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PARTISAN REVIEW
I've often wondered why Howe clung to the idea of social democ–
racy, though he called it socialism.
It
is true it can no more be proven that
socialism can never work or come into being than, as Sidney Hook
pointed out years ago when I was a philosophy student of his, it can be
proven that God does not exist. Still, after the terrible experience and
demise of Communism, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it is
unlikely that socialism will be tried in the future. As for Howe's persistent
belief in such a possibility, I can only guess that he became the captive of
his own disciples and his constituents.
In addition to his literary and political writing, Howe was deeply in–
volved in Jewish matters.
World of Our Fathers
was a monumental work,
and his pieces on the Holocaust had a kind of moral grandeur. But he was
haunted by the question of why our intellectual community, particularly
in the pages of
Partisan Review,
had paid so little attention to the
Holocaust in the early forties . He phoned me before he wrote his memoir
and asked me to have lunch with him. He wanted to know why we had
failed to respond more strongly to the gravity of events. He asked me
why we had written and talked so little about the Holocaust at the time it
was taking place. Neither of us knew the proper answer, but we tended
to believe that our residue of Marxist thinking and our preoccupation
with the nature of World War Two - was it an imperialist war or not?–
distracted us from the mind-shattering slaughter ofEuropean Jewry.
Despite our differences in recent years, I've always had a good deal of
fondness and an enormous intellectual respect for Howe. I first met him
back in the late forties when he began to write reviews for
Partisan
Review.
I recall particularly his coming to the office one day with a re–
view, I believe, of a book about Sherwood Anderson. We went over his
review line by line. He was unusually bright, quick to grasp, eager, sensi–
ble, respectful, ambitious - no show of bohemian arrogance or petulance.
It was already clear he would become a leading thinker. Over the years,
we became friends, though there were ups and downs. When he zigged, I
zagged, and vice versa. His outstanding characteristic, I would say, was
his
unshakeable seriousness. He had little patience for small talk or cheap
gossip. He was impressively articulate, fast on the verbal trigger, provoca–
tive, a formidable polemicist. The only one I can recall who bested him
was Philip Rahv, who once wrote that Howe was a much better political
writer than literary critic. Howe argued back but not very strongly. I
could never figure out why he let Rahv have the last word. Usually,
Howe did not so easily let go of an intellectual stand or sense of himsel£
Some years ago, when we were both on a panel, I apparently said
something that suggested I no longer believed in socialism. Howe, who
