[A friend of Howe's for many years, Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. In the following essay, he discusses Howe's views on politics, literature, and Judaism.]

It was a moody September morning in 1991, and we were walking down Madison Avenue, gossiping about books, when Irving Howe changed the subject. "Something happened to me in Paris that you might understand" was how he began the least likely conversation we ever had. "I was in the garden at the Rodin Museum. For a few minutes I was alone, sitting on a stone bench between two long hedges of roses. Pink roses. Suddenly I felt the most powerful feeling of peace, and I had the thought that death, if it means an absorption into a reality like the one that was before me, might be all right."

That was all. I mumbled something about the importance of such an experience, and said nothing more; illuminations are not occasions for criticism. But I was filled with gladness for my friend. He had recently recovered from a rattling period of physical infirmity; and during those months, when he fought his fear with the help of Haydn, and Proust, and the first tranquilizers of his otherwise urbane life, I had wondered whether his urbanity, his intellectual strictness, his decades of dialectic, had adequately prepared him for the times that humble the mind. I learned, that morning on Madison, that he was not unprepared.

I was not altogether surprised. Over the years of our friendship I discovered that Irving, who died May 5, was not just the god of rigor and reason that his admirers, the socialists and the secularists especially, made him out to be. He was, of course, a master controversialist, and fierce in his insistence on clarity in thought and in prose; and it did not make your own thinking and writing any easier to know that sooner or later Irving would have a view of it. For many people, he was the perfect representative of "the New York intellectuals"—those brilliant critics of politics and culture who believed in many things in the course of their extraordinary lives but most of all believed in brains.

In truth, Irving was rather an imperfect representative of the breed. In politics, he was steadier, and had no craving for conversions; and in his later years this made him rather marginal, which was not much of an impediment for a man with a romantic view of marginality. (This almost never made him doctrinaire. Irving had a gift for feeling certain that you were wrong without feeling certain that he was right.) More important, it was Irving, in his unforgettable essay "The New York Intellectuals" in 1968, who warned of the limitations of brilliance, of the gladiatorial excesses of the metropolitan style of mind.

There was something unexpectedly concrete about the man and his work. He was intrigued by the utopian imagination, but he had a vivid sense of the facticity of life. He understood the importance of the common touch, even if he lacked it. He suspected things that dazzled. He liked ideas more than theories, reasonableness more than correctness. His tone, when he was interpreting a novel or analyzing a historical figure, was often provisional, gracious, patient with perplexity, collaborative. He was always in the middle of trying to get something right. He enjoyed admiring more than he enjoyed criticizing.

He was a great authority on radicalism, not least on the sources of its appeal, which were, in his case, a childhood in the Depression and a virtually European fascination with the career of ideas in politics. Yet he was, in a way, divided against himself, for his temperament was not at all radical. Irving had no weakness for totality, no innocence about revolution. All his life he proudly called himself a socialist, or more precisely a democratic socialist. (In 1954, he was the moving force behind the creation of the journal Dissent.) He was the terror, so to speak, of the Stalinist left. About the authoritarian tendencies of the New Left, and the shabbiness of many of its notions, nobody was more withering. He castigated his own congregation as naturally as he castigated the others. And so his congregation kept shrinking, and the honor of belonging to it kept growing.

I have an allergy to socialism myself, and so I was impressed by the infrequency with which our ideological difference amounted to a political difference. May his comrades at Dissent forgive me, but Irving struck me finally as a welfare-state liberal with a fluency in the Marxist tradition. I remember the evening—it was early in the 1980's, at the height of the Reagan dizziness—when he argued against the uncritical praise of the market on the ground that it missed what was valuable about the market, which was its amenability to reform. He despised those who refused to see the suffering that capitalism sometimes caused; but capitalism, he said, is an economic system that may be politically corrected. In recent years, after the collapse of state socialism in the big Soviet Union and all the little Soviet Unions under its sway, Irving interested himself in the possibility, conceptual and practical, of "market socialism." It looked to me like a contortion, but it was proof, if proof was still needed, that he was a man with his eyes open, and his heart.

What kept his eyes and his heart open, however, was not politics. It was literature. He loved nothing more. As a critic, Irving came to occupy a peculiar position. He was both anachronistic and urgent. In an era of literary theory, he was dead to literary theory; and yet you had to read him, because his humanism was sophisticated rather than sentimental. Irving's approach to poems and novels was part Matthew Arnold, part East Bronx. That is, he turned to literature to learn about life, but the life about which he most wished to learn was the hard and lumpy and common one. He despised proletarian art, and the ways in which populism and mass politics tortured the writer; but he had little patience for art's high priests. He preferred beauty to estheticism. [Thomas] Hardy, Sherwood Anderson, [William] Faulkner: the writers about whom he wrote books (how magical still are the opening pages of his study of Hardy!) were masters of form who found in ordinary people difficulty and dignity enough. Irving's greatest thrill was high art that felt democratic. (And so he was devoted to the ballets of Balanchine.)

He had no illusions about the extent to which the world was changing and he was not; but no change struck Irving with greater force, and made him feel more like the end of the line, than the eclipse of Yiddish—the language, the culture, the sensibility. I have never known anyone in whom the paradoxical Yiddish inflection, the cheerful grimness, the sunny decay of hope, survived so purely. For decades Irving threw himself into the task of rescue, editing and introducing and writing about what he made famous as the "world of our fathers." He was without nostalgia, but he was not without grief. I cannot count the number of breakfasts at Leo's on East 86th Street that were taken up with the disappearance of that world, with the decline of secular Jewishness.

As a Jew, Irving felt almost like a man without contemporaries. All that remained as a foundation for Jewish identity, he would argue, was religion or nationalism, and he was excluded, by experience and by conviction, from both. I would argue that, as foundations for identity go, religion and nationalism are not bad; and then I would gently suggest to him that he was not as alienated from either Judaism or Israel as he thought. (About the philistinism of the American Jewish community, however, I offered no disagreement.) The Yom Kippur War left him fearing for Israel's safety, and he was passionately drawn into the great Jewish debate about the Palestinian question. His wife, Ilana, an Israeli woman of great cultivation, filled the apartment with Hebrew writings and sometimes with Hebrew writers. He even started to visit the synagogue on Yom Kippur—not to find God, of course, but not many Jews visit the synagogue to find God.

Irving and God? Not a chance. And yet, when he wrote or lectured or just talked about the deeper and the more difficult themes, Irving was surrounded by the atmosphere of intellectual seriousness and intellectual tolerance that the rabbis describe as "for the sake of Heaven." He was, this skeptic and secularist and socialist, a great-souled man. And he was the man who, more than any American intellectual of his generation, by his work and by his example, conferred greatness upon the homeliest of qualities, the quality that transforms controversy into a search for the true and action into a search for the good, the quality that mattered most to Orwell and Silone, who were, we may now say, Irving's true company: the quality of decency. It is, in his absence, a quality more strained.