Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks

8. Politics and the Critic

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 [77], (3) Lines: 17 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [77], (3) 8 Robert Boyers Politics and the Critic Robert Boyers is Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, founder and editor of the quarterly Salmagundi [1965–present], and Director of The New York State Summer Writers Institute. He is the author of seven critical books, including Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, After The Avant Garde, and The Book of Common Praise (July 2002). He frequently reviews books for The New Republic, and contributes essays to such publications as Granta, The American Scholar, TLS, Dissent, and other magazines. Early in Politics and the Novel Irving Howe writes of “the vast respect which the great novelist is ready to offer to the whole idea of opposition, the opposition he needs to allow for in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and fantasies.” Though he was not a novelist, and did not fancy himself an artist, Irving respected, even loved “the whole idea of opposition ,” and he once proposed “a rule of thumb” whereby intellectuals were encouraged to “criticize whichever outlook is dominant at the moment, whether in the sphere of cultural opinion or public decision.” Challenged on this, he conceded that the oppositional posture—when not directed against one’s own predispositions— might well become an empty reflex, a parody of genuine oppositional criticism. But it seemed to him that the risk was well worth assuming. The habit of trimming or accommodation was potentially more damaging by far to the critical spirit than the disposition to oppose. I met Irving in 1967. As Editor of Dissent magazine he had published a few of my early pieces, and he seemed to me at once the very perfect model of the intellectual as man of letters. Even his editorial letters of acceptance were, in their way, oppositional documents, taking issue with one or more of my principal contentions without in any way suggesting that I take back 78 Robert Boyers 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 [78], (4) Lines: 44 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [78], (4) or revise them. Was I so very certain, he wanted to know, that Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, which was then causing a stir in New York, did not in fact reflect attitudes more and more prominent in the new Euro-American youth culture? In the polemic he had accepted for Dissent, Irving wrote, I had seemed rather more certain than was warranted that Weiss’s play was by no means an ideological document. It was one thing, Irving wrote, to argue that a play was conceived exclusively to promote a fixed position, as Weiss’s play clearly was not. But it was something else entirely to suggest—was I perhaps unwilling seriously to entertain this idea?— that such a play might nonetheless get behind a fashionably radical idea for which its author had some genuine sympathy, though as yet he had for that idea no formal name. I would do well, Irving wrote, to give this possibility “a little more thought” before I let the piece I had written go forward. In subsequent correspondence regarding other pieces I wrote for Dissent Irving would urge upon me a more consistently robust, assertive manner, what he nicely called “just a bit less anxious circumspection.” He admired, he said, my reluctance to fight my way out of doubts I expressed about the seriousness of so-called “revolutionary” ideas as they had lately been taken up and blithely espoused by several younger writers. But, he cautioned, I was to be careful not to allow judiciousness itself to become in my writing a motive. The state of doubt was, much of the time, a good thing, an expression of a very human tendency, but it could become—I’m not certain that this was in fact the word Irving used, though it seems to me what he intended—incapacitating. What was worse, Irving said—and here I recall exactly what he...