SOURCE: "A Radical and His Roots," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4170, March 4, 1983, pp. 203-04.

Symons was an English novelist, poet, biographer, and critic best known for his detective fiction. In the review below, he presents a balanced assessment of Howe's autobiography.

"Don't you feel", John Berryman once asked Irving Howe, "that Rimbaud's chaos is central to your life?" He replied in the negative, as he had failed to share Delmore Schwartz's feeling that on some mornings he couldn't even bear to tie up his own shoelaces. Such expressions of preference for order over chaos, and of belief that he could manage the simple, practical affairs of life, made Howe an object of amused pity in those Princeton circles, "a nice fellow, but not one of the haloed victims". But he was not cast down. "Berryman might have Rimbaud and chaos, but I had Marx and history."

Marx...