Intellectuals.

Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson (Harper & Row, 385 pp., $22.50)

INTELLECTUALS IS a book for people for whom "intellectuals" is already a dirty word. Paul Johnson offers case studies of 12 outstanding men of the mind who in private life were pretty nasty numbers: Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, and Lillian Hellman. The final chapter glances at Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, Kenneth Tynan, James Baldwin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Noam Chomsky.

What do all these people have in common? I'm still wondering. They vary enormously in their ideas, interests, stature, and sins. Johnson never really explains what Tolstoi and Miss Hellman are doing in the same book. It seems odd to call Hemingway an intellectual, though he was a genius. If the common denominator is simply celebrity in the intellectual world, why is Gollancz included?

The real focal point of the book seems to be Johnson's attitude toward his subjects: fascinated disapproval. Most of them are "progressives" whose own lives were hardly advertisements for their ideas; none could be called "reactionary." But it's hard to say whether Johnson disapproves of them because they don't live up to their own ideals, or because they do.

Nearly all of them created misery around them, especially in their treatment of the opposite sex; but this isn't the special prerogative of intellectuals. Hemingway was a terror, but this has nothing to do with his talent or his opinions: he got drunk a lot, and preferred the company of toadies who would put up with almost anything. Rousseau, Shelley, and Brecht were monsters of self-promotion, cynicism, ingratitude, and the heartless use of others; the same might be said of certain rock stars. Ibsen was rude and cold, but he never seems to have done anything he could be arrested or even divorced for.

"Intellectuals," in short, is a bogus category. Johnson nevertheless moralizes freely about them-"This is typical of intellectuals"; "it is a characteristic of such intellectuals"; etc.-as if his peculiar selection of a dozen or so people he dislikes constituted some sort of inductive demonstration. It doesn't. I have no affection for any of his targets, and he persuades me that most of them are as despicable as he thinks they are. But this proves nothing about "intellectuals."

The book has its virtues. Johnson writes with zest, and he provides excellent gossip. As in other and better books, he has a sure sense of what the reader already knows and supplies an endless stream of piquant facts few readers do know. Heaven knows this book is not boring.

But it is monotonous, in that Johnson's attitude of censure rarely lets up and eventually makes these disparate people sound more alike than they are. He is Will Durant with a beadle's whip. He dwells on his subjects' sexual sins, sometimes beyond the call of duty, so that his criticism of Rousseau's La Noupelle Heloise applies to his own book: "It is written with extraordinary skill to appeal both to the prurient interest of readers . . . and to their sense of morality."

Johnson is shrewd about his subjects' shrewdness: all of them knew their audience, and even their most "daring" ideas were pitched with great skill at a receptive public, while seeming to defy the powers that be. Insofar as he is debunking the pretensions of cultural icons who posed as iconoclasts, he is very good.

But he doesn't stop there. There is something wrong with a writer who arouses in me the impulse to defend Lillian Hellman. Bitch, slut, liar, tyrant, crypto-Communist, self-deluded fool, yes. But is it fair to pile on the rumor that she once made herself the prize in a poker game? Does the inductive method require such detail? Doesn't the beadle's arm ever weary?

On the East Coast, she was the queen of radical chic and the most important single power-broker among the progressive intelligentsia and the society people who seethed round them. Indeed in the New York of the 1970s she dispensed the same kind of power which Sartre had wielded in Paris, 1945-55. She promoted and selected key committees. She compiled her own blacklists and had them enforced by scores of servile intellectual flunkies. The big names of New York radicalism scurried to do her bidding. Part of her power sprang from the fear she inspired. She knew how to make herself unpleasant, in public or in private.

And so on. Sounds awful, but such characters could probably be found among people whose politics Johnson shares. Noam Chomsky is dragged in solely for his detestablc radical views, with no evidence-apart from the very fact that he appears in this book-that his personal life is in any way defective. Mentioning him in this context seems unfair.

"What conclusions should be drawn? Readers will judge for themselves." All this moralism, and no moral! Except this: "Beware intellectuals." Yes, yes, but how do we spot 'em? Johnson's bag is mixed, but not mixed enough. He should have complicated it with a few unpleasant "right-wingers." If he couldn't find them, he wasn'treally looking.