`Perhaps Even Pleasure in Difference'

Friendships, in my experience, are mysterious and defy expectations. Opposites attract and so do kindred spirits. Irving Howe and J.V. Cunningham number among the former, and fashioned one of the least likely literary friendships I know. Howe (1920-1993) was a literary critic and anti-communist socialist, the son of Jewish immigrants in New York City and co-founder of Dissent. Cunningham (1911-1985) was an Irish-Catholic poet and scholar who grew up in Montana. In A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (1982), Howe devotes two out of 382 pages to Cunningham but concludes by calling him “the one colleague whom I regarded as my teacher.”

They met at Brandeis University, where Howe taught from 1953 to 1961. Cunningham started the same year and remained at Brandeis until his retirement in 1980. They shared working-class backgrounds – a seemingly trivial circumstance I know sometimes to be a deep source of mutual understanding. Howe writes:

“Prickly, contentious, rudely charming, he was a determined plebian. If I had a New York dress presser for a father, he had a Montana carpenter, and we both felt warmth for the unions to which our fathers had belonged, both despised the genteel pretensions of many academics. Cunningham was not an easy man to be near. Inner torments could make him savage (as they could make me sullen). The way to preserve a friendship with him was to keep a certain distance.”

This rings true to life. Nor will readers of Cunningham’s stringently witty poetry, written in the classical plain style reminiscent of Ben Jonson, be surprised by Howe’s characterization. Here’s an untitled poem from Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted (1959):

“I had gone broke, and got set to come back,
And lost, on a hot day and a fast track,
On a long shot at long odds, a black mare
By Hatred out of Envy by Despair.”

Howe rightly notes: “The voice of his poems, though sometimes marred by an affectation of toughness, is severe, sardonic, and bruising.” He describes Cunningham as “an intellectual opponent of romanticism [who] struggled in his poetry, as in his life, with an ineradicably romantic temperament.” This is shrewd criticism and character analysis, and Howe goes on to praise the example Cunningham set for him as a critic, teacher, scholar and human being:

“Between Cunningham and me there was an enormous gap in experience, temperament, ideas. Yet we worked easily together, amused and pleased that we could. Being professional himself, he honored me with the presumption that I too could become professional. I learned, by being with him, the value of scraping against a mind utterly unlike one’s own, so that finally there could emerge between our two minds a conditional peace, perhaps even pleasure in difference.”