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82 Chapter 5 Grace Schulman“A Margin of Hope at the 92nd Street Y,”7 November 1983. Introduction In this sprawling, previously unpublished interview, conducted by the poet Grace Schulman at New York’s 92nd Street YMCA, Howe gets to play before a homecourt crowd, for whom he is reading and commenting on his intellectual autobiography , A Margin of Hope, published in November 1982. In 1983, although still riding the wave of bestseller success with World of Our Fathers, Howe was more concerned with this political and intellectual memoir. Facing a literatureoriented interviewer, yet dwelling on politics and the failure of Socialism, Howe is in a pensive, backward-looking mood. Grace Schulman, born in 1935, was by the time of this interview an established poet and critic, as well as the poetry editor for The Nation, a position she held from 1971 to 2006. As long-time head of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, she invited Howe for this occasion. She had already published literary criticism on the work of Ezra Pound and would go on to write and edit volumes on Marianne Moore. Beginning with Burn Down the Icons (1976), she had published several volumes of her own poetry, continuing to this day. Schulman’s vocation is obvious in her choice of questions. Indeed the inflections in her own poetry may have been influenced by Howe’s role in bringing Yiddish literature to a position of some visibility. At this time Howe was prominent in a number of areas, which overlap in this reading from his autobiography. He had emerged as the leading Left-liberal Jewish intellectual in America and, with the deaths of Edmund Wilson in 1972 and Lionel Trilling in 1975, had also arguably become the leading literary-po- Interview with Grace Shulman, November 1983 83 litical intellectual. Given this new status and the marvelous reception accorded World of Our Fathers, he felt that it was time for an autobiography. Much of this transcript consists of a reading from a manuscript of his memoir, which Howe explicitly referred to as “an intellectual autobiography”; it contains very few details about his personal and family life. Instead A Margin of Hope paints a vivid picture of the context and background of Howe’s young life as a Socialist on the streets of the Lower East Side and in City College. In a more distanced, detached way, it subsequently covers both his own political evolution and the development of Dissent magazine. A Margin of Hope then discusses the turbulent and paradoxical 1960s, a period of early promise for the Left that ended in violence and dashed dreams, and closes with a brief discussion of the even more disappointing and dismaying 1970s. Howe during this reading plays the role of the intellectual celebrity. Pronouncing on literature, culture, criticism, and to an extent the Jewish condition —at a time when it was very good to be a Jew in America—he addresses how the immigrant experience led to an intellectual ferment for his generational cohort of Jewish intellectuals. Howe admits that his own ideological motivation has come to a dead end: “It’s been my fate to experience the defeat of the Socialist idea.” All that remains, he says, is a vague idealism: “I cling to a vision of a society beyond the manifest inequities of the given.” As subsequent interviews in this volume show, Howe and his Dissent colleagues continued to propose concrete policies to promote elements of that vision, though he acknowledged that an organic social transformation seemed unrealistic. Schulman’s questions prompt Howe to discuss the literary and political culture of his time as both an onlooker and a participant. He describes Partisan Review as “based upon a wonderful and brilliant misunderstanding. The misunderstanding was that it was possible to combine anti-Stalinist leftism with highbrow literary life,” a paradox that explains much about the early postwar New York Intellectuals who simultaneously claimed to speak for the proletariat and for the artistic elite. This is a contradiction that, it could be argued, Howe spent the rest of his life trying to resolve, even as some conservative members of his intellectual circle would drift further into elite territory, particularly on matters of economic and political policy. In answering Schulman’s questions, Howe’s view of writers and intellectuals who grew up in the 1960s and beyond contrasts revealingly with the memories of his youthful deprivations in the Depression-era Bronx. Some of Howe’s observations about the differences between...

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