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There is the same sharp, passionate youthful urgency as in the
famous beginning by Paul Nizan Uean Paul Sartre's closest friend
from their Sorbonne days) to
Aden Arabie:
"I was twenty. I will let no
one say it was the best time of my life. Everything threatens a young
man with ruin: love, ideas, the loss of his family, his entrance into
the world of adults. It is hard to learn one's part in the world."
Abel was a far more mischievous bohemian wanderer than
most New York intellectuals - he played around with the surrealist
painters in New York in the 1940s and broke bread with Sartre's
crowd in Paris after World War II - though never parochial or pre–
dictable. He was also a political animal. As the significant thing
about socialism is either its new political theory, or its active prac–
tice, and most New York intellectuals did neither, frequently their
heated writings on socialism tend to be askew and boring. But Abel's
lively account of happenings in the thirties during the period when
"the whole of New York had gone to Russia," including the blow-by–
blow description of how Rahv and Phillips "stole"
Partisan Review
from the communist movement is wonderful: it appears to be one of
the few times the communists claimed they had their property taken
from them. Abel points out this was a considerable act of courage
during a period when the labor unions, the New Deal, and the
general temper of the times was pro-Russian. Abel's account of the
Trotskyists' assumption that the Nazis would win the war and of
their disinclination to back "capitalist democracies" is troubling.
"Perhaps," he says, "they would not have been so trusting of the
'dark' concepts embodied in their philosophy of history if they had
had a little more respect for natural rights and the existing laws they
so often dismissed as bourgeois illusions."
This failure to appreciate the everyday bread and butter rights
which bourgeois society takes for granted also permitted the Ameri–
can anticommunist left, so valiant in perceiving early the totalitarian
nature of the Russian experience, to remain tragically indifferent to
McCarthyism.
Indeed, 1 do feel that Abel, who displays a marvelous dialectic
sleight of hand plus a talent for drama as an avant-garde playwright,
goes somewhat far afield when he juxtaposes Sartre's metaphysical
statement that all anti-Semites are murderers (a statement meant to
shock the numbed French conscience concerning their complicity
with the Nazis in rounding up Jews for deportation) with
McCarthy's witch hunt. One was a verbal statement, the other a
