Lucidity may have been Irving Howe’s favorite word, as much in prose as in politics. In a preface to the republication of Politics and the Novel, written shortly before his death, he remarked that nowadays, “when critical writing is marked by obscurantism and jargon,” he aspired to prose “so direct, so clear, so transparent that the act of reading comes to seem like looking through a glass.”

Not that the world was so direct, so clear, so transparent. He knew too well its murkiness, but rebelled against internalizing it. He wasn’t “post- modern.” He sco...