COMMENT
Imng Howe
played a significant role in all our lives. He was one of the
dwindling number of survivors of the cultural community better known
as the New York Intellectuals. We were an argumentative, strident group,
full
of talent and passionate conviction. Howe was actually a member of
the second generation. And he was an outstanding addition. He was
gifted, strong-minded, erudite in literary matters, social issues, politics,
and Jewish affairs. He was one of the few remaining members of that en–
dangered species, the man of letters (written about so acutely by John
Gross) or what was recently called the literary and political intellectual.
Except for an interlude in the sixties, when Howe, embattled against
the arrogant sectarian stupidities of the new left, swung to what would be
considered a more conservative position, he was what the French call a
man
of the left, a socialist - but not a revolutionary one. I did not agree
with some of his political stands in recent years, but he clearly opposed
the academic onslaught against traditional knowledge and literary
achievement. He was simply too intelligent and too well educated to go
for the popular academic turn against the past. After all, Howe was him–
self
a large figure in the literary and intellectual tradition. As a literary
critic, Howe believed in the primacy of quality and in the cleansing effect
ofliterary judgment. He wrote brilliantly, not preciously but incisively,
and
he steered clear of the trendy theorizing and jargonized thinking so
popular in the academy.
Howe was an indefatigable writer. He wrote for countless magazines
and
papers. He was the author of many outstanding books on a wide
range of literary and social subjects. Aside from
World
rif
Our Fathers,
the
best-known are
Politics and the Novel, Steady Work, The Decline of the New,
and
an autobiography,
A Margin of Hope.
He wrote penetrating studies of
William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, and Sherwood Anderson. He edited
Dissent.
He gave innumerable talks. He seemed to be in perpetual intel–
lectual
motion. Yet he also appeared to have time for the non-intellectual
amenities of ordinary living and for frequently meeting with friends.
As for Howe's politics, he was simply a social democrat, in line with
the
European social democratic parties - parties of reform within the gen–
eral
framework of capitalism and committed to the concept of a welfare
state. Perhaps the closest viable version of European social democracy in
Ibis
country would be a genuine liberalism - free of the knee-jerk radical-
1111
often infecting it. Recently, Howe seemed to indicate that his social–
ism
was more a moral statement than a programmatic politics.
Editor's Note: These remarks first appeared,
in
slightly different form, on May
14,1993,
in
The Fonvard.
