286
PARTISAN REVIEW
Spanish communists' murder of Andreas Nin, the leader of the
Poum,
and Durutti, the anarchist leader- yes , concerning Nin, but
no one knows who shot Durutti in the back. Koltsov, the
Pravda
cor–
respondent, whose account of the Civil War wasn't published until
after Stalin's death, and who was purged on his return home, has a
long paragraph on Durutti's death in his diaries . "Poor Durutti," he
wrote, "poor Durutti.")
Abel has many tonalities in this book. His account of Sartre as
"the best writer among philosophers, the best philosopher among
writers," is an extraordinary synthesis of the best of Sartre's contri–
bution to our thought and our literature. As Abel points out, it was
Sartre who first made possible the post Word War II idea of being a
communist without believing in Marx. He says of him : "His hesita–
tion was between Hamlet and Don Quixote, and he tried out the
postures of both, the first during the Spanish civil war, [Sartre, un–
like Malraux, chose not to go], and after World War II the second,
when he tried to take communism away from the French Commu–
nist party in the radical grouping of rassemblement he started with
David Rousset." Abel traces Sartre's development of two opposing
philosophical theories: Sartre's strength was in abundance of
thought, of action, and of daring not to be consistent. Like Sartre,
Abel has an extraordinary combination of talents: playwright, critic,
thinker, political creature, a hobnobber among artists, bohemians ,
low and high life, all of which makes his autobiography essential
reading for those who want to know what it was like when the cream
of the crop started out in the thirties, and, fortunately for us, became
our intellectual survivors who were in it for the long haul.
BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON
TRICKS OF SELF·CONSCIOUSNESS
GRACE ABOUNDING. By Maureen Howard.
Little, Brown, and Co.
$13.95.
NO FOND RETURN OF LOVE. By Barbara Pym.
E. P. Dutton.
$12.95
If
self-consciousness is one prerequisite of worthy fiction,
its opposite - the play of the unconscious - is surely another. Art
