The Great Encourager: Remembering Irving Louis Horowitz

I think of the letter often for it deeply affected the course of my literary career. On 8 July 2002, Irving Louis Horowitz, whom I did not yet know, wrote to request my permission to reprint in Human Rights Review an article that I had devoted to the French author Marcel Cohen, which had originally been published in France Magazine. I surmised that he must have come across the article by chance while leafing through the magazine, waiting for a colleague to show up in the public reading room of some library. France Magazine, which is published by the French Embassy in Washington and in which I wrote a column about contemporary French literature, was displayed in such places. It was no academic periodical; little, if anything, in its pages could interest a social thinker. But Irving Louis Horowitz was a very curious man—both a specialized scholar and a generalist—as I soon would learn.

I was delighted to have this opportunity to reprint an essay about short prose that deserves more attention, especially in regard to Cohen’s literary approach to the vestiges of the Shoah and to the human consequences of the world economic situation. I granted the permission gladly. But this professional agreement between Irving Louis Horowitz and me hardly marked the end of our correspondence, which was already on frank, friendly terms. I found myself engaged in a broader discussion with him, by email, about articles that I had published elsewhere. By 17 October, Irving (he had established our exchange on a first-name basis) was already perusing a sort of ‘proto-manuscript’ consisting of photocopies of those articles about contemporary French poets and novelists, and he was inviting me to ‘make cosmetic changes and additions to assist the reader … and provide a decent Introduction so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’ As I would notice on several subsequent occasions, he valued introductions highly, and not just because lazy reviewers too often skim through an introduction in order to write their article, hence the importance of a cogent outline and summary. Beyond such practical editorial considerations, Irving insisted upon the intellectual challenge of penning an introduction, which requires reconsidering what one has written, especially in the case of a collection of essays, and delineating a lucid argumentative vantage point. It was because of this challenge that I more deeply understood why I had long emphasized the rich autobiographical vein in contemporary French literature. Now I could put this theme forward as the essential trait of that national literature.

I got down to work. We discussed possible titles for the book, Irving characteristically disliking the -ism of the word intimism that appeared in my initial title proposal. And by 4 December, I received a contract for what would become the first volume of Paths to Contemporary French Literature. The publication season had been established on 8 February 2003 in an email message from Irving urging me, with typical vigour, to get busy tying up the loose ends of the manuscript. ‘The door remains open for the Fall-Winter 2003-4 season,’ stated Irving. ‘I know that this is a labor of love. … Yes, fine-tuning end notes and the like can be done a bit later. I look forward to seeing and reading the manuscript whole.’ In the meantime, he had encouraged me with other notes such as one, dated 4 September 2003, generously quoting William James’ dictum that ‘the mark of an intellectual is to know a good man when you see one—or in this case, read one.’ In January 2004, the book appeared. For a writer otherwise used to editorial delays and tergiversations, this was incredibly efficient and invigorating. Thanks to Irving’s confident support, my articles and essays were at last able to be presented as a coherent critical panorama. Some twenty-five years of literary journalism were given a more profound significance and a new direction.

During those first few months of our professional relationship, what astonished me was Irving’s interest in literature. He was, after all, a social...