Looking back on American literary criticism of the 20th century, it doesn't surprise me that the politics of almost all of the great critics was at least of the Liberal persuasion and occasionally leaning further to the Left. In his great book, To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson chronicled the intellectual (as well as quite emotional) roller-coaster on which communism took him from the 1920s all the way through to the Cold War and beyond. Though somewhat disillusioned by the experience, Wilson remained, I think, nostalgic for the debate that Stalinism effectively stifled, but which subsequent cultural critics have never let go.
Irving Howe was perhaps the last, and I would say the par excellence, of the line of great American critics that included Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Randall Jarrell, who witnessed and celebrated, as best they could, the rise and fall of the novelists Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Bellow, and the poets Stevens, Bishop and Lowell. Howe - alone it seemed - wanted to extent criticism to include life as he knew it and took it in, the life of the intellect as much as the conscience of his age.
His introduction to a collection of essays that he called A World More Attractive, published in 1963, shows the extent to which Howe took the American Dream seriously, as a promise of something much more than just material comforts, of people rising not just out of poverty but into riches. He reminds us how hollow such promises ring when we examine the history of our country. Greater liberty (now known more simply as freedom) and equality are what upward mobility is about - a constant moving toward a better society. These values, however, are more threatened today than ever before. Conformity has intensified exponentially. Apathy is taking over. People have grown too comfortable to continue the struggle.
Howe would surely have cheered Bernie Sanders's run for the nomination of the Democratic Party as candidate for president. Even the failure of his candidacy was a thrilling spectacle for a democratic socialist (like myself) and every believer in the progressive political philosophy. Here is Howe's introduction (I have taken the liberty of italicizing certain passages):
Composed in the years between 1950 and 1963, the essays in this book range in kind from literary criticism to political analysis, from intellectual portraiture to cultural polemic. They cover a wide spectrum of topics and figures, but if varied in subject, they are, I believe, unified in outlook. Behind almost all of them can be found a stable complex of values and convictions, a persistent concern with problems and ideas, having to do primarily with that style of experience and perception sometimes called the "modern." By the "modern" I have in mind neither the merely contemporary nor the momentarily fashionable, either in our culture or our politics. I have in mind the assumption that the twentieth century has been marked by a crisis of conduct and belief that is perhaps unprecedented in seriousness, depth and extent.
The "modern," as it refers to both history and literature, signifies extreme situations and radical solutions. It summons images of war and revolution, experiment and disaster, apocalypse and skepticism; images of rebellion, disenchantment and nothingness. To claim that all of these are visibly present in the essays that follow, would be absurd; but I would say that the sense of their presence has been a dominant pressure, setting both the terms and the limits, of what I have written here. Whether it be strictly literary, or primarily political, or a crossing of the two — as in the study of T. E. Lawrence, which forms the centerpiece of the book because it brings together so many of its themes — the work presented in these pages takes its meaning and its shape as a response to the problem of the "modern."
A number of the essays are literary in character, written from the assumption that literary criticism, like literature itself, can be autonomous but hardly self-sufficient. There is strong reason to stress the integrity of the work of literature, as an object worth scrutiny in its own right and in accordance with its own nature; but I would also insist — and in the last two decades it has become quite necessary to insist — that the work of literature acquires its interest for us through a relationship, admittedly subtle, difficult and indirect, to the whole of human experience. The kind of detailed or close analysis of particular texts which has been favored in recent years and which I have occasionally undertaken in lengthier studies, will not be found here. What I have tried for has been to provide a description of the characteristic qualities, the defining mode of vision, by which a writer can be recognized and valued; I have hoped to isolate the terms through which he confronts the experience of our time.
The few strictly political pieces in this book are drawn from a larger body of writing in which I have tried to speak for, even while criticizing, the tradition of socialism. Being a socialist in the mid-twentieth century means, for anyone who aspires to seriousness, a capacity for living with crisis, doubt and reconsideration. The ideal of socialism has become a problematic one, but the problem of socialism remains an abiding ideal. Some traditional doctrines of socialism now seem to me outmoded or mistaken, but I remain convinced of the need for a democratic and radical renovation of society, through which to give a fresh embodiment to the values of freedom and fraternity. A good part of the effort to preserve the animating purpose of socialist criticism in the past decade can be observed by turning to the files of Dissent, the quarterly of which I have been an editor; but some of that effort, the more speculative and less topical side of it, can be found in these pages.
If one side of my political writing has required the kind of self-questioning and reorientation which must today go on among serious socialists, another side has been devoted, in the years since the war, to an attack upon the growing acquiescence and conservatism of the American intellectual community. The early 'fifties in particular struck me as a time in which too many intellectuals abandoned their traditional privilege and responsibility of criticism. In "This Age of Conformity" — a polemic in which certain references maybe seem dated but the controlling ideas of which seem to me still valid — I joined in a counter-attack which a few intellectuals launched against the turn to political quietism and conformity, the acceptance of the social status quo, the dilution of liberalism into a kind of genteel conservatism. Now, only a few years later, I find myself especially eager that such writings speak to those younger people who have recently come to their intellectual maturity and seem not quite to recall what happened in this country only a decade ago.
I have brought together in this volume about half my periodical writing over the last twelve or thirteen years. Whatever struck me as merely journalistic or too closely interwoven with a transient polemic, has been omitted. Yet I have included a few pieces that are journalistic and polemical, first because I believe them to possess a certain value in commenting upon significant discussions of the past decade, and second because I wish to write, not for some dim posterity, but for living men and women caught up, as I am caught up, with the problems and interests of our time.
"In my eyes," Leon Trotsky once wrote, "authors, journalists and artists always stood for a world that was more attractive than any other...." One need not accept Trotsky's political outlook in order to appreciate the force of his remark, both as it indicates respect for the intellectual life and a complex, perhaps, ironic sense of the difficulties faced by those who would preserve a relationship between politics and literature, action and reflection. A world more attractive — from sentiments of this kind I have tried to live and work, . . .
A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics (New York: Horizon Press, 1963)
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