by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
This is by no means the only kind of political material to have appeared in the New York Review; at least in my own experience I have found its editors prepared to print articles of a sharply different kind; and in recent years it has published serious political criticism by George Lichtheim, Theodore Draper, and Walter Laqueur. And because it is concerned with maintaining a certain level of sophistication and accomplishment, the New York Review has not simply taken over the new sensibility. No, at stake here is the dominant tone of this skillfully edited paper, an editorial keenness in responding to the current academic and intellectual temper—as for instance in that memorable issue with a cover featuring, no doubt for the benefit of its university readers, a diagram explaining how to make a Molotov cocktail. The genius of the New York Review, and it has been a genius of sorts, is not, in either politics or culture, for swimming against the stream.
Perhaps it is too late. Perhaps there is no longer available among the New York writers enough energy and coherence to make possible a sustained confrontation with the new sensibility. Still, one would imagine that their undimmed sense of the zeitgeist would prod them to sharp responses, precise statements, polemical assaults.
Having been formed by, and through opposition to, the New York intellectual experience, I cannot look with joy at the prospect of its ending. But not with dismay either. Such breakups are inevitable, and out of them come new voices and energies. Yet precisely at this moment of dispersion, might not some of the New York writers achieve renewed strength if they were to struggle once again for whatever has been salvaged from these last few decades? For the values of liberalism, for the politics of a democratic radicalism, for the norms of rationality and intelligence, for the standards of literary seriousness, for the life of the mind as a humane dedication—for all this it should again be worth finding themselves in a minority, even a beleaguered minority, and not with fantasies of martyrdom but with a quiet recognition that for the intellectual this is likely to be his usual condition.
Notes
1* In placing this emphasis on the Jewish origins of the New York intellectuals. I am guilty of a certain—perhaps unavoidable—compression of realities. Were I writing a book rather than an essay, I would have to describe in some detail the relationship between the intellectuals who came on the scene in the thirties and those of earlier periods. There were significant ties between Partisan Review and the Dial, Politics and The Masses. But I choose here to bypass this historical connection because I wish to stress what has been distinctive.
A similar qualification has to be made concerning intellectuals associated with this milieu but not Jewish. I am working on the premise that in background and style there was something decidedly Jewish about the intellectuals who began to cohere as a group around Partisan Review in the late thirties—and one of the things that was “decidedly Jewish” was that most were of Jewish birth! Perhaps it ought to be said, then, that my use of the phrase “New York intellectuals” is simply a designation of convenience, a shorthand for what might awkwardly be spelled out as “the intellectuals of New York who began to appear in the thirties, most of whom were Jewish.”
2* In 1948 Ezra Pound, who had spent the war years as a propagandist for Mussolini and whose writings contained strongly anti-Semitic passages, was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize. The committee voting for this award contained a number of ranking American poets. After the award was announced, there occurred a harsh dispute as to its appropriateness.
3* Some recent historians, under New Left inspiration, have argued that in countries like France and Italy the possibility of a Communist seizure of power was really quite small. Perhaps; counterfactuals are hard to dispose of. What matters is the political consequences these historians would retrospectively have us draw, if they were at all specific on this point. Was it erroneous, or reactionary, to believe that resistance had to be created in Europe against further Communist expansion? What attitude, for example, would they have had intellectuals, or anyone else, take during the Berlin crisis? Should the city, in the name of peace, have been yielded to the East Germans? Did the possibility of Communist victories in Western Europe require an extraordinary politics? And to what extent are later reconsiderations of Communist power in postwar Europe made possible by the fact that it was, in fact, successfully contained?
4* It is not clear whether Macdonald still adheres to “The Root Is Man.” In a BBC broadcast he said about the student uprising at Columbia: “I don’t approve of their methods, but Columbia will be a better place afterwards.” Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t; but I don’t see how the author of “The Root Is Man” could say this, since the one thing he kept insisting was that means could not be separated from ends, as the Marxists too readily separated them. He would surely have felt that if the means used by the students were objectionable, then their ends would be contaminated as well—and thereby the consequences of their action. But in the swinging sixties not many people troubled to remember their own lessons.
5* Not quite no one. In an attack on the New York writers (Hudson Review, Autumn 1965) Richard Kostelanetz speaks about “Jewish group-aggrandizement” and “the Jewish American push.” One notices the delicacy of his phrasing.
6* That Marcuse chooses not to apply his theories to the area of society in which he himself functions is a tribute to his personal realism, or perhaps merely a sign of a lack of intellectual seriousness. In a recent public discussion, recorded by the New York Times Magazine (May 26, 1968), there occurred the following exchange:
Hentoff: We’ve been talking about new institutions, new structures, as the only way to get fundamental change. What would that mean to you, Mr. Marcuse, in terms of the university, in terms of Columbia?
Marcuse: I was afraid of that because I now finally reveal myself as a fink. I have never suggested or advocated or supported destroying the established universities and building new anti-institutions instead. I have always said that no matter how radical the demands of the students and no matter how justified, they should be pressed within the existing universities. . . . I believe—and this is where the finkdom comes in—that American universities, at least quite a few of them, today are still enclaves of relatively critical thought and relatively free thought.
7* John Simon has some cogent things to say about Brown and McLuhan, the pop poppas of the new: “. . . like McLuhan, Brown fulfills the four requirements for our prophets: (1) to span and reconcile, however grotesquely, various disciplines to the relief of a multitude of specialists; (2) to affirm something, even if it is something negative, retrogressive, mad; (3) to justify something vulgar or sick or indefensible in us, whether it be television-addiction (McLuhan) or schizophrenia (Brown); (4) to abolish the need for discrimination, difficult choices, balancing mind and appetite, and so reduce the complex orchestration of life to the easy strumming of a monochord. Brown and McLuhan have nicely apportioned the world between them: the inward madness for the one, the outward manias for the other.”
8* Fiedler’s essay “The New Mutants” (Partisan Review, Fall 1965) is a sympathetic charting of the new sensibility, with discussions of “pornoesthetics,” the effort among young people to abandon habits and symbols of masculinity in favor of a feminized receptiveness, “the aspiration to take the final evolutionary leap and cast off adulthood completely,” and above all, the role of drugs as “the crux of the futurist revolt.”
With uncharacteristic forbearance, Fiedler denies himself any sustained or explicit judgments of this “futurist revolt,” so that the rhetorical thrust of his essay is somewhere between acclaim and resignation. He cannot completely suppress his mind, perhaps because he has been using it too long, and so we find this acute passage concerning the responses of older writers to “the most obscene forays of the young”: “. . . after a while, there will be no more Philip Rahvs and Stanley Edgar Hymans left to shock—antilanguage becoming mere language with repeated use and in the face of acceptance; so that all sense of exhilarat
ion will be lost along with the possibility of offense. What to do then except to choose silence, since raising the ante of violence is ultimately self-defeating; and the way of obscenity in any case leads as naturally to silence as to further excess?”
About drugs Fiedler betrays no equivalent skepticism, so that it is hard to disagree with Lionel Abel’s judgment that, “while I do not want to charge Mr. Fiedler with recommending the taking of drugs, I think his whole essay is a confession that he cannot call upon one value in whose name he could oppose it.”
9* Two examples: “Tom Hayden began to discuss revolution with Mailer. ‘I’m for Kennedy,’ said Mailer, ‘because I’m not so sure I want a revolution. Some of those kids are awfully dumb.’ Hayden the Revolutionary said a vote for George Wallace would further his objective more than a vote for RFK.” (Village Voice, May 30, 1968—and by the way, some Revolutionary!) “If he still took a toke of marijuana from time to time for Auld Lang Syne, or in recognition of the probability that good sex had to be awfully good before it was better than on pot, yet, still!—Mailer was not in approval of any drug, he was virtually conservative about it, having demanded of his eighteen-year-old daughter . . . that she not take marijuana, and never LSD, until she completed her education, a mean promise to extract in these apocalyptic times.” (The Armies of the Night.)
10* In this regard the editor of Dissent bears a heavy responsibility. When he first received the manuscript of “The White Negro,” he should have expressed in print, if he chose to publish the essay, his objections to the passage in which Mailer discusses the morality of beating up a fifty-year-old storekeeper. That he could not bring himself to risk losing a scoop is no excuse whatever.
Irving (on right) at a farm or Fresh Air Camp (?) in the Catskills at age about 10 or 11. This is the earliest known picture of Irving.
Irving with violin at about age 11 or 12.
Irving’s graduation picture from CUNY, 1939.
Irving with daughter, Nina, and son, Nicholas, about 1954.
Irving at Stanford University, 1962. Photo credit: Jose Mercado/Stanford News Service. © Stanford University.
Irving Howe photographed by Jill Krementz on December 18, 1973, in his apartment on Riverside Drive, New York City.
The 1970s
A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson
{1970}
THE CENTENNIAL OF Edwin Arlington Robinson passed several years ago—he was born on December 22, 1869—with barely a murmur of public notice. There were a few academic volumes of varying merit, but no recognition in our larger journals and reviews, for Robinson seems the kind of poet who is likely to remain permanently out of fashion. At first, thinking about this neglect, I felt a surge of anger, since Robinson seems to me one of the best poets we have ever had in this country. But then, cooled by reflection and time, I came to see that perhaps it doesn’t matter whether the writers we most care about receive their “due.” Only the living need praise. Writers like Robinson survive in their work, appreciated by readers who aren’t afraid to be left alone with an old book.
Robinson himself would hardly have expected any other fate, for he was not the sort of man to make demands on either this world or the next. Shy of all literary mobs, just managing to keep afloat through a workable mixture of stoicism and alcohol, he lived entirely for his poetry. Most of the time he was very poor, and all of the time alone, a withdrawn and silent bachelor. He seems to have composed verse with that single-mindedness the rest of us keep for occasions of vanity and profit. As a result he wrote “too much,” and his Collected Poems, coming almost to 1,500 crowded pages, has a great deal of failed work. But a small portion is very fine, and a group of fifteen or twenty poems unquestionably great.
This, to be sure, is not the received critical judgment—though a few critics, notably Conrad Aiken in some fine reviews of the 1920s and Yvor Winters in a splendid little book published in 1946, have recognized his worth. The public acclaim of a Robert Frost, however, Robinson could never hope to match; the approval of the avant-garde, when it came at all, came in lukewarm portions, since T. S. Eliot had declared his work to be “negligible” and that, for a time, was that. Robinson stood apart from the cultural movements of his day, so much so that he didn’t even bother to oppose literary modernism: he simply followed his own convictions. He was one of those New England solitaries—great-grandsons of the Puritans, nephews of the Emersonians—whose lives seem barren and pinched but who leave, in their stolid devotion to a task, something precious to the world.
The trouble in Robinson’s life was mostly interior. Some force of repression, not exactly unknown to New England character, had locked up his powers for living by, or articulating openly, the feelings his poems show him to have had. Even in the poems themselves a direct release of passion or desire is infrequent; they “contain,” or emerge out of, enormous depths of feeling, but it is a feeling pressed into oblique irony or disciplined into austere reflection. He was not the man to yield himself to what Henry James once called “promiscuous revelation.”
Robinson lived mainly within himself, and sometimes near a group of admiring hangers-on who, as he seems to have known, were unworthy of him. Among his obsessive subjects are solitude and failure, both drawn from his immediate experience and treated with a richness of complication that is unequaled in American poetry. For the insights Robinson offered on these grim topics, in poems such as “The Wandering Jew” and “Eros Turannos,” he no doubt paid a heavy price in his own experience. But we should remember that, finally, such preoccupations are neither a regional morbidity nor a personal neurosis: they are among the permanent and inescapable themes of literature. In his own dry and insular way, Robinson shared in the tragic vision that has dominated the imagination of the West since the Greek playwrights. By the time he began to write, it had perhaps become impossible for a serious poet to compose a tragedy on the classical scale, and as a result his sense of the tragic, unable to reach embodiment in a large action, had to emerge—one almost says, leak through—as a tone of voice, a restrained and melancholy contemplativeness.
At the age of twenty-two, Robinson could already write, half in wisdom and half in self-defense, sentences forming an epigraph to his whole career:
Solitude . . . tends to magnify one’s ideas of individuality; it sharpens his sympathy for failure where fate has been abused and self demoralized; it renders a man suspicious of the whole natural plan, and leads him to wonder whether the invisible powers are a fortuitous issue of unguided cosmos.
Like Hawthorne and Melville before him, Robinson came from a family that had suffered both a fall in circumstances and a collapse of psychic confidence. To read the one reliable biography, by Herman Hagedorn, is gradually to be drawn into a graying orbit of family nightmare, an atmosphere painfully similar to that of a late O’Neill play. Tight-lipped quarrels, heavy drinking, failing investments, ventures into quack spiritualism and drugs—these were the matter of his youth. Hagedorn describes the few months before the death of the poet’s father:
[The elder Robinson’s] interest in spiritualism had deepened and, in the slow disintegration of his organism, detached and eerie energies seemed to be released. There were table rappings and once the table came off the floor, “cutting my universe . . . clean in half.” . . . Of these last months with his father, he told a friend, “They were a living hell.”
Not much better were Robinson’s early years in New York, where he slept in a hall bedroom and worked for a time as a subway clerk. He kept writing and won some recognition, including help from President Theodore Roosevelt, who was impressed by one of Robinson’s (inferior) poems but had the honesty to admit he didn’t understand it. Toward the end of his career Robinson scored his one commercial success with Tristram, the least interesting of his three lengthy Arthurian poems. This success did not much affect his life or, for that matter, his view of life. He died in 1935, a victim of cancer. It is said that as Robinson lay dying one
of his hangers-on approached him for a small loan: life, as usual, trying to imitate art.
II
The imprint of New England on Robinson’s sensibility is strong, but it is not precise. By the time he was growing up in the river-town of Gardner, Maine (the Tilbury Town of his poems), Puritanism was no longer a coherent religious force. It had become at best a collective memory of moral rigor, an ingrained and hardened way of life surviving beyond its original moment of strength. Yet to writers like Hawthorne and Robinson, the New England tradition left a rich inheritance: the assumption that human existence, caught in a constant inner struggle between good and evil, is inherently dramatic; and the habit of intensive scrutiny, at once proud and dust-humble, into human motives, such as the old Puritans had used for discovering whether they were among the elect. Writers like Hawthorne and Robinson were no longer believers but since they still responded to what they had rejected, they found themselves in a fruitful dilemma. They did not wish entirely to shake off the inflexible moralism of the New England past; yet they were fascinated by the psychological study of behavior that would come to dominate twentieth-century literature and, meanwhile, was both a borrowing from nineteenth-century European romanticism and a distillation of Puritan habits of mind. The best of the New England writers tried to yoke these two ways of regarding the human enterprise, and if their attempt is dubious in principle, it yielded in practice a remarkable subtlety in the investigation of motives. As for Emersonianism, by the time Robinson was beginning to think for himself it was far gone in decay, barely discernible as specific doctrine and little more than a mist of genteel idealism.