[Littlejohn is an American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following review, he examines the central themes of Decline of the New and faults Howe's tone as bitter and defensive.]

The scrapbooks of literary critics—those periodic collections of essays, reviews, lectures, and prefaces—have always seemed to me a bit difficult to justify. Who ever buys them, except libraries? In the present case justification might appear even harder than usual, since seven of the seventeen pieces in Decline of the New are reprinted from Irving Howe's last collection, A World More Attractive, published only seven years ago. And two of these—one on black writers, one on the "angries" and the "beats"—the author admits are seriously out of date.

My guess is that this book came into being primarily in order to give Mr. Howe's essay "The New York Intellectuals"—and possibly just its last 6,000 or 7,000 words—a wider circulation and a more durable setting than was provided by the October 1968 issue of Commentary, where it first appeared, and that the author did not have enough additional new material on hand to fill up a 300-page book.

Which is not to say that Decline of the New is indefensible, or unreadable. Writers commit such collections, I suspect, less for money, or even to assert (as they might in a single-subject book) their critical opinions, than to make total personal gestures, public declarations of themselves. This, at least, is the kind of fundamental coherence I look for; this is what I search for à travers a dozen or seventeen essays and reviews on as many scattered subjects: an image of the author, his attitudes, obsessions, values, concerns. Who, what, and how useful does Irving Howe reveal himself to be in 1970?

He is—and this will come as no surprise—a literary critic with strong political predispositions. In the central testament of this volume he tries to explain the sources, the nature, the troubled evolution of the radically political approach to literature and ideas employed by the "New York intellectuals," including Irving Howe, over the past thirty-five years. This essay is a remarkable performance: quintessentially autobiographical in impulse, it makes almost no reference to Irving Howe. It is a vivid and vital piece of cultural history, but impressionistic or intuitive in nature, history that begins in reminiscence. Mr. Howe is hard, unflinching, even agonized in his analysis of other men's errors. Much of the essay's vigor clearly derives from personal reference, from the polemic tone often humming just beneath the surface. For ultimately Mr. Howe feels compelled not only to analyze his own milieu, his chosen fellows, but to defend them—their politics, their intelligence, their achievements, their style—and thereby to defend himself against "the 'leftist' prigs of the Sixties, sons of psychiatrists and manufacturers."

In this essay he focuses on the specifically political issues that have marked the history of his group: anti-Stalinism, the Ezra Pound case, the American Congress for Cultural Freedom, etc. More interesting to me, however, are the ways in which the surrounding essays and reviews display his insistently political reading of literary works.

Mr. Howe is still bothered by the reactionary political opinions expressed by several of the giants of early twentieth-century literature. He shows especial sympathy, on the other hand, for those modern writers (Silone, Dreiser, Orwell, above all Joyce) who maintained a warm, democratic compassion for the common man, who avoided "those sins of aristocraticism which stain the work of so many twentieth-century European writers"; who kept the faith, however critical, in liberal democracy; and who, as did Orwell and Silone, combined political activism with literary creation. He is unhappy with mythic or romantic fiction (writers like Melville and Dostoevsky, he insists, were really more political than most of us think) and hostile to the would-be apolitical, individualist writers of the 1950s. Mr. Howe all but orders black writers to be militants.

He not only prefers social realism in the novel, he virtually demands it. Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and particularly Henry James are singled out for praise for accepting social reality, for believing that "the web of society is the true locale of man's destiny." The assumption of "some complex and significant relationship" between social place and moral value "has been a major resource of modern novelists … a prerequisite for the very existence of the novel." Novelists "need to live in an environment about which they can make economical assumptions…. The theme of personal identity, if it is to take on fictional substance, needs some kind of placement, a setting in the world of practical affairs." Books I have always regarded as primarily fables, as profound and eloquent fantasies—works by Hawthorne, Faulkner, Ellison, Mailer—Mr. Howe reads as realistic social critiques, or even as nonfiction. "Huck will light out for 'the territory,' and no doubt become a responsible citizen; but he will now have to live, like the rest of us, within the clamps of social limitation." He will? Where? Huck does not even exist except as a function of and in the context of Mark Twain's novel.

It is right that a critic attempt to illuminate what he knows and loves best, and not try to be all things to all men. Mr. Howe's case for the political anarchism of the American nineteenth-century masters is, I think, overstated (can two people on a raft really be an "anarchic community"?) but much of it is sound, provocative, and corrective. I love the unapologetic assurance of his piece on Henry James, and his enlightening approach to Hemingway. If anybody ever edits one of those anthologies of criticism on Edith Wharton or I. B. Singer, Irving Howe's fine studies of these writers should be included. And his uphill battle on behalf of Dreiser gradually begins to erode one's resistance.

Others of his "cases" are less persuasive. The three concluding tributes (to Orwell, Silone, and T. E. Lawrence) may seem a bit too respectful for the unconverted. Certain postwar writers he dismisses in cursory and, I think, irresponsible paragraphs. I can't see many people being won over to Céline or Martin du Gard by his casual introductions, and he never does adequate justice (for my taste) to Yeats, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or Brecht. Perhaps their politics were wrong.

But my quarrel is not basically with this or that judgment, nor even with what strikes me as a dangerous tendency to slight the nature of the work of art and of artistic creation. My quarrel—let me, rather, say discomfort—is with the bitter and defensive tone Mr. Howe often adopts to make his point.

Essay after essay begins with a sour acknowledgment that its subject is no longer properly respected. There is a mean and gratuitous slap, in the Richard Wright essay, at people who don't share Mr. Howe's taste for protest novels. There are many references, overt or covert, to "my generation." "We" loved Orwell and The Waste Land. "We" were made by (and fought for) the modernist masters. "We" stood up for liberal democracy against both Stalinism and McCarthyism. "We" treasured complexity, culture, and close reading of texts. We've been through hell, damn it, and we're not going to sit by and allow "recent New Left ideologues to present the Forties and Fifties as if they were no more than a time of intellectual sterility and reaction."

Irving Howe is angry. He is angry because he was made by and has dedicated his life to Joyce and Orwell and Partisan Review and Dissent, and he hates to see young New York Review punks making fun of them now. He is angry because "whatever the duration or extent of the influence enjoyed by the New York intellectuals, it is now reaching an end…. [It is] a tradition in process of being lost, a generation facing assault and ridicule from ambitious younger men." Decline of the New is not only an impassioned, personal defense of a time, a milieu, and a tradition; it is also an attack on a newer time, milieu, and tradition that seem to threaten them.

This is why I find the real heart, the pulsing center of this book in Mr. Howe's passionate outburst against the "new sensibility" of the Sixties which concludes "The New York Intellectuals." Hints of what is here directly expressed may be detected elsewhere, but only in these pages is his indignation so explicit:

The new sensibility is impatient with ideas. It is impatient with literary structures of complexity and coherence, only yesterday the catchwords of our criticism. It wants instead works of literature—though literature may be the wrong word—that will be as absolute as the sun, as unarguable as orgasm, and as delicious as a lollipop. It schemes to throw off the weight of nuance and ambiguity, legacies of high consciousness and tired blood. It is weary of the habit of reflection, the making of distinctions, the squareness of dialectic, the tarnished gold of inherited wisdom. It cares nothing for the haunted memories of old Jews. It has no taste for the ethical nail-biting of those writers of the Left who suffered defeat and could never again accept the narcotic of certainty. It is sick of those magnifications of irony that Mann gave us, sick of those visions of entrapment to which Kafka led us, sick of those shufflings of daily horror and grace that Joyce left us. It breathes contempt for rationality, impatience with mind, and a hostility to the artifices and decorums of high culture. It despises liberal values, liberal cautions, liberal virtues. It is bored with the past: for the past is a fink.

Why should I quarrel with or be made uncomfortable by Mr. Howe's bitterness and anger? Surely many manifestations of New Left politics, of black militancy, of the American youth culture do have the earmarks of barbarism, and do appear to threaten, or at least to oppose, a political and cultural tradition I am as much a product of as he is. But I ask: is his really the best, the wisest, the most useful response that a critic of the older dispensation can make to the "new sensibility," to the cultural revolution that appears to be in progress?

He ignores movies. He dismisses with sneers the new theater and popular culture. Marcuse, McLuhan, Norman O. Brown merit no more than clever insults. He blames Norman Mailer for much of the prestige of the new barbarism, then blames his own liberal colleagues for not taking the threat Mailer represents more seriously; yet he himself never risks a confrontation of more than two paragraphs. To Susan Sontag he is especially nasty—she is one of Us who has sold out to Them—but never has time for more than a passing barb. The best that he can say for the whole new scene ("a period of overwhelming cultural sleaziness," so lamentably below our generation "in seriousness and accomplishment") is that it combines with its anticultural horrors a certain decorative charm and "a desire for goodness of heart."

I put it that the new cultural wave that has come to the attention of Western intellectuals in the last four years is not something to be dismissed with contempt. Nor is the case against it sufficiently made by writing of the "modernism" of the Twenties as if it were the great, burning current crisis, or by tired and prickly defenses of a handful of older authors. This is not to belittle the strong and persuasive things that are here; only to insist that what I see as the central argument of this collection—the assertion of the continuing validity of humanist, democratic, liberal, and intellectual values against new cultural assumptions that seem inimical to them—must be made either by presenting one's own tradition more forcibly, coherently, and persuasively than Mr. Howe has done here or by confronting the enemy—in so far as it is the enemy—with the far greater seriousness and attention he deserves.