Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe

Afterword

327 Afterword Nina Howe Reading this set of interviews with my father, Irving Howe, which have been so kindly and thoughtfully collected and organized by John Rodden and Ethan Goffman, gave me much happiness and, inevitably, some sadness. Hearing my father ’s voice again, especially the cadence and tone of his public voice as he spoke with such strength and clarity on the wide range of topics that interested him, brought me great pleasure, but also evoked sadness. I realized how long it has been since his voice has been with us, and I was reminded of the loss of my beloved brother, Nick. Initially, Nick had agreed to write the afterword to this book, a task for which he was well suited. He was an English professor and had known many aspects of our father’s work better than I, as a psychology and education professor. Unfortunately, his untimely death in 2006 prevented him from doing this task. Although I was hesitant when John Rodden first asked me to write this afterword in Nick’s place, once the manuscript arrived my initial reluctance vanished . Naturally, I wondered what I could say that would add to what my father had already said so eloquently. One of the advantages, however, of looking over a set of such engaging and interesting interviews is that one does not need to say very much as the pieces literally speak for themselves. While outlining the three main currents of my father’s work—Socialism and politics, literary criticism, and Jewish issues including the preservation and promotion of Yiddish literature—these interviews reflect a variety of moods and textures and cover a range of insights. Some are more formal, while others read more like conversations. Certainly the audiences of the interviews varied, and this had an influence on the kinds of questions and the topics of the interview. The interviewers had differing degrees of skill in obtaining the information that they wanted, and clearly, my father was more comfortable with some interviewers than others. It is hard to know why; perhaps it was the topic of the interview 328 AFTERWORD or the tone of the questions (which cannot be determined from a written transcript ). My father was often eloquent in his responses; sometimes he showed flashes of humor or made sardonic comments, but as he was sometimes wont to be, he could also be prickly, especially on some issues that he considered more personal. If there is a centerpiece to this book, it is the interview conducted by Stephen Lewis for a radio program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which took place in the fall of 1983. My father had come to Toronto to be an external examiner on a doctoral dissertation in English at the University of Toronto. At the time I was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo, and I traveled the short distance to Toronto to see him. He was staying at the Park Plaza, an elegant old hotel, for which he held a particular fondness. My warm and rosy memory of the interview was confirmed in reading the transcript . Lewis asked a range of questions that engaged my father, and he seemed quite at ease and gave lengthy and interesting responses. Somehow Lewis captured the essence of my father’s personal, political, and intellectual experiences in his questions and comments in a more complete way than many of the other interviewers. There seemed to be some kind of connection, an understanding, a sympathy for each other’s background and life that was evident between the two men. I realize that I must have learned a great deal about my father’s life from being present during that interview. It is one of the pleasures of my life that I was present, so I was very pleased to find it included in this book. The interviews in this book took place over the last seventeen years of my father’s life, a time when I was coming to appreciate the breadth and depth of his professional work. William Novak’s interview about World of Our Fathers reminded me of an interview conducted by Peter Gzowski, probably about 1976, which helped place the importance of this theme of my father’s work into context for me. Gzowski was the long-time host of the national morning radio show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The show was broadcast live into the reception area where I waited for my father. When...