[Siegel is an American educator, nonfiction writer, poet, and critic. In the following review of Selected Writings 1950–1990, he remarks on Howe's literary tastes and criticism.]

Irving Howe's writings continue to enact the tension between thinking and doing, cerebral play and social responsibility, that has been the public trial of the modern, urban-based intellectual; they approach literature as a consequential event, and analyze social and political events as if they deserved the attention of great literature. "My belief," Howe writes in the preface to [Selected Writings 1950–1990], "is that it should be possible for a serious person to hold more than one interest, or one idea, at a time." The lightly ironic tone should not be necessary. No serious person reading these brilliant essays on literature, culture, politics, and society will fail to admire the range of Howe's interests and expertise, or to be moved by the impassioned judgments he expends on what he sees happening in the world before him.

To modify a famous term from T. S. Eliot, Jewish-American intellectuals have usually required an objectionable correlative. Howe himself dubbed the most influential generation of those—now mostly erstwhile—virtuosi of opposition the "New York Intellectuals," a loosely cohesive group that during the calamitous thirties began cutting its literary and polemical teeth. Like other New York intellectuals, Howe was nourished and instructed by political radicalism on the one hand and cultural modernism on the other; like most of them he at one point revised his enthusiasm for modernism's often antihuman energies; unlike all of them he has held courageously to a belief in a democratic radicalism. For if he has soured on heroic modernism, he has persisted in calling for a heroic anti-modernism. Having rejected epistemological despair, he has retained a marginal challenge to the status quo. Now that modernism's "terrible beauty," its shocks and its terrors, have been institutionalized as cultural norms, Howe seeks an avant-garde of decency, an adversarial humanity. Some people will only be saved by a certainty; reading Howe you feel that he hopes for the certainty and freedom of an ultimate contradiction.

As well as being a distinguished literary critic and social historian, Howe is coeditor of the quarterly journal Dissent. He is a committed democratic socialist, and the present volume is dedicated to the memory of Michael Harrington. A veteran of ideological wars, Howe is well aware that to make a political agenda humane, you have to welcome paradox and ambiguity, and that to assure its exclusive success you have to lock them out. His political writings wield abundant complexities, so much so that while asserting politically radical values he seems to be making sure that they remain inhospitable to arid theoretical interests. In the essay, "Why Has Socialism Failed in America?" he ruefully concludes that socialism had to fail here, and that verdict serves as a warning to anyone naive or callous enough to mire the whole enterprise in an abstract fervor; but socialism, he adds, did and does not have to fail in such a big way—and that is a comforting rebuke to anyone weak-hearted enough to be discouraged by Howe's own rational skepticism.

A certain sect of Jewish mystics believed that only after every conceivable sin had been committed would the Messiah appear to redeem the world, and they devoutly set about hastening his arrival. Howe will let stand no postulate about human nature or social policy until he has mined it for every nuance of fairness he can, until he has subjected it to all manner of analytic and emotional logic. His method might be subtle, vigilant, and fastidious, but his aim is simply expressed: to create a just society. During the Reagan administration's reign of apocalyptic optimism, Howe wrote in a bristling essay included here:

Criticism and more criticism—that's the need of the moment, the need for tomorrow…. Let people of determination, steady workers with some humor and no fanaticism, keep saying: "This is not what America is supposed to be, this is not how human beings should live."

Howe's major preoccupations are well represented in this volume: literary essays on Faulkner, Pirandello, Dreiser, Frost, Zola, Dickens, and Solzhenitsyn, among others; appreciations of Jewish literary figures such as Sholom Aleichem, and of literary figures who happened to be Jewish, like Isaac Babel and Delmore Schwartz; pieces on Whittaker Chambers, Lillian Hellman and the McCarthy years, and the New Left; masterly cultural history in "The New York Intellectuals"; and seminal literary history in "The Idea of the Modern." There is an intriguing rumination on T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), one of those intellectuals of action who, like Trotsky and Malraux, haunt one corner of Howe's imagination. And in "Writing and the Holocaust," Howe approaches the problem of applying critical standards to Holocaust literature—the argument is unique of its kind, so far as I know, and important to read.

The collection begins with a trenchantly dismissive essay on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the French nihilist writer par excellence, and ends with a judiciously hopeful meditation on socialism and the future. The juxtaposition is a pointed one. If a theme circulates through these writings, it is Howe's characteristically complex belief that on one side, the nihilistic bleakness he sees as a still vibrant remnant of cultural modernism has to be chipped away at by people of good will, and on the other, that no conscientious modern person can pretend to be unmoved by nihilism's appeal.

For the Russian writers who inhabit another special corner of Howe's mind, pessimism has always sheltered hope from despair. For Howe, wise to the conditions of what is in the West an approximately reverse historical situation, optimism has to break its way through frozen seas of catastrophe before it may earn the right to persuade. It's the only kind of optimism you can be persuaded by.

To catastrophe, Howe is as sensitive in literature as in life. "The first task of the novelist," he believes, "… is to create an imaginary social landscape both credible and significant." He favors the great realist writers, who reveal the flesh, blood, and bones of human travails, over the literary modernists, in whose work, "the problematic nature of experience tends to replace the experience of human nature." He is sometimes accused of a lack of sympathy for the modernist style. On the contrary: himself expert in using irony and paradox as critical strategies to liberate the human element from ideological dross, he has grown disillusioned with writers who employ the same strategies to liberate existence from the human element. Maybe that's why I have often found Howe's qualifications of modernism too illuminating of their subject to be entirely convincing arguments against it.

More effective as antimodernist statements are his intelligent and eloquent defenses of writers working in a traditional vein, such as his superb essays on Zola and Dreiser. If anything, his critique of Eliot and Yeats, Kafka and Lawrence et al. shows Howe's modernist roots in the way he overestimates the capacity of modernist imaginations to do harm. A bit of an anarchist himself, Howe would probably agree with the anarchist, social reformer, and proto-modernist Shelley, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of at least a certain sector of humankind—unlike Shelley, he fears the consequences of some of their legislation. Thus, whereas some conservative and Marxist critics alike condemn the modernist writers as amoral aesthetes, Howe finds in them a moral vision he doesn't like. The difference in perspective underscores a difference in the breadth of critical reach. Yet I hope Howe would concede that the memory of an imaginative truth which was hostile on the page to ordinary experience might help independent spirits breathe when they are on the street. And as for the practical effects of modernists and their work, it was John F. Kennedy, not Hitler or Stalin, who enjoyed reading Malraux's "haughty authoritarianism," as Howe calls it; it was Malraux who fought against fascism in Spain and the Nazi armies in France, not Eliot or Yeats who took arms against democracy in Great Britain. That said, there exists an artistic imagination and an ethical imagination, and Howe's explorations of the places where they conflict or converge are rare and gratifying occasions in American letters, and sometimes, fruitful provocations.

A last remark about Howe's literary presence. Familiar steps strike the ground with the weight of an unmistakable temperament; so it is when a genuine personality strikes words onto the page; so it has been with this immediately recognizable voice, which kindles reasonableness, idealism, and humane feeling in selfish times. Howe has coined the term "style of brilliance" to characterize the "freelance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knock-about synthesis" that flew from the pens of the New York writers. His own prose is robustly elegant, gracefully sober, swift and lucid, precisely anchored to the object of discrimination. It is a sort of honesty. The best virtue of the greatest critics is that they proceed under the power of their own minds. The fineness of Irving Howe is that in his writing a powerful critical mind draws its independence from an unabashedly stubborn heart.