Irving Howe has written his autobiography

A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography By Irving HoweHarcourt Brace, 352 pp., $14.95 Once, in an attempt to come up with the least alluring of all possible titles for an article, I proposed “An Open Letter to Irving Howe.” It was a gibe at Howe’s endless polemics rather than at his literary gifts. Over the years he has moved from Trotskyism to social democracy, refining his position from its original monstrous innocence to its present sophisticated irrelevance.

“Position” is the mot juste. It is neither conclusion nor program; just the place he happens to be. This book records, with fine introspection, nice turns of phrase, and overall shapelessness, “my journey out of the immigrant milieu” and halfway back again. His parents were Jews from “Eastern Europe”—no more precise location than that?—who settled in the Bronx. He was born in 1920, became a socialist in his teens, and began his snail’s odyssey toward “the great [world] outside” without getting far. When he taught at Princeton he rushed back to New York every weekend; the Army stuck him in Alaska for two years, and . . . that’s about it. The rest is not silence, but muffled self-definition.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography By Irving HoweHarcourt Brace, 352 pp., $14.95 Once, in an attempt to come up with the least alluring of all possible titles for an article, I proposed “An Open Letter to Irving Howe.” It was a gibe at Howe’s endless polemics rather than at his literary gifts. Over the years he has moved from Trotskyism to social democracy, refining his position from its original monstrous innocence to its present sophisticated irrelevance.

“Position” is the mot juste. It is neither conclusion nor program; just the place he happens to be. This book records, with fine introspection, nice turns of phrase, and overall shapelessness, “my journey out of the immigrant milieu” and halfway back again. His parents were Jews from “Eastern Europe”—no more precise location than that?—who settled in the Bronx. He was born in 1920, became a socialist in his teens, and began his snail’s odyssey toward “the great [world] outside” without getting far. When he taught at Princeton he rushed back to New York every weekend; the Army stuck him in Alaska for two years, and . . . that’s about it. The rest is not silence, but muffled self-definition.