CORRESPONDENCE
"THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY":
PROTEST AND REJOINDER
SIRS:
The story is told that during the
years when Professor (then Mr.) Irv–
ing Howe worked as a writer for
Time--on
a part-time basis-he met
one day in the corridors of the Time–
Life Building an acquaintance whom
he had known only in the less com–
mercialized world. "My God," said Mr.
Howe, immediately taking the offen–
sive, "what are
you.
doing here?"
"Why, I'm working here," said his
acquaintance.
"Full-time?"
said Mr.
Howe.
It is not altogether clear in Profes–
sor Howe's compendious aspersion on
the chastity of practically everybody
("This Age of Conformity" PR, Jan–
uary-February 1954), whether he is
claiming actual virginity for himself;
probably he is claiming only to be a
part-time virgin ("the pressures of con–
formity are at work upon all of us, to
say nothing of the need to earn one's
bread; and all of us bend under the
terrible weight of our time"). This is
more than most of us could claim, or
would wish to. Still,
if
I were Profes–
sor Howe wntmg about Professor
Howe, I might find it "no accident"
that although he makes hostile refer–
ences to
Commentary,
the
New Leader,
and the
New Yorker,
there is no men–
tion in his article of the Luce publi–
cations-nor any mention of them that
I can recall in what I have read of
Professor Howe's other writings. And
there are other notable omissions in
his article which might raise similar
questions. Since I am not Irving Howe,
I do not seriously ask such questions.
It is Professor Howe, and not I, who
believes that the opinions and acts of
those who disagree with him must
have their source in cowardice, career–
ism, or at best a mere weak drifting
with the tide. I don't think Professor
Howe had to yield up his non-con-
235
formist virtue to Henry Luce in order
to work on
Time.
Probably Mr. Luce
only wanted to know whether Profes–
sor Howe was a competent journalist;
I am sure he made no mistake in hir–
ing him.
Professor Howe tells us that
Com–
mentary
seems to be "more deeply
preoccupied . . . with the dangers to
freedom stemming from people like
Freda Kirchwey and Arthur Miller
than the dangers from people like Sen–
ator McCarthy." It should be men–
tioned that
Commentary's
article on
Arthur Miller (actually, I prefer to
think of it sometimes as
my
article,
since I wrote it and
Commentary
didn't) never suggested that Mr. Mil–
ler was a danger to freedom; if he is
any danger at all, he is only a danger
to culture-and no more so, in my
opinion, than Professor Howe himself.
But if I were Professor Howe, I should
find it relevant to point out that dur–
ing the period when
Commentary
was
preoccupied with the problem of civil
liberties in its connection with the
problem of Communism, he was pre–
occupied with writing books on Sher–
wood Anderson and William Faulkner,
and, to judge from the excerpts so far
published in
Kenyon Review,
he is now
at work on a book preoccupied with
the dangers to freedom stemming from
people like Joseph Conrad. Since I am
not Professor Howe, I think he has a
perfect right to devote his energies to
producing such books. I do not even
raise the question of whether his books
are interesting, though he himself
seems to consider
it
a kind of "con–
formism" in others to write books that
nobody wants to read, or even to
read
books that
he
doesn't want to read.
Professor Howe shakes his head gravely
over the young graduate students who
want to be critics (what does he want
to be?) and over the summer schools
which teach "methods" of literary cri–
ticism. What are we to say, then, to
the advertisements for the summer ses–
sion of the School of Letters of In–
diana University, offering "course
Ii
on
the graduate level in the theory and
practice of literary criticism," and list-
