Speaking for many cosmopolitan radicals who once disdained merely tribal loyalties, he writes ruefully that “we had tried to ‘make’ our lives through acts of decision, ‘programs’ that thwarted the deeper, more intuitive parts of our own being.”
That, and all that follows, is all from an essay, Finding the Right Words: Irving Howe in perspective by Morris Dickstein in the Dec/Jan 2005 issue of BookForum.
As I often like to do, I’m posting the extracts below, without comment. I neither claim to agree or disagree with what is said, but I do claim that this material is, for me, very thought-provoking and … good.
… After a period of “painful soul-searching” around 1948, Howe reacted sharply against his own sectarian background and the Marxist criticism it had fostered. He took a growing delight in literature itself, apart from its ideological tendency. Fiedler’s imperious psychoanalytic method, he wrote, “disregards the work of literature as something ‘made,’ a construct of mind and imagination through the medium of language, requiring attention on its own terms and according to its own structure.” We rightly think of Howe as a historical critic, yet he always grounded his commentary in a writer’s language and style, the emotional patterns revealed in the work, and the unique or familiar ways the writer remakes the world.
… Like Lionel Trilling, Howe took every literary work, as he did many political issues, as a moral challenge, a set of embodied convictions on how to live. This led him into sweeping polemics in which he played the provocateur, evoking passionate controversy, though at times he went badly astray. It was the outraged moralist in him that led him to attack James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for betraying the legacy of rage in the work of their mentor, Richard Wright, and to revile Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint for putting his talent “to the service of a creative vision deeply marred by vulgarity.” The same puritanical streak led Howe to travesty the “new sensibility” of the ’60s as a toxic dose of primitive innocence, a form of moral anarchy, and to wonder “whether this outlook is compatible with a high order of culture or a complex civilization.” Despite a lifetime fighting for social justice, Howe, like other Jewish writers (including Freud and Trilling), found himself caught up in a tragic vision of almost insoluble moral tension and irreconcilable conflict. In a brief essay on Isaac Babel, he picks up Trilling’s cue that Babel, riding with the Red Cossacks through territory dotted with his fellow Jews, “was captivated by the vision of two ways of being, the way of violence and the way of peace, and he was torn between them.” But, typically, Howe, speaking out of his own sense of the conflicts between politics and art, gives a historical coloring to Trilling’s timeless observation, seeing the soldiers’ brutality in political terms: “Babel understood with absolute sureness the problem that has obsessed all modern novelists who deal with politics: the problem of action in both its heroic necessity and its ugly self-contamination.”
… Howe saw Orwell, like Silone, as a writer trying to live by a consistent set of values after they had lost their ideological underpinnings. Aside from A Margin of Hope(1982), Howe’s 1968 essay on Orwell is perhaps the closest thing he ever wrote to a self-portrait. In it, he describes Orwell as someone who kept his head, and “wrote with his bones” through the worst political episodes of the twentieth century: “the Depression, Hitlerism, Franco’s victory in Spain, Stalinism, the collapse of bourgeois England in the thirties.” Howe writes that “for a whole generation — mine — Orwell was an intellectual hero.” Howe saw in Orwell many of the qualities he aspired to or regretted in himself. Like his other heroes, including Wilson, Orwell was an irascible, even “pugnacious” man, whose essays Howe rightly admired for their “blunt clarity of speech and ruthless determination to see what looms in front of one’s nose.” Howe notes, without really complaining, that Orwell “is reckless, he is ferociously polemical,” even when arguing for a moderate position. In the face of those who see Orwell as some kind of secular saint, Howe doubts that Orwell “was particularly virtuous or good.” Although Orwell “could be mean in polemics,” he sometimes befriended those he had criticized, for he was driven not by personal animus but “by a passion to clarify ideas, correct errors, persuade readers, straighten things out in the world and in his mind.” Howe admires Orwell’s “peculiar sandpapery humor” and the “charged lucidity” of his prose, which nicely describes his own. Like Howe, Orwell “rejected the rituals of Good Form” and “turned away from the pretentiousness of the ‘literary.’”
… Another hero of his, a figure of genuine moral authority, was the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, “the least bitter of ex-Communists, the most reflective of radical democrats,” whose later books were nonetheless weakened, Howe believed, by “his exhausting struggle with his own beliefs, the struggle of a socialist who has abandoned his dogmas yet wishes to preserve his animating values,” something Howe himself understood very well.
… Echoing Trilling’s well-known critique of liberalism in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950), Howe described a commitment to socialism in the mid-twentieth century as “a capacity for living with doubt, revaluation and crisis,” yet also called it “an abiding ideal.” Socialism for him became a politics of conscience rather than a specific program or a set of goals; he came to admire figures who put their conscience, as well as their powers of observation, before their theories and ideas.
Read the full piece. It’s excellent. [ link ]
-Julie
Orwell is an exceedingly interesting man. From his “Down and Out in Paris” through “Burmese Days” and on to his more famous works. His collected essays are particularly good including “Politics and the English Language.” What I wanted to comment on is the strangeness of his appearance as an icon in the American Popular imagination for his take down of the totalitarian State in “Animal Farm” and “1984.” Of course the irony of this when used by Conservative commentators should not be lost. And then, of course, he can be used with intentional irony by bloggers like Billmon. The best thing about Eric Blair is that he felt that the only way to inculcate a love of reading in children was to let them read anything, but in vast quantities. He read “penny dreadfuls.” So, there you are.
Comment by Dr. C. — January 28, 2009 @ 7:48 pm
I really need to read Orwell’s essays. I bump into references to them everywhere. Thank you for reminding me that I need/want to do that.
To go off on a slight tangent, the “read everything” attitude (which I agree with whole-heartedly) should, in my opinion, be paralleled by an equal amount of physical liberty for children (within reason). As a child, I was allowed, what would today, be considered crazy amounts of freedom (we were essentially turned loose outside after breakfast and they would ring a big bell to tell us it was time to come in and eat — we lived in the country).
Out of curiosity, I searched your blog for Orwell references and found some good posts (and some (not about Orwell) that were wildly funny — all of which is why I am running so late this morning … ). But also, I found one post from 2006 with pictures that made my hair stand on end in view of the recent and on-going violence in Gaza. It’s the pictures of Israeli children signing or inscribing missiles.
Comment by unrealnature — January 29, 2009 @ 7:43 am