'An Odd Yet By No Means Arbitrary List'

A tough lesson to remember, one even the most open-minded among us resists: we can learn something from people with whom we vehemently disagree. Please don’t mistake this for a group-hug. I’m just reminding myself that only occasionally is someone thoroughly wrong down to the mitochondria level. 

One of the critics I learned most from when young was Irving Howe (1920-93), a socialist to his dying day. His politics were stubbornly silly but I remember reviews and essays he wrote half a century ago that left an abiding impression on my thinking – those on the great Hungarian novelist György Konrád, the American novelist Paula Fox, Vasily Grossman, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and such unlikely Howe enthusiasms as Kipling and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He devoted an intelligent book to Sherwood Anderson.

 

I’ve written before about Howe’s close friendship with J.V. Cunningham when both taught at Brandeis. In A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (1982), Howe describes the poet-critic as “the one colleague whom I regarded as my teacher.” I’ve since acquired a copy of Cunningham’s Tradition and Poetic Structure (1960) inscribed “For Irving, Aug.29, 1960, J.V.C.”

 

Howe devotes many pages in A Margin of Hope to his political evolution, from Trotskyist to “democratic socialist.” The book’s saving grace, even when you disagree with his conclusions, is his inevitable return to literature and literary values. He writes near the conclusion of his autobiography:

 

“The names of the writers who have meant the most to me—I put forward an odd yet by no means arbitrary list: Eliot and Brecht, Solzhenitsyn and Orwell, Kafka and Silone and Nadezhda Mandelstam—are not necessarily those of the greatest writers. But they are the names of crucial witnesses.”

 

Howe’s qualification of his list is critical. With Eliot and Mandelstam I have no quarrel. The others I rank from utter dismissal (Brecht) to respect with limited quantities of pleasure (Solzhenitsyn). In his next paragraph he writes:

 

“Old Tolstoy having come unbidden, let me bid four writers of my own time to an imaginary but not wholly unimaginable meeting. They sit in my apartment: Octavio Paz, the Mexican; Milan Kundera, the Czech; V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian; György Konrád, the Hungarian.”

 

Howe stages an imaginary conversation among the gathered writers. All but Kundera, now ninety-three years old, are dead, including their host. Howe writes, mingling literature and politics:

 

“The writers gathered here, all endowed with a keen political sense, have sung the dirge of utopia. Their voices ring with skepticism, doubt, weariness: they are poets of limitation. But could their skepticism weigh so heavily upon them, had there not been an earlier enchantment with utopia—that of the generation of Silone and Malraux? Now, what separates these two generations is not just a few decades but a historical chasm.”