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PARTISAN REVIEW
remember that writing is not a transcendent activity. And anyone
who has not succumbed to the latest literary theories can report that
students who are expected to analyze classics have no idea how a
work of fiction or any essay is actually produced.
Perhaps the best thing to be said of Winston's first installment
of a biography of Mann is that, unlike the deconstructionists, who,
contrary to their claims, mystify the act of writing, it actually
demystifies the subject. It is unfortunate that Winston was unable to
complete the project.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
THE RED AND THE BLACK
THE LEFT BANK: WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND POLITICS FROM THE
POPULAR FRONT TO THE COLD WAR. By Herbert R. Lottman.
Houghton Mifflin Company. $15.95.
TEACHERS, WRITERS, CELEBRITIES: THE INTELLECTUALS OF
MODERN FRANCE. By Regis Debray.
Schocken Books. $19.95.
Both Herbert R. Lottman, correspondent and biographer
of Camus, and Regis Debray, counselor of cultural affairs in
Fran~ois
Mitterand's government and former revolutionary, show
that intellectuals don't lie: they just fool themselves for the sake of
their politics. Both have written about the French intelligentsia; both
acknowledge the importance of history and agree that French poli–
tics beginning with Voltaire and Hugo always had its writers on call;
both draw on memoirs by Andre and Clara Malraux, by Andre
Gide and his
petite dame
Maria Van Rysselberghe, by Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and many more; and many of the
same names recur in their texts and indexes. But the similarities end
there. For
The Lift Bank
tells a rather straightforward story of politi–
cally committed people and of their dialogues and shifts, in relation
to the specific twists and turns of fascism and communism between
the thirties and the Cold War.
Teachers, Writers, Celebrities
is much less
evenhanded, using selective facts and opinions to substantiate that
French intellectual history from 1880 to 1930 was made primarily by
