SOURCE: In an interview in Book Forum, Vol. V, No. 4, 1981, pp. 534-40.

[In the following interview, which was conducted in 1980 while Howe was the Visiting Hurst Professor in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Howe comments on literature, education, and socialism.]

[Greenberg]: Mr. Howe, you recently described current novels as thin, lacking in substance and morality. Do you believe the novel as a form is exhausted?

[Howe]: I think it is presumptuous for critics or anyone else to speak of the exhaustion of a form that has been so rich and fruitful as the novel has been. All literary forms go through high and low points, plateaus and planes, and right now we seem to be experiencing what I take to be a plane. This is a judgment that other critics would probably call into question or deny, and it is possible that what we are confronting here is a generational difference, namely, that people of my age find it difficult to adapt to some of the new voices and tones and sensibilities that have since appeared. That is always a possibility, and it is foolish to deny it. I, of course, stand by my own judgments; other people have a right to call those into question.

What, more precisely, are your reasons for believing that we are on a 'plane' right now?

Much of the fiction that is published these days, though I can't pretend to read it in great quantities, strikes me as willful, lacking in imaginative density, deficient in the sense of the richness and complexity of society, sometimes even deliberately narrow in its moral scope. For one thing, we are living after a very great cultural period, the period of Modernism, and as a result of this, it is very difficult, understandably, for newer writers to find their own way, and to not be overwhelmed by the masters who have preceded them. A lot of the things that are around these days seem to me very contrived, in the bad sense of the word, sometimes almost adolescent in their tone and voice, as if the complex burdens of Modernism have proven to be too much to bear.

You have said that you connect the rise of relativism and skepticism with the prevalence of disintegrated characters in modern fiction. You contrasted Tolstoy, who wrote with an abundance of self-confidence and certainty, with such modern writers as Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, who create fragmented, disintegrated characters. Since relativism is clearly flourishing rather than diminishing, do you believe characters in future fiction will disintegrate even further, almost to the point of dissolving?

I don't think characters in future fiction can very likely disintegrate any further, because one of the things that marks contemporary fiction is virtually a dismissal of the idea of character in its traditional sense, as well as a lack of interest in the dynamics and the pleasures of storytelling. There are younger writers who have deliberately, they say, given up the whole idea of storytelling, of narrative, and this seems to me, really, to be a kind of disaster. It is giving up the heart of the novel, and perhaps also the heart of literature in general.

What do you believe are some distinctive themes and ideas of modern literature?

That's a big subject … but if I were to try to put it into a few phrases, I would say that the essential element of the Modernist impulse is to see the whole of human existence as problematical. There are no longer any certainties; the various transcendent sanctions of the past have been lost. Everything has been called into question. There is a large tendency toward subjectivity, toward skepticism, toward relativism, toward restlessness; restlessness is seen as having a value in and of itself. Experimentation is not a necessary component of Modernist literature, but it is frequently an accompaniment of it.

How do you feel about this?

It doesn't make any difference how I feel about it because, in a way, there it is; it is one of the greatest achievements of the last century and a half, and extraordinarily brilliant and profound works have been created out of the Modernist impulse. The whole Modernist idea is associated with historical crisis, with the sense of living through a time which is qualitatively different and more difficult, a time when all the premises of human existence that have sustained people in the past, are called into question. And out of this has arisen the great work of Eliot and Joyce and Brecht and Babel and Borges and Beckett and many others, as well as great work in painting and in music. One of the impulses has also been the calling into question of all accepted genres, forms, decorums, and sensibilities, which were inherited from the past. I think it has been the decisive shaping influence upon the sensibility of literate and educated people. There are elements of it now, in retrospect, which seem to need reexamination, especially on the political side. One of the unhappy aspects of Modernism was the tendency of some, not all, but of some of the Modernist writers to be impatient, and indeed, sneeringly hostile, toward liberal values, and this I find increasingly disturbing.

Do you believe there is a connection between neurosis and literary genius, between brilliance and pessimism?

I don't know; I really don't know. I wouldn't pretend to say. I would say this: there is something about the kind of work that writers do, the fact that they are constantly drawing from within themselves, which would seem to suggest that the psychological cost for that sort of work is very high. I believe very strongly in Yeats' remark that out of the quarrels with others one makes rhetoric and out of the quarrels with oneself one makes poetry. Though I myself don't do creative writing as it is called, (I don't write novels or poetry), even the kind of thing that I do, which is expository writing, I find that the sense of strain drawn from oneself, in some sense, of almost attacking oneself, is enormous. And the best writing comes from calling into question one's own beliefs, one's own views, one's own premises. And this, of course, is no easy thing to do. There's a high price to pay for this. I would advise people looking for tranquil lives not to marry writers.

Or not to be writers.

Or not to be them.

Who, of the writers currently publishing, do you believe will create fiction that will survive, that will conquer and defy the limits of time?

It's very, very hard to say, because one doesn't have any clear idea of what survival means these days, or whether civilization itself will survive. There are a few writers who seem to me to have done some work, all who have a fair chance of surviving. A couple, not many, but a couple of the novels of Saul Bellow, especially the beautiful fiction, Seize the Day, a few stories by Bernard Malamud, a few stories by Eudora Welty, one story by Tillie Olsen, a few stories by Katherine Anne Porter, quite a few by Flannery O'Connor (though she is dead, she is really contemporary)…. Not a vast amount.

What do you believe these writers are doing or saying that is going to enable them to survive while others will not?

They have very great talent, they are honest, they find forms which are appropriate to what they have to say, and they succeed in creating, even if only sometimes on a small scale, a self-sufficient, imaginative place or world.

In your introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, you said that one of the distinguishing marks of 'The New Critics' was their belief that content and form are inseparable. Do you believe this is true?

That's terribly hard to answer … Yes, I believe there is a separation between form and content, otherwise the two words wouldn't have arisen. The fact that the two terms have been with us for a very long time in one way or another indicates that people saw something in the way of difference, that they saw the difference, crudely put, between how a thing is being said and what is being said. The New Critics came along with the perfectly sound, corrective suggestion that in literature we could not separate what was being said from how it was being said—that indeed, how a thing is said in literature determines what is being said. And yet we know, for example, that while the short story as written by Rudyard Kipling and the short story as written by Isaac Babel, or the ballad as transposed by Kipling and the ballad as transposed by Brecht, have many points of similarity, nevertheless, what the two writers in each pair are saying, the vision of life, the vision of the world that they communicate, are very different.

In your introduction to Modern Literary Criticism you also said: "If criticism now finds itself in a state of uncertainty and perhaps even exhaustion, one reason must surely be that it has lost the buoying sense of purpose that had come from the avant-garde experience." What do you think caused the dissolution of the avant-garde?

All world views, all new modes of sensibilities and styles, such as Romanticism in the early nineteenth century and Modernism in the late twentieth century, have a life of their own; they don't last forever. They satisfy certain historical and emotional needs, and then with the change of conditions, they tend to exhaust themselves. By the avant-garde, we mean here something pertaining to Modernism. The avant-garde, let's say, is the grouping of writers who are the bearers of the Modernist spirit. By its very nature an avant-grade has to be a grouping which is not accepted by the dominant forces of society. But something happened in the middle of the twentieth century which had not been anticipated; namely, the absorption of a good deal of avant-garde tradition, avant-garde literature, into the dominant culture. Writers like Eliot, Brecht, Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, and many others, who had been strongly resisted beforehand in the academic world, suddenly became the favored texts in the universities. The dominant mass culture of the United States, with its endless capacity for absorption, found that it could take not the essential spirit of Modernism, but many of its decorative elements and defang them, make them unthreatening, domesticate them. Also, there is something about the whole Modernist spirit which creates so much tension, so much internal turmoil, that it may be that there is some kind of internal dynamism in the Modernist spirit which has led to exhaustion. The historical crisis which had given rise to Modernism, or which at least had been its matrix, continued to exist, in some ways to get worse, but it would be committing a genetic fallacy to assume that because 'a' is the cause or the matrix of 'b,' the persistence of 'a' necessarily means the persistence of 'b.' My impression is, and one cannot be entirely certain of these matters, but my impression is that Modernism has come to an end—has been exhausting itself—though there are still a few heroic survivors like Beckett, but essentially, what we have had is the slick imitation of its externals and the shaking off of its essential spirit.

How do you believe the death of the avant-garde affected literary criticism?

At one point, in the '20s and '30s, literary critics had a sense of commitment, a burning purpose, and urgency, a great need to become the spokesmen of, the expositors of, the defenders of, the explainers of, Modernist literature. After all, literary criticism is a secondary procedure, and it thrives, most of all, when there is a body of fresh literary work which is not always clearly understood, which is perhaps seen as an affront to the dominant ways of feeling and thinking. Critics find their fulfillment in being the spokesmen, in being the articulators, for that new body of literature. In more recent years, not many critics have felt there was anything like that to set them into motion, to stir them, to inspire them, and this, I think, is one reason for the decline of interest in criticism.

In your article entitled: "What's the Trouble: Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both," [published in The Seventies (1972)] you said that one of the strongest symptoms indicating that America is experiencing a crisis of civilization rather than simply a social or political crisis is that "the enterprise of education is in grave trouble" because "there seems barely any consensus among educators as to what they are supposed to profess, barely any agreement among educators as to what they believe education to be or do." What is your image of an educated person, and what do you regard as the moral and cultural values that you would like to pass on from generation to generation?

I would say that an educated person is someone who has some acquaintance with the great works of the mind that have been written in the past. If one wants to reduce this to a few simple examples, I would say someone who has read a couple of Plato's dialogues, and a couple of Shakespeare's plays, and an essay or two by Montaigne, who has looked into Homer and Virgil—and who perhaps has even gone so far as to read a few passages from the Bible. Yet, it is not merely a question of this name or of the other, but of having some sense of the continuity and the depth of Western civilization. An educated person has some awareness of the kinds of issues, problems, and questions that have plagued humanity over the centuries, but that have also enlivened human thought. This way one does not live as if he is just beginning from scratch; there is a sense of a living, vital tradition behind him that sustains him, and sometimes disciplines him. The mark of the uneducated person is his behaving as if he is the first person in the world and has to discover everything for himself—which of course is impossible—so therefore he never discovers very much. One great problem with American education is the lack, or the breakdown, of this connection with the past, of the sense of a living tradition…. It is a question of having certain attitudes and receptivities—a feeling for, a sense of the possibilities of, the life of the mind. I think it would be utopian or foolish to claim that the majority of our graduates from American colleges have anything of the sort.

What has enabled you to remain exceedingly devoted to socialism for the past 45 years?

I have remained a socialist because I believe in the idea of a society in which the values and processes of democracy are extended from the relatively narrow limits in which they function today (as much as I value what we do have in the way of democracy), to other areas of life: socioeconomic life, life of the corporation, life of the factory, where presently democracy barely exists, or doesn't exist at all. I became a socialist because I thought that the values of capitalist society, its competitiveness, its exaltation of brute success, its tendency to put down those at the bottom, were in conflict with humane values. And I remain a socialist because I believe in the idea, whether or not it can be fully achieved, of something to aspire to, a goal, a vision of society where we will not have the shameful contrasts that we have in this society between rich and poor, between those who have too much and those who do not have enough, and between those who have an excess of power and those who have none. So my sense of a socialist society is one of an indefinite extension of democracy and democratic values, and tendency toward greater egalitarianism, though not a literal egalitarianism, but a move in that direction, and a society which would encourage more fraternal, friendly, cooperative values.

Do you have any idea of how we go about getting this society?

I'll skip that one … that's too much.

When reading from your as yet unfinished autobiography [A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography] at a recent lecture, you said that you spent very little time in class during college because, "who could go to class when the world was going to blow up?" Do you often have this same fear today?

Sure, I have that fear every day; it seems to me a constant possibility, a constant shadow upon our existence, and I don't see that any sensitive person can avoid living with that fear. At the same time, if we are going to live, we cannot allow that fear to overwhelm us; first, because there is still value and pleasure in the time that is given us, and we have no other; secondly, because if we are to act politically or socially in some constructive way to perhaps control the forces that move toward atomic warfare, then we simply cannot give in to our fears and our anxieties and our depressions, though I certainly share them. There are days when one wakes up in the morning and it seems as if the world is too terrible to contemplate, and those are just the days one has to prod oneself into working and responding.