Leftfield

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE INTELLECTUAL FOLLIES by Lionel Abel

Norton; 304 pages; $17.95

Lionel Abel, 73, is an essayist and playwright, and the latest veteran of New York City's old literary left to publish his memoirs. Other recent recollections of this once exclusive and fractious fraternity include Irving Howe's A Margin of Hope and William Barrett's The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals. They were, in Critic Harold Rosenberg's memorable phrase, "the herd of independent minds," part of the theory class that dominated political and cultural debate from the '30s through the '50s. Although deaths, dispersions and change have greatly reduced the group's influence, its value should not be underestimated. Ideas, like less durable products, reach the public through a network of production and distribution. Raw materials are imported and fabricated by artists and scholars. The newest images and thought are offered in galleries and boutique periodicals. Eventually the avant-garde attracts the journalists, and the elite get to take an uncertain bow be fore the philistines.

Abel and the friends he cites in this amiably prescriptive work were major importers of mandarin goods. Coming of age in the '20s and '30s, these apprentice high brows were influenced by two intoxicating concepts from Europe: the power of the subconscious as expressed through psychoanalysis, and the possibilities for political change as revealed by Marxism.

This was giddy stuff for bookish human ists reared in the threatening shadow of Sinclair Lewis' small-minded America.

An implied article of faith in Abel's reminiscences is that with the exception of Manhattan island, real life was best lived overseas. During the mid-'30s, one could battle for the moral high ground in the Spanish Civil War. After 1945 there was Paris, where one could mix with American writers, painters, musicians and, if Lionel Abel, lunch with the reigning philosopher of the left, Jean-Paul Sartre.

In A Margin of Hope, Howe describes Abel as "a sort of freelance guerrilla ready to take on all comers." The Intellectual Follies is not as combative as this statement leads one to expect. The narrative adheres loosely to a chronology. Abel, son of a Niagara Falls rabbi, goes to Greenwich Village in 1929 to begin his literary venture. The Depression finds him there, receiving a weekly check from a federally sponsored writers' program. Many of the artists and litterateurs of the period had little affection for the hand that fed them; Abel notes with a twinkle that he stayed home and wrote a poem titled How Comrade the Present Addressed Our Party.

Outside, he moved in a magic circle of surrealists, hardheaded Partisan Review editors and cafe philosophers who lived from hand to mouth, mostly mouth.

Many of the author's scenes are richly remembered. But Abel the autobiographer keeps getting interrupted by Abel the professional explainer of moral dilemmas. He also opens old wounds: writers he knew are accused of having acted like politicians when they declined to support or condemn positions that could have been regarded as damaging to the left. He re-examines at length an old controversy stemming from a discrepancy between Hannah Arendt's views in The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in England as The Burden of Our Time) and her Eichmann in Jerusalem. The first book argued that the Nazis successfully crushed opposition in occupied countries by making the price of individual resistance unbearable for the community. The account of the Eichmann trial reproached Europe's Jewish wartime leaders for surrendering without a struggle.

The airing of such issues could, and did, end professional and personal relationships. If Abel illustrates anything, it is the passion and competitive effort that his literary crowd brought to ideas. He describes a raucous evening when Italian Intellectual Nicola Chiaromonte tried out some heretical notions on a tough audience that included Partisan Review Editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips, Critics Harold Rosenberg and Dwight Macdonald and Novelists James T. Farrell and Mary McCarthy. Tempers flared ("At least Marxism isn't boring and you are!" shouted Farrell), but before fists flew, Abel remembers, McCarthy rose and demanded order "in the name of humanity." It is hard to imagine liberals or neoconservatives making such a dramatic plea today, in a cultural climate where the talk is cool and the image is king.

--By R.Z. Sheppard