant organ, expressing “the joy of sects.”) My own estimate of Howe’s achievement is much more positive, if by no means uncritical, as my contributions to this collection make clear.5 In my view Irving Howe was the last major American public intellectual, certainly the last of the Old Left. Not only was he prolific—he wrote eighteen books, edited twenty-five more, penned dozens of articles and 2 Introduction 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 [2], (2) Lines: 46 ——— * 49.162pt ——— Normal P * PgEnds: [2], (2) reviews, and edited Dissent for forty years—but he was also competent and more often brilliant in virtually every literary endeavor of his mature years. While some readers may find his work on “politics and the novel” to be most valuable, I believe that his contributions to the study of Yiddish literature and Jewish immigrant history are most likely to last.6 Indeed, as I suggest in the preface, it is quite possible that Howe’s work will endure longer than that of the elder generation of New York intellectuals in whose shadow he sometimes found himself.7 Of Celebrations and Attacks Yes, Irving Howe had his admirers—and his detractors. “Irving made a lot of enemies in his lifetime,” recalls Robert Boyers, an intellectual and friend on the Left. Indeed, Howe was fond of the remark of William Dean Howells that anyone could make enemies but the real test was to keep them. By that criterion he succeeded well. Though he occasionally reconciled after falling out (with a few writer-intellectuals, such as Lionel Trilling and Ralph Ellison, and a few New Leftists, such as Jack Newfield, Carl Oglesby, and Todd Gitlin), Howe made and kept an impressive number of enemies. Howe’s chief enemies and most severe critics included one-time friends and colleagues in his New York circle who had moved to the Right in the late 1960s and ’70s: Hilton Kramer, Norman Podhoretz, Saul Bellow, Midge Decter, and Sidney Hook. But other harsh critics stayed on the political or cultural Left—or moved even further leftward—such as Alexander Cockburn, Philip Rahv, and the majority of those New Left leaders whom Howe excoriated in Dissent’s pages. Still other opponents, such as Richard Kostelanetz and Philip Roth, were literary or aesthetic rather than explicitly political adversaries. For instance, Bellow dismissed Howe as “an old-fashioned lady.”8 Roth parodied...