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A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography
A leading literary critic-and the author of World of Our Fathers-looks back on his life from the early 1930s through the 1970s. A perceptive account of Howe's intellectual growth. Index.
372 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
About the author
Irving Howe
184 books42 followersIrving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 9, 2009
Generally gorgeous and perfectly retrained, read for the accident in geography and subtle polemic guns.
March 15, 2024
Though inevitably tendentious and to some degree self-serving (it’s a memoir, after all), A Margin of Hope is a sharply observed account of the tortured trajectory that the New York intellectuals followed from youthful commitments to communism in the 1930s to political retreat and turncoatism in the 1950s, and then to fragmented forms of Cold War liberalism and troglodyte neoconservativism in the 1970s and 1980s. Though their squabbles and fallings-out may seem antiquated today, the intellectual style forged in these disputes has had a profound and often regrettable influence on contemporary American cultural life--the tepid, statist liberalism of the NYRB and the alarmist prognostications of the resistance liberal intellectual set, who are apt to see Kremlin intrigue behind almost every contemporary American ill, are latter-day embodiments of it. In vivid prose, pugnacious and graceful by turns, Howe brings to life the dramatis personae of this bygone generation and makes us see why their quarrels matter today, for better or worse.
Howe himself is something of an odd bird, politically and intellectually. He has the cantankerous scrappiness of the Bronx-born Jewish son of a presser fallen on hard times (a transformation into the suave intellectual guru for the liberal goyim, like Trilling, was never a possibility for him) but also a credulous, wide-eyed faith in the political good sense and integrity of the American common man that perhaps stems from his readings of the transcendentalists and Sherwood Anderson. His rueful introspectiveness and his generosity to his intellectual adversaries, cutting and bleakly humane, owe something, perhaps, to his deep engagement with Yiddish writers and his own Ashkenazi NYC background. A prolific, wide-ranging writer on politics and literature, he seems to me more interesting than others in his set, Trilling included, and underread today.
Politically, Howe seems to have always been a social democrat at heart even during his firebrand Trotskyist days, despite his claims to the contrary; for New York intellectuals of any political stripe, even for those who made severe political right turns in the 1950s, youthful devotion to the communist cause was an essential component of their self-mythology, as promiscuity was for St. Augustine pre-conversion, experiences that lent to their later recantations of Marxism and their adoption of a despairing liberalism in its place a kind of jaded authority. New York intellectuals of a liberal bent, Howe included, seemed to like nothing so much as to have an exuberant materialist thought (or a sudden desire to perform a class analysis of any given subject) and then grab the nearest copy of Darkness at Noon or The Captive Mind and sit with it in gloomy contemplation until the thought went away, rather like some earnest Tractarian curate dosing his tea with saltpeter to quell a sexual urge. No, we can’t have a better world because “totalitarianism” became for too many of many of them a sclerotic intellectual reflex passing itself off as a deep insight, or an excuse for a retreat from politics into a personally advantageous quietism. Yet the fact that Howe did remain a socialist for the rest of his life, or at least a muddled variety of social democrat, has to be seen, in the context of a generation that produced the likes of Irving Kristol, as a fortunate fate, or at least a less ugly one than that of many of his contemporaries.
Howe’s thrusts and parries with the New Left and second-wave feminism in the last half of the book do, on the other hand, seem to me to smack of fuddy-dud-ism. His apparent requirement that the anti-war movement carefully offset activism against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam with dutiful hairsplitting critiques of how bad the communist Vietcong were seems to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how political movements work, and was a sure recipe for demobilizing people and dissipating political energies. It’s fortunate, then, that the concluding chapters on Howe’s selfless work to translate and publish the work of the fading remnant of New York’s last Yiddish writers and on his chafing, conflicted relationship with his father are written with such harsh, eloquent feeling. There we find again that rueful querulousness and bleak, acerbic candor that make Howe an interesting witness of his time, and this book worth reading.
Howe himself is something of an odd bird, politically and intellectually. He has the cantankerous scrappiness of the Bronx-born Jewish son of a presser fallen on hard times (a transformation into the suave intellectual guru for the liberal goyim, like Trilling, was never a possibility for him) but also a credulous, wide-eyed faith in the political good sense and integrity of the American common man that perhaps stems from his readings of the transcendentalists and Sherwood Anderson. His rueful introspectiveness and his generosity to his intellectual adversaries, cutting and bleakly humane, owe something, perhaps, to his deep engagement with Yiddish writers and his own Ashkenazi NYC background. A prolific, wide-ranging writer on politics and literature, he seems to me more interesting than others in his set, Trilling included, and underread today.
Politically, Howe seems to have always been a social democrat at heart even during his firebrand Trotskyist days, despite his claims to the contrary; for New York intellectuals of any political stripe, even for those who made severe political right turns in the 1950s, youthful devotion to the communist cause was an essential component of their self-mythology, as promiscuity was for St. Augustine pre-conversion, experiences that lent to their later recantations of Marxism and their adoption of a despairing liberalism in its place a kind of jaded authority. New York intellectuals of a liberal bent, Howe included, seemed to like nothing so much as to have an exuberant materialist thought (or a sudden desire to perform a class analysis of any given subject) and then grab the nearest copy of Darkness at Noon or The Captive Mind and sit with it in gloomy contemplation until the thought went away, rather like some earnest Tractarian curate dosing his tea with saltpeter to quell a sexual urge. No, we can’t have a better world because “totalitarianism” became for too many of many of them a sclerotic intellectual reflex passing itself off as a deep insight, or an excuse for a retreat from politics into a personally advantageous quietism. Yet the fact that Howe did remain a socialist for the rest of his life, or at least a muddled variety of social democrat, has to be seen, in the context of a generation that produced the likes of Irving Kristol, as a fortunate fate, or at least a less ugly one than that of many of his contemporaries.
Howe’s thrusts and parries with the New Left and second-wave feminism in the last half of the book do, on the other hand, seem to me to smack of fuddy-dud-ism. His apparent requirement that the anti-war movement carefully offset activism against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam with dutiful hairsplitting critiques of how bad the communist Vietcong were seems to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how political movements work, and was a sure recipe for demobilizing people and dissipating political energies. It’s fortunate, then, that the concluding chapters on Howe’s selfless work to translate and publish the work of the fading remnant of New York’s last Yiddish writers and on his chafing, conflicted relationship with his father are written with such harsh, eloquent feeling. There we find again that rueful querulousness and bleak, acerbic candor that make Howe an interesting witness of his time, and this book worth reading.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews