On the New York Intellectuals
I first read Irving Howe in college, in Andrew Ross’ seminar on intellectuals. We read Howe’s “The New York Intellectuals.” I don’t remember what I thought of it; what I remember is that I admired Howe as the epitome of the independent political intellectual. At some point in graduate school, I grew less enamored of the New York Intellectuals as a whole (in part because of their compromises or collaboration with McCarthyism, in part because the ideal of the independent intellectual loosened its hold over me), and Howe fell in my esteem as a result. Which is ironic because Howe was one of the few anti-Stalinist intellectuals who kept his bearings during the McCarthy years. This past year, I’ve been re-reading Howe. His literary criticism hasn’t really held up for me (I’d add to my list of essays there his cramped reassessment of Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett.) But I’ve been newly impressed by his political criticism. When he’s not obsessively whacking the New Left, he can be astonishingly keen and prescient about the weaknesses of the American Left, the paradoxes of the welfare state, and the long-term impact of McCarthyism. At his best, when he’s not seized by that crabbiness of spirit that so often marred his judgment and writing, he can see from up high and down deep what’s moving and stagnant in the American current.
This morning, I re-read “The New York Intellectuals.” It first appeared in Commentary in 1969. It has two weak moments: when he’s rehashing his critique of the Stalinism of the American Left of the 1930s and 1940, and when he’s gnawing on the “new sensibility” of the counterculture and its spokepersons (Marcuse, Mailer, Norman O. Brown, even Susan Sontag). It’s those pugilistic moments that Howe is so often celebrated for—Howe the political and cultural polemicist—that I find the most tiresome and familiar. When he’s not rehearsing his case for the prosecution, Howe can really rise above the material. That’s the Howe I find most enduring.
Here are just a few observations of his in that essay that I thought were worth noting.
1. The European socialist intellectual ends his political engagement by breaking with the Communist Party; the New York Intellectual begins his engagement by breaking with the Party.
2. “They came late“: The New York Intellectuals were late to modernism (by the mid to late 1930s, when they had come into their own, the battle for Joyce, Eliot, and Pound had been won). They were late to the radical experience: by the mid-1930s, Communism had become a political problem for the left, and much of the New York Intellectuals’ engagement with radicalism was, from the beginning, a process of disenchantment. “Their radicalism was anxious, problematic, and beginning to decay at the very moment it was adopted.” They also came at the end of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. Overall, theirs was a condition of belatedness; despite our sense that they were at the center of the action, their own sense of things was that everything happened before them.
3. The one political achievement of the New York Intellectuals was the delegitimization of Stalinism among socialist intellectuals. I can’t help but think that for Howe, who aimed to forge a vibrant and politically effective socialist left free of the Stalinist taint, that would be something of a disappointment.
4. The New York Intellectuals made no serious contribution to political thought; their main contribution was a style. Howe may be at his most brilliant best in describing that style and its limitations.
Let us call it the style of brilliance. The kind of essay they wrote was likely to be wide-ranging in reference, melding notions about literature and politics, sometimes announcing itself as a study of a writer or literary group but usually taut with a pressure to “go beyond” its subject, toward some encompassing moral or social observation. It is a kind of writing highly self-conscious in mode, with an unashamed vibration of bravura. Nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transition and other concessions to dullness, calling attention to itself as a form of or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle—such, at its best or most noticeable, was the essay cultivated by the New York writers. Until recently its strategy of exposition was likely to be impersonal (the writer did not speak much as an “I”) but its tone and bearing were likely to be intensely personal (the audience was to be made aware that the aim of the piece was not judiciousness, but rather, a strong impress of attitude, a blow of novelty, a wrenching of accepted opinion, sometimes a mere indulgence of vanity).
In some of these essays there was a sense of tournament, the writer as gymnast with one eye on other rings, or as skilled infighter juggling knives of dialectic….
At its best the style of brilliance reflected a certain view of the intellectual life: free-lance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knockabout synthesis. For better or worse it was radically different from the accepted mode of scholarly publishing and middlebrow journalism. It celebrated the idea of the intellectual as antispecialist, or as a writer whose speciality was the lack of a speciality: the writer as dilettante-connoisseur, Luftmensch of the mind, roamer among theories.
The downside of this style, or at least one of them, was, its quick and easy descent into fashion, an inability to remain with a theory long enough to understand its ins and outs, and narcissism, a problem we often identify with our internet age but which long predates it:
The twists and turns were lively, and they could all seem harmless if only one could learn to looking upon intellectual life as a variety of play, like potsy or king of the hill. What struck one as troubling, however, was not this or that fashion (tomorrow morning would bring another), but the dynamic of fashion itself, the ruthlessness with which, to remain in fashion, fashion had to keep devouring itself.
…
In the fifties the cult of brilliance became a sign that writers were offering not their work or ideas but their persona as content.
5. The main cultural contribution of the New York Intellectuals was the consolidation of a canon. They were not the avant-garde of modernism; they were its curators.
6. What drove the New York Intellectuals was not money, power, or even fame; they were possessed by a “gnawing ambition to write something, even three pages, that might live.”
7. The influence of the New York Intellectuals has reached an end. (That was in 1969.)
8. On liberalism and the intellectual:
For those of us who have lived throughout the age of totalitarianism and experienced the debate of socialism, this conflict over liberal values is extremely painful. We have paid heavily for the lesson that democracy, even “bourgeois democracy,” is a precious human achievement, one that, far from being simply a mode of mass manipulation, has been wrested through decades of struggle by labor, socialist, and liberal movements. To protect the values of liberal democracy, often against those who call themselves liberals, is an elementary task for intellectuals as a social group.
9. On The New York Review of Books:
The genius of the New York Review, and it has been a genius of sorts, is not, in either politics or culture, for swimming against the stream.