Who is irving howe

And what the raised eyebrows and whispers finally came down to was this: could the son of an immigrant be trusted to teach, and to write about, American literature? In the case of the book on Faulkner, other factors muddied the branch waters. Howe, of course, belonged squarely in the latter camp. He grew up with people who drank celery tonic, not Dr.

In short, there must have been some hangers-on in Nashville who regarded Howe as a literary carpetbagger. Granted, none of this should matter, and for the best of the New York intellectuals and for the most impressive of the New Critics, it did not. Both groups agreed wholeheartedly with T. Not surprisingly, then, the Faulkner that most interested Howe was the one who shared his passion for elegy, for missions of retrieval and rescue.

The great battles for Joyce, Proust, and Eliot had been fought in the twenties and mostly won; now, while clashes with entrenched philistinism might still occur, these were mostly mopping-up operations. The New York intellectuals came toward the end of the modernist experience, just as they came at what may yet have to be judged the end of the radical experience, and as they certainly came at the end of the immigrant Jewish experience. One quick way of describing their situation, a cause of both their feverish brilliance and recurrent instability, is to say that they came late.

Perhaps nothing says more about the current literary scene than the spate of book-length studies about the New York intellectuals.

However, what these scholarly studies, valuable as they are in many respects, tend to overlook is the sheer volume of fear that was an inheritance from immigrant Jewish fathers, and that often masqueraded as bravado—or as chutzpah —in the most Utopian schemes of their sons. As Howe said, again in retrospect and with an understanding he would not have been able to articulate in the mid-thirties:. Immigrant Jewish life left us with a large weight of fear. Fear had seeped into Jewish bones over the centuries, fear had become the intuitive Jewish response to authority, fear seemed the strongest emotion that the very world itself, earth, sky, and sun, brought out in Jews.

To be Jewish meant—not this alone, but this always—to live with fear, on the edge of foreseen catastrophe. It exists at no point in time and space, it is never merely given, it cannot be willed either into existence or out of sight, it speaks for our sense of what yet may be.

Or may not. But whether a real option or mere fantasy, this utopia is as needed by mankind as bread and shelter. From this [utopian] posture, no failure of policy ever need be confronted, no error needed be confessed.

But, at least with regard to America, we continue to speak of small groups trying to keep alive a tradition. Sometimes, as in The American Newness , he appears to come full circle, returning to consider an Emerson that he had largely avoided.

Writers like Hawthorne, like Melville, even like Fitzgerald, had seemed to be kindred spirits—storytellers a generation or two removed from some former, forever-lost greatness. I call it Emersonian. To be sure, with Emerson there is much to quarrel about: the gauzy side of this thought; the easy pantheism that ends with a god in every tree; and, perhaps most of all, his habit of seeing history through a glass lightly.

In this regard, as in so many others, his own words say what needs to be said with conviction and with eloquence:. American intellectuals seem capable of almost anything except the ultimate grace of a career devoted to some large principle or value, modulated by experience and thought, but firm in purpose. Sanford Pinsker is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including book-length studies of Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Joseph Heller, and J.

He also has published more than articles, essays, editorials, and book reviews, frequently contributing to Georgia Review, Sewanee Review , and VQR. He recently retired after 37 years of teaching at Franklin and Marshall College. View cart Subscribe Login. How to Give Why Give? How to Give Store. Known most widely for his award-winning book World of Our Fathers, a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism as can be seen in the pages of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years.

Deeply devoted to the ideal of democratic radicalism and true equality, Howe was constantly engaged in a struggle for decency and basic fairness in the face of social injustice. In the century of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and global inter-ethnic mass murder, it was difficult to sustain political certainties and take pride in one's humanity.

To have lived a life of conviction and engagement in that era was a notable achievement. Irving Howe lived such a life and Gerald Sorin has done a masterful job of guiding us through it in all its passion and complexity.

Skip to content Home Irving Howe. His radicalism was modified, however, toward socialism emphasizing the need for democracy during World War II when he was drafted into the Army and spent three years at a military base in Alaska.

Howe wrote prolifically on many subjects, including literary, political and labor luminaries and ideas. He also edited several volumes about Judaism, literature and political activism. During an appearance in Beverly Hills in , Howe was taken aback by Jewish dissidents who protested his advocacy of an international conference on Mideast peace. All Sections.

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