Selected Writings: 1950-1990

A couple of years ago, as part of a series of some youthful recollections triggered by a fellow high school classmate who was looking for a far different type response, more banal and routine family stuff aminly, I dragged out memories of my first associations with the name Irving Howe and his New York-based journal, "Dissent", that I frequently read at the local branch of the library. The points there could rightly serve as background of Howe's selected writings, mainly from "Dissent", under review here. I will, however, not bore the reader with the details, but mainly it has to do with his and the magazine's surrender to American bourgeois politics and my declaration of an armed political truce for the duration of the post. I thereafter wrote another entry about his biography on Leon Trotsky and with that the truce was over. That said, it is again time to call a truce, or at least a momentary "ceasefire" as I briefly mention how good Professor Howe can be when he is away from the class struggle and deep in reflection on his specialty, American literary traditions, important Western canon authors and even, occasionally a gem about the trials and tribulations of past history of the generic socialist movement in America. This selection includes provocative essays on the benighted William Faulkner; the heroic Soviet writer, Isaac Babel; unkindly digs at the reputation of Theodore Dreiser; the then unjustifiably much neglected Sholom Aleichem; a very justifiably angry Richard Wright, a quirky view of George Eliot and Jewish characters in Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist". Not bad, right? And then, less successfully, some more generic essay about his crowd, the malaise of, mainly Jewish, New York intellectuals of the 1950s and an objectivist apologia for the failure of socialist ideas to take roots in the mainstream of American political life thus retrospectively (and prospectively as well) absolving himself, and his crowd, from a share of the responsibility for its then current failure by "farming" out the task to the American imperial state, the 'state department socialism' that is still with us. I guess with that last phase the ceasefire is over. But read this book if you want to know what literary criticism was really like before the zany deconstructionists held sway.