BOOKS
NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS
THE INTELLECTUAL FOLLIES.
By
LIonel Abel.
W. W.
Norton
&
Co.
$17.95.
This past decade we have read considerable intellectual
autobiography: William Barrett, Irving Howe, William Phillips,
Lillian Hellman, all have told us what it was like to have been
young, thinking, quarrelsome and political during the 1930s and
1940s. Mary McCarthy is currently finishing her version of those
turbulent times, and the new addition, this past year, has been
Lionel Abel's utterly delightful and irreverent backward glance at his
own life:
The Intellectual Follies.
French novelists, at least prior to the nouvelle vague, fre–
quently began their autobiographical fiction with the innocent
young hero's arrival in Paris. (There was no other city.) Indeed, the
protagonist's loss of youthful ideals, his rite of passage into a more
knowing, albeit at times cynical maturity, is connected to his en–
counter with Paris.
It
becomes the equivalent of life itself.
Whether it was Lionel Abel's abiding delight in French culture
that prompted him to adopt this frame, or whether it was a happy
accident, it is a particularly felicitious choice for
The Intellectual
Follies.
It
works. Abel's first chapter, "The Modern Moon - A Young
Man Beginning" charms and sets the tone Abel uses throughout.
I would be nineteen at the end of November. I had some
prospects but little money; however, I was not thinking about
money. I did not even know there had been a crash on Wall
Street. ... No doubt with each breath I took in, some favorable
situation was being lost. But I was wholly unaware that this was
happening, looking forward as I did to the adventure before me,
my scheduled meeting after dark with Lionel Stander.
In the park I thought, "This is the place for a tryst." But the
fact was that I knew nobody in New York City with whom a tryst
was possible. A tryst with the park itself? Why not? I write down
the very words I used about fifty years back: "Tomorrow at the
same time of day I shall sit here on the same bench, with the
same tender feelings for this place."
