Reading that Isn’t Reading

Abstract

writers enough energy and coherence to make possible a sustained confrontation with the new sensibility.” I never met Howe, though I corresponded with him briefly. Although I criticized his vaporous socialist agenda, I felt an affinity with him because I too disliked the “new sensibility” and also because our nonpolitical enthusiasms were the same: the poetry of Robert Frost, the ballets of George Balanchine, the paintings of Edouard Vuillard—and the baseball playing of Willie Mays! Like Howe the New York intellectuals were mainly essayists. “If to the minor genre of the essay the New York writers made a major contribution,” Howe says, “to the major genres of fiction and poetry they made only a minor contribution.” Edmund Burke once asked: “Who now reads Bolingbroke?” Today one might ask: Who now reads the essays of Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Daniel Bell—to name some of the most prominent New York intellectuals? Howe surmised the work of the New York intellectuals would not last because their writing “was always in response to something. That was the sense of the essay that we all did. And that’s why none of us is likely to survive.” He may have been right. Yet the essays of the New York intellectuals will always be of interest to historians, since these writers wrestled with political and cultural questions that preoccupied this nation in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.