To the Editors:
Hilton Kramer’s October 1990 piece, “Irving Howe at Seventy,” repeats several charges aired in earlier articles, and again in what seems a deliberately misleading way. For one, Mr. Kramer describes the leading socialist intellectual in the country as having aimed for and won “a ticket to the establishment.” But of course Howe does not belong to any of the established groups that wield significant power in American society. He is not a counselor to Presidents or to cabinet members or senators. His views are anathema to most captains of industry and foundation executives. Even in academic precincts he is regarded principally as an outsider, a resolute nonspecialist in an age of specialists, a practical critic in a world of “theorists,” a writer of accessible prose in a profession noted for its addiction to obscurantist jargons, one who has been willing to resist fashionable movements on the academic and literary Left even when that meant alienating many who would otherwise have wished to make common cause with him. One would not suppose—reading Mr. Kramer’s attack on Howe—that at critical times in his career he took arms against feminist literary criticism, spokesmen for black consciousness, participants in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and all manner of liberal sacred cows.
Similarly, one would not know from Mr. Kramer’s observations on Howe’s criticism of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that he never attacked the great Russian novelist “for failing to take the politically correct position on the Bolshevik Revolution.” Howe’s criticism of Solzhenitsyn
