A Margin of Hope by Irving Howe

First published: 1982

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The 1930’s to the early 1940’s

Locale: Primarily New York City

Principal Personage:

• Irving Howe, a prominent member of New York’s intellectual circles

Form and Content

Irving Howe has been since the 1940’s a prominent figure in American intellectual life as a literary critic, editor and anthologist, historian, and spokesman for Democratic Socialism. The subtitle of his book, An Intellectual Autobiography, alerts the reader to the work’s focus. Indeed, A Margin of Hope is scanty on the personal side of Howe’s life. His mother is briefly described as the stereotypical Jewish mother: “Strong, humorless, enclosing.” His father receives more attention but mostly as the symbol of Howe’s own ambivalent feelings toward the Eastern European immigrant world of his childhood. Not even their names are given. Howe alludes several times to his wife, but he fails to explain that he was married more than once. There is nothing about his two children. Perhaps most surprising is his failure to deal at length with his own writings. Some of his more important works are noted but without much in the way of explication. The work is primarily an account of the evolution of Howe’s attitudes and beliefs.

The first four chapters—making up approximately 30 percent of the text—deal with Howe’s formative years. Although he never says so, he was born in New York City on June 11, 1920, the son of David and Nettie (nee Goldman) Howe. What appears to have been the most important influence on his childhood was the family’s Depression-era fall from lower-middle to working class with the bankruptcy of his father’s grocery store and the accompanying move from the West to the East Bronx. His father became a presser in the garment industry, his mother an operator. Although the family had its financial problems, there was still sufficient money to allow Howe to attend De Witt Clinton High School and then City College of New York. Howe was a precociously bookish youngster who cultivated “both a heightened social awareness and an adolescent cultural snobbism.”

Although a loyal union member, his father was dismayed by Howe’s left-wing political activism, first as a member of the Socialist Party’s youth wing, the Young People’s Socialist League, then as an adherent of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, and finally, as a member of the splinter Trotskyist group headed by Max Shachtman. As Howe himself admits, he has difficulty in explaining why he became a Socialist. The conscious motive appears to have been the belief that “things had gone profoundly wrong.” Even more important, however, was the way a political sect, such as the Trotskyists, with a comprehensive worldview offered the security of a defined sense of place, order, and coherence. “The movement,” he recalls, “gave me something I would never find again and have since come to regard with deep suspicion, almost as a sign of moral derangement: it gave my life a ‘complete meaning,’ a ‘whole purpose.’”

Howe found the classroom side of City College disappointing. More educationally valuable to him was his involvement in the debates that raged within the student body between the independent anti-Stalinist radicals and the Communist Party loyalists. After his graduation in 1940, he was editor of the Shachtman group’s weekly, Labor Action, until he was drafted a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He spent most of the war shuffling papers at a remote base in Alaska, where he had ample leisure time for extensive reading. As he relates, “Enforced isolation and steady reading, together brought about a slow intellectual change. I remained passionately caught up with politics, but increasingly it became an abstract passion.”

The next four chapters—making up approximately 40 percent of the text—deal with the narrow span of the decade following the end of the war. Those were the critical years of transition in Howe’s life. In chapter 5 (appropriately titled “Into the World”), he tells of his gradual withdrawal from active involvement in the Shachtman group to try his hand as a free-lance intellectual; his work as Dwight Macdonald’s assistant on Politics until that magazine’s end in 1947; his four years as a part-time book reviewer for Time; and his entry into the circle of largely Jewish New York intellectuals centered on the Partisan Review. A separate chapter (“Literary Life: New York”) details his experiences as a junior member of that formidably influential coterie before its fragmentation. Chapter 7 (“Loose-Fish, Still Flapping”) recalls his association while living in Princeton, New Jersey, with the avant-garde writers around critic R.P. Blackmur (the poets John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and novelist Saul Bellow), followed by his own appointment in 1953 to the English department of the newly founded Brandeis University.

Although Howe largely slides over the details in A Margin of Hope, those were probably his most productive years as a literary critic. His more important book-length works were Sherwood Anderson (1951), William Faulkner: A Critical Study (1952), and Politics and the Novel (1957). Politics, however, continued to engage his emotions most forcefully; at fifty pages, chapter 8, “Ideas in Conflict,” is the book’s longest. The American Communist Party: A Critical History, 1919-1957 (1957)—coauthored with sociologist Lewis Coser—was a pioneering study that has remained an important source for later students. Howe’s own intellectual trajectory was from Marxism to a vaguely defined Democratic Socialism. Nevertheless, there was simultaneously a strong feeling of hostility toward those intellectuals whom he believed had sold out by becoming apologists for American capitalism. Looking for a middle way between an outmoded and discredited Marxism and establishmentarian conformism, he was the moving force behind the founding in 1953 of Dissent as a journal of independent radical opinion to wage “polemical battle against our rightward-moving friends, especially those who had been less than lionhearted in standing up to McCarthyism.”

In the early 1950’s, Howe began to pursue what would remain one of his major interests in the years that followed: the preservation of at least the memory of the once-vibrant but dying Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe and New York City’s Lower East Side. That effort—recounted in chapter 9 (“Jewish Quandaries”)— resulted in a series of translations that Howe edited in collaboration with the Yiddish poet Elizier Greenberg and culminated in his authorship of the best-selling World of Our Fathers (1976). In 1961, Howe left Brandeis, during an apparent mid-life crisis, for what proved to be an unhappy two years at Stanford University before he returned to New York to teach at the Hunter College branch of the City University of New York. Yet the dominating preoccupation of his life in the 1960’s—the subject of chapter 10 (“The Best and the Worst”)—was how the bright promise of a revitalized reform impulse turned sour as the New Left succumbed to a mindless fanaticism.

The 1970’s appear to him almost a void. “It’s as if,” he writes, “the years had simply dropped out of one’s life and all that remains are bits and pieces of recollection.” The “Fragments of a Decade” that stick in his mind are the rise of the feminist movement (with which he is warily sympathetic), his newfound enthusiasm for the ballet, and his father’s death. He feels only revulsion for the “sordidness” of the era of Ronald Reagan: “It’s as if the spirit of the old robber barons had been triumphantly resurrected, as if the most calloused notions of Social Darwinism were back with us, as if the celebrations of greed we associate with the late nineteenth century were reenacted a century later.”

Critical Context

Given Howe’s involvement in the controversies that had so bitterly divided American intellectuals over the preceding half century, the immediate critical reception to A Margin of Hope was strongly influenced by reviewers’ political attitudes. There were those who thought him too rigidly anti-Soviet, others who found him the opposite. There were those who regarded his Socialism as too moderate, too gradualist, too reasonable to effect fundamental changes in American society; others who denied that one could be simultaneously a socialist and a democrat. The consensus was that here was a decent and well-meaning man who had struggled bravely to make sense of the world.

A Margin of Hope will probably not be ranked among the great autobiographies. Howe was not one of the movers and shakers of his time. As he freely admits, his influence upon the course of history was nil. While the Partisan Review group did have a significant impact upon American cultural life, Howe was no more than a secondary figure even within that circle. He founded no school of literary criticism. He was not responsible for discovering any neglected genius. He belonged to the tradition of the independent man of letters that could be traced back to Samuel Johnson. Nevertheless, he was not the equal of such contemporary examples as George Orwell or Edmund Wilson in terms of insight or importance. Although his interests were more political than aesthetic, Howe was neither profound nor novel in his thinking about man and society. Indeed, there was a strongly bookish quality to the evolution of his ideas. He appeared to respond not so much directly to events as to others’ interpretations of those events. At most, his intellectual autobiography illuminates the thought processes of a narrow type: his generation of the intellectually inclined offspring of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

Bibliography

America. CXLVII, February 5, 1982, p. 97.

Atlas, James. “An Insurgent of the Mind,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (October 31, 1982), p. 1.

Decter, Midge. “Socialism and Its Irresponsibilities: The Case of Irving Howe,” in Commentary. LXXIV (December, 1982), pp. 25-32.

Gornick, Vivian. “A Life of the Mind,” in The Nation. CCXXXVI (January 1, 1983), pp. 20-22.

Human Events. XLII, October 23, 1982, p. 9.

Lewis, R.W.B. “A Liberal Spirit,” in The New Republic. XXXII (November 1, 1982), pp. 32-34, 36.

National Review. XXXIV, October 1, 1982, p. 1226.

The New York Review of Books. XXX, February 3, 1983, p. 5.

Progressive. XLVII, February, 1983, p. 57.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXII, September 24, 1982, p. 68.