[Symons was an English novelist, poet, biographer, and critic best known for his detective fiction. In the review below, he presents a balanced assessment of Howe's autobiography.]

"Don't you feel", John Berryman once asked Irving Howe, "that Rimbaud's chaos is central to your life?" He replied in the negative, as he had failed to share Delmore Schwartz's feeling that on some mornings he couldn't even bear to tie up his own shoelaces. Such expressions of preference for order over chaos, and of belief that he could manage the simple, practical affairs of life, made Howe an object of amused pity in those Princeton circles, "a nice fellow, but not one of the haloed victims". But he was not cast down. "Berryman might have Rimbaud and chaos, but I had Marx and history."

Marx and history, or one might say more exactly Trotsky and radical politics, have been the guidelines of Irving Howe's life. Novelists, poets and critics who have taken a dip into politics and found the water too hot or too cold are familiar, but Howe is something much rarer in the United States and almost unknown in Britain, a man primarily involved throughout much of his adult life with politics who has retained a deep interest in literary creation. It is true that his interest is chiefly in the social aspect of such creation. His fine short essays on Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Turgenev and Henry James are included in a book rightly called Politics and the Novel. He remains, in that book and in his many articles on American and European (but rarely British) novelists, basically a political writer, feeling the need to adopt a stance that is not purely literary. The need extends beyond literature, to everything that concerns the United States, American entry into World War Two, McCarthyism, Vietnam … more often than not Howe worries about the stance's correctness, but the need to have an opinion about everything is one he would never question. It is an opinion passionately held, and a serious difference with a friend is likely to lead at best to coolness, often to a severance of relations. Thus, after a public debate about Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in which Howe opposed Arendt's thesis, he met her at a party and extended his hand. "With a curt shake of the head and that bold grim smile of hers, she turned on her heel and walked off." A typical British approach to cultural politics differs from that of the New York Jewish intellectuals. It is on a politer, less noisy level of discourse. It is also much less frank.

The subtitle [to A Margin of Hope] "an intellectual autobiography" is doubly justified. Howe is pleased and even proud to accept the label "intellectual", and the book is personal only about ideas, not about the author's personal life. It tells us that Howe was born in 1920, and brought up in the poor Jewish community that crowded the East Bronx, that his father's grocery store went bankrupt in 1930 and thereafter both his parents worked in the dress trade. There is a moving, candid account near the end, of the son's feelings on his father's death. And that is all. We do not learn whether Irving Howe was an only child, his wife is no more than mentioned, and his son Nicholas appears on the last page. This is the life of an American radical, not of a husband or father.

Howe's later life and attitudes have been coloured by the fact that he entered the Trotskyist movement in his teens, remained active in it until called up in 1942 for Army service, and was a passive supporter for some years after the war was over. The movement at this time had, like most sectarian groups, a Left and a Right wing which split on the issue of the nature (in 1940) of the Russian state. Was it still a "workers' state" although a degenerate one, or had it moved into a phase of "bureaucratic collectivism", neither capitalist nor socialist? James P. Cannon, the Right-wing leader, was a power-politician who would have been perfectly at home in the Communist Party, from which indeed he had been expelled. His rival Max Schachtman was a brilliant speaker and polemicist. When Schachtman paid a brief, perhaps surreptitious, visit to England he impressed all those he met by his wit and quick-mindedness. When the split came the young Howe went off with Schachtman, and worked for the group's weekly paper, Labour Action. The Cannon rival paper was named Militant.

It is a tribute to Howe's narrative skill that he is able to make these manoeuvrings interesting, and to convey the verve and excitement of a time when, for the young, everything seemed possible. CCNY, the City College of New York, was filled with Trotskyists in Alcove 1, a space "dark-stained, murky, shaped like a squat horseshoe, one of perhaps ten along the edge of the lunchroom". The more numerous Stalinists were nearby in Alcove 2, but it was in Alcove 1 that you could walk in at any time and find "an argument about the Popular Front in France, the New Deal in America, the civil war in Spain, the Five-Year Plan in Russia … here ideas simulated the color of reality, here we defended the 'correct line', that mystic pride of Marxism." Intellectual disciplines were strict, for in these years the American Trotskyist movement attracted many good minds. The argument between James Burnham and Trotsky about bureaucratic collectivism, carried on in the Fourth International and the New International, the movement's theoretical monthlies, was conducted on a high level. Trotsky's reply to Burnham (Trotsky supported the Cannonites) was called "From a Scratch to a Gangrene", a title felt to be justified when within a few months (not years, as is said here) Burnham had propounded his theory of the managerial revolution. Howe does not overstate the case when he says that training in the movement "taught us to grasp the structure of an argument … to speak and think, and to value discipline of mind." Nothing similar could be said of the British Trotskyist movement, then or now.

It was a training that prepared the young Howe, after Army service where in Alaska he caught a glimpse of Dashiell Hammett, for entry into the literary world as critic and social commentator. Or rather, into the New York Jewish literary world, for in that place at that time it was positively an advantage to be a Jew, and conscious of it. The first literary article mentioned here is about a novel by Isaac Rosenfeld, in which Howe writes of a scene "that impinges upon my own life—as so many other Jewish readers will feel". A Jew was particularly in tune with this time, when many Americans were struggling to come to terms with the realities of the holocaust, and to understand its meaning. It was peculiarly difficult even for first-generation immigrants, brought up in a country where they believed that "here the Jews at least had a chance" to comprehend the concept of the holocaust, the deliberate design to kill every Jew who could be found. The need for "explanations" like Hannah Arendt's perverse and tortuous theory that the Jews collaborated in their own destruction, that (to overstate a little) they truly desired their own deaths, was strong, as it could never have been in Europe. It moved Howe to assert his solidarity with specifically Jewish literary traditions, and to collaborate in editing English translations of Jewish works. It moves him also to acceptance of the idea that something he vaguely calls radical evil exists in human nature. Such passages, uncharacteristically uncertain in tone, are among the weakest in the book. The radicalism Howe still retains does not permit consideration of the idea that the message spelled out by the concentration camps is that the behaviour of human beings who possess complete power over others is almost never humane, and that any view of modern society should take account of this. Where concentration camps have been set up, where torture is practised as a matter of policy, there will be no lack of torturers. It is not too much reality that humankind is unable to bear, but too much freedom.

Howe lacked a degree, so that an academic post seemed out of his reach. He made a living post-war by writing for Commentary, for Dwight Macdonald's Politics, which was founded in 1944 and lasted five years until Macdonald found it drained his energies too much (or simply tired of it), for Partisan Review—and, with some twinges of conscience, for Time, which paid more than all the others put together for his occasional reviews. On Politics Howe did editorial chores, including a magazine chronicle under the name of Theodore Dryden, said to be a ferret-breeder from Long Island. He was paid $15 a week, and found his editor "a hard boss, charmingly irascible, at once bright and silly". The silliness is easy to believe, given the variations and divagations of Macdonald's free-wheeling career, but it is not particularized, and the portraits of other friends and acquaintances are also rather inadequate. Howe's turns of phrase are often forceful and vivid, but he lacks the capacity—or perhaps the desire—for revealing portraiture of physical appearance and habits Partisan Review paid almost as badly as Politics—Orwell got $10 an article for most of his "London Letters"—but it was, Howe says, "the vibrant center of our intellectual life", and no doubt he would have been happy to write in it unpaid.

He came to the magazine in the late 1940s, when the great years were over. For perhaps six years, from the end of 1937 onwards, Partisan Review was a paradigm of what a literary-political magazine should be, aggressively but undogmatically concerned with all the issues of the day, respecting but not revering established names, yet alert for any hint of creative promise showing above ground. The editors—Macdonald, Philip Rahv, William Phillips, George L. K. Morris, and others from year to year—searched their own souls often enough not to be accused of complacency but not so frequently as to seem fascinated chiefly by their navels. Turning the pages one might find a poem by Eliot, an article by Trotsky, memorable stories by Trilling, Wilson, Delmore Schwartz, part of Saul Bellow's first novel, poems by Auden and Stevens, the arrival of a sparkling new theatre critic named Mary McCarthy. Almost every issue contained also a minatory or theme-setting article by one or other of the editors, about the twilight of the Thirties, cultural Bolshevism, Fascism as a possible "New Order", the intellectual failure of nerve (a retreat from scientific rationalism into obscurity), the future of democratic values.

Such editorial perceptiveness lasts only for a brief time, a historic moment when everything flows in harmony. Although harmony is hardly the right word, since the Partisan editors and chief contributors were so often in a bubbling stew of argument.

The only time all the Partisan writers came together, except for a rare meeting to draft some statement of protest, was at the parties Rahv or Philips gave two or three times a year, gatherings of seventy-five to a hundred people that resembled a bazaar more than a social event. Here alliances were struck up or down, deals clinched, quarrels reheated … Milling about in the drafty rooms of the West Village, the PR writers distributed pieces of gossip, weighed prestige ratings, fought over politics.

Howe deprecates the myth of "a golden age, or at least a golden minute, in which writers shared ideas and ideals", an age or minute succeeded by a fall, and adds wittily: "It's a nice story, but while I witnessed the fall, I'm not sure there was ever a garden." Perhaps not: but ponderous Rahv, erratic Macdonald and the others fashioned out of their quarrels and overstatements what was for a few years a marvellous magazine. What a fine stroke it was, for instance, to pick Orwell as writer of the "London Letters." It is disagreeable but not surprising to be told that "a distinguished literary lady" (at this distance of time she could surely be named) called the Howe who had audaciously scaled the Partisan heights "a Jew-boy in a hurry".

The political and Jewish themes recur constantly—when, for instance, Howe had become a figure of sufficient distinction to be considered for an academic post in spite of the missing degree. In 1952 an invitation to apply for a post at Sarah Lawrence was followed by a series of interviews with faculty members. "Greenest of the green at this ritual, I wondered why some greeted me with endless questions, while others smiled politely and let me pass." After rejection he learned that the polite smilers were Stalinist fellow-travellers unprepared even to consider a man who retained his membership in Schachtman's group. Acceptance came from Brandeis University, after a committee meeting conducted in Yiddish when the committee members learned that Howe was working on translations with a Yiddish poet. The recently-founded Brandeis was essentially a Jewish university, although Gentiles like the poet J. V. Cunningham were on the faculty. Its students were the "children of the children of City College, erratic, cocky, shy, arrogant", with "the quarrelsome love of politics and literature that had been handed down to their overburdened parents." They were in training to be Partisan Reviewers, it might be said. Howe evidently felt at home there as perhaps he has never done since. He compares Brandeis favourably with "the genteel anti-Semitism" and effortlessly superior tone of Harvard at the time. Perhaps it was the tone that rankled most, apparent at moments like that when he was introduced to a visiting Italian novelist at a Cambridge reception as "one of our more promising younger … literary journalists". A generous-minded man himself (in his collection Celebrations and Attacks the celebrations are whole-hearted, the attacks mostly mild), Howe is easily wounded by lack of generosity in others.

The recent years have been mostly a success story, and since success is less interesting than struggle, they are less vivid than the days of Trotsky and Partisan. But although Howe is now Distinguished Professor at CCNY he has hardly sunk into academic ease. He was one of the founders of the lively magazine Dissent, spent two miserable years at Stanford from which he emerged longing for New York and feeling that California offered only "a second-rate culture". He survived both McCarthyism and the student troubles of the 1960s without doing anything to be ashamed of, and in the 70s had what he modestly calls his fifteen minutes of fame when his study of East European Jewish immigrants to America, World of Our Fathers, became a best-seller.

Has success spoiled Irving Howe? No, but he emerges from these pages as a man clinging to beliefs about human behaviour that time has not justified, something particularly apparent in his attitude to the student attempt to overthrow all academic authority in the 1960s. He disapproves, as many do in retrospect, of what he calls the "authoritarian debauch" of the New Left, abetted by academics whom he names "guerrillas with tenure". He gives instances of student excesses. Yet in spite of the instances and the hard words he cannot bring himself altogether to condemn the nihilism of Mark Rudd, Tom Hayden and their friends, the revolt not simply or even chiefly against conservative attitudes, but against the existence of any academic standards at all. One might expect him to squash these blowflies of radicalism as, long ago, his hero Max Schachtman had destroyed Earl Browder in debate. He takes refuge instead in perhaps. Perhaps he and his colleagues on Dissent mishandled their meetings with the students, perhaps there was something in "participatory democracy" (that is, everybody voting about everything all the time), perhaps these were good and sincere young people who because of Vietnam or for some other reason went too far. Perhaps, perhaps. It is not to Howe but to Diana Trilling ("On the Steps of Low Library") that we must look for total candour about the student activities of those years, and their basic meaning.

Well, such flinching is a tribute to a kind heart if not to a disciplined mind. A Margin of Hope is the record of an admirable life, the testimony of a decent, honest man. The final beliefs of this battered survivor from the American literary-political civil wars of forty years are stated almost at the end of the book. They are words expressing modest enough aspirations, but they still give justification to his title:

Will Socialism in America ever again be more than a marginal phenomenon? I hope so, but am far from certain. Perhaps it does not finally matter. What matters is that the moral impetus that drove people to become Socialists should find expression, with a fresh vocabulary, on behalf of a fresh radical humanism … Just as there would be an especially acute need for abrasive critics, both anarchist and conservative, in a socialist society, so there is a special need in capitalist society for socialist critics offering an alternative vision of human possibility.