WHERE, WHO, WHEN, WHY, WHAT, HOWE : A CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK, <i> By Irving Howe</i> . <i> Edited by Nicholas Howe (Harcourt Brace: $27.95; 384 pp.)</i>

There is a concept, part illusory perhaps, known as the brotherhood of arms. It evokes a respect between antagonists as well as comrades; not because they renounce their differences but because, in fighting for them, they have mutually undergone an ordeal that can uniquely bind. You don’t much hear about a brotherhood of intellectuals. Like pigeons and unlike wolves, they peck to the death, and keep on pecking.

In a time of battles over multiculturalism, political correctness and deconstruction--each a salvo of tiny mental genocides--this makes the example of Irving Howe particularly precious. He was an intellectual who fought with military courtesy. Literature and politics were causes that you shed your blood for and, when you rested, you realized that your opponents were bleeding too.

Howe, who died this year, was one of our best literary critics, and he was not simply a man of letters. You could call him a gentleman of letters if it were not for the genteel implication. Earthy and concrete as he was, the likelier term ought to be peasant of letters. He had the unsentimental shrewdness, the instinct of hospitality and the acquaintance with growing things. Here, in “A Critic’s Notebook,” he reflects on the subject of anecdote in literature:

He brings up Mark Twain’s Mississippi River yarn-spinners and Sholom Aleichem’s tales of the shtetl . Anecdote, he writes, “holds the possibility that human beings may still connect, perhaps only briefly, through memory and story.” It is characteristic of a pre-urban, pre-novelistic setting where, at day’s end, people come in from the long defeat of life on the soil or on the road for the brief victory of a story. And he adds this lovely sentence: “Time isn’t a problem, there’s no place to hurry off to, another story is always welcome, things repeat themselves anyway.”

Time and again in these posthumously collected pieces we experience criticism as the odor of life. Howe uses books and ideas as a baker uses flour and an oven; what he turns out can seem more like loaves than pages.

Edited by Howe’s son Nicholas, who also wrote an introduction, the collection ranges from brief thoughts to fully developed pieces. There are jottings for an essay on style in the novel. There are reflections on some particular aspect of a writer’s work: why Anna Karenina had to die, or why Sir Walter Scott, whom any 19th-Century canon would have entrenched, has quite fallen out of our own.

Some of the items are slight. A few pages on the comic academic novel--Kingsley Amis’ “Lucky Jim” and Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures From an Exhibition” for example--suggest that Howe is reconnoitering and not finding much. More frequently his rambles turn into flights, almost in spite of themselves.

Howe has nothing very arresting to say about the difference between farce and comedy until suddenly he edges from literature into politics, and arrests us. Comedy implies civilization and the possibility of progress, he writes. Farce denies both, which is why “revolutionists are cool to farce.” Howe continually edges into something else, as if literature were indeed part of something else: not a single enclosed principality but a river that waters them all.

He meanders. He is serious but does not take himself seriously. He has a grievance against Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed” even though he admires it enormously. Its treatment of the villainous nihilist Verhovensky seems to him, an old-time Socialist, to condemn all revolutionary reform. But he allows that he may be wrong and that the scholar Joseph Frank may be right--I think he is--in interpreting it more traditionally as the portrait of a very specific amoral nihilism.

Meandering, he can speculate that some of the extreme characters in Dickens’s last novels suggest that had he lived he “might have become Dostoievsky or rather, Dostoievsky is a name we give to the glimpsed desire of Dickens.” This is not quite a finished idea; it is more of a provocation, a self-provocation, in fact. What it provokes is the useful thought that a novel may contain characters who don’t fit it because they belong in some future book, which the writer has not yet thought of.

His seven pages on “Kim” are a contained explosion of pleasure, and powerfully contagious. “Kim” has that property: It snared Orwell and it has snared the radically opposite Edward Said. For his part, after instantly making us want to read or reread it, Howe quite wonderfully bustles us through Kipling’s ability--contentious nowadays--to set an irresistible story amid the vast poverty of British India: “It brushes past social misery as more recent novels brush past personal happiness.”

He has bustled us, in fact, into present-day literary contentions, and the collection’s nerviest pieces take place there. “The Common Reader” deals with the changed nature of the audience addressed by those who write about literature. Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf used the term in various ways to denote non-specialized readers who read to receive pleasure and knowledge rather than, as Woolf put it “to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”

Up through the 1950s, he writes, the most distinguished literary critics had one foot in the university, but their writing, in such magazines as Partisan Review, was at least in part tied to a journalism that aimed at a cultivated general audience. Nowadays, the university has it all: “The literary theorist, rid of the grubby tasks of practical criticism and not obliged to pay very much attention to literature itself, can find satisfactory expression by remaining within the academy speaking to fellow theorists and not having to worry about that nuisance, real or imagined, known as the common reader.”

He elaborates on the neglect of such readers--”the kind of obsolete person who still enjoys stories as stories and still supposes that characters bear some resemblance to human beings”--by the current critical fashions. In “Characters: Are They Like People?” he engages with the deconstructionist argument that the “people” in novels are in fact simply verbal constructs. Why, then, he wonders, have novelists struggled to the point of despair and madness to achieve the effect of human reality?

He can be very funny on the subject. When William Gass writes that one of Henry James’ figures is not a real character but only “a controlling conception” and goes on to demand: “Does he even have a nose?” Howe replies: “Very likely. If he didn’t James would have been the first to notice.”

He quotes a critic on the heroine of Jane Austen’s “Emma”: “Emma Woodhouse is not a woman and need not be described as if it were.” Emphasizing the “it” quality of a verbal construct, the formulation is itself pretty funny. Howe does not deny wit or, indeed, all manner of good qualities to those whom he opposes. He does, however, think they are terribly wrong and that they have wittily made a desert between the wellsprings of literature and the thirst of those whom literature has always existed to reach and to succor.