Parting of the Ways

Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism.
by Irving Howe.
Harcourt, Brace & World. 364 pp. $6.95.

Thomas Hardy.
by Irving Howe.
Macmillan. 206 pp. $4.95.

When the new left was just beginning in Britain, in the late 1950's, someone put me in touch with Irving Howe and we corresponded a little, keeping in contact intermittently over the years. I had hardly any other contact at that time with United States radicalism, and when I read the anthology, Voices of Dissent, I found some close correspondences in experience and commitment with the sense of our own movement. I said at the time (and it caused some momentary excitement) that there were sick voices among these dissenters, but all that I saw of Irving Howe's work made me feel close to him, in political thinking, in a way only otherwise available at that time in some of the new Polish writers and thinkers.

We have continued to exchange the occasional letter, and I was very glad to agree to review these two new books. They arrived last spring, and I began reading them with interest. Quite quickly, however, I could hardly bear to read them. Indeed, for almost the first time in a busy writing life, I defaulted on a review, and the books have been lying on my table like a reproach. I would still, in a way, prefer not to review them, for reasons I will explain. But I have tried to disentangle some of the reasons for this reluctance, and they may be of interest. For what has happened since I formed my first impression (at the distance of the Atlantic), is the political experience of the 60's, and this is of more public importance than the ending of one of those loose international intellectual associations which play some necessary part in one's life.

I want first, though, to make my point about the Hardy book. For a variety of reasons, it is very much surer ground for me. It happened that I had finished both an essay on Hardy (perhaps published before this book was finished) and a section on Hardy in a long essay on English literature and rural society before this book arrived. Many of the essential political battles of the last fifteen years have, for me, been on cultural issues. Among them, especially, was an attack on the idea of an organic society of the pre-industrial past which drew its images from the English countryside and English country writing. This idea was used, of course, by conservatives, who hated both industrialism and democracy; but also by one kind of radical—in England mainly F.R. Leavis. At many different levels of criticism Leavis insisted on judgments of the “quality of life,” through emphases of style and tone, in ways which indeed preserved a critical radicalism—the defense of values by the isolated mind—but in practice, in response to contemporary society, had little more to say than that it found both political institutions and political protest distasteful, common symptoms of the same disease. Leavis ended, in fact, by defending what seemed to me openly conservative positions, as in his opposition to the expansion of higher education; always with a point—in this case that much of the motive and content was utilitarian—but also with an acquiescence, perhaps involuntary, in the consequently preserved structures of society, against which, of course, an overall position had been presented. To be that kind of radical, against the society but also against the new forces seeking to alter it, expressing distaste for its orthodox symptoms but also for the manner of the revolt against it, seemed to me, after some years' experience, too easy. Always, it seemed to me, the core of the position was a body of literary values drawn from the past and generalized into an account of a pre-existing better society: the organic community; old rural England.

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I recall this as background to my opening Howe's book on Hardy, who as it happens is a key instance for just this argument, since he wrote the real history, in the way a novelist does, and in any real view breaks the ratifying image. But on his first page Howe writes this, of the England of 1840 when Hardy was born:

England was then deep into the convulsive transformations of the Industrial Revolution; the reform movement known as Chartism was stirring many people and frightening many more; but in the Dorset countryside at the southwest corner of the island (Wessex, in the novels) one might almost have supposed that human existence was changeless, unaffected by history or technology, flowing through the centuries like a stately procession of verities and recurrences.

I have read this sort of thing many times before, and in most contexts it no longer surprises me. But this was from a socialist critic, and in either capacity was at this date shameful. What kind of cancellation of human experience is it to ignore the fact that six years before Hardy was born, in a village only five miles away, the best-known event of British 19th-century trade unionism had taken place: the trial and transportation of the Tolpuddle martyrs? This is the kind of event which everyone who has any serious involvement with that experience knows. But it is only one of many in the real history which makes Howe's account (with its literary protection, “one might almost have supposed”) deeply inadequate; its sentimental rhythms of the “stately procession,” ominous.

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I put the book down and asked myself what had happened. Was this an American critic who had got the English experience wrong? Was it the sort of mistake I would have made if I had written that sort of book about Faulkner? Perhaps. It would certainly be easier if it were. But as I crossed over to the very different rhythms of the political essays in Steady Work, I felt, increasingly, that I was on familiar ground. Thus an essay attacking Isaac Deutscher on Pasternak, much of which seemed to me worth saying, ends with a couple of sentences that include the equally striking phrase: “If and when freedom is re-established in Russia.” Note: re-established. I think I share most of Howe's views on the political character of Soviet society, but I do not know what freedom he looks back to, as something to be re-established, unless he is caught again in something very like his false view of 19th-century Dorset and is reconstructing a history from his reading of a literature. But then what stately procession of verities and recurrences could possibly pass through that pre-revolutionary tyranny, that post-revolutionary tyranny, that whole cruel and arbitrary history in and through which real social changes occurred?

This brings me to the several essays in which Howe attacks what he calls “Left authoritarianism,” and the related essays in which he criticizes the New Left in the United States. It is not that I disagree with his most general proposition: that indefensible cruelties and suppressions have been and are being defended in the name of an idea of socialism. It is good and right that this should go on being said, in all circumstances. But all of us, of any generation, who are living through the present political crisis, have, if we are socialists, to do more than dissent from that kind of lying and apologetic. What we can certainly defend is a liberal idea of the truth and of human kindness, but it is the decisive experience of the last fifteen years that this, on its own, can insulate us from the very crisis in which we are involved. This is, indeed, just that position of the radical critic, the dissenter, who is finally defending, not living people in history, but an idea in himself. The distinction is difficult but crucial. I have been forced to it, again and again, by the history of the 60's. There is enough false rhetoric as well as actual lying, enough casual violence as well as systematic cruelty, in almost every Left movement now active in the world to make any man want to withdraw from it. He can, after all, while telling the truth there, go on to tell the truth about the lying and cruelty of imperialism, of his own society, about its systematic violence and stupidity. His record is clear: he has denounced cruelty and lying whatever their source. It is how anyone would want to live, if he is a good man.

But is there anywhere, now, where such a man can live, defending this idea in himself and no more? This is the tragic weight of the experience that has come to us: that if we move at all we put at risk every value we know, since all the actual movements, all the actually liberating forces, are caught up in a world of reciprocal lying and violence, with no point of entry for any sustained action except in just these tragic terms. I do not mean at all that any of us should surrender to lying and violence; that fight matters inside the movements with which we have to associate ourselves. But we all know the structure of this experience in detail, from trying to live in truth and humanity in an exploiting society.

Every job we take, most of the money we earn, is in that sense an involvement with the indefensible; we say what we think of it, publicly or to each other in private, but to carry on life at all, let alone to do certain necessary and useful things—writing, teaching—we involve ourselves in structures that deny and violate our active beliefs. And except in a pretended neutrality—in Britain or the United States in one of the reserved occupations—there is nowhere to go, in any real action; even the form of the reservation, in our universities for example, is an aspect of the structures to which we are involuntarily committed. And if this is so, we ought, as socialists, to examine, with more generosity though with no less stringency than Howe has achieved, the unwished-for historical experience in which authentic revolution and authentic liberation have been involved with indefensible cruelties and wholly negative and destructive suppression and lying. To live this experience through, and to know that in every moment we are factually involved in it, is a harder life—I say simply that, harder—than the kind of analysis we apply to history already made, literature already written, when the position of the observer has been prepared for us in advance.

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I find then that though I agree with much that Howe says about the past, and about current styles of glossing or lying about the past, I part company with him, wholly, in what seems to me the rancor of his response to the present. And not only the rancor: that can be understood, though not justified, in the sheer noise of contemporary political argument and action. It is more than that: it is a position of superiority—an unworked for, unjustified superiority—in his critique of the young American Left. He and I have both worked hard; he would want that said, as he emphasizes in the title of his political book. But the superiority is unworked for, and wholly unjustified. For we have not found a humane and active socialism; perhaps always humane enough, as we formed our ideas, but never active enough—we have only to look at our world.

I do not know at all closely the young American Left he criticizes. I have met some people over here, and it has usually been difficult. But difficult both ways; to see past the style, on which Howe puts so much negative emphasis, and into the situation in which we are all being tested: a crisis in which the idea is being made active through major historical difficulties. The relevant response seems not the cataloguing of faults, the references-back, the classification as if of types or specimens, but, in our failures and successes, a sharing of energy and a rigor of critical reason which we have made substantial and available in a common action.

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My prolonged hesitation in writing about these books can now perhaps be understood. For there is a sense in which I would expect Howe to agree with much that I have urged against him, in these terms, as a way of denying that it applies to his work, which he describes in his foreword in much the same adjectives. The critique, that is to say, is truly internal. From those active values he gets this actual body of work. But that is the trouble. For what I see in this steady work is not a sustained socialist or radical criticism of those elements of United States life and policy that are profoundly dangerous to the world and to its own people. Such criticism is occasionally present, but the dominant theme is something else: a sustained criticism of other people and other groups on the Left. There is very little constructive social criticism on the problems by which millions of people are constantly affected. There is not much destructive criticism of the directly cruel and powerful. And then the critique of others on the Left, which would be authentic and necessary as an aspect of these other kinds of work, comes through as something else, and steady is not the word I would use to describe it. The decisive structure is that of the critic whose idea of socialism is so strong in his own mind that he does not fully see the real world he is facing, but feels concerned and even threatened at that point where other versions or practices of socialism come too close or overlap. It is a common enough structure from the years of the cold war, and I know it, I think, in some detail from my own experience. But it is no longer, really, where we now have to live, unless we choose its mode, as distant as any imagined Dorset: its internal alignment on verities and recurrences.

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I have now lived twice through this kind of situation; that is what made me reluctant to criticize Howe. In 1940 I was trying to live as a pacifist and a socialist; that idea, those contradictory ideas, were absolutely important. To go into the army and end up fighting SS tanks in the orchards of Normandy was a disintegration: wholly defensible, by abstract ideas—the fascist tanks had to be burned, the rocket sites flattened, the camps emptied of prisoners and refilled with SS officers; wholly vulnerable, by other abstract ideas—the cruelty and destruction beyond the call of duty, the involvement with patriotic lies and an authoritarian military structure. The disintegration of an arranged self was an unlooked-for history; would it not have been better to have spent the war making each position clear, and drawing lines between myself and unacceptable others? Yet it is how we learn, at any level that matters, and it has happened again, for me, in the 60's. On the one hand, the rhetoric of revolution, the vicarious violence, the covert authoritarianism, the crimes and stupidities of socialist and liberation movements; on the other hand, the fight for one's life, intellectually, in a Europe being taken over by the United States; the fight for one's people, dominated and impoverished by international capitalism; the fight for life at all, across seas and frontiers, by men so poor and so exposed that only one position is available to others—for them or against them.

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It is again a disintegration, of ideas that had seemed settled, of a structure that had been long in the making, and hard with experience in every detail. Not transcendence, the easy word; but still not only disintegration: some new self, living beyond the map of the self; moving with unexpected people to unlooked-for places; looking back and seeing a once friendly man, not moving, ready to cut one down with a phrase. This is what made and makes me reluctant to criticize Howe: that I have stood where he stands, and think I know how it feels; that his arguments against movements now being made, on quite different bearings, are as familiar as yesterday, but are only yesterday; that it would be better, really, to say nothing, but just wave and turn away, across a growing distance.